>>Jon Snow: You were informed by your brother and your father, both of whom had serious
respiratory problems created by allergies.
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
>>Jon Snow: And you were 14.
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
I actually got interested in air quality when I was 11 years old, and that was after seeing
a problem in my family.
And that was that my brother and my dad suffered from severe chronic allergy symptoms that
persisted well past the pollen season.
I actually have a very long history of respiratory disorders in my family.
So it was something that as a 11-year-old I was, like, Why is this happening to my family?
And I wanted to ask questions that I could answer through science research.
>>Jon Snow: The problem is, though, when you went in to look at allergies and when you
went into presumably on Google and elsewhere, you came up with things you didn't understand.
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
>>Jon Snow: So, I mean, why didn't you stop there?
I mean, how did you -- how did you understand conceptually things which nobody at 11 would
understand?
>>Naomi Shah: Yeah, that's a really good question.
I think most kids who, like, take on science research at a young age will agree that it
is really difficult to, like, step in, looking at peer-reviewed articles and the literature
that's already available in the field.
And I think that one way that we overcome that is by looking for mentors and looking
for people who are already in the field willing to guide us.
And so as an 11-year-old, I basically would cold call different universities in the area,
companies, and I would ask for materials that I could understand as an 11-year-old or I
would go through and -- >>Jon Snow: You admitted you were 11?
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
And everyone was definitely taken aback as someone in middle school trying to ask these
questions.
I think it was because of that that they were willing to open their arms and willing to
open their resources to someone who was a lot younger who was interested in the science.
>>Jon Snow: See, Jack, I can cope with Naomi because essentially her research was linear.
But your problem was you were looking at pancreatic cancer.
And you were motivated, I think, by the death of a close family friend.
You were looking at pancreatic cancer, which is somewhere in here.
Or is it here?
Or is it around here?
I don't even know where the hell the thing is.
But you were looking at pancreatic cancer.
And you wanted a quick way to diagnose it.
So how did you start?
>>Jack Andraka: Well, I actually became interested when a close family friend, I was 13 when
they passed from the design.
And what I found is that 85% of all cancers are diagnosed late when someone has less than
a 2% chance of survival but also there is no current diagnostic test.
The current one costs $800 and misses 30% of all cancers.
And it hasn't been updated in six decades.
I mean, that's older than my dad.
[ Laughter ] >>Jon Snow: That's very old, indeed.
[ Laughter ] >>Jack Andraka: Essentially, what happened
is I just used Google and Wikipedia to do all of my research.
And essentially I didn't -- like, at first I had no clue what these scientific papers
were doing.
There is this popular saying in cancer research, is that essentially you feel like you are
hitting your head against a brick wall.
But, eventually, a few of those bricks begin to fall.
And that's essentially what I did.
I just hit my head against, like, these papers until they finally kind of made sense.
>>Jon Snow: So you could identify really with Sugata's claim that you could throw these
kids in this Indian village at a screen, bombard them with information they couldn't understand,
but they would find a way through it.
And that's what happened to you?
>>Jack Andraka: Yeah, that's essentially what happened.
I would kind of, like, just go through with my highlighter and highlight it while watching
the "Glee" season finale, of course.
And, essentially, I would finally understand it and just kind of piece together all these
different puzzle pieces and try to come up with a different, like unique ways to solve
the problem.
>>Jon Snow: So far so good.
You are both finding out material about the condition that you're trying to research,
but you are not finding any solution that is going to change things.
How did you move from finding out to finding a solution?
>>Naomi Shah: That's a really good question.
So, it definitely wasn't something that happened immediately.
It wasn't like I started researching an effort to find a solution.
I just started researching for me to understand kind of where the problem was coming from.
So I have been working on this for seven years.
And for the first four or five years, it was really about me understanding the relationships
in our environment.
How do these indoor air pollutants in environments where we spend over 90% of our lives impact
our lung health?
And then it was really in the past two years that I have been working on creating a solution,
which is basically I'm working on creating a biofilter to remove these pollutants from
indoor air streams.
And the solution really came after doing all of the preliminary research and after being
in the field for so long and just being exposed to some of these ideas.
It was something that gradually I was able to think, you know, how can we take a step
back and filter out these pollutants so even before these harmful chemicals and harmful
particles come into contact with our lungs, they're being removed from our environments.
>>Jon Snow: Well, hang on a minute.
Because you've skipped a step.
I am thinking of the diamond revolving and then changing its direction.
The change in direction surely had to be a way from the idea that medication was what
your father and your brother needed and towards environment.
And that in itself for somebody of 11, 12, 13, 14 is conceptually quite a difficult jump.
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
>>Jon Snow: Or perhaps it isn't.
I don't know.
