I had this happen to me in high school. My project won my local fair, at which point I went on to the state. At that point, someone pointed out that I was missing a tremendous amount of paperwork, and I had to go seek, ahem, creative ways to get it done post-facto. My project went on to finish high enough in the state fair that I got to go to the national event.<p>The issue here is that ISEF, Intel and other organizations that sponsor national science fairs don&#x27;t want a PR disaster when it turns out that the winning project violates standards for institutional review and consent. That would be a major scandal and PR black eye. The only way to avoid this is by having every participant at every level complete the appropriate pre-clearance for the experiments.<p>As with any experiment, doing any kind of work with animals (even house pets) is subject to strict scrutiny, and any work done on humans, even siblings, even yourself, is subject to the highest level of review. As others have said, this is a fact of life in science, and learning about informed consent sooner rather than later is actually a valuable lesson.