She lost her mother to cancer after a misdiagnosis. At 16, she built an AI system to prevent the same thing from happening to others.
Melek Öztürk was 16 when her mother was first misdiagnosed with pancreatic cancer, then correctly identified with adrenal gland cancer. The delays and confusion during treatment showed her firsthand how much damage a wrong diagnosis can do. Her mother didn't survive. Instead of letting that grief consume her, Melek channeled it into something that could help others.
Working through her school's math club "Matrix" in Izmir, Turkey, she developed an AI system called ONCOMathRIX that uses topological and differential analysis to detect kidney cell carcinoma from pathological images in seconds. It was tested on 537 open-source datasets and achieved a 97% accuracy rate. A professor at Ege University's medical faculty initially saw it as a student hobby project, then realized the system was filling a real gap in the literature.
The project has passed the first round of TEKNOFEST, Turkey's largest technology competition, and is currently in the patent process. She is 16 years old.
58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.
Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died.
And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop.
As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience."
They built a wall in Washington with American names on it.
A beautiful wall. A solemn wall.
Good. Mourn your dead.
But understand what that wall does not say.
It does not say why they died.
It does not say what they were doing there.
It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was.
It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned.
Three years. House arrest. Pardoned.
For five hundred people murdered in a ditch.
It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today.
Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today.
Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought.
And the chemical companies that made it are still in business.
Still profitable.
Still un-prosecuted.
And yet they send us human rights reports.
They grade our democracy.
They warn us about our behavior.
The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive.
Almost.
Every time I see articles with titles like “10 signs you used AI to write this,” I can’t help but smile at a certain irony.
AI was trained on the accumulated record of human knowledge, thinking, and writing.
All those performances and outputs became the data shaping what it can do.
But once all that material was aggregated into a single system with immense computing power, it began to outperform any individual human in measurable capability.
Along the way, it exaggerated some stylistic habits it learned from us. Those habits are now treated as telltale signs of “AI writing.”
As a result, humans are being pushed to become increasingly self-conscious about using stylistic elements that were originally their own — long before AI — but have since evolved into AI idiosyncrasies. Use them today, and you risk being suspected of claiming authorship of something written by a machine.
That’s the irony:
Humans are now being told to avoid those patterns—or risk being accused of borrowing from AI. The creators must now avoid sounding like their own creation.
Check out my new post on Substack! It is the draft chapter 1 of a book I'm writing about uncovering the real value of time through the decisions we make and how to make better ones. Your feedback is welcome. Enjoy it!
The Architecture of Time Through Decision (Chapter 1) https://t.co/5wxOzld3jD