Keven Stonewall is just 19 years old, but this overachieving student has already proven his age doesn’t dictate the limits of his contributions. While still in high school, the Chicago-area teen put in time researching at Rush University to pursue a cure for the affliction. Last summer, he researched at the University of Wisconsin, where he’s currently a sophomore. As one would expect, Stonewall’s youth had proven an obstacle in being taken seriously early in his career, but now serves as a new source of problems, as he’s made a name for himself on the University of Wisconsin’s campus as “colon cancer guy.”
Speaking to DNAinfo for a feature on the promising student, Rush University lab manager Carl Ruby says that Stonewall’s quiet progress should be recognized more than it has been, stating that Stonewall “should be heralded for helping to develop more effective colon cancer treatments that will impact the elderly, the population that is most susceptible to colon cancer. He has all the tools. He will go far."
In fact, he already has. Three years ago, he gave his first TED Talk at Wisconsin, titled “Finding a Breakthrough to Fight Colon Cancer.”
Keven started his colon cancer work prior to his senior year of high school as an intern at Rush University three years ago. After conducting his own research and reviewing existing studies, he started to investigate whether an agent used in chemotherapy could kill off cancer cells without the toxic side effects produced by the caustic treatment.
Using old and young mice as subjects, Stonewall injected a vaccine consisting of mitoxantrone, then injected cancer cells. After three days, he noticed that the cancerous tumors the young mice quickly developed were eliminated completely, but the tumors in the older mice remained and grew as they would have if untreated. While these developments showed promise for the treatment in general, Stonewall has dedicated himself to finding the reason for the different effects on young and old mice, since over two-thirds colon cancer sufferers are elderly.
Andrew Zloza, a Rush University professor and co-director of the school’s HIV and Cancer Scientific Working Group, explained the next steps. "This means that age may have to be a factor when physicians choose which drugs and what dosage to use in people of different ages. This is something already taken into account for children versus adults, but now adults may need to be separated into groups by age," he said.
Stonewall finds his notoriety to be a mixed blessing. "It's weird at times having that title, and sometimes I feel I shouldn't be given a title. But it's also kind of cool at times because people actually look at what I'm doing, and it feels really good in my heart,” he says.
His work in high school earned him six scholarships in his collegiate pursuits, and he’s certainly making the most of the unique opportunities afforded him at his young age. He’s returning to Chicago this summer to continue his study of colon cancer at the University of Chicago, and he plans to parlay his undergrad work into a medical career as an oncology doctor.
Even at 19, he’s learned enough about the scientific process not to expect things to happen overnight. Years of studies, trials, and further research are in store for Stonewall and his work. But he’s clearly focused on his lofty goal in the long term. He’s already made believers out of his coworkers, with his mentor Valyncia Raphael at Wisconsin sharing her high hopes, saying, "His goal is legitimately to cure cancer. Everybody in the Posse [Foundation] looks at Keven as a person who's going to legitimately change the world."
Still, Keven’s taking a measured approach to his meteoric rise thus far:
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Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.