Go med young man
Most of the people closest to me, coming up in the heart of the Baby Boom, gravitated toward careers in computing.
Our next door neighbor in Massapequa was an IBM lifer. The kid across the street, whom I admired like no one else, became one as well.
So many of my Rice classmates wound up as programmers, even my wife, no matter what their majors had been. I have enjoyed covering their adventures.
Since the collapse of the dot-bomb, however, IT has not been the career path of choice for young go-getters. Many have wasted megabytes bemoaning this fact. Our profession is aging.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Every generation has a big task before it. My grandparents' generation worked in aeronautics and radio. My parents' generation created TV and went to the moon. My generation has built the Internet.
The best advice I can give young people today is, go med young man. And young woman.
They don't have to hear that from me. They intuit it. My kids see computers as I saw TV, as a medium, a means to an end. And that end is not programming.
Instead it's medicine that is drawing their best efforts. That's easy to see when you look at the winners of this year's Siemens awards.
The big winner was a 17-year old who worked on antimicrobial coatings for medical equipment, a key weapon in the fight against MRSA. Wen Chyan of Denton, Texas deserves the college recruitment reserved for quarterbacks and point guards.
Chyan, whose high school is affiliated with the University of North Texas (from which I got this picture) created a polymer with embedded silver ions that is adhesive and can be used to coat catheters placed inside a patient.
Silver has long been known for its antiseptic properties. I wrote here about colloidal silver as a MRSA cure back in October, 2007.
Sajith M. Wickramasekara and Andrew Y. Guo of Durham, NC won the "team" prize for discovering new ways of identifying substances for chemotherapy, using genetics.
These are just the tip of a growing iceberg. Other winners in this year's Siemens contest worked on MRI technology, on gene structures, and on nanomechanics.
It's no accident.
Most of our great breakthroughs are made when we're young. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started as teenagers. Einstein was in his early 20s when he discovered relativity.
Idealism, energy, and drive are powerful forces. In a free society they save and renew the world. Liberty lets people go where their instinct says they are needed.
And you, young man or young woman, are needed in the medical field. Stat.