11 ms·

15-Year-Old Maker Astronomically Improves Pancreatic Cancer Test

285 points by swombat 14y ago

molossus 14y ago
I've actually read about this before, but still never found any technical details about how the test works. My inner conspiracy theorist worries that a pharmaceutical corporation has bought this idea up.
- hirenj 14y ago
  I was interested to see what criteria were used to measure performance, but I haven't found a paper written about it. The most detailed information I could find was from here: http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_program/news/topic_maryland_science_fair_pancreatic_cancer_diagnosis.php http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_pr... Essentially, this seems pretty damn early as far as results go. There will probably be a few years before we know it actually works or not.
  - pcrh 14y ago
    Without wishing to rain on the kids parade... There are two aspects to the reported work. The first is the use of carbon nanotube biosensors incorporating antibodies. Google shows they've been around for a while and are reportedly more sensitive than previous methods. The second is using the levels of mesothelin to diagnose pancreatic cancer, this is less widely established, but was also recently reported by a different lab (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040157 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...). Putting the two together seems to be the work of Jack Andraka.
    - pyre 14y ago
      The fact that a 15 year old digested that information and put the two together is impressive in itself. Who cares if he was standing on the shoulders of giants? He bothered to gaze towards the horizon rather than at his own navel.
      - pcrh 14y ago
        I agree. Also, it's possible that his work will actually directly lead to a test for pancreatic cancer, though that would take more work to establish, obviously.
- gavinlynch 14y ago
  Why would that be a problem?
  - molossus 14y ago
    The same reason that Exxon Mobile likes to keep patents on electric cars in its collection.
randomdrake 14y ago
"I actually love single-walled carbon nanotubes; they're like the superheroes of material science." I feel the same way. This kid is genuinely excited and interested which, is extraordinary. I love seeing youngsters getting excited about science. Unfortunately, this blog post and the one it claims as a source [1] are rather fluffy on details. Justin organized this information and presentation for the Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) [2]. More details about the process he discovered can be found on the ISEF 2012 profile page [3] and for those who don't want to follow the trail, I've reproduced it here: "Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with a five-year survival rate of 5.5%. One reason for this is the lack of a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive screening method. A novel paper sensor is described that simply, rapidly and inexpensively screens for pancreatic cancer. Mia Paca cells overexpressing mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer, were cultured; mesothelin was isolated, concentrated and quantified with ELISA. After optimization with the Western Blot assay, the antibody to human mesothelin was dispersed with single walled carbon nanotubes. This dispersion was used to dip-coat strips of filter paper, rendering the paper conductive. Optimal layering was determined using a scanning electron microscope. Cell media spiked with varying amounts of mesothelin was applied to the paper biosensor. Change in electrical potential was measured before and after application and a dose-response curve was constructed with an R2 value of 99.92%. In vivo tests on human blood serum obtained from healthy people and patients with chronic pancreatitis, PanIn, pancreatic cancer revealed the same trends.. The sensor’s limit of detection was found to be 0.156 ng/mL, satisfying the limit of 10 ng/mL, the level considered an overexpression of mesothelin consistent with pancreatic cancer. The sensor costs $3.00; 10 tests can be performed per strip. A test takes 5 minutes and is 168 times faster, 26,667 times less expensive, and 400 times more sensitive than ELISA, 25% to 50% more accurate than the CA10-9 test and is a sensitive, accurate, inexpensive, and rapid screening tool to detect mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer." [1] - http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-who-is-changing-how-we-test-for-cancer http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-who-... [2] - http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/ http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/ [3] - http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?PID=ME028&CFID=28485&CFTOKEN=10931553 http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?...
- brittohalloran 14y ago
nzeribe 14y ago
Because "we" are mediocre, our children follow after us, staring out of classroom windows while teachers prattle on about only-God-knows-what. When we are inspired and and challenge our kids to do more, they come up with s* like this. Age is no barrier! Bravo.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I am reminded of the Steve Jobs quote, A class people hire other A class people. 199 rejections, and the Professor that decided to let a 15 year old try a wild idea is at ... Johns Hopkins. America may be doing a lot of things foolishly, but mentoring great talent for the future seems taken care of
- michaelhoffman 14y ago
  I bet many of the other applications were also to top institutions. It wouldn't be a good fit for most labs even if a Nobel Laureate were the one wanting to do it.
