Roger Ebert, the film critic who guided American movie selections for decades, has died, a family friend revealed to newspapers today. He was 70 years old. This sad news comes just days after Ebert wrote a column in the Chicago Sun-Times, celebrating the 46th anniversary of his column and announcing a “leave of presence.”

“On April 3, 1967, I became the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of you have read my reviews and columns and even written to me since that time. Others were introduced to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website, the film festival, or the Ebert Club and newsletter. However you came to know me, I’m glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for,” he wrote. “I must slow down now, which is why I’m taking what I like to call ‘a leave of presence.’ What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me.”

The reason: he once again had cancer.

“It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital,” he wrote in this post. “At this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you.”

Over the past decade, Ebert had battled both cancer of the thyroid and cancer of the salivary gland. In 2006, he had part of his jaw removed — which left him unable to talk or eat. He told the incredible story of learning to speak again at TED2011. Watch his beautiful talk, “Remaking my voice,” above.

Ebert’s written reviews were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers nationally, and he appeared on television in the shows Sneak Preview, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper & the Movies. The first film critic to get his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Ebert will be greatly missed.

Below, some of our favorite photos of this tremendous writer and person.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

]]> http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/04/roger-ebert-beloved-film-critic-dies/feed/ 6 Ebert-3 kateted Ebert-3 Ebert-2 Ebert-4 Ebert-5 Ebert-1 http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/16/ted-weekends-explores-our-capacity-to-see-afflictions-as-gifts/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/16/ted-weekends-explores-our-capacity-to-see-afflictions-as-gifts/#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:00:36 +0000 Shirin Samimi-Moore http://blog.ted.com/?p=72991 ]]>
At TED2010, Stacey Kramer told the moving story of the most treasured gift she ever received: a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. Stacey Kramer: The best gift I ever survived Despite the pain, she wouldn’t have traded her experience for anything – because, in the end, it changed her life for the better.

Kramer’s poignant talk is featured on today’s edition of TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post, as she and other bloggers share stories of turning hardship into gratitude. Here are three powerful stories:

Harshada Rajani: The Cost of My Catastrophe

Finding opportunities out of tragedies, making dreams out of nightmares, and discovering gifts out of punishments. Those seem like the great accomplishments of an insightful survivor, but near impossible for a naive fighter. My wonderful life was stolen like a secret, thrown away like garbage, silenced like a sin, for no reason any doctor or priest could come up with. This sounds like nothing more than a harsh tragedy, seems like nothing more than an inescapable nightmare, and feels like nothing more than an unfair punishment, for being a little too happy. I can’t readily see any opportunities, dreams, or gifts in this mess I have to now call my life. But what if I could dig a bit deeper, find in me new levels of maturity, and see this as a gift?

It’s so much easier to lazily lie in my comfortable bed of bitterness. It’s so much easier to get lost in the jargon of negativity and regret. It’s so much easier to hate the world for doing this to me. But if I consciously choose to look past the simplicity of this as a punishment, I know I can realize the complexity of this as a gift. Read the full essay here »

Lawrence G. Calhoun: Can Trauma Really Be a Gift?

Stacey Kramer describes her experience with a brain tumor as a gift. She wouldn’t want to wish serious illness on anyone, but her own illness was a gift nonetheless. Elements of this gift included deeper and more meaningful friendships, a strong sense of love and support, new vitality, and deeper spirituality.

Stacey’s experience mirrors a body of research of which I’ve been a part for many years. It’s the study of what my colleague Richard Tedeschi and I have called post-traumatic growth. The idea that the struggle with very challenging life circumstances can lead to positive transformation is ancient. It seems to be part of the human condition. Our work suggests that the transformations Stacey experienced are shared, at least in some ways, by many other people facing a wide range of crises. People report changing priorities, having greater appreciation for what life still has to offer, a deepened connection with others and perhaps greater compassion for others who suffer, positive changes in their understanding of spiritual and existential questions, and sometimes a radical change in the direction they choose to take their lives. Read the full essay here »

Stacey Kramer: How My Brain Tumor Was The Most Unexpected Gift I Received

Recently, I spoke to a class of at-risk high school kids. These kids, mostly non-white, have faced many different types of challenges. Some come from abusive parents. Some don’t have parents. Some don’t have a bed. Nearly all rely on the donated food they get at school as their daily sustenance. Every one faces economic challenges of varying proportions. For a few, it takes several buses and nearly two hours to get to school.

