17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/17-year-old-wins-100k-for-creating-cancer-killing-nanoparticle-2011128/

by ukdm • 15 years ago

332 112 15 years ago

rickdale• 15 years ago

Just 100k? Seems like a small sum for something that could potentially help cure cancer.

ukdm• 15 years ago

It's not about the money though, is it? Imagine being 17, working on a project you are really passionate about, and then someone saying well done with 100k. Then think about what the coverage of your achievement will do for you, opening doors to the future you desire so much. The cash is just a nice extra I'd imagine.

sp3322• 15 years ago

It's the top prize from this particular competition. Patent licensing comes later :)

tomjen3• 15 years ago

If it cant cure cancer then it isn't likely to be worth much.

If ti does cure cancer, she will make a fortune through patent grants.

luriel• 15 years ago

> could potentially help cure cancer.

Sorry for being pedantic, but much harm is done by this misconception.

Nothing can 'potentially cure cancer', cancer is hundreds if not thousands of (often) very different diseases.

Also put another way: cancer is simply the result of evolution at the cellular level.

You can't 'cure' evolution, all you can do is try to implement some 'population control' strategies that will work (for a while) for certain genetic variants.

majmun2• 15 years ago

cancer drives evolution? [[citation needed.]]

besides, nobody is asking to cure cancer in all population for all times. but in specific individual. who may or may not reproduce later in life.

EDIT: don't need to downvote me being curios. if i didn't ask, this guys who answered would have less chance to post this usefull stuff . so i'm somewhat beneficial to this.

DanBC3• 15 years ago

It shows there is potential for other funding: getting a wider variety of student into Math Olympiad is one example.

mikedmiked2• 15 years ago

Here is what I believe to be an informative comment on reddit about the subject: http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/n4hnw/now_im_proud/c3...

eggywat• 15 years ago

Just enough money to cover her college tuition me thinks

mikedmiked2• 15 years ago

Well it is actually a scholarship, as shown by the over-sized cheque in this image: http://i.imgur.com/qIFgX.jpg

^ (please excuse the borderline-racist meme on the second half of that image, it is not mine.)

artursapek2• 15 years ago

I love how an HNer was just forced to use a horrible meme from reddit because it has the biggest reference photo available

alexholehouse• 15 years ago

Sans racism (though sadly not sans the grammatically incorrect and non-existent contraction, "she've")

http://imgur.com/W0WuJ

oldcigarette• 15 years ago

why is everyone so excited by some asian female's fake science

carldall• 15 years ago

News like these are fantastic. I often wonder how much time and resources mankind looses because there're so many young people in third world countries who are very smart and can ask the right questions, but who will never be able to gain the necessary education to be able to commit their fantastic innovations to society. Imagine how much further ahead, as a whole, we could be if the education and standard of living of the first world would be the same all over the world.

hopeless• 15 years ago

"Her dream job is to be a research professor"? It sounds like she's already better than most research professors! Well done that girl!

bluedevil2k4• 15 years ago

I read a disturbing stat in the WSJ on Saturday - it pointed out that 20% of school's resources are geared towards learning disabled, developmentally challenged students and "low achieving students", while only 0.5% is devoted to talented and gifted students. The article blames this on the increasing costs of adhering to all the national and state laws regarding disabled children, while another argument could be made that schools are more concerned about obtaining minimum scores on standardized tests to receive funding.

It may seem completely insensitive to argue against helping disabled students, but it seems to be happening at the expense of the gifted students. When you read articles like this one, you realize that the people who move society forward in leaps and bounds, the ones who create great businesses, create new products, discover new medicines are predominantly the talented and gifted ones.

If we as a nation are making a decision to cut funding to these gifted students, are we at the same time making a decision that jeopardizes the advancement of our society as a whole.?

dorkitude• 15 years ago

Check out the book "Genius Denied"

euroclydon2• 15 years ago

Not exactly related, but HomeSchool Baby! It's SO nice to just opt out of the whole discussion about what the school system should be doing for my kids. I've got friends who are selling houses, going to school board meetings, essentially begging the government to educate their kids well.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Not to mention you're not locked into taking your vacations during high season.

rjh29• 15 years ago

I don't know, I look back fondly on my school days. I'm not sure if I would have liked to miss out on that.

phillmv3• 15 years ago

Schooling is relatively unimportant. There's nothing your kid can't learn on their own time.