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  >A class people hire other A class people. I like the quote but I think people throw it around far too loosely. It seems to be an impossibility or else every company founded by A class people (assumption: there must be at least SOME such companies) would only ever consist of A class people, but that clearly isn't the case. For sake of argument let's assume Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and likely many, many others) were all founded by A class people. Do these companies consist solely of A class people? If not someone, somewhere, must have hired a non A class person, thus the hirer themseves couldn't have been A class by the original statement. You can apply the recursive argument here eventually terminating in the founders :) EDIT: Add Apple to the list of companies with (obvious) A class level founding teams. Funny oversight on my part since the quote is from Steve Jobs himself :)
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    The more accurate way to phrase it is "it takes A class talent to hire A class talent." the implication being it is not a guaranteed thing. Bs and Cs are also capable of hiring As, but it is often random luck.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - 14y ago
majorapps 14y ago
I'd love to hear the reaction of those universities who initially rejected this and their reasons.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Just so it's clear, these were individual labs at universities that rejected his request. There are a lot of legitimate reasons they may not have wanted to take him on, including: -Not enough physical space in lab - most wet labs are crowded with 2-3 people per bench -No one with enough time to supervise a high school student bumbling around the lab. You basically need a grad student or post-doc babysitting new people (HS student or new grad, doesn't matter) since they don't know where anything is or how to do anything -Not enough money. Funding has to come from somewhere, and if they don't have money to throw at this particular project they won't. -Not the focus of the lab. I would hazard a guess that the HS student emailed anyone that was remotely involved in pancreatic cancer or material science. Realistically, there are probably a handful of labs that do this sort of research and the kid just didn't know which ones to email...so he emailed everyone. -Other. Maybe the professor is teaching? On sabbatical? Already has ten undergrads?
- michaelhoffman 14y ago
  The lab he worked in seems very well-suited for this project. I find it unlikely that there are really 200 labs in the Baltimore/Washington area that are. So I'm guessing much of the reaction is "good for this kid, it never would have worked here."
marknutter 14y ago
I get tired of "X-Year-Old Does Such and Such" posts. If the accomplishment is newsworthy enough on its own, why can't it stand on its own merit?
- bcrescimanno 14y ago
  A new pancreatic cancer test is absolutely newsworthy on its own (especially if this one proves out in broader studies). The fact that it was done by a 15-year old makes it even more impressive. It's not unreasonable to applaud a young person for being way ahead of the curve.
- twistedanimator 14y ago
  You must not have much experience being around teenage boys. An improved test for pancreatic cancer is not something normally coming forth from that demographic.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  Because it's even more newsworthy that a 15-year-old did it, and news sites are in a constant battle for our attention. Why would this tire you out, though?
spyder 14y ago
Video about him when receiving the award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVzs3-GNBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVzs3-GNBc
- martinshen 14y ago
  I actually saw this on CollegeHumor scarily enough a week ago.
lhartwich 14y ago
Straight up awesome!
mistercow 14y ago
>he’s just pioneered a new, improved test for diagnosing pancreatic cancer that is 90% accurate Without more context, that claim is meaningless. Surely it cannot mean "this test gets the right answer 90% of the time when used on the general population". Nearly 99.99% of people do not have pancreatic cancer, so if I make a program that prints out the sentence "You don't have pancreatic cancer.", then my "test" would have a 99.99% accuracy rate against the general population.
- ShawnBird 14y ago
  It must mean that it is 90% accurate in identifying cancer. If your test was given 100 people with PC it would be 100% wrong but this test would be 90% correct. That is how I am reading it anyway.
  - happimess 14y ago
    The problem is that you're forced to speculate. Your interpretation sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I don't know any more about it than you do. I'd rather have an unambiguous explanation.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    But a low false negative rate is equally unimpressive unless it is combined with a low false positive rate. If I modify my program to always say "You have pancreatic cancer", then it would have a 0% false negative rate, but it would still be a worthless test because it would have a 99.99% false positive rate. Simply knowing the false negative rate is not particularly helpful.
  - shasta 14y ago
    Sounds like you want my "You do have pancreatic cancer" program, which is 100% accurate.
  - firebones 14y ago
