University With Age 13, PhD With Age 17
I am a geek. By age 13 I started working at the university, by age 14 I developed sensors for high field spectroscopy, by age 15 I developed the first method worldwide to calculate when hair turns grey, by age 16 understood quantum mechanics, by age 17 I made a breakthrough in field of cancer research and got offered to do my PhD in medical science, by age 18 had my own company. This is my story…
The Bloody Beginner — The Hard Years
My first year in High School went terrible. My grades were only average, I rather focussed on girls than studying, and did not do my homework. At that time I attended the Schulfarm Insel Scharfenberg in Berlin, Germany, which also included a boarding school. My mother wanted me to attend the boarding school because my grandmother had cancer and she had to work ever day of the week. In primary school I rather liked watching Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh than studying. School was just to easy for me. I gained weight only to lose it again in High School. To be honest, I was not unhappy about my life.
The boarding school was a huge mess. Every day, we did not do anything else than messing around with the faculty members, partying, and listening to music. Homework? No way.
At that time, people started switching from jappy to Facebook and deleting their MySpace page, when I first got exposed to science. You want to know my science grade? C. Average grade of my physics exams in year seven and eight: F. But, to be honest I didn’t care. Who the hell needs physics, I thought.
But, there was this one weird guy in the dorm beside my who kept staring at himself in the mirror pretending to be the devil because his head had been deformed since his birth. A total geek, I thought. Listening to Slipknot, weird Rap Music and some other death medal core music I did not like. I was more into David Guetta, Jay Sean, and Linkin Park, the ‘cool’ musicians at that time.
One day, his dorm was empty and I started looking around in it. I found a copy of Stephen Hawking’s “The Universe in a Nutshell” and started reading in it. I put it down after 30 seconds. Boring, I thought. But, the cover looked nice. I opened it again; And started wondering. What is this? I took the book to my room and punched a few keywords into my old Dell computer. QED, QCD, Theory of Relativity…I had no clue about it. Finally a familiar face appeared in the book: Albert Einstein. That guy was smart, I knew. In this moment I realized that he will be remembered forever and ever because of what he had done but not by what he had not done. But who was I? I was the one who was to cool to do his homework, prepare for presentations or get in touch with any other educational material.
I started reading the book, googling ever second word. I finished it after a week. That was the beginning. I was still a complete idiot but my attention had shifted.
Shooting Stars But Still Being A Noob
Yeah, I wanted to be smart. Just like Albert Einstein or this guy in the wheelchair who cannot move. But, was I?
I started reading as much as possible. Which has been like 20 pages a day at that time, now its more like 500 pages a day.
My mother send me to the Free University of Berlin in order to get more exposed to science. I attended a summer camp and felt even more stupid than before. These guys were not just older but also smarter and wiser. I knew the Lyrics to Jay Sean’s ‘Down’ but had no idea how to measure pressure. After two weeks I went back home, frustrated. But, I did not want to give up. I wanted to prove myself that I can beat these guys at what they are good at. All of them. Every single one.
My school wanted me to do an intership at some company or organization. I started writing e-mails to universities to give me the chance to let me work at one of the researcg groups in the university. I had 25 “NO”s and zero “YES’”. It was one day before the deadline when I got the e-mail that changed my life, which was not more than a: “Come around next monday, then we can talk, maybe we can find something for you. Bye”.
So, next monday I went. Knees shacking, wet hands, I entered the Free University of Berlin in order to meet Prof. Dr. Robert Bittl. This title sounds smart as fu**, I thought. I want to be at least a Prof. Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Leon Chaudhari some day.
I went down one of the hallways and waved to one of the guys in one of the offices. He looked at me in a weird way. After 5 minutes of looking for Prof. Dr. Bittl’s office, I realized that I just passed him…
Suprisingly, the interview went good and he offered me an internship for two weeks.
Getting To It The Hard Way
So, I started my intership which gave me the opportunity to get introduced to electron spin resonance spectroscopy. The faculty members introduced it to me. I did not understand anything. They handed me a book with 300 pages about electron spin resonance. Until today, I haven’t read it.
The bad thing: I was not allowed to work with it. Nevertheless, I was a fast learner and understood the basics after a few days. At that time I was 14 years old.
Every day it took me 90 minutes to get to the university, which is an insanely long time when you are a boarding school student whom it took three minutes to get to school.
My intership took 2 weeks. What I did all this time? I build a metal box. Seriously. The ‘project’ took a little longer than two weeks, so the lab assistant asked me to come back some other day and finish it.
After a couple of weeks I came back to finish the project, when one of the assistants came into my room and showed his colleague a graph. “Can you guess what this graph shows? It’s the resonance absorption curve for COFFEE. Hahahahahaha……..Hey Leon, do you want to put something in the machine too? Maybe your milk shake?!”, he asked me. So, I started filling milkshake into a thin NMR glass capillary putting it into the ESR spectrometer. “Hahahahha…we got a result again. Wohooo. Let’s put some more stuff in it.”, the lab assistant shouted. At that moment I had an idea…
I ran out of the university to get home as soon as possible. I brewed some coffee and set down on my desk with a pen in my mouth. “This could be it, the opportunity of my life”, I thought. I just had to come up with a good project and always show up when that lab assitant was alone in the lab, which was always at night…Don’t ask me how but I came up with the idea of putting hair into the machine. I guess it was because the girls in my class always talked about their hair.
Next day, I wrote an e-mail to the lab assistant pretending I would have worked with electron spin resonance and the machines in the lab already a couple of times. And, he believed me. He invited me to come back in a few weeks. He wanted to have a look at the project.
He loved the project and helped me meassuring the resonance absorption of my mother’s, grandmother’s, aunt’s, and my hair. The results where intersting. The curves’ MAX and MINI where at different spots. So, I collected more hair. Class members. Relatives. Even my dog.