These kids are barely making it through high school — at a time when many of my peers’ kids are celebrating acceptances to upper echelon colleges. This school is their last chance. Simply getting to school on a daily basis is a hardship when you don’t have any money or any food. Or anyone to motivate you to do so. Read the full essay here »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

When Jack Andraka was 15 years old, he didn’t know what a pancreas was. Now, this teenager has created a test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer that, while still in the preliminary stages, looks promising. So how did he become an health innovator?

Andraka tells the story during Session 6 of TED2013.

“Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing, you just want to learn everything you can to make sense of it all?” he asks.

For him, that moment came when a family friend, who’d been like an uncle to him, passed away from pancreatic cancer. In Andraka’s Googling, he discovered startling statistics about this kind of cancer — that in 85% of cases, pancreatic cancer is diagnosed late when a person only has a 2% chance of survival. As Andraka explains on the stage, this is because the same (very expensive) pancreatic cancer test has been used for decades, and is only given if a doctor already suspects you have the disease.

“It’s a 60-year-old technique — that’s older than my dad,” says Andraka.

Andraka set out to develop a new test for pancreatic cancer that’s inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective and minimally invasive. He began by looking for a protein in the bloodstream that would be a biomarker for pancreatic cancer — one that would be found in all cases, even in the earliest stages. The problem: there were 8,000 possible proteins. When Andraka was “close to losing sanity on the 4,000 protein,” he finally found one that could work — mesothelin.

But then he found a whole new problem — how would he go about detecting it?

“My inspiration came from the most unlikely place for innovation — high school biology class, that absolute stifler of innovation,” says Andraka, to big laughs from the audience.

While studying carbon nanotubes, Andraka had a flash of insight — that he could lace antibodies to these nanotubes so that they would react to mesothelin. This gave him the idea to make his cancer sensor out of paper. While he swears that doing this was “as easy as making chocolate chip cookies,” he realized that he needed to find a lab in which to do his work. “I can’t really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop,” says Andraka. “My mom doesn’t like that.”

Andraka wrote to 200 scientists asking for space in their lab. He received 199 rejections. And even at the one lab at Johns Hopkins University where a professor was willing to entertain his theory, he was bombarded with questions from grad students trying to sink his procedure. Andraka realized that his method did indeed have blank spots.

“Over the course of the next months, I painstakingly filled all those holes,” he says.

In the end, Andraka has created a paper censor that costs 3 cents — about 26,000 times less expensive than the current pancreatic test. The test takes five minutes. And it appears to have close to 100% accuracy, potentially allowing pancreatic cancer to be detected in its early stages, when a person has a much better prognosis. This accomplishment not only made Andraka the winner of the Intel International Science Fair – it has the potential to save many lives.

Even better, Andraka thinks it could potentially be used to test for ovarian and lung cancer too. And by switching out the protein the test reacts to, it could — down the road — be used for diseases as varied as heart disease and HIV/AIDS.

“Thorough this journey, I’ve learned an important lesson — that anything is possible with the internet,” says Andraka. “You don’t have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your idea work.”

Read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Andraka.

• Suleika Jaouad, who writes about being young with cancer, talks about the embarrassing but very real prospect of being a sexually active cancer patient. [The NYTimes Well Blog] For other unconventional responses to cancer, watch Ananda Shankar Jayant’s talk on fighting cancer with dance.
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• Data visualizationist and programmer Olivier H. Beauchesne maps Wikipedia geotags to uncover some unexpected connections across the tome. [Collaborative Cybernetics]

