(C) LA NACION
Original Spanish version: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1628452-los-adolescentes-tienen-algo-que-ensenarnos
Jack spent his 15th
birthday in a lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, working.
Earlier, during a Biology class in high school, he had an idea, an
idea that in the future could save thousands, maybe millions of
lives.
His story, from that
moment of inspiration to the other, the moment of ecstasy, that went
viral on YouTube, when he won the Grand Prize of the Intel's International
Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF, for its acronym in
English), is a constellation of guiding principles on which I think
is worth pondering. That the teaching of science and technology in
high school is not optional, transverse, accessory or complementary,
is as essential as arithmetic, history and language. That adolescence
does not have to be just a bowling carefree period, but that this
carefree lifestyle, applied to intellectual issues, can offer
revolutionary ideas. And that information must move freely on the
Internet, not because this ideal sounds just good, but because
it makes us more efficient against the many threats we face.
Cancer, for example.
DEATH, PAIN, REVELATION
Jack Thomas Andraka, now
16, is a native of Crownsville, a town of less than 2000 inhabitants
in Maryland, USA. His unusual story begins with the untimely death of
his uncle, whom he adored and who accompanied him during the last
months of his life, until he died of pancreatic cancer.
Jack didn't just mourn. He
was 14, had just started high school, and began to investigate why
pancreatic cancer is so deadly. He found, googling, that this illness
is asymptomatic until it is too late. He made then the most
reasonable question of all: why this cancer can not detect earlier?
Simple, because no one had yet discovered a better diagnostic method.
Most of us probably would
have stayed with that; if scientists have not found a way to do
something, then it must be because it is not possible. But that's not the
style of Jack, and is not usually the style of adolescents.
He kept looking on the
Internet and learned that the body overproduces a particular protein, called mesothelin, when contracts pancreatic, lung or ovarian
cancer, even at very early stages. So, what had not been discovered
yet was the way to detect mesothelin in the blood.
His father, a civil
engineer, had led him sometimes to take water samples from the
Chesapeake Bay and then assess their components using carbon
nanotubes. Jack knew, therefore, that these microscopic structures
can be used to detect substances dissolved in water. He was in a biology class
when both things displayed together in his mind: the nanotubes would
be able to reveal the presence of the elusive mesothelin in human
blood?
He continued googling and
printing freely available scientific articles, this time on the
qualities of nanotubes of carbon and mesothelin. It had occurred to
him this: to embed carbon nanotubes with mesothelin antibodies and to
impregnate with this solution a dipstick. When exposed to a drop of
blood, if the mesothelin were present, the antibodies would bind to
the protein, would expand and would stretch nanotubes, whose
electrical properties would change in consequence. These changes could be
measured with a simple ohmeter.
He was reprimanded once
for reading in class on nanotubes instead of paying attention to the
teacher, who even removed the Web pages he has printed. What a
problem! The documents were on the Internet, so they could snatch his
papers until the end of times. Only the budget on toner at the North
County High School would increase. Because Jack was determined to
come up with a formula for early detection of pancreatic cancer.
199 TIMES NO
For now, however, Jack had
only one idea. Now he needed a laboratory.
Jack told me by mail that
he presented this project to their parents, who, among other things,
explained to him that the minimum age to be accepted in a laboratory
in the U.S. Is 16 (at the time he was 14) and advised him to look for
something less complicated. But you know what it is to convince a
teenager. In general we take this stubbornness as a defect. It's not.
With adamantine
stubbornness he told their parents that he was going to find a lab to test his idea, and as we do adults faced with this teenager
attitude, they eventually gave up.
With the assistance of his
(now resigned) father, Jack wrote a rudimentary protocol describing
the diagnostic method developed by him and sent it to 200 oncologists from
Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health; 199 refused even
to meet him. But Dr. Anirban Maitra, of Johns Hopkins Medical School,
opened the door of his laboratory to him, not without qualms. After all, how
many times a teenager writes to you claiming that he has developed a
new method to diagnose cancer?