One night at university, I came up with a different idea: What if I collect one person’s hair over a longer period of time? My mother gave me hair from when I was three years old and I took hair from myself every month in a 6 months period of time. I meassured all the probes and discovered that the MAX got lower and lower and the MINI higher and higher. After several months of research, it led to the first method worldwide to calculate the exact time (+/- 4 months) when hair turns grey. I discovered something. Damn. I think I have never been that proud in my life.
I send my project to several science competition and won all of them. Awards came from the Max-Planck Society, Helmholtz Association, Martin Luther Stiftung and many others. I had to prepare pitches for investors, the inventor of the mp3 format became my tutor, and I really started missing out on sleep. I even had offers from the United States and travelled in summer 2014 to Pittsburgh, PA, in order to do research for the pharmaceuticals company Bayer AG, meeting several cancer researchers.
The United States And How I Generated Ideas
After that I lived in the United States for one year self-studying quantum physics. I only had one thought: That was a good beginning but when I come back to Germany I want to do something great!
I proved to myself that I could do a least something in the field of science. But still, I felt a sense of luck that came with all my success, which made me feel really uncomfortable.
In this year I started generating ideas and wrote them down in a book. I am not kidding, until now I jotted down around 15,000 ideas. Only several thousands of those I printed on paper and reviewed them. My ideas always come at night which is why I have a general problem with sleep.
At that time I read a book a day. Most of them not related to science, giving me a general view on many things. I wish I would have that much time right now. Loved doing it! And I recommend everyone to do that. In that year I read about 250 books, and used the following strategy: Go to the library and just grab rendom books. Sometimes I grabbed the following literature for a week: “Veden — The Holy Book of Hindus”, “Prostitution in Austria and Czechoslovakia”, “Shakespeare: Hamlet”, “The Martian Chronicles”, “Microsoft Excel 2008”, “Richard Feynman: CalTech Notes”, and “Trading Commodities Handbook”. Reading so much every day, will expand your mind in every way. And it will actually be fun doing it if you have the right motivation. I always get my motivation from music.
In that year, I not only came up with around 15,000 ideas but 4 life-changing inventions, and laid the foundation for my later success.
Being Back And Starting from ZERO
I am back in Germany and no one gives a crap about my last discovery. Their is still this rumour in school: “this guy discovered something” but not much more was left. I had to come up with something new. I reviewed my ideas and found a note that I didn’t even remember. It said: “Check whether skin cancer patients’ tumours have hair going through the tumor”. THE NEXT PROJECT WAS BORN.
I actually started doing research on skin cancer; And didn’t want to mess it up. So, I went right back to the lab, used the sensors I developed at age 14 in the lab, invested in a few other things, and took some time off to just sit down and think about what approach would be the smartest. I will not attach a photo of my desk at that time…you wouldn’t want to see it…
At that time I reviewed every possible book about my topic but did not find anything about what I wanted to do. I had to start from ZERO. So how do you do research on something without any foundation, when you are only 17 years old?
→ Do as many measurements as you can. And THINK THINK THINK.
Often it is not about intelligence but about the hours you invest into doing something. I invested days, weeks, months only reading, every day. Taking thousands of notes.
I started collaborating with several institutions and asked cancer patients to give me hair growing through their tomours.
The measuring process was tough. Every day I had to learn many new things, and then coming up with my own solutions.
But, in the end, my way led me to success. I could successfully prove that my theory was right, and made a breakthrough in the field of cancer research. It is now possible to predict the reproduction of tumor cells for basalioma and spinalioma (both types of skin cancer).
I received the German National Environmental Award, won again several competition and got scholarships from companies and private investors.
PhD With Age 17
No, I don’t have a PhD. Why? Because it’s ridiculous. When I presented my cancer research to the public, several institutions offered me to do my PhD on my topic. But, I kindly refused. I don’t invent and do research for titles, I don’t invent for other people, I invent because I can.
I am 18 years old now and I am still thinking about doing it but actually I have no interest in doing it. Of course, my parents would be extremly proud and I could say that had a PhD before Einstein, Hawking, Dirac or whom ever but I would waste time living my life. In the last years I did an insane amout of travelling and getting in touch with other cultures. I don’t want to stay the same. There is always space for change.
Making Money vs. Science — A Battle?
No one wants to die poor. Me neither. In 2015 I started two companies. Both doing pretty successful at the moment. Scientists who don’t care about money are at a very rich university or terrible scientists. The problem today in science is, the more successful you become, the more you just sit in the office and write e-mails. If you don’t have any private funding, you are screwed. If your university has a lot of money, just keep going. The truth nowadays is that most universities have to cut projects in order to save money.
Here’s what I think: When you are young build a successful business and learn as much as possible about everything on earth, travel and find a way to outsource your work as much as possible. Why? Because free time is better then work if you use that time wisely.
The End Will Not Come
Find a way to motivate yourself to learn and read as much as possible. It will pay off soon. It took me 5 years to go from ZERO to where I am right now.
This was not even the beginning of what I want to do in my life. I want to travel every country, go to Harvard, give Keynotes in the style of Steve Jobs, make a billion, go to space and read every book that exists on earth. And do you know why? Because there is nothing in life that can stop me. Every barrier is breakable and often just an excuse. I love sitting on the couch watching TV (even though I did not watch TV for several years). Seriously, there is no “but…” about to come. Learn as much as possible. Whether it is TV, through travel, books, CDs or what ever medium. As soon as you have enough ideas start re-evaluating; And then, start executing as soon as possible. Life is too short.
In the end, one more advice: Never forget the people who love you and the ones you love. They are the foundation of your later success.
Give Love Back!
All the best from Beijing, China, where I am living already for three months,
Leon Chaudhari
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