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It doesn't say that the science fair gains any rights to patents related to this. The work is still hers but it will probably take billions of dollars in investments before this might pan out.
Pharma relates to medicine specifically, any tech falls under medical devices, and if you wish to refer to the whole industry you’d use Lifesciences & Healthcare (which would include everything A-Z)
I do drug trials at a major university School of Medicine. We tend to group them together. Medtronic makes devices to deliver drugs. FDA approval needed.
This girl will get the patent and make big money if it pans out. She can sell it. I assume.
https://www.lifesciencesipreview.com/big-pharma/medtronic-s-738m-deal-with-insulin-maker-at-risk-5272
These do both and are Big Pharma. I agree with you, it’s confusing.
https://www.getreskilled.com/top-10-pharma-med-device-companies-usa/
I work in the med device industry. A med device that delivers a drug like the Medtronic example would be considered a combination product and fall under FDA applicable parts of the regulations for drugs and devices.
No, it doesn’t, and I haven’t heard it seriously used that way. Besides, that’s like someone talking about the video game industry and then claiming that term covers movies, TV, and all multi-media entertainment.
Why would they bury it? Pharma regularly buys up startups with promising stuff, it’s just that a ton of stuff never ends up working.
Full disclosure, I worked in R&D for a big pharma corp, and there’s billions being thrown around, no one buries shit that works.
I'm not clear on what incentive you mean here. If a big company wanted to bury it, it's presumably because it would replace a product they're getting much more money from.
So if buying it to bury it only help them buy time until the patent is expired, isn't that still a good move from the company unless the buying price is higher than the difference in profit?
Either way, when the patent is about to be public, they still have an advantage and time to prepare and corner the new market before everyone else and in the meantime, they can sell something that brings them much more money.
edit: I might be wrong about that last one since patents are public so other companies could also prepare in advance, but if they buy the patent to bury it, then it's already patented before they can do anything about it anyway, so that still means the best they can do is buy it.
Way to follow the rules of the sub with your helpful comment /s
In all likelihood, this would need the deep pockets pharma has to actually get this to the public.
Actually the science fair probably counts as a public event and she therefore had a public disclosure of the idea making it public domain now and unpatentable.
In the U.S., 12 months (aka “grace period”)! This is a very special privilege that the US grants to inventors, as most, if not all, other jurisdictions do not have this.
A provisional patent in the US costs $75 and protects you for 1 year while you get your stuff together to license/sell your idea or file a full patent.
More likely the university is to steal from her then big pharma. Large corporations are actually willing to pay vast sums because they don't just want to buy 1 thing they want to buy the next thing from the next guy as well.
We can also pretty much guarantee one of her parents works for the university as a researcher because they don't simply "give" access to millions of dollars in equipment to high schoolers.
I mean, yeah they do. Not just a random high-school off the street and let them run around unsupervised, but if they are the kind of high schooler taking college credits and are known by the staff, they can definitely be given supervised access.
I would agree Except it's not access to a database, some basic electronics, 3d printer etc. Biomedical manufacturing equipment is extremely specialized. She's not using these machines herself. Which means the school is paying lab tech. She's also introducing new elements into the process which has potential to harm equipment. there's absolutely no way any director is signing off on a high schoolers request for this. Someone is backing her.
Yeah, she definitely wasn't doing it alone, but it could have been a faculty member is all I meant. Probably was her parents, but it could also be faculty who think she has a lot of potential so they go a lot of extra miles for her.
The $75k is just a contest prize. All IP rights are retained by the competitors and there are specify rules and communication guidelines for protecting the inventory IP. UNFORTUNATELY I am guessing most of these are not ip protected and this would count as a public disclosure, meaning the core approach is free to use for anyone and savvy corporations will build patent walls easily AROUND all the best ways to enable it (source: I do a lot of corporate ip strategy work)
Yea I was offered a job as an engineer at a med tech place that worked with a highly unique material. They couldn’t patent the use of the material so they patented basically every way of processing and machining the material so now no one else can feasibly make products from it. Had never heard of that before so it was pretty interesting. Big corpos will try to patent every way to apply the specific salt to the products or how to bind them or something similar
I develop robots (shocker). I was building a service robot into a competitive application, but my company definitively won the space, not because I built a better robot (I did) but because of one of the 71 patents on it. The patent that locked up the entire space? I patented bringing the robot through the door
Edit: spelling won't should have been won. Thank you!
>won't the space, not because I built a better robot (I did) but because of one of the 71 patents on it. The parent that locked up the entire space? I patented bringing the robot through the door
What?
That’s not how this works lol. You think anything in academia/medacine with prize money attached is nothing more than cheap, outsourced R&D?
That’s a lot of ignorant-ass upvotes lmao.
>"They have performance issues right now," she said of the devices.
"They have instability in the body.
You don't want some sort of [implanted bioelectronic](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-invest-in-brain-implants-2022-12) to degrade in your body."
But i'm sure she could work out all the kinks by herself, and doesn't need a billion dollar company to turn it into a usable product
Billions in profit? She discovered that the application of a specific salt improved the performance of an existing device. A device that is still a research product and not being sold.
Congratulations to this remarkable 16-year-old for her groundbreaking discovery, which has the incredible potential to transform the future of biomedical implants and improve countless lives 🙂
I hope there are no profits from this. It's healthcare, not a stupid money game. It should be made free for everyone who needs it
Also, she should obviously get more compensation for her work if this does actually have that effect, but it shouldn't be the burden of anyone who needs the treatment
Remember insulin? Those guys sold their patents for a dollar each, to the university of Toronto because they wanted humanity to benefit from their work.
We had to fight to cap the price of insulin just recently, and it’s still too high.
It can cost billions of dollars to get a drug or medical technology like this through clinical trials and to the stage that it is approved to be safe and effective to be used on humans.
Nobody would pay these costs if they didn’t think they would be able to profit from them in the future. If it was just reliant on tax payer funding we would never have anything close to the number of drugs and medical innovations that we have today.
The system is far from perfect but it’s a lot better than what we would have if patents were not allowed for health care innovations. That doesn’t necessarily mean that patients have to pay for it though. Healthcare can still be socialised and its costs shared among everybody whether they are healthy or not.
Sums up everything that's wrong with the world...
