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Friday, October 13, 1995     Page: 12A

Be proud, Meyers High: A grad just won a Nobel
   
Maybe you missed the story, tucked away as it was on page 3A of Wednesday’s
paperBut somebody from Meyers High School in Wilkes-Barre just won a Nobel
Prize.
    A Nobel Prize!
   
If the Meyers administrators haven’t already done so, they should clean out
a display case, put a few dusty athletic trophies into storage and set up a
glowing tribute to Edward B. Lewis, Meyers class of ’36. Because achievement
doesn’t get much higher than his.
   
Lewis won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on the genetics of
fruit flies. Together with colleagues at Princeton University and in Germany,
the Cal Tech scientist manipulated genes to breed “a circus sideshow of fruit
flies,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: “flies with two heads, flies with
no head, flies without abdomens or legs or skin.”
   
The mutant flies sound like characters from a grade-B horror movie. But in
truth they played a part in a much more profound and uplifting drama. By
teasing out the mysteries of which genes caused which mutations, Lewis and his
colleagues helped crack the organism’s genetic code.
   
The scientists mapped critical genes on the flies’ DNA. DNA is an amazing
molecule that is common to all cells. It tells one group of cells in a
developing fetus to turn into an eye, another group to turn into an ear and so
on.
   
Mapping the genes on a strand of DNA is a little like identifying, via
satellite, specific houses along the New York-to-San Francisco length of
Interstate 80 — except the DNA “interstate” stretches across the nucleus of a
cell, not across a continent.
   
And the result?
   
“Together, these three scientists have achieved a breakthrough that will
help explain congenital malformations in man,” the Nobel citation said.
   
At Meyers this morning, a group of students may trudge off to chemistry
lab, dreading another lecture on the boring Periodic Table of the Elements.
Biology students will look at the cold, dead amphibian staked out in their
dissection trays and wonder, “What do I care about the stomach of a frog?”
   
Physics students will find their heads spinning like a flurry of sub-atomic
particles as their teacher tries to explain protons and neutrons and
electrons.
   
Wouldn’t it inspire at least a few of those kids to know that a Meyers grad
made it to the top? That a student who walked the same halls, sweated through
the same lab periods, maybe even — given the budgets in many schools —
cleaned the same beakers and test tubes, had gone on to win the Nobel prize?
   
Maybe Dr. Lewis would agree to come back to talk to a Meyers class, or to
address the graduating seniors. Maybe the school could permanently display
some equipment from his laboratory, or put a layman’s chart and diagrams
explaining his experiments under glass in the front foyer.
   
One way or the other, administrators shouldn’t hesitate to honor the man.
Local high schools make much of the star athletes who’ve gone on to pro
careers. Here’s a chance for the Meyers to spotlight a graduate who reached
for — and touched — the intellectual stars.
   
There are very few summits of human achievement higher than winning a Nobel
prize. Meyers High School and the whole community deserve to take exceptional
pride in Dr. Lewis’ achievement.
   
For the long path to that summit began right here, in humble Wilkes-Barre.
And Meyers helped both to point young Ed Lewis in the right direction, and to
nudge him on his way.