Leslie Morgan Steiner: Why domestic violence victims don't leave

• Read Leslie Morgan Steiner’s CNN article, “Why abused women stay in bad relationships,” in which she calls on lawyers to provide pro bono work to victims of domestic violence. [CNN] Make sure to watch her TED Talk on the same topic.
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• An 18-minute documentary on the future of interactive design, along with eight insights. [Co.DESIGN]
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• Soren Kierkegaard’s Valentine’s Day ode to his love — a pen. [The American Reader]
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• On Tuesday night, TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein‘s documentary about gun violence in Chicago aired on Channel 4 News in the UK, before the U.S. State of the Union address. [Channel 4] See our annotation of Obama’s speech, in TED Talks and playlists.
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• How moshing taught a physics grad student about the dynamic of human collective motion. [The Atlantic]
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• Here, 34 tips from the Vimeo Video School on shooting a video promo for a nonprofit. The featured lesson was created by the film production crew, What Took You So Long?  [Vimeo] They also happen to be behind this video chat with Hans Rosling from the TEDxSummit in 2012.
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• Simply sublime watercolors accompanying stories by beloved Italian author Italo Calvino. [Brain Pickings]
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• Don’t feel bad if you’ve failed the famous invisible gorilla test. Eighty-four percent of radiologists, who seem to have superhuman attention spans, fail, too. [NPR]
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• Is a wearable wrist computer on the horizon? Will we soon all be wearing iWatches? Perhaps so.  [NYTimes Bits blog]

Photo: Anne Francey

Today is World Cancer Day, an annual campaign organized by the Union for International Cancer Control to raise awareness about cancer-related issues. This year’s theme is “Cancer—Did You Know?” and the goal is to highlight myths about the disease and replace them with facts.

The organization has put forth four major myths: that cancer is just a health issue, that it affects only the elderly and those in rich and developed countries, that it is a death sentence, and that it is fate. The UICC lays out its own counterpoints to these myths here, here, here, and here. The main take-home is that cancer affects people in all parts of the world, and is quickly worsening in less developed nations. All that disease is an incredible economic burden on both individuals and societies, and is particularly acute for women in developing nations who make up the majority of the 750,000 annual deaths from cervical and breast cancer.

But, on a more positive note: advances in medical science mean that people are surviving cancers that were once thought untreatable, and preventative steps — from education on healthy lifestyles to new vaccines for certain cancers — are further reducing cancer-related deaths. The trick will be getting education programs and medical technologies to more people, particularly those in the developing world.

In honor of World Cancer Day, here are 10 TED Talks that explore other aspects of cancer, from prevention to diagnostics to possible treatments.

Mina Bissell: Experiments that point to a new understanding of cancer
Breast cancer expert Mina Bissell doesn’t understand why, out of the tens of trillions of cells in the human body, cancer researchers focus on single cancerous cells. Why not also consider all the cells around it, or what Bissell calls the “context” and “architecture?” In this 2012 TEDGlobal talk, Bissell shares two key experiments that proved the prevailing wisdom about cancer growth was wrong and outlines her intriguing take on curing cancer.

David Agus: A new strategy in the war on cancer
With today’s advances in medical technology and genetic research, oncologist David Agus points out that the current approach to cancer identification and treatment is archaic. In this 2009 TEDMED talk, he asks: why define cancer by the body part in which it is found rather than by its own genetic profile? From there, Agus explores the future of cancer diagnoses and treatment.

Danny Hillis: Understanding cancer through proteomics
Scientist and inventor Danny Hillis wants to take cancer research beyond genes to the proteins they encode for — in other words, not the ingredients for a body, but what is going on in that body in the moment it is sick. In this 2010 TEDMED talk, Hillis breaks down proteomics, or the form and function of all the proteins in the human body, and what it might mean for cancer research.

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?
Angiogenesis, or the growth of new blood vessels, is vital for a healthy body. When it goes awry, it isn’t good: for example, too little can lead to chronic wounds, and too much can lead to cancer. In this 2010 TED talk, medical doctor William Li explores ways to control the blood supply to a tumor through eating naturally cancer-fighting foods.

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research
What’s remarkable about Jay Bradner’s approach to cancer research isn’t just the discovery chemistry, although it is fascinating. It’s the fact that he’s bringing it to open source. In this 2011 TEDxBoston talk, Dr. Bradner shows how sharing data and information with as broad a group as possible can help solve a real-life cancer puzzle.