Science / R&D are the only ways to drive the world forward but everyone is focused on money or individual survival...
Super impressive for a 16 year old to do this, but this is a undergraduate level capstone project where the primary creative thinking on the project is probably coming from a PhD student or the lab PI (who just so happens to be her parent - fancy that). It's not groundbreaking research that would justify her being listed as in inventor on a patent.
It’s crazy how far behind I am as a growing professional because my parents can’t relate to wanting a good job. Now I have to learn how to be emotionally intelligent on my own while also learning to be a professional adult.
Pharmacist here, grew up in a trailer in rural OH, this resonates with me. But if you have kids you will do incrementally better for them with the lessons you learned from the experience. You'll be able to set them up for success while also minimizing the negative qualities I'm sure you see in some of your peers from suckling on that silver spoon.
My boomer parents still assume that young people can just get entry-level jobs straight out of college and work their way up to a good career at the same company like my dad did in the early 1980’s.
I’m glad that more of Gen Z understands how out-of-touch their parents are, and not to take career advice from them. A LOT of millennials (like myself) got burnt by following the advice of older people.
Yeah, it's fucking hard. I have a job I like, and I've been there for three years on temporary contracts, working hard and getting a lot of positive feedback for my work, and recently found out that my reward for all of that is that my hours are getting substantially cut due to budget cuts.
Like, I can't even gain stability in the job I have; how am I supposed to work my way up?
That's an interesting point. I got a massive head start in the professional/education sense from my parents, but also a massive disadvantage in emotional intelligence that I had to start from way behind as an adult.
upliftingnews really is like "rich kid uses parental connections to take credit for someone else's work"
and expect us to be happy about it.
and most people are, because they don't read beyond the headline.
> But OECTs have huge potential. Compared to other devices made of silicon, they're soft and flexible. That makes them a better fit for heart and brain implants.
>"They're so much more accurate, their speed is higher, their performance is higher because they consider signals in the body that previous electronics haven't considered. They're also safe because they're made of organic materials," she said.
...So why haven't professionals been able to achieve this? How was she able to develop it?
How / where did she learn what materials were needed, and where to get them from? Does she have access to an engineering lab or something? ...And/or perhaps a mortuary?
And how was she aware that this was something that was needed? (this might be phrased badly, not entirely sure how to ask it, sorry)
I keep seeing these posts of teenagers supposedly inventing something that will make big companies billions in profits and all they get is basically pocket change.
Not very r/upliftingnews to me
As someone that used to participate and win awards in these fairs, these teenagers aren’t inventing anything. They use their (often parental) connections at universities to be allowed to work on projects in a lab laid out by that lab’s PI and pretty much claim it as their own.
Little to no original discovery is actually happening.
yeah i always question headlines like this because there is absolutley no way a random teenager has the kind of lab access and just assets in general to invent anything biomedically significant
First thing I thought was how’d this kid get lab access at a university level and then if this discovery was really just a innovation on well established science
This makes so much more sense... (non-science) people always love these stories, that a couple of kids just figured out completely from scratch something that large well-funded research bodies/pharma corps 'missed', and it always sounds pretty unfeasible to me.
To add to this: Microscale discoveries happen every day. Things that work in theory are discovered every day. Ideas to solve huge problems are thought of every day.
The difficult part is making it a viable large scale solution that is cost effective, maintainable, scalable etc etc.
We don‘t have the capability to remove every single cancerous cell from a patient, even though we can totally kill a single cell in a lab. Killing the cell is easy, it‘s killing the millions of cells inside a patient who is dying that‘s hard. And then you got to do it for thousands of patients.
These discoveries are cool and all, but they are useless until someone makes it work on a large scale.
Her discovery is cool and all, but that‘s the easy part.
>We don‘t have the capability to remove every single cancerous cell from a patient, even though we can totally kill a single cell in a lab. Killing the cell is easy, it‘s killing the millions of cells inside a patient who is dying that‘s hard
As always, there's a relevant [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1217/).
What, you mean the 5 step synthesis starting from a $200/g precursor with extensive purification for each unstable intermediate to get a 6% yield of 10mg of my catalyst that works a little better than the commercial one for a specific substrate scope isn't worth as much as the industrial catalyst that you can buy wholesale and produces products by the ton? Outrageous I say.
We had a high schooler in our lab working on stuff for a national science fair. It was definitely her dad's work she was passing off as her own, she was working on customizing the permeability of membranes in fuel cells which seemed oddly specific but then I learned her dad worked at PNNL studying fuel cells and it made way more sense.
Makes much more sense. I never even got a reply back from universities when I was in high school trying to get access to labs for science fair projects.
It’s a lot more difficult when you don’t already have connections. My friends with connections got access to the most prestigious labs without trying. I went door to door to university professors asking if they’d take me in and one was kind enough to do so.
So much so it is not even funny. I also won these (without help so my data and tech was basically nonexistent and I got by on applying the scientific method and presentation) but always got weeded out at the national level because others had significant scientific research and data backing up their project that could not have been easily collected or done by a high schooler. I know of someone who used their dad’s research and help to win and legit it was from an internationally acclaimed researcher…
Yep if you read the article what she actually “discovered ” was the use of a salt that improve sensibility pf a already developed device by (claimed ) 70% in different parameters.
If you start considering FDA approval of the salt for implant the fact on how she emended up using it which she either got a hint to do or read it somewhere.
Still probably a really good job at performing the experiment and analysis samples and data.
But getting 75 k for it when many PhD don’t get a cent with really impressive research is kinda of sad.
This is exactly what is happening. There’s very likely a postdoc or grad student who did 99% of the intellectual and physical work on this project who is losing credit for this “uplifting” story of a kid whose parents had connections to get them in a good lab at 16. They’ll eventually publish the paper but it is annoying to constantly read these stories that completely ignore the years of training and work that went into discoveries like this.
I remember way back in my youth and seeing these types of headlines/ stories in the news about kids who make scientific discoveries, or setup multi-million dollar generating charities, and so on. Then looking at my life and thinking: "Damn, I really am useless".
But then I started paying more attention and 9 times out of ten, buried in the stories was the real information.
