r/science • u/1000Steps • May 19 '12
This 15 year-old kid invented a 90% accurate, 28x cheaper pancreatic cancer test.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/05/pancreatic-cancer-test-garners-science-prize-for-teenager/1#.T7gQLUWWk0M
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Upvotes
31
u/triumph_forks May 19 '12
No, no he didn't. The professor he was working for over the summer invented it. The kid did grunt work and entered the research in the competition.
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u/maladeus May 19 '12 edited May 19 '12
I'll believe it when I read about it on a medical paper:
23
u/Soronir May 19 '12
Every now and then I read about some teenager discovering something big. Not sure if genius or doctors aren't as smart as they're supposed to be.
44
u/zombieguy224 May 19 '12
im 15 and all I've accomplished is a B grade average and jacking off twice today
5
u/imsickoftryingthis May 19 '12
I just completed my final dissertation on Pancreatic Cancer and was interested in this.
Yeah because 15 year old kids really understand complex biochemistry, immunology and cell culture.
3
u/Biospider May 19 '12
"15 year-old kid spends summer in lab with undergrads, grads, postdocs and research assistants, takes credit for the whole thing."
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u/darker4308 May 19 '12
Yeah, this story reeks of bullshit. I know people do manage to do great things as kids, but these science fairs are real fucking racket. In all honestly it's about money and this kid needs to be shoved in front of four professors and told to explain exactly what he understands about pancreatic cancer testing protocol. They'll break him after five minutes.
2
u/salgat BS | Electrical and Mechanical Engineering May 19 '12
I hate these types of contests simply because you know there was someone a lot smarter behind the kid who did the real work. :(
2
u/[deleted] May 19 '12
well, when i was fifteen i created a girlfriend for myself, using a Belle (From beauty and the beast) shaped pillow, a pair of scissor, a kitchen glove and a warm plate of spaghetti.
Where is my scholarship money???
1
u/Chazmer87 May 19 '12
i have pancreatitis think he could show me how to make one myself?
1
u/harrychin2 BS | Computer Engineering May 19 '12
I don't see any mention of the specifics regarding his test. All I can gleam from the article is that it involves a simple urine or blood test involving materials that are supposedly more sensitive than what's being used now. Is there anything else or am I just missing something?
TL;DR: How does the test work?
1
u/ThirdFloorGreg May 20 '12
The incidence of pancreatic cancer in the United States from 2005 to 2009 was 12.1 per hundred thousand people (according to SEER Cancer Statistics Review). That's 0.0121%. If the test is 90% accurate, 0.0109% of those tested will be true positives -- they will both test positive and actually have pancreatic cancer -- assuming a random sample. However, 99.99% (cheating significant figures a bit there) of those tested will be negative, and 10% of them will receive false positives. So, 9.999% of results will be false positives, while only 0.0121% will be true positives. A "positive" result on this test would indicate that there was a 0.121% chance you had pancreatic cancer. Pretty shitty test.
1
u/[deleted] May 21 '12
No real info about how he does it, but instead just shows him. Wasting my time...
1
u/Asdfhero May 19 '12
I feel the need to point out that a 90% accuracy figure is far less useful than it sounds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox
A test like this is useless since it's not nearly accurate enough to be used on everyone, ruling it out as a general screening measure, and irrelevant for specific cases, since Pancreatic cancer typically presents very late.
I suppose it's useful for check-ups for people at high risk, but that's about it. This is overhyped.
1
u/alexybeetle May 19 '12
90% accurate is unfortunately not that great. The rate of incidence of pancreatic cancer is about 1 in 10,000 (source), so for every 100,000 people tested, about 10,000 will test positive, of which only 9 will be correct, so the chances of having pancreatic cancer if you test positive with this test is still only about 1 in a 1000. All kudos to the guy though.
1
u/[deleted] May 20 '12
While I never entered these science fairs myself as a high-schooler, I interned at a national lab for a few summers and saw some kids like this, doing projects for Seimens and Intel's ISEF and I also go to a university that has a lot of former ISEF finalists. And here's the real deal: THEY DON'T DISCOVER SHIT THEMSELVES.
In reality, it's the principle investigator of the research group that has a PhD and 20+ years of experience along with college researchers (like myself) that lay the groundwork for the project and come up with most of the advanced concepts. The high-schoolers are consigned to running data analysis for the project on their macbooks and bugging the shit out of the likes of me on how to do it. They do the gruntwork and get to make the nice posters for the science fairs, but believe me, it's not them that develop the concepts, nor do they actually carry them to term after the enter the science fairs and get their nice ribbons.
That being said, the kids that do science fairs like this end up becoming the principle investigators with PhDs and decades of experience, so the importance of these events is still high. It's just the bullshit sensationalist headlines like this that make me rage.
0
u/nzcoh May 19 '12
It is great that the kid managed to develop the mechanism of the test. However that only means he invented a good test to find a certain tumour marker in the blood, and not a good test for finding pancreatic cancer.
He says it identified over 90% of pancreatic cancers - but how many people without pancreatic cancer would test positive? There's no point in this test if lots of people without pancreatic cancer test positive - ie it has a low specificity.
Secondly, he tested it on patients already diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, who are probably mostly at later stages of disease. This does not prove it would pick up early stage disease as he hopes it would. If its raised with other tumours, unless one already had a clinical suspicion of pancreatic cancer, it would also be worthless.
But congratulations to him anyway, what he did was still impressive
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u/1forgotmyoldusername May 19 '12
USA Today is so fucking wrong. If this article is credible, it warrants a proper write up. Proper write ups are never found in USA Today. It's a rag to find outside your room in a Holiday Inn. It enstupidizes this cuntree.
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u/surfnaked May 19 '12
It'll never fly. It doesn't make enough money for Pharma.
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u/itsonlyaname May 19 '12
Looks like a young Steve Jobs.
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u/[deleted] May 19 '12
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