Bill Doyle: Treating cancer with electric fields
The standard toolkit of cancer therapies includes surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Bill Doyle adds to this set of choices, at least for certain types of cancer, by using electric fields. The fields stop the movement of electrically charged proteins in cancerous cells that are necessary for cell division (and, subsequently, cellular multiplication). In this 2011 TEDMED talk, Doyle explains the process and why it may give patients one thing that the traditional tools cannot: better quality of life during treatment.

Elizabeth Murchison: Fighting a contagious cancer
Cancer doesn’t just affect humans. In this 2011 TEDGlobal talk, geneticist Elizabeth Murchison explains her work on an alarming contagious cancer that is wiping out the Tasmanian Devil in Australia. What does this have to do with human cancers? Studying such cancers in animals could give insight into the rare chance of a contagious cancer in humans.

Eva Vertes looks to the future of medicine
Microbiology prodigy Eva Vertes was only 19 years old when she spoke at TED2005 about cancer stem cells. In the talk below, she presents research that suggests cancer might be a repair response to damage to stem cells in the lungs, liver, bones, etc. The implication she is testing? “It’s possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could think of cancer being used as a therapy,” she explains in the talk below.

Yoav Medan: Ultrasound surgery – healing without cuts
Traditional cancer surgery requires cuts and slices to flesh and bone, which take a lot of time to heal. It’s a painful process. In this 2011 TEDMED talk, Yoav Medan describes a non-invasive approach to surgery using focused ultrasound, which has applications in cancer and several other diseases.

Jack Andraka: Detecting pancreatic cancer … at 15
The future of cancer research depends on the bright minds of young researchers. In this TED2013 Talent Search talk, fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka describes his invention: a cheap, efficient diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer.

And a TED Book you should definitely check out on this topic …

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking on the World’s Most Daunting Disease
Could cancer be caused by viruses pushing infected cells to the brink? Paul Ewald, a leading thinker in the field of evolutionary medicine, postulates that this may be the case. In this TED Book, he and co-author Holly Swain Ewald lay out a bold plan for attacking cancer. By attacking the virus, he believes that we could come close to eradicating cancer altogether. (Read our Q&A with Paul.)

Making this TED-Ed video required (a) a lot of knitting and (b) a ton of boxes of Nerds.

When it came time to animate the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” from educator George Zaidan, our TED-Ed animators had a crazy idea for how to make cell division come alive — using seeds and beans to animate what healthy cells look like as they divide in an orderly pattern and brightly colored candies to show how cancer cells divide quickly and wildly. They also had a good idea for how to show the way cells make up organs of the body—yarn, some knotted, some spooled, some purled and some crocheted.

Sure, cancer doesn’t sound like the most fun topic for an animation. But this lesson explains how chemotherapy works, and why it has such terrible side effects — showing how cancer’s strength is also its weakness. And because the process of making this animation was so fascinating, we asked director Biljana Labovic and animator Lisa Labracio to tell us about how they arrived at this approach.

Nerds? Seeds? Tell us a bit about the visual inspiration and your choice of materials.

Biljana: ”It’s all about growth.” That line from the script inspired me to start thinking how I could make cells physically GROW. Materializing them out of something physical seemed like a good starting point, and seeds seemed like a perfect symbolic material to represent the idea of growth. So I started looking at different type of seeds. Some were too small or too big to animate. Eventually, I expended into grains to create a variety of colors, textures and sizes to play with. I went from white couscous to dark azuki beans, and stayed in the range of brown tones — natural food colors. Combining the seeds and grains allowed us to create a variety of different looking cells, but we ended up using only two — hair cells and liver cells.

Once we animated the healthy seed cell, I wanted apply the same philosophy and visual style to creating a cancer cell. The first thing that came to my mind was candy — food full of processed sugar. My original idea was to use different kinds of jelly beans, but they were a little too big compared to our seeds, so I decided to go with Nerds. Their texture and size was much easier to handle for animation. In contrast to the natural seeds and grains, the colors were very unnatural. In addition, we later digitally adjusted the colors to make them feel even more off.

How did you turn the individual pieces into moving, dividing cells?