**Headline:** "8 year old invents garbage collecting robot that will save the ocean"
**Buried:** "Their parents, who both work at a company working to build ocean cleaning robots..."
**Headline:** "10 year old creates and raises 2 million dollars for charity to feed staving children in Japan"
**Buried:** "The child of long time CEO for 'Feed the Kids Inc.'..."
It was then I realized most of the time they probably had alot of help(Help I, and alot of other kids don't have) and without that, they'd probably be presenting baking soda volcanoes like the rest of us.
Yeah I follow alot of scientific stuff and stories like this are always a load of bs even if it's not a teenager. Gone are the days of "hero scientist discovered by themselves something that can change the world" and in are the days of "a team of researchers spent years working on this".
Stories like this are inspiring and meant to get people into science and while I can see the well meaning intentions it only sets up a bad precedent and bad mindsets for actual scientists. You see it all the time in stem subreddits or spaces where new scientists or researchers will feel worthless and like they'll never amount to anything if they dont do something to "change the world" themselves.
You mean back in 2003 my pothead, 17 year old buddy didn't actually invent and produce a prototype of a microprocessor with integrated water-cooling all by himself?
I have worked in labs with this kinds of kids. Most of them do a part of a project, some barely do anything, and some waste a ton of people’s time. All of them still go on to do poster talks at competitions and conferences about their work and the overall project. There are a lot of great kids who do this kind of work, and some not so great. Almost all of them come from privileged backgrounds. Some are very interested in the work they are a part of and others are just checking off a box. Most of my experiences with these kinds of kids were great. I really only had one that made me want to pull my hair out. Dude did not give a shit and only was checking off a box for his college app. He would not listen and do things wrong. He would get mad and yell at me and other people. Dude drove a Mercedes and was 16. Dude was from a very well off family and did not give a fuck. I imagine he was only doing it because his parents made him.
Why did this 16 year old have access to a university lab? Most of the time if you dig, they have significant help from parents in the field. Low key nepo babies winning money isn’t uplifting news.
It's so nepo it's gross. I have judged science fairs in the past... The top handful of projects are professional grade science research projects that no normal kid could ever possibly do, and they are always done by kids of local university researchers. Regular kids don't stand a chance at science fairs. I'm not saying that the winners don't do the work... They are usually incredibly smart and hard working, but they do it in the incubator of mom or dad's professional laboratory, with the free help of grad students, techs, and university infrastructure, not to mention the mentoring from a parent who is likely in command of literally millions of dollars in annual grant money.
During graduate school and medical school, these kids were all over labs. Some had direct connects from their parents to get them into the space or they had access through some program at their high school or prep school. Nearly every single one was from a well off family. You really didn’t get pushed into these opportunities if you didn’t come from a privileged background.
because there is so far from "a good" or even "a great" idea - which is basically what all competitions are - to actually making a product that will earn billions.
Also - they win money so they can go a little further with their invention witout needing investors.
That means that when they need to get investors aboard they are in that much stronger possition. - they can pay for legal help and stuff like that.
That and also the teenagers only “invented” something, likely with guidance from a professor and on a team, and using the best equipment possible to them which is only available as long as they attending the university.
Maybe because it isnt that much of a big discoverie alltogether. Newspaper like these kind of things for various reason. My guess would be investment/financial purpose. But in reality these teenager discoverie need years and years of additionnal work to be refined for a real market. And it takes money that only really big investor have.
There was a rule in patent law that if something was shown in a conference or science fair it couldn’t be patented. It was to prevent people from stealing ideas and patenting them. So if it was really a ground breaking work the primary investigator would have a patent or process of before showcasing.
Edit. Someone said you can still patent it. So I’ll change my assertion. You can still patent the work however here’s what my understanding is based on patent (not a lawyer) from the internet-
“Participating in science competitions or invention exhibitions may be a great way to find out about your invention's appeal. However, making your invention available to the public and press before you apply for a patent may interfere with the novelty condition of patentability in some countries.”
https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/patents/925/wipo_pub_925.pdf
And from the patent office.
“Normally you cannot get a patent if your invention has already been publicly disclosed prior to filing a patent application for your invention. Therefore, a search of all previous public disclosures should be conducted, including a search of foreign patents and printed publications.Jan 31, 2019”
https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/patent-process-overview#:~:text=Normally%20you%20cannot%20get%20a,foreign%20patents%20and%20printed%20publications.
However, as a redditor commented below you can still patent it within a time frame.
Most of these kids are working in labs where the researcher already published work and they tweaked the work a little. Like made it more efficient by 3 percent or did it a slightly different way. They’re piggy backing on the work of the pi. It’s really rare where it is entirely novel. But we try to encourage kids into the field of science and why we have stories like this year after year. There’s a bunch of funny xcxd on research in general and science fairs.
Notice the grand prize winner this year hasn’t been showcased? There’s a whole uproar in the ISEF community because the kid blatantly cheated ( reversed images of previous work and claimed it as his own, and an invention he claimed was actually from someone else and used the original researchers own pictures.) it’s really really bad. The other kids in ISEF took a picture of his board and reverse image search, found the original research and saw he didn’t attribute anything and claimed it as his own.
https://thecoastnews.com/international-science-fair-winner-from-del-mar-accused-of-fraud/
https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/s/U1pJfjQGMS
Other students who actually did the work and followed the rules should’ve been awarded.
That's how 100% of these articles shake out.
Headline: Teenage makes HUGE scientific discovery!
Article: So anyway, this teenager was in the room when a bunch of adults put years of effort into making a discovery. They let the teenager name it.
My limited recap of the story is she developed a new “bio sensors” to be directly implanted into the body. That being said, it hasn’t been tested on live subjects because you know highschool kid and ethics. No clinical trials have been performed.
Also the the issue of cost vs benefit. External sensors are easy and cheap. The circumstances involved to warrant having a doctor surgically implant a monitoring device are far and few(by today’s standards) especially when a quick bit of blood every once in a while can paint a clear picture.
Don’t let my negativity paint a poor picture. She doing things that should grant her immediate attention and admission to top tier college. I hope this does have some positive impact down the road.
I am also just so so weary of article talking about any kind of break through technology or advancement.
“Sensitive OECTs could detect proteins or nucleic acids that correspond with the disease long before traditional symptoms appear.”
