Elijah plays in a jazz band and is active in the Boy Scouts. He hopes to someday become a scientist, because science "allows a person to solve the mysteries of the universe."
Ethanol is made from corn by breaking starch into glucose and converting the sugar with yeast. But the process is too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. Elijah discovered that the much more widely available cellulose – a main structural component of plants – could serve as an alternate source of glucose, but that it is much harder to produce. After his father explained how a mushroom smashed on his T-shirt created a hole because of enzymes that reacted with the cotton in the fabric, Elijah wondered if he could use the enzymes found in fungi to more easily convert the cellulose into glucose.
Elijah made extracts of 11 different local fungi. He added cellulose (in the form of filter paper) and measured initial and final glucose concentrations with a glucose strip. After some success, he tried paper and hay as cellulose sources. The fungi were unable to convert these materials unless they were first boiled in weak acid. He then successfully converted the glucose into ethanol by fermentation with yeast.
