 I've always felt different. There are a lot of labels to describe my difference, but none of them define me. Who am I really? What can I become? Can I overcome my challenges? Have others like me found their strength? Can I find it too? At least 20% of our population has some kind of disability. That's one out of every five people. Women with disabilities are successful in every field, in the arts, in politics, and in science. 175,000 disabled scientists working in America today. I used to think I was the only one. When I grew up, I lived in a town that was very provincial. And I was the only disabled person that I knew in my school. Then I got out and I saw that there were lots and lots and lots of people with disabilities in the world who were very active in society. By having a revolution of one, we can change our society. We don't need to think about the differences that separate us. What we need to think about are those unifying characteristics that we call humanity. A revolution of one means that every single one of us has the power to change the world, starting with changing our own lives. I'm Dr. Margaret Nosek, and I've dedicated my life to studying and improving the lives of people with disabilities. As a rehabilitation counselor and as a medical researcher, I've written hundreds of scientific articles about men and women with disabilities. And I've met amazing and inspiring people all along the way. In this program, you'll meet three extraordinary women scientists who have triumphed over their own challenges to achieve astounding success in their fields. They each endured physical and emotional struggles growing up. But they found a way to turn this pain into strength and they used the strength they've developed to help others who face challenges of the mind, body, or spirit. As you watch this program, remember that these women have done what many people thought was impossible. And if it's possible for them, it's possible for you. Whether you're rich or poor, a woman or a man, disabled or not, you can succeed in science. Don't let anybody tell you you cannot do it. Remember that you need time and you will learn how to do it. Don't allow anybody to discourage you to the point that you really cannot do it. Set your goals for what you want to do in life and do it. I learned myself through many years. I was not born blind. I became blind when I was 11 years old. I was born in Mexico, a family of 10, and everybody very healthy and very happy. When I was 11 years old, I had a severe unexpected illness. And when they were trying to help me to survive, it was damaging my optic nerve. So in a matter of a couple of months, I lost my sight. My treatment was that I had transfusions all the time, many times, two or three times a week. So that happened for about eight, nine years. I feel that the experience with my doctor led me to be in the field of psychology. He became a very, very important person in my life, not only because he was the one who kept me alive, but he started doing something else. He also was a teacher in sociology. And he told me, Verta, when you feel better, you can go to my class. And I felt like it was the most important gift I ever can get. And I would go and I would take my tape recorder and the time that I spent in bed with the transfusion, I listened to his lectures. I start questioning, what do people do to turn this pain into strength? And in a way, I was probably questioning myself, how can I turn this pain into strength for myself? When my parents realized that I was blind, they figured out that my life was over. The expectation for a disabled child was zero, especially in Mexico at that time. So I need to move away from that expectation of nothing to move on. So when I was 19, I left Mexico and I started at Braille Institute in Los Angeles where I learned Braille, mobility, techniques of daily living, and English. Three years later, I got my BA in psychology from Pepperdine University. A year later, I got my master's degree in psychology from Pepperdine. What I was doing was completely dedicated for that until my master's degree that I met my husband. And he was also in psychology, so we just kinda joined effort. And three years later, I got my PhD. A wonderful thing about United States in the school system is that there's many ways to get educated. I did a lot of with tutors. They read the book and I listened to a tape and take notes in Braille. What I do now is I get up about six o'clock in the morning, spend time with my husband, and I wake up my son, Samuel, who is 18. He is going to go to the university in six months so I'm thinking about this as a precious time for me to spend as much time as I can. And after that, I start getting myself organized for my day. My office is very convenient to my house because I wanted to deal with the mobility issues. Sometimes my husband can drop me, sometimes I take a taxi. The kind of patients that I have, a lot of them are Mexican-Americans. And they're couples and individuals, a lot of women. Sometimes people call me when they have a child with a disability and then I give them some help with that. My point is to you that you need to feel comfortable that your child will go. If you don't help the parents to feel calm and to feel competent, they cannot help to provide the support that I tell them to provide for their children. You need a mom or a dad or a significant person that can walk with you and say, nothing is gonna happen. We are with you. I would like to do more work in the area of research that I'm very much involved with, which is depression and then Mexican-Americans and the Latin world. My husband is very involved too, so we can really make a good team, a research team together. Things that I like to do outside my work. I like reading, I like poetry. And I like to sit and look into my life and try to be more spiritual. I don't see myself as a blind person who happens to be a psychologist. I see myself more as a psychologist who happens to have a disability. