When high school students Agya Soni and Claudia Carrera interned at the School's BioMedical Imaging Laboratory last summer, they had no idea they would be bucking the odds. "I didn't tell the girls that it had never been done," reflects Rick Rogers, the laboratory's director, "and that there was a strong opinion that it couldn't be done. I just said this is what we'd like and if you could try, that would be magnificent. And, well, they did it." What these teenagers did was create a Web-based image library containing photographs and videos of tissue culture samples in order to make them readily accessible to a broad spectrum of health and medical researchers. Designed to be searchable using library cataloging rules and with links to original journal articles and other online resources, the Biomedical Image Library (bil) offers an innovative way for scientists to share visual information with their colleagues and further the understanding of a wide variety of diseases and health conditions.

Soni and Carrera's remarkable achievement was the direct result of their participation in the School's Minority Research Apprenticeship Program (RAP), which offers an enriching combination of work, independent research, and education for ten minority teenagers each summer. For 17 years, the program has recruited talented Boston-area students, predominantly from the Mission Hill and Fenway neighborhoods, to apprentice in laboratories or other research settings at the School for approximately six weeks in June and July. Blended with this work experience are a variety of activities--discussion groups, special lectures by faculty, and field trips to facilities like Harvard's primate research center and local health clinics--designed to enlighten the students about career options in public health and bioscience. Participants are also required to pursue an independent research project related to their daily work--like Soni and Carrera's library--which culminates in a written scientific paper and a multimedia presentation at the end of the summer session.

Originally established by an NIH grant in the Office of Academic Affairs, RAP now falls under the auspices of the Office of Human Resources, with HR's Assistant Dean Carolyn Everette at its helm. Sharon Wallace, former HR associate director, has also played a key role in RAP, serving until recently as the program's coordinator. According to Wallace, RAP has gone through some noteworthy changes since it was first created. In the beginning, recruiting focused purely on students' academic achievements and prior contact with the scientific community, but soon the staff realized these students already had substantial access to mentoring and other resources. "We found that there were many jewels in the rough floating around out there," comments Wallace, "so we decided to enrich the program by expanding the pool beyond the confines of the original requirements and focus on a variety of gifted students with the motivation to achieve."

Finding and encouraging these precious gems--motivated minority students with an interest in health and bioscience--has never been more critical. Only about 2 percent of the 24-year-olds from underrepresented minority groups hold a bachelor's degree in science and engineering--less than half the rate of the majority white population. Minority students earn only 7 percent of the master's degrees in scientific fields and less than 5 percent of the doctorates. "There are such tremendous disparities in academic opportunities for minorities," notes James Ware, the School's dean for academic affairs, who has been a staunch supporter of RAP since its inception. "The School itself is right in the middle of a community where young people don't have equal opportunities for educational advancement. And it's been shown in a number of different settings that programs like these that introduce not just minority youth but all disadvantaged young people to other possibilities can have a powerful impact on their future."

There's little doubt of RAP's positive impact on its participants. For both the students and their supervisors, the program has become much more than a summer internship. The RAP experience offers many of these young people their first chance to spread their wings in an environment outside their homes and take on responsibilities in a working environment. Rogers, whose BioMedical Imaging Laboratory takes on one or two students each year, says that the teens are often surprised at the autonomy they are given by their supervisors but that once they understand their responsibilities and know they will be given every encouragement to help them succeed, they jump right in and embrace their role as fully functioning members of a team. "I think it's most important to really mentor these kids," he notes, "and make them realize that we value their input as thinking individuals."

The youngsters, many of whom face challenging home lives or precarious support systems, have thrived within this refuge of respect and understanding. Many program graduates have moved on to successful careers in the health sciences (some even right here at the School), after first earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in areas like medicine, biology, social work, public health, and veterinary medicine. Even those who don't pursue health professions are profoundly impacted by their experience like, for instance, the architecture major who has decided to dedicate his career to designing better health care facilities. "This program is about introducing these teenagers to science as a career choice and enriching their lives," notes Everette, who is responsible for assessing the program's needs and securing funding to keep it going, "but it is also about the fulfillment those of us who mentor or teach get out of nurturing someone we feel has a lot of potential." No matter where their potential takes them after the program, the students' ties to the School remain. Whether it's returning to their sponsoring labs to work over winter or summer breaks or emailing from college for advice, these young people have formed indelible relationships with their mentors. "I just get a lot of satisfaction knowing that I have participated in someone's growing experience," says Rogers.

Satisfaction may be putting it mildly. "The supervisors' and co-workers' reactions are amazing to watch when their students are up there presenting. They're actually beaming like proud parents," laughs Everette, referring to the graduation ceremony held at the end of each year's program. Officiated by Dean Ware, the event offers the students the chance to give multimedia presentations of their independent research projects to their families, friends, and fellow participants along with the dean and participating faculty. These projects truly make the program a meaningful experience, providing a way for students to pursue their personal interests, achieve concrete goals, and experience the gratification of a job well done.

And, as in Soni and Carrera's case, they might even have the chance to make an enduring contribution to the infrastructure of the School and the University. Recently the Bio-Medical Imaging Laboratory and the Francis A. Countway Medical Library received funding from Harvard's Library Digital Initiative, led by Dale Flecker, to develop an electronic collection of biomedical images for research and scholarly purposes. According to Rogers, their grant proposal to develop a permanent online collection, like the one the girls designed, has been greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm. The result could be an entirely new job classification at Harvard: a professional with experience in both library science and laboratory research to code the digital images. Beams Rogers, "This really shows what a couple of high school students can do if you give them the confidence and freedom to expand their horizons. It has been one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences for everybody involved."

Alexandra Benis