Lisa: I began by watching several microscopic videos of cell division, which I used as a reference to create a hand-drawn line animation to serve as a guide for my stop-motion animation. With the cancer cell, for example, the purple candies were gathered together as the nucleus, which were surrounded by multi-colored candies as the cytoplasm. Using a series of tools — including chopsticks and tweezers — I moved the candy bits individually into each position of cell division. After each cell was in place, I would take a picture. All of these steps were done by hand, with a camera and stop-motion software to capture the individual frames.

Did you have to do more digital animation?

Lisa: I shot all of the stop-motion animation against a green screen. This was important, because later when you see several cells dividing on screen at once, I was able to duplicate animation in order to fill the screen with cells. Then, in the scene where we portrayed the effects of chemotherapy on liver, hair, AND cancer cells while all were simultaneously dividing, I was able to shoot the individual cell divisions, and composite them as a whole. This saved me from having to organize and shoot all of that animation under the camera at once, which could literally take weeks! Also, the cell membranes — which were doilies for the healthy cells and plastic plates for the cancer cells — were animated and incorporated with the cell animation in the computer.

How did you design the human body?

Biljana: I started to think of the human body and organs as a very delicate creation and, once again, I wanted to use natural organic materials for everything healthy. Yarn came to mind. I was going through some stock footage of yarn patterns and knitted or crouched ornaments, making a parallel to how each organ is a carefully “knitted” object. I came across a multi-colorful twined ball of yarn and this perfectly represented the brain. Then we put knitted gloves for the hands. Our artist Celeste “digitally crocheted” a few organs like the stomach and lungs using Photoshop. We took photographs of twisted yarn for the intestines, etc. The rest of the body had a nice wavy purl pattern representing the blood flowing.

What were you hoping to communicate to your young TED-Ed audience with this video? 

Biljana: During the early development period for this animation, I was reading a lot about cell division, cancer and chemotherapy, but I was also thinking a lot about healthy lifestyles and foods, and how to convey that message in this video. I was hoping that I could inspire our young audience, perhaps even subconsciously, to be more aware of the food they eat — especially processed sugar. Interestingly enough, the conversations and debates over healthy diet and vegetarianism vs. eating meat exploded on our YouTube channel within minutes of the video being posted. The message apparently came through.

“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release his records via his website — to maintain his sense of humanity.

“Your life really does change. It becomes a procedure,” says Iaconesi in this powerful talk. “You cease to exist because you become a patient. In more than one way, you’re not a human being any more. You’re replaced by your clinical records. Yes, those records are talking about you, but they’re really not talking about you. They talk about some of your body parameters, but their language is different than the language of human beings.”

In this talk, Iaconesi outlines the staggering results of reaching out to the world for cures: 600 poems, 35 videos, 15,000 email conversations and counting. The New Scientist recently created a gallery of some of the artistic “cures” that Iaconesi has received, including a sculpture of his brain tumor created in Second Life by artist Patrick Lichty and a performance piece created by Francesca Fini inspired by the magnets used in brain scanning.

Iaconesi tells The New Scientist that the response from medical professionals has been exciting, too. “I have been able to become an expert in neurosurgery and neurology. Through this kind of complete openness, I could access thousands of people who have provided me with their knowledge, their skills, their testimonies, their life experiences,” he tells the magazine. “Roughly 60 neurologists, neurosurgeons and radiologists contacted me suggesting techniques for surgery and for treatment. They are even talking to each other.”

One of the medical professionals who has been most helpful is TED Fellow Jimmy Lin of the Rare Genomics Institute. As it turns out, Lin is the geneticist who did the first genome sequencing for the very type of brain cancer that Salvatore has, glioblastoma.

Iaconesi recently reached out to Lin with good news — that the latest magnetic resonance imaging shows that the tumor is not growing and that he might be a good candidate for radical surgery. Lin offered to give a second opinion, and has also volunteered to help Iaconesi sequence the genome of his tumor after surgery, in an open source platform.

Overall, Iaconesi says that all the input — artistic, personal and medical — has helped him created his plan for treatment. “It’s a strategy that goes around the world and across thousands of years of culture,” says Iaconesi in his TEDx talk. “No one commiserates with me — no one is sad, and everyone is doing something. And most important of all, everyone involved is really feeling part of the human society. This is a good use for technology.”