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Elizabeth Blacko was the very first women doctor in America and she was blind in one eye. I love science because I can use my head even when my body doesn't cooperate. I dream of becoming a doctor because doctors helped me. I believe I can succeed because I know that I am strong. But will anyone else believe it? My name is Judith Badner. I have an M.D. and a Ph.D. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and I work both as a psychiatrist. I see patients with mental illnesses and I also work in statistical genetics trying to identify genes that contribute to various disorders, a particular psychiatric disorder like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Growing up certainly and even now there's no one that I know that's just like me. I think I'm the only person with dwarfism that has an M.D. and a Ph.D. combined. An M.D. allows you to do clinical work. It allows you to see patients. Ph.D. is geared more for doing research. And an M.D. Ph.D. is someone that is qualified to combine both clinical work and research work. I started getting interest in genetics when I was about in junior high school I guess. And I started to want to learn more about my form of dwarfism. I had a lot of leg surgery to prevent future problems. I was out of high school for many months at a time. My experience with the surgeries in high school very much contributed to my interest in medicine. And my family was very supportive. It was interesting that they always told me, they believed in me, they thought that I could do it and they supported me. But they told me many years later after I actually did it, they thought I was being totally unrealistic but they didn't want to be the ones to tell me. And they actually thought, well, surely they would tell her at college that this was totally unrealistic. And no one ever did so. I did it anyway. I remember for me the turning point. I was at a hospital and I saw a person with dwarfism and surgical scrubs. When I saw it I thought, gee, it is possible. And I thought, well, if it is possible that someone can do it, then it's possible that I can do it. People talk about finding a mentor that is as much like you as possible. I mean, that's not something I really saw as possible for me because I was so different. But what I've learned is you try to be flexible. I mean, you don't just look for someone exactly like you, but someone that shares parts of you. The issues involving an invisible disability are not surprisingly different from those involved with an invisible disability. And I think one of the big issues is disclosure, what you tell others. For a visible disability, you don't have much of a choice, I mean. Anyone who meets me or looks at me can tell about my dwarfism. And in some ways that makes things hard and in some other ways I think it makes it easier because I don't have to worry about, well, what if they find out this about me? You know, they already know, I gotta deal with it and that's it. And with my patients, they always have to think about, well, who do they tell? What's gonna happen when they tell? And well, if they don't tell, what happens? When they can't keep it a secret any more. There are long hours and a lot of hard work, but there's definitely time for relaxation. In fact, I think finding that time is essential, you know, in terms of being able to do well at work. Science and medicine, both. I mean, they have a lot of flexibility in terms of what you actually do from day to day. There's a lot of different paths one could take. And even if someone had physical or mental limitations, on that might close off some paths, but other paths would still be open. Einstein, one of the most famous scientific thinkers in history had a learning disability called dyslexia. I use my strength in the face of my challenge and the boundaries around me disappear. My own fears and my own limits are the first to go. I am a pediatric neurosurgeon, and a pediatric neurosurgeon is someone who operates on the brain and the spinal cord, and specializes primarily in taking care of children with problems of the brain and spinal cord. Many times when you're starting out on a road where there are not a lot of people who have done similar things, you have to forge your own way. And for me in neurosurgery, at the time that I was initially applying, there were not a lot of women, there weren't a lot of role models that I could use. I think I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I was probably around four, five, six, when I looked at everything and I said, you know, I really think I want to be a doctor. Probably that's because I also, when I was a child, spent a fair amount of time seeing doctors going back and forth. I have a form