The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Jan smiles broadly as she shakes her head. “Taylor, do you ever go to classes here? How are your grades?”

  “All A’s,” Taylor says, fibbing.

  “Why don’t you bring us up to speed?” Jan says. “What have you got going with your projects?”

  “Okay, first, with my two front-burner ideas, I’ve retracted my Homeland Security proposal because I want to refine the engineering details. In addition to detecting nuclear weapons and conventional explosives, I’ve thought of a way to set it up to discover chemical weapons too, by using nuclear fluorescence.”

  Taylor says he’s also been offered funding from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy to further his research into portable Cherenkov weapons detectors.

  “What kind of detectors?” Jan asks.

  “You’re not gonna get it,” Bob tells Jan. “I don’t get it. The main thing is that the patent office gets it.”

  “And the new application?” Jan asks.

  “I’ve got an idea for designing a specialized particle accelerator that could revolutionize the production of diagnostic pharmaceuticals, at one-thirtieth the cost and one-tenth the floor space. I’ve just been invited to the National Center for Nuclear Security to do proof-of-concept tests on their dense plasma focus device.”

  “But first,” Harsin interjects, smiling, “you should probably finish your homework.”

  Jan Davidson looks at her husband and raises an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know,” she says, dead serious. “Maybe not.”

  Then Taylor’s phone rings. And Taylor, in a meeting with his wealthy benefactors, the founders of a school in which cell phones are not even supposed to be turned on, pulls his phone out of his pocket and . . . answers the call.

  “Hi, Sofia,” he says. “I’m in an important meeting right now. Can I call you back?”

  I look at Bob Davidson, and I can see that he’s looking at Taylor—not with annoyance but with admiration. He turns to me and grins, shaking his head in astonishment. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, his eyes say. Can you believe this kid?

  At the school cafeteria, Taylor has abandoned Sofia and Ikya at their usual lunch spot; he’s now eating lunch with Shelly. At home, Taylor is driving everyone crazy. Plenty of teenagers go through narcissistic phases, but Taylor takes it to extremes, talking over everyone, demanding to control the TV remote, not bothering to lift a finger around the house (not that Tiffany and Kenneth have ever been sticklers for their kids doing chores). That Saturday afternoon we gather in the family living room to watch the CNN Next List special on Taylor, which was taped several weeks earlier.

  As Taylor watches the show, he looks completely starstruck—with himself.

  “He’s gotten addicted to the spotlight,” Phaneuf told me a couple of days earlier. “And he’s started embellishing, telling the media things like he built the reactor in his garage for two hundred dollars. It wasn’t built in his garage. You can’t do that. And that turbo pump alone cost twelve thousand dollars, even though that’s not what he paid for it. I don’t know why he’s doing that, but I keep telling him, ‘Please don’t say things like that, because people who are scientifically knowledgeable will discredit you if they hear it.’”

  “Sometimes,” says Dona Matthews, “by indulging that superficial showman thing, supersmart kids learn really well that if they keep up the demands, they will be met. We create a sense of entitlement and a narcissistic tendency that don’t serve them well in the long run. That overconfidence, that showman thing will inevitably get challenged. If his identity is wrapped up in being a whiz kid, being anything less is going to be a blow.”

  Another all-too-common scenario, says Matthews, “is that the kind of energy he has been putting into science and developing just one part of himself, he’s not putting into self-awareness, all of the social/emotional challenges and tasks.” The adolescent years are where the consequences start to be felt, she says; sometimes these former child prodigies take a long time, even into their thirties, to catch up emotionally and socially.

  “My worry,” says Brinsmead, “is it could have an unhappy ending. What happens when everything he does doesn’t succeed? Some burn out; they’re so intense so young, then they get to be twenty and they’re hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.”

  Then again, Taylor’s successes were a relatively recent thing. He’d had plenty of early failures; maybe they would gird him against the downfall that so many people were worried about.

