The Daily Tarheel

Issue date: 5/24/07 Section: University

Media Credit: DTH/Allie Mullin Eighth-grader Atiyasha Kaur from Salem Middle School participates in "Genes in a Bottle," a gene extraction experiment on the DESTINY bus on Saturday morning outside the Morehead Planetarium.

To those passing by the Morehead Planetarium last Saturday, the Destiny bus may have appeared to be an ordinary vehicle idling in anticipation of its passengers.

But inside, Destiny was bustling with activity.

Clad in safety goggles, aprons and Carolina-blue rubber gloves, a group of eighth-grade female students and their mentors spent the afternoon performing a science experiment using the latest science and technology equipment installed on the Destiny.

The experiment, titled "Genes in a Bottle," gave students the chance to learn about genetics by extracting DNA from their own cheek cells.

The students were silent as they listened intently to the instructions given by Lenis Chen, Destiny's community education specialist.

The Destiny program, Morehead Planetarium's traveling science learning initiative, features two custom-built, 40-foot, 33,000-pound buses called Destiny and Discovery. The high-tech labs on these two buses give students who would not otherwise be exposed to modern scientific technology the chance to see what a career in science can offer them, according to Chen.

This is why mentor Alecia Bell from the Women and Mathematics Mentoring Program elected to take her students on a field trip aboard Destiny.

The Women and Math program, which has been in existence since 1993 in Durham County and 1995 in Wake County, aims to retain the interest of girls who already excel in science and math by pairing them with female mentors with science- or math-related careers.

"It's important for girls to do whatever they like, and this is the age when they decide what they like. Science can be intimidating, and it is good for them to see women in science and math," says Bell, a service processor test lead at IBM who has been involved with the program for two years.

"(TV) shows like CSI help to dispel the stereotype that science is a nerdy field. The girls see science in these shows and want to do what the scientists are doing."

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