Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Mar Jimenez-Quesada
So when I was a kid, I was repeatedly asked the quintessential kid question:
What do you want to be when you grow up?
The girl to the right of me usually said,
"I want to be a doctor so I can help people."
And the boy to left of me usually said, "I want to be a firefighter."
Once in a while you'd have a kid who would say,
"I want to be a gazillionaire."
So you knew that was the kid that you needed to be friends with.
(Laughter)
But for me, I always wanted to be a librarian.
Why?
Because I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading books.
I remember that as a kid, my one dream for when I grew up
was to have a library
just like Belle did in "Beauty and the Beast,"
a library that was so wide and so expansive
that it only left a sliver of the wall
and required a ladder just to get to some of the books.
Fortunately for me, this library does exist in a monastery in Austria,
and so my dream continues to hopefully visit there one day.
But the reason that I'd always loved reading
was because within each book
I could be in the midst of a swordfight
between Arthos, Porthos and Remus from The Three Musketeers,
or I could be learning about why a plane flew.
So, for me, each book represented a new fact, a new experience,
that I previously hadn't known.
I often worried as a kid that there was so much to know,
so much to learn, to experience,
that I couldn't possibly finish reading all of the books that I needed to.
So, as I grew older, I became the very definition of a bookworm.
I always had three books with me,
a classic, a non-fiction science book, and a Scientific American magazine.
I often felt that the most prized possession in my room
was not my piggy bank, which had 1,549 dollars and 22 cents,
but, instead, my bookshelf, which had 134 books,
99 which I'd read, as well as 60 Scientific American magazines.
I always had this weird habit as a kid,
I would read texts too challenging for me, that just went over my head.
For example, one time in the fifth grade,
I attempted to read, embarked on, a rather Odyssey-like journey,
to read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."
After a couple of weeks, a couple of long arduous weeks,
I aborted that mission and decided to read
Stephen Hawking's other book, "A Briefer History of Time."
(Laughter)
Fortunately for me, I was able to finish reading this book,
but it did have its own difficulties.
Reading it, I felt like it was an archaeologist,
like I was taking something completely unknown and abstract,
and having to uncover familiar pieces and parts
and string them together in order to make sense of this rather abstract book.
But it was the desire to learn,
to find out more about physics and how this world works,
which was what let me keep going and keep reading challenging texts.
It was this love of reading, this love of learning,
and this naivety to take on challenging texts,
that led me to contact a professor at a local university.
I told him very simply all I wanted to do was to learn,
that I had been reading about his research in a magazine,
and had exhausted Google by looking up information about his research,
I wanted to come directly to the source
to find out right there what he was doing with his research.
The logical answer to say to a 14-year-old girl
who wants to come work in a lab is no.
Which is exactly what he said.
But after a couple dozen emails on my behalf trying to convince him,
we eventually reached a compromise.
He said, "I can't give you access to my lab,
but what I can do is I can give you a stack of articles
that will be more current, in-depth, and comprehensive,
than the articles you'll read in Scientific American."
So I take home this stack of articles,
and I'm so excited thinking to myself
I'll stay up all night, finish reading these articles,
and tomorrow I'll be back asking for more articles.
So, I sit down with my highlighter,
and I start highlighting words that I don't know.
This is what my paper looked like when I was done.
Nearly every single word except for maybe prepositions had been highlighted.
A stack of papers that I thought would maybe take only one night to read,
ended up taking three months.
I spent every single day of that first year,
not in the lab,
but in the medical school library
using text books to look up concepts that I didn't know.
But it was this love of learning,
this desire to want to learn more about what I was reading,
that allowed me to persevere through those long nights,
and to work through that archaic foreign language of science research.
Eventually, an article that took maybe a week to read,
only took a couple of months.
So, I'd like to share with you some of the information I learned.
I learned primarily about the current problems
facing current cancer treatments.
I learned about the necessity to develop more sensitive diagnostic tools
in order to improve cancer diagnosis
I also learned about the need to localize treatment
in order to minimize toxicity to healthy cells
in order to improve patient quality of life during treatment.
