Doctors of the Future winners back home with wealth of U.S. experiences

August, 2012

The three winners of Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar’s annual Doctors of the Future Scholarship returned home after two weeks of intense medical and scientific exposure that has fanned strong desires in the young students to pursue a future medical career.

Hessa Khalid Al-Hail, Ali Mohsen Hajji and Hamad Nasser Al Naimi were this year’s winners of a fully funded, two-week trip to the lab of Dr. Ronald Crystal, chairman of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell in New York. There they learnt about laboratory procedures and the scientific method from physician-researchers at WCMC and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Standing before the faculty of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, three Qatari high school students outlined all they had accomplished over the last two weeks: differentiating cell types, culturing cell lines, performing a DNA restriction digest and transfecting cells with a reporter gene — among a half-dozen other scientific and laboratory techniques.

Students are awarded the Doctors of the Future Scholarships based on an annual essay competition open to all high school students throughout Qatar. This year’s essay topic was on the history and future of medicine in the country. Separately, each of the students wrote about the changing face of health care in Qatar, from the practice of traditional herbal medicine through the introduction of modern technology in the last 25 years and, finally, to the future of medicine in the next 50 years as envisioned by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser, who chairs the Qatar Foundation.

WCMC-Q Director of Student Recruitment Noha Saleh said it was a memorable and an exciting experience for the winners. “Since the inception of the Essay Competition in 2008, WCMC-Q has awarded scholarships to 11 students.  By doing so, we hope to stimulate the interest of the younger generation of Qatar to pursue medicine and research as a career by providing them with an opportunity to visit our research labs in New York. So far the program has been very successful as students come back and apply to our Pre-Medical Program.”

During the course of their two-week visit, the students toured three labs and two patient care units, including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s medical intensive care unit.

In the labs, the students worked with two main cells lines, A549 and 293HEK. One of the primary experiments was the introduction of a reporter gene into a cell line and then testing and identifying the expression of the newly introduced gene.

“We had embryonic kidney cells and we transfected these cells with a gene that codes for GFP (green fluorescent protein). And we added also a PEI (polyethyleneimine), which helps DNA get into cells, and then we viewed the cells under green laser,” said Al-Hail, who attends high school at the Al-Bayan Educational Complex for Girls in Doha.

For Hessa, this was her first trip to the U.S. and she was fascinated by the different lifestyle. “It was a remarkable experience. New York was so unbelievable and way better than what the movies show. I really enjoyed my time there. Yes, it was different to Qatar but it was also a very beneficial experience. I made the utmost of it,” she said.