17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle

Growing up two hours away from the nearest real university, I didn't realize teenagers could work on projects like those. It rankles my sense of fairness that many (though certainly not all) of the people in the upper levels of the science competitions got there with a very large amount of help.

Of course, the same logic would apply to people who have even less access to resources than I did, so I should count my blessings.

No one can say these kids aren't smart and deserving, but what about kids who are also smart and deserving but not related to researchers or their friends? I prefer math contests where any kid who can reach the library has a downtown tty good opportunity.

1. The gifted program (at my school) was next to worthless. We skipped one regular crap class (social studies) to go build paper airplanes to prepare for this competition: http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/

2. Early intervention (yes funded with tax payer dollars as part of a program) helped my son with high functioning autism. Due to that intervention he is now (besides from some personality quirks and the occasional melt down) virtually indistinguishable from any other student. In fact his IQ puts him very close to the gifted range.

Yes, this is a personal anecdote.

I would like to see the research on gifted programs. Are they worth the cost?

As a "gifted" student, I learned much more from the library (and now the intranet) than any kind of gifted program.

False dichotomy.

1) To begin with, scholastic success correlates most heavily with income, so we're not quite rewarding what you might think we're rewarding

2) The whole purpose in this case is to help these kids become independent or be able to function properly in society. Cutting these kinds of programs only increases the number of people who need to be assisted.

> "When you read articles like this one, you realize that the people who move society forward in leaps and bounds, the ones who create great businesses, create new products, discover new medicines are predominantly the talented and gifted ones."

This is a tautology. These people don't necessarily do well in school. Success in school != success in life, despite what my family told me.

But why screw with the disabled and learning challenged when there is the other 79.5% of the funding you are ignoring? Or the fact that massive funds are spent on standardized testing which can be so difficult that high-achieving adults have trouble passing them?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/2011/1...

The talented and gifted students don't really need much help in school. Often the best thing you can do is get out of their way, perhaps offer them some organizational skills, but those should be offered to all students. I got more from that in school than any other instruction offered.

As phillmv pointed out, this is a false dichotomy. If somehow these two were mutually exclusive, I would argue that (if anything) spending on gifted students hurts disabled students. Like pragmatic, I also have some experience with programs for the learning disabled and for the gifted. My twin brother Henry is extremely "intellectually disabled" (he has severe Autism and cannot speak English or take care of himself).I tested into my school district's gifted program in 4th grade. The gifted programs at the schools in the district seem very well funded, while the care my brother was bad enough that we moved Henry to a private school.

> If we as a nation are making a decision to cut funding to these gifted students, are we at the same time making a decision that jeopardizes the advancement of our society as a whole.?

Don't be ridiculous. Gifted programs are pretty useless. The truly gifted will find time to work on what they're good at, no matter the circumstances. Speaking from personal experience as a student in my district's gifted programs, most of them are wastes of time and money because they don't allow students to explore what they're interested in.

My elementary school's gifted program was worthless - we gifted students skipped social studies (like pragmatic) and learned... all about Louis and Clark's journeys. If you weren't interested, too bad. The program did not suffer from lack of funding - We had guest speakers and access to the internet - but lack of good design.

In middle school, we got to skip one class a week to work on whatever we wanted (within limits). Every week there were a couple of different projects that we could work on. My favorite were the lego mindstorms, but I also really enjoyed some of our literature units. The program was extremely well done - give students a chance to miss a class they dislike to focus on something they might, while still exposing them to different areas of knowledge.

Unfortunately, the Highschool's program was terrible. Taking the place of a free period, we had a curriculum set without any input from the students. There were no grades, but we were expected to attempt to do well anyway, regardless of whether or not the area of study was interesting (usually not). Again, it didn't suffer from lack of money, but fundamental problems in how that money was used.

About nine out of ten gifted students at my school dropped out of the program after the first year of Highschool because it was such a waste of time. All of these kids are intelligent and hard-working - they quit because they realized they could spend their time more efficiently.

