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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
.. 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
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 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.
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...
No, but his parents might.
Whoever invents a way to detect prostate cancer without a TSA re-enactment deserves 10 fucking Nobel's.
Table-ized A.I.
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.