And I also learned about cancer stem cells,
a recently discovered subset of cancer cells
identified for initiating and driving tumor growth,
inducing metastasis, which is the spread of tumor growth around the body,
as well as cancer recurrence and drug resistance.
Finally, I learned about theranostics,
which is the combination of therapy and diagnostics into a single platform
with the hopes of improving cancer treatment
as well as making it more personalized.
So, to me, all of this research was just mind-blowing
because it really was cooler than science fiction.
But what made this experience, this reading adventure, truly unique
was that I started realizing
that a lot of the information I was reading around these articles
were being translated into projects in the lab.
So, to me this was more mind-blowing
because essentially this meant that the text, the information,
was coming to life by forming a foundation for a new idea,
a potential new treatment for cancer.
So, I started thinking to myself, could I possibly do the same thing,
take something I've been learning about for the past year
and translate it into a project?
So I went to my professor and asked him that very question.
He said his favorite word: no.
But I'd been hearing that word a lot from him
and I knew that about two out of every ten nos he said actually meant yes.
So, I went home and I sketched out an idea.
This idea was based on the information I'd been learning.
My idea was to create an iron oxide/gold dumbbell nanoparticle
that had three main functions based on what I'd been reading.
The first function of my nanoparticle is to specifically target cancer cells.
How it does this is,
is this iron oxide nanoparticle is linked with a peptide
that specifically targets and binds to biomarkers
that are overexpressed on only cancer and cancer stem cells.
So this was borrowing the idea of just targeting cancer cells
while leaving normal cells unharmed.
The second characteristic of my nanoparticle
is this photothermal-controlled, drug-releasing characteristic.
Essentially what this means
is that the gold nanoparticle is coated with this smart polymer
that, when heated by an external laser that's aimed at the tumor,
causes the smart polymer to collapse, shrink,
and therefore squeeze out the preloaded drug
directly at the tumor site.
So this was borrowing the idea of localizing treatment
in order to minimize toxicity to the healthy cells
and hopefully improve patient quality of life during treatment.
The third characteristic of my nanoparticle
was borrowed from this idea of theranostics.
The previous two characteristics dealt with therapy,
now I was starting to wonder if I could incorporate diagnostics in some way.
Since my nanoparticles have metallic properties,
I thought they could be used as contrast agents
for multiple imaging tools such as MRI, Raman or photoacoustical imaging.
This allows the nanoparticle to not only act as a detection tool,
a diagnostic tool,
but it can also act as a tool
to monitor the real-time response of treatment efficacy.
I have a video here to show you guys
what essentially this nanoparticle does when it's all put together.
(Movie) Angela's idea was to mix cancer medicine in a polymer
that would attach to these nanoparticles,
nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells
and show up on an MRI,
so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are.
Then she thought, "What if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors
to melt the polymer and release the medicine,
thus killing the cancer cells
while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.
(Movie ends)
So, the overall goal of this project
was essentially just to personalize cancer treatment
in order to improve the efficacy,
as well as to improve the patient quality of life during treatment.
So, I took this idea to my professor,
and I was hoping he would say anything but no.
and, in fact, he did.
He made a bunch of corrections and a bunch of modifications,
and he said, "Okay, I guess you could start working on this."
So, I spent the next three years and several hundred hours,
and failing every single night,
having failed synthesizations working on this project.
But one day, this project went from an idea that I'd been reading about,
from something in an article,
to something real.
In fact, it was so real
that I was able to present this project as well as my results
to President Obama
at the White House Science Fair this past February.
And so all I did was pursue this knowledge, this love of learning,
and I had this unique experience of realizing how exciting it was
to translate information into something tangible.
Now I'm a senior in high school,
I'm being asked the quintessential senior-in-high-school questions,
like: what college are you going to, what are you going to major in,
and that same question of what you want to be when you grow up,
except now it's more intimidating.
It's: what are you going to do for the rest of your life?
But my answer stays the same:
I want to spend the rest of my life learning everything possible.
Except now, I also want to translate these ideas,
make the information come to life,
by creating a project that I hope will help society.
Thank you.
(Applause)(Cheering)