    If the prevalence of PC in the population is 1 in 10,000, then giving this test to 100,000 people would result in 10,000 cancer-free people testing positive for PC, 9 people being screened correctly, and 1 person with PC being missed. The number is meaningless without knowing the false positive rate. Rolling a D10 with 9 sides painted black and one white could also give 90% accuracy as a test too.
politician 14y ago
The real question now is whether this work will be patented and made 26,000 times more expensive or buried.
- drharris 14y ago
  I'm voting buried. No way Big Pharma is letting this one see the light of day.
  - mattdeboard 14y ago
    Appropriate cynicism but I'd wager that an improved test for pancreatic cancer would garner them more money & market share than whatever treatments they've got for late-stage patients. Besides, finding it earlier == longer treatment periods == more money spent on medicine right? What's the smiley face for disappointment?
  - refurb 14y ago
    Do you know of any technologies that Big Pharma has suppressed? I'd be interested to read about it!
    - EricDeb 14y ago
      Well there's the male birth control method that is discussed on here occasionally. Apparently big Pharma does not want to pursue it because it's a one-off solution http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3773227 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3773227
      - refurb 14y ago
        But "not being interested" is not the same as "suppressing".
        sukuriant 14y ago
        True; but, I think what they're trying to say is the spirit is the same. 1) Not interested. Why? Doesn't make us money. 2) Supressing. Why? Because this keeps us from making money.
larrydag 14y ago
From the article... "Yes, he even got in trouble in his science class for reading articles on carbon nanotubes instead of doing his classwork." This just irks me about our (U.S.) education system. I understand doing classwork is important. Yet here you have a young student taking interest in science and engineering and gets in trouble for it? That doesn't make sense to me at all. The work he's doing should be more than enough credit for his classwork. Take him aside from the class and foster this work and passion. He'll learn more science from this one project than doing 10x the amount of classwork in any syllabus. I see no reason why his science grade could be reflected on this work.
- wisty 14y ago
  Education is a competitive sport. You don't let Olympic sprinters waste time playing basketball, or they won't win any medals. If kids waste time learning about stuff that's not on the exam, they won't get the marks they deserve, and some other kid will get their place in university.
  - cududa 14y ago
    Your metaphor is flawed. By your metaphor this kid is an olympic basketball player being forced to practice sprinting. Who cares what's on the exam? Memorizing facts for high school tests isn't any real indicator of knowledge of intelligence. That is precisely what's wrong with education though. When I was in High School I got in trouble for designing software and writhing code on paper. Then I got hired by Microsoft when I was 18, and have been doing pretty well for myself since.
    - jeremyarussell 14y ago
      I got in trouble all the time for tinkering with the school computers and reading more then doing my homework. (I still aced tests.) I'm making decent money now programming and computer fixing for a 200+ employee ophthalmology (eye doctors) office.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Most education systems around the world are broken. They are still modelled on production systems from the industrial revolution. Here is a wonderful 11 minute talk by Ken Robinson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
benthumb 14y ago
Great story. You have to admire this young man's drive, determination, and obvious intellectual precocity. He'll surely go far (he already has). I also think it's inspirational b/c it points up the importance of synthetic scientific research done by folks who are so to speak 'out of the fold'. We need institutional science, clearly, but we also need people who can take a step back and look at the big picture and see how things fit together.
vtry 14y ago
It has been proven that prostate cancer screening does not improve final outcome.
- saddino 14y ago
  Especially for pancreatic cancer.
drchiu 14y ago
This is a really neat concept. I have a MD and a background in biochemistry, and can say most people I've met in the field of oncology don't nearly have the creativeness and audacity of this kid's idea. Essentially he's using the carbon nanotube materials, sending an electric current through it, and detecting minute voltage changes that occur when cancer proteins bind to the antibodies laced over the nanotubes. The cost of using nanotubes to detect cancer, however, may be quite prohibitive. Think 500-1000 dollars per test. On a population screening level, I don't think most governments or insurance companies would go for it.
confluence 14y ago
Is there a law for "something"-year-old does "something" headlines? I see them all the time - and I hate them because I cynically predict that what ever it is that they are about to tell me is going to be either trivial, false or hyped. I don't blame the kids - I guess it's just to get the clicks/attention for the news organisations. If your age is being touted as the reason we should care about what you have done - then the thing that follows is probably bullshit, trivial or hyped. Have you ever heard "34"-year-old tech CEO launches new multi billion dollar product line? No. You read "Google launches Project Glass".
dreadsword 14y ago
I hate to sound like a dick, but it bugs me that MAKE claims him as one of their own by arbitrarily labeling him a "Maker." He's not a maker, he's a research scientist.

