From the time we are born, through our teens and until we are around 20 years old, the human body is steadily growing.
By the age of 20, hormones have triggered the growth plates to fuse shut, stopping our bones from growing.
That keeps us from getting taller, keeps our feet and our hands from getting bigger.
Even the brain is fully developed well into our twenties.
We stop growing because certain cells stop growing.
So, what if you applied that same idea to the fight against cancer?
And, what if you were only 14 years old?
My name is Joshua Meier. I'm 18 years old, and my research shows how we can harness the aging process to treat diseases.
Josh has accomplished more in the last four years than many people will in a lifetime.
It began his freshman year with an assignment from one of his teachers.
One of the wonderful things about working with young people, with regard to science, is that they aren't programmed.
So, when they come up with ideas, they're really, you know, sometimes completely idiotic and sometimes comically so. But, often they are profound.
And they are profound because you talk about thinking outside the box; they don't know there's a box.
They not only don't see it; they have no idea that it's there.
Josh had an idea. It was outside the box, but he didn't know that.
Josh only saw possibility. He was just 14 years old.
My father and sister are ob-gyns, and they're always talking about their work.
What they tried to get me excited with was cord blood stem cells, how you can take a cell and turn it into any other kind of cell.
I thought that was fascinating. So, I went home and I said, "I'm going to do stem cell research."
So, I start googling them and I see, oh, [there're] problems.
One of the problems was that they have rapid aging.
And I started to say, "Hey, why do they age? Why don't we just turn off the molecular properties that cause them to age?"
Well, it turns out nobody knows why they are aging.
So, I'm like, "OK, let's try and understand. Let's try and look at different theories."
He came up with the idea and Dr. P. said, "That's not gonna work."
And he did it anyway and he wrote out his hypothesis.
And he did not get a good grade on the first trial but he pursued, because Josh is very adamant in pursuing everything that he wants to do.
At school, Josh was able to work in the lab on his research.
His hypothesis about aging and stem cells was correct.
When an adult stem cell's created, it loses a third of its mitochondria.
That's the part of a cell that converts food to energy. It also contains DNA.
Losing the DNA weakens the stem cell and causes it to age rapidly.
Josh focused on controlling the amount of DNA deletions in the cell and was able to slow or even stop the cells from aging.
And with it he had another idea -- if you could stop the aging of stem cells, could you force other types of cells to age, like cancer cells?
While some people don't like aging, I started thinking about how we could use it for good reasons.
So, for instance, cancer is a disease where cells keep growing and growing and growing.
But, if we could age cancer and stop its growth, then that's a potential treatment.
Josh has successfully aged cancer cells in a petri dish. The next step will be testing his process in animals.
His work has won him awards and accolades from around the world.
It's hard work with long hours in the lab, not your typical high school experience.
He's very involved in all these things and he's very happy in what he's doing. He's working very hard.
He sleeps, like, two hours a night, but he never complains. And he's doing all these things, and that's what he enjoys.
Science and medicine are both fun and useful.
It's really great just to go in and learn new things and to ask your own questions, and to learn things that nobody else knew about.
But I always come home at night and [say] that it's not just that I had a good time with my friends, but that I also have produced something that can help people.