How do you handle properly socializing your kids? You can't teach them that.

maeon3• 15 years ago

You will be unable to prevent the industrious people of the world from being showered with wealth and success. Better to spend time turning drains on society into small contributer.

DanBC3• 15 years ago

You're right, but there should be plenty of companies willing to fund education of very bright youth.

Not many people care about those with a learning disability - see the death rates and poor health outcomes for simple illnesses.

Whether it's acceptable to have the IBMs and DuPonts providing funding for education is up for debate. Seeing the god-awful job that governments make of education for regular students I'm not sure many people would be too upset.

Finally: learning disabled covers a wide range; unfortunately it's sometimes used to include "people with mild dyslexia", and everything done for those people gets included in that budget. So people with severe need may not be seeing much result from that money because it's all being used for, for example, photocopying handouts onto different color paper.

bluedevil2k4• 15 years ago

Not sure if you were exaggerating, but that seems like a good idea to get companies to fund and brand gifted learning programs in schools. "IBM Gifted Class"

huxley• 15 years ago

That 20% you quote covers a wide range of programs which apply to a substantial percentage of all students not just the disabled.

But why screw with the disabled and learning challenged when there is the other 79.5% of the funding you are ignoring? Or the fact that massive funds are spent on standardized testing which can be so difficult that high-achieving adults have trouble passing them?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/2011/1...

The talented and gifted students don't really need much help in school. Often the best thing you can do is get out of their way, perhaps offer them some organizational skills, but those should be offered to all students. I got more from that in school than any other instruction offered.

bluedevil2k4• 15 years ago

"The talented and gifted students don't really need much help in school."

That couldn't be further from the truth. Every study shows that T&G students need more interaction and more guidance than other students to ensure their increased appetite for knowledge is met. Otherwise, they become bored and disinterested. If you read the Steve Jobs bio, it's a great example of what happens when a gifted kid isn't taught properly

anamax• 15 years ago

> Or the fact that massive funds are spent on standardized testing which can be so difficult that high-achieving adults have trouble passing them?

Did you look at the test? He may be considered "high-achieving", but don't you wonder what he's missing by being innumerate?

pragmatic• 15 years ago

As a father of a child with special needs and also someone who participated in the "gifted" program, I can add a few thoughts.

1. The gifted program (at my school) was next to worthless. We skipped one regular crap class (social studies) to go build paper airplanes to prepare for this competition: http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/

2. Early intervention (yes funded with tax payer dollars as part of a program) helped my son with high functioning autism. Due to that intervention he is now (besides from some personality quirks and the occasional melt down) virtually indistinguishable from any other student. In fact his IQ puts him very close to the gifted range.

Yes, this is a personal anecdote.

I would like to see the research on gifted programs. Are they worth the cost?

As a "gifted" student, I learned much more from the library (and now the intranet) than any kind of gifted program.

TheEzEzz• 15 years ago

My experience with the gifted program was similar, but I'm not sure it's fair to judge it based on what it accomplishes with it's current paltry funding.

shasta• 15 years ago

I had a similar opinion of the gifted program I was in. But you seem to drawing the conclusion that money therefore shouldn't be spent on gifted students. I think on the contrary that with bright students it's worth the money to splurge on high functioning teachers.

andylei• 15 years ago

i think there is an argument to be made that your gifted program sucked because it had basically no resources, probably as a result of budgeting decisions.

polyfractal6• 15 years ago

I was in Odyssey of the Mind as a child for a number of years, and absolutely loved it. To be fair, it was not run by the school in my district which is apparently pretty abnormal (most are school-based). As such, we had a lot of motivated and enthusiastic parents working as coaches and mentors, instead of burnt out teachers who were only doing it for the stipend.

