It's almost always safe to ignore any 'Wonder Teenager makes Breakthrough' articles if the field of the breakthrough is hard science. The likelihood of a novic

It's almost always safe to ignore any 'Wonder Teenager makes Breakthrough' articles if the field of the breakthrough is hard science. The likelihood of a novice inventing something novel in a field with tens of thousands of PhDs is so incredibly low that the breakthrough is almost guaranteed to be overstated. George Church (and others) looked at Andraka's preprinted paper and wasn't exactly blown away. The cost and speed comparisons were wrong, the sensitivity and specificity were both too low to be clinically useful, and like you pointed out, mesothelin has some intractable problems when trying to diagnose tumors. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-biotech-whiz-kid-jack-andraka-is-not-on-the-forbes-30-under-30-list/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-bi... Kids with the aptitude and interest to devote themselves to biotech or engineering should absolutely be encouraged but putting them on the cover of magazines never works out.