Jeff Murray knows how to reach his audience. Standing in front of a screen in a small auditorium on the ground floor of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics complex, he holds a laser pointer and faces an audience made up of 14- and 15-year-olds from rural Iowa.

"Here." He flashes the red light of his laser on the simple double helix that is charted across the screen. "Scientists figured out the basic structure of DNA back in 1953. Think of it this way: there are 3-billion rungs on the DNA ‘ladder,’ which is like a thousand Des Moines telephone books stacked on top of one another. People like me try to find the one letter in those thousands of telephone books that’s messed up, causing a certain disease or birth defect. That’s what the Human Genome Project is doing–we’re charting out every single letter in the code, every letter in those telephone books from top to bottom."

The students are exhausted. They’re away from home, many of them for the first time. Most haven’t slept more than a few hours at a time since they arrived. But when Murray, professor of pediatrics and director of the University’s component of the Human Genome Project, begins to speak, they suddenly are alert. And curious.

"What can you do with information like that?" one student asks. "Will people abuse it?"

"A great question," Murray says. "And it’s up to your generation to answer it."

This is just one morning of the week-long residential Environmental Health Sciences Institute (EHSI) research camp for rural youth, a program developed by the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, and cosponsored by the University’s Belin-Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE). Applicants coming from towns of fewer than 2,500 must be nominated to attend the camp, usually by a teacher or community member. Each year the University invites 15 rural youth and exposes them to a wide variety of new research and experiments in environmental health. This year there are students from towns such as Defiance, Wilton, Birmingham, and Jesup.

In addition to hearing Murray and visiting his genome lab, these students will tour the Molecular Immunology and Cell Biology Facility, the Inhalation Toxicity Lab, and a water quality testing site. They will observe a brain autopsy conducted in a pathology lab at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. And they will travel to the phytoremediation lab in Amana, where researchers are learning to use natural substances, such as bacteria, microbes, and poplar trees, in order to detoxify areas blighted by oil spills or chemical run-off.

Each teen will then outline an independent research project on one or more of the topics covered and prepare a lecture. After attending camp, the 15 participants will be required to return to their home communities and give at least two formal presentations to school and public groups.

Chris Brus, director of WISE and one of the founders of the EHSI camp, attends at least one presentation for each student.

"I’m there to say to the people in all these communities around Iowa, ‘This is your university, and we have resources here that belong to you,’ " Brus says. "We do our research by the good graces of the Iowa population, and we ask a lot of them. This is one way we can give back and let our communities know what we’re doing."

University researchers involved in teaching youth through EHSI agree that the camp has a greater impact than simply educating and enriching 15 students each summer.

"Our lab is dedicated to better understanding birth defects," Murray says. "But in a larger sense, it is part of a research lab’s function to allow talented students to experience research and see how it will affect the future world they will both inhabit and create. Then they, in turn, take this knowledge back to their home towns."