What A Boiled Potati by Camille

What A Boiled Potati by Camille - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

For a long time, I thought doing science meant following a recipe. You mix Chemical A with Chemical B, write down the color change, and get your grade. But during a biology lab last semester on enzyme catalysis using catalase from potatoes, the recipe broke, and that is when I actually became interested.
Our goal was simple: measure how changing the temperature affects how fast enzymes break down hydrogen peroxide. My group started with boiled potato extract. According to our textbook, the heat should have completely denatured the enzymes, meaning we should have seen zero reaction. Instead, when we added the hydrogen peroxide, it started fizzing. Not a lot, but enough to completely throw off our expected data.
My lab partners wanted to wash out the test tube, call it a fluke, and start over with a fresh potato. They just wanted the "right" numbers for the lab report. But I couldn't stop wondering why a dead enzyme was still doing its job. Was our thermometer broken? Did the boiling process not get hot enough? Or was there something else in the potato tissue causing the reaction?
I ended up spending my afternoon looking into it. After digging through a few old biology forums and papers, I found the culprit: iron. Potatoes contain a small amount of inorganic iron, which acts as a very weak, non-protein catalyst. Even though the heat destroyed the organic enzyme, the raw chemical element survived the boiling water and still caused the breakdown.
That small glitch completely changed how I look at academic projects. I realized that the most exciting part of research isn't when everything goes perfectly according to the manual; it’s when things go wrong and you have to figure out why. It taught me that real science isn't about memorizing outcomes, but about having the curiosity to look closer at the anomalies.