Heman Bekele was inspired by Ethiopian workers laboring under the sun, and wanted to help ‘as many people as possible’
A middle-school teen has been named “America’s top young scientist” after developing a bar of soap that could be useful in the treatment of melanoma, a skin cancer that is diagnosed in about 100,000 people in the US each year and kills approximately 8,000.
Considering I know someone, personally, who also made a scientific advancement at a young age, yes, it is possible.
They taught themselves python, then how to inference and train machine learning models, then used image recognition models to detect their sister’s illness, which had visual signs.
They had to get help from someone with a phd to test this on a larger scale, cuz resources, but I absolutely believe a middle/high schooler could do it.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/del-norte-high-school-seniors-invention-could-save-thousands-of-lives/3159354/
It’s not that phd’s are incapable of doing it, it’s simply that they never bothered taking a crack at this problem, using this method.