This professor of
pathology, oncology and biomolecular engineering helped him to
implement his idea. "Of course, wrote Jack in an email, the real
work has only just begun and I had many more obstacles to overcome
before I can build the sensor".
Jack went to Maitra's lab after
school, every day, including Saturdays, and worked until
midnight. They assumed that soon would tire. But he kept going,
without pause, for 7 months. He spent his 15th birthday in the
laboratory.
He knew how to endure
months of frustrations and obstacles until one night their test
strips detected mesothelin in artificial samples of blood. Shortly
thereafter they'll achieve the same result with samples taken from mice with
cancer.
After 200 days of effort,
Jack proved that his idea was viable. And we usually say that teenagers
can not pay attention for more than 10 minutes. What I say: if they get bored,
no, of course. To me it would be the same. If we do not help them to
discover their passion, they will get distracted.
THE DECADE AFTER
Maitra said that the
method must still pass many tests and he estimates that it is still a
decade before the test reach the public, if it proves to be as
reliable in the real world as in the laboratory. I hope so, because
Jack test is 168 times faster and 400 times more sensitive than
current diagnoses. And 26,000 times cheaper. It costs 3 USD cents.
What follows in this story
is, therefore, predictable: the Gordon Moore Award at the Intel ISEF,
worth $ 75,000 that Jack plans to use to pay his education as a
pathologist; the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award; their
inspiring (and wise, in my opinion) TED conferences; and former
presidents and pop stars who want to take pictures with him.
If all goes well, the Andraka test
will one day be a standard method and will help millions of people
to treat cancer early. This is obvious. And it is also obvious that they call Jack a genius, "is a new Edison" Dr. Maitra said.
In this manner we put him in the box of the exceptional. Because
prejudice says that teenagers are incomplete, immature. Troublemakers
and carefree. They just want to have fun. They make noise, they comb
in strange fashions and have nothing in their minds. Jack is not
normal, "is a genius", so he discovered a revolutionary method to
detect cancer.
This kind of reasoning
should inflame an alarm that big in our minds. But no. Not at all. Undaunted, we
accept the wild everyday discrimination faced by adolescents.
We also accept the idea
that scientific disciplines and, in particular, computing and
genetics, are accesory to the other disciplines, the traditional ones.
We also accept the idea
that it is OK to control the information circulating on the Internet,
to balcanize the Net, as Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
anticipate, concerned, in his book "The New Digital Age".
Jack's story refutes all
these false truths, one by one.
TOO MUCH CHANCE
First, the word "genius".
What happens with Jack, beyond their obvious creativity, ambition and
will power is that, as stated by his mother several times, at Andraka's
home there was less frivolous TV and more scientific journals. In
this intellectual climate Jack was formed, like his brother, Luke,
also winner in 2010 of the ISEF, and the Think Award from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. Two geniuses in the
same family?
Let's apply Occam's Razor.
What theory is simpler, that these guys are the result of good
training that included scientific and critical reasoning or that the
Andraka's won the genetic lottery two times in a row? I think there
is something exceptional in Jack, of course: teen spirit educated in
an atmosphere of intellectual challenge and imbued with the culture
of effort.
During adolescence, in
general, we have a huge number of advantages: we have more free time
than adults, our minds are not yet contaminated with specialization
and we are looking to differentiate ourselves from our family of
origin to build our own identity. It's not easy and we use to have
attitudes that irritate parents and teachers, but that ease and that
stubbornness, that search for self, the battle for independence, that
rebelliousness, well guided, can lead to revolutionary ideas. Perhaps
99% of these occurrences do not amount to anything, but the remaining
1% is so valuable that I do not understand why we miss them so. The
fact that Jack received 199 rejections were due to a single cause: he
is a teenager, a boy.
I want to say here, as we
are, that Albert Einstein was a teenager too when he came to think
about how it would be to travel aboard a ray of light.
Of course, there are some
teenagers who are scoundrels or full-time useless individuals, but,
please, not because they are teenagers, it is because there always
is, was and will be useless and scoundrels.