Its a great program though. We competed in the "structures" division, where you build balsa wood structures and see how much weight they can hold. You also have to perform skits (think mini theatre performances) and do "spontaneouses", impromptu activities designed to make you think creatively or work as a team.

Totally awesome program, definitely on my short list of things I'll get my kids involved in.

__ingrid__• 15 years ago

My personal experiences are as follows:

1. I was also in a couple of gifted programs in school that didn't do much. They were fun at the time, but I don't really think they helped me develop much personally.

2. I participated in some out of school gifted programs that helped me tremendously. I also just learned things on my own time for fun.

3. I went to 2 different middle schools and 3 different high schools (one of them being the school recieving the lowest amount of funding among all the schools in the state). Most of them were really tight on money and were cutting a lot of programs, both academic and otherwise.

While I do wish that school sponsered gifted programs could get more funding as I know gifted programs can be great, if money is tight, I'd rather money go to other programs. There are many ways a gifted child can learn on their own if they choose to, if some one has an undiagnosed learning disability they can't just change that on a whim.

Really I wish schools just got more funding in general. It varies greatly from school to school (I reccently saw my partners old high shcool and I was amazed at how nice the they had proper gym equipment and clean facilities, I don't know about their actual programs, but it looked like they'd have the money to spend on gifted programs), but at the schools I went to there simply wasn't enough money to go around.

Wilduck• 15 years ago

I think part of the problem is that we phrase it as "gifted". While I was also in a "gifted" program that was completely worthless, my High School also offered classes that were designed for students who wanted to be high achievers. You didn't have to test into them, you just had to want to work hard.

This program was great. I loved it and learned a lot. However, it was controversial because it came at the expense of what was called "mini-school", a program for low achieving (but not handicapped) students, which basically allowed them to do very little academic work and still graduate.

Trading one of these programs for another was a bad choice though. While I clearly didn't suffer negative consequences, every student that took a normal (not mini-school, not high achieving) class did, as they suddenly had a bunch of kids who didn't do well in a normal school environment disrupting their learning.

The lesson I took away from this is that regardless of "giftedness" students will generally self select into the level of classes that is appropriate for them. All that the school needs to do is provide these classes. While this is a hard question, I think it is a more appropriate question than "what do you do with gifted kids"?

Dove• 15 years ago

Gifted programs really vary.

When I was in elementary school, I went to Spokane District 81's Tessera program. That program challenged me, and encouraged creative and self-directed study. I absolutely credit it with a big piece of how I think today.

When I was in middle school, I took the school's gifted class as an elective. We made gingerbread houses, told stories, carved pumpkins, and did word search puzzles. It was a profound waste of time.

I have always had a hard time making friends because I think differently than most people. Tessera was the sole exception to that, and I wouldn't have traded it for anything.

akkartik• 15 years ago

Serendipitously: http://xkcd.com/987

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

Oh god, I did Odyssey of the Mind for a couple years in elementary school. At the time it was somewhat fun, but in retrospect it was pretty ridiculous.

I think I did "Crunch" (building a balsa wood structure to hold weight) and "Scientific Safari" (some really lame skit thing)...

http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/materials/1995problems.php#p...

http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/materials/1996problems.php#p...

goblin89• 15 years ago

I'd better question the way how teaching low achieving students (as opposed to "talented and gifted") is done. The first thing you do to make a person low achieving is call them so and treat them like "low achieving" all the time.

I recall there probably are even some researches indicating that if you treat a student like genius, he or she will most likely turn into genius. We can't reliably measure what we call "natural abilities".

In other words, what you need IMO is not only spending more money on talented students, but also considering more students gifted and talented. Although this is probably slightly out of scope here. =)

phillmv3• 15 years ago

>It may seem completely insensitive to argue against helping disabled students, but it seems to be happening at the expense of the gifted students.

False dichotomy.

1) To begin with, scholastic success correlates most heavily with income, so we're not quite rewarding what you might think we're rewarding

2) The whole purpose in this case is to help these kids become independent or be able to function properly in society. Cutting these kinds of programs only increases the number of people who need to be assisted.

> "When you read articles like this one, you realize that the people who move society forward in leaps and bounds, the ones who create great businesses, create new products, discover new medicines are predominantly the talented and gifted ones."

