Body Positivity
Stars of the Week
Highlighting the achievements of talented youth who are making a positive change in the world.
Jazz Jennings
Jazz Jennings, a renowned TLC (I am Jazz) star LGBT rights activist, revealed back in June 2018 that she was preparing to undergo gender confirmation surgery, and told ABC News that the gender surgery was something she’d been longing for.
“I was like, I can’t believe this is happening.”
The demands from her surgeon in order for the surgery to be successful and the unusual challenges Jazz had to overcome, however, were back-breaking. Her surgeon told Jazz to lose 30 pounds before going under the knife — extremely challenging for her because she had an addiction to food. Season five revealed that Jazz’s surgery was a bit more complicated than others due to her incompleteness of puberty and insufficient penile skin. In spite of a longer-than-usual surgery, Jazz’s gender surgery, fortunately, went well. Everything seemed perfect, except for the fact that Jazz started having medical complications. “Her wounds were definitely separating and a blood blister began to form.” She had to go back to the OR for additional surgery.
Experiencing some of her “highest highs and lowest lows,” she has become more vulnerable than ever before as she dealt with anxiety surrounding her personal life, social life, and advocacy. Although it continues to be difficult to cope with the hurdles life throws her way, she has been actively working every day to get better and improve her physical and mental health.
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Jack Andraka
After the death of a close family friend caused by pancreatic cancer, 14-year-old Jack Andraka decided to launch research to find a way to beat cancer. He found data indicating that over 85% of pancreatic cancers are diagnosed too late, thus decreasing the person’s chance of survival to under 2%. The current diagnosing method was old, expensive, and inaccurate (up to 30% of the cases were missed by it). For these reasons, he ambitiously set off to find a new diagnosing method.
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His research started with the identification of a certain type of protein, mesothelin; this was one among the thousands of proteins he analyzed that was found in all pancreatic cancers at high levels. The revelation in this project, though, occurred in an “unlikely” place, so he describes. During his biology class, he figured he could use his knowledge of carbon nanotubes with what he was studying in biology class about antibodies. He describes the diagnosing method with the words: “You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes, add antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer.”
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Even if he made this extraordinary discovery, no lab he sent his ideas to took him into consideration. After trials and tribulations, Andraka developed an efficient test strip. This test was 168 times faster, 400 times more sensitive, and 26 times cheaper than modern diagnosing technology.
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To learn more about Andraka’s mission to find a cure to pancreatic cancer, read this article:
Erika Debendictis
The inspiration for Erika’s project came when, at 14 years of age, she went to visit a museum to look at Saturn V, a huge rocket weighing more than 132 tons. She then reflected and started studying why humans couldn’t reach some planets in our solar system; the biggest problem she found had to do with fuel. In the current state of space exploration, we are using rockets that require a lot of fuel, and therefore, every time scientists need to refuel, they use more fuel to bring it to the rocket while it’s traveling.
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To fix this problem, Erika came up with a plan: “Why fly directly from point A to point B in space knowing well we can’t reach this point with only one tank of fuel?” and “Why not develop an itinerary for the rocket to take it where it needs to be?" Her idea was to use the gravitational force of our solar system to help bring the spaceship where it needs to be. She, therefore, went on to build a plan of the asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and she proved that these asteroids can attract and push away even huge objects.
The only downside is that this method is very slow and makes a journey that currently takes only a couple of days in a 5-year journey. This means that this itinerary can be used to deliver the fuel for rockets if sent in advance from the departure of the rocket and this can be measured perfectly for when the rocket will need to refuel.
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To learn more about Erika's journey, click the link:
https://www.ted.com/talks/erika_debenedictis_it_s_time_for_intelligent_design
