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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."
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.
when will we see wide-spread usage in regular medical practice?
When insurance companies and hospital administration boards find a way to make it ridiculously expensive.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Maybe, but it would be nice if there were more details. I remember reading a slashdot news story about another teen science fair winner with some awesome result, but someone pointed out that he essentially copied someone else's PhD dissertation. Kinda made me skeptical about amazing science fair results. In this case, was he a chemical engineer? How did he even get access to pancreatic cancer urine samples?
Is the 90% accurate, faster, and far cheaper than current tests maybe because it's just a strip of paper that will always give a "You do not have pancreatic cancer" result? That sounds like it would be a lot cheaper, faster, and at least 90% accurate if you weren't selectively testing people you thought had pancreatic cancer...
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
I remember reading a slashdot news story about another teen science fair winner with some awesome result, but someone pointed out that he essentially copied someone else's PhD dissertation. Kinda made me skeptical about amazing science fair results. In this case, was he a chemical engineer? How did he even get access to pancreatic cancer urine samples?
I participated in ISEF from 7th grade until 12th, with varying levels of success. I did very well, but never as well as this kid, but I dated a girl for 4 years who basically won the same place. This competition is very high stakes, as the winners basically get to choose their school from the top schools in the country. I attribute my acceptance into CMU more to ISEF than anything else I did in Highschool.
With such high stakes, there is a lot of parental support, especially from parents who are scientists and engineers. A friend of mine had unlimited access through her family to a MRI machine. She did very well and went on to MIT. Another friend had access to vast quantities of microbial data through her mom. Other people had their parents design and supervise the experiments, while others still performed extensive and impressive statistical tests well beyond the skill of a 14 year old, thanks to their parents. After dating my girlfriend for some time, who again placed as well as the kid in the story, she revealed to me her father basically did all the work.
None of this is ever disclosed at the fair, and all work is always presented by the students to be their own original research. I'm not saying the kids in question were dumb... quite the opposite they were brilliant. But they also had a great deal of extra help from highly educated people to "guide" their research. I'm also not saying this was the case for the winner this year, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.
My project was a really cool baking soda volcano.
My wife is pursuing her doctorate in science education, and this comes up continually. Equity in education is a huge, huge issue, especially in STEM, and the theme that consistently shows up is that having parents who are educated, who are in the upper middle class, and/or who are in a professional field gives you a huge leg up. It doesn't mean that these kids work less, or aren't as smart, or aren't as deserving as kids from poorer backgrounds, but it does mean that they start out with larger reserves of educational capital than other kids. I mean, you could be a genius, but if your parents are working two full-time landscaping jobs and barely speak English, you're going to be at a disadvantage compared to a kid who has a parent who can spend an hour a day helping with homework.
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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.
Searching for a better detector for mesothelin, Andraka coated paper with tiny tubes of atom-thick carbon. Antibodies stuck to the carbon nanotubes can grab the telltale protein and spread the tubes apart. The carbon’s resistance to the flow of electricity drops measurably as more protein attaches. Tests of the paper using blood samples from 100 people with cancer at different stages of the disease identified the presence of cancer every time, Andraka reported.
It's one thing to pull yourself up from the bootstraps if you're born uppermiddle class. It's another if you're born lower class. There's a strong argument that it's easier today to move up the social ladder in Europe than the United States. This is appalling.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
all entrants have to make clear up front what their contribution to their project was, how much help they had from others etc.
Yeah of course they have to. That's the way it was back when I was in the fair. But this is not what happens. My highschool had a very large science program and we sent about 90-100 kids a year to regional fairs. For some reason it was the kids who had researcher/professor/PhD/engineer parents who always made it to the international fair. After competing in these fairs year after year, you get to know the crowd, who's legit, and what kind of nonsense is going on.
If you really talk to these kids on a peer level (which you'll never be able to do at this point) you can see right through them. The judges are about the last people who have a grasp on the true character of some of these kids. I personally know a kid who completely faked his entire project year after year and never got caught. He was really good at faking work... probably was more effort than it would have taken to actually to the project. He won several high profile special awards from the military and armed forces for his "research."
It would be quite counter-intuitive if the US had more social mobility than socialist countries. In the US you receive little assistance from the state, so it won't be helping the poor up the ladder, while the state also doesn't impose much of a burden on the rich, so it won't be pulling them down the ladder either. In a socialist country, the poor receive more assistance and there are more demands on the rich. Obviously the latter is more conducive to social mobility, so I don't know why you state it as if this was some sort of strange idea that might even be true. Why wouldn't the US have poor social mobility?
Is the 90% accurate, faster, and far cheaper than current tests maybe because it's just a strip of paper that will always give a "You do not have pancreatic cancer" result?
I can do better than that. A strip of paper that says "you have pancreatic cancer," stuffed into fortune cookie laced with U-235.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
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?
It's a perception bias, with the poor being poorer and the rich being richer the rags to riches stories also get more extreme. It creates the illusion that everyone can go from the very bottom of the ladder to the very top of the ladder but a few extreme outliers don't mean social mobility for the masses. Also the rich and powerful like to perpetuate this idea because it means that instead of going Robin Hood and taking from the rich and giving to the poor, people want to get rid of taxes for when they themselves become rich. Of course most people don't actually end up rich, but if you can make them believe they will then you get people working 60+ hour weeks for shit pay, little help from the government and they want it that way...
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