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["Brungardt, Sam" <Sam.Brungardt@state.mn.us>]

Title: The fruit of their labors (newspaper article RE pawpaws)

(from Newsday, New York, N.Y.)

PAWPAW POWER
The fruit of their labors
Caryn Eve Murray

January 9, 2005

It didn't take long at all for some ninth-graders at Syosset High School to develop a consuming passion for pawpaw.

"I like fruit in general," said Paul Kim, 13. "But I never had this before and it tasted probably like the best fruit I ever had."

Kim and 47 of his classmates needed little more than this small science classroom sampling last fall for their appetites to be whetted - not for an all-you-can-eat fruit binge in the school cafeteria but for what teachers and administrators hope will be their four-year commitment to a pawpaw cultivation project in the school's new 400-square-foot greenhouse.

Working in cooperation with the University of Kentucky and the PawPaw Foundation, a Kentucky-based research organization, the kids are studying the native North American plant, with an eye toward contributing findings on its germination, growth and development of the seeds inside the 26 fruit that the group's founder, Neal Peterson, had pollinated before sending them. One of the foundation's goals is to increase the edible fruit's viability in the commercial marketplace - and even in health care. Some studies have suggested the pawpaw contains cancer-fighting agents.

"Hopefully we are going to add to a body of existing science; that's what research is all about," said Angela Lukaszewski, the school's coordinator of research programs. "And that doesn't work in our little 10-week marking periods." Like nature, she said, the project has no beginning, middle or end, so these ninth-graders will follow the pollinated seeds for four years, to be succeeded by the next series of ninth-graders.

The seed vigor study, which required the students to dissect the mango-shaped fruit, extract the 8 to 10 seeds and take a variety of measurements, is being conducted inside the school's Geological and Ecological Research Facility that opened last spring, and includes the greenhouse as one component.

That was done in September, almost 120 days ago - the required time for the seeds to winter over in refrigeration. At the end of this month, when midterms conclude, the seeds will be potted and the next phase begins - charting germination.

"In the second four years, our trees will be bearing fruit," said Lukaszewski.

But that's a long way off: Paul Kim and Daniel Ricken, 14, will have become graduates by then. Still, they've already tasted a kind of success they're not likely to forget, even in college.

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.