Slashdot Mirror
Maryland Teen Wins World's Largest Science Fair
Velcroman1 writes "A Maryland student was awarded the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on Friday for developing a urine and blood test that detects pancreatic cancer with 90 percent accuracy. Jack Andraka, 15, claimed the $75,000 prize for his test, which is roughly 28 times cheaper and faster, and over 100 times more sensitive than current tests. Each year, approximately 7 million high school students around the globe develop original research projects and present their work at local science fairs with the hope of winning."
Bright kid.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
when will we see wide-spread usage in regular medical practice?
Sounds like an awesome result, but isn't this more a feat of engineering than science? Not that I am complaining per se, but I feel that it's important that people recognize the difference.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
If all he did was get a specification from a client and build something to that specification, I'd agree with you. Seeing as he both developed the test and did a scientific evaluation, I think this qualifies as a healthy mixture of both engineering and science.
Insert self-referential sig here.
How much of the work supposedly done by this individual were actually done by the child? What about the others considered for the award? Science fairs have become a huge joke, and I'm sorry if this child actually did this on his own. Even HS fairs have no credibility.
Meanwhile, here are some of the approximately 6,999,999 losers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
How many contestants entered in with volcanoes and solar system dioramas.
Humankind needs more people like him, and less dickheads that go into finance.
.. from what I have seen of these fairs where kids invent/discover things seemingly beyond their mental, physical or financial means, they are inevitably "guided" by parents who are professionals. In the case of Andraka, his mother appears to be an anaesthetist at a hospital and his father might be an engineer ...
It's nevertheless a commendable result.
but ridiculously profitable. I would imagine charging 1/4 current rates would be about right, considering that the cost is 28 times cheaper.
What had you accomplished by age 15? Hairy palms and premature blindness?
Something tells me one of the smartest adolescents in the world (who happens to be $75,000 richer than you) doesn't really give a fuck what you think.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The student will see no more money. Consumers will pay the same price. And some executive will increase his income 15-20x! Go Technology!
A Maryland student was awarded the top prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on Friday for developing a urine and blood test that detects pancreatic cancer with 90 percent accuracy.
Who did the work? I'm not thinking the kid did. He may have "developed" it in the same sense that modern americans talk about how they are "building a house" when they really mean cutting a check for someone else to build it.
I'm thinking most of the list is "This is what my dad does at work and this is what they did while I watched them".
Plausible projects that could actually be done by kids would be:
"Euglena: The Solution to Nanosilver Pollution" Nothing too unobtainable here, nothing requiring a weird environment, clearly possible in a basement, or in my basement anyway.
"Design and Creation of Small Wind-Power Engines for Low Wind Speeds Based on Magnus Effect" Totally designable and buildable by a kid, key word being "small" and "low speed"
"Repelling Effect of Plant Extracts on Bees-A Study on Preventing Bees from Pesticide Toxicity" Plenty of normal civilians keep bees, at least in rural areas, coincidentally same place plants to extract and pesticides to sample also reside. Totally believable that a smart hard working kid could do this alone.
"Effect of Food Types on Quantity and Nutritional Quality of Weaver Ant". Ants, we got em. Food, we got it too. Can we count? Yes we can. Sounds like good science doable by an actual kid.
Implausible projects that could not have been done by kids:
"A Study of the Endogenous Activity Rhythms of the Marine Isopod Exosphaeroma truncatitelson" Where does a kid get that and the testing environment necessary?
"Analysis of Photon-Mediated Entanglement between Distinguishable Matter Qubits" Oh come on. Well I'll head on over to home depot and get a can of qubits on the way home from school, and then...
"DNA Repair Mechanisms: Investigations of Base Excision Repair Pathway in Differentiated and Proliferative Neuronal CAD Cells" Oh come on. How big was the lab that did this work? 50 people and 10 million bucks of gear maybe?
"Synthesis of Trimethylguanosine Cap Analogues with the Potential Use in Gene Therapy" Oh come on
"Synthesis of Triazene Compounds and Their Application in Spectrophotometric Determination of Cadmium" Nobody's doing cadmium work outside a lab, at least without turning the basement into a "radioactive boyscout" situation. I would promote this to "possible" if and only if it were done as independent study at a high school chem lab.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If the test is only 90% accurate then it's useless.
A 10% error rate would generate a number of false results greater than the incidence of pancreatic cancer in the first place.
