STX students in the footsteps of Nobel laureate August Krogh.
Once again this year, students from Grenaa Gymnasium were strongly represented at the annual Science Festival at Kattegatcentret.
They manned a total of five stands with small tasks for primary school students in the subjects of biotechnology, physical geography, chemistry, physics, and biology.
The Science Festival in Grenaa this year was themed around the 150th anniversary of Nobel Prize winner and local resident August Krogh, and therefore the tasks at the five stands from Grenaa Gymnasium related to him and his wife Marie Krogh’s research.
August Krogh predicted global warming as early as the 1920s. So, in the combined biotechnology and physical geography stand, the task was to demonstrate CO2 in our exhaled air and to read graphs showing how much the CO2 level in the atmosphere needs to be reduced if the Paris Agreement is to be met.
Krogh was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his groundbreaking research on how oxygen and CO2 are exchanged in the lungs. At the chemistry stand, primary school students could therefore investigate how oxygen is transported in the blood.
At the other end of that stand, it was physics students who, with “lie detectors” in the form of small devices that measured the electrical resistance in the skin when the subjects – the primary school students – answered a series of questions with instructions to lie in one of the answers. August Krogh admittedly never invented a lie detector, but he was somewhat of a tinkerer and developed many other devices for use in his research.
August Krogh collaborated with his wife Marie Krogh on the research that led to him receiving the Nobel Prize. Marie Krogh was a doctor and probably chose that path because no fewer than four of her eight siblings died of tuberculosis. The task for the primary school students in the biology stand was therefore to illustrate how we today, now that researchers have come much further in understanding how the immune system works, are able to test patients for tuberculosis.
