
Student invention grows hundreds of ‘mini-brains’ at once - chc2149
https://spectrumnews.org/news/student-invention-grows-hundreds-of-mini-brains-at-once/
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giarc
>“They [high school students] know more than we do about programming and 3D
printing, all that cool stuff,” he says. “They can make a design in a very
different way than how we were trained.”

I think this is an important statement. Kids tinkering in their basement have
knowledge to do great work, but are often overlooked because of their age or
education.

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jayhuang
This exactly.

Back when I first started taking client work, I had plenty of trouble securing
contracts because owners/execs saw a kid at the table, not someone who was
going to solve their problems for a respectable amount of money. This was
always the result of prospective clients insisting to have a video call/meet
prior to any work being done.

Quickly after, I strongly refused any situation that would give away my age.
I'd be lying to say I didn't receive a lot of opposition but when your chance
of securing a deal is sub 10% and tons more time wasted, it's easy to just
drop the prospect.

By now, my age is (for the most part), no longer a deal-killer, but I still
usually do the same thing unless they're referred by an existing client. It's
a huge timesaver.

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moron4hire
I don't mean to belittle what the kid has done. It's an actually amazing
accomplishment, for anyone of any age.

But it calls to question a problem. Is there a major issue with cross-
disciplinary collaboration within the medical and academic spaces? I would
think a mechanical or electrical engineer would consider this to be a fairly
trivial application of the tech, yet the medical community seems to be hailing
it as a ground-swell.

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FroshKiller
It may be, but I'm more concerned with the poor treatment the kid got
initially, getting ignored like that. Even if you didn't think he was serious,
would it have killed you to refer him to what you thought would have been a
more appropriate channel rather than ignoring him?

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moron4hire
I don't know. I think I understand the viewpoint. I get emailed by random
people all the time. I usually reply to them, and try to be encouraging,
unless I'm super harried and it just slips through the cracks. But, as far as
I can tell, none of them have really turned into anything. Usually, they end
up ignoring _my_ email. There's been dozens over the years and it probably
would have been a better use of my time to ignore them.

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koluft
Could you send a form letter inviting them to verify that they are serious?

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mbrundle
Earlier this year, someone from Reddit asked me for advice on classifying some
tricky medical image data (CT/MRI/SPECT of healthy vs Parkinson's patients),
an area somewhat related to my PhD research. The guy was very knowledgable and
had already made a lot of progress. I asked him which lab he was doing his
thesis in. He replied to say he was a high school student.

I'm seriously impressed with what these students are capable of these days.

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Aelinsaar
That's... amazing. He just took something from the artisinal to mass
production stage so quickly! I wonder how many applications like this will
emerge in the next decade, that no one has even considered?

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deegles
>"But unencumbered by the constraints of a doctoral thesis, high school
students have the time and energy to innovate"

Does that seem sad? Maybe doctoral programs should include a year of lab-time
after your thesis so you can work on innovative projects.

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abc_lisper
Is this ethical. I know there are other people who are growing mini(should
call them micro, by their size) brains, but considering the fights against
abortion in US, I wonder if law makers approve of this.

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patall
Well, its just another example why the eSC = human argumentation is BS. A
human is a fully developed nervous system, not some cells. Given some vectors,
we could create iPS from pretty much any body cell and then probably a human
from that (if we had a sufficient bioreactor). You can also let them divide,
seperate them and now you have 2 - (some big number) humans. Cells or organs
are no humans. People that think that cells are the same as a grown human may
have a ethical problem here, but honestly, thats their problem.

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koluft
>“My thought was, okay, let’s just wait. If he is serious, he’s going to ask
me again,” says Song, professor of neurology

This is a horribly destructive attitude, that promotes salesmanship over
technical talent.

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patall
I totally agree (and at the same time assume that just the story he tell now,
he probably just ignored it because he gets hundreds of emails a day. When he
got the third he may have thought: I should say something before he spams me
the whole day). Its a typical strategy that works as long as not everyone is
doing it.

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fapjacks
And they're certainly going to be doing it now!

