17-Year-Old Wins $100K For Creating Cancer Killing Nanoparticle 255
An anonymous reader writes "17-year-old Angeloa Zhang was recently awarded the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled 'Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.' The creation is the so-called 'Swiss army knife of cancer treatment,' which allows a nanoparticle to be delivered to a tumor where it proceeds to kills cancer stem cells."
Did SHE do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am wondering whether it was her specifically who did it. I have been lead to believe that high-school students work under PHD researchers. Specifically, she was working under a Stanford PHD researcher with 10 - 20 years experience researching cancer. So, I take this with a grain of salt.
Re:Did SHE do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying this is always the case, just in the vast majority that I've observed.
Re:We will not live to see it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. Do it outside of the USA first.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
And football coaches get a million plus a year.
Re:Biology Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
Cure cancer, only make 100k
... and who owning the patent?
Re:Did SHE do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well like all research it of course builds upon work from others. Those PhD researchers themselves usually work in a team, exchanging ideas and work results, in the process teaching each other about various aspects of the work, giving each other new suggestions on how to do stuff, etc. Sometimes the view of an outsider can be very enlightening.
To move on in research and make new discoveries, someone has to come up with a new idea, and that someone (or someone else) has to work out that idea. That idea may appear to be a little improvement, later unexpectedly working out to something great.
Indeed in this case I wouldn't be surprised if it works out roughly like that: experienced researcher walks around with various ideas in his head, gets a student assistant, and then gives that student assistant one of those ideas to work out. And then this happens to be a smart student that gets a promising idea to work on which actually works out surprisingly well.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it sure isn't. Maybe she just saved that hypothetical inventor's life, on the other hand. I feel those erudite, yet lacking innovation, they deserve to be leveraged against. That is, considering how often true innovators are stifled and devalued. Stuff like this, if a successful innovation can solve a trillion dollar problem with a few dollars--said innovator should feel free to offer it to all sides. Maybe you don't ask for a trillion dollars, although, you could ask for a lot more than $100K.
Your comment feels like a puzzle I must unravel.
The 100k is a prize. There is probably an awful lot more development to do before this becomes an actual treatment, and there is nothing to say the talented winner won't earn ten times, or a hundred times the prize money by the time that treatment is fully developed. I'd say her career is almost assured at this stage, and that alone is probably worth millions.
They are all pretty difficult these days (Score:5, Insightful)
We've cured/prevented/etc the simple stuff. No surprise as medical science advances, just like any science, the simpler problems are solved first. Things like sterilization before surgery was a major, and fairly simple, advance that prevented a lot of shit.
Well we are now getting to the more tough stuff. Things were the body attacks itself, diseases that use our immune system against us and so on. Much harder to find a way to deal with. That isn't to say we won't, but it shouldn't be surprising that it takes a lot of time and thus costs a lot of money.
The autoimmune stuff, also very hard. Again it is the body causing itself trouble. It isn't a foreign agent messing with the body, the body itself is the problem. Tough problem to deal with.
Re:We will not live to see it. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no truth to it. It is a combination of the general anti-corporate whining some people like to do and the badly misinformed position of more or less thinking anything you don't know how to do must be easy.
In medicine it is a particular problem since not that long ago, there were a lot of advances and simple solutions. Once humanity got an understanding of cellular life and infections and all that, there were massive advanced made pretty easy. Hell you sterilize an operating room and give a patient post-op penicillin and it was amazing how many problems just didn't happen anymore.
Thing is, that time is gone. We've solved the simple medical problems. We are getting on to the much harder ones. As such dealing with them is more difficult.
You have some things like herpes. Not a major health issue, but a tough one to deal with. Normal immunization procedures won't work. Why? Well viral immunization works by introducing something to the body, generally a dead or weakened strain of the virus, that the body can see and learn to fight off safely. That is also why they don't work post-infection. Your body already had the virus and learned how to fight it. Thing is, with herpes you do have it, it stays with you. So the body has it, but can't learn to fight it. Means introducing it would do fuck-all. Have to work something else out.