285 points by swombat 14y ago

I've actually read about this before, but still never found any technical details about how the test works. My inner conspiracy theorist worries that a pharmaceutical corporation has bought this idea up.

hirenj 14y ago
I was interested to see what criteria were used to measure performance, but I haven't found a paper written about it. The most detailed information I could find was from here: http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_program/news/topic_maryland_science_fair_pancreatic_cancer_diagnosis.php http://www.pancan.org/section_research/strategic_research_pr... Essentially, this seems pretty damn early as far as results go. There will probably be a few years before we know it actually works or not.
- pcrh 14y ago
  Without wishing to rain on the kids parade... There are two aspects to the reported work. The first is the use of carbon nanotube biosensors incorporating antibodies. Google shows they've been around for a while and are reportedly more sensitive than previous methods. The second is using the levels of mesothelin to diagnose pancreatic cancer, this is less widely established, but was also recently reported by a different lab (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040157 http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...). Putting the two together seems to be the work of Jack Andraka.
  - pyre 14y ago
    The fact that a 15 year old digested that information and put the two together is impressive in itself. Who cares if he was standing on the shoulders of giants? He bothered to gaze towards the horizon rather than at his own navel.
    - pcrh 14y ago
      I agree. Also, it's possible that his work will actually directly lead to a test for pancreatic cancer, though that would take more work to establish, obviously.
gavinlynch 14y ago
Why would that be a problem?
- molossus 14y ago
  The same reason that Exxon Mobile likes to keep patents on electric cars in its collection.

randomdrake 14y ago

"I actually love single-walled carbon nanotubes; they're like the superheroes of material science." I feel the same way. This kid is genuinely excited and interested which, is extraordinary. I love seeing youngsters getting excited about science. Unfortunately, this blog post and the one it claims as a source [1] are rather fluffy on details. Justin organized this information and presentation for the Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) [2]. More details about the process he discovered can be found on the ISEF 2012 profile page [3] and for those who don't want to follow the trail, I've reproduced it here: "Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with a five-year survival rate of 5.5%. One reason for this is the lack of a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive screening method. A novel paper sensor is described that simply, rapidly and inexpensively screens for pancreatic cancer. Mia Paca cells overexpressing mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer, were cultured; mesothelin was isolated, concentrated and quantified with ELISA. After optimization with the Western Blot assay, the antibody to human mesothelin was dispersed with single walled carbon nanotubes. This dispersion was used to dip-coat strips of filter paper, rendering the paper conductive. Optimal layering was determined using a scanning electron microscope. Cell media spiked with varying amounts of mesothelin was applied to the paper biosensor. Change in electrical potential was measured before and after application and a dose-response curve was constructed with an R2 value of 99.92%. In vivo tests on human blood serum obtained from healthy people and patients with chronic pancreatitis, PanIn, pancreatic cancer revealed the same trends.. The sensor’s limit of detection was found to be 0.156 ng/mL, satisfying the limit of 10 ng/mL, the level considered an overexpression of mesothelin consistent with pancreatic cancer. The sensor costs $3.00; 10 tests can be performed per strip. A test takes 5 minutes and is 168 times faster, 26,667 times less expensive, and 400 times more sensitive than ELISA, 25% to 50% more accurate than the CA10-9 test and is a sensitive, accurate, inexpensive, and rapid screening tool to detect mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer." [1] - http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-who-is-changing-how-we-test-for-cancer http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680194/meet-the-15-year-old-who-... [2] - http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/ http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/ [3] - http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?PID=ME028&CFID=28485&CFTOKEN=10931553 http://apps.societyforscience.org/intelisef2012/project.cfm?...

brittohalloran 14y ago

nzeribe 14y ago

Because "we" are mediocre, our children follow after us, staring out of classroom windows while teachers prattle on about only-God-knows-what. When we are inspired and and challenge our kids to do more, they come up with s* like this. Age is no barrier! Bravo.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