Maybe because you are not cluttered with all the things we are cluttered with, it wasn't.
I don't know.
How did you change from thinking, as the doctors were thinking "take some more drugs, "to thinking,
"Hang on a minute, where do they live?"
>>Naomi Shah: That's a really good point.
I definitely think that it wasn't an immediate change.
It wasn't something that was very obvious.
And a lot of people don't see that.
I guess how it came is I've seen in my family that people have been, you know, taking drugs
or taking inhalers, taking steroids to treat some of the disorders that they've faced.
And it is definitely a short-term solution.
It is something that, you know, they can survive on for a few years.
But what I was thinking about -- and I guess that might come from a -- from a more younger
generation, kind of like looking at these problems from a younger perspective, is that
how can we remove these dangers from the root of the problem.
And that in my mind, that was in the environment that we were living in.
>>Jon Snow: You've understood peer review papers.
You've made contact with various sources and the rest of it, but you haven't got to a discovery
as to how to detect pancreatic cancer.
>>Jack Andraka: Well, actually, my kind of epiphany moment happened in my high school
biology class.
I know it's like, high school biology class?
What were you doing there?
Like throwing spit balls at someone, probably.
But that's what I do in my biology class, at least.
But, yeah, so essentially I just snuck in this article on single walled-carbon nanotubes.
>>Jon Snow: Hang on a minute.
Slow down.
Say it again.
>>Jack Andraka: Single-walled carbon nanotubes.
>>Jon Snow: There are several words there which themselves would have required research.
[ Laughter ] >>Jon Snow: Nanotubes.
>>Jack Andraka: Okay.
So -- >>Jon Snow: Go ahead and tell me, but you
discovered this, anyway.
>>Jack Andraka: Yeah, I pretty much just read it online.
I thought these look really interesting because they had this long fancy name and acronyms,
and I was like, ooh.
And so essentially there are these long thin pipes of carbon that are an atom thick and
one-fifty-thousandths the diameter of your hair.
And they have these extremely amazing properties.
They are kind of like the super heroes of material science.
So I had just been reading these properties in my biology class, and then we were reading
about these things called antibodies; essentially molecules that only react with one specific
protein.
In this case it would be a cancer bio marker.
And I was just siting there and all of a sudden it hit me.
What if I took these antibodies and kind of like mashed them up with these nanotubes.
So essentially weave this antibodies into this network of nanotubes, and then you have
a network that only reacts with one specific protein, but also it changes elastical properties.
>>Jon Snow: At this point, you have to extract yourself, presumably, from the computer and
the Internet and start thinking about a practical experiment to see whether you can detect pancreatic
cancer.
>>Jack Andraka: Yeah.
And so that was actually -- so once I came up with that, I actually realized my mom wasn't
going to let me do cancer research on my kitchen counter.
>>Jon Snow: Were you looking for grannies with pancreatic cancer?
>>Jack Andraka: No, I was not looking for grannies with pancreatic cancer, but essentially
I was looking for people who would let me into a lab, because my mom, she'd come up
with a lot, like e-coli where I make sandwiches and stuff.
But essentially what happened is I contacted 200 professors at Johns Hopkins University
and the National Institutes of Health and --
>>Jon Snow: Disclosing your age?
>>Jack Andraka: Yes.
I was just like, "Hi, I'm 14, and so let me into your lab."
Of course I sent them like a procedure, materials list and that, and I got 199 rejections.
And I realized one thing.
>>Jon Snow: But you got one.
>>Jack Andraka: Yes, I finally got one, but it was a maybe, though.
And I learned that with professors, their face, like their profile picture doesn't match
up with how nice they are at all.
[ Laughter ] >>Jack Andraka: But --
>>Jon Snow: That I think is also clear in the Congalese jungle.
Carry on.
>>Jack Andraka: Essentially what happened is I finally got into this lab space, and
I kind of once again be at this problem it for about seven months trying to make the
sensor -- >>Jon Snow: The "maybe" let you into the lab.
>>Jack Andraka: Yes.
The "maybe," after this like hour-long interrogation where he calls in ph.D.s and they are all,
like, firing these questions that were, like -- it was pretty intense in there.
>>Jon Snow: I bet they were excited, though.
>>Jack Andraka: Oh, it didn't show on their faces.
They were like (making bored face).
>>Jon Snow: You're at a very dangerous point here, which I will come back to in a moment
and I will pick you up there, but I want to now get this point that you've understood
something that we've all claimed as workers, that buildings do suffer from sick building
syndrome, and you've got a solution but it's --
>>Naomi Shah: Yes.
>>Jon Snow: Carry on.
>>Naomi Shah: Okay.
Basically my solution is I've created this filter which is based on plant species.
