[jbail]

I think you're underestimating her intelligence and capabilities. Clearly she had the background and the initiative. There are super smart and dedicated people out there. She sounds like one of them.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if the patent is absurd or not...but I definitely don't think its absurd for a 19 year old woman to write up and be awarded a patent.

[Alupis]

No, I was meaning I find it highly unlikely she understood or could actually implement the technology behind her patent.

A 19 year old, no matter how smart, is not likely to have a thorough enough background to understand all of the related technologies involved in this patent. This is a medical device, and has to be "done right", or people can be injured or worse. I don't expect even a top-tier CS student could pull it off.

I'm not attempting to discredit her intelligence, just pointing out she seems to have been/is an "idea guy". We've all run into "idea guys", they'll pitch a great idea with all this elaborate stuff, but then can't execute on it without outside help. Perhaps she got help, who knows?

A patent is, more-or-less, a mere idea (which is absurd in it's own right, ideas should not be patentable imho). So, you are right, it's not "absurd for a 19 year old [gender-is-regardless] to write up and be awarded a patent", it's absurd it was patentable in the first place.

[MaysonL]

Back in 1963, I was tutored in calculus by a 15-year old who won that year's Science Talent Search for his research in nuclear magnetic resonance. He had completed essentially all of undergrad math and physics. I think you have a badly warped view of what is possible for smart people, whatever age.

[ghshephard]

Depends on how motivated the 19 year old was, and how much freedom they had to focus on what was important to them.

By the age of 14 or 15, most intelligent and motivated people have enough education to start learning advanced processes and systems. Say you start at 14, if you are focussed, by the time you are 19, you will have had 12,000+ hours of opportunity to develop expertise in your field. And Ms. Holmes sounds very capable (Learned Mandarin in her spare time as a teenager, as a result spent a summer at the Genome Institute in Singapore,etc, etc,...)

I would expect that there is a significant (if not excessively large) population of 19 year olds out there that can not only invent, and understand, but also design, and prototype advanced technological platforms of the same complexity identified in this patent.

We had a 13 year old in my Computing Science Undergraduate course at SFU who just absorbed and aced every math course he encountered, zero effort at homework or note taking.

Some people are capable of great accomplishments at a very young age, and strictly speaking, 19 is not particularly young.