This is a tautology. These people don't necessarily do well in school. Success in school != success in life, despite what my family told me.

jasonkolb• 15 years ago

I think this is a failing of our educational system at a fundamental level. The way it is currently structured--by treating large groups of students as one whole and then teaching to the average or median student--doesn't work well for anyone except for those students who happen to fall very close to the totally average/median.

A much more tailored approach is needed, where students falling behind are helped in their specific problem areas, and gifted/exceptional students are allowed to progress at whatever rate they're capable of. This doesn't need to cost more, either, this is not a matter of setting up an exponential number of schools/classes. Technology can easily do most of this, but a large number of sacred cows would need to die.

Ultimately IMO this boils down to the fundamental problem facing our society right now--vested interests controlling the political process to maintain the completely outdated status quo. You see this pretty much everywhere you look.

But it always awesome to see gifted kids like this young woman overcome the system to do incredible things. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does next.

timtadh• 15 years ago

As some one who spent the majority of my primary education in various learning disabled programs I have to entirely disagree with you. These programs allow people like me to become productive members of society, without them many people who can achieve great things would never learn the basic skills they need to succeed.

What we call "gifted" has nothing to do with "gifts" during the elementary education phase. It has to do with a child's learning style properly fitting the surrounding environment. These children succeed because they fit the system. Others, like me, who have an "impedance" mismatch with the educational environment struggle to gain basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.

However, if those basic skills can be mastered and the environment can be altered to fit these "disabled" students they can become highly successful. I consider myself to have succeeded in academia despite not learning to read till the third grade. If I had not been placed in the proper program I would have likely failed to learn to read, write and do arithmetic for a much longer period of time.

While "gifted" students need assistance and programs designed for their needs as much as "disabled" students it makes no sense to reduce already limited resources available to programs for disabled children. These children can become productive, highly successful individuals if given the proper support.

tryitnow• 15 years ago

Throwing more money at "gifted" programs is like an emergency room taking care of someone with the sniffles while the guy with a gunshot wound bleeds to death.

From an economic perspective it just doesn't seem like a valuable use of resources.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

It's more like an emergency room treating the drug dealer who has just been shot while the police officer that has just been knifed sits in the waiting room after being given a towel to bleed into. Sure, the gunshot wound is more pressing, but is it really good for society to save him over a police officer?

The amount of money spent on education goes farther if the people being educated have more potential. You could use the money to make someone below average less below average, or you could make someone above average into the next Einstein. I'd rather spend my money on the future researcher that cures cancer rather than on someone who will do little more than collect welfare checks and eat a bunch of high fructose corn syrup.

(The good news is that enough money seems to be being spent on gifted programs. I got to go to a state-sponsored math and science high school, and it was the best experience of my life.)

peter_l_downs• 15 years ago

> It may seem completely insensitive to argue against helping disabled students, but it seems to be happening at the expense of the gifted students.

As phillmv pointed out, this is a false dichotomy. If somehow these two were mutually exclusive, I would argue that (if anything) spending on gifted students hurts disabled students. Like pragmatic, I also have some experience with programs for the learning disabled and for the gifted. My twin brother Henry is extremely "intellectually disabled" (he has severe Autism and cannot speak English or take care of himself).I tested into my school district's gifted program in 4th grade. The gifted programs at the schools in the district seem very well funded, while the care my brother was bad enough that we moved Henry to a private school.

> If we as a nation are making a decision to cut funding to these gifted students, are we at the same time making a decision that jeopardizes the advancement of our society as a whole.?

Don't be ridiculous. Gifted programs are pretty useless. The truly gifted will find time to work on what they're good at, no matter the circumstances. Speaking from personal experience as a student in my district's gifted programs, most of them are wastes of time and money because they don't allow students to explore what they're interested in.

My elementary school's gifted program was worthless - we gifted students skipped social studies (like pragmatic) and learned... all about Louis and Clark's journeys. If you weren't interested, too bad. The program did not suffer from lack of funding - We had guest speakers and access to the internet - but lack of good design.

