What it's like being a scarily talented teenager

It was when she said how she loved ‘watching the computer do exactly what you wanted it to do’ that I realised how exceptional she must be. To be so young, just 19, and so at home with technology that you can control it rather than be in awe of its complexity. By the age of 11 Brittany Wenger was teaching herself computer coding, after being inspired by a course at primary school in ‘Futuristic Thinking’. She didn’t find it easy, but she found it ‘a lot of fun’, which says a lot about her. First she persisted in spite of the difficulty, and second she found amusement in that toil and tedious repetition.

Brittany is one of ten teenagers featured on this week’s Radio 1 Stories for having done something that has the potential to change the world. In Brittany’s case she devised a software program that is 99 per cent effective in diagnosing breast cancer. Twice her experiments failed completely but she persevered (driven on by the fact that at the time her cousin was being treated for the disease) and now she says she learned a lot from those earlier mistakes.

Brittany was in elite company on Tuesday night. Gemma Cairney (too old at 29 to be included but a game-changer herself because of the way she’s able to make Radio 1 sound serious) also talked to Malala Yousafzai, who at 15 was shot and almost killed by the Taleban because of her outspoken demands that girls should have freedom of access to education, and who has now been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for continuing her campaign in spite of her injuries. What has her experience taught her? ‘That I should not be afraid of anything.’