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Science whiz suffers biggest brain freeze ever


Um… Blankness. Panic.

The kid's brain fizzles. This is pressure.

It's late September and Keoni Gandall is at the National Geographic Center in Washington D.C. It's the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars) national competition. Six thousand nominees have been whittled to 30 finalists.

Keoni has brought his story with him from Huntington Beach, about how he, this 14-year-old kid, engineered a virus into a plasmid into a halobacterium – what normally takes a fully operational laboratory to do – on his kitchen table.

And he's being grilled about it by a panel of adult scientists.

Well, um …

When Keoni's really thinking about an answer, his eyes dart up to the left.


The judges don't let up on Keoni. How, they have asked, can you explain the chain reaction you've engineered in the form of a mathematical equation?

Keoni can feel himself blowing it.

He comes up with something about the numbers doubling over and over again. He can tell the judges aren't buying it.

Why can't he think of the answer? HE KNOWS THE ANSWER! But it's not coming.

He's not usually like this. He has Hawaiian blood; his father says, Hang loose, brudda; and he's usually calm. But Keoni knows he's going to be thinking about this horrible, helpless moment for the rest of his life. As he finishes the Q& A with the judges, he's sure it's over.

Goodbye championship. Goodbye prestige. Goodbye prize money.

Several things at the Gandall house suggested to his parents that Keoni wasn't like other kids.

“He would figure things out too soon,” said Chris Gandall, his mother.

When he was 1, Keoni crawled into the garage, grabbed a fan, dragged it back into the living room and plugged it in.

As he advanced at Newland Elementary School, his parents were confronted with a box of paper airplanes. When Keoni finished lessons, they were told, he would begin folding paper airplanes at his desk. The airplanes then would be confiscated.

“His teacher was complaining,” his father, Alan Gandall, said.

Keoni won a fifth grade academic award when he was in third grade.

Then it got weird.

Keoni became infatuated with carnivorous plants. And he started ordering the seeds of these meat-eaters on eBay. Strange deliveries started coming to the house (he still has more than 100 types of snapping plants).

The carnivorous plant fascination gave way to an obsession with viruses.

Keoni started ordering different strains of E. coli from places like the Czech Republic and China.

“Viruses are so small, but they could infect millions of people,” Keoni said with a smile.

The smaller the organism, the more Keoni liked it. He started studying the DNA inside the viruses.

Then he ordered a kit that enabled him to put organisms inside other organisms.

“One night, I came home late,” Alan said. “I was thirsty, so I opened the refrigerator to get a bottle of water… ”

Instead of water, he grabbed a container of E. coli.

Keoni rolls his eyes as his father recounts the old story. His father, he explained, was never in danger.

“K-12 E. coli can't exist outside petri dishes,” Keoni said.

Everybody knows that.

“I have no idea what he's doing,” Alan said of his son.

His parents made a couple of rules.

1. All eBay purchases must be cleared by them.

2. All deliveries of dangerous plants, viruses or chemicals go directly to the lab at UC Irvine, where Keoni works after finishing his regular school day at Edison High.

Recently, they bought him his own refrigerator, which he keeps on the back patio, in case his viruses need a place to sleep.

“I hope the FBI isn't watching us,” Alan said. “They'll think we're terrorists.”

Keoni laughs when his father tells the story of the mail carrier who looked at him suspiciously when he delivered strange organisms from China.

Keoni isn't an isolated nerd who can't connect with other kids his age.

When he was younger, he played baseball and soccer.

He has friends, though he invites them over only if they don't mess up his home laboratory.

He said kids at school like to sit next to him in class because he likes to help them with their projects.

“We've preached to him to share all your knowledge,” Alan said. “That's the Hawaiian in him.”

You wouldn't call Keoni a cheerleader for science education in public schools.

“The experiments we do don't make us think outside the box,” he said. “I taught myself on the Internet.”

Actually, his big science project didn't succeed. He started off trying to change pink salt (halobacterium, which is found in river beds and salt flats) into green salt. In the end, he couldn't change the color.

What he did come up with was a simpler way to put virus-filled plasmids into halobacterium.

Keoni said teachers might be able to use his method to inspire science students in the future.

His big discovery won't cure cancer, but it might help students learn how to combine viruses, plasmids and bacteria.

His engineered pink salt won the overall sweepstakes award at the Orange County Science Fair.

One judge called the project “Ph.D. material.” Afterward, Keoni was invited to work in the lab at UCI.

“Keoni's understanding of synthetic biology concepts is exceptional,” said Chang Liu, biomedical engineering professor at UCI. “Synthetic biology is a relatively new discipline, and most of us leading the charge have come into it from other fields.

“But to see someone as young as Keoni grow up doing synbio research so well, living and breathing this stuff, is inspiring,” Liu said. “It is second nature to him and I have no doubt he will be a true leader in the field in his adult life.”

It also got Keoni into the final round of the national contest, though when he went to Washington, D.C., for the Broadcom MASTERS competition, he couldn't bring his engineered pink salt on the airplane.

Homeland Security frowns on viruses.

On the day before the finals (and the day before the government shutdown), Keoni and the other finalists met President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden.

The president escorted them into the White House, where he showed them the Emancipation Proclamation and the patent for the telegraph.

“It's an honor to meet you,” Keoni said.

He wanted to say something else, “but my mind went blank.”

The same thing would happen the next day when he faced the judges.

And then the judges had to ask him about the math.

Even Chris, his mother, was rattled.

“I was pretty nervous,” she said.

The answer Keoni should have given was 2 to the 30th power.

That would explain the chain reaction he used, in simplest terms, when he stuffed a virus into a plasmid into a halobacterium.

Keoni shook his head as he told the story last week in his home. The number came to him long after the judges left. He will never again forget 2 to the 30th power.

“I was thinking – darn,” he said.

He sat in his seat at the Carnegie Institute awaiting the announcement of the winners. They were doing the science category first, so he wasn't paying as close attention.

He thought he would be judged in the “Engineering” category since his project was called “Engineered Pink Salt.”

So when they announced the winner of the science category – and it was Keoni Gandall – he was caught off guard. “Shocked,” is how he put it.

He won an iPad and $3,500.

But the photos with the president weren't sent because of the government shutdown.

Keoni's parents are looking forward to that package arriving in the mail.

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