Scientist, 14, Has Earned Big Moment in Limelight
At first glance, Ray Bateman Jr. hardly seems the academic type. He wears Reeboks. He has a mouthful of braces. And his adolescent’s voice is in constant danger of cracking.
But on Oct. 7, Ray, 14, will take center stage at a New York City meeting of the American Federation of Clinical Research, a prestigious medical research society.
There, before a roomful of academic physicians more than twice his age, the computer whiz from Huntington Harbour will present a paper on a new method of chemotherapy that he researched along with his mentor and next-door neighbor, cancer specialist Dr. Glenn Tisman.
Although broader testing is needed to determine just how useful the method will be, Tisman said, it has proven effective at his private clinic in Whittier. He said the drug therapy has substantially reduced tumors in a number of his patients, and sent one man’s lung cancer into total remission.
But no matter how the new study is received, Tisman said, the bashful teen-ager is certain to cause a stir when he shows up to explain it at the New Jersey-based society’s Eastern regional conference.
“This is an unheard-of situation,” Dr. Youcef Rustum, deputy director of the Grace Cancer Drug Center at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., said of Ray’s scheduled appearance.
But Rustum, a noted cancer researcher, added that Ray and Tisman, 46, have developed “a very . . . important concept in cancer chemotherapy. . . . I think that’s potentially very useful.”
The new therapy involves a little-used drug, 5-Fluorodeoxyuridine (5-FUdR) in combination with another drug, Leucovorin, to kill cancer cells by inhibiting DNA replication. A similar drug, 5-Fluorouracil (or 5-FU), has been used in combination with Leucovorin to treat certain types of cancer since it was discovered a few years ago that Leucovorin increased 5-FU’s effectiveness. But Tisman said his research suggests that 5-FUdR may be even more effective than 5-FU, when used with Leucovorin.
No Minimum Age
Although the medical society is devoted to encouraging the work of young scientists, a spokeswoman for the organization said, the scientists are rarely younger than medical students. Still, the organization has no minimum age for those who can present papers. And its rules decree that if two authors submit a paper and one of them is older than 41, the senior author must defer to the younger one as the presenter.
But Tisman said he would have allowed the youth to present the paper in any case. After all, he said, it is only fitting recognition for a boy who, without having taken so much as basic chemistry, was able to get the experiment up and working, analyze the data and interpret the results in ways that had never even occurred to Tisman, who has been a cancer researcher for nearly 20 years.
Ray shrugs off the attention, as though the conference and the research project are to be expected of a boy who has known he wanted to be a doctor since kindergarten.
“When I was 2, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was 3, I wanted to be a fireman. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to be some type of doctor,” he said in a mocking tone he usually reserves for answering adults’ silly questions.
While Ray’s parents are not sure of his IQ, they and his teachers have known for years that he is smart.
Adults Often Mystified
He is so proficient at science, according to Jay DuVall, his eighth-grade science teacher, that adults often find it difficult to believe that the work he does is really his own. Sometimes, adults cannot understand the work themselves.
The story of how Tisman and Ray paired up goes back to the time Tisman got a sophisticated new stereo system that no one--including the technician who came to install it--could assemble. Ray, a friend of Tisman’s son, started working on it at 6 p.m.; 14 hours later, he had put the thing together.
It was only natural, then, that when Tisman got a new shipment of lab equipment that his own technicians could not assemble, he would turn to the teen-ager.
Tisman said he gave Ray a stack of manuals over the weekend. The following Monday, the boy was ready to put it all together.
The next step was learning how to use the equipment and to calibrate it for Tisman’s experiment. Ray did that too.
Recalls Own Youth
Thinking of how he would have liked some scientist to have taken him under his wing when he was a kid, Tisman invited Ray, who was then 13, to become the equivalent of a post-doctoral fellow at his lab. In the next eight months, the youth put in about 1,300 hours on the project.
By his own admission, the news that his son would speak at a medical conference sent Ray Bateman Sr. into “fantasy land.” Not long after that, it sent the retired, 62-year-old civil engineer in search of publicity for his child prodigy--”so he can go to the school of his choice.”
There is another reason for the father’s enthusiasm. For years, he said, his son felt misunderstood by teachers and peers alike. Until the boy was put into a program for gifted students at a local school, Bateman said, his son was convinced that he was stupid, and was so bored at school that he did poorly in his classes. In his frustration, the father said, his son became isolated from his peers, who in turn resented him for being so distant.
“He was a loner, oh boy, a real loner,” Bateman said. “It has been a very, very uphill battle to get Ray feeling as good about himself as he does now.” Bateman glanced at the room where his son was glued to his computer screen and said, “That’s where his self-esteem was born--by good, hard work.”
“We spare no expense to allow him to achieve his objectives,” Bateman said, gesturing at the $23,000 Macintosh II computer--complete with a laser printer; the $17,000 stereo system, and the few hundred dollars’ worth of medical textbooks his son has been reading and re-reading ever since he got involved in Tisman’s cancer research project.
“We’re trying to satisfy his drive,” Bateman added. “We just want to help him get there.”