In middle school, we got to skip one class a week to work on whatever we wanted (within limits). Every week there were a couple of different projects that we could work on. My favorite were the lego mindstorms, but I also really enjoyed some of our literature units. The program was extremely well done - give students a chance to miss a class they dislike to focus on something they might, while still exposing them to different areas of knowledge.

Unfortunately, the Highschool's program was terrible. Taking the place of a free period, we had a curriculum set without any input from the students. There were no grades, but we were expected to attempt to do well anyway, regardless of whether or not the area of study was interesting (usually not). Again, it didn't suffer from lack of money, but fundamental problems in how that money was used.

About nine out of ten gifted students at my school dropped out of the program after the first year of Highschool because it was such a waste of time. All of these kids are intelligent and hard-working - they quit because they realized they could spend their time more efficiently.

DISCLAIMER - This is all based off of personal experience. I cannot speak for all gifted programs in all schools.

bh42222• 15 years ago

Speaking as a foreigner who spent one year in a US high-school, I was shocked that both disabled students and non-disabled students were in the same school.

To me it was obvious this was bad for both, but especially the disabled students who could be served much better in a specialized school.

But then once I learned more US history regarding segregating different groups of people... well I still think it's a bad way to go, but now at least I understand why it is that way.

In other countries disabled students attend specialized schools who provide them with a much better level of services. The concentration of students with disabilities allows for the concentration of people with advance and specialized skills. This not usually possible in a standard school, where only a very small number of students is disabled.

scott_s• 15 years ago

What kind of disabilities are you talking about? Physical disabilities, or emotional and cognitive disabilities?

My mother was a special education teacher - her students had emotional and cognitive disabilities. While she taught inside of a normal elementary school, she was really in a school-within-a-school. All of her students had emotional disabilities, and they had a separate staff and reporting structure than the rest of the school.

Some emotionally disabled kids can go into general education later on, but not all of them can.

Now, physically disabled students is a different matter entirely. They have the same emotional and cognitive abilities as everyone else. I think they should be in the same classes, and the general educational system should accommodate them.

DrStalker• 15 years ago

An anecdote: I was fortunate to attend a primary school in Australia where the headmaster was very keen on helping both the low end and the high end students. The main work for the gifted students had almost zero budgetry requirements; it was a weekly class with assorted thought provoking questions and projects led by one of the existing staff members.

Obviously there was a time cost involved in having someone do that instead of other duties, but that would not have shown up as extra budget.

roadnottaken• 15 years ago

worst. Mobile. Layout. Ever.

ytNumbers• 15 years ago

A better article on this story includes this quotation: "Zhang says it could take 25 years between clinical trials and other steps before her research is helping patients." To prevent a jillion people from dying while awaiting treatment, maybe someone could bankroll a $100K "Bring a Product to Market in Less Than 25 Years" science competition.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/dec/05/calif-teen-ta...

polyfractal6• 15 years ago

And in 15 years we would have a similar post on the internet about how someone should bankroll a competition that increases the safety of these drugs that are flooding the market with heinous side effects.

Clinical trials take so long because there are so many regulations about safety. You can argue that cancer patients are going to die anyway, so let them decide to take whatever drugs they want. On the other hand, this opens the most vulnerable people up to those that have the most to gain from exploiting them.

There is a lot of red tape involved in getting a medical drug to market, but a lot of it is there for good reason.

epistasis2• 15 years ago

>Clinical trials take so long because there are so many regulations about safety.

Clinical trials take so long because it takes so long to perform the study. Clinical trials cost so much because of regulations, and because of sparing no expense to make them happen more quickly.

epistasis2• 15 years ago

25 years is a worst-case situation, where it turns out that this particular method doesn't actually help much.

But when you're dealing with biology, and particularly human biology, you are subject to iterating at the speed of the biology. Depending on the type of cancer, accruing enough people so that you can actually determine efficacy and then waiting to see how the people do on the treatment can take easily 5 years, perhaps 15.

And while a huge number of treatments look promising at this stage of development, the vast majority end up not being effective. The chances of success, amount of effort, and potential monetary payoff to the basic researchers, are all less favorable than a startup.

