Breakthrough (11 page)

All these proteins in our bodies have very particular reasons and purposes, with each one telling a unique story. Proteins are also good predictors of disease and show up at the earliest stages of every cancer long before the patient feels any symptoms.

One little protein could be the key to detecting pancreatic cancer early, before it spread to other parts of the body and while it was still treatable. I needed to find one that appeared in the earliest stages of pancreatic cancer.

I began to scour the database of proteins. Here, I hit a wall. This wasn't a list of fifteen or twenty proteins that I would have to test.
It was a list of eight thousand! Any one of those unique proteins could be the one! Each one would have to be specifically studied and tested.

That could take a hundred years, and I had already wasted fourteen of them! I turned back to my computer and continued my research. As I worked, I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins. If I kept at it, I knew that somewhere within those eight thousand proteins was the answer I was searching for—a biomarker that could potentially save countless lives. Maybe it could even have saved the life of my uncle.

I had no idea if I would succeed.

But one thing was certain: my work had just begun.

It felt so strange to see September come and go without crabbing with Uncle Ted.

Every now and then, I found myself lost in thought, half expecting to look out my window and see his fixer-upper blue sedan swoop down my driveway. I imagined myself sprinting down the stairs, slamming the door behind me, jumping into his passenger seat, and speeding off to begin the dirty work of baiting our crab traps. Few things in life are more disgusting than chicken necks.

Other times, I caught myself replaying the first time I visited him in the hospital after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I could tell he didn't want to talk about his sickness or the future. I think he knew where that was going. Instead, it was my future that seemed to spark his interest the most. Especially the projects I was working
on. Once, when I told him about an idea I had for finding more efficient ways to clean up water, he told me that when times look tough or obstacles appear insurmountable, I should stay focused on who would be affected by my work and all the good it could do.

“In your work, whatever it is you choose to do, never forget who is being impacted,” he told me. “Remember the patient.”

The advice had hardened into my mind as a sort of living thought memorial.

Remember the patient.

Those words really resonated with me, and not just because it was my uncle's medical condition that first inspired me to wage this battle, but also because those three words served as a stark reminder that our goals extend far beyond ourselves.

In the months that followed the passing of Uncle Ted, my work was fueled by sheer determination. I would come up with an early-detection method for pancreatic cancer, and
nothing
was going to stop me.

It was tedious, and at the end of the day, I had no idea whether any of my hours of hard work were ever going to pay off. I had to sift through thousands of proteins looking for these tiny little differences and asking several questions each time. First, I had to find out if the proteins were down-regulated—meaning that the cell gets smaller in response to an outside change—or up-regulated, meaning that it gets bigger. I needed a protein that was up-regulated, so it would
be easier to detect. Once I had finished answering those questions, I had to find out if the proteins were sensitive to all other diseases or only to pancreatic cancer.

Depending on the research I was able to find online, sometimes I was able to rule out a particular protein in a few minutes. But other times, none or very little research was available (at least that I could find), and the process for ruling out just one of these proteins could take hours or even days!

If I was going to follow through with my idea, it was going to take a lot of time and, most important, patience. Patience is an especially important quality if you happen to find yourself haunted by eight thousand proteins every time you close your eyes. Those proteins laughed, did strange dances, and taunted me.

Above all else, it was the false leads that were absolutely killing me. Every few days, I thought I had finally discovered the protein. It seemed to fit all the right criteria, passing every test, and then, just when I got to the point where after spending several hours on it I was about to do the final test to confirm, my hopes would come crashing down.

However, as I was chugging along, working my way through the list of proteins, I noticed that I was beginning to feel seriously worn down. After hours and hours spent staring into screens, it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise.

For a kid who loves the outdoors as much as I do, being trapped
in front of my computer all day could sometimes feel like torture. It didn't help that on the few occasions when I had the opportunity to actually see my brother, I had to listen to him drone on and on about all the great things he and his friends were doing without me.

“Then we were just kayaking along and you wouldn't believe what we saw, Jack! A black bear!”

I've never seen a black bear. Lame.

My days at North County High School weren't exactly brimming with inspiration, either. It may have been better than middle school, but I was still a bit shy and I wouldn't have to wait long into the year to learn that my classmates could still be jerks. One day in the beginning of the year, my Spanish teacher went around the room asking the students what they had learned over the summer. Now, here was something I'm comfortable talking about, I thought to myself, as I raised my hand up high.

The teacher called on me and I launched into all the amazing things I had learned over the summer at math camp. In fact, I was too caught up in my own enthusiasm to notice that almost everyone in the class had broken out into a fit of laughter.

I put my head down and felt my stomach sink into my shoes. I felt a flash of heat rise to my face. That was it.

Go ahead and cry, Jack! That will give your classmates four years' worth of ammunition!

Right before the floodgates were about to open, an angry voice
of authority cut through the laughter.

“He's new to this school and you think it's a good idea to laugh at him because he likes to learn?” the voice said. “Real mature, guys.”

