How a 12-Year-Old’s Science Fair Project Led to a Breakthrough in Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

A teenager named Nina Kathe suggested an experiment in a secondary school biology classroom in the northern Swiss canton of Aargau, which caused her biology teacher to give her a sidelong glance. Although it sounded idealistic, he advised her to give it a shot and not to be too upset if it didn’t work out. Her idea involved engineering bacteria to essentially produce the molecules that would kill them, and she requested access to university lab equipment as well as the opportunity to work alone. Not your average sixth-form assignment.

Nevertheless, Kathe proceeded, searching scholarly databases, organizing the experiment herself, and ultimately generating results that won her prizes at both the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Tallinn, Estonia, and the Swiss Youth in Science national competition. Her work, according to the ETH Zurich judge, was “at a level far above what can be expected from a secondary school project.” He wasn’t giving. He was telling the truth.

One of the biggest public health issues facing contemporary medicine is antibiotic resistance, the issue Kathe was working on. For almost a century, antibiotics have been the cornerstone of every significant development in organ transplantation, cancer treatment, surgery, and infection control. Routine procedures become potentially lethal without them. However, bacteria change over time. They are exceptionally skilled at it.

Every time an antibiotic is used, selection pressure is created; susceptible bacteria perish while bacteria with resistance genes survive and procreate, passing those genes on. Antimicrobial resistance is estimated by the World Health Organization to kill one to two million people annually; by 2050, that number could rise to 20 million, at a cost of more than $2.9 trillion. Despite the urgency, funding for the development of new antibiotics has lagged for decades, in part due to the unfavorable economics for pharmaceutical companies—a drug used sparingly, which is the proper clinical approach to antibiotics, doesn’t generate the revenue of a cholesterol medication taken daily for life.

Kathe’s method was sophisticated in a way that seemed to have escaped the attention of more seasoned researchers. Through particular genes, the E. coli bacteria she was working with had become resistant to the antibiotic tetracycline. Instead of searching for a novel medication to suppress those genes, she created synthetic RNA sequences intended to disrupt the activity of those genes. She then took it a step further and modified the DNA of E. coli so that the bacteria would make these altered RNAs on their own. In essence, the bacteria were being forced to undermine their own defenses from within.

“That was maybe a bit mean,” Kathe chuckled. “The bacteria themselves produced the RNAs that would ensure the antibiotics could kill them.” Many of the bacteria were successfully killed when exposed to tetracycline in the presence of her engineered molecules, which caused them to lose their resistance. Not eliminated as a class, not replaced by a new medication, but made vulnerable to an existing medication once more. Although it’s not a perfect solution—the process’s efficiency still needs to be improved, and the transition from lab bacteria to in vivo animal models to eventual human treatment is a long one—the idea is incredibly promising. When she did it, she was seventeen.

A fourteen-year-old student used agar plates to compare zones of inhibition—the transparent rings where bacteria fail to grow—across different antimicrobial agents at about the same time in a completely different type of classroom experiment. Oregano oil was one of those agents. The outcomes were unexpected enough to garner interest outside of her school. In every bacterial sample she tested, oregano oil outperformed the commonly used antibiotic amoxicillin, producing the largest zones.

The active ingredient in oregano oil, carvacrol, is known to degrade bacterial cell walls and interfere with bacterial reproduction, according to scientists who examined the experiment. Although carvacrol’s antimicrobial qualities have long been known to researchers, the observation gained new attention when it outperformed a pharmaceutical antibiotic in a student-led test. Because the supply of synthetic antibiotics has dried up, there is a renewed interest in natural antimicrobials. Research on carvacrol may be able to help, either as a potential enhancer or as a starting point for the synthesis of more stable compounds, rather than as a replacement for medication.

Additionally, nature itself is pushing the science of antibiotic resistance in unexpected directions. A bacterium known as Psychrobacter SC65A.3 was discovered in February 2026 when researchers drilled into a 5,000-year-old ice layer in Romania’s Scarișoara Ice Cave. This bacterium predates the entire antibiotic era and carries over 100 resistance-related genes, demonstrating resistance to ten modern antibiotics, including ciprofloxacin, vancomycin, and rifampicin. Some presumptions were disproved by the discovery.

It turns out that resistance developed naturally over millennia in environments where microbes competed for survival, rather than just as a result of human overuse of antibiotics. These ancient resistance genes may spread to contemporary bacteria as Arctic and mountain ice melts, exacerbating an already severe issue. However, the same bacterium also demonstrated the capacity to inhibit multiple superbugs and possesses hundreds of genes with unidentified functions, indicating that researching these ancient microbes may provide both tools and cautions.

From a Romanian ice cave to a Swiss classroom, there is a recurring theme in all of this: the antibiotic resistance crisis is being addressed from angles that the pharmaceutical industry had not given priority. making bacteria turn against one another. extracting substances from plants that existed before synthetic chemistry.

Examining the ancient ice’s genetic record. It is becoming less and less likely that the breakthroughs will come from the traditional drug development pipeline. Like Kathe’s, they might begin with someone posing a question that a more circumspect mind might have written off as idealistic.