The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Davidson Academy had come into existence to swim against the very powerful stream of the dominant educational culture. But now its administrators found themselves faced with a dilemma: Should they stick with their original vision and let students pursue their narrow passions, or should they produce well-rounded students? Under the growing parental pressure, Davidson was moving toward roundedness and putting more focus on “ticking all the boxes” that college-admissions directors were looking for.

  “Of course, that partially annihilates the original goal,” says Bruno Bauer, the UNR physicist whose three children attended Davidson.

  A much-ballyhooed accreditation process brought other changes, including less flexibility when it came to core classes such as English. Most of Joey’s teachers found ways for him to make up the work he missed when an illness kept him out of school for a month, but he got little sympathy from his English instructor and eventually received a grade of Incomplete in the class.

  Tiffany and Kenneth went in to talk with administrators; they advocated for their son, did what they could. But the flexibility that had been such a big part of Davidson’s draw had apparently vanished—or at least been dramatically tightened up.

  After Joey finished what would have been his freshman year of high school if Davidson used traditional grade levels, the family made a decision: Joey would not return to Davidson Academy the next year.

  “I don’t feel resentful or critical of the academy,” Tiffany says, “because they’re giving gifted kids an education they can’t get elsewhere. Even though it wasn’t a perfect fit, Joey had some wonderful math and science teachers. They’ve gone through some growing pains and had to make adjustments, but both our boys got a much better education over four years than they would’ve back home.”

  Just before the ISEF in Pittsburgh, Taylor flew to Hawaii for a gathering of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. A delay on the return trip got Taylor to the convention center with only a couple of hours to spare. Taylor, jet-lagged and exhausted, quickly got his display set up.

  “Now he just wants to sleep,” says Ochs, who is wrangling a contingent of four Nevada students and three adult supporters, including Kenneth. But as soon as Taylor emerged from the hall, Ochs says, “there was a mob of people demanding autographs and pictures with him. Groupies! I had to put him in a hooded sweatshirt and give him a name tag that said ‘Todd.’”

  While Taylor sleeps, I head over to the opening ceremony. As Eurobeat music thumps, fifteen hundred kids snake through the crowded hall in packs, dancing and holding aloft their countries’ flags. The air is charged with jet-lagged adrenaline; there’s a light show, a ridiculously charismatic celebrity emcee, and lots of energy, pride, and hype.

  During the shout-out, the emcee calls each country’s name, and its contestants sprint to the stage, their flag flying. They may be the nerds back at their schools, but here, they’re rock stars.

  Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist, takes the stage and declares, to massive applause, “I am a geek. Geeks rock!” A minute later, Johnson says, “The most radical thing I ever did was to declare myself an optimist. The future is far too important to be negative about. The reason it will be awesome is because we’re gonna build it!”

  The next day, there’s a lower-key panel of Nobel laureates and talks on financing, patents, and pirating. The ins and outs of building a business has become a popular and growing part of the ISEF program. Suddenly, it seems every young scientist wants to be an entrepreneur too.

  I get a chance to walk among the displays one morning before the contestants arrive. Apart from a few standout gadgets, such as an autonomous leaf vacuum/shredder, and a few robots, there are mostly posters—lots and lots of posters.

  “That’s a trend we’ve been seeing,” says Gail Dundas of Intel. “There are not as many ‘things.’ In parallel to the mainstream movement away from hands-on tinkering, ISEF is becoming, year by year, a more cerebral experience, with lots of posters describing research and fewer prototypes that go pop zip-zap-pow.”

  But what stories some of the posters tell.

  There’s a kid who trained honeybees to take the place of bomb-sniffing dogs. One student developed a program to help blind people navigate using iPhones; another made a football helmet that detects concussion-level impacts; a few others are getting energy from mud or paint.

  And then there’s Ari Dyckovsky, who managed to untangle the esoteric phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Dyckovsky developed a theory for an entanglement configuration that could potentially be used to send information (in the form of quantum bits, or qubits) via quantum teleportation. Using quantum teleportation, a spy agency could send encrypted information without running the risk of interception because no particles would actually travel to the new location. The information from one atom would simply appear in another atom in the new location when the quantum state of the first atom was measured.

  When the room opens to the public, the kids go through their pitches with any and all passersby, whether a judge, a journalist, a competitor’s dad, or just an interested schlub. I stop and talk to Jan Matas, part of a team of three boys from Slovakia who have built—yep, actually built—a victim-seeking robot for use in earthquakes and other disasters. It scans for higher-than-ambient temperatures to detect living things and has a microphone “like a droid. But they are under our control,” says Matas, who adds that the team tested it in a former elementary school. “But we found strange individuals living there; it wasn’t safe. So we took a baseball bat just in case. In sixteen out of twenty cases, we found the victim.”

  Some of the projects are dull; some are cool but not particularly practical; some are jaw-dropping, world-changing discoveries. Andy Arthur, an oncologist who has been judging at ISEF for thirty years, brings me to the display of Michigander Nithin Tumma. Tumma discovered that a single protein in breast cancer cells plays a decisive role in turning these cells from bad to worse. When that happens, the diseased cells escape the body’s anticancer protections and spread to other organs.

