Breakthrough (14 page)

Did I ever.

However, all my problems paled in comparison to my struggles with the Western blot. The Western blot, which is also sometimes called the protein immunoblot—or, as far as I was concerned, evil incarnate—is a machine that uses something called gel electrophoresis to separate proteins by their 3D structure or length. The proteins are then transferred to a membrane where they are stained with antibodies specific to the target protein.

If that hurts your head to read, try actually doing it. The precise measurements and care needed for every step were like a game of Operation. Every time I made the smallest mistake, or miscalculated in the slightest way, I had to junk the rest of my work and start over again.

Then, if I ever managed to successfully master the Western blot, I would be confronted with the equally difficult task of mixing the human mesothelin–specific antibodies with single-walled carbon nanotubes, which I used to coat strips of filter paper to make the paper conductive.

The next step involved using a scanning electron microscope to determine the optimal layering of the paper. If I hadn't messed up by that point, the MIA PaCa cells should have spiked with varying amounts of mesothelin and could then be tested against the paper biosensor. I only saw the results of my experiment once I had graphed out the measurements of electricity on the paper test strips. It should reveal exactly how much of the biomarker protein mesothelin was in the blood.

Most days I thought I would never get it right. If I wasn't contaminating my experiments with my sneezes or knocking them over, I was accidentally baking my cultures in an incubator.

Since I was the youngest in the lab, I didn't have much to add when the doctors talked about their spouses and kids, and I was ashamed of my performance. I was embarrassed by the black stain on the floor and the fact that I called the forceps “tweezers,” which made them laugh. When the doctors pulled chairs up around a table near the lab, I took my food to a stairwell. It was better than eating in the middle school bathroom.

As I ate in the stairwell, I remembered the 192 doctors who rejected me, and I wondered if Dr. Maitra had begun to regret the day when he gave me space in his lab.

Maybe I am Dr. Maitra's charity case.

Sometimes, after coming home from the lab, I'd find another rejection letter.

Dear Mr. Andraka,

After spending time reviewing your idea, it is clear that you should consider a few more years of education.

Sincerely,
                      

Dr. So and So
               

The more I worked, the more I saw that there were countless holes in my original theory. After five grueling months in the laboratory, the only thing I had to show for my efforts was the hockey puck–sized stain of nanotubes on the floor.

One day, I went to my secret spot under the stairwell and broke down in tears. I felt like the unluckiest scientist in the world. That night, I went home and reread a passage online about legendary inventor Thomas Edison.

On December 10, 1914, ten entire buildings full of Edison's treasured experiments were engulfed in flames and destroyed. Much of Edison's life's work turned to ash that night. He was sixty-seven years old, and many believed that Edison's days as a great American inventor had gone up in smoke too.

However, as he stood watching the flames burn away years of records and prototypes, Edison turned to a reporter from the
New York Times
and told him, “Although I am over sixty-seven years old,
I'll start all over again tomorrow. I am pretty well burned out tonight. But tomorrow there will be a mobilization here and the debris will be cleared away, if it is cooled sufficiently. I will go back to work to reconstruct the plant. There is only one thing to do,” Edison continued, “and that is to jump right in and rebuild.”

Edison even took it a step further, and began to explain how the fire was actually a great opportunity. Now that “the rubbish” of his old factory had been burned away, he could begin the task of building a bigger factory that would be better than the old one, he told his son. With that, he rolled up his coat for a pillow, curled up on a table inside one of the buildings in the burned-out factory, and fell asleep. When Edison woke up he looked at the ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.” With that, he immediately began the task of getting his plant up and running again. His employees worked double shifts and set to work producing more than ever.

It wasn't just Edison's innate genius that separated him from the other scientists of his day. What I love about that passage on Edison is it shows his ability to see missteps as stepping-stones. Three weeks after the fire, Edison invented the phonograph, the first device to record and play sounds.

I began to see that although many of the mistakes I was making were the result of inexperience, other times, like in the case of the Western blot, my errors taught me to be more careful and pay closer
attention to the details of my work. I made a conscious effort to see the setbacks as opportunities and to remind myself that within each mistake was a clue that could bring me another step closer to creating an early-detection method for pancreatic cancer.

During these days the words of Uncle Ted were never far from my mind.

Just slow down, Jack, you're going to be okay. Everything will work out.

I dug in my heels and began working longer hours, every day after school and past midnight on Saturdays. I barely ate. When I did remember that I needed food, my diet consisted of pizza, hard-boiled eggs, and Twix candy bars. I worked through Thanksgiving and Christmas. When I needed sleep, I snuck under the stairwell, where I had made a mattress out of magazines and copies of printed-out journal articles, and, using my hoodie as a pillow, took a quick power nap. I thought it was a great hiding space until, one time, I woke up from a nap and saw Dr. Maitra staring down at me with a look of complete confusion.

“Hi, Dr. Maitra,” I said.

“Hi, Jack,” he answered. He walked away shaking his head.

