Breakthrough (17 page)

The next day, we awoke to find a black car waiting outside to whisk us away to the CNN headquarters. We were met in the lobby and escorted to a room that was stocked with Krispy Kreme donuts, muffins, and the kind of small bottled drinks that cost way too much money for my family to ever consider purchasing.

“Who are these for?” I asked my mom.

We both looked around. We were the only ones in the room.

“Us, I think,” she said.

I grabbed two gourmet chocolate milks and drank one after the
other. I love chocolate milk. Unfortunately, I didn't think to bring my backpack or I would have taken a few more for the road. Before I could hit the glazed donuts, a producer wearing a futuristic headset walked over to let me know that makeup was ready.

I looked at my mom. She laughed at the look on my face. I followed the producer into a beauty salon–looking room, where he sat me in a chair and spun me around so I was staring at myself in the mirror. Next, a woman who looked like she was cut out of a fashion magazine came over and began caking my face with a thick powder that smelled faintly like sulfur. After my makeup was finished, I looked at my new rosy complexion and smiled. It was showtime.

As I walked onto the set, I worried that the lights were so bright and hot that they might mingle with my sweat and convert my makeup into cement, freezing my face in a perpetual expression of shock. The producer walked me over to a chair, and a second later I was introduced to the host, Alina Cho.

She took her seat directly across from me and began flipping through a packet of papers, reviewing some notes. A man behind the camera began a countdown—five, four—then at three he switched to hand signals—
two, one—
until pointing at us.

A green light came on the camera. After a brief introduction, we were live.

Alina hit me with her first question.

“Tell me, how did you come up with the idea? I know you were
inspired by a close family friend.”

I swallowed hard. The host was looking at me, smiling. My mom was behind me offstage. Now a camera was revolving around me in a 360-degree swivel. I felt nervous, but I had recited these lines so many times at the science fairs that I just sort of went into autopilot.

“So, after a close family friend passed from the disease, I became really interested in early detection of pancreatic cancer because early detection is one of the problems behind the huge death rate,” I answered.

As soon as I began talking, I could feel all the nerves melt away. I was having fun. Next, she played a video of my reaction to winning the award.

“It is so remarkable,” she said, laughing. “I watched it a couple of times.”

It was a bizarre moment, akin to having an out-of-body experience; I was being interviewed on television while watching myself on a little television and being asked for my reaction, which was, of course, being televised. My mom was watching off to the side. My dad and brother were watching from home, along with hundreds of thousands of other viewers.

After Alina thanked me for coming in, it was all over. I felt both exhilarated by the experience and relieved that I didn't stumble. It also felt a little strange that after hours of travel, makeup, and anticipation, the actual interview took only a few minutes. I was quickly
escorted out of the studio. My mom ran up to me from where she had been watching.

“Jack, I'm so proud of you!” she said. “You did great!”

On the way home to Crownsville we could hardly contain our glee. The project had gotten the kind of national exposure we could only dream of. Now, we figured, it was time for me to turn the page and start thinking about the next project. We had barely unpacked our bags when the lady in charge of media relations for ISEF called. She sounded exasperated. Her office had been inundated with media requests.

“This is unprecedented,” she said. “We aren't really sure how to handle it or what you want us to do.”

“Well, that's okay. Jack's happy to talk to the press,” my mom answered. “Just tell them yes. We can make time. How many requests have you received—a dozen? Twenty?”

There was a pause on the line.

“Thousands.”

For once in our lives, my mom and I were speechless.

After all the frenzy of the past few weeks, it was time to get back to school. Between ISEF and the trip to Manhattan, I had missed nearly two full weeks.

I began my next morning with the same school-day routine. I woke up at five thirty, hopped in the shower for fifteen minutes,
quickly made myself a few scrambled eggs, brushed my teeth, and by six thirty was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's car for the thirty-minute car ride to school. I wasn't really sure how my teachers were going to react. Of course, I knew they would be okay with me going to ISEF, but the trip to New York could be a problem.

“I think I missed a biology test,” I said to my dad.

“I think your teachers will let you make up any work you missed, Jack,” he responded.

“I hope so.”

I arrived in school as everyone was hitting their lockers. It was strange that nothing here had changed. I could hear shuffling as books were stuffed into bags, the metallic clang of lockers opening and closing, and the morning greetings as students passed each other in the halls. A few minutes before the morning bell, an announcement sounded over the loudspeaker.

“And congratulations to Jack Andraka, for winning the Gordon E. Moore Award.”

In that singular instance, I felt my two worlds fuse. I hadn't been very social over the course of my freshman year and had barely spoken about my project. I chalked it up to residual walls that I still had up from my time in middle school. You don't get over that kind of ostracism and hatred quickly. Of course, I knew there was no way of hiding it after winning the regional science fair, but up until that moment, at least in my head, I had always kept the projects I was
working on separate from my time in school. Now it felt as if my worlds had collided, and to my surprise, that felt okay.

