Jack Andraka is a 15 year old boy from Crownsville, Maryland who watched a beloved family friend die of pancreatic cancer, and it was a traumatic experience for him. Rather than accept it as fact of life, he chose to become proactive and do something.
Jack realized that a significant part of the problem was a lack of early detection tests, so he decided to come up with a test to detect cancer in its earliest stages. And not just that he invented a better test, but he invented a test that has a 100 percent accuracy rate, and takes only 5 minutes!
Current testing methods are 60 years old, cost on average $800, and miss 30% of all pancreatic cancers.
The test Jack developed is:
– 168 times faster
– 26,000 times less expensive
– 400 times more sensitive than the current standard of detection
– He did his research using Google and Wikipedia as his primary research tools — online resources that are
– available to virtually anyone on the planet with an internet connection.
– The cost for his test: Three cents
Compare that to the current standard, which employs 60-year-old technology, costs about $800, and misses 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers.
Children have something that slowly fades away in adults. They have this refusal ability where they simply don’t accept something as it is and that’s that.
As we grow up we are told that some things are the way they are and we supposedly cannot do anything about them. But kids refuse to believe in that. And that’s why they are the ones who most of the time come up with ideas that change the world.
Sources: Daily Health Post; http://myhealthmaven.com/jack-andraka-boy-refused-give/jack-andraka/;
