And to Amy Chyao and Yale Fan.  (Kevin Ellis got first billing because he's from Vancouver, Washington.)  For their wins in the Intel International Science And Engineering Fair.

Here's what Chyao did:

She worked on a concept to extend the usefulness of a promising treatment for cancer.   The approach is called photodynamic therapy, or PDT, which uses light energy to activate a drug called a photosensitizer that produces a form of oxygen that kills nearby cells.   The treatment can be used to narrowly target cancer cells, with fewer adverse effects on others, Chyao says.  The problem is, since PDT requires light it has been confined to use with skin cancers, she says.

Chyao says she tried to extend the concept using energy that can penetrate the skin, such as near-infrared light, in hopes of attacking other forms of cancer.  Her goal was to develop a photosensitizer that would be activated when exposed to such forms of energy.  She says she couldn't actually experiment on living tissue, but was able to demonstrate the toxic effect of her photosensitizer (which included esoteric materials such as quantum dots).

And, here's what Ellis and Fan did:

Both teens created projects around computers.   Ellis developed a method to automatically speed up computer programs by analyzing the programs while they are running so that work could be divided across multiple microprocessors.

Fan's project demonstrated the advantages of quantum computing in performing difficult computations.

(I'd like more details on the projects, but these were the best descriptions I found in a very quick search.)

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.