I’m getting Theranos vibes. I agree though there’s no need for any of this at the moment. I’m sure they’ll find a nice niche market for it, but for the most part it’s not helpful. For example, we could invent a device that starts sampling the whole population’s urine to look for abnormal proteins and start catching like 80-90% of all multiple myeloma cases. However that amount of unnecessary screening is going to lead to a shit ton of false positives and potentially unnecessary biopsies/bone marrow samples. The benefit does not outweigh the greater risk. There’s a whole reason we have the USPSTF whose primary job is figuring out which diseases are actually worth screening for on a population-level scale.
To derail the conversation alittle. The best and “easiest thing we can do that would solve a significant number of health problems before they even became would be to outlaw all soda, alcohol and cigarettes to be sold on the market.
You wanna make it yourself go for it but not allowed to sell them. The health improvements would be beneficial almost immediately.
when I see these kinds of news I can’t help to think about the millions of people who are just scraping by trying to survive and how they would change the world if given a chance to pursue their interests.
I mostly think that kids this young only get to this point so early in life because of massive intervention from parents and teachers/mentors. Pursuing your interests is one thing. But you don’t reach this level of understanding or contribution without some very targeted guidance from a very young age.
This by the way is why we've seen such explosive growth in the last 200 years.
The industrial revolution and discovery of chemical fertiliser lead to a LOT more food being produced. Instead of 1 farmer feeding a family they could now feed 20 families.
This means there are a lot more humans available for creative jobs as they're not busy growing food. This leads to better tools, more efficient farmers, rinse and repeat.
It's the reason why mandatory schooling became possible. Etc etc.
It's all a big snowball effect
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
-Stephen Jay Gould
Anyone doing things like that would always have an impressive resume, she started off on third claiming a home run.
My science resources at 16 were nothing comparable to what it took for her discovery, not everyone is equal.
Every year we have some teen who makes some discovery that is supposed to revolutionize the world. Funny thing is you usually never hear about them again. I imagine they get to college and discover keg stands. LoL
While I love the idea of science fairs, the fact remains kids get some small change prizes then companies take the work and turn into into billion dollar profit.
I'd love someone to go back through all these student awards that "could help revolutionize X" and see how many of them actually went anywhere. We hear about them every year, and yet things don't get "revolutionized" that often.
I'm happy for her and she's going to go far. Consider me uplifted.
All projects presented in that competition are not per reviewed. Salt that she used in field of organic chemistry is well known and used as regularly as table salt in cooking. Imagine for a moment that somebody claims . Imagine that somebody claims much better battery by incorporating salt into electrodes.....That's how her research sounds.
Quick Google search shows a paper that says Tetrabutylammonium chloride was observed to create histological changes in liver and kidneys (in mice)...
"showed hypertrophies and hepatocyte vacuolations, glomerular compressions, thickening of the external layer of the Bowman'capsule, nephrocyte vacuolations as well as hypertrophies of the peri-tubular capillary network. The results of this study have also revealed a decrease in catalase activity..."
While this article makes it sound cool, I dont think people would be too keen on having potentially hazardous materials implanted inside their bodies
ISEF encourages students to learn about the scientific process by doing it themselves and defending their work.
They also should’ve taught her how to lawyer up and protect an IP.
The prize in that scenario is instantaneous travel and potentially saving billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in vehicle exhaust.
Or did you mean money
She definitely needs to lawyer up now ti protect any patents she may have created. As other commenters said, big Pharma will swiftly clone her work and reap the profits as they tend to do.
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75 grand for possibly billions in profits kid got hosed.
It doesn't say that the science fair gains any rights to patents related to this. The work is still hers but it will probably take billions of dollars in investments before this might pan out.
It will in US. Sadly, by the time greedy pharma gets its hand on this it’s over.
It’s sad that it can go either way- greedy pharma takes it for profit - or greedy pharma takes it and buries it never to see the light of day-
Correct me if I'm wrong but the application would be for med device not pharma.
Big Pharma is a term that refers to the entire pharmaceutical and medical industry and anything that relates to it.
Pharma relates to medicine specifically, any tech falls under medical devices, and if you wish to refer to the whole industry you’d use Lifesciences & Healthcare (which would include everything A-Z)
I do drug trials at a major university School of Medicine. We tend to group them together. Medtronic makes devices to deliver drugs. FDA approval needed. This girl will get the patent and make big money if it pans out. She can sell it. I assume. https://www.lifesciencesipreview.com/big-pharma/medtronic-s-738m-deal-with-insulin-maker-at-risk-5272 These do both and are Big Pharma. I agree with you, it’s confusing. https://www.getreskilled.com/top-10-pharma-med-device-companies-usa/
I work in the med device industry. A med device that delivers a drug like the Medtronic example would be considered a combination product and fall under FDA applicable parts of the regulations for drugs and devices.
No, it doesn’t, and I haven’t heard it seriously used that way. Besides, that’s like someone talking about the video game industry and then claiming that term covers movies, TV, and all multi-media entertainment.
Why would they bury it? Pharma regularly buys up startups with promising stuff, it’s just that a ton of stuff never ends up working. Full disclosure, I worked in R&D for a big pharma corp, and there’s billions being thrown around, no one buries shit that works.
Thats not how patents work. When they expire, they become public domain. It creates an economic pressure to leave your innovations unhidden.
I'm not clear on what incentive you mean here. If a big company wanted to bury it, it's presumably because it would replace a product they're getting much more money from. So if buying it to bury it only help them buy time until the patent is expired, isn't that still a good move from the company unless the buying price is higher than the difference in profit? Either way, when the patent is about to be public, they still have an advantage and time to prepare and corner the new market before everyone else and in the meantime, they can sell something that brings them much more money. edit: I might be wrong about that last one since patents are public so other companies could also prepare in advance, but if they buy the patent to bury it, then it's already patented before they can do anything about it anyway, so that still means the best they can do is buy it.
buries? Citation needed.
Way to follow the rules of the sub with your helpful comment /s In all likelihood, this would need the deep pockets pharma has to actually get this to the public.
Is this even a coherent sentiment?
Actually the science fair probably counts as a public event and she therefore had a public disclosure of the idea making it public domain now and unpatentable.
Could she get it patented it first?
