WENDELL — When 17-year-old Giovanni Leon heard about the six-week summer science program called Seed, he envisioned students touring labs and watching scientists work.

“When they told me, ‘you will be conducting research,’ I was shocked,” says Leon, a senior at East Wake High School.

By the end of the summer at N.C. State University, he had a body of work that he entered into the Siemens Science Competition. Leon’s research was weighted against 1,200 other students’ nationwide.

And the result — he was named a semi-finalist. The competition is sponsored by the Siemens Foundation, which uses the Siemens’ companies as a guide for its benevolence in science, technology, engineering and math in the United States.

The Seeds program gives minorities and disadvantaged students the opportunity to work with scientists on research projects in industrial, academic and federal laboratories.

Leon was one of twelve North Carolina high school students who made it to the top of the competition. They received the distinction and prizes like video recorders and flash drives.

Ten of those honored were from Project Seed. Nine of the students attend the N.C. School of Science and Math.

Leon tells his tale with a refreshing candor, humility, idealism, enthusiasm, humor and wisdom.

For instance, when he explains his paper he prepared, “Differential Incorporation of Cholesterol by Sindbis Virus Grown in Delipidated Insect Cells,” he tells the experiences that went into learning about it himself.

With the dense facts swirling around, he couldn’t write notes, and listen to his professors at the same.

He spent 10 hours at N.C.  State, two in class in seven in the lab, plus another two and a half hours studying each night to master the material.

He learned that previous studies showed cholesterol was required for reproduction of the Sindbis virus, a mosquito-borne virus.

Yet research had only been conducted on one type of mosquito cell line and only using one chemical method to extract cholesterol from a cell.

In Leon’s study, he used three types of cholesterol delipidation methods, the process of using chemicals to remove a substance.

He also used three types of mosquito cell lines to test the results of the previous studies.

Strikingly, his work produced new results. He found the virus does not require cholesterol in order to reproduce.

Learning more about the Sindbus Virus will help scientists understand more about complex viruses such as West Nile virus and Dengue Fever, Leon says.

All this attention is a lot to take in.

“When I heard the news (of the award), I was surprised,” he says. “I was speechless. I hadn’t heard of anybody in my family or anybody at East Wake ever winning an award like this. After I got home, I was proud, extremely proud.”

Leon says he then thought about all the people who had helped him.

He thought of his parents, Emilio and Albairis Leon, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico before he was born. His father is now a U.S. citizen and his mother is a permanent resident.

“When the project Seed director started explaining what the Siemens actually is, they (his parents) were proud. They said where do you want to go out to eat.”

He thought of chemistry teacher Cathy McCluskey who first suggested Leon apply to project Seed.

Chemistry isn’t his best subject, math is.

She helped him with his application and to prepare for an interview, Leon recalls.

His preceptor or mentor who was paired with Leon at State is trying to get Leon’s paper published in a scientific journal.

His older sister Ruby, a student at UNC and the first in his extended family to go to college, taught him to dream big.

“She’s the one who encouraged me in the beginning to reach far then go farther than what I had planned,” he says. “When I first entered high school, I never thought I’d go to a four-year college. I thought I’d go straight into the workplace.”

Now, he plans on becoming a surgeon, and plans to apply to Harvard, UNC, Duke or Wake Forest.

Leon wants more for his family. Until he was injured at work, his father worked two jobs as do all the people in his extended family. He draws disability that supports a family of five. Most of Leon’s cousins have dropped out of high school.

“We (Ruby) noticed it was pretty much like a circle,” he says. “You pretty much ended up doing what your parents do. Most Hispanics don’t do research. There’s got to be a change. If I can do it. Anybody can do it.”