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.

Pause for a moment and imagine the grand, confusing and ultimately exhilarating drama that is the sweep of your life. Think you can summarize it into a half-dozen carefully crafted words? Larry Smith thinks you can, and created the popular ‘Six-Word Memoir‘ project, that challenges contributors to make us pause, reflect and even laugh. He has just published his latest edition as a TED Book, and added a special twist: artwork.

Smith put out the call for students — ranging from grade school to graduate school — to contribute illustrated Six-Word Memoirs. The result is the evocative and often moving Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs By Students Making Sense of the World. Today, the Washington Post features a slideshow of just a few of the mini-memoirs and images from the book. So below, we asked Larry Smith all about how Six-Word Memoirs came to be.

How did the idea for Six-Word emoirs come about?

There’s a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. He wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I was inspired by that. Others had played with the idea of the six-word story form before, but I and my storytelling community, SMITH Magazine, re-imagined it. So in November 2006, we partnered with a little-known company called Twitter for what was then supposed to be a one-month contest to win an iPod. The idea is as simple as it sounds: tell the story of your life in exactly six words. Those six words can be an attempt to sum up your whole life. Think of it as the title of your autobiography or epitaph on your tombstone. Chef Mario Batali certainly did when he wrote, “Brought it to a boil often.” Others try to capture one aspect of their life such as, “According to Facebook we broke up” or “Mom’s Alzheimer’s: she forgets, I remember.” At its core, Six-Word Memoir projects takes a basic human need—self-expression—and makes it accessible, easy and often quite addictive.

This is the first illustrated memoir you’ve done. Why add the art?

As with most of what happens in a passionate community, I took the lead of the people in it. Soon after the Six-Word Memoir project took off I began hearing from teachers who were adapting Six-Word Memoirs in their classroom, from grade schools in the Bronx to Yale Law School. It was used in English and art classes alike. One grade-school teacher in New Jersey had her students create six-word “memory boxes.” At Parsons School of Design, illustrated Six-Word Memoirs are a regular assignment. Whether a Six-Word Memoir takes the form of just words, or words and images, video, or 3-D collage, the constraint fuels rather than inhibits creativity. So when TED approached me and asked, ‘What’s the Six-Word Memoir book you’re most jazzed to do?,’ it was an easy answer: a book that’s a celebration of the artful works of students and, I hope, an even more effective catalyst for educators everywhere. So we put out a call for submissions.

How many submissions did you get? 

We had around 2,000 submissions, often from entire classrooms.

How many did you choose for the book?

Between the 60 individual memoirs you see in the book, and the classroom slideshows (in which we feature all the work the teachers sent in) we have fewer than 200 in the book. There’s one part I don’t like about my job: telling people—of any age—that they haven’t been chosen for the book. The end result isn’t necessary “the best” but a selection that I hope offers a wide range of ages, themes, ideas and forms of self-expression. We’ll be featuring many more memoirs not found in the book at smithmag.net/school, where teachers can also download our free teachers’ guides.

What surprised you about the responses of the students?

I was surprised by the depth of feeling and the angst and the life lessons that they may not have even realized they were sharing. I mean, does the little girl who wrote the memoir that said “Tried surfing on a calm day” even know she’s a Zen master? Now I absolutely expect brilliance and have seen it first hand at school across the country and every day on the site. I was a little surprised by how good some of the artwork was, but I probably shouldn’t have been. And I also didn’t expect to get so many impassioned notes from teachers lobbying for their students’ work to make it into the book.

Childhood is a confusing time. What major themes did you see?

One theme that came through clearly is about actively taking life into your own hands—memoirs like “This time Cinderella demanded it back” and “Break the rules now and then.” There are unsurprisingly a number of memoirs on technology, but with more of a melancholy vibe than I had expected: “Life is better with headphones on,” “Feeling small in a mechanical world,” and “Honey, your dinner is getting cold,” where you see a teen girl surrounded by gadgets and looking pretty lost. And while many of the memoirists haven’t been on earth too long, they’re wise beyond their years and ready to dole out life lessons. The beautifully illustrated, “There’s no such things as secrets,” is as true as it gets in 2013.

Any favorites or memoirs that have particularly touched you?

