A high school girl's science project has alerted many people to the potential hazards of heating food in microwave ovens.

When Claire Nelson was 12 and growing up in Little Rock, Ark., she struggled to come up with a science fair project. As she and her mother discussed some articles she was reading for her science class, the topic turned to diethylhexyl adipate, or DEHA, a carcinogen found in plastic food wrap. Its effect on food had not been tested in the United States.

Nelson, now a senior at the University of Mississippi, filed that information away until her sophomore year in high school, when she decided to test what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still had not -- whether the DEHA in some plastic wraps migrates to food heated in a microwave.

But first, she had to find the correct equipment to test her hypothesis.

Intrigued by her proposal, Jon Wilkes from the National Center for Toxicological Research (an FDA affiliate) in Jefferson, Ark., agreed to provide her with the equipment she needed. With her mother driving her 30 miles to Jefferson several times a week, she began her testing.

Nelson placed olive oil into four containers, each covered with a different type of plastic wrap, then microwaved them for four minutes. The wrap touched the oil to see whether any toxins in the plastic leached into the oil. The oil was analyzed and compared with oil microwaved uncovered.

For 2 1/2 years, Nelson made several trips each week to and from the research center.

"The legal limit for migration of plastic into food is 0.05 parts per billion -- that's minuscule. But I found that this plastic and this DEHA were migrating at hundreds of parts per million," Nelson said.

Armed with this critical information, she went to her first science fair. As a high school junior, she received the American Chemical Society's top science prize for students; as a senior she placed fourth in the International Science and Engineering Fair.

She credits her success to having a project that was original and her ability to explain her findings.

"Judges came around to ask you questions, and since I've always been a good speaker, I loved 'broadcasting the news' and telling what was going on," she said.

Nelson also felt that she had a level of commitment to her project that some of her competitors did not have -- and that commitment made the difference, she said.

"I had really worked every single day. I felt like some of the other people that were at the science fair had had a lot of help from their parents or from a sponsor or they hadn't really done all of their own project," she said.

Also, she added, "I did not get my project from a book or from someone telling me, 'You can test this.' I just read in a magazine that it had never been done before in the U.S., and I did it."

And it didn't hurt, she said, that she received funding from the FDA.

Nelson said the weeklong international fair "was an incredible experience. . . . You meet a lot of really great people, and I met several Nobel Prize winners who judged me. . . . And then, of course, the international science fair is a completely free trip."

Nelson thinks her participation in science fairs taught her how to present complex ideas to industry experts. But the most important thing she experienced was "actually doing the project versus just learning about it in a book," she said.

Nelson has gained some fame from her project; her work has been published in many science journals, including "Carcinogens -- At 10,000,000 Times FDA Limits," by People Against Cancer.

"It's really funny checking on the Internet to even type in my name on a search engine because so many people have based their ongoing research for the last five years on my research. So it really opened a lot of doors. I actually even had a lawsuit filed against me. I guess the American Plastics Council, they weren't too happy about my research," she said.

"But people should know that if you don't vent one corner and you let the plastic wrap touch a high-fat and high-sugar food, DEHA is migrating. I showed exactly how it's migrating, and I did test upon test upon test to show the same result," she continued.

Nelson is pursuing a career in TV journalism, not science. But she's thankful for all science has provided for her.

"I used, I think, three different computers and mass spectrometers just to do all of my research. Without computers, I couldn't have done anything," she said.

"When new technology comes out, I want to know about it. I'm very curious."

ASSISTANT EDITORS : Lisa O'Connor, 15; Becca Wyrick, 15.

REPORTER : Lauren Slemenda, 14.