🇺🇸 Nathan Han

The award

The Society for Science lists Han as the 2014 Gordon E. Moore Award winner, with $75,000, for 'Characteristics of Deleterious Mutations in Tumor Suppressor Genes'. The award goes to one project judged best across the whole fair.

He was 15. That is young for the top of ISEF, where the winning entries usually come from students in their final year or two of high school, and it made his the youngest first prize of the years covered on this page.

The scale of the field is the other half of the claim. More than 1,700 finalists were in Los Angeles that week, every one of them already the winner of an affiliated fair somewhere in more than 70 countries, regions and territories. The Moore Award is what a cross-disciplinary panel names best among all of them.

What the title describes

Tumor suppressor genes are the genes whose normal function restrains cell growth; when they are disabled by mutation, that restraint is lost. The practical difficulty in genetics is that most observed mutations are harmless, and telling those apart from the damaging ones — the deleterious ones in the title — is a standing problem.

The project title says that Han examined the characteristics that distinguish them. The source publishes no abstract, so the dataset, the method and the findings are not documented here, and this page does not describe them.

The 2014 fair

Intel ISEF 2014 ran from 11 to 16 May at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Society for Science records more than 1,700 young scientists, selected from 435 affiliated fairs in more than 70 countries, regions and territories.

More than 500 finalists received awards and prizes, including 17 Best of Category winners at $5,000 each. The Intel Foundation added $1,000 grants to each winner's school and affiliated fair.

The other 2014 winners

Two Intel Foundation Young Scientist Awards of $50,000 were given. One went to Lennart Kleinwort, 15, of Würzburg, Germany, for dynamic mathematics software for smartphones and tablets.

The other went to Shannon Winjing Lee, 17, of Singapore, for nature-derived carbon microsheets as an efficient electrocatalyst for energy storage. Two of the three top winners that year were 15 years old.

What is documented — and what is not

The listing gives his name, age, home city, the award, its value and the project title. It names no school, no mentor and no laboratory, and publishes no abstract.

It also stops at the fair. No source used here reports where Han studied afterwards, whether the mutation work was published in a journal, or what he does now. His birth year is inferred from being 15 in May 2014 and is approximate.

Computational biology at high school

Work on mutation classification is typically computational: it uses published genomic databases rather than a laboratory bench, which is part of why students can enter the field at all. A laptop and access to public data can support a genuine analysis.

That is a general point about the discipline, not a description of Han's method, which the source does not give. What the record establishes is the judgement: a cross-disciplinary panel ranked his entry first among more than 1,700.

It is also worth noting what the award is not. It is not peer review, and it is not a clinical finding. It is the considered judgement of a large panel of doctorate-level judges, made over several days of interviews on the convention centre floor.