Cupertino high school student Angela Zhang may know the cure for cancer: As a freshman, she started reading doctoral-level papers on biological engineering. By her sophomore year in high school, she managed to convince Stanford University to let her use their laboratories, and by junior year, she began doing her own research that led her to develop a recipe that boggles even her chemistry teacher.
Zhang’s recipe won her a $100,000 award at a national science competition sponsored by Siemens.
Her method of curing cancer by aiming an infrared light at mutated cells killed cancer in mice; it will be a few more years before it can be determined if the method works in humans. Nevertheless, Zhang’s three years of research is considered a breakthrough. [CBS News]
