Bradenton teen named to Time's '30 People Under 30'
Published: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 6:55 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 6:55 p.m.
BRADENTON - When Brittany Wenger checked her Facebook page a couple of weeks ago, she doubted she would find any Earth-shattering news.
But she was shocked when one of her friends posted a Time Magazine article featuring Wenger's picture and a description of how she changed the world.
The 19-year-old college freshman was named one of Time Magazine's “30 People Under 30” who have impacted the world in almost every capacity: including in the health, technology, education and humanitarian fields.
Although she just graduated from the Out-of-Door Academy last year, Wenger invented a new way to test for breast cancer that has sent shockwaves of excitement throughout the cancer research community.
She remains surprisingly humble about her award.
“I was shocked,” the Bradenton teenager said. “I was up against college grads, and so many people doing amazing things. I can't believe that many people believed in the program.”
Wenger was honored for inventing a new procedure for diagnosing breast cancer that has proven to be 99 percent effective when identifying cancer cells.
The most accurate test used now, known as a “fine needle aspiration,” is an invasive biopsy that is used only at about five hospitals throughout the country. Sometimes it could not identify nearly 40 percent of samples.
Wenger's process differs from the “fine needle aspiration” in that it monitors complex brain activity instead of an unidentified mass.
It is able to detect subtle differences in normal cells and abnormal cells — changes that previously went unnoticed.
Her work already won her the 2012 Google Science Fair's Grand Prize and has earned her speaking spots with both breastcancer.org and soon with Britain's Royal Society of Medicine.
Cami Wenger said her daughter's unyielding curiosity helped to launch her career in science.
“She never grew out of the “why” phase,” Cami Wenger said. “She would ask why is the sky blue? Why does the wind blow? After a while her dad and I couldn't answer her questions.”
Nurturing science teachers ignited her love of research, and by the time she was a sophomore in high school, she was beginning work on her new breast cancer detection program.
She would set an alarm for every four hours when she wasn't at school, so she could check the slew of tests she set up to experiment with her process.
Now a freshman at Duke University, where she plans to double major in computer science and biology, Wenger is developing testing procedures for other cancers, like leukemia and ovarian cancer.
She said although there are fewer women in research labs than males, there is no reason a young woman should not give the field a try.
“There's nothing that says guys are better than women at science,” Wenger said. “Explore every field, because there are so many interesting things in science.”
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