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Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)
When three teenagers glimpsed what others dismissed as plant disease, they saw a path to solving agriculture's nitrogen problem—and the scientific establishment's skepticism only made them dig deeper.
By Science Blog Editorial Team
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Edited by Brendan Brown
Published August 30, 2026
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How we edit
The discovery began as a suspected disease. Émer Hickey was gardening with her mother in Kinsale, on the Cork coast of Ireland, when they pulled up a pea plant and found its roots studded with pale, wart-like lumps. It looked sick. Émer, then in her early teens, did the thing that separates a science story from a compost story: she took the plant to school and asked her teacher what was wrong with it.
Nothing, was the answer. The warts were nodules, and inside them lived rhizobium, a soil bacterium in the nitrogen-fixing family called diazotrophs, which legumes like peas deliberately house in exchange for fertilizer. The bacteria pull nitrogen from the air and hand it to the plant as ammonia; the plant pays in sugar. It is one of agriculture’s oldest partnerships, and one of its most frustrating exclusions, because the world’s staple cereals, wheat, barley, rice, cannot form it.
Émer told her friends Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow, whose geography class happened to be studying the world food crisis in the shadow of the 2011 Horn of Africa famine, and the three of them landed on a question with billion-dollar aid programs attached: if cereals can’t host these bacteria, could the bacteria still help cereals?
The advice from grown-up science was discouraging. Rhizobia’s benefits were understood to belong to legumes; many people told them the bacteria would have no impact on cereal crops. The girls, aged around 14 when they started, decided the objection had never actually been tested at their scale, and set out to test it at a scale nobody expected.
Working from home, with a bedroom in the Judge house converted into a laboratory, incubation racks, hand-labeled samples, a homemade regime of controls, they soaked cereal seeds in rhizobium cultures and measured everything: time to germination, germination rate, seedling growth, dry mass. Batch after batch, season after season, for three years, they ran the experiment across barley, oats and wheat, ultimately testing some 13,000 seeds, plus thousands more in an outdoor field trial, and logging on the order of 120,000 individual measurements by hand into their notebooks and spreadsheets.
The seeds ignored the expert consensus. Treated barley and oats germinated dramatically faster and more reliably, with germination rates improved by up to 50 percent, and the head start carried through: in their growth trials the treated cereals put on substantially more dry mass, with increases running as high as 74 percent. The bacteria could not give barley a legume’s nodules, but something in the association, delivered at the seed, was waking the grain up early and sending it into the world stronger.
Irish science noticed first. The project won the BT Young Scientist of the Year in 2013, making the trio the first group of girls ever to take Ireland’s premier young-science title, then the EU Young Scientist contest. In September 2014 came the summit: at Google’s headquarters in California, “Combating the Global Food Crisis: Diazotroph Bacteria as a Cereal Crop Growth Promoter” was named grand prize winner of the Google Science Fair, beating thousands of entries worldwide. The prize haul included scholarship money and a trip to the Galápagos; Time magazine put Ciara Judge among the world’s most influential teens. They were 16 and 17, and they had started at 14, on a plant most gardeners would have thrown away.