For a high school student, William Shen has a couple unusual skills to put on his resume thanks to work he is doing with an SFU biology professor.
In a study that could help scientists find a way to genetically modify mosquitoes to stop the spread of dengue fever, the Burnaby North Secondary Grade 12 student has learned how to knock out a mosquito with C02, position it under a microscope with “a little vacuum suction thing” and inject it with a very tiny needle just behind the neck.
“I don’t know if it’s technically called a neck,” Shen says. “It’s just the part between the head and the thorax.”
These are precise skills that take concentration and practice to master, according to Shen.
“I’ve definitely killed more than a few mosquitoes. If you stab a needle through it, it dies. It’s a very small, little creature,” he says.
The work is part of a study Shen is running at SFU with help from biology professor Carl Lowenberger, an expert on Aedes aegypti, the species of mosquito primarily responsible for spreading dengue fever.
(The disease kills an estimated 20,000 people a year.)
Aedes aegypti is special, though, because there is subset of it that can’t transmit the disease.
In Shen’s study, which Lowenberger helped design, Shen is looking to see whether genetic differences known to exist between the two kinds of Aedes aegypti are important to their ability or inability to spread the disease.
How did Shen – a high school student – come to be running a study at SFU?
It’s part of a directed-study course he’s taking through the university’s concurrent studies program, which allows high-achieving students like Shen to take credit courses at SFU while still in high school.
Besides the directed-study course (Biological Research 298), Shen also completed Genetics 202 last semester.
Shen, who maintains a 99 per cent average in his high school classes, wants to get into medicine but would also like to keep working in research.
“A lot of doctors nowadays do research on the side as well, so I want to do one of those careers,” he says.
The SFU experience has prepared him well, when it comes to the research end.
“I’ve learned a ton about how to design an experiment and approach a topic.”
And – if his future research ever calls for mosquitoes to be injected just behind the “neck” – well, he’s got those skills too.
For more information about SFU’s concurrent studies program, visit www.sfu.ca/students/concurrentstudies.html.