I am reminded of the Steve Jobs quote, A class people hire other A class people. 199 rejections, and the Professor that decided to let a 15 year old try a wild idea is at ... Johns Hopkins. America may be doing a lot of things foolishly, but mentoring great talent for the future seems taken care of

michaelhoffman 14y ago
I bet many of the other applications were also to top institutions. It wouldn't be a good fit for most labs even if a Nobel Laureate were the one wanting to do it.
ryanmolden 14y ago
>A class people hire other A class people. I like the quote but I think people throw it around far too loosely. It seems to be an impossibility or else every company founded by A class people (assumption: there must be at least SOME such companies) would only ever consist of A class people, but that clearly isn't the case. For sake of argument let's assume Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and likely many, many others) were all founded by A class people. Do these companies consist solely of A class people? If not someone, somewhere, must have hired a non A class person, thus the hirer themseves couldn't have been A class by the original statement. You can apply the recursive argument here eventually terminating in the founders :) EDIT: Add Apple to the list of companies with (obvious) A class level founding teams. Funny oversight on my part since the quote is from Steve Jobs himself :)
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  The more accurate way to phrase it is "it takes A class talent to hire A class talent." the implication being it is not a guaranteed thing. Bs and Cs are also capable of hiring As, but it is often random luck.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- 14y ago

majorapps 14y ago

I'd love to hear the reaction of those universities who initially rejected this and their reasons.

polyfractal 14y ago
Just so it's clear, these were individual labs at universities that rejected his request. There are a lot of legitimate reasons they may not have wanted to take him on, including: -Not enough physical space in lab - most wet labs are crowded with 2-3 people per bench -No one with enough time to supervise a high school student bumbling around the lab. You basically need a grad student or post-doc babysitting new people (HS student or new grad, doesn't matter) since they don't know where anything is or how to do anything -Not enough money. Funding has to come from somewhere, and if they don't have money to throw at this particular project they won't. -Not the focus of the lab. I would hazard a guess that the HS student emailed anyone that was remotely involved in pancreatic cancer or material science. Realistically, there are probably a handful of labs that do this sort of research and the kid just didn't know which ones to email...so he emailed everyone. -Other. Maybe the professor is teaching? On sabbatical? Already has ten undergrads?
michaelhoffman 14y ago
The lab he worked in seems very well-suited for this project. I find it unlikely that there are really 200 labs in the Baltimore/Washington area that are. So I'm guessing much of the reaction is "good for this kid, it never would have worked here."

marknutter 14y ago

I get tired of "X-Year-Old Does Such and Such" posts. If the accomplishment is newsworthy enough on its own, why can't it stand on its own merit?

bcrescimanno 14y ago
A new pancreatic cancer test is absolutely newsworthy on its own (especially if this one proves out in broader studies). The fact that it was done by a 15-year old makes it even more impressive. It's not unreasonable to applaud a young person for being way ahead of the curve.
twistedanimator 14y ago
You must not have much experience being around teenage boys. An improved test for pancreatic cancer is not something normally coming forth from that demographic.
snowwrestler 14y ago
Because it's even more newsworthy that a 15-year-old did it, and news sites are in a constant battle for our attention. Why would this tire you out, though?

spyder 14y ago

Video about him when receiving the award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVzs3-GNBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVzs3-GNBc

martinshen 14y ago
I actually saw this on CollegeHumor scarily enough a week ago.

lhartwich 14y ago

Straight up awesome!

mistercow 14y ago

>he’s just pioneered a new, improved test for diagnosing pancreatic cancer that is 90% accurate Without more context, that claim is meaningless. Surely it cannot mean "this test gets the right answer 90% of the time when used on the general population". Nearly 99.99% of people do not have pancreatic cancer, so if I make a program that prints out the sentence "You don't have pancreatic cancer.", then my "test" would have a 99.99% accuracy rate against the general population.

ShawnBird 14y ago
It must mean that it is 90% accurate in identifying cancer. If your test was given 100 people with PC it would be 100% wrong but this test would be 90% correct. That is how I am reading it anyway.
- happimess 14y ago
  The problem is that you're forced to speculate. Your interpretation sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I don't know any more about it than you do. I'd rather have an unambiguous explanation.
- mistercow 14y ago
  But a low false negative rate is equally unimpressive unless it is combined with a low false positive rate. If I modify my program to always say "You have pancreatic cancer", then it would have a 0% false negative rate, but it would still be a worthless test because it would have a 99.99% false positive rate. Simply knowing the false negative rate is not particularly helpful.
- shasta 14y ago
  Sounds like you want my "You do have pancreatic cancer" program, which is 100% accurate.
- firebones 14y ago
  If the prevalence of PC in the population is 1 in 10,000, then giving this test to 100,000 people would result in 10,000 cancer-free people testing positive for PC, 9 people being screened correctly, and 1 person with PC being missed. The number is meaningless without knowing the false positive rate. Rolling a D10 with 9 sides painted black and one white could also give 90% accuracy as a test too.