DonnyV• 15 years ago

100k....thats it? No TV spot on a morning show or Letterman? This is why kids look up to sports stars and reality show stars, incentives are all wrong. Kim Kardashian just got married and divorced within 60 days and made 18 million! Yes I understand this form of career is not about fame and notoriety but kids don't know that until there older. The only thing they know is Kim Kardashian just made a boat a load of money for marketing her wedding and selling tv spots and not for studying hard and curing a diseases.

They should of given her 1 million, so she doesn't ever have to think about money. Frees her to try riskier projects and ideas.

simonbrown• 15 years ago

$1M is not enough to never have to think about money.

igravious4• 15 years ago

Tell that to someone on $2 a day and see what they say. Tell that to kids who have to literally wade through garbage looking for plastic to earn a living. Tell that to those who are starving in Somalia. Doesn't a little alarm bell go off in your head at all when you something like that is on the tip of your tongue?

sp3322• 15 years ago

The money is just for this one competition. When it comes to productization, she'll probably get a lot more.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

That entirely depends on the rule of the contest. Remember previous discussions on hacker news where the school (company) that the kid is trained in actually get rights to the patent and the money there-related? I wouldn't be surprised if this was a case where the school gets the money. Boils my blood, frankly. But... we'll have to wait. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

polyfractal6• 15 years ago

This is very cool, but the article is also very light on details. I have some experience with this competition and the field.

Intel ISEF is like the world championship of science fair projects. Its a very cool competition and a wonderful experience. I attended the 2003 ISEF in Portland, Oregon for my project on distributed computing. Hands down the best experience I had in high school.

However, there is a huge disparity between the projects in medicine/biology and everything else. I completed my project entirely on my own with no mentors. Many other CS and engineering projects were similar. The projects in medicine and biology, however, were conducted at a local university under the guidance of faculty and staff, simply because these experiments are not something you can perform at home. They also raked in a disproportionate amount of the awards.

Having switched to biology in college and now working in a lab post-graduation, I've seen the type of work most undergrads and high-schoolers perform. Even if they are intellectually committed, much of the work is actually performed by others in the lab. Undergrads, and especially high-schoolers, often serve as support roles rather than investigators. Obviously this varies to some degree depending on the lab.

My point: Awesome that this student won, and awesome that this is helping to guide her into biology. But, I doubt she did most of the work. Nanoparticle treatment of cancer is not exactly a new idea, so she is likely working under a post-doc who has been working on this for some time.

Looking back at my post, this comes across very curmudgeonly. Perhaps I'm just disappointed that ISEF winners tend to be those helping out professional projects rather than those who design and build the project entirely on their own, or with minimal mentor help.

Edit: to clarify my point, assume a HS student gets out of school at 3pm and work until 5pm, five days a week. That's a lot for a HS student. Unfortunately, 10 hours a week isn't going to get anything done in biology. A single western blot takes longer than 6 hours to run. Hell, I work 50+ hours/week and progress is still very slow.

gujk5• 15 years ago

These high school placements into university labs are a classic example of how privilege plays out, converting socio economic status into plausible credentials. Connected parents get glamorous internships for their kids that massively overstated the kids' contributions to and translate into elite college placements.

No one can say these kids aren't smart and deserving, but what about kids who are also smart and deserving but not related to researchers or their friends? I prefer math contests where any kid who can reach the library has a downtown tty good opportunity.

maayank• 15 years ago

"I prefer math contests where any kid who can reach the library has a downtown tty good opportunity."

It's funny that you mentioned math, because I thought about it while reading the rest of your message.

In my university I know many (over a dozen) people who had their math degree (or most of it) done in high school/are in high school and are currently pursuing it. Virtually all of them (all but one) have a parent who's professionally into mathematics (most have parents who are PhDs or professors of math, another parent has a PhD in electrical engineering, etc.).

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

I call bullshit on the 'privilege' claim. Colleges are recruiting from extra curricular activities, clubs and honor societies. They reach out to those kids and offer them a chance to go to 'summer camp' and often offer financial aid to those who qualify but can't afford it.