The whole Six-Word Memoir project is oddly intense. Think about it: people have decided to share a little piece of themselves with strangers. If they’re lucky they’ll end up in a book so many strangers can peer into their lives. When the submissions are coming from students—most teens or pre-teen—and they’ve worked hard to create an illustration, it’s impossible not to be moved by so much of what comes in. One that really hit me is, “They said to follow my dreams.” In her illustration you see an empty bed and a trail of those six words leading out a window and into the world. It feels like the beginning of a Maurice Sendak story. Another is called, “Going back to the happy days,” and we see a girl playing hopscotch; the author is a junior in high school and already nostalgic for a simpler time. And then there’s kind of a goofy one that just brings a smile to my face every time I look at it. It’s by a fourth grader whose Six-Word Memoir is, “Bears are my number one fear.” Next to a drawing of this scared kid you see a big bear with the words, “Humans are my number fear.” It reminds me that everything is really a matter of perspective.

How can readers contribute to future Six-Word Memoir projects?

That’s easy. Go to SmithMag.net/sixwords or SmithTeens.com and share as many Six-Word Memoirs are you like. Some people share just one, others thousands. The Six-Word Memoir project is very much an example of the Network Effect: we get better with each new person who gets the six-word bug.

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Things Don’t Have To Be Complicated is part of the TED Books series. It available for the Kindle and through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Here, a interview conducted by Sadie. 

Photographer Rick Smolan brought the flavor of homes across the United States to life, helped 25,000 photographers capture the spirit of American life minute-by-minute and cofounded A Day in the Life books, an ‘80s cultural touchstone. Smolan’s new project, The Human Face of Big Data, is about information in our world today. It’s just the latest in his long career, which began at age 16.

At TEDYouth, Rick spoke with me about his road to success, as well as what it’s like to be an amateur, a professional and the big, bad editor all in one.

Sadie Cruz: What drew you to be a photographer?

Rick Smolan: I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people — and it was just left out of my toolkit. So I sort of thought if I kept watching other people enough, and hung out close enough to them, I could figure out how they did it. Having a camera was a great excuse to kind of be there but not be there.

SC: Which project is your favorite, and why?

RS: The Human Face of Big Data has been by far the most challenging, and now the most satisfying, of any project I’ve ever done, because I think that we’re trying to start a global conversation about big data.

SC: So, how did that book start out?

RS: A friend of mine, Marissa Mayer, is the CEO of Yahoo, and I’ve known her for a long time. She said, “You should look at the world of big data.” And I said, “What’s that?” She started explaining it to me, and she said, “It’s like watching the planet develop a nervous system. All of us have become human sensors, with our phones and we’re all helping give this feedback loop that the human race has never had before.” So we started looking at it, thinking, how do you photograph that?

SC: If you weren’t a photographer, what would you be?

RS: Wow. You stumped me. This has been my whole life since I was 16, so it’s even hard to imagine. I’m not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I’m not very good at teaching. I’m not very patient. I don’t know the answer.

SC: Did you ever think you were going to be as successful as you are today?

RS: No, never. My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings. He told me I was being totally unrealistic because I wanted to work for Time magazine and National Geographic, and he said, “You never complete anything. You never finish any job. How could you ever work for these great magazines?” And I don’t know, somehow it happened.

SC: So when was that moment that you turned from amateur to professional?

RS: I don’t think it ever happened, because amateur means something you love, and I still really love what I do. Now I mostly photograph my kids, and I hire the best photographers in the world to work on my projects, so I sort of have the best of both worlds. But all of my friends who were really great professional photographers, they always had one camera which was their job camera and one camera which was their personal camera. So while they were shooting their assignment, they were also shooting personal pictures the whole time.

SC: How have cameras evolved from when you started to now?

RS: Oh, it’s so different now. I mean, the idea that we used to carry rolls of film around, and that when you got to 36, you had to stop for two minutes to change the roll of film — or that maybe the film you were using had been baked in the truck and you didn’t know it — there were so many things that could go wrong.

Now the fact that you can look down at the camera and see the results instantly, it’s called “chimping.” What they say is, while you’re chimping, you’re missing shots. Because instead of shooting, you keep reviewing what you’ve just done while the stuff keeps happening out there.

SC: Have you ever found any bizarre pictures that make you say, “oh no, we cannot put that in the book?”

RS: Oh, sure. You see a lot of things like that. I mean, what amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person’s perspective, rather than the situation itself. So I love hiring photographers who can be in a pack of a thousand photographers and they always come back with something very distinctive.

The hard part for me when I do my project is that I can’t be fair to every photographer, so even though we hire people, there’s no guarantee they’ll get a picture in the book. I feel like I’ve become the bad editor that I used to hate when I was the photographer, but we have to do what’s best for telling the story of the book. So sometimes there’ll be a kid on our staff who’s an intern, and he or she will get a better picture than one of our Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers. That’s just how it works.

