Prototype: Serving a Cause, 25 Cents at a Time

Mr. Fradin, a high school senior and budding entrepreneur who lives in Studio City, Calif., is the creator of CherryCard.org, a new Internet start-up that seeks to make it easy for consumers to give money to the charities of their choice.

Last week marked CherryCard’s soft launch — very soft, because Mr. Fradin is still lining up retailers to participate. As of this weekend, thanks to a group of sponsors that include NBC Universal and the Milwaukee Brewers, anyone who visits the site will be given 25 cents to spend for a cause. But the underlying mechanism of the venture — retailers distributing CherryCard vouchers that customers can redeem and donate to charity — has yet to materialize.

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” Mr. Fradin says, referring to his simultaneous need to attract consumers to use the site and retailers to pass out vouchers. While he believes his youth is an asset, not everyone he has approached sees it that way.

“One business owner said, ‘I just don’t see any big retailer wanting to take the chance on an 18-year-old kid,’?” Mr. Fradin recalls. “But who better to get people excited about something than kids? We’re excited about everything!”

Over the last year or so, Prototype has featured many a creative company and the adults who run them. This month, we lower the median age significantly with Mr. Fradin, who lives at home with his parents and younger brother and will be attending Brown University in the fall (one of his application essays was about pirates).

Why should we care about rookie entrepreneurs like him? Steve Mariotti, the founder of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says they aren’t just inspiring — they’re essential. “Since all net new jobs over the last 30 years have come from start-ups, we’d better be seeing young people willing to take these risks,” he says, adding that the Internet is an especially powerful tool for them. “They have an intuitive understanding of how social media has changed marketing and branding.”

Here’s how CherryCard works: Participating retailers will hand out business-card-size vouchers to their customers after a purchase. “Redeem this card at CherryCard.org to give $0.25 to the cause of your choice,” reads a typical card, which is printed with a code.

Later, after a consumer logs in to the CherryCard site via Facebook and types in that code, the card’s monetary value is deposited in their account, which they can draw upon to give to charities (which are not charged to be listed on the site). Right now there are 35 charities, and Mr. Fradin hopes to add many more.

So who pays? The retailers do — a minimal fee per card goes to CherryCard (though Mr. Fradin is waiving it at the moment to encourage companies to sign on). When a consumer redeems a card, the retailer who distributed it is also charged its face value.

Mr. Fradin believes CherryCard can be financed out of retailers’ marketing budgets because it identifies them as socially conscious enterprises. Their logo will appear on the CherryCard site and will pop up on consumers’ Facebook pages when they donate.

“It’ll say, ‘I’ve given this amount to World Wide Fund for Nature courtesy of’ all the different places you’ve gotten the cards,” Mr. Fradin says.

Mr. Fradin has been fascinated by business since he was 9 and his grandfather, an accounting professor, taught him about the stock market. He counts Warren Buffett and Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Toms Shoes, among his idols and likes to quote Arianna Huffington on cause-based marketing (when he isn’t making a reference to the Swedish data guru Hans Rosling).

Mr. Fradin has spent about $2,000 of his own money on the CherryCard project, but he needed more than money to make it a reality. The Internet connected him with two other teenagers who helped him develop the site. He found 18-year-old Kris Mendoza, a graphic designer who lives in Lynnwood, Wash., (and is headed to Western Washington University in the fall) on a site called Dribbble.com. Mr. Fradin met CherryCard’s programmer, Will Cosgrove from Fort Worth, Tex., through a twist of what he calls “computer-generated fate.”

While trying to build the site himself, Mr. Fradin hit a roadblock last November. He sent a plea for help to Aardvark, a social search engine that quickly pairs people seeking information with those likely to have answers. Mr. Cosgrove was working on his college applications when Mr. Fradin’s query popped up.

“Anything was more exciting than working on those essays, so I looked at it,” recalls Mr. Cosgrove, who is also 18 and will attend Texas A&M in the fall.

In a later phone call, the two hit it off, and Mr. Cosgrove — who, like Mr. Fradin, is working without pay — is now a limited partner (he owns 10 percent of CherryCard). Sure, at the moment that’s worth nothing. But that’s O.K. when you’re 18 and live with your parents.

CherryCard is not the only site of its kind. Last fall, SocialVest.us began with a similar goal: enabling charitable giving through everyday purchases. Unlike CherryCard, though, users of SocialVest must register before making a purchase. Also, SocialVest relies on credit and debit card or electronic purchases, whereas CherryCard works even with cash or check purchases. But SocialVest has scores of retail partners, including Staples, Sephora and Saks Fifth Avenue. And it’s run by people old enough to buy beer.

Some of these professionals, though, are impressed by Mr. Fradin. “The program that Noah has created generates immediate consumer connectivity between the Milwaukee Brewers and deserving charitable organizations,” Rick Schlesinger, chief operating officer of the Milwaukee Brewers, wrote in an e-mail. The owners of the team, Mark and Debbie Attanasio, are friends of Mr. Fradin’s parents.

