Breakthrough (5 page)

After hugging my mom and dad, I couldn't wait to call Uncle Ted and tell him the news. I grabbed my mom's flip phone.

“Uncle Ted, guess what?” I said.

“What? How did you do?”

“I won,” I said.

“That's great. Which category?”

“The whole thing. First place overall!”

He was blown away.

“Congrats, Jack! That's amazing,” he said. “We need to celebrate!”

As a reward, he took me on his boat for a day of sailing around on the Chesapeake. I thought that was even better than the laptop the school awarded me for winning. I brought Jake and Sam along with me and made it a party. It was a beautiful day. As we cruised all around the bay, we waved to other boats passing by while we took turns steering.

I'd be back on the boat before long. As sixth grade came to a triumphant end, crab season was just beginning. Even though I was older, I still set my alarm and stared out the window, feeling the same childlike excitement when I saw Uncle Ted's beat-up car will itself down my driveway.

However, this year, I noticed that something was different. As we went through our familiar routine of dumping and pulling up the traps, instead of an abundance of crabs, there were only a handful.

“What's happening?” I asked. “Where are all the crabs?”

“The crabs are dying because there is more pollution in the water,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

One of Uncle Ted's favorite topics of conversation was the water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. In his job as a water-quality specialist, he knew firsthand the devastating effect pollution could have on the fragile marine life and talked for hours about what could be done to prevent it.

“The pollution comes from a lot of different places,” he said. “There is a new industrial plant in Baltimore, and I think some of it comes from that. A lot of it is just runoff from people's houses.”

I still didn't understand and wanted to know more.

“When people put a lot of fertilizer in their yards to make their grass green and their flowers grow, the runoff goes into the water and makes algae grow in the bay,” he said.

I was confused. I thought algae was good.

“How does algae kill crabs?” I asked.

Even though I was just a kid, he spoke to me about his ideas like I was his equal. He just assumed I understood what he was saying, knowing that I would ask questions if I didn't. I always thought that
must have been one of the reasons his words stuck to the insides of my brain like they did.

“The algae can block out the sunlight and sometimes leave the oxygen level too low to support marine life like crabs,” he said.

It was the first time I had ever considered the problem, and I was fascinated. I began to connect all these different thoughts in my head: the pollution in the Chesapeake Bay has a chain reaction that extended way beyond the water, into almost every aspect of the surrounding ecosystem. As he explained, I could see his words turn into pictures. The pollution that soaks into the water. The fish that soak in the pollution. The people that eat the fish. He ended his story about pollution the same way he ended all his stories, by shaking his head and adding—“There has to be a better way.”

We were eventually able to gather enough crabs for our annual crabbing feast. I was looking forward to the rest of summer vacation when my mom had another bright idea: flying me to Colorado Springs to attend a math camp.

I was skeptical that this was a worthwhile investment of my precious summer vacation. A math camp? I mean, it was literally called math camp.

The first day of camp felt like the first day at a new school. A lot of the kids knew each other because they had gone the previous year. I didn't know anyone. On the bus ride that took us from the airport to the camp site, I sat quietly by myself.

That's when an older girl came up to me and introduced herself.

“Hi, I'm Katherine, where are you from?”

“Maryland,” I replied meekly.

Katherine took me under her wing immediately. She was an eighth grader and she acted like a big sister. I'd never had a big sister before, and I liked how she showed me around and introduced me to the people she knew.

Not only did I make a great friend, but I was wrong about the camp. It was so much more than math. Imagine an extended thirty-day sleepover with a group of really cool people. We played lots of card games and watched movies. Even the sports there were fun; we had intense Ultimate Frisbee and soccer matches. In the evenings we played round after round of Truth or Dare. Despite my awkward experience with Logan at the beginning of the year, I remained a dare guy. I also learned how to do origami. Folding paper into intricate shapes became a great way for me to relax and allow my ideas to come to me. At the end of each camp day, Katherine and I found a large sofa in the recreation room, where the big television was, and we curled up and watched
America's Next Top Model
together.

When we did focus on math, it was challenge after challenge. The other campers were smart, and often we became embroiled in mathematical discussions during lectures or in breakout sections about the problems we were solving. We debated about whether math was created or discovered, shared tricks for solving complex
equations, and examined different approaches to the same problems. I was actually sad when camp ended, and I decided I wanted to go back next year.

After returning home, I discovered two furry additions had been made to the Andraka family. My mom had surprised Luke and me with our very own ferrets. I named mine Ginny Weasley, after the Harry Potter character, and Luke named his Phaedrus, after the ancient Greek philosopher who once said, “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.” Ferrets make great pets. They are affectionate and smart, and they sleep all the time. Ginny Weasley loved to curl up on my shoulder and take a nap as I read.

They didn't bother Casey, our golden retriever. They arched their backs and hopped around, goading him to play. Casey stared at them in amusement but generally didn't pay much attention.

I spent what was left of the summer in my basement working on more experiments. The more time I spent in the basement, the more complex my experiments became.

