Breakthrough (19 page)

Once my group was piled into a car for the drive over to the Capitol, I noticed that agents on motorcycles were blocking traffic.

“Look,” I said, finally breaking my silence to the group of very famous strangers. “They are shutting the streets down for us.”

Everyone turned to look at me.

“Actually,” a stern voice replied, “they aren't shutting down the roads for us. It's for the president.”

What a party pooper.

After a short drive, we parked outside the Capitol and were shuffled into a secret entrance. An official led us up a set of stairs, and everyone was shown where they would be sitting on a chart. When it came time to show me where I would be sitting, the official pointed to the nearby stairwell.
How fitting!
I thought. I didn't care; I still had a view and I was just happy to be in the room.

I never felt so patriotic as when I heard the president announced. I stood up and clapped and cheered for him. Shortly after the State of the Union address began, a soft-voiced lady who looked like a librarian sat beside me on the stairs.

“You're a peasant too,” I joked to her about our prestigious seating designation.

“I am,” she responded, introducing herself as Valerie.

Valerie explained that she had been around the White House for a few years, and began sharing little tips and explaining to me what it was that I was watching.

“See, all the people standing to applaud are Democrats,” she said. “Everyone sitting down is a Republican.”

I jumped up and applauded every time President Obama mentioned innovation in science and medicine.

When the speech was over, my new friend Valerie asked me to follow her to a room off to the side. A second later, President Obama walked in. After seeing him as a talking head on television for so long, it was weird to see him standing in the flesh right in front of me. The president extended his First Hand to me and we shook hands. It was the softest hand I had ever touched.

“What was your project about, Jack?” he said.

Knowing he had more important things to do, I gave the leader of the free world the Cliffs Notes version of my science project.

He was surprisingly well versed in science. As I began to explain to him what nanotubes were, he stopped me.

“I know what nanotubes are,” he said.

“What? No way!” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, chuckling.

That moment talking with the president lasted less than two minutes, but it will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I tell President Obama about my pancreatic cancer test.

Days later, I was watching television when I saw my stairwell-sitting friend Valerie's face flash across the screen. That was the moment I realized that this super-warm lady who kept me company throughout the State of the Union was one of the most powerful people in the universe, White House Chief of Staff Valerie Jarrett.

As my sophomore year of high school continued on, I was feeling ready for my next project. In middle school, science was an escape from bullying and self-doubt, but now that I was older and more confident, I wanted to try something new just for the fun of it. I decided that I wanted to try to unlock the secrets of one piece of technology that has always fascinated me—the Raman spectrometer.

The Raman spectrometer is a machine that shoots a powerful laser that can break down almost any object on a chemical level. That means it can let us peel the layers back on everything from explosives to environmental contaminants. The problem is that because they are extremely delicate, as large as a small car, and cost up to $100,000, few people will get the benefits of this amazing technology.

I decided that if I could build a spectrometer that was smaller and
less expensive, then it could be used for everyday tasks, like detecting pollutants in a stream or weapons in airplane luggage. I spent nine months working, before I finally had a breakthrough. I realized that if I could swap the Raman spectrometer's big laser for a laser pointer and its liquid nitrogen–cooled photodetector (which it uses to determine the chemical makeup of whatever material is being analyzed) with an iPhone camera, I could reduce the cost to fifteen dollars and make it the size of a smartphone. My spectrometer is 7,000 times less expensive and 1,250 times smaller, while also being just as efficient! This project was very different from working on my pancreatic cancer test, because I had to learn a lot about engineering. Some of the vocabulary was confusing.

But once I figured it out, I had a new project, which I called “The Tricorder: A Novel Raman Spectrometer for Real World Applications.” I entered it into the Anne Arundel County Regional Science and Engineering Fair and was rewarded for my efforts with a first-place prize and another trip to ISEF, this time in Phoenix, Arizona.

When I got to ISEF, I found myself in the unfamiliar position of being admired by the other contestants. Throughout the event, students kept coming up to me, asking if they could take a picture with me. I was flattered, but while I enjoyed the limelight, I didn't spend nearly enough time practicing my presentation. I also knew this year's project wasn't quite as great as last year's.

My favorite project belonged to Ionut Budisteanu. The
nineteen-year-old from Romania was awarded first place for using artificial intelligence to create a four-thousand-dollar self-driving car with 3D radar and mounted cameras that could detect traffic lanes and curbs, along with the real-time position of the car. Wow, did he deserve to win! I felt fortunate when I won two special awards.