Mr. Fradin expects a flurry of visitors to CherryCard this weekend, lured by his offer of 25 cents to play with. But he knows the clock is ticking: people will quickly lose interest unless retailers get on board. Still, he sounds undaunted.

“We want giving to be a part of every monetary transaction,” he says. “Let’s end poverty. Let’s end world hunger. I really do think that’s possible.” ?

 

Magazine Preview: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

  Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.

“The tumor was exactly in the pattern of the antenna,” Reynard told King. In 1989, Susan Elen Reynard, then 31, was told she had a malignant astrocytoma, a brain cancer that occurs in about 6,000 adults in America each year. To David Reynard, the shape and size of Susan’s tumor — a hazy line swerving from the left side of her midbrain to the hindbrain — uncannily resembled a malignant shadow of the phone (but tumors, like clouds, can assume the shapes of our imaginations). Suzy, as she was known, held her phone at precisely that angle against her left ear, her husband said. Reynard underwent surgery for her cancer but to little effect. She died in 1992, just short of her 34th birthday. David was convinced that high doses of radiation from the cellphone was the cause.

Reynard v. NEC — the first tort suit in the United States to claim a link between phone radiation and brain cancer — illustrated one of the most complex conceptual problems in cancer epidemiology. In principle, a risk factor and cancer can intersect in three ways. The first is arguably the simplest. When a rare form of cancer is associated with a rare exposure, the link between the risk and the cancer stands out starkly. The juxtaposition of the rare on the rare is like a statistical lunar eclipse, and the association can often be discerned accurately by observation alone. The discipline of cancer epidemiology originated in one such a confluence: in 1775, a London surgeon, Sir Percivall Pott, discovered that scrotal cancer was much more common in chimney sweeps than in the general population. The link between an unusual malignancy and an uncommon profession was so striking that Pott did not even need statistics to prove the association. Pott thus discovered one of the first clear links between an environmental substance — a “carcinogen” — and a particular subtype of cancer.

The opposite phenomenon occurs when a common exposure is associated with a common form of cancer: the association, rather than popping out, disappears into the background, like white noise. This peculiar form of a statistical vanishing act occurred famously with tobacco smoking and lung cancer. In the mid-1930s, smoking was becoming so common and lung cancer so prevalent that it was often impossible to definitively discern a statistical link between the two. Researchers wondered whether the intersection of the two phenomena was causal or accidental. Asked about the strikingly concomitant increases in lung cancer and smoking rates in the 1930s, Evarts Graham, a surgeon, countered dismissively that “the sale of nylon stockings” had also increased. Tobacco thus became the nylon stockings of cancer epidemiology — invisible as a carcinogen to many researchers, until it was later identified as a major cause of cancer through careful clinical studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the most complex and most publicly contentious intersection between a risk factor and cancer often occurs in the third instance, when a common exposure is associated with a rare form of cancer. This is cancer epidemiology’s toughest conundrum. The rarity of the cancer provokes a desperate and often corrosive search for a cause (“why, of all people, did I get an astrocytoma?” Susan Reynard must have asked herself). And when patients with brain tumors happen to share a common exposure — in this case, cellphones — the line between cause and coincidence begins to blur. The association does not stand out nor does it disappear into statistical white noise. Instead, it remains suspended, like some sort of peculiar optical illusion that is blurry to some and all too clear to others. (A similarly corrosive intersection of a rare illness, a common exposure and the desperate search for a cause occurred recently in the saga of autism and vaccination. Vaccines are nearly universal, and autism is relatively rare — and many parents, searching to explain why their children became autistic, lunged toward a common culprit: childhood vaccination. An avalanche of panic ensued. It took years of carefully performed clinical trials to finally disprove the link.)

The Florida Circuit Court that heard Reynard v. NEC was quick to discern these complexities. It empathized with David Reynard’s search for a tangible cause for his wife’s cancer. But it acknowledged that too little was known about such cases; “the uncertainty of the evidence . . . the speculative scientific hypotheses and [incomplete] epidemiological studies” made it impossible to untangle cause from coincidence. David Reynard’s claim was rejected in the spring of 1995, three years after it was originally filed. What was needed, the court said, was much deeper and more comprehensive knowledge about cellphones, brain cancer and of the possible intersection of the two.

Allow, then, a thought experiment: what if Susan Reynard was given a diagnosis of astrocytoma in 2011 — but this time, we armed her with the most omniscient of lawyers, the most cutting--edge epidemiological information, the most powerful scientific evidence? Nineteen years and several billion cellphone users later, if Reynard were to reappear in court, what would we now know about a possible link between cellphones and her cancer?

To answer these questions, we need to begin with a more fundamental question: How do we know that anything causes cancer?

The crudest method to capture a carcinogen’s imprint in a real human population is a large-scale population survey. If a cancer-causing agent increases the incidence of a particular cancer in a population, say tobacco smoking and lung cancer, then the overall incidence of that cancer will rise. That statement sounds simple enough — to find a carcinogen’s shadow, follow the trend in cancer incidence — but there are some fundamental factors that make the task complicated.

Siddhartha Mukherjee (smukherj2011@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of medical oncology at Columbia University. He is the author of “Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

 

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