  “Maybe so,” Brinsmead says. “But right now he’s headstrong, and he’s playing games with people. It may be just a phase, and he’ll get through it. But right now, I just feel sorry for his parents, and Joey.”

  I had already confided to Tiffany and Kenneth, who looked exhausted, that I was beginning to worry that I’d helped to create a monster.

  “I think he’ll get through this,” Tiffany says. “But honestly, Tom, we just want it to be over. We’re ready for him to move on so we can concentrate on Joey.”

  Taylor, as a high-school student, had already done things that would be the envy of most PhDs. Everywhere he turned, someone was calling him a genius or an Einstein. But Taylor wasn’t ready to be an Einstein. And as those closest to him watched his celebrity status grow, they saw the traits that had brought him this far—his passion and curiosity, his exuberance and confidence—devolving into hubris. Taylor’s arrogance and narcissism were having corrosive effects—on himself and everyone around him.

  The lesson of the Icarus myth came to mind—how could it not? But Icarus’s story wasn’t a perfect fit. After all, Icarus hadn’t put the sun in a box.

  28

  * * *

  The Super Bowl of Science

  THEN IT ALL fell apart.

  “I wrote her a note every night for five months,” Taylor says. “But I found out it wasn’t Shelly’s parents who were making the choice for her not to date me after all. It was her.”

  It was hard, at first, for Taylor to understand why he didn’t have the right stuff. He had won the top award in high-school science. He had met, and wowed, the president of the United States and the CEO of Intel. He had a Nobel laureate begging him to come to Harvard, investors begging to fund his company, and Hollywood producers begging to make a movie about him. He’d been on TV and in the magazines and newspapers that were framed on the school’s walls.

  At a school for academic superstars, Taylor was the closest thing there was to a star quarterback. Why didn’t she like him?

  As it turned out—and this Taylor had to learn from the grapevine—Shelly was just as impressed as everyone else with Taylor’s accomplishments. What turned her off was the way he was treating people.

  Taylor doesn’t mention that part when he tells the story to his half sister, Ashlee, and her friend Natalia over dinner one night in Beverly Hills. (Ashlee was then working at a nearby talent agency.)

  “It’s hard to believe that girl wouldn’t go for you,” Ashlee says.

  She turns to Natalia. “Can you believe he’s still in high school, and he’s fighting cancer? And nuclear terrorism—”

  “And the emergent shortage of rare-earth minerals,” Taylor chimes in. “And next I’m thinking about exploring a possible cure for HIV that would shatter the virus using actinium-225, an isotope that emits alpha particles.”

  “Taylor,” Ashlee says, setting down her fork. “Can you maybe just explain that to me without the word alpha in it?”

  Before he has a chance to answer, Ashlee turns again to Natalia. “Can you believe this guy’s my brother?”

  Then, to Taylor: “Why didn’t that girl want to go out with you? Was she crazy?”

  “It’s complicated. But anyway,” Taylor says, aware of the melodrama, “I decided to drown my sorrows in science.”

  The HIV research would come later. Now, in his senior year in high school, Taylor was ready to take on what would prove to be his toughest challenge yet, bringing to fruition the id
ea that he’d had when his grandmother was dying. He would take the next step toward becoming the world-changing scientist that his eleven-year-old self had imagined. That image of his future self had inspired him and energized him. It had drawn him forward through the years, over and around obstacles, toward the solution he now saw in front of him. Taylor was ready, finally, to develop his nuclear fusion–generated medical isotopes.

  In the United States each year, more than twenty million people get nuclear medicine procedures, which are part of the diagnosis or treatment of about a third of all hospital patients. Most medical isotopes are used as tracers or radioactive dyes. A tiny amount of radioactive material is injected into the body; it binds to specific tissue and emits gamma rays that are detected by special cameras, giving doctors a dynamic picture of what’s going on inside bones, hearts, and other tissue.