  That in itself is an extremely significant discovery. But Tumma didn’t stop there. He got the cancer cells growing in petri dishes, then he figured out a way to shut the rogue protein down and watched the cells switch from malevolent mode to a more docile state that was less likely to spread.

  “This is by far the most eloquent, impressive thing I’ve seen in years,” Arthur told me. “I have absolutely no doubt that in ten years, this is how we’ll be treating cancer.”

  I reach the physics section as a crisis is unfolding at Taylor’s booth. Ochs is trying to calm Taylor, who, in the hubbub of his Hawaii trip, forgot to ask Kenneth to bring along his prop, the chamber that slips into the dense plasma focus (DPF) machine and secures the medical-isotope-generating device. Taylor couldn’t drag an entire DPF accelerator to the fair, so his project mostly consists of a poster detailing the concept, the methodology of the proof-of-concept tests, and the results.

  “The judges don’t need to see that prop, Taylor,” Ochs says. “They’re physicists; they can understand what’s important, which is that you’ve been able to make medical isotopes by hitting them with five-million-volt ion beams using dense plasma focus instead of a cyclotron or a linear accelerator. That’s what’s important!”

  Taylor isn’t having it.

  “No!” he says. “The chamber, that’s where the magic happens. Yeah, they can read the poster, and they can understand it, but they need to hold it.”

  Ochs says he’ll see what he can do. He heads for the door to track down Kenneth. Ochs is right, of course; the physicists judging Taylor’s project would certainly understand it, on an intellectual level, by reading the poster. The prop that was left behind in Reno is nothing more than a machined and welded assembly.

  But Taylor is right too; like all great showmen, he understands the transcendent value of having a physical object to give to the judges, something they can hold and turn over in their hands, something that triggers a phy
sical and emotional connection—something that makes the idea real.

  “The big question for the judges is, how much of the work is the kid’s and how much is someone else’s? To figure that out, we ask them a lot of questions.”

  The next day, I’m walking through the hall with Chuck Yu, chair of the twelve hundred judges who are assigned categories depending on their subject expertise. Yu, who sports a beard, glasses, and a tie that reads E = mc2, believes that the science-fair system has helped to offset the general decline in educational resources for the sciences. He says that about 20 percent of the entrants are published or hold patents, and the projects are increasingly sophisticated. “By the time they are in high school, they’re solving problems that have puzzled scientists for years and doing things where twenty years ago people were doing them in graduate school.”

  We observe from the periphery as the judges make their rounds, stopping to chat with crisply dressed teenagers. Some contestants are deep in presentation mode with the judges; others chat with neighboring students; still others practice their presentations by talking into thin air. “A lot of them are nerdy,” Yu says, “but more and more are outgoing, erudite, and dynamic. More and more, kids who do the science fairs are cool. The ones who do best are the ones who have gotten a lot of encouragement from parents and teachers. And mentors, especially mentors. Working with a good mentor is really fundamental to success.”

  We approach the physics section, where kids near Taylor stand alone at their booths with their hands clasped, waiting, as Taylor, surrounded by half a dozen judges, explains his invention. Though the all-important chamber, his prop, has not yet arrived (Tiffany sent it the previous afternoon via Federal Express), Taylor works the crowd of judges skillfully, with a confident, if slightly arrogant, charm.

  “When he started, he was the only one dealing with fusion,” Yu says. “Now there are four or five and they all know him and used him as a mentor. It’s hard to overstate what an inspiration he’s been; he’s really popularizing science.”

  I tell Yu that the judges seem just as eager to meet Taylor as the kids are.

  “If not more interested,” Yu says. “The Nobel Prize winners can walk around unmolested, but not Taylor.

  “But . . .” Yu says, then pauses for a moment. “I hear that he might not attend college. I think college is important. I think the beer drinking and socializing and chasing girls are as important to development as is the knowledge.”

  The judges separate for a minute to allow a video crew to move in for a quick interview with Taylor. Yu and I step a little closer to listen to Taylor’s sound bite.

  “Some people may not go into science because they think just nerds go into science, or science isn’t cool,” Taylor tells the interviewer. “But the thing is, science is cool, and me and my friends who do science are cooler than the people who don’t. So if you really want to change the world, go into science. Because that’s the future and that’s what will really change the world.”

  It’s not particularly eloquent but it does the trick. Taylor, smiling apologetically, turns back to the judges.

  Of all the teaching and mentoring and coaching Ochs has done, nothing excites him more than ISEF. “I love the personalities of the kids,” he says, “and the energy, and seeing the excitement.”

  At lunchtime, Ochs finds a quiet spot outside for his flock to gather for a debriefing. Sans Taylor, the mood is significantly calmer.

  “Any comments from the judges that stand out?” Ochs asks. “What do they seem most interested in? Do they seem skeptical of anything?”

  One of the students, Cole, is a rancher’s son whose invention regulates the flow of the bubblers that fill cattle troughs. He’s down-to-earth, humble, and grateful. He says he knows that his documentation is marginal and that he’s not going to come close to winning. But, he says, “I’m just happy for a ticket.”

