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Hello everyone! I'm Francis Collins, I'm the Director of the National Institutes of Health
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and I'm delighted to be here with Jack Andraka.
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Andraka: So I'm Jack Andraka. I'm a sophomore. And I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
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Collins: So how did you come up with a project? And what was that project?
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Andraka: Essentially what I've created was a new way to detect pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer
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that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. And it's 100% accurate so far in clinical studies
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and then also it can detect the cancer in earlier stages when someone has close to a 100% chance of survival.
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Collins: Clearly you had to do a lot of searching then through science, what people had worked on,
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what experiments they'd done, what publications were there. So you were sitting at your computer
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or were you going to a library? How did you get access?
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Andraka: How I got access was with Google. Essentially I would just google, like, some key words and
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go to a publication. And then sometimes it wasn't really about the content of the publication,
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it was more about the references in it. And then I would look at all of those and look through those.
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But that was actually really hard because I hit a lot of paywalls: Like if you have to pay $40 per article.
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And unfortunately I couldn't, like, shell out a lot of that. So instead I would have to, like, kind of cheat
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and copy the article title back into Google and then look for PDF versions. A lot of the times
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I actually found them on the NIH PubMed site, so...
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Collins: Aha! So you used PubMed a fair amount? Andraka: Oh yes, I spent hours on PubMed!
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Collins: Where there some things you couldn't even get to even with your workaround? Where there things
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that weren't in PubMed?
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Andraka: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. There was a lot of articles that the abstracts weren't even
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published for, so what would be a lot better is if we would be able to have all of these access.
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And that's really important because I'm not a unique case. There are millions of people like me.
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And so if you can just go on Google and Wikipedia and find these amazing articles, we could
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have this great innovation, but these paywalls are stopping us!
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Collins: I agree with you. So NIH has tried to sort of take a lead in this situation,
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and now I gather PubMed gets about 830,000 people hitting on it every day and downloading
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from PubMed about 1.6 million articles. Not just the abstract but the whole article.
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I'm telling you how much interest there is out there to use this information.
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At the moment, we have a deal that anybody who is funded by NIH who publishes a paper,
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that paper has to be available in twelve months, so that anybody can see it.
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I think the goal that we all want to see is that this is really purely Open Access.
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There are some challenges in getting there and not everybody agrees about this,
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not every funding agency across the world has followed our lead. But it's making such a difference.
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Andraka: So what do you think about Obama's new Executive Order on Open Access?
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Collins: I think it's great! I think the President by making this a real priority
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at the highest level of the administration is saying this matters. He's very much into science,
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our President. Clearly, if anybody cares about science, the idea of having Open Access is going
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to be crucial to the future. So for him to say, "OK, this needs to be done across Government,
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not just here and there", is a very signal moment. This is basically crowdsourcing science.
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And that's a really powerful concept. The idea that we could make progress in sort of
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a closed shop. Yeah, we make progress that way. But to open that up to the vastness
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of human creativity and inspiration by Open Access, that's how we are going to really turbocharge this
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effort to come up with answers.
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Andraka: So Open Access if kind of like, opening the playing field from only like, maybe a few
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hundred thousand people to millions and millions of people in this field of research.
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Collins: Essentially. Maybe even billions. Maybe the whole world.
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Andraka: That's super exciting.