The Science Fair Letter

How many adults who eventually become scientists get their start as children at science fairs? Or more likely, how many are scared away permanently? Like the championship game for the sports guys, the school play for the thespians, the science nerds enter science fairs in the name of school spirit. Even after experiencing this horror once, I actually submitted myself to it a second time, and with all the self-delusion of a TV show contestant, actually expected to win.

My first exposure was in grade eight, when science fair projects were mandatory. My father, who had never entered a science fair when he was a kid, suddenly became a Science Dad. I had some vague idea about constellations, poking holes in cardboard to be held up to a light so you could see something like the real thing. Before I knew what was happening, my father assembled a metre wide globe from poster board, cut a hole in the bottom for people to stick their heads into, painted the inside black with several coats of non-reflective paint, painted the outside sky blue, transformed the entire night sky into its reverse image and stencilled it onto the outside, somehow got ahold of a dentist's drill and bored the stars into the appropriate pattern, the brightest ones getting the largest holes, while I stood by and watched. He cut a hole in an old card table for the planetarium to rest in, and you crawled under, stuck your head into the globe and experienced the night sky. In these days, long before the Internet provided instructions for everything, this was almost a miracle. 

At the school science fair, the vice principal ran down the stairs, shouting to me, "Did you make this?!!" with enormous excitement. Of course, afraid that I would get a lousy grade, I lied and he was fooled. But at the city championships it was obvious to all the judges that there was no way a 13 year old could have done this. I did not win. The planetarium rolled around the house for a few years, and was then donated to the school, where undoubtedly it was stored in a closet until the mice found it.

In high school, science fair projects were no longer obligatory, but in grade eleven I made the mistake of joining the new science club, started by our enthusiastic new physics teacher. Unfortunately, he wanted everyone in the club to participate in the city wide fair and could not imagine that anyone might be reluctant to devote all their spare time, including a full weekend at the fair, to a project. He suggested that a friend and I reproduce the famous Miller experiment, in which amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) are spontaneously synthesized from ammonia, methane, hydrogen (simulating the ancient Earth's atmosphere) and water (the ocean) by shooting electric sparks (the angry gods, or was it lightning?) repeatedly through the vapour. 

Clearly we were living out the fantasies of our teacher more than doing an experiment ourselves. I couldn't set this up by myself even today, with all the glassware, electrical circuits, transformers, and explosive gases. Cobbling together the apparatus was possible within the resources of the school, but analyzing the resulting sludge was not. Arrangements were made to do chemical tests at the university. Our host was a gnomish little man in a lab coat covered with mysterious stains, who helped us determine that we had successfully made amino acids in our artificial primeval world  (i.e. he did it for us). His lab was stuffed full of unidentifiable glass vessels and rusting metal clamps, assembled on scaffolds, connected by lengths of yellowing plastic tubing. Everybody was astonished that our experiment had worked. But despite the evidence presented, the judges apparently did not believe the data. We did not win, place or show this time around either, much to my shock. My partner blamed our failure on my decision to market our project as Spontaneous Generation. Trying to rejuvenate disgraced theories, even with a wink, is no way to win a science fair, where irony has no place.

And so I forgot about science fairs, or tried to. Until my graduation. For the ceremony, I sat beside the prettiest girl in my class, but only because our names were next to each other in the alphabet. She wore a lovely dress but her name tag wouldn't stick to her skin or the very thin shoulder straps. She giggled like Goldie Hawn and told me that I had to help her get the name tag to stay attached. On stage, they were handing out the school letters. "They called your name!" she whispered. "What?" "They called your name!" I thought she was still teasing, but then someone else poked me. I stumbled down the row of knees and stackable chairs, relieved to escape thoughts of my hands interacting with her name tag. And they awarded me the school letter. Everyone assumed it was a mistake, because all the other winners were jocks. The school letter was based on a point system combining grades and sports, and you needed points in each category to receive it. I had the grades, and what most people did to know (because I did not tell them) was that although I had never been on a sports team, I had indeed represented the school with gases, sparks, and amino acids. But I still felt like a fraud. The letter now sits downstairs in a box, and I never had the nerve to sew it on a jacket.