When Allison Winn was eight and her family adopted(收养) a dog named Coco, they had no idea how much the little dog would change her life. "Coco helped me feel better," says Allison, who was recovering from cancer at the time." She would stay with me when I didn't want to play." Allison loved Coco so much that she told her parents she wanted to help other sick kids find the same kind of comfort.

    She started raising money by selling homemade dog biscuits in front of her house. Her first customer was the mailman. By the end of that summer, she had raised nearly $1,000, enough to adopt and train two dogs and give them to children with cancer. Now, a little more than two years later, an organization has been founded for Allison's cause.

    Her organization, the Stink Bug Project, is run to help families adopt pets. To date, the program has raised $ 33,000 and given ten dogs to ten kids with cancer. With the remaining money, Allison's mother, Dianna Litvak, who helps run Stink Bug, hopes to extend(扩大) the pet adoption program all over the state and help support cancer research.

    Her daughter is just as ambitious(雄心勃勃的)."I wanted to do a million adoptions, but my morn made me lower it," says Allison. Still, she'd finally like to get, dogs to sick kids in other states." Allison has figured out(理解) how to help  in a way that no one else has," Litvak says proudly. "We made her younger sister, Emily, her friends, and the adopting families take part. It took the love of a little girl to wrap(包) all that together into one amazing package."

    Life is full of surprises and you never know how things will turn out.

    Sir John Gurdon is a good example of this. As a boy, he was told he was hopeless at science and was at bottom of his class. Now, aged 79, the very same Gurdon shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Japanese stem cell (干细胞) researcher Shinya Yamanaka.

    Like so many scientists, Gurdon shows us where the power of curiosity and perseverance(坚持) can lead.

    When he was 15 in 1948, Gurdon ranked last out of the 250 boys at his high school in biology and every other science subject. Gurdon's high school science teacher even said that his dream of becoming a scientist was "quite ridiculous".

    In spite of his teacher's criticisms(批评), Gurdon followed his curiosity and kept working hard. He went to the lab early and left later than anyone else. He experienced thousands of failures.

    "My own belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work," Gurdon said.

    In 1962, Gurdon took a cell from an adult frog and moved its genetic (基因的) information into an egg cell. The egg cell then grew into a clone of the adult frog. This technique later helped to create the sheep Dolly in 1996，the first cloned mammal(哺乳动物) in the world.

    In 2006, Gurdon's work was developed by Yamanaka to show that a sample(样本) of a person's skin can be used to create stem cells. Using this technique, doctors can repair a patient's heart after a heart attack.

    "Luck favors the prepared mind," Gurdon told the Nobel Prize Organization. "Ninety percent of the time things don't work, but when they do, you have to seize(抓住) the chance."