11 Year-Old Scientist Invents a Lead Test to Help #FlintWaterCrisis
Are you smarter than an 11 year-old?
A young lady named Gitanjali Rao just won the title of Young Scientist of the Year for inventing a reliable, accurate sensor that tests for lead in drinking water. The 7th grader (who obviously was smart enough to skip a grade) calls it Tethys. Where does an 11 year-old get the idea to build an advanced, carbon nanotube lead sensor? From reading a website published by MIT. For fun. You know, #justpreteenthings.
Along with the title, Gitanjali also won a $25,000 prize. She says she’s going to save part of it for college, but she plans to reinvest most of it back into her project to help make it available to folks in Flint as soon as possible. Because of course she does. We would say that more 11 year-olds should aspire to be like Gitanjali, but honestly, that doesn’t go far enough. Most adults could stand to learn a thing or two from this young genius.
Here’s why Gitanjali’s invention is so important: She was inspired to start working on it out of concern for the people of Flint, Michigan, who are in the midst of a horrible water crisis. Most of you have heard about this, but in case you’re not up on it, here’s a quick recap: A few years ago the city of Flint started pumping water out of a nearby river to save money. The river water ended up corroding their pipes, which filled the drinking water with bunch of poisonous chemicals, the worst of which was lead. This is what the disgusting water looked like:
When the citizens of Flint complained to the city government about how obviously filthy their water was, the city told them it was safe to keep drinking, bathing and cooking with it. But within the government, some officials knew there was too much lead in the water and lied to cover it up. It was more important to them to keep their jobs than it was to keep 100,000 people from drinking poison. In the end, 12 people died and 79 people were sickened. Thankfully, those officials have been brought to justice: they are being charged with manslaughter, misconduct and obstruction of justice.
Make no mistake, that dirty brown filth coming out of the faucets in Flint doesn’t just look bad. Lead is a horrible poison, especially for kids. If they are exposed to too much of it, it can make them sick, ruin their physical development and cause lifelong mental problems - including lower IQ, ADHD and even criminal behaviors. There’s a ton of evidence that suggests that the main reason violent crime has dropped so much in America in the last few decades is because we’ve taken the lead out of water, gasoline, paint and a bunch of other products we use on a daily basis.
Now, soon after scientists discovered how much lead was in the water, the governor of Michigan sent in the National Guard and President Obama sent in FEMA to help get bottled water to folks. Today, the crisis is contained and the city’s efforts to fix the water system are properly funded, though the problems are far from over. Rao’s lead sensor can help folks in Flint take a big step toward ending the crisis by giving them peace of mind when it comes to the safety of their drinking water and their children.
Her invention is even more important when you consider this: The catastrophe in Flint may be the worst example of widespread lead contamination in the country, but it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens again somewhere else. Scientists have discovered over 5,000 water systems across the nation that are currently in violation of the law and endangering children due to unsafe levels of lead.
The bad news: State governments know about this problem, but around the country, most aren’t lifting a finger to do anything about it. The worse news: The EPA knows the state governments are breaking federal law by ignoring the lead, but they aren’t doing anything about it, either. In the words of one researcher who testified in front of Congress about the issue “(The EPA) does not care whether children are lead poisoned from public drinking water.” Imagine a cop that sees a bank robbery in progress, and instead of trying to stop it, just pulls up a lawn chair and a glass of iced tea and watches the whole thing go down.
So states refuse to clean up their drinking water, and the feds just shrug their shoulders about it. This is an outrage - it’s not like the EPA is too busy protecting forests and fighting climate change to do anything about this, because they’re not doing that, either. Governments at every level are just ignoring the millions of kids in this country who are at risk of being poisoned every day. And these aren’t just small towns getting ignored - it’s communities of all sizes (it’s happening in cities as large as Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon right now) and researchers estimate more than 17 million Americans are drinking water with potentially unsafe levels of lead.
If you’re worried about whether the water you and your family are drinking is safe, take steps to protect yourself. When the government refuses to do its job, it’s up to the people to look after ourselves. That’s why we love Gitanjali’s amazing invention, and we hope it makes a big difference for the people of Flint and everywhere across America where the water supply is poisoned with too much lead.
