Thinking Boldly at 18

Geoffery Gagnon:

When he was 14, Wilson built a nuclear-fusion reactor. Then, a bomb-sniffing device that impressed even the president. Now 18, the prodigy is skipping college and using a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to try to crack the riddle of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion--a feat that plenty consider impossible.

I was about 10 when I got into nuclear science. That was when that spark hit me. It took a few years of research, but when I was 14, I produced my first nuclear-fusion reaction.

Since then, the areas where I've made a lot of innovation are counterterrorism and nuclear medicine. I've been focused on detecting nuclear terrorism at ports, in cargo containers, and I developed and built detectors that are extremely cheap and also very sensitive. My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer. It's a design that costs less than $100,000 and wheels right into a hospital room--replacing multimillion-dollar, warehouse-size facilities.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 10, 2012 2:04 AM
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