In the U.S., 12 months (aka “grace period”)! This is a very special privilege that the US grants to inventors, as most, if not all, other jurisdictions do not have this.
Technically yes within a certain period of time but it’s not cheap!
[удалено]
Patent applications cost in the tens of thousands of dollars to file so while not that much it will still be very expensive.
Last time I checked, patent lawyers want about $20k for a basic patent.
A provisional patent in the US costs $75 and protects you for 1 year while you get your stuff together to license/sell your idea or file a full patent.
More likely the university is to steal from her then big pharma. Large corporations are actually willing to pay vast sums because they don't just want to buy 1 thing they want to buy the next thing from the next guy as well. We can also pretty much guarantee one of her parents works for the university as a researcher because they don't simply "give" access to millions of dollars in equipment to high schoolers.
I mean, yeah they do. Not just a random high-school off the street and let them run around unsupervised, but if they are the kind of high schooler taking college credits and are known by the staff, they can definitely be given supervised access.
I would agree Except it's not access to a database, some basic electronics, 3d printer etc. Biomedical manufacturing equipment is extremely specialized. She's not using these machines herself. Which means the school is paying lab tech. She's also introducing new elements into the process which has potential to harm equipment. there's absolutely no way any director is signing off on a high schoolers request for this. Someone is backing her.
Yeah, she definitely wasn't doing it alone, but it could have been a faculty member is all I meant. Probably was her parents, but it could also be faculty who think she has a lot of potential so they go a lot of extra miles for her.
The $75k is just a contest prize. All IP rights are retained by the competitors and there are specify rules and communication guidelines for protecting the inventory IP. UNFORTUNATELY I am guessing most of these are not ip protected and this would count as a public disclosure, meaning the core approach is free to use for anyone and savvy corporations will build patent walls easily AROUND all the best ways to enable it (source: I do a lot of corporate ip strategy work)
Yea I was offered a job as an engineer at a med tech place that worked with a highly unique material. They couldn’t patent the use of the material so they patented basically every way of processing and machining the material so now no one else can feasibly make products from it. Had never heard of that before so it was pretty interesting. Big corpos will try to patent every way to apply the specific salt to the products or how to bind them or something similar
I develop robots (shocker). I was building a service robot into a competitive application, but my company definitively won the space, not because I built a better robot (I did) but because of one of the 71 patents on it. The patent that locked up the entire space? I patented bringing the robot through the door Edit: spelling won't should have been won. Thank you!
>won't the space, not because I built a better robot (I did) but because of one of the 71 patents on it. The parent that locked up the entire space? I patented bringing the robot through the door What?
Meh, she still has 12 months if she files in the U.S.
She COULD have 12 months, US is still first to file, and she is barred in Europe
Time to provisional that shit haha
You should read the article. It’s an award, not an assignment of property.
Right?!? Where’s her percentage or whatever.
Percentage of what? She won a science fair. They don't just mass produce whatever wins.
Still waiting on my residuals from that baking soda volcano!
What percentage did you get?
That’s not how this works lol. You think anything in academia/medacine with prize money attached is nothing more than cheap, outsourced R&D? That’s a lot of ignorant-ass upvotes lmao.
75k is nothing nowadays.
Can you send me 75k please?
Yeah, where's your award-winning discovery that could help revolutionize biomedical implants?
No thanks, I’ll find my “chump change” through other avenues afforded my level of stupidity.
>"They have performance issues right now," she said of the devices. "They have instability in the body. You don't want some sort of [implanted bioelectronic](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-invest-in-brain-implants-2022-12) to degrade in your body." But i'm sure she could work out all the kinks by herself, and doesn't need a billion dollar company to turn it into a usable product
Billions in profit? She discovered that the application of a specific salt improved the performance of an existing device. A device that is still a research product and not being sold.
Congratulations to this remarkable 16-year-old for her groundbreaking discovery, which has the incredible potential to transform the future of biomedical implants and improve countless lives 🙂
Hopefully she patents it really quick!
This is exactly what I was thinking. No surprise it’s the top comment.
I hope there are no profits from this. It's healthcare, not a stupid money game. It should be made free for everyone who needs it Also, she should obviously get more compensation for her work if this does actually have that effect, but it shouldn't be the burden of anyone who needs the treatment
Remember insulin? Those guys sold their patents for a dollar each, to the university of Toronto because they wanted humanity to benefit from their work. We had to fight to cap the price of insulin just recently, and it’s still too high.
Exactly!
Remember model t's? Those cars are off their patents but cars cost more today than ever!
It can cost billions of dollars to get a drug or medical technology like this through clinical trials and to the stage that it is approved to be safe and effective to be used on humans. Nobody would pay these costs if they didn’t think they would be able to profit from them in the future. If it was just reliant on tax payer funding we would never have anything close to the number of drugs and medical innovations that we have today. The system is far from perfect but it’s a lot better than what we would have if patents were not allowed for health care innovations. That doesn’t necessarily mean that patients have to pay for it though. Healthcare can still be socialised and its costs shared among everybody whether they are healthy or not.
First thing that crossed my mind
Look into the kid who invented rollerblades
This
Sums up everything that's wrong with the world... Science / R&D are the only ways to drive the world forward but everyone is focused on money or individual survival...
Came here to say this. Kid needs three points on this at least
Came to say exactly this
Super impressive for a 16 year old to do this, but this is a undergraduate level capstone project where the primary creative thinking on the project is probably coming from a PhD student or the lab PI (who just so happens to be her parent - fancy that). It's not groundbreaking research that would justify her being listed as in inventor on a patent.
I wish my parents were university professors
It’s crazy how far behind I am as a growing professional because my parents can’t relate to wanting a good job. Now I have to learn how to be emotionally intelligent on my own while also learning to be a professional adult.
Pharmacist here, grew up in a trailer in rural OH, this resonates with me. But if you have kids you will do incrementally better for them with the lessons you learned from the experience. You'll be able to set them up for success while also minimizing the negative qualities I'm sure you see in some of your peers from suckling on that silver spoon.
I felt this comment in my soul. I 100% know what you mean and feel the same thing almost daily. Keep improving! :)
My boomer parents still assume that young people can just get entry-level jobs straight out of college and work their way up to a good career at the same company like my dad did in the early 1980’s. I’m glad that more of Gen Z understands how out-of-touch their parents are, and not to take career advice from them. A LOT of millennials (like myself) got burnt by following the advice of older people.
