Cancer terrifies most people. For Gage Anderson, it has been the driving focus of his independent studies since he was a freshman at Berwick Academy in South Berwick.

“It’s a scourge on the Western world and the second-biggest killer in the United States,” Anderson said, “and I find it absolutely fascinating.”

As a freshman, Gage elected to participate in an extracurricular program, “Innovation Pursuit,” that was designed to build on his longstanding personal interest in science and engineering. The springboard for his studies was “Physics of the Future,” a 2011 book that he read as a seventh-grader.

Written by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the book describes a future where computers constantly scan us for health problems and diseases such as cancer are battled by reprogramming genes through biomedical engineering and nanotechnology.

“I read that and thought, ‘I don’t believe it, but that’s absolutely fantastic,’ ” Anderson recalled.

Throughout high school, Anderson studied everything he could about ongoing cancer research. In ninth grade, it was biomedical engineering. As a sophomore, it was cancer and nanotechnology. As a junior, he studied nutrition and lifestyle choices related to cancer prevention, and as a senior, he studied the latest research on genetic mutations.

“I find it fascinating to find the exact set of circumstances that led to a mutation,” Anderson said. Researchers would then target the mutation with preventive vaccines, immunotherapy or other countermeasures.

He spent time at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, where he shadowed oncologists and radiologists and interviewed cancer patients and research scientists. He also works part time for his family’s excavation and landscaping company in York.

Anderson was accepted early decision to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he plans to study chemical and biomedical engineering. Ultimately, he’d like to do intensive research in targeted cancer therapy.

Anderson is inspired by his grandmother, who survived breast cancer and now battles ovarian cancer. And he’s motivated by the pure challenge of figuring out one of the most fearsome diseases.

“There is no single cure for cancer,” he said. “There are millions of them. Each mutation is different, so you’re never going to cure them all at once. We’ll have to cure each one. I want to be a part of that.”

– By Kelley Bouchard