I would not disagree that if you are in a position where you have to work to support your family while you are going to high school a number of opportunities are unavailable, but that represents a much smaller group of kids.

You take any smart and deserving kid and have them participate in activities that the universities are watching, and they will reach out. Take the SAT or PSAT and make your scores available and they will reach out. Go to university websites and email the professors who are working on interesting projects and they are often happy to share information with you, and if you are 'smart and deserving' they will reach out too.

dromidas• 15 years ago

It's the way life works. If we reigned in the best achievers to the same level of achievement as the worst level of achievers to make everyone 'equal' then we might as well just fire off all the nukes cause humans would be doomed. Read some Atlas Shrugged, the bottom of the pyramid is necessary. Without it we'd have a flat line, and you know what else is a flat line? The way a no longer beating heart reads on an EKG in a hospital.

scarmig3• 15 years ago

I've always wondered about this. In a similar state level competition, I felt like a giant hillbilly because all the projects were so damn awesome compared to mine (terrible feeling when you've put months upon months into a project only to walk into a room and realize you don't have the slightest chance in the world to win). Some of those awesome projects were definitely home-brew and were better than mine, but even those paled in comparison to the ones that came with professional help.

Growing up two hours away from the nearest real university, I didn't realize teenagers could work on projects like those. It rankles my sense of fairness that many (though certainly not all) of the people in the upper levels of the science competitions got there with a very large amount of help.

Of course, the same logic would apply to people who have even less access to resources than I did, so I should count my blessings.

learc83• 15 years ago

Same here, I went to our state science fair in 8th grade (late 90s) I really felt that most of the experiments there far outstripped the abilities of an 8th grader.

In fact one of the biggest disparities was in price, I had maybe $100 budget, and that was after I upgraded my project for the state level. Many of the experiments there looked to be at least 10x more expensive.

Palomides• 15 years ago

coming from the other side: in HS, I did a science fair project relating to the effects of various carotenoids on cancer cells in vitro. I (top part of the class) didn't even really understand what a carotenoid was; my HS, as is probably typical, did not have an organic chemistry class. The only reason my project was anything impressive is because my dad runs a cancer research lab and could foist me off on his grad students. It was a great experience, and I learned tons about what laboratory biological research is like, but it wasn't really my own original effort.

faramarz• 15 years ago

I would like to know if Siemens has any stake on the "outputs" of such competitions. Do they effectively own the patent, if there is one? Please don't tell me she had to sign a waiver.

polyfractal6• 15 years ago

I'm unsure about the Siemens competition, but its definitely a "no" for the ISEF. I imagine Siemens is the same.

Besides, this work was done at a university, so they would own the IP before anyone else.

alberich• 15 years ago

I don't get it. The girl supposedly created the "swiss army knife of cancer treatment" and she gets only U$ 100k? This doesn't sound right... this is no "swiss army knife" or the girl was cheated.

If the project is such a great advancement she would be able to rise lots of money from some medical research company... like some millions of dolars.

lightcatcher• 15 years ago

Its odd, but I feel like I've seen this project (some sort of cancer killing thing) win at each of the significant science fairs over the last couple of years. From my experience, most of the kids at these high level science fairs just make reports over stuff they've worked on (not designed) in a lab.

My sister is currently working on a pretty good science fair project involving paint that can generate solar power. The cycle for this was to come up with an idea, email universities/labs in the area, find a mentor who agrees to work with them, and then just listen to and do what the mentor advises. Its still a great project and she is learning a ton from it, but not really something she designed and I wouldn't be happy to compete against it with something I came up with and made in my garage.

Overall, I wish there was some sort of limit to how much the mentors are able to be involved. I had a ton of fun (and learned a lot) doing $150 max budget, internet research only projects mostly on my own (sometimes had help from my dad building apparatus), but its pretty impossible to compete with people working out of labs with professional help.

Also, I just realized that some guy I met a few months ago when school started (and who I have classes with) won the Siemens competition last year.

omegant• 15 years ago

It is only me or this page always gives problems with Iphone?.

17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle

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