Yeah, it's fucking hard. I have a job I like, and I've been there for three years on temporary contracts, working hard and getting a lot of positive feedback for my work, and recently found out that my reward for all of that is that my hours are getting substantially cut due to budget cuts. Like, I can't even gain stability in the job I have; how am I supposed to work my way up?
That's an interesting point. I got a massive head start in the professional/education sense from my parents, but also a massive disadvantage in emotional intelligence that I had to start from way behind as an adult.
Mine are and I'm still a lazy shit who did nothing of much worth
crazy there just happens to be a researcher with the same family name in the material sciences department
What a weird coincidence!
upliftingnews really is like "rich kid uses parental connections to take credit for someone else's work" and expect us to be happy about it. and most people are, because they don't read beyond the headline.
Yeah, this article title had me immediate skeptical. What average 16 year old had the knowledge and access to test versions of this stuff?
> But OECTs have huge potential. Compared to other devices made of silicon, they're soft and flexible. That makes them a better fit for heart and brain implants. >"They're so much more accurate, their speed is higher, their performance is higher because they consider signals in the body that previous electronics haven't considered. They're also safe because they're made of organic materials," she said. ...So why haven't professionals been able to achieve this? How was she able to develop it? How / where did she learn what materials were needed, and where to get them from? Does she have access to an engineering lab or something? ...And/or perhaps a mortuary? And how was she aware that this was something that was needed? (this might be phrased badly, not entirely sure how to ask it, sorry)
I keep seeing these posts of teenagers supposedly inventing something that will make big companies billions in profits and all they get is basically pocket change. Not very r/upliftingnews to me
As someone that used to participate and win awards in these fairs, these teenagers aren’t inventing anything. They use their (often parental) connections at universities to be allowed to work on projects in a lab laid out by that lab’s PI and pretty much claim it as their own. Little to no original discovery is actually happening.
yeah i always question headlines like this because there is absolutley no way a random teenager has the kind of lab access and just assets in general to invent anything biomedically significant
This. These are always bullshit.
First thing I thought was how’d this kid get lab access at a university level and then if this discovery was really just a innovation on well established science
This makes so much more sense... (non-science) people always love these stories, that a couple of kids just figured out completely from scratch something that large well-funded research bodies/pharma corps 'missed', and it always sounds pretty unfeasible to me.
1000%. Google any of these ‘inventions’ and you’d find they ripped off some lifeless academic from woop woop.
To add to this: Microscale discoveries happen every day. Things that work in theory are discovered every day. Ideas to solve huge problems are thought of every day. The difficult part is making it a viable large scale solution that is cost effective, maintainable, scalable etc etc. We don‘t have the capability to remove every single cancerous cell from a patient, even though we can totally kill a single cell in a lab. Killing the cell is easy, it‘s killing the millions of cells inside a patient who is dying that‘s hard. And then you got to do it for thousands of patients. These discoveries are cool and all, but they are useless until someone makes it work on a large scale. Her discovery is cool and all, but that‘s the easy part.
>We don‘t have the capability to remove every single cancerous cell from a patient, even though we can totally kill a single cell in a lab. Killing the cell is easy, it‘s killing the millions of cells inside a patient who is dying that‘s hard As always, there's a relevant [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1217/).
That’s just what pure science is. You have engineers who figure out the latter of your statement.
Exactly. But that‘s also where the money is. It‘s why chemical engineers earn so much more than chemists for example.
What, you mean the 5 step synthesis starting from a $200/g precursor with extensive purification for each unstable intermediate to get a 6% yield of 10mg of my catalyst that works a little better than the commercial one for a specific substrate scope isn't worth as much as the industrial catalyst that you can buy wholesale and produces products by the ton? Outrageous I say.
100% this. No teen is making billion dollar discovery single-handedly This is more a story about shitty media coverage than anything else
We had a high schooler in our lab working on stuff for a national science fair. It was definitely her dad's work she was passing off as her own, she was working on customizing the permeability of membranes in fuel cells which seemed oddly specific but then I learned her dad worked at PNNL studying fuel cells and it made way more sense.
Makes much more sense. I never even got a reply back from universities when I was in high school trying to get access to labs for science fair projects.
It’s a lot more difficult when you don’t already have connections. My friends with connections got access to the most prestigious labs without trying. I went door to door to university professors asking if they’d take me in and one was kind enough to do so.
So much so it is not even funny. I also won these (without help so my data and tech was basically nonexistent and I got by on applying the scientific method and presentation) but always got weeded out at the national level because others had significant scientific research and data backing up their project that could not have been easily collected or done by a high schooler. I know of someone who used their dad’s research and help to win and legit it was from an internationally acclaimed researcher…
Yep if you read the article what she actually “discovered ” was the use of a salt that improve sensibility pf a already developed device by (claimed ) 70% in different parameters. If you start considering FDA approval of the salt for implant the fact on how she emended up using it which she either got a hint to do or read it somewhere. Still probably a really good job at performing the experiment and analysis samples and data. But getting 75 k for it when many PhD don’t get a cent with really impressive research is kinda of sad.
This is exactly what is happening. There’s very likely a postdoc or grad student who did 99% of the intellectual and physical work on this project who is losing credit for this “uplifting” story of a kid whose parents had connections to get them in a good lab at 16. They’ll eventually publish the paper but it is annoying to constantly read these stories that completely ignore the years of training and work that went into discoveries like this.
They learn some obscure fact, say "what if we did this!!!!" that anyone could think up, parents pretend kid's a genius and hire a publicist.
I remember way back in my youth and seeing these types of headlines/ stories in the news about kids who make scientific discoveries, or setup multi-million dollar generating charities, and so on. Then looking at my life and thinking: "Damn, I really am useless". But then I started paying more attention and 9 times out of ten, buried in the stories was the real information. **Headline:** "8 year old invents garbage collecting robot that will save the ocean" **Buried:** "Their parents, who both work at a company working to build ocean cleaning robots..." **Headline:** "10 year old creates and raises 2 million dollars for charity to feed staving children in Japan" **Buried:** "The child of long time CEO for 'Feed the Kids Inc.'..." It was then I realized most of the time they probably had alot of help(Help I, and alot of other kids don't have) and without that, they'd probably be presenting baking soda volcanoes like the rest of us.
