Cataluna: What this girl did in the name of science

Fifteen-year-old Summer Royal has a patent pending on a product that will eliminate ukus.

The story of her years-long science project that culminated in a buzz- worthy product is one of remarkable curiosity, creativity and tenacity. The ‘Iolani School junior is almost nonchalant when she talks about all the work she has done to get this far, but her commitment to science is impressive.

To get the test lice for her research, she put ads on Craigslist offering to buy people’s head lice — alive, $1 per louse — and paid for the specimens with her birthday money.

To hatch more lice, she first borrowed an incubator from University of Hawaii at Manoa but later fashioned her own small incubator behind her mother’s refrigerator, using the heat given off by the appliance and logging the temperature and humidity in notebooks twice a day every day for two school years.

To feed the lice, which survive on blood, she let them sit on her arm.

“I’ve tested thousands over the years,” Summer said.

Her scientific inquiry started, as scientific inquiries do, with an observation followed by a question.

In the summer before her sixth-grade year, she came home from a theater class with a case of head lice. “At first my mom didn’t believe me, but I kept saying my head was itchy. Then when my mom looked in my hair, she screamed,” she said.

What was curious to Summer was that even though she and her mother shared a hairbrush, her mother didn’t get head lice. From this observation came the question, Why? Was something in her mother’s hair-care products preventing an infestation?

Her teachers at Stevenson Middle School, where she was a student at the time, were supportive of her scientific inquiry and connected her with professors at UH-Manoa, who let her use some of their equipment.

And she made friends with some of her uku suppliers, sometimes going back to buy more in subsequent years. She asked one man how he treated his son for head lice. “He said, under his breath, ‘Well, if you really want to know … kerosene.”

Hearing that really bothered Summer. Kerosene is not a safe treatment, but prescription treatments can run up to $300 a box, so some people might be tempted to resort to a cheaper option. At the same time, she says, the Centers for Disease Control is warning of “super lice” that have developed resistance to over-the-counter treatments. Summer wanted to find a safer solution that was more effective and affordable.

Her research showed that isopropyl alcohol killed lice on contact, but she wanted to figure out a way to apply it to the hair so that it wouldn’t drip into people’s eyes. She created a hair gel with copolymers that keep the product in place on the hair and also work to suffocate the lice and prevent the eggs from hatching.

“It’s not a chemical reaction. It’s a physical mode of action,” she said.

The product has gone through a series of different names: first Bye Bye Lice, then Kaput Lice and now Ditch Dat. In 2018 Summer joined with two other students, Thomas Noochan and Ryan Nguyen, to form a team to enter the eCybermission science competition. The lice treatment was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Department of Defense STEM in Action Program. The grant was given to create the product. Her goal is to get it into Longs Drugs.

“At this point I feel I’ve capped off what I can do on my own,” she said. She doesn’t have a means of producing the hair gel on a large scale, but she has made sample bottles and given them to schools. “I’m trying to find someone who can help get it into stores.”