Breakthrough by Jack Andraka

the rescue. It was Chloe Diggs. The girl who had let me sit next to her at lunch on the first day of school.
    It was in that moment that we became friends.
    School was easier after that. I sat with Chloe and her friends at lunch and actually talked! She was smart and wanted to hear about the projects I was working on. However, as I became more focused on my task of finding this biomarker, school was becoming less and less relevant to me. I had other matters that needed my attention. I kept reminding myself again and again that I could save one hundred lives a day if I just kept pushing and pushing through protein after protein.
    I wish school had been my only obstacle. A lack of money was also testing my already-strained patience. It was shortly after beginning my research that I made the discovery that not all information on the internet is free. Unfortunately for me, that turned out to be especially true for almost all the articles I needed most to move forward with my work.
    A lot of the best scientific work available is published in something called a scientific journal. These articles are written by thebest of the best in the scientific community. The problem is that the only ones who can access this wealth of information are other scientists—unless, that is, you pay for a subscription. To gain access to one article in a scientific journal will usually cost around thirty-five dollars!
    Well, this put me in a tough position. I didn’t have any money and my parents could work only so many hours of overtime, but getting the information contained in these subscription journals was absolutely essential for me if I was going to continue my research. I was prepared to try every trick in the book to get my hands on these papers.
    First, like any poor teenager, I tried to pirate the papers. But evidently I’m not a very good pirate. And after my feeble career as a hacker crashed and burned, I thought that maybe emailing the professors and doctors who had authored the articles directly and pleading with them to make their work available to me would do the trick. After all, who could resist a kid, right?
    It turns out that everyone could resist a kid. Most emailed me back to explain that they didn’t own the copyright and weren’t allowed to share with the public what they had learned. Others just blew me off entirely.
    That’s when I resorted to begging my parents for the money. Lucky for me, I am far more skilled at parent-begging than I am at pirating.
    If my parents had been less generous, here is where my quest for an early-detection method for pancreatic cancer would have met its end. However, even after my parents agreed to sign off on this high-tech form of highway robbery, my troubles with these articles had only just begun.
    Sometimes, I’d go through all that hassle and finally succeed in being able to buy the desired research article, only to discover the pages I had forked over all that cash for had absolutely nothing to do with my research. And as you could probably guess, there was a strict policy of no refunds.
    Other times, even when I did manage to get the right article, I found myself staring at the screen for hours like a freak, unable to make sense of all the words. Who wrote these things? More than once the thought even crossed my mind that the scientists writing in these journals were intentionally hoping that no one could read their work.
    I began printing out articles. I got into the habit of keeping my computer open and by my side so I could quickly plug words or phrases that I didn’t understand into an online dictionary.
    Heterozygous .
    Hetero means different; zyg means yolk or union; ous means characterized by or full of. Heterozygous refers to a union characterized by the joining of two different alleles, or versions of a gene, for a given trait.
    It wasn’t uncommon for one paragraph to take me half an hour to read. Some days, I felt an overwhelming urge to take