Posted on 08/25/2012 6:17:52 PM PDT by JerseyanExile
Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka took home top science fair honours this year for the development of a cancer-testing method found to be 168 times faster, 26,000 times cheaper and 400 times more sensitive than the current gold-medal standard.
His work was impressive enough to earn the Maryland high school student a total of $100,500 in grants and prizes at the 2012 Intel Science Fair.
Even more impressive is the source he credits for much of his success: Google.
"I definitely could not have done this research and project without the use of the internet", Andraka told BBC News in an interview published this week.
"I basically went to Google and was looking up cancer statistics, also looking at a bunch of different documents on like, single walled carbon nanotubes and pancreatic cancer biology," he told the BBC.
Andraka was able to find enough information using search engines and free online science papers to invent his procedure, which is now being hailed as "revolutionary" by the American Cancer Society and science publications around the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
/johnny
Great story and possibly great news on the cancer front.
Crowd sourcing is supposed to lead to a lot of various kinds of breakthroughs.
Wonderful! But I hate Google’s tracking of my every move! I use IXQuick for a search engine. They search google and several other search engines,, but no IP tracking, no cookies, etc..
This could really hurt Big Pharma. Thus I suspect they will buy him off and we’ll never see this again.
Yes, Big Pharma (or Big Medical Machinery) will buy (or, more likely, license) that patent for a significant amount of money, and then proceed to make that money back many times over as part of an evil conspiracy to bring that cancer-testing product to market & save countless thousands of lives.
Except for it’s 26,000 times cheaper than current methods, so that means it is bad news for Big Pharma. There is a trending movement in med schools and residency programs right now called Just Say No To Drug Reps.
Watson turns medic: Supercomputer to diagnose disease
IBM hasn't described Watson in too much detail as far as I know, but it is a big database/search engine/AI program that reads text and can infer connections.
Something that is saving lives, and will end up saving countless lives, is new medical smartphone apps. These are especially being used well in developing countries where they don't have much infrastructure.
I hope he hires a bodyguard. I suspect he’s made some Very Important People very angry. Big Pharma, anyone?
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
I could have sworn I read the exact same story about a year ago, involving a young girl.
Bookmark
I am sure he is on The One’s $h!tlist !
Not surprsng, really.
The Internet is essentially the repository of the sum total of all human knowledge.
It just takes time to wade through it all.......
Amazing!
My mom died 3 months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, because of the daily fear I have of also succumbing from it, I sure hope this kid’s testing is approved. Or, any kind of preemptive testing, trials, breakthroughs. I thought after Patrick Swayze died from it, it would become the cancer du jour with tons of money coming in, but, alas, it wasn’t.
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