An 8 year old with a cure for cancer?

Here is the article I saw recently.

What I find most interesting about this story is the change in parental attitudes it reflects.

When I was 8 years old, back in the 1970s, if someone our generation had come up with some big idea, I can imagine the response it would have generated from the adults around us: “Those people are far too busy and important to be bothered with letters from every 8 year old child! If you want to do something helpful, you can do the dishes.”

Or perhaps, subconsciously anticipating such a response, it would not have even occurred to any of us to suggest writing a letter. I truly believe that if I had voiced such a proposal, I would have been roundly ignored, or told what an imagination I had. At best, I think I would have received a smile and a pat on the head.

Kids can be veritable founds of creative ideas, and some of them are rather good. However, it is one thing to come up with an idea, but to actually think of writing a letter, to find out to whom it should be addressed and the postal address to which to send it (a task admittedly made much easier these days by the Internet) is usually beyond the patience and attention span of a small child, unless they are receiving help from an adult. The fact that this story was then supplied to the Press seems to suggest that the boy was receiving adult help in publicising the letter and the researchers’ response.

In my day (doesn’t that phrase make me sound old? LOL) children didn’t write letters to someone they didn’t know, unless it was “fan mail”, and then it would be a simple letter of appreciation, and the most you were taught to expect in return was a signed photograph. Even a keen young astronomer like I was would have been met with stern disapproval if I had bothered the local university with every new idea I had about space. Favourite pop stars, authors and TV presenters were fair game, but you didn’t bother authority figures whom your parents told you were “busy and important” and that your ideas were probably silly anyway. How attitudes change.