Jack Andraka
Gordon E. Moore Award Winners
Jack Andraka, 15, of Crownsville, Maryland, was awarded the Gordon E. Moore Award for his development of a new method to detect pancreatic cancer. Using an approach similar to that of diabetic test strips, Jack created a simple dip-stick sensor to test the level of mesothelin, a pancreatic cancer biomarker, in blood or urine, to determine whether or not a patient has early-stage pancreatic cancer. His study resulted in over 90 percent accuracy in detecting the presence of mesothelin. Further, his novel patent-pending sensor proved to be 28 times faster, 28 times less expensive and over 100 times more sensitive than current tests.
This is something easily done by a high-school student (the hard work is determining what to test for and that can be done by a literature search) and , yes he did apply for a patent.
His study resulted in over 90 percent accuracy and showed his patent-pending sensor to be 28 times faster, 28 times less expensive and over 100 times more sensitive than current tests.
Moron.
He just won an international level science competition, he is going to have job and scholarship offers coming out his ass.
If he had done this privately and tried to monetize it the business school graduates would have fucked him over.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
to take your project home on the airplane. They might end up shutting down the airport for several hours, arresting you, and confiscating your project.
My first thought when I read the headline was "where will he keep it?"
If you only need a 90% accuracy, then all you have to do is just tell everybody that they don't have pancreatic cancer. You'll be right more than 90% of the time!
There are reports that suggest that many people get diagnosed with diabetes before they get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, although the relationship between the two is unknown. If this kid's test is based on the diabetic test strips (which measure glucose in the urine/blood by estimating glucose oxidase activity through release of H2O2), then maybe it is making use of this fact.
From TFA:
Dyckovsky investigated the science of quantum teleportation, and discovered that through a process of "entanglement" information from one atom will appear in another atom when the quantum state of the first is destroyed.
Doesn't this seem like a pretty important discovery?
My project was a really cool baking soda volcano.
he is going to have job and scholarship offers coming out his ass
Sounds painful, do you suppose he might develop a test for this condition?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
An anecdote: I judged at a middle and high school science/engineering fair myself once, a few years ago now. It was an ... interesting experience. Before the judging began, we held a meeting in which the lead judge reminded jurors to "pick winners based on creativity and hard work of the CHILD, not the parents". Whenever possible, we tried to interview the kids to see if they had any inkling of the project contents; this was usually the best way to determine if the parents did the project or not.
From what I saw that day, I would say half at best did the work themselves. One kid even admitted that his dad was an engineer and came up with the design, and he more or less just watched and took down notes (the parents had walked off when I came to his booth, so I guess they weren't around to stop him from being an honest little kid). I didn't even get the impression that he liked it much; more that the parents pushed him to doing it.
I did not want to discourage interest in science, especially if the parents are really trying hard to encourage their kids, but at the end of the day I awarded my votes to the less visually impressive projects that were very obviously done by the kids. One was a simple experiment with growing plants in certain soil conditions. I can't remember exactly what the additive was. But nothing fancy. But here we got to the booth and the kid was beaming and excited to show off the plants, and demonstrated a decent grasp of scientific method (trying to control conditions, etc.). I gave her more points than the equivalent of the "quantum qubits" project.
I haven't tried doing it again since then because honestly it made me feel discouraged. There were very few students truly interested in doing a science project, that were able to find a project interesting to them. Most of the projects struck me as either "completely cobbled together last minute in order to prevent a failing grade in science class", or "forced to do a particular project by overbearing parents that want the most spectacular project possible". I can see where it is very hard to judge in that environment because the helicopter parents will demand 1st prize when their kids don't deserve it. The fact that I was allowed to be a "secret" judge helped a bit that particular time. I imagine most people just thought I was a curious parent wandering around asking basic questions.
HERE HERE
There's a strong argument that it's easier today to move up the social ladder in Europe than the United States
I've always thought that this is very widely accepted fact. Where I live, higher education is free (and in fact, you get social security of 500 euros ($640) a month, lower rent, government-backed loans, etc. if you're a student) and university admissions are based on objective tests to select the best students (everyone who finishes Highschool will participate in national testing. Grades come from bell curve and graders don't know whose paper they're grading... or even the highschool of the student). It seems obvious to me that a system like this will result in more social justice and less inequality (Nearly everyone who has the will and skill can climb the social ladder regardless of who their parents where) but people in USA decided that the gain is simply not worth the price (=more taxes, less personal liberty, more nannystate...).
This is appalling.
Why so? Again, I assumed this had always been both well-known and intentional but if it isn't... is there something that makes Europe especially appalling in this regard or is it just so appalling to hear that USA isn't at the top?
