The laboratory on the third floor of the old Central High School in Evansville, Ind. gleams incongruously with the sleek, modern equipment of college and industrial biochemistry. There, this week, a select group of five students will move into one of the most ambitious high-school science projects in the nation: to identify and isolate all the amino acids in ordinary fruit. To pay the bills, the Federal Government's National Institutes of Health last year gave $2,300, the only research grant it has ever made to a high school.
The man who persuaded NIH to invest in high-school students is Robert Lee Silber,...