For more reading about Iaconesi and the open-sourcing of his cure:

• My open source cure for brain cancer, CNN
• Crowd-sourcing a cure for cancer through the internet, BBC News
• Italian Internet Users Want to Help Heal Cancer, Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paolo
• Thousands of Opinions Can Also Have Risks, Folha de Sao Paolo
• The Story of Salvatore Iaconesi Could Become Law, Wired Italy
• The Cures, written by a friend of Salvatore’s for Huffington Post Healthy Living
• Geeks and Dreamers in Rome Believe in the Future, Italy’s la Reppublica

“I have a brain cancer.”

Data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi posted these words this morning, along with a video of himself speaking. With his long ponytail reduced to a scruffy mohawk, he shares this story:

Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors.

Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life.

I cracked them.

I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone.

Read the full manifesto after the jump.

See Salvatore’s website to download everything in his medical files — his CT scans (labeled in Italian “TAC”), MRIs (labeled “R.M. 1″ and “R.M. 2″), lab notes and his medical records and diagnosis of his glioma — and take a look. The images above are two TAC or CT scans.

In cracking his medical files and opening them to the world, what’s he hoping for? An open-source cure. And he means a cure of any kind:

There are cures for the body, for spirit, for communication.

Grab the information about my disease, if you want, and give me a CURE: create a video, an artwork, a map, a text, a poem, a game, or try to find a solution for my health problem.

Artists, designers, hackers, scientists, doctors, photographers, videomakers, musicians, writers. Anyone can give me a CURE.

See the website to download his CT scans, MRIs and notes — and do what you will.

Salvatore Iaconesi’s manifesto from http://artisopensource.net/cure/

Rome, September 10th 2012

I have a brain cancer.

Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors.

Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life.

I cracked them.

I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone.

Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition (about my brain cancer) with 3 doctors.

2 of them already replied.

I have been able to do it because the data used open, accessible formats: they have been able to open the files using their computers, their tablets. They have been able to reply from home, on sunday.

I will progressively publish all the replies I will receive, using open formats, so that anyone with my same disease will be able to benefit from the solutions I will find.

This is a CURE. This is my OPEN SOURCE CURE.

This is an open invitation to take part in the CURE.

CURE, in different cultures, means different things.

There are cures for the body, for spirit, for communication.

Grab the information about my disease, if you want, and give me a CURE: create a video, an artwork, a map, a text, a poem, a game, or try to find a solution for my health problem.

Artists, designers, hackers, scientists, doctors, photographers, videomakers, musicians, writers. Anyone can give me a CURE.

Create your CURE using the content which you find in theDATI/DATA section here on this site, and send it to info@artisopensource.net.

All CURES will be displayed here.

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Brittany Wagner taught a computer to diagnose breast cancer, a feat that required 600 hours of coding as well as the running of 7.6 million trials. In other words, this 17-year-old has been very busy for the past few years. That’s right, Wagner — who was named the winner of Google’s second annual International Science Fair yesterday — isn’t even old enough to vote.

“I started in the 7th grade,” Wagner tells ScientificAmerican.com. “In school we were researching the future, and my part of the future that I was researching was future technologies. I grew fascinated by artificial intelligence. I went home that night, and I bought a computer programming book and, with no experience, decided that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”

Wagner created an artificial neural network, essentially a program that learns as it encounters more data, and trained it to differentiate between benign and malignant breast tissue. The data came from fine needle aspirates, currently the least invasive but also the least conclusive test for breast cancer. Wagner’s network is 99.1% sensitive to malignancies and, as it learns more, should only get better. Down the road, Wagner hopes to open up the network to hospitals. With more research, the least invasive test for breast cancer could become the most accurate.

“I want to be on the frontier of cancer research, finding the cures that are going to save lives and doing things with computer science that can be the technologies of the future,” says Wagner.

As we at TED have learned, many teenagers are interested in finding new solutions to cancer. After the jump, four young people who’ve taken the TED stage to talk about their research.

Mina Bissell was not always the most popular person in the field of cancer research. After studying chemistry in college and getting her Ph.D. in bacteriology, the leading theory on how cancer develops — that a single cancer gene in just one of the body’s trillion cells is enough to cause the disease — simply didn’t make sense to Bissell.

