TED - Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager

TED JackAndrak PancreaticCancer-Detection GordonMoore-Award index

"Through the Internet anything is possible. Theories can be shared, and you don't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It's a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender, it doesn't matter. It's just your ideas that count."

Jack Andraka (January 8, 1997——），2012年获英特尔戈登摩尔(Gordon Moore)奖。

TED-2013-Andraka-PancreaticCancer-Test

• I went online to find answers. 互联网。WWW：this is for everyone。 Wikipedia，Google，StackOverflow，Github
• there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated. 学校中所教课程和知识有多少年没有更新了
• However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism. 玻尔没有正规学过牛顿力学？
• a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia。中国网民的话：百度，百科？
• a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer. So I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins and see which ones could serve as a biomarker for pancreatic cancer. 生物信息学，数据挖掘，大数据分析
• map out a scientific criteria. And here it is. Essentially first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers at high levels in the bloodstream in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer. 过滤规则
• when I'm close to losing my sanity, I find the protein. And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin. 科学家的喜悦
• my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place, possibly the most unlikely place for innovation: my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation. 山不在高，有仙则名。
• They're (carbon nanotubes) kind of like the superheroes of material science. 工欲善其事，必先利其器。猿人：使用工具，制造工具。天文学：望远镜。计算机科学：计算机。数学：选择公理。
• Antibodies are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein, but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes. 酶：专一性
• However, there was a silver lining.
  As you can never say no to a kid. 《这个杀手不太冷》：No woman , no kid
• The result? One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. This makes it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection. One of the best parts of the sensor, though, is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy, and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival.
• suddenly it hit me: I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes, with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies. 学而不思则罔，思而不学则殆。学=paper，思=code
• But it wouldn't stop there. By switching out that antibody, you can look at a different protein, thus, a different disease, potentially any disease in the entire world. So that ranges from heart disease to malaria, HIV, AIDS, as well as other forms of cancer -- anything.