Leaving aside the obvious
issues that impose a limit to be of age, which is fine because teens
need the guidance and protection of their parents, I think we should
take change our view of this stage of life.
Which brings me back to
school.
I THINK, THEREFORE I AM
In my high school we
learned not only arithmetic, but also mathematical analysis. We read
Latin fluently before 16. We had to understand the Relativity (that
was not easy) and basic quantum physics. We meet Euclides, but also
Riemann and Lobachevksy. And we discussed philosophy as doctors.
That is, they never
treated us like people of lesser minds or as if our only goal in life
was fun. Quite the contrary.
For me it was a mystery.
Why out of school I was "just a boy" and inside the school I found
myself so intelectually demmanded?
With time I understood.
Teens lack experience of the world, not brains. In fact, their minds
are more hungry than they will ever be in adulthood, except for some exceptional cases. Their acts of the present and their future depend on what food we provide to that minds.
That is the mission of the
school and parents, and the main problem is that there is nothing
easier to get bored than a curious mind. Systematically, we fail to
capture the attention of teenagers because, in my opinion, we are
teaching less than they are capable of processing.
I have said on several
places that, from Gutenberg to here, it is necessary to teach children
to read and write, but today, in my opinion, they should also learn
to program.
For the same reason we
would have to give science and technology a central place in high
school. Do not teaching what a microprocessor is, what is machine
language, what is source code, what is a variable or a control
structure, how propositional logic functions, what is the RAM, what
means encrypting or how TCP / IP protocols are, in these times, is completely irresponsible.
Knowing how to use a
computer and the Internet is not the same as knowing how to use a
car. Thru the digital arteries circulate our civil rights now, not diesel.
Genetics will bring the
next big revolution in this sense, and it could profoundly alter our
civil rights scenario in the next 25 years, if we are not careful.
If we do not teach digital
technology and genetics in high school, we will be forming users, not citizens.
Citizens are aware of their civil rights and defend them, an attitude
essential to the health of the Republic; users just give up and obey.
And no, kids do not
know anything about technology, they can't, nobody is born
knowing. The idea that because they came to the world after the PC
and the Internet they are computer experts is a gigantic lie. I know
it from experience, I teach young people from 19-23 y/o since 2006.
True, unlike many adults, they're not afraid to use a smartphone or
the Web, but they ignore absolutely everything that really matters
about new technologies.
INFORMATION OF THE
HUMANKIND
Jack could not devise
their test without the aid of publicly available data found on the
Internet. As good as the public library in Crownsville could be, is
unlikely to contain vast molecular databases or technical
manuals on carbon nanotubes. Before the Internet, Jack never would
have succeeded.
For this kind of thing we
defend the free flow of information online. It's the whole idea:
freedom of expression and access to information. These two freedoms
make us more efficient as a species.
Jack used a lot of the
Wikipedia, he says. This is the reason I support the free
encyclopedia all the time. While a band of skeptics says that the Wikipedia is unreliable, this Maryland boy used it to start looking
around for one of the most difficult challenges of modern medicine.
If that is not a lesson, I do not know what is.
We criticize them,
discriminate them and we tend always to expose a handful of vandals
like the stereotype of the teenagers, instead of showing more
examples like Jack. I really think that adults have much to learn
from them, as much as they have to learn from us. I also think it
would be good to keep some teen spirit in the adulthood. "To stay always
beginners", as the Zen master advised.
EPILOGUE AND HOPE
Two things I remembered
while writing this column. First, the film "Lorenzo's Oil", of 1992. Based
on true events, it tells the story of Augusto and Michaela Odone, who
found a way to treat the illness endured by his son Lorenzo
(an adrenoleukodystrophy), hitherto incurable. Neither of them was a
doctor, but both rebelled at the idea of letting her son die without
doing anything. The same mechanism that led Jack to his new test.
Rebellion against the word “impossible”.
Second, Steve Jobs, the
eternal teenage of many irreverences and a well-known inability to
obey the rules, passed away on October 5, 2011. He was only 56 years old.
He suffered from pancreatic cancer.
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