As I walked through the halls, several classmates congratulated me. I slowed down as I passed by Damien's locker. For a moment we locked eyes. I hadn't seen him since the day he told me my project “sucked” at the regional fair. I smiled at him. He turned away, pretending he didn't see me.

The rest of the day went by like every other, except in Spanish class. When I walked in, I saw my teacher had brought me a big cake to celebrate my victory that said “
Felicitaciónes
, Jack!” I love cake. The whole class got to have a piece. Afterward, I went to speak with my biology teacher about letting me make up the test I had missed while in New York. She saw the worry on my face and broke out in laughter.

“Jack, are you serious? Of course!”

That was a relief. As a high school freshman, I wanted to do well in science.

As my freshman year drew to a close, I was expecting the media attention to end. But by June, the video of me winning the award had gone viral. What really blew my mind was that the majority of the interest was from the kind of kids who weren't exactly science geeks. In fact, many of them had never seemed to have much of an interest in science or math at all.

By the end of the second week of June, the phone in our living
room was ringing off the hook with interview requests from different reporters, including those from some of my favorite magazines, like
Smithsonian
,
Discovery
, and
Popular Science
. Television crews from national news organizations like ABC World News and the BBC all wanted to talk to me.

“What is going on?” I asked my mom as she read down the list of requests.

“People look at you and see science as fun again,” she said.

When we received a call from the news show
60 Minutes
, my mom couldn't say yes fast enough. Morley Safer, the legendary correspondent, had asked if he could come to my house to interview my family!

A few days later, Morley Safer arrived, flanked by a small army of camera-crew techs and assistants. As we all sat down, he began asking questions with the same famous voice I had heard so many times coming from my television on Sunday nights. My family and I took turns talking about our early family life, the things we liked to do, and, of course, our love for doing experiments in the basement.

“You do experiments in the basement?” Morley asked. “Can I see?”

My mom looked nervous. She had no idea what was down there.

“I think it's probably a real mess, right, boys?” she said.

She was looking at us for support. There was no way she wanted strangers, one of them being Morley Safer, seeing that part of her
house. Luke and I didn't help my mom at all. Instead, we just sat there, acting like we hadn't heard her. Truth is, I hadn't been in the basement in a little while and wasn't exactly sure what it looked like—but I did know that one did not say no to Morley Safer, especially when Morley Safer was sitting across from you in your living room.

“Let's go check it out.” He signaled to his camera crew, not waiting for an answer. We followed him down the narrow staircase to our basement lab.

The next thing we heard was a big thud, followed by a muffled groan. Morley Safer had tripped over some wires that were on the stairs. He had face-planted in my basement and he wasn't moving.

For a split second, everyone stood there frozen, looking down at the eighty-year-old television icon as he lay motionless on the Andraka family basement floor.

Oh my God
, I thought.
We killed Morley Safer.

His staff and my parents rushed over to help and that's when we saw a faint movement.

He's not dead!

“I'm okay,” he said.

He didn't want any help. He insisted on pulling himself up and continuing with the interview as if nothing had happened.

After the
60 Minutes
segment aired, I noticed a snowball effect. The more times I appeared on television, the more other television
reporters wanted to speak with me. Soon after the airing, we received an invitation to attend an event for the Clinton Global Initiative, a charitable foundation started by the Clintons. There was this big dinner filled with wealthy CEOs, a bunch of famous people I had never heard of, and of course, the Clintons themselves, who were the rock stars of the event.

The moment that former president Bill Clinton walked into the room, everyone was looking at him. He has a presence about him, as though he makes his own gravity.

He walked over to me and shook my hand.

“It's nice to meet you,” he said. “You won the science award, right?”

Wow, it's nice for Bill Clinton to meet
me
?

“Congrats,” he said.

My mom asked if she could take a picture and he happily agreed.

I made my way back to my seat, in shock over having just shook the hand of a former president, when I noticed that someone had moved my glass of Sprite. That's when Hillary Clinton approached me. She had this wide smile on her face. “Did I take your glass?” she asked.

This was awkward. She had, in fact, taken my glass, but I wasn't about to tell the secretary of state that she had swiped it from me.

“It's totally okay, no problem at all,” I said in an apologetic tone.

She handed it back and pulled up a seat next to me.

I meet Bill Clinton at a dinner for the Clinton Global Initiative.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

By now, I'd told my story countless times to all kinds of different audiences, but this was a little bit different. As she listened, I was surprised by the warmth and care that she projected. At one point, while I was speaking, her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, walked by, touched my head, and said, “Nice hair.”

After I told Hillary my story, I informed her that I didn't understand a lot about politics.

“Oh, it isn't as complicated as you might think. Did you ever see the movie
Mean Girls
?” she asked. “Well, politics is a lot like that movie,” she continued. “Imagine all of these politicians as different cliques, and my job is to maneuver around them to get things done.”

“Wow,” I said. “In a way, high school never ends.”

She nodded. “Now you get it!”