I agree but then disagree also. We as adults learn to fear a legal system that will force us in to stone age poverty if we step on one of those patents in the inventing mind field. Kids don't have that worry, and are often immune to the legal system. Medicine is a late entry to the patent system compared to information technology, so we'll see how something like this goes in a few years. You never know, you may see a headline in a few days about a patent suit against a science fair winner.
Have the additions to the libraries helped tremendously in the age of programming? I think so. We no need any longer to write your own string processing and most of it is uniform from system to system. I'm not sure how that has made programming in general much easier, and wonder about the implications to educating younger programmers. Our old libraries were how we started learning to code. We learned to be portable and stock pile code for re-use in college or we missed deadlines.
[required /. sarcasm]"Java and C# have fixed all of our computer programming problems!" Not by a long shot, and in many cases it makes advanced programming that much more difficult because of how easily someone can mess up the use of libraries. It is nice that people can learn higher level functions and start use with things we found difficult to come up with. I'm sure it helps them do more, but I often want to slap people that don't understand the basic concepts and wonder how they even get a degree. My favorites are the programmers that see memory allocation failures and ask you to add more disks or "Why can't I allocate 1Tb of memory on a 256G sysem?".
So maybe programming now is easier, but I find debugging is now much more complex.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Now if only we could apply this method to something more useful like detecting a small amount of pot in someone's system... /s
Beats the heck out of those darn potato batteries. I mean, sure, I guess they're trying, but it's not exactly original, now, is it...
FTFA:
His study resulted in over 90 percent accuracy and showed his patent-pending sensor to be 28 times faster, 28 times less expensive and over 100 times more sensitive than current tests.
Moron.
Absolutely.
And I'd like to point out to you that you didn't understand satire.
Moron, indeed.
BTW, he could be rich instead of doing what he's doing.
He's a moron - tongue in cheek - satire - and humor. Just want to draw a picture for you in words.
Or let me put it this way: someone that brilliant would be better off keeping their inventions to themselves and then patenting them to get rich.
Get it?
If you still want to flame me, go ahead. I don't give quite give a shit, but I sort of do when folks completely miss my point - like you did - and get mod'ed up for it. Unbelievable! Well, not so unbelievable. I was warned.. ..about stupid people. That's why they're super rich and I'm a wanna be and you and the rest of these Slashdot assholes are well, whatever ....
Maryland Teen Wins World's Largest Science Fair
I was wondering what he was going to do with the World's Largest Science Fair, how big it was, and where he was going to store it. But apparently he only won $75k at a Science Fair. I guess it's the largest science fair, but I'm not sure anymore, no faith in the submission being accurate.
I kid!!!! Really nice a 15 year old can make something better then most the adults out there. When I was 15 I was just thinking about how I needed to get laid. oh, wait, that never changes....
Be seeing you...
It may be "patent-pending" but it does not mean he will be the one to milk the patent. Such contest rules usually have boilerplate language to make you give up your rights to the creative work in return for the recognition or prize money.
It's ok, the fifteen minutes of facebook fame was probably worth it for his parents doing the work. Carbon nanotubes ? Scanning electron microscope ? Urine and blood samples from patients ? Plutonium ? Yeah, I'm sure that's all available in every drug store in 1995, but in 1955 that's a little harder to come by!
You don't get satire.
Please, commit suicide. Please.
Pretty please!
And save your condescending moronic comments for folks who deserve it.
MmmmKay?
Think about my post. mmmmKay?
And you will understand the satire - I hope. Unless you're one of those arrogant shitheads who think liberal arts are for losers - MMMmmkay?
Fucking moronic uneducated douchebag. .
No, but his parents might.
Refreshing to see the judging panel resisting the agenda to always put token females, Indians, or Chinese in the top 3.
I can't believe the numerous posts suggesting these obvious young super geniuses are in some ways dupes set up and put on pedestals by the power that be to give an impression that STEM in this country is not actually crumbling in front of our eyes.
I'm speechless that so many are of little faith.
Whoever invents a way to detect prostate cancer without a TSA re-enactment deserves 10 fucking Nobel's.
Table-ized A.I.
That doesn't occur only when it comes economic and social justice but with pretty much every heated topic.
Take abortion, for example: Essentially everyone agrees that we shouldn't be allowed to murder children. Very few accept the "potential to be children one day" argument (by which male masturbation is murder). The whole discussion is about when does life/personhood actually begin (at conception or much later) and thus how do we - as a society - want to define what makes a human human. If we say "We, as a society, want to say that bible tells us when the personhood begins" then it's simply a matter of theological discussion of what does the bible say... but turns out that a lot of people don't agree with that decision. If we say "We, as a society, want to say that a person is a person when they're capable of human-level intelligence, have a personality clearly above the level of animal, etc." we get to really uncomfortable questions about human worth of a comatose patient or mentally retarded person... and whether it makes any sense to treat intelligent animals in ways that we would never treat small children.
