Geeky teen emerges from the lab a superstar
BREAKTHROUGH by Jack Andraka with Matthew Lysiak (Scribe Books, £12.99)
JACK ANDRAKA is just 18, yet his newly-published memoir carries a blurb from Barack Obama. ‘Spectacular stuff...’ enthuses the President.
Jack’s short life has been packed with incident, but there was little in his background to suggest that he would become a teenage celebrity. He was born in 1997 and grew up in suburban Maryland with his elder brother, Luke, and parents, Jane, a nurse, and Steve, a civil engineer.
The Andrakas encouraged their boys to think about how the world worked: school runs were fiercely competitive as Jack and Luke tried to solve science questions fired at them by their mother. At home, the basement became a laboratory, from where Luke’s attempt to turn a microwave into a ray gun plunged the entire neighbourhood into darkness.
At school, Jack won prizes for science projects, but was ostracised as a geek and viciously bullied when he came out as gay, aged 13.
Then a close family friend, Uncle Ted, died of pancreatic cancer. Deeply depressed, Jack made an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
That awful moment proved to be a turningpoint. At summer camp, Jack met a sympathetic counsellor, and began to channel his grief into the science that would make him a star.
Initially, he thought of trying to find a cure for pancreatic cancer — an ambitious task, given that he didn’t know what a pancreas was. An online search revealed that survival rates are low, partly because the cancer is hard to detect. He had his project — but he needed access to a proper laboratory.
He wrote 200 emails to university science departments — and 199 rejections later Dr Anirban Maitra, an expert in pancreatic cancer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, offered Jack a corner of his lab to work in, under supervision.
The supervision proved necessary as Jack contaminated samples by sneezing on them, and smashed a tray of test tubes by tripping over his shoelaces. But at last there came the moment that every research scientist longs for: his experiment worked.
When his test for detecting pancreatic cancer won the top award at a prestigious international science competition in 2012, his wild celebrations at the awards ceremony went viral. He was interviewed by CNN and the BBC, and had to fit school assignments around invitations to meet world leaders and give TED talks.
He was photographed with Bill and Hillary Clinton (who told him that politics was just like the film, Mean Girls). There was an audience with the Pope, he was hugged by Michelle Obama (‘She was incredibly strong’) and met the President who was, Jack notes, ‘surprisingly well versed in science’.
Of course, it wasn’t all praise and presidential parties. There was anti-gay abuse, and scepticism from the scientific community. ‘One major publication even dedicated a thousand words to why they were NOT going to celebrate my achievements,’ Jack writes.
Funny, brave and super-enthusiastic, with a healthy dose of adolescent egotism and some comic glimpses of the trials of being Jack’s parent, Breakthrough is an inspiring story for would-be scientists — just don’t complain when they turn your microwave into a ray gun.
His attempt to turn a microwave into a ray gun plunged the entire street into darkness