Never Too Young : Boy, 14, to Read Paper on Cancer Therapy He Helped in Developing

At first glance, Ray Bateman Jr. hardly seems the academic type. He wears Reeboks. He has a mouthful of braces. And his adolescent’s voice is in constant danger of cracking.

But come Oct. 7, Ray, a 14-year-old, will take center stage at a New York City meeting of the American Federation of Clinical Research, a prestigious medical research society.

There, before a roomful of academic physicians more than twice his age, the computer whiz from Huntington Harbour will present a paper on a new method of chemotherapy that he researched along with his mentor and next-door neighbor, cancer specialist Dr. Glenn Tisman.

Although broader testing is needed to determine just how useful the method will be, Tisman said it has proven effective at his private clinic in Whittier. He said the drug therapy has substantially reduced tumors in a number of his patients, and sent one man’s lung cancer into total remission.

‘Unheard of Situation’

But no matter how the new study is received, Tisman said, the bashful teen-ager is certain to cause a stir when he shows up to explain it at the New Jersey-based society’s Eastern regional conference.

“This is an unheard of situation,” Dr. Youcef Rustum, deputy director of the Grace Cancer Drug Center at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., said of Ray’s scheduled appearance.

But Rustum, a noted cancer researcher, added that Ray and Tisman, 46, have developed “a very . . . important concept in cancer chemotherapy. . . . I think that’s potentially very useful.”

The new therapy involves a little used drug, 5-Fluorodeoxyuridine (5-FUdR) in combination with another drug, Leucovorin, to kill cancer cells by inhibiting DNA replication. A similar drug, 5-Fluorouracil (or 5-FU), has been used in combination with Leucovorin to treat certain types of cancer since it was discovered a few years ago that Leucovorin increased 5-FU’s effectiveness. But Tisman said his research suggests that 5-FUdR may be even more effective than 5-FU, when it is used with Leucovorin.

“We think we’ve got a better drug,” Tisman said.

Although the medical society is devoted to encouraging the work of young scientists, a spokeswoman for the organization said, the scientists are rarely younger than medical students. Still, the organization has no minimum age for those who can present papers. And its rules decree that if two authors submit a paper and one of them is older than 41, the senior author must defer to the younger one as the presenter.

‘Never Forgets Anything’

But Tisman said he would have allowed Ray to present the paper even if the rules didn’t require him to do it. After all, he said, it is only fitting recognition for a kid who, without having taken so much as basic chemistry, was able to get the experiment up and working, analyze the data and interpret the results in ways that had never even occurred to Tisman, who has been a cancer researcher for nearly 20 years.

“He never forgets anything,” Tisman said in a whisper, trying not to be overheard by Ray, who was pecking away at his computer in the next room. “Yes, I think he’s a genius--but I wouldn’t tell him that.”

Ray shrugs off the attention, as though the conference and the research project are to be expected for a boy who has known he wanted to be a doctor since kindergarten.

“When I was 2, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was 3, I wanted to be a fireman. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to be some type of doctor,” Ray said in a mocking tone he usually reserves for answering adults’ silly questions.

While Ray’s parents aren’t sure of his IQ, they and his teachers have known for years that he is smart. In the most recent battery of tests, the eighth-grader scored well above 12th-grade proficiency levels in every subject except spelling, said his mother, Daphne Bateman, 57.

Ray is so proficient at science, according to Jay DuVall, his eighth-grade science teacher, that adults often find it difficult to believe the work he does is really his own.

“Most people say, ‘This is impossible, a 14-year-old kid doing this? Forget it,” DuVall said. “And I was guilty of it in the beginning myself.”

Ideas That Baffle Adults

Sometimes the real problem adults have with Ray’s work, DuVall said, is that they can’t understand it themselves. That, at least, is the way DuVall felt when Ray proposed doing his eighth-grade science project on the work he was doing with Tisman.

“When he presented the idea to me, I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, what is this?’ ” Duvall recalled. “And he had to explain it to me over and over and over.”

The story of how Tisman and Ray paired up goes back to the time Tisman got a sophisticated new stereo system that no one--including the technician who came to install it--could assemble. Ray, a friend of Tisman’s son, started working on it at 6 p.m.; 14 hours later, he had put the thing together.

“You should see the back of that thing,” Tisman said. “It’s like spaghetti!”

It was only natural, then, that when Tisman got a new shipment of lab equipment that his own technicians could not assemble, he would turn to the teen-ager.

Tisman said he gave Ray a stack of manuals over the weekend. The following Monday, Ray was ready to put it all together.

“It would have taken me 10 times the time it took Ray,” Tisman said.

The next step was learning how to use the equipment and calibrate it for Tisman’s experiment. Ray did that too, so the only thing left was to start the experiment itself.

Thinking of how he would have liked some scientist to have taken him under his wing when he was a kid, Tisman invited Ray, who was then 13, to become the equivalent of a post-doctoral fellow at his lab. In the next eight months, Ray put in about 1,300 hours on the project.

Father in Fantasy Land

By his own admission, the news that his son would speak at a medical conference sent Ray Bateman Sr. into “fantasy land.” Not long after that, it sent Bateman in search of publicity for his child prodigy--”so he can go to the school of his choice,” he said to explain why he been calling up so many newspapers to tell them about his remarkable son.

There is another reason for Bateman’s enthusiasm, however. For years, he said, his son felt misunderstood by teachers and peers alike. Until Ray was put in a gifted program at a local school, Bateman said, his son was convinced he was stupid, and was so bored at school that he did poorly in his classes. In his frustration, his father said, Ray became isolated from his peers, who in turn resented him for being so distant.

“He was a loner, oh boy, a real loner,” Bateman said. “It has been a very, very uphill battle to get Ray feeling as good about himself as he does now.” Bateman glanced at the room where his son was still glued to his computer screen and said, “That’s where his self-esteem was born--by good, hard work.”

Ray has responded to the attention with a mixture of delight and annoyance.

Ask him a question about his research, which won him first place in the 1988 California State Science Fair, and Ray will talk your ear off. But when the questions take a more personal turn, the teen-ager turns on the defenses he has learned from a lifetime of never quite fitting in with his schoolmates.

Asked whether he had a girlfriend, Ray gave a wary look and said, “What do you mean by a girlfriend?”

A Question for Dad

To the question of how his father was taking his extraordinary success, Ray grinned wickedly. Then he stomped out of his computer room to shout sarcastically across the living room: “Dad, how would you describe your attitude toward my project? Are you happy? Very happy? Extremely happy? Or do you hate it?”

The elder Bateman came into the room, chided his son for being rude, and said, predictably, that he was indeed extremely happy about his son’s success.

“We spare no expense to allow him to achieve his objectives,” Bateman said, gesturing at the $23,000 Macintosh II computer--complete with a laser printer; the $17,000 stereo system and the few hundred dollars’ worth of medical textbooks his son has been reading and re-reading ever since he got involved in Tisman’s cancer research project.

“We’re trying to satisfy his drive,” Bateman added. “We just want to help him get there.”

“Then why won’t you get me that monitor?” Ray demanded peevishly.

“You’re not going to get a 37-inch monitor,” his father said with the weary air of a parent who has been through this before. “You’ve practically broken my bankroll already.”

Despite the harsh talk, it was clear that there is no better way the retired, 62-year-old civil engineer, formerly a senior executive at Bechtel Western Power Corp., would rather spend his money.

“You see what I’m doing for Ray in that room of his?” he said later, out of his son’s earshot. “Building an environment for him that frees him from any inhibition about his interest in computers. . . . This kid is smart.”