  Going back to Taylor’s sixth-grade explanation of technetium and cesium, most medical isotopes have short half-lives, so they can do their job and then fade away before they damage the body. Since these delicate isotopes can’t be stockpiled, doctors and patients depend on a just-in-time delivery system. Once the irradiated material comes out of a cyclotron or a reactor, such as Canada’s Chalk River complex (which Taylor would tour later that year, after keynoting the Canadian Nuclear Association’s annual conference), technicians work all night to process and purify batches. Then they race them, at 6:00 a.m., to waiting jets. With no time to waste, the final quality-control tests are conducted as the planes are flying to pharmaceutical companies in distant cities. Nuclear pharmacists like David Boudreaux then assemble generators and, as Taylor pointed out in his sixth-grade talk, “milk the cow.” By 5:00 p.m., the finished and precisely calibrated products are delivered to medical facilities.

  The use of nuclear medicine is growing around the world, but the supply of radioactive isotopes is increasingly fragile, and a looming shortage has specialists worried. The Chalk River reactor will shut down in 2016, and when it does, up to 40 percent of the world’s isotope supply will vanish, with no alternative supplier geared up to fill the void. The pending shutdown has triggered flashbacks to a crisis in 2009 and 2010, when two major producers—in Canada and the Netherlands—shut down for repairs, resulting in a worldwide shortage that left patients undiagnosed and studies unfinished.

  Taylor’s childhood brainstorm during the dark days just before his grandmother’s death had triggered his intense interest in nuclear fusion and led to so much more. Over the past six years he’d become even more convinced that nuclear fusion was the best and most efficient way to produce the isotopes. But he’d also realized that his fusor could never produce neutrons with the precision and focus needed for this application.

  And so Taylor began pursuing a very different technology, known as dense plasma focus. He started to design and build a machine that could create a compressed, short-lived plasma hot and dense enough to generate a nuclear fusion reaction that could produce medical isotopes by hitting materials with five-million-volt ion beams. These sorts of energies had previously been available to medical-isotope makers only in multimillion-dollar cyclotron or linear accelerator facilities requiring large amounts of space and shielding.

  He spent the next few months experimenting in Phaneuf’s lab, designing, building, testing, and rebuilding. “I made three or four major iterations of the machine and dozens of minor modifications,” Taylor says.

  Via calculations and trial and error, he tweaked and retweaked the gas mix (deuterium, helium-3, and hydrogen) and pressure, the electrode design and layout, and the electrical network to create pulses of exactly the right shape and duration.

  Taylor threw everything he had into it, consulting often with Brinsmead and Phaneuf. The project consumed him for nearly a year as he worked on one physics and engineering problem after another. In the end, he perfected a way to capitalize on the instabilities of the ultra-dense plasma to produce extremely energetic ion beams that could activate materials and transmute them into medical isotopes.

  “The trickery,” he’d told Ashlee over dinner in Los Angeles, “is pinching the plasma.”

  Taylor’s proof-of-concept experiments demonstrated the viability of a hundred-thousand-dollar tabletop nuclear fusion device that could produce medical isotopes as precisely as the multimillion-dollar cyclotron or linear accelerator facilities could. What’s more, it could produce both the short-lived positron emitters (SLPEs) used in PET imaging as well as molybdenum-99, the parent isotope of technetium-99m, the workhorse isotope in diagnostic imaging that’s used in about two-thirds of all nuclear medicine procedures.

  Taylor titled his ISEF entry A Novel Process for the Production of Medically Relevant Radioisotopes. It was a complex and meticulously documented project with a dense, jargon-heavy description. But behind the science, the experience was intensely emotional for Taylor. He’d finally achieved his eleven-year-old self’s dream of designing a machine small enough, cheap enough, and safe enough to potentially make medical isotopes at nearly every electrified hospital on earth. But as ISEF approached, in Pittsburgh that year, he felt something he’d never felt before: a fear of failure.

  As Taylor focused on his isotopes project, the senior class at Davidson was abuzz with talk of college applications, calls from recruiters, and odds-making on chances of admission to both top universities and smaller, more specialized colleges. But Taylor, who was more sought after than perhaps any other student at the academy, was feeling ever more ambivalent about college.

