Ian Emmanuel González Santos stepped into a university classroom at age nine. His previous school had told him he had an attention deficit disorder. At 13, he walked out as the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Guadalajara. Now 15, he is deep into doctoral-level molecular biology research, including work on enzymes that can break apart one of the world’s most stubborn plastics.
His degree, a Pharmaceutical Chemist and Biologist, fuses chemistry, biology, and health sciences. He finished it in four years at the university’s Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering, known as CUCEI, while also completing an international master’s degree in molecular biology and cytogenetics. He started his doctorate in January 2024.
“My story is a combination of dreams and sacrifices, pandemic, hard work, mockery, but also many satisfactions and achievements,” González Santos said during his December 2023 graduation ceremony, according to the university’sofficial announcement.
The Plastic His Research Targets
González Santos’s work has drawn attention for a specific focus:breaking down PET plastic with bacteria. PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, is the stuff of drink bottles and food containers. It is light, clear, and tough, which is precisely why it lingers for centuries once it becomes waste.
The numbers behind that persistence are stark. The OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook reports that plastic production hit 460 million metric tons in 2019, double the output from 2000. Waste reached 353 million metric tons that year. Only nine percent was ultimately recycled. Roughly 22 million metric tons seeped into the environment.
His current doctoral work zeroes in on water safety, applying metagenomics to study genetic material in Lake Chapala, Mexico’s largest lake. In interviews, he has described a routine that includes track and field training, music, and video games. His stated aim is to contribute “to humanity,” whether through plastic research or water quality science.
How an Enzyme Takes Apart a Bottle
Plastic-eating bacteria make for catchy headlines, but the actual chemistry is more pedestrian and more useful. A plastic bottle is a long chain of repeating molecules. Enzymes function as precision cutters, slicing those chains back into chemical building blocks that can be reused.
A 2016 paper published in Science first identified a bacterium called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6. It produces enzymes that hydrolyze PET and consume it as a carbon and energy source. The finding cracked open a new field, though the natural enzyme worked far too slowly for any practical use.
That changed in 2022. A team at the University of Texas at Austin published a study in Nature describing FAST-PETase, an engineered enzyme that nearly fully depolymerized untreated post-consumer PET from 51 different products in about a week. The process ran at 50 degrees Celsius. The enzyme carries five targeted mutations, identified through a structure-based machine learning algorithm. The researchers, led by Hongyuan Lu and Hal S. Alper, also closed the loop: they took the recovered monomers and resynthesized virgin PET.
The Real Bottleneck Is Sorting
Biology can do its part, but only under the right conditions. Enzymes need PET that is clean, separated from other materials, and pretreated to maximize surface area. The jumbled contents of a curbside recycling bin do not qualify.
Sorting is not a footnote. It is the whole game. Most researchers view enzymatic recycling as a partner to mechanical methods, not a substitute for cutting waste or building better collection systems. Without proper sorting, even the most advanced enzyme stalls before it starts.
Industrial scale presents the harder test. The French company Carbios announced in March 2026 that it still intends to build its Longlaville facility and start production by early 2028, pending financing and presales agreements. Timelines that long reflect the tangle of engineering, logistics, and market forces that separate a lab result from a working plant.
U.S. recycling figures add further context. The National Association for PET Container Resources pegged the PET bottle recycling rate at 30.2 percent in 2024, down slightly from a revised 32.5 percent in 2023. Those gains are real, yet they underscore how much material still escapes, particularly from packaging formats that are difficult to collect or that confuse consumers.
A Student Who Defied the Template
The University of Guadalajara had no playbook for a nine-year-old undergraduate. Marco Antonio Pérez Cisneros, rector of CUCEI, admitted as much at González Santos’s graduation.
“We received Ian at the beginning with a lot of surprise because we are not accustomed to this,” Pérez Cisneros said. “The teachers, at first uncertain, later became enthusiastic because they believed in the project.”
González Santos has been candid about being told he had an attention deficit early in his schooling. His path shifted when teachers and family backed his move into advanced coursework. The university published the details of his graduation on December 8, 2023. The story rippled through Mexican media.
Susana Guerra Martínez, coordinator of the degree program, told the ceremony that the faculty had watched González Santos grow academically and personally. “The world is literally his,” she said, predicting he would become a formidable professional.
His trajectory threads into a larger effort. The OECD report names four levers for cutting plastic’s environmental damage, among them stronger markets for recycled plastics and policies that spur technological innovation. New ideas sometimes arrive from unexpected directions. González Santos’s path shows what becomes possible when schools and universities clear room for high-ability students who do not match the standard pattern.
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