ELISA test beaten by STEM high-schooler: when experience is overrated

Great story. High school freshman, Jack Andraka, develops a paper sensor for detection of blood proteins signaling some early stage cancers. Certain proteins get over-expressed in the blood for different cancers at early stages.  Tests categorized as ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) are part protocol for early cancer diagnostics. Jack’s discovery—now with the patent lawyers and Johns Hopkins—seems factors more efficient and accurate than ELISAs, the first of which was invented over 40 years ago.  For perspective, here’s how ELISA was celebrated only in 2006.

I note:

• Jack attends a public high school.
• Like the rest of us he was also “home-schooled”, i.e, he learned stuff at home.
• Jack did research outside the advantages, constraints, accoutrements and professional politics of a conventional research grant-based environment.
• Jack had supportive parents and teachers.
• He had fun.
• Jack seems personable, well-mannered, cordially and easily conversant with a balance of complexity and simplicity, and people seem to want to work with him. (TRANSLATION: Jack’s emotional IQ doesn’t appear inversely proportional to his conventional IQ.)
• Jack focused on a little part of a really big something.
• Jack is 15.

Much cancer work is on treatment. In conventional medicine—whose professional impulses in the grimmest cast mimic complacency if not a more honorable abject surrender—cancer is a given.  Oncology’s whole start. And in truth there are problems about which we know little to do and cancer’s surely among them. Viruses too. They stump us for similar reasons and it’s no coincidence we’ve cured neither.

But this  freshman is focusing on a small part of the story—proteomics and detection— upstream. Less of treatment and more of time. Because everything is a rate. And he’s  valuing the simple proposition of earlier diagnostics—plus better ones—as, yes, a prelude to earlier treatment.

Thinking about big problems can be daunting.  Cancer is big.  But the ability to focus on a little important piece is key.  It’s all science is.  But research tradition—even in the fine exploratory arena of a progressive Johns Hopkins lab—can sometimes obscure how legitimate little pieces look.  Some fruit, I fear, hangeth too low for view by the fanciest eyes.

A Yale management professor said it takes 10 years of doing something to become an expert—there are studies. Yes. It takes volume. And volume takes time. But that’s not the story, increasingly. First, whole industries now rise and die in 10 years. You won’t get that window to “master” in.  Secondly, you’re due to know something after 10 years, but a remaining question is whether it’s optimum. Lastly, even if you get to master something, your frequency of innovation over the course—e.g., Jack-style—is something else. And that’s business’ whole deal.

Quite opposite dismissing children because of youth or no volume, I particularly attend. I follow them on twitter. In science great questions and discovery, as Jack teaches, not only can come early before you’re a conventional expert and often seem to come in part because you’re not, but increasingly in a competitive world, they must.

STEM to STEAM: new ways to problem solve

Weeks ago the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) hosted a provocative workshop called “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy“.

“…The goal of this gathering of minds was to develop strategies to enhance STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] education by integrating art and design – transforming STEM into STEAM and promoting the intellectual and creative potentials in the process.

“The workshop brought together 60 leaders from the fields of science, creative IT, engineering, art and design, mathematics and education research to strategize about innovative ways to fuse these fields and teach new approaches to creative problem solving.”

I like this.

It means breaking through an “artificial bifurcation between art and science” that I’ve felt for some time. On a college campus, the buildings where science and art are taught can reside in different zip codes. Disparate whole subcultures of professors and students go in and out. There’s economy in this and I get it. But some learning approaches in the sciences haven’t ever much changed. We’re creating some great scientists on the one hand, but on the other we have a shortage, and many new students aren’t raring to go because they disidentify with a zip code.

Disciplines are siloed off behind inert traditions. Yet academies themselves know silos are false. Many in the end spend energy stitching much of it back together through Dual Degree Engineering and cross disciplinary joint degree programs.

Folks in science can be ashamed to be closeted poets or guitarists–like it means lack of focus. Venus and Serena Williams—who appear continuously in school or learning a foreign language or designing a clothing line—are high profilers who have publicly nurtured creativity while “scientifically” mastering a conformist, precision oriented day job. It was their rejection of convention—in training, strategy, and scheduling—that correlated with their original success and worked as a template for others. They have weathered the lack of focus critique; but as career “delineations” that for them were congruent, creativity arguably enhanced their game.