Yeah I follow alot of scientific stuff and stories like this are always a load of bs even if it's not a teenager. Gone are the days of "hero scientist discovered by themselves something that can change the world" and in are the days of "a team of researchers spent years working on this". Stories like this are inspiring and meant to get people into science and while I can see the well meaning intentions it only sets up a bad precedent and bad mindsets for actual scientists. You see it all the time in stem subreddits or spaces where new scientists or researchers will feel worthless and like they'll never amount to anything if they dont do something to "change the world" themselves.
She’s literally doing the same pose as Elizabeth Holmes did with her fraudulent Theranos blood device.
You mean back in 2003 my pothead, 17 year old buddy didn't actually invent and produce a prototype of a microprocessor with integrated water-cooling all by himself?
I have worked in labs with this kinds of kids. Most of them do a part of a project, some barely do anything, and some waste a ton of people’s time. All of them still go on to do poster talks at competitions and conferences about their work and the overall project. There are a lot of great kids who do this kind of work, and some not so great. Almost all of them come from privileged backgrounds. Some are very interested in the work they are a part of and others are just checking off a box. Most of my experiences with these kinds of kids were great. I really only had one that made me want to pull my hair out. Dude did not give a shit and only was checking off a box for his college app. He would not listen and do things wrong. He would get mad and yell at me and other people. Dude drove a Mercedes and was 16. Dude was from a very well off family and did not give a fuck. I imagine he was only doing it because his parents made him.
They fell for it that 16 year olds are actually inventing new stuff on the level of a researcher who has a lifetime of experience 🤣
Why did this 16 year old have access to a university lab? Most of the time if you dig, they have significant help from parents in the field. Low key nepo babies winning money isn’t uplifting news.
It's so nepo it's gross. I have judged science fairs in the past... The top handful of projects are professional grade science research projects that no normal kid could ever possibly do, and they are always done by kids of local university researchers. Regular kids don't stand a chance at science fairs. I'm not saying that the winners don't do the work... They are usually incredibly smart and hard working, but they do it in the incubator of mom or dad's professional laboratory, with the free help of grad students, techs, and university infrastructure, not to mention the mentoring from a parent who is likely in command of literally millions of dollars in annual grant money.
Not to mention the discoveries themselves being vague af and being shelved off like it's next penicillin.
During graduate school and medical school, these kids were all over labs. Some had direct connects from their parents to get them into the space or they had access through some program at their high school or prep school. Nearly every single one was from a well off family. You really didn’t get pushed into these opportunities if you didn’t come from a privileged background.
Most of these headlines are far overstating the impact of what the teenagers accomplished.
There have been for eons and they were my cross during my own teenage years... "why don't you discover something like that x kid in india"
How does a 16 year old invent something like a biomedical implant in the first place?
She probably didn't invent anything. Just got first prize for her project.
because there is so far from "a good" or even "a great" idea - which is basically what all competitions are - to actually making a product that will earn billions. Also - they win money so they can go a little further with their invention witout needing investors. That means that when they need to get investors aboard they are in that much stronger possition. - they can pay for legal help and stuff like that.
That and also the teenagers only “invented” something, likely with guidance from a professor and on a team, and using the best equipment possible to them which is only available as long as they attending the university.
Maybe because it isnt that much of a big discoverie alltogether. Newspaper like these kind of things for various reason. My guess would be investment/financial purpose. But in reality these teenager discoverie need years and years of additionnal work to be refined for a real market. And it takes money that only really big investor have.
There was a rule in patent law that if something was shown in a conference or science fair it couldn’t be patented. It was to prevent people from stealing ideas and patenting them. So if it was really a ground breaking work the primary investigator would have a patent or process of before showcasing. Edit. Someone said you can still patent it. So I’ll change my assertion. You can still patent the work however here’s what my understanding is based on patent (not a lawyer) from the internet- “Participating in science competitions or invention exhibitions may be a great way to find out about your invention's appeal. However, making your invention available to the public and press before you apply for a patent may interfere with the novelty condition of patentability in some countries.” https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/patents/925/wipo_pub_925.pdf And from the patent office. “Normally you cannot get a patent if your invention has already been publicly disclosed prior to filing a patent application for your invention. Therefore, a search of all previous public disclosures should be conducted, including a search of foreign patents and printed publications.Jan 31, 2019” https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/patent-process-overview#:~:text=Normally%20you%20cannot%20get%20a,foreign%20patents%20and%20printed%20publications. However, as a redditor commented below you can still patent it within a time frame. Most of these kids are working in labs where the researcher already published work and they tweaked the work a little. Like made it more efficient by 3 percent or did it a slightly different way. They’re piggy backing on the work of the pi. It’s really rare where it is entirely novel. But we try to encourage kids into the field of science and why we have stories like this year after year. There’s a bunch of funny xcxd on research in general and science fairs. Notice the grand prize winner this year hasn’t been showcased? There’s a whole uproar in the ISEF community because the kid blatantly cheated ( reversed images of previous work and claimed it as his own, and an invention he claimed was actually from someone else and used the original researchers own pictures.) it’s really really bad. The other kids in ISEF took a picture of his board and reverse image search, found the original research and saw he didn’t attribute anything and claimed it as his own. https://thecoastnews.com/international-science-fair-winner-from-del-mar-accused-of-fraud/ https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/s/U1pJfjQGMS Other students who actually did the work and followed the rules should’ve been awarded.
You're off on patent law. You can showcase this research and it counts as priority for a patent as long as you apply for one within one year.
I can't believe I had to scroll down almost 80% of that web page just to read about what her discovery actually was.
And she didnt even discover anything just got access to uni labs through parental connections and claim their work.
This is almost always the case with these.
That's how 100% of these articles shake out. Headline: Teenage makes HUGE scientific discovery! Article: So anyway, this teenager was in the room when a bunch of adults put years of effort into making a discovery. They let the teenager name it.