of spina bifida, so I had an operation when I was younger to deal with the curvature of the spine. I also have weakness in one of my legs. My right leg is weaker. It affects me primarily because it means that I have to wear a leg brace, so I need to have a shoe that is a slightly different size as well just to be able to have both legs be even when I'm walking. For me, the handicap was something which I wanted to make certain was part and parcel of who I was, but not the thing that was focused on most. If you ask me about myself, I consider myself a woman and a neurosurgeon and a wife and a person with various interests and talents, and it takes a long time for me to come to the point of saying, oh, and I have a brace. I think neurosurgery is like many high-end areas of medicine, science, art. I think all things come down to talents, ability, and interest. And then to some degree, drive. How much do you want it? The first things I did when I realized that I thought about becoming a neurosurgeon was to talk to a lot of people. I went to neurosurgeons at the institution at Columbia, where I was a medical student. I talked to neurologist. I talked to residents in neurosurgery, and I tried to define what it was that a neurosurgeon did. How did you become a neurosurgeon? What did it take to become a neurosurgeon? Did I have the physical stamina, the abilities emotionally to deal with some of the problems that they deal with, and the intellectual strength and ability to become a neurosurgeon as well. When I followed my patient into the operating room, it was love at first sight. I had never seen anything as beautiful or spectacular or interesting in all of the time that I'd been training. And I can remember details of that operation to this day, and that's 20 some odd years later. It was just exciting. It was exciting to be able to operate. My days are always full, they're always complex, and they're always changing. Generally get to work sometime between six and six thirty in the morning. Most days I will go and round on my patients and make sure the patients that I have in the hospital are doing well. I'll operate generally two to three days a week, and I'll see patients in clinic another two days a week, and then various times I'll also do various research projects. It was a time when I first came here that I spent a considerable amount of time in the laboratory doing experiments. That's changed over time as my responsibilities as chief of pediatric neurosurgery, and also my responsibilities in taking care of patients have increased, and so I spend much more time now in a collaborative fashion doing research. For me, teaching is one of the reasons also why I'm in an academic center. I love teaching residents, I love teaching medical students. One of the exciting things about being a pediatric neurosurgeon is that you're dealing with children who grow up to be teenagers who then grow up to be adults. So you're not just dealing with a person who's already completely formed. I take care of problems of children that started as they were being formed, that happen as they begin to grow and develop. In some cases it's related to things like tumors that may develop at any point. The variety is enormous. I participate in a project that we've been working on now for over five years. In fact, this year when we go it'll be our sixth year to Guatemala. It's called Project Shunt, and what it represents is a combination of working with Healing the Children and the Pediatric Foundation of Guatemala to deal with neurosurgical problems of poor children within Guatemala, city in Guatemala. Last year, 25 of us went down to Guatemala and performed about 35 neurosurgical operations in a period of one week. I'm married. My husband is an architect. He comes as his own person to our relationship and so we support and love each other but also are very independent people. Right now we're in the pursuit of adoption of a child and so we've been spending a lot of time working through the process of the adoption which hopefully will be happening sometime in the next several months. And we're excited about that because we'd like to have a family. We think that that's important as well. You need to find ways to find peace in your own life because the most important thing is to make certain that you're there and ready for the next patient that needs you and to do that you have to come to the table whole. I think it's easy to know why you do neurosurgery or why you do anything that's difficult. One, because you love it and two, because at the end when all is said and done, you've done something valuable. Charles Bernay, who is deaf and blind, is considered one of the founders of modern biology for his studies of photosynthesis and reproductive science. Just because someone thinks I can't do something doesn't necessarily mean I can't. The fact is, you know, just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done. And a lot of people without disabilities have no idea what it's like to have a disability or how you can work with it or work around it. You can succeed in science because you are putting the best of you within yourself. Decide that you are not gonna take any less than the best. So what you do is you make use of what's available to you and most of all you look for quality. There are staffed scientists. I am a young woman. I am strong. Watch me succeed.