DISCLAIMER - This is all based off of personal experience. I cannot speak for all gifted programs in all schools.

What we call "gifted" has nothing to do with "gifts" during the elementary education phase. It has to do with a child's learning style properly fitting the surrounding environment. These children succeed because they fit the system. Others, like me, who have an "impedance" mismatch with the educational environment struggle to gain basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.

However, if those basic skills can be mastered and the environment can be altered to fit these "disabled" students they can become highly successful. I consider myself to have succeeded in academia despite not learning to read till the third grade. If I had not been placed in the proper program I would have likely failed to learn to read, write and do arithmetic for a much longer period of time.

While "gifted" students need assistance and programs designed for their needs as much as "disabled" students it makes no sense to reduce already limited resources available to programs for disabled children. These children can become productive, highly successful individuals if given the proper support.

Not many people care about those with a learning disability - see the death rates and poor health outcomes for simple illnesses.

Whether it's acceptable to have the IBMs and DuPonts providing funding for education is up for debate. Seeing the god-awful job that governments make of education for regular students I'm not sure many people would be too upset.

Finally: learning disabled covers a wide range; unfortunately it's sometimes used to include "people with mild dyslexia", and everything done for those people gets included in that budget. So people with severe need may not be seeing much result from that money because it's all being used for, for example, photocopying handouts onto different color paper.

From an economic perspective it just doesn't seem like a valuable use of resources.

A much more tailored approach is needed, where students falling behind are helped in their specific problem areas, and gifted/exceptional students are allowed to progress at whatever rate they're capable of. This doesn't need to cost more, either, this is not a matter of setting up an exponential number of schools/classes. Technology can easily do most of this, but a large number of sacred cows would need to die.

Ultimately IMO this boils down to the fundamental problem facing our society right now--vested interests controlling the political process to maintain the completely outdated status quo. You see this pretty much everywhere you look.

But it always awesome to see gifted kids like this young woman overcome the system to do incredible things. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does next.

To me it was obvious this was bad for both, but especially the disabled students who could be served much better in a specialized school.

But then once I learned more US history regarding segregating different groups of people... well I still think it's a bad way to go, but now at least I understand why it is that way.

In other countries disabled students attend specialized schools who provide them with a much better level of services. The concentration of students with disabilities allows for the concentration of people with advance and specialized skills. This not usually possible in a standard school, where only a very small number of students is disabled.

I recall there probably are even some researches indicating that if you treat a student like genius, he or she will most likely turn into genius. We can't reliably measure what we call "natural abilities".

In other words, what you need IMO is not only spending more money on talented students, but also considering more students gifted and talented. Although this is probably slightly out of scope here. =)

Obviously there was a time cost involved in having someone do that instead of other duties, but that would not have shown up as extra budget.

Clinical trials take so long because there are so many regulations about safety. You can argue that cancer patients are going to die anyway, so let them decide to take whatever drugs they want. On the other hand, this opens the most vulnerable people up to those that have the most to gain from exploiting them.

There is a lot of red tape involved in getting a medical drug to market, but a lot of it is there for good reason.

But when you're dealing with biology, and particularly human biology, you are subject to iterating at the speed of the biology. Depending on the type of cancer, accruing enough people so that you can actually determine efficacy and then waiting to see how the people do on the treatment can take easily 5 years, perhaps 15.

And while a huge number of treatments look promising at this stage of development, the vast majority end up not being effective. The chances of success, amount of effort, and potential monetary payoff to the basic researchers, are all less favorable than a startup.

Sorry for being pedantic, but much harm is done by this misconception.

Nothing can 'potentially cure cancer', cancer is hundreds if not thousands of (often) very different diseases.

Also put another way: cancer is simply the result of evolution at the cellular level.

You can't 'cure' evolution, all you can do is try to implement some 'population control' strategies that will work (for a while) for certain genetic variants.

If ti does cure cancer, she will make a fortune through patent grants.

Besides, this work was done at a university, so they would own the IP before anyone else.

^ (please excuse the borderline-racist meme on the second half of that image, it is not mine.)