Bringing Dr. Fernandez's Work to the High School Classroom 
by Andrew Kerr
Over the last few years, television has been flooded with advertisements for wonder drugs designed to better our lives in almost every conceivable way. Of course, penny-wise shoppers will always seek ways to get the things they see advertised on TV at the lowest possible cost. The combination of these two factors has resulted in a booming black market for counterfeit drugs. Not too long ago, the news reported on senior citizens taking buses to Canada in order to purchase cheaper drugs across the border. Today, all one needs is a credit card, basic Internet skills, and a certain level of desperation to go online, purchase a drug (which may originate from any country), and have it shipped directly to one's door. One need not worry about getting a prescription from a doctor—the sorts of people who are in the business of manufacturing and selling counterfeit drugs are not all that demanding.
Unfortunately, "The drugs that you get on online pharmacy are not necessarily legit," says Jennifer Gerhold, an AP and IB (International Baccalauriate) Biology and honors chemistry teacher at Norcross High School in Gwinnett County.
She spent last summer as a Georgia Intern-Fellowship for
Teachers (GIFT) fellow working with Dr. Facundo Fernandez at Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry analyzing counterfeit drugs. It was her job to tell the fakes from the real deals.
"The project [Dr. Fernandez] had me work on involved chemical analytical techniques," she explains. "I basically grounded the samples up into powder. Then I had to dilute each sample with a solvent; these compounds won't dissolve in water. Mix it up, inject it into the HPLC, it separates them—that's about a half hour process. This produces a graph with spikes. You can then compare the graph of the counterfeit drug to the standard."
One hurdle Jennifer had to leap was getting permission from reluctant drug manufacturers to study samples of their product (necessary in order to differentiate fakes from the real deals). Although this research could save drug manufacturers big bucks in the long run, the chemical composition of their pills is also a necessarily well-guarded secret—rather like the formula for Coca-Cola. With the lab's chromatography and spectromety equipment, the secrets of these pills reveal themselves.
This is a very serious business. Many countries from which counterfeit drugs originate either lack the stringent standards of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or lack the law-enforcement resources to adequately police what are, in many cases, hard-to-detect home-grown operations. And with demand for cheaper meds so high, it is no surprise that some unscrupulous individuals might try to make a fast buck selling senior citizens baking soda instead of a real drug. In the worst case scenario, that could become a serious public health nuisance. Imagine if people stricken with malaria started "treating" themselves with phony anti-malarial drugs?
What techniques did Jennifer use in the laboratory? "One we used is HPLC [high pressure liquid chromatography]," she says. "We also did MS (mass spectrometry). My students haven't really heard of this before. The machines I was working with are probably worth about $45,000 apiece, and even explaining how to use them is sort of beyond my students. So, I have to apply general principles to the classroom."
Although Jennifer may have to scale the complexity of her summer work down for her classroom, she will be bringing some of her students to Dr. Fernandez's lab in order to give them a taste of real, university level research (and those big, expensive machines). Other rewards from her GIFT experience: the school's Hispanic club, "La Voz," will be getting guest speakers through Dr. Fernandez's connections. Also, Dr. Fernandez, Jennifer, and Norcross's Principal, Mary Anne Charron co-authored a grant to create a summer research camp targeted to Hispanic students.
Jennifer has been teaching for a total of eight years. She transferred from frigid Minneapolis, Minnesota to Georgia in part "to enjoy the warmer weather," and is teaching at Norcross High School for her second year.
To download Jennifer's Action Plan Summary, click here. (MS Word Document | 97 KB)
To download Jennifer's Implementation Plan here, click here. (MS Word Document | 102 KB)
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