Recently browsing the interwebs, I came across a Huffington Post article about high school student Angela Zhang, who won the $100,000 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, with a method to use nanotechnology to detect and destroy cancer tumors. And with a little further browsing, I found a Scientific American article about Shree Bose, who won The $50,000 Google Science Fair with yet another cancer treatment.
I'll admit that 2 is too small a sample size to really say whether the fact that Angela and Shree are female has anything to do with their wins beyond coincidence. But it's certainly a positive sign, when there seems to have been a lot of lamenting that there aren't as many women entering the STEP disciplines as men. And even more noteworthy than that, I think, is just how advanced a level of research some high school students are both able to do, and interested in doing.
This is many worlds beyond the old baking soda volcano. And I would bet that these capabilities owe no small debt to the evolution of technology and collaboration, and the democratization of information and access to information that ye olde internet has wrought. Angela Zhang mentioned in the HuffPo article that she started reading doctorate-level bioengineering works when she was a freshman in high school. I'd be willing to bet that it was a lot easier for her to find and access such publications than it would have been for me 20 years ago. The internet alone, plus the developments of search engines like Google, have surfaced so much more information to the masses than would have been easily findable prior to their arrival. I might have been able to find those sorts of articles if I had wanted to, but it would have required a much greater investment of time and travel for me than it likely did for Angela. In the time it would have taken me to locate and get hold of such articles (and decipher them), Angela was already beginning her research.
It's always been possible for highly motivated people to accomplish amazing things. But what's truly amazing, and really quite promising, is how quickly technology enables those motivated people to get to the meat of what they're interested in accomplishing. And it can substantially reduce the threshold for less motivated folks to get to something interesting and valuable before they lose their motivation. Which all ultimately benefits society.
Just imagine, if these young women are successfully working on curing cancer at age 17 or 18, how much more might they accomplish in another 40, 50, 60 or more productive years of their lives?
Dare we hope that such accomplishments create a virtuous cycle of increasingly ambitious young people? If two teenage girls can cure cancer (okay, that's a bit hyperbolic, but still, their work is significant), perhaps more high schoolers will realize just how much they can accomplish if they want to. And of course it's not only high schoolers who can do amazing things, but if significant discoveries start being made by more and more younger people, just think how many more productive years that essentially adds to all sorts of fields of study. 5-10 extra years of practical contribution is a lot, and multiply that by thousands of young people, and you have a lot of potential benefit to society.
Cheers to Angela and Shree for being a big part of that potential!
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