Watching Ionut standing on the stage holding the Gordon E. Moore Award brought back a lot of memories of the best moment of my life. It was hard to believe it had been three whole years since Uncle Ted had passed and one year since I had run screaming up to the stage to accept my award.

I found that, over the course of time, Uncle Ted's words had hardened into memorials that served as guideposts in my mind whenever I felt like I was at a crossroads.

I'd stopped expecting to see Uncle Ted's beat-up car come down my driveway for a day of crabbing, but I hadn't forgotten his voice. I could hear him urging me on in the moments when I wanted to quit, or the times when I received a particularly hurtful email. Uncle Ted made the moments of his life count by making a positive impact on the world. I wanted to do the same.

During my junior year, Chloe and I were walking around the Baltimore Harbor one day, being totally grossed out by all the disgusting water bottles bobbing in the water. I thought, what if we could create a water bottle that could purify water? Chloe and I began bouncing
ideas off each other and formulating a plan of action.

“It would need to be a water bottle that people used again and again, with a filter unlike anything on the market today,” she said.

“That would take a biosensor that would detect anything that might be harmful,” I added.

“It would have to be inexpensive,” said Chloe, “so that it could reach people in third-world countries where contaminated drinking water is such a killer.”

Chloe and I had become even closer. We liked to watch the Iron Man movies together, and were particularly interested in the lab in Tony Stark's house and all the gadgets he had. But Chloe was also incredibly smart, and together we were like a scientific odd couple. We were both minorities in the science world, me for being a gay kid, and her for being a black girl.

We got right to work on our filter. To accomplish our goal of creating a purifying water bottle, we had to figure out how to produce microfluidic structures, or devices that deal with volumes of fluid on the order of tiny measurements of water known as nanoliters. To do this, we had to come up with an entirely new procedure and custom-make our own equipment. It took six months of research, trial and error, and hard work to create a microfluidic biosensor to detect the presence of chemicals.

I knew from my previous experiences that if we just kept at it, we would get where we wanted to be. By working together, we created
a plastic filter made from recycled plastic water bottles. We attached amino acids to these bottles, which work like magnets to attract out all the dangerous contaminates like mercury and pesticides. The filter we made is able to monitor water contaminants rapidly, inexpensively, and easily.

Our filtration system can be used in third-world countries, where dirty drinking water takes countless lives each year, and it has other uses, like improving the effects of fracking, oil spills, and even chemical spills. Chloe and I entered our project in the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge, a nationwide contest that has become the biggest environmental sustainability competition. To compete, students have to identify an environmental issue that has global impact and provide a viable, replicable solution. Chloe and I won first place and got to share fifty thousand dollars in scholarship money! Winning with my best friend, my scientist partner in crime, was the best.

Chloe and I after winning the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge

I still miss a lot of school these days because I travel and
give lots of speeches. For the most part, I love all the exposure and attention I've received since winning the Gordon E. Moore Award. Sometimes I still don't understand what a teen science geek is doing meeting the president or the pope. However, I like it best when I'm by myself in my basement, digging into my next project.

One day, while I was sitting in my AP Chemistry class junior year, I had another idea. We were learning about equilibrium, which was boring me to tears, so I skipped ahead to another chapter about a process called photocatalysm, which is when organic chemicals are broken down using light. I began to wonder if I could create a paint that could break down different air contaminants that are harmful to breathe. After all, most people spend, like, 90 percent of their time indoors, and breathing stale air is not good for your health, especially if you have asthma or some other respiratory problem. I'm still working on this project, but I'm hoping that I can make a paint that is cheap and comes in nice colors.

I'm also hoping that my pancreatic cancer detection test can be modified to detect other diseases. Since almost every major disease has proteins that show up early and can be used as biomarkers, by switching out mesothelin antibodies and using an antibody for another target protein, I'm hoping my test can detect diseases such as Alzheimer's, HIV, or even heart disease to give doctors a head start on treatment.

I've even thought about combining my paper test strip with my
modified Raman spectrometer. That way, by using a little device the size of a phone, people could screen themselves at home for different diseases. This would help doctors catch problems even earlier, and it would seriously cut down on hospital wait times.

Right now there's an exciting change going on in how we detect different illnesses. The old way of doing things, by scanning and poking and taking temperatures, is giving way to a new method called molecular diagnostics, which focuses on the proteins in your blood. This means that certain diseases can be caught before a patient feels sick or has any symptoms.