Cure to Cancer--Coming Soon from a Group of 18-Year-Olds?

It had been a while since I was able to actually put in a decent amount of time and effort into a presentation, so I went “ham” on this last one. I also was pretty bad at using Google Slide before we made this presentation, so I went extra ham on the presentation so I could learn how to use Google Slides well. After spending 2 hours drawing my own pictures on the PowerPoint and making sure every picture looked just the way I wanted and everything was formatted well, I felt like I had picked up some nice PowerPoint making skills—score! Also, I felt the actual presentation went well for me. I didn’t stutter too much, and I made sure to project my voice loud and clear.

The day after when we had to pick our final project, I felt like I had to pick which child I loved most. This actually wasn’t hard because we all know parents secretly love one child more than the others (kidding). I wasn’t too sad to see the artificial wound sealing project go—it didn’t seem like it would be that successful anyway, and the competition was too tough. I was genuinely sad to have to kick my own project, the biological sunscreen, off the list. While I think it was actually very novel and something that was genuinely doable that would have a large impact on a lot of people, there were just too many bioethical issues that would come into play. No one would be willing to modify his own genome, even if it meant protection from skin cancer. On the one hand, I was very happy to see that we’re working on cancer because it’s so broad and we could help so many people if we were to design a successful system for detecting cancer, but I’m also perturbed at how slim our chances of success seem. Labs all over the world are working on things like cancer detection methods, and there’s no way a few 18 year olds would be able to do it better than them. The competition is fierce, so if we want to develop a significant project, we would either need a stroke of genius to find a unique solution, or we would need to target a very specific problem that few labs are working on.

This is important to me because something I decided when we started the project was that I wanted to make system that could genuinely help people, and I’m afraid that might be difficult to accomplish in the area we’re currently trying to develop a system for.