If there are curious young minds, science will survive

One evening last month at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., 40 high school seniors dressed in formal wear and nibbling hors d’oeuvres showed off their scientific research to a crowd of more than 500 people. Positioned at their posters, the students enthusiastically described their efforts to improve quadcopter flight control, study implicit bias and gender stereotypes, and track space debris, for just a few examples. Before the evening was over, one deserving senior received a $250,000 top prize, and her peers went home with hefty scholarships, too. The students had come to Washington as finalists for the 2017 Regeneron Science Talent Search, a program of Society for Science & the Public, which publishes