The asthma patient recorded her condition each day of April, then mailed back the survey in an envelope addressed to the researcher: ”Mr. Griffin Weber.”
The patient has been a dutiful research participant, filling out the surveys twice a year for several years now. The researcher has been studying the effects of weather on asthma and hay fever, developing ways to predict when symptoms will be the worst.
But the researcher doesn’t usually go by ”Mr. Weber.” He doesn’t even call himself a researcher. That’s because his laboratory is his bedroom in his parents’ home, and he is a 16-year-old Denbigh High School junior.
Weber started work on his project five years ago, when he was in the seventh grade. Since then, he has surveyed some 300 patients and racked up a string of science fair awards for his work. This year, he won the grand prize in Newport News’ contest and in the Tidewater regional competition.
This year also brought him a new honor: a first-place award in an international science fair held a few weeks ago in Alabama. The 45th Science Service Inc. competition drew more than 900 students from more than 20 countries. Weber’s project, ”Asthma and Weather: A Mathematical Model,” won the top prize in the competition’s medicine and health category. School officials say it has been almost 10 years since a Newport News student did that well in the international fair.
”We were just all so thrilled for him,” said Lucille Lebold, who teaches Weber’s advanced-placement calculus class at Denbigh. ”It’s good to see the applications go outside the classroom. A student who is really testing and using what he’s been taught – I see that in his work all the time.”
School officials describe Weber as a top student. He takes classes at the Governor’s School for Science and Technology and is interested in studying medicine eventually, perhaps doing medical research. The teen-ager also is a talented artist – when he was 9 he was featured on the front page of the Daily Press for winning a national PTA art contest -and musician.
But it is his asthma study that has made him famous, at least on the science-fair circuit, because few students pursue one project for so long.
Weber said he has stuck with his project for personal reasons.
As a youngster, he suffered from asthma and allergies. ”I noticed whenever the weather report said there was going to be a drop in the barometric pressure, I seemed to have an asthma attack later in the day,” he said.
”If I didn’t have asthma or allergies myself,” he said, ”I probably wouldn’t be that interested in it.”
Weber’s project started with surveys of other asthma and hay fever sufferers. He found participants at school and by having local nurses hand out his surveys. Later, he got data from hospitals here and in New York City and New Orleans showing how many asthma patients needed treatment in a given month. He also got weather information for the same time periods.
He now has a network of more than 60 asthma patients on the Peninsula who send him daily reports of their suffering during two monthlong survey periods each year.
By correlating the two sets of data, he discovered, among other things, that asthma sufferers did much better in warm weather.
But finding that wasn’t enough. Weber wanted to find a way to predict how severe the symptoms would be based on any given set of weather conditions. That, he reasoned, could help an asthmatic decide how much preventive medicine to take.
A series of complex mathematical formulas worked out on his computer did the trick. But Weber said those formulas were too complicated for most people to use easily.
So he developed his hand-held ”Asthma Wheel,” which allows a patient to turn a few plastic dials to determine how severe their symptoms will be on a cold, rainy day, for example.
”I think this is one of my biggest breakthroughs,” he said. ”When I was able to translate these formulas into something they could really use.”
The wheel figured prominently in his science fair displays this year.
James G. Batterson, a Newport News School Board member and NASA engineer, was a judge at this year’s city science fair. He said the teen-ager’s project was on par with the type of work usually seen in graduate school.
”It was a very nice job,” he said.
Weber said he does not know if he will continue his project next year; he is not sure he’ll have access to any new data. But he said he has enjoyed the research – and the winning.
”I love going to the fairs. I like just talking about my project with other people,” he said. ”But even if I didn’t have the science fairs, I’d still be interested in it. I never really get bored with the project.”
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