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Check out more of the TED Blog’s coverage of TEDYouth »

Young Guru, best known for producing Jay-Z’s albums, may be on tour in Europe. But he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remix the teenage singers, MCs and thinkers who contributed their vocals at TEDYouth. At the event on November 17, World Up — a non-profit dedicated to making the world smaller through hip hop, technology and education — set up their Living Remix Project and recorded dozens of teenagers sharing how TEDYouth inspired them through harmonies, rhymes and beats. Here, Young Guru’s remix of this amazing material, starting with his own talk from session 1 of the event.

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And here is a longer version of the track, spun together by World Up’s Interactive Music Director, Spazecraft, on the spot during session 2.

At TED, we’re constantly impressed by the accomplishments of young innovators. With talks like Adora Svitak’s “What adults can learn from kids,” 12-year-old Amy O’Toole assisting Beau Lotto in “Science is for everyone: kids included,” and Thomas Suarez, who was developing apps before he could drive, we can’t help but be hopeful for the future. That is why we are thrilled to announce the third anniversary of TEDxYouthDay, a series of independently-organized TEDx events designed to empower and inspire teens and kids worldwide.

This Saturday and Sunday more than 100 TEDx events will participate in TEDxYouthDay, with youth conferences going down in 42 countries — including Egypt, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. A whopping 26 of these TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreamed through the TEDxYouthDay website. Additionally, more than 100 youth leaders — some as young as 11-years-old – have volunteered to report on these events, and will be writing, photographing and tweeting from events across the globe. You can follow their reporting on Twitter live on the 17th and 18th by following the hashtag #TEDxYouth.

TED will also be participating in the fun with TEDYouth in New York City, a free, day-long event for high school students. More than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and performers will dazzle participants with mind-shifting stories as well as incredible lessons on what they do best. (While the in-person event is fully booked, TEDYouth will also be livestreamed for FREE on Nov. 17, from 1 to 6pm EST, and interpreted into Spanish and Arabic. Sign up for a livestream reminder notification here.)

This year’s TEDxYouthDay theme is “Dream Big…Then Do It!” For the past month, youth from around the world have been sharing their big ideas for a better world. Here, some selections from the TEDxYouthDay photo campaign, for which young people completed the sentence, “A dream that I commit to making real is…” The breadth, depth, and creativity of these answers have astonished us — like the answer above from Instagram user shenjustshen – and we can’t wait to see what these dreamers will accomplish.

Also from Instagram user shenjustshen, a TEDxYouthDay participant writes that her dream is “to show the world that there is no such thing as perfection in art.”

A participant from TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege says he hopes to be the first man on Mars and Pluto.

TEDxYouthDay reporter Serena Chao shares her dream, to stay true to herself.

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team member shares his dream, “Finding a enjoyable and successful job.”

Instagram user sritahereje says she commits to the “spread of creative messages.”

A participant of TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege shares her dream: “To prove everyone wrong.”

TEDxYouthDay Reporter Jahbari Wallace aims high with his dream, filling in the sentence with the words “doing the right thing in every situation.”

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team members share her dream “to help stop starvation.”

This weekend, join us as we celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments and drive of our youth to keep this world an ever-incredible place. Settle down, make yourself a sandwich, and stay glued to the TEDxYouthDay website, where TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreaming throughout Saturday and Sunday.

TEDYouth livestreams!
In English: http://new.livestream.com/tedyouth/en
In Spanish: http://new.livestream.com/tedyouth/es
In Arabic: http://new.livestream.com/tedyouth/ar

On Saturday, Nov. 17, more than 20 speakers, performers and kids will take the stage at TEDYouth, a TED event for high school students. It happens 1-6pm Eastern in New York, and it’ll be livestreamed for free — and translated into Spanish and Arabic!

Sign up for an email reminder of the TEDYouth webstream — you’ll get one email on Friday and another email one hour before the show starts.

And read more about the amazing speakers planned for TEDYouth. Each one will be bringing a great short lesson, poem or demo to share with the audience in New York and around the world.

TEDYouth is just one part of a larger event happening this weekend across the globe. TEDxYouthDay is a series of TEDx events for and by young people on Saturday, November 17, and Sunday, November 18. Themed “Dream Big … Then Do It,” more than 100 events in 46 countries will be inspiring curiosity, igniting new ideas and empowering young leaders.

Check out the live simulcasts of speakers from TEDxYouthDay events around the world at tedxyouthday.ted.com >>

Find a TEDxYouthDay event in your area >>