If we only could delve into the important value discussion of how to define personhood and what makes someone human, we would get answers to numerous questions about abortion, euthanasia, animal trials, environmentalism, etc. etc. etc... But we are just not ready for that yet. It's easy to choose a side and pick up a couple of talking points (Such as "Life is sacred" or "A woman has a right to choose") when it comes to a simple issue with two sides... But I don't think we as a society are nearly educated and reasonable enough to actually have interesting discussions about how to define life/personhood and what follows from that.
developed webs in high school. much cooler!!
I'm late on this one, and haven't posted in awhile, but this is probably worth chiming in on. (Posted above anonymously, just replying in full here.) I chatted with him after the fair, and also chatted with his parents for awhile. He understood the theory behind and around his work, and by all accounts did the work himself; this wasn't a parent doing it for him. What he did is likely going to save lives. I also had a chance to talk to Nicholas Schiefer, who did a project called Apodura; better search of short content based on markov chain modelling. He also very much understood what he had done, how it worked, what some of the pitfalls were, and what he might do on it next. Or, in short, at least at the level of winner/runner-up, they've done the work themselves, and are phenomenally advanced students. If you have experience in the target field - which the judges do! - it should be *very* evident which students have done the work, which students have done the work with assistance from a university lab, and which students are essentially parroting knowledge that a parent handed to them. Students that do phenomenal work on their own and can speak intelligently about that to a subject matter expert, I'd certainly give the benefit of the doubt.
Here's the officially certified ISEF 2012 ABSTRACT of "A Novel Paper Sensor for the Detection of Pancreatic Cancer."
"Pancreatic cancer is a 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."
A Novel Paper Sensor for the Detection of Pancreatic Cancer
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 aper biosensor. Change in electrical potential was measured before and after application and a dose-response curve was constructed with 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% mopre accurate than CA10-9 test and is a sensitive, accurate, inexpensive, and rapid screening tool to detect mesothelin, a biomarker for pancreatic cancer.
Jack Andraka was fortunate to find a supportive mentor in Dr. Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Maitra has worked extensively on identifying biomarkers for early diagnosis of cancer, and studied the molecular pathology of preneoplastic lesions (i.e., changes that precede cancer). He also has a special interest in familial pancreatic cancer, and he is working with his colleagues in the Pancreas Cancer Group at Johns Hopkins to elucidate the "familial pancreatic cancer gene" with novel Gene Chip technologies.
The question is if Dr. Maitra's protege has beaten out Dr. Marc Porter and his team at USTAR, University of Utah in their search for a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer. As Dr. Porter announced in 2010, "By aligning a specific magnetic nanoparticle with an antibody that in turn binds to a specific protein and then reading the nanoparticle/protein combinations on a chip array, the device can profile different proteins simultaneously. "What we expect to find are specific markers or groups of markers that may indicate the onset of pancreatic cancer before the patient even begins to feel ill."
Research has identified approximately 200 proteins to be studied. "Part of this study will be to narrow the number of candidate markers, the presence or absence of which may be significant," Porter said. There's a lot of statistical analysis that goes into solving this problem. The NCI grant will help us run scans on a very large sample base to spot the correlations.
Interesting that Andraka just studied one protein - mesothelin, and claimed such strong results!
Jack Andraka is fortunate to find a supportive mentor in Dr. Anirban Maitra at Johns Hopkins University, who has worked extensively on identifying biomarkers for early diagnosis of cancer, and studied changes that precede cancer. He also has a special interest in familial pancreatic cancer, and he is working with his colleagues in the Pancreas Cancer Group at Johns Hopkins. Has Dr. Maitra’s protege beaten Dr. Marc Porter and his team at USTAR, University of Utah in their NCI funded search for a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer. Dr. Porter announced in 2010 that by aligning a specific nanoparticles with an antibody that in turn binds to a specific protein and then reading the nanoparticle/protein combinations he expects to find specific markers that may indicate the onset of pancreatic cancer before the patient even begins to feel ill. The team identified approximately 200 proteins to be studied, and then narrowed the number of candidate markers using advanced statistical analysis and scans on a very large sample base to spot the correlations. Interesting that Andraka just studied one protein – mesothelin, and claimed victory! Serendipity or Grandiosity??