The Boston Globe recently had a super uplifting article about Alafia Spencer, a high-school student who pushed her school system to start a specialized high school that focuses on engineering:

As a 10th grader [Spencer] sat through biology and geometry lectures about subjects she had long ago mastered. Bored, the aspiring aerospace engineer worried that the school wasn’t challenging enough for her or her classmates.

So last spring, when Boston school Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant sought ideas from students, teachers, and principals for themed high schools, the teenager raised her hand. The only student to do so, Spencer suggested an engineering school that would offer advanced classes in physics, chemistry, and computer science and let students take classes at nearby universities.

The idea sounds like a no-brainer, especially given how dismal a job many public high schools seem to do in preparing students for careers in science and math. But teachers tried to talk Spencer out of proposing her engineering high school at a meeting with the superintendent of schools.

But on the day Spencer had to present the idea for the engineering school to the superintendent, she still had not persuaded any Hyde Park teachers to support her proposal. Many of them had already committed to other teams led by colleagues, who wanted schools that focused on such subjects as social justice, business, and health. Several discouraged Spencer, advising her to join their teams because hers would not make the cut. One told her that teachers, not students, should be driving the proposals because teachers would be affected most by the changes.

Spencer’s response — that the teachers already had their degrees, and she wanted to know what they were going to do to help the students go to college — was awesome. She asked the would-be headmasters how they planned to raise MCAS scores and attendance, and reduce suspensions. In the end, she got her engineering school, with 350 students.

The Australian newspaper has a really cool interview with UCSF scientist Elizabeth Blackburn, who recently shared a prestigious Lasker prize with two other researchers. She also just won an award from the Gruber foundation for her research but also for fighting “the politicization of science.”

Born in 1948 in Hobart, she soon discovered a childhood passion for creatures. She also developed – as she confessed in her Lasker acceptance speech – a “spine-chilling habit of picking up dangerous animals” including jellyfish and stinging ants. All this translated into an interest in biochemistry and how living things work.

Blackburn, an Australian who’s lived in the U.S. for three decades, is best known as the co-discoverer of telomerase, “the enzyme that makes and repairs telomeres, the DNA caps that protect the ends of each chromosome and the integrity of the genes contained within them.” Her research has shown that telomerase constantly replenishes the telomeric tips of chromsomes in some organisms, but not humans. If we could reactivate our telomerase, we might be able to stop cell aging. But also, turning off telomerase could help stop cancers, which have high telomerase levels.

The other reason she’s well known is the fact that George Bush booted her from his Council on Bioethics, after she criticized his policy on stem cell research. In the interview, she also talks about the problems women scientists have balancing career and family, and how she solved them herself.