and if one of these young

ones had an autoimmune disease perhaps they would consider the usefulness of the work of faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org ristori  + BCG and pubmed.org faustman dl? or perhaps they would be just like Venus Williams and do as she has done for Sjogren's?

Venus Williams: The champion trying to slam Sjogren's ...

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Mar 21, 2014 - Venus Williams won in Dubai last month to end a trophy drought which ... Venus Williams opens up on her battle with Sjogren's syndrome; Still ...

Effects of Bacille Calmette-Guerin after the first demyelinating event in the CNS.

Ristori G, Romano S, Cannoni S, Visconti A, Tinelli E, Mendozzi L, Cecconi P, Lanzillo R, Quarantelli M, Buttinelli C, Gasperini C, Frontoni M, Coarelli G, Caputo D, Bresciamorra V, Vanacore N, Pozzilli C, Salvetti M.

Neurology. 2014 Jan 7;82(1):41-8. doi: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000438216.93319.ab. Epub 2013 Dec 4.

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  Apple's New Whiz Kids

App Developers Who Are Too Young to Drive

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By

Jessica E. Vascellaro

Updated June 18, 2012 2:16 p.m. ET

Paul Dunahoo went on a business trip to San Francisco last week, where he attended technical sessions at Apple Inc. AAPL +0.24% 's developer conference, networked with other programmers and received feedback from Apple engineers on his six productivity apps.

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Paul Dunahoo, one of the teens who attended Apple's developer event. Robert Falcetti for The Wall Street Journal

Then, Mr. Dunahoo, chief executive of Bread and Butter Software LLC, returned to Connecticut to get ready for the eighth grade.

A growing number of teenagers have joined the app-making frenzy, and Apple, the app industry's ringleader, is encouraging the trend. Jessica Vascellaro has details on digits.

"It's a very rare opportunity" to be at Apple's conference, said Mr. Dunahoo, who is 13 years old and wears red braces.

Mr. Dunahoo is one of a growing number of teens joining the app-making frenzy. Apple, the app industry's ringleader, is encouraging the trend.

This year, Apple opened up its developers event for the first time to 13- to 17-year-olds. The Cupertino, Calif., company supplied 150 teens with scholarships to cover the event's $1,599 entrance fee, arranged a student lounge with beanbag chairs and Skittles, and invited their parents to chaperone. The teens, or their parents, still had to sign Apple's customary nondisclosure agreements.

"We used to think that inviting students as young as 18 years old was great," said Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, in an interview last week. But he said Apple's iPhone and iPad software, called iOS, has lately attracted interest from an even younger group of developers.

"We would get emails after the developer conference from students, 16, 15, 14 years old, saying I already have X number of apps in the app store. I'm a developer. Can I take part in this too?" he said.

Apple's catering to youthful developers comes as children's use of technology has skyrocketed and more companies are trying to draw in young audiences. The number of games and education apps targeted at kids is climbing, and social networks, such as Facebook Inc., FB +1.31% are exploring ways to let youngsters use the sites with parental supervision.

Apple said a few hundred teens and college students were among the 5,000 attendees at its developer event last week, where they met with other programmers and brainstormed new app ideas, including a game about crashing the conference's Thursday night "Beer Bash," the only part of the event off-limits to the underage contingent.

Ryan Cohen, 15, whose mother raised the $2,500 needed to cover his travel expenses by appealing to her friends on Facebook, said his fellow programmers gave him tips about topics like "UITableViews," a way of listing items on a screen. But the highlight for Mr. Cohen was meeting Apple CEO Tim Cook after he rushed the stage following Mr. Cook's keynote address and appealed to a sympathetic security guard.

"It was an once-in-a-lifetime thing," said Mr. Cohen, who has a photo of himself and Mr. Cook on his iPhone.

Teens are still a small subsection of the thousands of developers who are learning to build apps, or software tailored to devices like mobile phones. But the movement is growing, giving rise to app-building camps and courses for teens. ID Tech Camps, a Campbell, Calif., company that runs several software summer programs for children and teens around the country, said the six app-building classes it and its related programs offer will draw 2,500 students this summer, up 70% from last year.

The camps start at $749 for a weeklong program. The company says its classes, available for children as young as seven years old, are taught on computers with strong parental-control software. "I think kids see how much money can be made from these apps," said Karen Thurm Safran, vice president of marketing and business development for the programs.

Mr. Dunahoo, who is self-taught, said his apps have so far been downloaded nearly two million times, fetching him around $8,000. He added that he is saving his earnings to someday buy a house, but spends a little on administrative costs for his company.

The rise of young app builders comes as regulators scrutinize growing app and website use by minors amid concerns about whether technology companies are doing enough to protect them. An Apple spokesman said the company has "industry leading" parental controls and rates apps based on age-appropriateness.

Parents said they cheer their young programmers on, but are careful to keep them away from material that isn't suitable for their age. "We're mindful of what is going on out there," said Allen Dunahoo, Paul's dad, who manages retirement plans.

Paul Dunahoo doesn't have a Twitter or Facebook account—and he said he doesn't want them for now. "Maybe someday for the business," said the younger Mr. Dunahoo, who released his latest app, a grocery-list maker, last week.

For many teen app developers, the apps aren't so much a full-fledged business as a way to exploit their technology interests, as well as to earn extra money and pave the way for an eventual job in the software industry.

Andrew Rosenblum, a 17-year-old in Virginia Beach, Va., has made several thousand dollars from ads in a Yahtzee app he built and from a 99-cent math app. "Some of my friends work at an ice-cream parlor," he said.

Midas Kwant, 15, already has begun job-hunting. He made the most of his visit from the Netherlands to Apple's event last week by swinging through Silicon Valley for casual visits to Apple's offices, Facebook's old headquarters, the house where Apple co-founder Steve Jobs grew up and Stanford University, which he hopes to attend. Ultimately, he said, he wants to work at Apple.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com