  “I’m just not sure about what I’d get out of it,” he told me. “I was giving a talk and a PhD student came up to me after and said, ‘I mean, what are you going to do after all this, go to college?’ When I thought about it, it did seem kind of absurd. Even if I was able to skip undergrad and go right into a nuclear engineering PhD program, it was hard to imagine I’d have the flexibility to do the kinds of experiments I wanted to do. And in the laboratory, I was on a roll; I was discovering some pretty exciting things on the science side of things.”

  Still, Taylor filled out some applications—to Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Texas A&M, the University of Tennessee—“but honestly, I did it halfheartedly, especially the essays.” Sometimes he’d even forget to have his test scores or his Davidson Academy transcripts sent.

  He’d seen advanced academia, and it didn’t look like he’d have a lot of leeway to do the sorts of things he wanted to. Gates and Jobs had dropped out. For ambitious entrepreneurs, maybe college just wasn’t the place to be.

  What Taylor really wanted to do was experiment and invent. But he wasn’t sure what sort of situation would give him the flexibility to do that. Maybe he could start a company so that he could do science on his own terms and produce and sell his patented inventions. Inquiries from venture capitalists had been coming his way since he and his accomplishments came into the national spotlight.

  One of those venture capitalists was Peter Thiel, who made his first fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, then made early investments in Facebook, Spotify, Yelp, and other Internet and tech high-fliers. In 2011, he began awarding Thiel Fellowships annually to twenty “uniquely brilliant” people under the age of twenty. Under the terms of the competitive fellowships, the notoriously contrarian, hyper-libertarian investor pays each fellow a hundred thousand dollars a year for two years to stay out of college.

  Thiel has argued that some career paths, such as entrepreneurship, don’t benefit from higher education and that the pressure young people feel to go to college is holding back innovation. He says he hopes his fellowships will encourage young people to pursue radical innovation that will benefit society. Thiel, who predicted the bursting of both the tech and the housing bubbles, says that what he calls “the education bubble” will be the next to burst. The one trillion dollars that Americans have accumulated in student debt has gone, he says, “to pay for lies that people tell about how great the education they received was.”

  Taylor and his parents sought advice—and
were surprised that most of the educators were supportive of Taylor’s pursuing a Thiel anti-education fellowship.

  “A college degree is great,” Bob Davidson told Kenneth. “But do you really think Taylor needs to go to college? It didn’t suit Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. Most people wouldn’t imagine that going to Stanford or MIT would be a limiting experience. But it might be with Taylor. I don’t want kids to be limited; I want them to fly.”

  George Ochs said that people like Taylor can get lost in education. “He could be at a university gathering information from others, year after year, always gaining knowledge, never using it. A Thiel Fellowship would allow him to explore all aspects of research.”

  But others, including Stephen Younger and Ron Phaneuf, urged Taylor not to forgo a well-rounded education. “Being exposed to a lot of different people and ideas can be a great multiplier and a growth experience,” Phaneuf told him.

  Whatever Taylor’s choices for higher education, there was no question that he had thrived at Davidson. But increasingly, Joey was struggling. Joey had made a few very good friends at Davidson, but he still missed his old friends back in Texarkana. Academically, he’d at first excelled under Davidson Academy’s agenda of letting kids fly in pursuit of their highly focused passions. What had been good for Taylor was, at first, good for Joey too. In UNR’s high-level math classes, Joey could stretch his interests as far as he wanted.

  But then Davidson itself began to change. Whereas the original intent was to let students pursue their passions “without putting limits on them,” as Bob Davidson put it, the academy was beefing up its college-counseling services and begining to put more focus on a broader, but perhaps blander, education. The shift came partly from parents; they could see that graduating seniors who had been encouraged to pursue their chosen single-minded goals during the academy’s first half-decade weren’t getting into Ivy League and other top-tier universities—which was a priority for many of the more ambitious parents, especially the growing number of those who were first- or second-generation immigrants.