I couldn't believe it! The laughter stopped. I lifted my head and looked around. It wasn't the teacher coming to the rescue. It was Chloe Diggs. The girl who had let me sit next to her at lunch on the first day of school.

It was in that moment that we became friends.

School was easier after that. I sat with Chloe and her friends at lunch and actually talked! She was smart and wanted to hear about the projects I was working on. However, as I became more focused on my task of finding this biomarker, school was becoming less and less relevant to me. I had other matters that needed my attention. I kept reminding myself again and again that I could save one hundred lives a day if I just kept pushing and pushing through protein after protein.

I wish school had been my only obstacle. A lack of money was also testing my already-strained patience. It was shortly after beginning my research that I made the discovery that not all information on the internet is free. Unfortunately for me, that turned out to be especially true for almost all the articles I needed most to move forward with my work.

A lot of the best scientific work available is published in something called a scientific journal. These articles are written by the
best of the best in the scientific community. The problem is that the only ones who can access this wealth of information are other scientists—unless, that is, you pay for a subscription. To gain access to one article in a scientific journal will usually cost around thirty-five dollars!

Well, this put me in a tough position. I didn't have any money and my parents could work only so many hours of overtime, but getting the information contained in these subscription journals was absolutely essential for me if I was going to continue my research. I was prepared to try every trick in the book to get my hands on these papers.

First, like any poor teenager, I tried to pirate the papers. But evidently I'm not a very good pirate. And after my feeble career as a hacker crashed and burned, I thought that maybe emailing the professors and doctors who had authored the articles directly and pleading with them to make their work available to me would do the trick. After all, who could resist a kid, right?

It turns out that everyone could resist a kid. Most emailed me back to explain that they didn't own the copyright and weren't allowed to share with the public what they had learned. Others just blew me off entirely.

That's when I resorted to begging my parents for the money. Lucky for me, I am far more skilled at parent-begging than I am at pirating.

If my parents had been less generous, here is where my quest for an early-detection method for pancreatic cancer would have met its end. However, even after my parents agreed to sign off on this high-tech form of highway robbery, my troubles with these articles had only just begun.

Sometimes, I'd go through all that hassle and finally succeed in being able to buy the desired research article, only to discover the pages I had forked over all that cash for had absolutely nothing to do with my research. And as you could probably guess, there was a strict policy of no refunds.

Other times, even when I did manage to get the right article, I found myself staring at the screen for hours like a freak, unable to make sense of all the words. Who wrote these things? More than once the thought even crossed my mind that the scientists writing in these journals were intentionally hoping that no one could read their work.

I began printing out articles. I got into the habit of keeping my computer open and by my side so I could quickly plug words or phrases that I didn't understand into an online dictionary.

Heterozygous
.

Hetero
means different;
zyg
means yolk or union;
ous
means characterized by or full of. Heterozygous refers to a union characterized by the joining of two different alleles, or versions of a gene, for a given trait.

It wasn't uncommon for one paragraph to take me half an hour to read. Some days, I felt an overwhelming urge to take all my research, and especially my computer, and make a huge bonfire out in the backyard. I figured we already had enough kindling lying around. Maybe do a new experiment on how quickly accelerants could combust a laptop!

I could visualize myself dancing around the fire and then walking down to my basement/science lab and trashing it in a wild fit of rage. I would take that bat (the one I could never seem to connect with to hit an actual baseball) and just go to town on these awful science projects.

After I had finished on the basement, I would stomp right up the stairs and into my brother's bedroom to demolish all his awards and his science experiments. The thought of it felt . . . so . . . remarkably . . . satisfying.

None of that happened. Instead, I just took a deep breath and pushed on. I kept moving forward, highlighting sections of what I had read that I could understand until eventually more and more words began to make sense to me. Where at first it felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall, eventually, one by one, a few of those bricks began to fall. After staring at the pages long enough, I was able to actually understand what I was reading in the journals.

Now that I could understand what I was reading, my search for the biomarker moved a whole lot quicker. By the end of October, I
was able to narrow it down from eight thousand to about fifty proteins. That was great, of course, but my work was hardly finished. While fifty may seem like a manageable number, these weren't just any proteins. These were the toughest, most time-consuming proteins of all, in large part because there was almost no research available on them.

Finally, when I was halfway through my short list and on the brink of losing my sanity, I came upon a protein called mesothelin. I ran it through my gauntlet of checklists, cross-referencing it against all needed criteria in my online database. It was passing test after test. I held my breath. After so many false hopes, I had been conditioned to keep my enthusiasm at bay until I knew for sure. I kept pulling up research papers for more information.

Was it up-regulated? Yes!

What body fluid was this protein found in? If it was in spinal fluid, that wouldn't work. (Ask anyone who has had a spinal tap, and they will tell you that would not fit my criterion of “easy.”) For my test to work, the biomarker had to be in the blood or urine.

Was it in the blood? Check!

That's it! Mesothelin!

It was the breakthrough I had been waiting for.

I began jumping up and down and screaming for my mother.