In an exhilarating and often laugh-out-loud talk at TEDGlobal 2012, Bissell describes her research on breast cancer over the past 35 years, proving that a cancer cell’s microenvironment plays a starring role in its story, giving the cell signals about whether or not to continue developing.

“I made a radical hypothesis that if it’s true that architecture is dominant, then architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think its normal,” says Bissell, explaining that her research confirmed her theory. “We can revert the malignant phenotype,” she continues, “It’s a hopeful way of thinking about cancer.”

In an ode to Bissell’s work, below, find 8 other amazing TEDTalks (and 1 TED Book!) on new ways of thinking about cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?

This talk will make you happily snack on strawberries, kale and licorice. At TED2010, Dr. William Li explains that cancer cells start out as microscopic, harmless nests that can’t grow because they don’t have blood vessels supplying them with nutrients. Li gives an overview of anti-angiogenesis, the strategy of preventing the growth of blood vessels to a tumor by eating cancer-fighting foods. Check out a full list here.

David Agus: A new strategy in the war on cancer

Traditional cancer treatments focus on individual cells. But at TEDMED 2009, Dr. David Agus argues that this approach is shortsighted. According to Agus, the future of cancer treatment lies in sequencing cancer genomes, as well as in using atypical drugs, computer modeling and protein analysis to treat the entire body rather than rogue cells.

Jack Andraka: Detecting pancreatic cancer early

Still in high school, 15-year-old Jack Andraka was shocked by the statistic that only 5.5% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive past five years, because diagnosis usually happens so late. In a talk given as part of the TED2013 Talent Search, Andraka explains his cheap and easy test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, using carbon nanotubes. (Read our Q&A with Jack.)

Bill Doyle: Treating cancer with electricity

Chemotherapy and radiation are the standards in beating back cancer. But what about electricity? At TEDMED 2011, Bill Doyle — the executive chair of Novocure — introduces us to Tumor Treating Fields, which use electricity to both interrupt cancer cell division and weaken the cells formed from divisions.

Ananda Shankar Jayant: Fighting cancer with dance

Classical Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. While her doctor recommended resting through treatment, Jayant believed that her mind and spirit needed healing in addition to her body. “So I would drag myself into my dance studio every day,” she said in a talk at TEDIndia 2009. “I danced through chemo and radiation cycles, much to the dismay of my oncologist.” Could having a person suffering from cancer continue the activities they are passionate about help them heal?

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research

Jay Bradner is working on a breakthrough approach for subverting cancer. His Harvard lab has found a molecule, JQ1, which might explain how cancer cells recognize themselves as cancer cells. Instead of patenting JQ1, they published their findings and mailed samples to friends at other labs to work on. In his TEDxTalk, Bradner explains how open-source publishing could fuel new cancer a-ha moments.

Eva Vertes: Do stem cells cause cancer?

Microbiology prodigy Eva Vertes was only 19-years-old when she spoke at TED2005 about cancer stem cells. In this talk, she presents research that suggests cancer might be a repair response to damage to stem cells in the lungs, liver, bones, etc. The implication she is currently testing? “It’s possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could think of cancer being used as a therapy,” she says.

Danny Hills: Understanding cancer through proteomics

Inventor and engineer Danny Hills makes a case at TEDMED2010 for the next frontier of cancer research: proteomics, the study of proteins. As Hills explains, genomic sequencing only shows us a list of the ingredients in the body — while proteomics shows us what those ingredients are signaling to each other. Using proteomics, Hills imagines designing specialized cancer treatments that would help an individual’s body fix itself.

And that book:

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking on the World’s Most Daunting Disease

In this fascinating TED Book, biologist Paul Ewald (with the help of co-author Holly Swain Ewald) lays out a bold plan for attacking cancer. A leading thinker in the field of evolutionary medicine,  Ewald breaks from conventional thought and postulates that cancer is caused by viruses pushing infected cells to the brink. By attacking the virus, Ewald explains that we could come close to eradicating cancer altogether. (Read our Q&A with Paul.)