A workshop participant remarked how the world comes to us whole and we dysfunctionally break it down into artificial pieces expecting to understand it.

I’m glad for this group of envelope pushers.

Mickey Mouse goes “gangsta”

That’s likely dramatic, but he is being cast in a reportedly more “shadowy” light in a brand extension and new video game due out tomorrow. For the record Mickey’s worth $6 billion in annual sales to Disney. Technically, he’s already “gangsta”.

I’m intrigued and not even a gamer: In the game, Epic Mickey, retailing for around $49.99, Disney has opted to give artistic license to A-list creatives like game developer Warren Spector whose esteemed following with serious gamers may bode well for the Disney foray into alternative machinations of the pristine character. It’s no small move for one of the strongest and most successful cheek-rosing brands ever, and reportedly an idea with roots in some interns in the company’s video game division–of course.

The game trailer evidences a famous and personally amusing Disney Law: no matter Mickey’s head position, his ears always face the camera. And it’s clear why Disney mesmerizes. Its world is vivid and transformative. Just like this:

Jay-Z’s Decoded

Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z’s book Decoded hit stores today. Brick and mortars think it’s a music book–it’s in the music book section. Or rather the service that categorizes print for retailers thinks it. They’re wrong.

This is a business book.

Decoded is fillerless. No intros. Just story from word one. There’s an urgency and clarity to communication in the world from which Jay-Z came.

The first 18 pages are among the most entrancing, gritty, authentic, poetic and sophisticated story channeling I’ve read. I’m on record saying Jay-Z is not a rapper–but  a storyteller.

Who it’s for:

• The business minded who aren’t tricked about value because of packaging.
• White people like Seth Godin, with marketing “expertise” who are culturally walled off from unique value propositions in strong US microcultures.
• Black people who don’t speak “urban”.
• People mastering their 10% vs. succumbing to the 90%.
• Brand builders.
• Poets.
• Hustlers. Which really, is anybody who ever had to eat and think about it.  It’s a primal timeless human testimony.

And the photography and presentation are perfect, likely due to the sufficiently autonomous and thankfully rogue sub-brand of publishers Spiegel and Grau.

Update:
Decoded discussion with Charlie Rose: An hour with Jay-Z from the Brooklyn Museum.

Erroll Garner: lesson in creativity

Classical learning is one way, but not the only way. This is famed jazz pianist Erroll Garner in Brussels playing Misty. A 100% “ear” player, he never learned to read music. Business has ‘Erroll Garners’. People who routed differently to executive leadership—Steve Jobs and Bill Gates among them. The irony is that in business and elsewhere maximum creativity, so heralded by CEOs, takes you outside of orthodoxy. Yet we often look for it via orthodoxy.

We look in boxes called schools for people who think outside the box. We look for today’s Aretha Franklin prodigy on a near manufacturing floor in American Idol when we found the first one organically in a church. We use well known formulas to discover magic: By Juilliard’s admissions criteria, Erroll Garner would have been “unqualified”, as would have been a 29 year old $400 MM value creator and marketing genius, Master P by Kellogg. And no, neither man needed the academy. But it may have needed them.

1500 CEOs cite Creativity as No. 1 leadership competency for the future

I’m a long-time down-size critic. When a firm downsizes, I always ask, what’s the real problem they aren’t solving. It’s a tactic, not a management strategy. Done regularly when management lacks ideas. And then what: you’re smaller–so are your competitors– and you still lack ideas.

An earlier CEO poll cited in Newsweek’s recent article on Creativity is an underscore. It’s about box leaving and game changing. Charlie Rose is on the case too. As of course Richard. Linchpin too. And here’s fast company’s 100 most creative listing.

creativity, creativity, creativity–Richard Florida talks plain on Great Reset

It’s the world of no manuals. In this audio graphic, Creative Class expert Richard Florida sprints through his big idea on the evolved economy.