Demetri Maxim is an outstanding skier. He came to Gould from Carlisle, Mass. to improve his skiing. When he got here he discovered something more fun. Although he loves skiing he was drawn to open science labs on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I had a middle school project that was basically a ski project. I looked at the effects of wool versus cotton socks and I did very well at the middle school science fair with that and the next year, I wanted to keep going. I just worked really hard put in a lot of hard work and here I am. He's still trying to come up with a name for what I call his flux capacitor. It's a machine that can quickly and inexpensively alert doctors to life threatening maladies. What it does is it detects protein that's produced by the body when a patient has transplant rejection or ovarian cancer. The work is deeply personal to Dimitri. He remembers anguish and fear when his mother Lefki almost died. When I was five years old, my mom almost died from kidney disease. The doctors said she had three months to live if she didn't receive a kidney transplant which is a life-saving procedure and just one month before she was supposed to die, or before when the doctors said she was going to die, she miraculously received a transplant. DEMETRI HAS THE SAME KIDNEY DISEASE HIMSELF SO HE started attacking kidney disease in three steps. His yet to be named flux capacitor helps treat the illness. He also has taken tissue and attached it to kidney tissue to help develop a working kidney in a lab animal. So I used human stem cells that can actually be isolated from the skins cells of the patient, so simply by taking a patient's skin biopsy or skin sample, I can turn these skin cells into kidney cells Dimitri thinks he gets some of his intellectual curiosity from Hiram Maxim of Sangerville. The inventor of the first portable fully automatic machine gun, he went to England to build a company after the US rejected his design. Five generations later, his great great grandson is doing amazing things. Could it be in the DNA? I do think there are some genetic involved because although I'm working very hard, I do have that sort of innate problem solving mind not everybody has that so I definitely think that some of that was definitely brought genetically from Sir Hiram. Demetri prides himself on being a normal kid although he's not. If you think there's not enough hours in the day to be a scientist, skier and student, you're right! I don't really sleep at night. (laughter) I try to sleep good at night for five to seven hours. A lot of times, you're right, there just are not enough hours in a day, so I have to stay up late doing homework and doing assignments. A lot of teenagers don't realize how much time they're wasting by going on facebook and messaging. I don't text people. A lot of my friends make fun of me for not texting them. I can say in a conversation in five minutes something that would take an hour in text. So if you're worried about the next generation, keep in mind that it's producing kids like Demetri Maxim. He says he is an example of what some intellect, a lot of hard work and good time management can do. In fact, he says it himself. I'm one happy kid.

WCSH