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Jack Andraka is a straight 35-year-old PhD in biology who has recently developed a way to find the early stages of pancreatic, lung, and ovarian cancers.
Highly respected in his field, Andraka wowed the minds of credible professionals in similar fields. From the birth of his idea--a dip stick in a water, anti-body/proteins solution that is inexpensive, simple, fast, and nearly 100% effective in detecting the early stages of the three previously named cancers--came droves of sponsorships from hospitals and medical professionals around the world. As well known and heralded as he has been in his field, it's no wonder he has been given so much money for continued research and development. He is published in textbooks around the world, and if his plans come to fruition, he will look to win the Nobel Prize in science by the time he is 40.
Like most similar scientists, he may only ever be known by colleagues, peers, and those that read his name in textbooks for the next several hundred years.
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All of that sounds extraordinary, doesn't it? I think it does!
But here's the thing: Most of what I just told you was a lie.
Jack Andraka is not 35. He's 18. Even though his sexual orientation doesn't matter--because it never does--he's gay, too.
Jack Andraka was not heralded by anyone. In fact, his original ideas were rejected by exactly 199 cancer researching PhDs starting at the age of 13. Even his parents, who ended up funding most of his research by supplying centrifuges and a basement lab, didn't think his research would ultimately be worth it.
His parents, father a civil engineer and mother an anesthetist by trade, were wrong (to start). All of those scientists? They were also wrong. His brother, Luke--2 years his senior--was the sole person in their family to believe in Jack's ambition--and, surprise, he's also pretty smart in his own right. He became Jack's lab partner when things started to take off.
Eventually, Jack did hear back from one professor from John's Hopkins, who decided to have him brought in to explain his idea. Despite some rough patches and a load of criticism--all of which you can find on his wikipedia page*--he's now funded by National Geographics for all of his research.
I had the fantastic privilege of hearing Jack talk yesterday (Sunday) for the closing of this year's Montessori conference. Aside: It's worth noting that I am not a Montessori educator or a teacher. For reasons I will get to in a moment, my significant other, Katie, who is a Montessori teacher, thought it might be a good idea to snag an ID badge from a colleague whom was unable to make it for the day. For that day I was not Pat Monteith. I was Ken Martin, Dean of Students, Philadelphia Montessori. And, man, was I grossly underpaid. I digress...
The day before, when I first learned I would have this privilege, I talked to my father about whether this kid/man/genius/prodigy was more closely related to Einstein or the guy who accidentally created the potato chip. For once, we were not arguing, but simply discussing the odds of him actually being a genius. Since all I had to go off of was wikipedia--or at least that's all I cared to look up at the time--I figured we would leave it at "who knows?" before actually getting to hear him talk.
Spoiler alert: He's a genius.
Along with explaining his (short) life story accompanied with an explanation of what he did, and why it's receiving a lot of attention now, he fielded questions from the audience. There are two questions in particular that he fielded--along with some tearful "thank yous" from other audience members who lost relatives to pancreatic cancer--that I think are pretty important to mention.
1. "Despite all of the adversity and rejection, how did you continue? What made you keep going?"
Answer (paraphrased): Well, there's a funny thing about discovering new science-y things: You can't go by fact! You have to have your own set of creativity that thinks outside of the box in order to make the world a better place, and I believe that creativity is in all of us!
2. Are you in the process of creating new things?
Answer (paraphrased): Well, yes, I'm doing this one thing where...*mind blowing answer about things I only half understood*...Also, I'm in the process of creating nanobots that enter the blood stream and program cells to commit suicide. This way, we can get right to the cancer and kill the cancer from the inside-out.
Another question that deserves honorable mention was one that asked, "How long will it take for your device to enter the market?"
Answer (paraphrased): Well, it should take 5-10 years for more studies by the CDC and other governing bodies to approve of its usefulness. So we're hoping it takes closer to 5.
Rebuttal by asker: Is there any way for us to speed up the process? Fundraising, etc?
Answer (paraphrased): Unfortunately, as far as medical innovations go, it normally takes about 17 years for these kinds of things to go from development to the market, so we're already going at a little faster pace than it normally takes for these things.
In other words, there's nothing more we can do--it's a process.
So, why does Jack Andraka mean anything to me? Why was the first book signing/meet and greet I've ever done/been a part of with someone 5 years my junior? Well his story is a bit similar to mine, except when I got discouraged or had my ideas rejected, I stopped pursuing and went a separate direction.
No, it's not to toot my own horn. It's true. When I was 14, my grandfather died of Melanoma. He was like a second father to me, and I was devastated. Similarly, Jack's uncle died of Pancreatic cancer, thus starting the flow of his creative juices. (You can find out all about his life in his book called "Breakthrough," which is an autobiography of sorts up to this point in his life. I've only read a bit of it so far, but it's quite fascinating to me...) I was just entering my first year at LaSalle when he passed away, and I couldn't wait to start learning about biology, which I was able to do more in-depth my sophomore year. When learning about the cell cycle, something interesting came across my mind: What if we could manipulate cell growth to, at the very least, stop the growth of cancerous cells? For instance--and I'll try not to be too confusing, here, because I know how I felt when Jack spoke and needless to say my brain exploded: cells go through these reproductive stages. More specifically I payed close attention to G1 and G0. G1 is the stage in cellular reproduction where certain chemical reactions occur inside the cell, blah blah blah, and the cell reproduces and keeps doing so until it reaches a point, if ever, of G0. G0, which occurs in only a few specific cells in the human body, i.e. brain cells, pulmonary cells, and nerve cells, is when the certain other chemical reactions happen, blah blah blah, and the cell stops reproducing.
The idea I had only works for cancer where tumors develop. Therefore, sorry, Leukemia and a few other cancers where the invasiveness of a procedure is too risky and costly. My idea encompassed the use of nerve, pulmonary, or brain cells, perhaps through extraction of tissue from living or recently dead organisms, and surrounding the cancer cells with these cells. In other words, connecting cancer tissue to the tissue that is in G0. I thought, since we are organisms that have the ability to learn, that learning could also happen at the cellular level. Ultimately, I thought I could get cancer cells to learn to stop growing.
Long story short, I asked 3 different doctors. 2 basically told me it's not possible. I was younger when I surveyed these two doctors, so it discouraged me and I stopped trying. It was years later when I was well into the establishing points of my accounting career that I asked the 3rd who told me that what I thought of is currently being worked on. The specifics are different than how I thought of it, because when I was younger I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that the cancer cells are constantly mutating--which means it's hard for them to learn much of anything. The point is, whatever creativity you have with certain ideas, don't be afraid to talk about them! It just might save a ton of lives, or make peoples' lives infinitely easier!
Jack. Did not. Quit.
Before yesterday, I didn't know Jack, but I'll know Jack like I know Einstein for the rest of my life. My goal through this blog is that you do, too. He beat the naysayers, and pushed through an extreme amount of rejection and adversity. In the name of saving our relatives for generations to come, I hope that you remember him, because he deserves to be remembered.
You didn't know Jack, but now you do.**
- PatInTheHat
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Andraka
** Here's a link to his book! http://www.harpercollins.com/childrens/breakthrough
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