Or things like cancer or autoimmune diseases where the body -IS- the problem. It is attacking itself. It isn't an outside agent that you could try and find a way to eliminate, the body has turned on itself for some reason. Makes elimination much harder.
But people aren't informed. They think it is just the evil companies that could magically cure all this, if only they weren't so greedy. Not at all the case. We are dealing with hard problems, and they'll only get harder. The more ills that we solve, the harder the remaining ones will be to solve.
Re:The 100k was a ripoff (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did SHE do it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree completely. Everyone should get their applause and their grant money here - but some serious thought needs to go into exactly what the hell happened when a high school student even has a shot at cracking a code like this. Most people are buried beneath a steaming pile of banality during their high school years. They're prepping student body political campaigns, writing papers on To Kill a Mockingbird, and trying to figure out how to dress in a way that will yield satisfying relationships.
There was a kid who graduated from my University at age 18 a few years ago with a Pre-Med degree. The first thing I thought was, "How sad that so few people are given the opportunity." We've studied development and neurogenesis to the point now that we know the difference between accidental happenstance and concerted purposive design. If more people were given the appropriate feedback early on about their own capacities and worth, this kind of functionalizing of young minds would be the baseline of education and not the one in a billion pot-shot it comes across as. We're totally selling ourselves short by shoveling Harry Potter and prom flower ribbons down our kids throats.
And for fuck's sake people... NO, a teenage girl did not just singlehandedly cure cancer. There is absolutely zero chance that she has a working understanding of quantum mechanical wave equation interpretations for molecular orbitals underpinning protein formation, let alone cell development and receptor pathways for the thousands of types of cells and their reproductive signaling constructs. The confounding issues of differentiating between self and non-self, histocompatibility and regulatory mechanism compatibility... they're not trivial. Medical doctors and academic researchers spend careers scratching at the surface of extremely narrow cases, and rarely find purchase on topics that are universally generalizable. Most all of them never produce replicable experimental designs towards deepening knowledge, just tiny slivers of insight into particular scenarios.
If this girl actually did run across the magic words and concepts that produced something workable, it is still extremely disingenuous to describe her as a "high school student" ... the ammunition one needs to acquire to even begin firing shots off in the right direction is never provided until midway through a Pre-Medical undergraduate major - at a good University. "High schools" around the world don't begin to describe this stuff. What you would be seeing is the triumph of home-schooling, autodidacticism, private tutoring, mentoring, nepotism, etc... the exact polar opposite of public education models. If everyone had to "get it" before the class could move on, this kind of student performance would be impossible.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
The question I've been asking and can't seem to find an answer for is:
By entering her particle as a project in this competition and accepting the 100k... Did she transfer any/all ownership of the IP to a drug company?
Re:Golly! (Score:4, Insightful)
The general equation reads young = retard moron = spoonfeed simplified stuff until grown up to be an adult moron.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a lifetime of no personal income tax?
Thats a really bad road to start down.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps you're right. I just think there needs to be some decent amount of hero worship for these sort of individuals. Its totally pathetic that some athlete gets paid millions to play a game as a career and gets huge amount of hero worship. Yet some inventor or small group of scientists are going to come up with the next breakthrough that transforms the cost of energy into something so cheap its practically free for everyone; and they might get 15min of fame and thats it. Personally I think if there were more emphasis put on scientific achievement the way we put on whether someone can make a shot consistently from the 3pt line, we'd be much further along in our breakthroughs.
Re:Biology Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Many more people are killed worldwide by simple diarrhea. All that is needed to cure it is clean drinking water. We could save over two million lives each year for less than what we're spending on HIV research. Too bad diarrhea is neither fashionable or tragic. There are no "brown ribbon" campaigns for diarrhea.
Re:Lousy t-shirt (Score:2, Insightful)