If you're anything like me, you faked approximately five science projects during the grades 7-12. This is why I always love when people express shock when scientific trials and experiments turn out to have been based on mistaken data. Uhh, no kidding. The same scientists who are doing experiments now were the same kids who gave everything a scientific name in their school science project, so some kid with a project like, Do turtles see color? ended up making a science project board that said, Do terrapin carolina carolina perceive subtle pigmentation alterations?

Does a turtle by any other name smell so sweet?

And everyone would ooh and ahh about how brilliant he or she was. Then that kid would win a prize and later you would see him burning grasshoppers with a magnifying glass on the soccer field. Except when you asked him what he was doing he would say he was testing the relative status of flammability or retardant capabilities of Phoetaliotes nebrascensis.

I never won any science projects and this is probably because every one of my science projects was put together three days before the project was due and always involved the fact that my mom was a microbiologist and had abundant supplies of petri dishes.

When other kids said, "Oh yeah, well your mom eats petri dishes," I was done. D-O-N-E.

I also wrote sentences in my log book which were almost as long as the one above. I would have purchased the log book months ago when my idea to study such seminal issues as "Does mouthwash really work?" and "Which toothpaste works best?" seemed like they were destined to lead me down the roseate path of scientific glory which would end when I accepted the Nobel prize for eradicating chicken pox. (Everyone wanted chicken pox to be over then). Inevitably this log book would sit on a shelf in my locker for the next four months during which time I would occasionally offer diligent reports to my science teacher about how well my research was going. Then a week before the project was to be due, a frenzy would set in. I would brush my teeth or swill mouthwash approximately forty-three times and then my mom would swab my throat with a cue-tip and wipe this on a petri dish. Then we would put the petri dishes in the oven overnight (I think this is what all great scientists did with their petri dishes). The next day Mom would take the petri dishes to the state of Tennessee's lab and eventually she would return and give the verdict on Scope, Listerine, Colgate, Palmolive, and whatever other dental favorites had been on special at Kroger. Then my dutiful lab work would begin and my composition notebook would fill up with all sorts of unique facts like:

Nov. 12th- Analyzed relative merits of Colgate and Pepsodent after vigorous brushing. Obtain petri dishes and transfer teeth rubbings to petri dish. Study ingredients and note significant difference in product ingredients. Then would be some mumbo jumbo about these ingredients, like: Colgate has .30 Triclosan whereas Pepsodent has only .19 Triclosan and this could be a hugely significant factor. (I would then repeat versions of this same sentence approximately eighteen times.)

Nov. 13th- Research on properties of Triclosan for purposes of analyzing relative importance of Triclosan. More research on Triclosan would follow.

Nov. 16- Retrieved petri dishes and considered the relative dirth of growth on Pepsodent while at the same time noticing the enormity of the growth for Colgate.

The Double Helix of science project data. Watson and Crick tremble.

These entires would go on for pages and pages. And no matter what, you would always change the color of your ink as if this somehow demonstrated how hard you were working to advance the cause of science. So hard, in fact, that you had worked thirteen different colored pens from full ink to no ink at all. Changing pens was the 9th grade equivalent of forgetting to pay your taxes as an adult, yet everyone was convinced of their own brilliance.

But finally, the great day would come and you would trudge into the auditorium with one of those huge science project boards that have no other existence but for science projects. They were like the science project equivalent of Playboy centerfolds, you could fold the two sides in and there was nothing to see and then voila, you unfolded that bad boy, and people were like, "Damn, he's got some hot pictures of petri dishes there."

k: Keeping it real-scientific style.

Then some grown guys and girls in labcoats would walk around and take notes on their pads that they kept close to their body. At least at my school, Martin Luther King Magnet High School for the Health Sciences and Engineering, these judges would adopt the reverant tones and expressions of oracles recently returned from Delphi. You would see them pause and whisper to one another. Perhaps they made fun of certain experiments like my friend Azar's ninth grade experiment, I kid you not, was: "Do people prefer big-headed tennis rackets or small-headed tennis rackets?" I remember my science teacher Ms. Speakman disagreeing with his reporting of data one day: "I hear you Azar," she said, "but I just don't believe anyone prefers small-headed rackets." Words to live by. Like all of us Azar had no clue, unlike most of us, he also lacked scientific names. But eventually the rulings would come down and the year's winners would get ribbons and assemble on the stage to be lauded for their promise, scholarship, and likely future as excessive-patent filers for Microsoft or Intel. Then the rest of us would take down our science project boards and trudge home while pictures of petri dishes gradually fell to the sidewalk like discarded flowers.

This has to be the sexiest petri dish ever. I think it's even been airbrushed.

And you grow up and move and and put your science project days into the distant mirror of your high school past. Maybe once or twice as you swill Scope mouthwash to disguise the smell of alcohol from your early morning french class professor you catch yourself thinking, "In ninth grade, I proved that Scope mouthwash had no value as a bacterial deterrent," or "I can't believe I'm using Pepsodent toothpaste when they only have .19 Triclosan" but for the most part your life as a scientic poseur fades away. And then all of a sudden, while you're sitting at work pretending to work and actually googling your friends names, you find a picture that brings your past scientific masterpieces screaming back into your present-day life....

Your college roommate has just completed a science project in his final year of medical school and there's a picture of him posing in front of it on the internet.

Krishna Tripuraneni, George Washington University
Project: Carcinoid Tumor of the Thymus in Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Type 1 Patients

Krishna, from the bottom of my heart thank you for reminding me that old science projects never die.

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