And as these volatile organic compounds, which are basically chemical pollutants, anything
that emits a scent or a smell in our home, as they come into contact with the plant species,
the plants will metabolically break them down into harmless byproducts like carbon dioxide
and water vapor.
So these microorganisms are using these pollutants as an energy source, and at the same time
we're benefiting because we get clean air.
So I ran this at a simulation in the basement of my home and the results are --
>>Jon Snow: Without becoming extremely ill.
>>Naomi Shah: Yes, exactly.
So it's all like a controlled environment.
So just like Jack, I didn't have very much access to a lab in my area so I just did everything
using materials based on like a high school budget.
And so it was a really cool experience because I was able to build everything on my own.
And the solution is a very cost-effective and sustainable one that ideally could be
implemented anywhere in the world.
>>Jon Snow: Have you patented it?
>>Naomi Shah: Right now I'm working on it.
So it's in a very provisional like research stage right now so I'm working on getting
the provisional patent for it.
>>Jon Snow: That's the $64,000 question with you because the fact is you're sitting there
with a whole lot of Ph.D. students and a "maybe" professor who might or might not help.
They're going to steal your idea.
>>Jack Andraka: Well, luckily, that didn't happen.
I'm rather glad that didn't happen.
But essentially I ended up with one small paper sensor that costs three cents and take
five minutes to run, so it's over 158,000 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive,
and over 400 times more sensitive than current ones, and you can broadly extend it to pretty
much any disease string, from Alzheimer's to heart disease, any forms of cancer and
even HIV/AIDS.
And I do have a the international patent on it.
[ Applause ] >>Jon Snow: We are completely out of time
because you're so intriguing, but I'm going to ask you two very quick questions.
One, what did your parents do right or wrong to create a situation in which you occurred?
[ Laughter ] >>Naomi Shah: Okay, so I'll start.
So neither of my parents were really in the science field.
This is my mom.
She's in the front here.
>>Jon Snow: Hello, Mummy.
[ Applause ] >>Jon Snow: Yes.
>>Naomi Shah: But what they did right, and now as I'm 18 years old heading off to college
I can finally admit that it was at a very young age they were so encouraging of any
curiosity that I had.
So I'd go to science museums.
They let me just run around as a two-year-old, play with anything I wanted in the science
museum.
And it's that kind of encouragement and not necessarily pushing me in a direction but
just letting me kind of go and take my own research path into the questions I was interested
in.
I think that's the best way to do it because now I'm on a track that it's something I'm
very passionate about and I want to continue in this field for the rest of my life.
>>Jon Snow: And you.
>>Jack Andraka: Essentially it was trial and error with me.
It wasn't as much trial and error as my older brother.
He kind of got the brunt of that.
But essentially they kind of cycled me through --
>>Jon Snow: You kept looking for his pancreas?
>>Jack Andraka: Yeah.
Well, actually I have this plastic pancreas in a jar of water now.
Essentially they cycled me through every sport, every single musical instrument, and I finally
settled on science.
Like, I sat in left baseball field making daisy chains and then they had to have ear-splitting
trombone music in their house.
And finally I was like, oh, my goodness, just go do some science.
That's what you like.
So that's essentially how they got into that.
And really their kind of philosophy is like a hands off one.
Just like let -- you just do whatever you want.
>>Jon Snow: He'll grow out of it.
>>Jack Andraka: Me and my brother, like, make these dangerous things in our basement.
They're like just don't blow up the house.
That's a basic ground rule.
[ Laughter ] >>Jon Snow: Last word, what's your ambition?
>>Jack Andraka: My ambition is to hopefully be able to have everyone have that one bit
of extra time with their grandparent or uncle or parent and inspire people.
Because I'm a 15-year-old, or I was a 15-year-old, and I found a new way to detect pancreatic
cancer using just Google and Wikipedia.
So really just imagine what you could do.
>>Jon Snow: And you?
>>Naomi Shah: That's a really good question, a heavy question.
My ambition would be definitely to continue research and just to improve the human condition
using environmental sources.
I think if we can target the root of these problems, that's the best solution.
And part of my ambition is also encouraging kids to enter the science research field at
a younger age, especially people who might not have the same opportunities that I have.
>>Jon Snow: And while you say that, I'm just going to ask Mummy, and I'm going to take
my microphone over there.
I am just going to ask you was there ever a moment -- and you can speak into my microphone
-- was there ever a moment when you were scared by your child's development?
>>> I was never scared.
I have been proud very often, and, you know, I'm just amazed at all the opportunities that
she has.
And she is doing a lot of things to provide that similar opportunities to other girls
and underprivileged children by doing camps.
>>Jon Snow: Well, it reflects fantastically on you.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ] >>Jon Snow:Thank you both very much.
[ Applause ]