Between his mom's place in Manhattan, his dad in Queens, and his high school in the Bronx, Noah Getz is on the subway a lot. It gives him time to read

This High Schooler Created a Drug Discovery Search Engine

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2021-06-12 22:30:03

Between his mom's place in Manhattan, his dad in Queens, and his high school in the Bronx, Noah Getz is on the subway a lot. It gives him time to read and to think.

Our first coronavirus summer was waning, and he'd been wrestling with a weighty science problem: using machine learning to hunt down tiny molecules that may help treat Alzheimer's. Thus far, his AI had been spitting out results that were "almost comically bad."

The problem was that the algorithms Getz was using did their best when they had massive amounts of data to sift through and discover patterns in. Getz' data set was far smaller; he was working with one lab at Mount Sinai, not a multinational pharmaceutical company with a galaxy-sized drug library.

"It (was) easier for it to assume nothing worked at all than for it to learn any trends," he says. Subscribe to Freethink for more stories like this. Email Subscribe

Since starting work at the Mount Sinai lab of Charles Mobbs in 2019, the summer before his junior year at Bronx High School of Science, Getz had been on a personal mission. On both sides of his family, he'd seen what Alzheimer's can do, and he'd reached out to just about every lab in the city looking for a place he could help.