One day, I ordered a bunch of organic molecules including nitrogen off the internet so I could produce a catalyst for breaking down organic chemicals. It was the first time I started doping titanium dioxide with nitrogen groups. I just wanted to see what would happen. What I didn't realize at the time was that some of the chemicals I was buying were also used to make extremely dangerous explosives.
The FBI somehow had access to my purchase history and sent a curt letter to my house letting me know that I was being watched. My mom and dad were not amused. Not even a little. I couldn't help but notice that from that point forward they began to stay farther and farther away from the basement.

Sometimes the experiments I intended to create at the beginning turned into ones I didn't expect. One night I was up late mixing nanoparticles in a breakfast bowl in my kitchen. When I got tired, I went to bed, leaving the bowl out on the counter. The next morning, I woke up and saw my twelve-year-old cousin Allen in the kitchen.

“Hey, I forgot you were coming,” I said.

He looked up and waved, too busy to give a proper greeting, since he was plowing spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth. I noticed something familiar about his bowl. My morning brain slowly made the connection.

My experiment!

I looked around the counter for my nanoparticles. They were gone. I looked back at my cousin. He had poured his milk and cereal into my experiment bowl and was slurping up the nanoparticles, which look like white powdery sugar.

“Dude, stop eating that!” I yelled.

He looked up, nanoparticle-infused milk dripping from his mouth.

“You're eating my science experiment!”

He spit out the cereal and ran to the bathroom.

Since that day, I joke around, telling him that he's my walking science experiment and I'm closely monitoring him, chronicling the results each time he visits.

With one week left of vacation before seventh grade, I got terrible news. My two best friends, Jake and Sam, were both moving out of state. It was a rough blow, but I tried to stay positive. After all, making new friends at math camp hadn't been too hard. Plus, I was coming off a first-place victory in my first science fair. That should earn me some new friends, I thought.

However, another, even more disruptive change was going on inside me. When seventh grade started, a lot of the guys at school couldn't help but notice how much the girls had matured over the summer. No matter how hard I had tried to ignore my feelings, it was becoming even more obvious that I wasn't into girls.

One day I found myself daydreaming about a male classmate.
He's cute
, I thought to myself. Sometimes I laughed a little too long at a boy's joke, or spaced out in class, thinking about boys. As seventh grade went on, these feelings and thoughts of attraction were becoming more and more difficult to block out. They were happening all the time.

What is going on with me?

Despite the obvious signs, I wasn't really sure, or ready to confront, what it all meant. I didn't know how people would react, but
I had a sinking feeling it wouldn't be good. I took my feelings and I locked them deep in a vault, and I did my very best to forget about them entirely.

I stayed focused on science. That was something that made complete sense to me. What I love most about science is how it allows me to peek into a different world, taking me to a deeper place, behind the seemingly random colors and shapes all around us, to a reality of rules and principles, a destination where the more I learn and the more layers I pull back, the closer I can come to unlocking the secret behind every problem or mystery in the universe. In science, contradictions don't exist. Every action has a cause and every problem has an answer, if only I can inspire myself enough to find it. I felt like there was no limit to what I could accomplish.

I could tell I was getting better at it too. My confidence was growing. My mind felt like a powerful weapon I could set loose on any problem.

When one of my favorite beaches was closed due to pollution, I saw how local officials had to lug all this expensive equipment to find out what was going on in the water. Not only were the tests expensive, but the equipment wasn't always readily available.

Fresh in my mind was my conversation about crabbing with Uncle Ted and how the pollution in the Chesapeake Bay had killed off so many of the crabs.

There has to be a better way.

Based on everything I had learned studying creeks, I thought I could come up with a solution. I had a feeling that a better indicator of pollution might be found in how bioluminescent organisms, those tiny organisms that emit light, react to contaminants. I began culturing bioluminescent bacteria in the only room in the house that had no windows—the bathroom. After a few weeks, I had so many glowing organisms in there that my mom could read a book without turning the lights on.

By exposing the different organisms to various levels of contaminants, I was able to show that the more pollution the bioluminescent organisms took up, the duller their light became. I had decided to name this year's school project “A Bright Detective: Can Vibrio Fischeri Detect Bioavailable Water Pollutants in the Stony Creek Watershed?” Now that I had a year of experience under my belt, I felt confident that I could have another good showing at my school's science fair, and I did. For the second straight year, I came away with first overall at the Anne Arundel County Regional Science and Engineering Fair.

Two years in a row I had won a major award. In the heavily competitive world of science fairs, I was fast earning a reputation as someone to keep an eye out for.

While I was working on better ways to detect pollution, Luke, who was now a freshman in high school and was still in the science fair game, was also knee-deep in water. His project was genius. It examined acid mine drainage's negative effects on the environment and wildlife and was able to come up with a real-world solution. It was his best project yet.

My seventh-grade science fair presentation, “A Bright Detective: Can Vibrio Fischeri Detect Bioavailable Water Pollutants in the Stony Creek Watershed?”

Luke had designed a cell that allowed him to test four different variables. Given those variables, he was able to create the perfect cell for any stream according to its specific parameters. Not only did it have the potential to change the way we treat the pollution in these streams and save millions of gallons of fresh drinking water, but it was also much easier to implement than the current limestone techniques because his method required less cost and manpower.

Luke titled his project “Electrochemical Remediation of AMD—A Solution to Acid Mine Pollution?”