For my fifteenth birthday, I brought a bunch of party hats and colorful streamers from the dollar store and decorated my workspace with signs congratulating myself. It was a weekend and the laboratory was empty.

One night in late December, after seven long, grueling months in the laboratory, I was having a particularly hard time. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't seem to get through the procedure without making a mistake.

I had memorized my procedural checklist (which is kind of like a recipe) and kept a tissue close by in the event of any unexpected sneezes.

The first thing I always had to do was make sure that I had all the right ingredients on hand:

       
1.
 
Mesothelin protein

       
2.
 
A dozen test tubes in a carrier

       
3.
 
Phosphate buffer solution, a water-based salt solution containing sodium phosphate and sodium chloride

       
4.
 
A pipette, which is a chemical dropper that looks like a big syringe

       
5.
 
A dozen of my custom-made nanotube-soaked paper sensor strips, each about half the size of a pinky

       
6.
 
An ohmmeter, a device that measures electric currents

Once I had everything, I was ready to get to work.

First, I needed to combine the carbon nanotubes, which look like a black powdery soot and weigh about one gram, with the antibodies by pouring both into test tubes and mixing them together.
It wasn't easy. Carbon nanotubes stick together and form bundles, which have to be unzipped by hitting them with ultrasound waves called sonication. The ultrasound waves create vibrations that make these bundles tear apart so they can be used for testing.

My test strips, coated with carbon nanotubes

Next I made my testing strips by taking some pieces of filter paper and cutting them into strips measuring five centimeters by a half centimeter before dipping them into my nanotube-antibody soup. Each strip had to be dipped and dried thirteen times. My first batch took twenty hours to make because the humidity in the air had added extra moisture. Eventually, I learned a way to make them dry
more quickly by placing them in a vacuum tube to suck all the water out. It is the same process they use to make astronaut food.

After the test strips were dry, I put my mesothelin sample on the soaked carbon paper to see if the protein would react to the antibody network. To see my results, I put electrodes on my strip and used my ohmmeter to measure the electric pulse. The process was painstaking. Every little step in my test was time-intensive and had to be absolutely flawless. Now, if my theory was right, the readings would show that the antibodies on my paper strips had detected my biomarker.

I furiously worked out the math equation. I made a graph of the measurements of the electrical currents along with the various amounts of individual protein solutions to find something called a dose-dependent response, which would basically see how they all matched up. I only knew if I had made a mistake after completing an entire batch.

I screwed up my first batch and had to start over. Then I contaminated my second batch, too. Three more hours spent creating the third batch resulted in more failure.

All the while, my mom was outside waiting in the parking lot. It was getting late. I was tired.
Maybe I should just call it a night
, I thought.

I decided to give it one more try. For the fourth time, I began the tiresome procedure of making my batch of solutions, sucking up some of the protein from my vials with my pipette, dropping the
proteins on my nanotube-soaked paper test strips, and then hooking up my ohmmeter to my paper test strips and running the numbers.

Wait! What is this?

As I began graphing the amounts, something was different. The numbers showed that my test with little papers strips had detected the biomarker!

I ran the numbers again. It was working. The ohmmeter was measuring the mesothelin levels in the solutions!

My test had showed a direct correlation between how much protein was in the solution and how much the electrical properties were changing. That meant its sensitivity was good enough to detect pancreatic cancer. My results were passing all the preliminary tests!

Holy crap! It's working?

Overwhelmed with hysterical joy, I ran around the small lab in circles, screaming like a hyena and trying not to knock anything over. Then a thought occurred to me—
It's so late at night. What if I saw what I wanted to see and not the actual results?

I ran back over and checked my results again. My hands were shaking as I held the ohmmeter. There it was—my hypothesis was correct.

I did it?

I wanted to share the moment with someone, anyone, but looking around the empty laboratory, I realized that it was 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and everyone else had gone home hours before.

My mom! I need to see my mom.

I had forgotten about my poor mother! She was still parked outside, probably asleep in the car, waiting for me. I went into full-sprint mode until reaching her.

“Hey, Mom, guess what?” I said, a wide smile across my face.

Barely awake, my mom opened her eyes and smiled back at me. She groaned.

“It's working!” I screamed at her.

She didn't answer with words. She began screaming. I was screaming. We were both screaming.

My mind raced through all the implications of the achievement. My paper sensor cost less than a nickel and would take five minutes to run, making it faster, cheaper, and more sensitive than the current test. It could save lives, lots of them.

I felt like I was dreaming. Yelling back and forth with my mom at the top of our lungs on the car ride home will go down as one of the best memories of my life. I felt as though I could lift off the ground.

However, as we pulled into the driveway I began to feel a small stab of pain. The one person I wanted to share my joy with more than anyone else was Uncle Ted. I would have picked up the phone and woken him up. He would have loved this moment most of all.

I wanted to stay up all night thinking about the future, about what this discovery would mean, but I needed sleep. After all, I had to go to school the next day.