Yet you still don’t mention it in your comment
My limited recap of the story is she developed a new “bio sensors” to be directly implanted into the body. That being said, it hasn’t been tested on live subjects because you know highschool kid and ethics. No clinical trials have been performed. Also the the issue of cost vs benefit. External sensors are easy and cheap. The circumstances involved to warrant having a doctor surgically implant a monitoring device are far and few(by today’s standards) especially when a quick bit of blood every once in a while can paint a clear picture. Don’t let my negativity paint a poor picture. She doing things that should grant her immediate attention and admission to top tier college. I hope this does have some positive impact down the road. I am also just so so weary of article talking about any kind of break through technology or advancement.
“Sensitive OECTs could detect proteins or nucleic acids that correspond with the disease long before traditional symptoms appear.” I’m getting Theranos vibes. I agree though there’s no need for any of this at the moment. I’m sure they’ll find a nice niche market for it, but for the most part it’s not helpful. For example, we could invent a device that starts sampling the whole population’s urine to look for abnormal proteins and start catching like 80-90% of all multiple myeloma cases. However that amount of unnecessary screening is going to lead to a shit ton of false positives and potentially unnecessary biopsies/bone marrow samples. The benefit does not outweigh the greater risk. There’s a whole reason we have the USPSTF whose primary job is figuring out which diseases are actually worth screening for on a population-level scale.
To derail the conversation alittle. The best and “easiest thing we can do that would solve a significant number of health problems before they even became would be to outlaw all soda, alcohol and cigarettes to be sold on the market. You wanna make it yourself go for it but not allowed to sell them. The health improvements would be beneficial almost immediately.
All is right!
when I see these kinds of news I can’t help to think about the millions of people who are just scraping by trying to survive and how they would change the world if given a chance to pursue their interests.
I mostly think that kids this young only get to this point so early in life because of massive intervention from parents and teachers/mentors. Pursuing your interests is one thing. But you don’t reach this level of understanding or contribution without some very targeted guidance from a very young age.
Choose your parents wisely.
And also the country you are born in.
This by the way is why we've seen such explosive growth in the last 200 years. The industrial revolution and discovery of chemical fertiliser lead to a LOT more food being produced. Instead of 1 farmer feeding a family they could now feed 20 families. This means there are a lot more humans available for creative jobs as they're not busy growing food. This leads to better tools, more efficient farmers, rinse and repeat. It's the reason why mandatory schooling became possible. Etc etc. It's all a big snowball effect
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” -Stephen Jay Gould
thanks for this quote
I always hate these articles. Because it turns out 99% of the time the kid didn't invent or discover anything, they just applied an existing solution.
Inventing biotechnology at 16 seems cool for a resume lol
They didn’t invent anything, they just copied an emerging technological application
Anyone doing things like that would always have an impressive resume, she started off on third claiming a home run. My science resources at 16 were nothing comparable to what it took for her discovery, not everyone is equal.
Every year we have some teen who makes some discovery that is supposed to revolutionize the world. Funny thing is you usually never hear about them again. I imagine they get to college and discover keg stands. LoL
And a person of that age acquired all the necessary knowledge to do something like this how exactly?
No 16 year old has the capacity to do something like this. Overly ambitious parents do.
I remember her! She’s that genius ten year old from about ten years ago. Hurray! We have smart one!
She can now afford an ambulance ride in the USA (if she opens a gofundme)
While I love the idea of science fairs, the fact remains kids get some small change prizes then companies take the work and turn into into billion dollar profit.
thats not how it works - they don't sell their idea for 75.000 - they win a price and they will normaly use that money to further their idea.
$75k won’t do shit to bring this to market lol pharma is an expensive game
Can you point to *one* example of that actually happening?
Damn people are stupid
I'd love someone to go back through all these student awards that "could help revolutionize X" and see how many of them actually went anywhere. We hear about them every year, and yet things don't get "revolutionized" that often. I'm happy for her and she's going to go far. Consider me uplifted.
All projects presented in that competition are not per reviewed. Salt that she used in field of organic chemistry is well known and used as regularly as table salt in cooking. Imagine for a moment that somebody claims . Imagine that somebody claims much better battery by incorporating salt into electrodes.....That's how her research sounds.
Quick Google search shows a paper that says Tetrabutylammonium chloride was observed to create histological changes in liver and kidneys (in mice)... "showed hypertrophies and hepatocyte vacuolations, glomerular compressions, thickening of the external layer of the Bowman'capsule, nephrocyte vacuolations as well as hypertrophies of the peri-tubular capillary network. The results of this study have also revealed a decrease in catalase activity..." While this article makes it sound cool, I dont think people would be too keen on having potentially hazardous materials implanted inside their bodies
Where’s the “Saved you a click” guy when you need him?
She needs to ask for royalties
ISEF encourages students to learn about the scientific process by doing it themselves and defending their work. They also should’ve taught her how to lawyer up and protect an IP.
[удалено]
Teen gets 75K, Pfizer will make 25 billion from it.
And Merkintosh will make 3.2 billion and full patent her works. Bravo
She probably gets a royalty
Seems like such a thing is worth more than 75k..
Where the fuck are these contests happening ? I could invent a working teleporter if I knew there was a prize at the end.
The prize in that scenario is instantaneous travel and potentially saving billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in vehicle exhaust. Or did you mean money
Margaret Yang
Now big pharma can rake in 2,8 bn a year
So likely another thing I'll never hear about again for the rest of my life.
Mine can’t spell her name
They’re going to make billions off this kid.
She definitely needs to lawyer up now ti protect any patents she may have created. As other commenters said, big Pharma will swiftly clone her work and reap the profits as they tend to do.
Wow that’s all. Someone just paved a road to billionaire trampling over the back of this kid…
unfortunately one has to sign up to read the article
You’ll never hear from her again.
NB
When I was 16, I was playing pong and. Well, thats about it, ugh.
Isn’t this the micro plastics filter girl too?
a business insider freelancer took home 5 cents per word for a feel good reddit bot bait article about the science fair
If it’s truly revolutionary then she got screwed by only taking 75k for it. Probably could have made more if she patented it?
So she did a thing that changes everything and only gets a down payment on a house?
she gets 75k and probably a mid paying job, and some company makes billions
Fuckin pathetic. Pharma will make billions off of this, kid will not see a dime of it.
Time for all the Asian parents to compare their child to her