A teen’s dreams of science to come true in Israel

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

For six weeks this summer, Evelyn Litwinoff will be living not just one, but two of her dreams.

On June 25, she set off for Jerusalem for the first time to study her favorite subject, microbiology, on the campus of Hebrew University.

She was one of 30 American teenagers selected for a summer internship program called Legacy Heritage for Young Scientists. The students are assigned to individual mentors at the university’s Belmonte Center laboratories.

“Some of my friends are going to Israel this summer and I thought about doing that. I also thought about getting a science internship here,” she said. “But when I heard about this program I thought it was perfect — everything all in one,” she said two days earlier as she prepared for her six weeks overseas.

Her parents, Philip Litwinoff and Cynthia Schwartz, are pleased that the oldest of their three daughters is combining her love of science with a trip to Israel.

The family, of West Orange, have been long-term members of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, where Schwartz serves as cochair of the Academy of Jewish Studies, the synagogue’s religious school, and Litwinoff is vice president of finance on the synagogue’s board of trustees. He has just completed service as a board member of New Jersey Jewish News.

Their 17-year-old daughter’s scientific interests began four years ago, when she was a student at Roosevelt Middle School in West Orange.

“I’ve always liked science since seventh grade, when I had a really awesome teacher. She got me into chemistry and physics.” At West Orange High School two years later, Evelyn said, “we took biology, and I felt the labs were incredibly fun. Dissecting the frog was really cool.”

But what really captivated Evelyn’s attention was extracting DNA from an onion. “It was so cool. The DNA looks like this white stringy stuff, and it was fascinating to see it rise up when you put chemicals in it,” she said.

To Evelyn, the prime appeal of all science is discovering “the knowledge of what’s going on and explaining why something happens, especially now that I’m more interested in biology. I know what’s going on in my body. It’s like this power I have over myself. I know when something would hurt.”

For a time, she considered that interest as a prelude to studying medicine.

“In middle school I wanted to find a cure for cancer, but I saw this gruesome video of surgery, and I just couldn’t handle it.”

The operation, she noted, “was on a human. But when we dissected a pig this year, I had a fun time.”

In the junior year she just completed, Evelyn enrolled in an advanced placement course in her favorite subject, focusing in on molecular biology because, she said, “I am interested in small things, like DNA and cells. Stuff like photosynthesis and respiration fascinate me.”

Attempting to join the Israel program was a competitive effort for the 150 people who applied. They were asked to file personal statements and 250-word descriptions of research projects, along with high school transcripts and recommendation letters from science or math teachers and from a representative of the Jewish community.

Evelyn conceived her own research paper after she clashed with the male sex education teacher in her health class over his assertion that “feminine qualities are submissive and quiet and masculine qualities are strong and aggressive,” she said.

“I just thought that was a bunch of stereotypes, so I started challenging the teacher on almost everything, and I think he got really fed up with me. He gave me the option to write a paper proving men and women are on equal levels. I spent the marking period in the library, and what I found was that a lot of research that said ‘men are this way and women are that way’ have a lot of things wrong with their experiments. So I wrote my paper on how wrong his sources were.”

After spending the past year focusing on her advanced placement courses, Evelyn is now turning some of her attention to searching for a college to attend. “I don’t know where I want to go yet, but I do know I want to study molecular biology.”

Between now and her return to West Orange in August, Evelyn said, she expects “both fun and a lot of hard work. I can’t wait. I’ve never worked in a lab before, so this is going to be awesome.”