  Claudia, from Lovelock, Nevada, is a bit more ambitious. “I just want to get my name called once,” she says.

  (It won’t happen this year, but next year she will make history outside of ISEF by being the first person from her hometown to attend Stanford.)

  When Taylor arrives, the energy shifts.

  “It’s not here yet!” he blurts out, his face pinched. “Will it get here on time? The final judging is this afternoon!”

  Ochs looks at the others and doesn’t say the obvious—We’re dealing with a bit of a drama queen here—then motions for Taylor to sit down next to him.

  “Taylor,” he says. “Stop. Look at me.”

  He holds up two fingers.

  “First, deep breaths. Next, calm down. It’s okay, one way or the other. The main thing is: focus. You’ve done everything you can. Now let it happen. When you go back in there, focus on what you need to do now. When the judges approach, you do an inner focus to calm your body. Then you listen, and pause. If you start talking right away, you haven’t focused yourself on what you’re about to say.”

  When Taylor was eleven, he had a future vision of himself as a nuclear physicist making medical isotopes. Now, seven years later, the vision is doubling back on him. This is Taylor, the eleven-year-old again, trying to save his grandma’s life.

  Taylor begins to calm. Then, he nods and heads back inside.

  “I’ve never seen him this nervous,” Ochs says. “But I understand it. His grandmother’s cancer and her death really impacted him. This is the big one for him. It’s what he wanted to do all along.”

  Taylor started out four years ago winning fourth place. Then third. Then Best in Category, along with the Young Scientist Award, which recognized his science project as one of the best in the world.

  “And now he wants that top award, the Gordon Moore Award,” Ochs says. “This is his big moment, the thing he’s been going for. He doesn’t want to fail.”

  Kenneth arrives with the just-delivered chamber and with news. Tiffany and Joey, who had planned to fly in for the awards ceremony, have decided not to come. “[Taylor will] be disappointed,” Kenneth says. “It could be his big moment. But . . . will he win it all? We don’t know. It’s a long way for them to come.”

  Once Taylor gets his prop, he feels more confident. As the judging enters its final phase, only entrants and judges are allowed into the hall. And so word of the next crisis arrives via messenger: the girl at the booth next to Taylor’s runs out and informs us that Taylor has forgotten to eat and he’s losing energy, feeling faint. She’s sent back in to tell him that food is on its way. People are mobilized; food is found; a delivery method is arranged. Ochs accosts a judge on his way in and asks him to deliver it. But when the judge sees who Taylor is talking with, he leaves the food with Taylor’s neighbor in the next booth and returns to Ochs.

  “My God,” he says. “He’s in there with Dudley Herschbach.”

  Herschbach, the Nobel Prize–winning professor, is trying to talk Taylor into coming to Harvard instead of taking the Thiel Fellowship.

  “Taylor,” the professor says, turning Taylor’s isotope chamber over in his hands, “if you skip college, you’ll be missing out on things like parties and girls and football games. And expanding your world and discovering and getting excited about things in whole other fields.”

  Taylor doesn’t tell Herschbach that he already made his decision, during the trip to Hawaii. Taylor isn’t going to Harvard, or any other college—at least not now. Instead, he will accept the Thiel Fellowship so he can focus on developing his national security and medical-isotopes inventions. He’s betting, mostly, on freedom; he doesn’t want to deal with someone else’s agenda, has never wanted to. He’s dropping out of the education system, like Joey. He has the Thiel Fellowship in his pocket; he’s been to Hawaii and hobnobbed with the venture capitalists, seen the possibilities. It’s hard to imagine what more college could give him.

  The next day, everyone files into the packed hall, set up with thousands of chairs facing the high stage. Taylor takes his place, joining the rest of the cont
estants who are wondering if their dreams of science-fair stardom will come true.

  Again, the Nevada team members sit together, waiting, as the emcee goes through all the categories. And then . . . “The first award in the Physics and Astronomy category goes to Taylor Ramon Wilson, of Reno, Nevada, USA.”

  Taylor trots up to the stage to accept that award and an additional award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society. Then he sits back down. The announcement Taylor has been waiting for comes at the very end of the awards ceremony.

  Again, it’s Wendy Hawkins, from the Intel Foundation: “The year’s top ISEF winner, the recipient of the Gordon E. Moore Award is . . .

  “Jack Andraka, from Crownsville, Maryland!”

  The fifteen-year-old high-school freshman developed a dipstick-sensor test for early detection of pancreatic cancer. His method, which costs three cents and takes five minutes to run, is dozens of times faster, much less expensive, and a hundred times more sensitive than current tests.

  Taylor, Kenneth, Ochs, and the other contestants leave the auditorium and drift back to the booths to pack up their exhibits. Unlike it was during setup, when excitement and anticipation were high, the hall is calm; the contestants, whether they won or not, seem grateful to finally be able to relax.

  Taylor lets out a sigh as he folds his tri-panel poster.

  “I got beaten out,” he says, “by a freshman.”