politician 14y ago

The real question now is whether this work will be patented and made 26,000 times more expensive or buried.

drharris 14y ago
I'm voting buried. No way Big Pharma is letting this one see the light of day.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  Appropriate cynicism but I'd wager that an improved test for pancreatic cancer would garner them more money & market share than whatever treatments they've got for late-stage patients. Besides, finding it earlier == longer treatment periods == more money spent on medicine right? What's the smiley face for disappointment?
- refurb 14y ago
  Do you know of any technologies that Big Pharma has suppressed? I'd be interested to read about it!
  - EricDeb 14y ago
    Well there's the male birth control method that is discussed on here occasionally. Apparently big Pharma does not want to pursue it because it's a one-off solution http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3773227 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3773227
    - refurb 14y ago
      But "not being interested" is not the same as "suppressing".
      - sukuriant 14y ago
        True; but, I think what they're trying to say is the spirit is the same. 1) Not interested. Why? Doesn't make us money. 2) Supressing. Why? Because this keeps us from making money.

larrydag 14y ago

From the article... "Yes, he even got in trouble in his science class for reading articles on carbon nanotubes instead of doing his classwork." This just irks me about our (U.S.) education system. I understand doing classwork is important. Yet here you have a young student taking interest in science and engineering and gets in trouble for it? That doesn't make sense to me at all. The work he's doing should be more than enough credit for his classwork. Take him aside from the class and foster this work and passion. He'll learn more science from this one project than doing 10x the amount of classwork in any syllabus. I see no reason why his science grade could be reflected on this work.

wisty 14y ago
Education is a competitive sport. You don't let Olympic sprinters waste time playing basketball, or they won't win any medals. If kids waste time learning about stuff that's not on the exam, they won't get the marks they deserve, and some other kid will get their place in university.
- cududa 14y ago
  Your metaphor is flawed. By your metaphor this kid is an olympic basketball player being forced to practice sprinting. Who cares what's on the exam? Memorizing facts for high school tests isn't any real indicator of knowledge of intelligence. That is precisely what's wrong with education though. When I was in High School I got in trouble for designing software and writhing code on paper. Then I got hired by Microsoft when I was 18, and have been doing pretty well for myself since.
  - jeremyarussell 14y ago
    I got in trouble all the time for tinkering with the school computers and reading more then doing my homework. (I still aced tests.) I'm making decent money now programming and computer fixing for a 200+ employee ophthalmology (eye doctors) office.
rogerbinns 14y ago
Most education systems around the world are broken. They are still modelled on production systems from the industrial revolution. Here is a wonderful 11 minute talk by Ken Robinson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

benthumb 14y ago

Great story. You have to admire this young man's drive, determination, and obvious intellectual precocity. He'll surely go far (he already has). I also think it's inspirational b/c it points up the importance of synthetic scientific research done by folks who are so to speak 'out of the fold'. We need institutional science, clearly, but we also need people who can take a step back and look at the big picture and see how things fit together.

vtry 14y ago

It has been proven that prostate cancer screening does not improve final outcome.

saddino 14y ago
Especially for pancreatic cancer.

drchiu 14y ago

This is a really neat concept. I have a MD and a background in biochemistry, and can say most people I've met in the field of oncology don't nearly have the creativeness and audacity of this kid's idea. Essentially he's using the carbon nanotube materials, sending an electric current through it, and detecting minute voltage changes that occur when cancer proteins bind to the antibodies laced over the nanotubes. The cost of using nanotubes to detect cancer, however, may be quite prohibitive. Think 500-1000 dollars per test. On a population screening level, I don't think most governments or insurance companies would go for it.

confluence 14y ago

Is there a law for "something"-year-old does "something" headlines? I see them all the time - and I hate them because I cynically predict that what ever it is that they are about to tell me is going to be either trivial, false or hyped. I don't blame the kids - I guess it's just to get the clicks/attention for the news organisations. If your age is being touted as the reason we should care about what you have done - then the thing that follows is probably bullshit, trivial or hyped. Have you ever heard "34"-year-old tech CEO launches new multi billion dollar product line? No. You read "Google launches Project Glass".

dreadsword 14y ago

I hate to sound like a dick, but it bugs me that MAKE claims him as one of their own by arbitrarily labeling him a "Maker." He's not a maker, he's a research scientist.