12-year-old begins medical school in Ill.

By Martha Irvine, Associated Press, 8/25/2003

CHICAGO -- Sho Yano's mother hands him his lunch for school in a brown paper bag -- a turkey sandwich and cookies.

"You don't need any bones today? No bones?" Kyung Yano asks her quiet, spectacle-wearing 12-year-old. Sho shakes his head "no" as they head out of their apartment. She wants to make sure he is not supposed to take his samples of spinal bones and a human skull to class, where he is learning human anatomy.

It is a typical morning many young students and their parents experience, except for one thing. Sho is not in junior high. He is a first-year medical school student at the University of Chicago, where he is the youngest ever student to attend one of the university's professional schools.

If he were not also getting his PhD along with his medical degree -- thus, pushing his age at graduation to 19 or 20 -- he would also be on track to become the youngest person to graduate from any medical school. According to Guinness World Records, a 17-year-old graduated from medical school in New York in 1995.

But Sho is utterly uninterested in setting records. He also shuns the labels often used to describe him, such as "prodigy" and "little genius."

Yes, he has an IQ of over 200. And yes, he graduated summa cum laude in three years from Chicago's Loyola University. But for Sho, going to school is about learning as much as he can.

"And there's a lot of stuff to know," he says, as he thumbs through one of his extra-thick medical books.

While many kids his age have been spending their summers at camp or the beach, Sho has been dissecting a human cadaver and learning the intricacies of the 12 cranial nerves. And so far, having scored A's on his first few quizzes, he is handling the course work better than some a decade or more older than him.

Some of his classmates were wary at first, including Luka Pocivavsek, a 22-year-old medical student who shared a room with his young classmate at a retreat for new students in the M.D./PhD program.

But Sho quickly won him over.

"He has surpassed my expectations in every imaginable way," Pocivavsek says. "His initial shyness has given way to a very sociable guy. And his understanding of complex social and political issues is very keen and observant."

In some ways, Sho is still a typical 12-year-old. He has a pet rabbit and sometimes squabbles with his little sister, Sayuri. And while he is not a fan of Harry Potter, he adores books by best-selling children's author Brian Jacques of "Redwall Abbey" fame.

At school, Sho is more of the little brother figure. His classmates tease him, for instance, about finding a girlfriend. But they also go out of their way to include him in, often socializing in their homes instead of bars or choosing PG-rated movies.

Born in Portland, Ore., Sho spent most of his early years in California, where his father, Katsura, runs the American subsidiary of a Japanese shipping company. Sho lives in the university's family housing with his mother, who originally came to this country from Korea to study art history, and 7-year-old Sayuri, a talented student in her own right who wants to be a cardiologist.

From when he was very young, his mom says, it was apparent that Sho was gifted.

By age 4, Sho was composing music. And by age 7, he was doing high school work. By then, he was being taught by his parents because they could not find a school that could accommodate him.

By age 8, he scored 1,500 out of 1,600 possible points on the SATs and began college at 9.

His mother says it is difficult to explain what having a child like Sho has been like. But she and her husband were always clear, "He will decide his own life, what he wants to do," she says.

They allowed him to choose the University of Chicago even though it meant Sho's father would have to live apart from them because of his job.

His mom also lets him decide which media interviews he accepts. A few months back, he turned down a request from talk show host Oprah Winfrey. He told his mom he wants he do something "bigger" before being on television, such as becoming a researcher and professor.

In the end, he says he chose medicine because he wants to help people.

"I wish I could find a big step," he says, his eyes widening slightly, "like a treatment for cancer."