Jack Andraka from Maryland won the grand prize at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. It is the largest high school science competition in the world. The Maryland teenager is the youngest winner of the $75,000 prize. He was chosen from among 1,500 students in 70 countries. Jack Andraka invented a test for pancreatic cancer  . He started to learn it after losing a close family friend to the disease. "I went on the Internet and I found that 85%of all pancreatic cancers are found late, when someone has less than 2% chance of survival , " he says, "and I was thinking,' That's not right. We should be able to do something.'" He found that early discovery is important to increasing the chances of surviving the disease. The Maryland teenager asked to work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and was allowed. There he developed a simple paper test, which can recognize the disease in a single drop of blood. His test has proved correct 90% of the time. It also is 100 times more sensitive than other tests. "It costs 3 cents per test, and then it takes only 5 minutes to run," he said. Jack's success wouldn't have been possible without Anirban Maitra, a professor at Johns Hopkins. He was the only person among the 200 researchers Jack wrote to who showed interest in his project. "I was very surprised that this was a 15-year-old who was writing this. I wanted to meet this clever young man and see what he wanted to talk about and so I called him over for an interview . " Jack worked in Professor Maitra's laboratory, completing his project in 7 months. The government has given the Maryland teenager patent rights to the pancreatic cancer test. He is now talking with companies about developing the test into a simple product. Whatever happens, the professor believes Jack Andraka's name is one we will be hearing again over the next 10 to 20 years. What made Jack Andraka research pancreatic cancer?
A high school task. A professor's encouragement. Losing a friend. Doubts about the present test.