lab at the family’s house in leafy Crownsville, Maryland, where a homemade particle accelerator crowds the foosball table.
This 15-year-old “Edison of our times,” as Andraka’s Hopkins mentor has called him, wears red Nikes carefully coordinated with his Intel T-shirt. His shaggy haircut is somewhere between Beatles and Bieber. At school one day, he cites papers from leading scientific publications, including Science, Nature and the Journal of Clinical Neurology. And that’s just in English class. In chemistry, he tells the teacher that he will make up a missed lab at home, where of course he has plenty of nitric acid to work with. In calculus, he does not join the other students who cluster around a blackboard equation like hungry young lions at a kill. “That’s so trivial,” he says, and plops down at a desk to catch up on assigned chapters from Brave New World instead. Nobody stops him, perhaps because last year, when his biology teacher confiscated his clandestine reading material on carbon nanotubes, he was in the midst of the epiphany that scientists think has the potential to save lives.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jack-andraka-the-teen-prodigy-of-pancreatic-cancer-135925809/#5LlWD8q6y5Vp2qDW.99
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