Lorena Benitez

Lorena, an only child, was born in St. Peter, Minnesota, April 17, 1995, to Ivan and Becky Benitez.  After several moves, the family settled in Lake Worth, Florida.

She is a junior at Atlantic High School in Delray Beach and is enrolled in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and takes both IB and Advanced Placement (AP) classes.  They are intense programs which could earn her college credit.  Two of the requirements for IB are knowledge of one foreign language (in her case, French) and community service.  In addition to the main subjects, Lorena dual enrolls at Palm Beach State College studying physics with calculus. 

When Lorena was in the 8th and 9th grades, she was selected, through an audition process, to perform in the Florida Music Educators Association’s All-State Chorus in Tampa.  Since August 2010, she has been in the chorus of the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches and will be performing at the Kravis Center May 12, 2012.  They perform two concerts a year there.   Every year she also sings an opera piece in French at the high school’s French Honor Society induction ceremony.  Lorena is the Treasurer of the French Honor Society and will be President next year.  She is also in the National Honor Society. 

Several weeks ago Lorena and her parents visited Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and Duke.  “I don’t have a favorite school.”  She would like to get a BA degree and then enter a graduate program for a PhD with a double major—biology and biochemistry.  She has her eye on research and draws inspiration from Betsy Dresser, who was the founding Director of the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species and Senior Vice President of Research at the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans.  Ms. Dresser is a full professor at the University of New Orleans.   “I thought cloning endangered species was very interesting and something I might want to do,” Lorena said.  She also admires Sean B. Carroll, professor of molecular biology and genetics and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, as well as author of one of her favorite books.   

She was recently accepted into a prestigious summer internship at Scripps Florida and is looking forward to helping Dr. Matt Gill with his research on metabolism and aging. 

“Education is one of the most important things.  I have always been around education.”  Her mother is a teacher.  “I think you really need to be educated—to know what is happening in your life, to make the right decisions, to understand everything that is around you.  I have a very strong work ethic and have always worked hard to do well.”

Volunteering at Green Cay is one of her favorite activities of the week, and part of her community service requirements.  “I thought it would be a nice place to volunteer, so I called Eva [the naturalist].  Every Saturday I feed all the animals, change their water, clean out their cages and tanks, fill the bird feeders and occasionally help with the programs.  I take Oliver [an eastern screech owl] out of his cage, walk around with him and show him to people.”  

“The environment needs our help and it’s our role to preserve and protect it.  A lot of people aren’t up to that task and that is a big problem.  It’s wrong to destroy the environment and think that someone else will take care of it.”  She is also concerned about bio-ethics as it pertains to the suffering of laboratory animals. “Does the end justify the means?”  Is the model for the advancement of medical knowledge through animal experimentation justified? 

Consider Mahatma K. Gandhi’s belief: 

“The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree  . . .  We reap what we sow.” 

Lorena is an illustration in-point that a country’s wealth is in its people.  They are its most valuable resource.  A well-funded, not-for-profit, beneficent educational system, tied to the fundamental needs of the earth and its species, should open for this oncoming wave of dedicated students.  And well-paid, full-time employment should be waiting at the goal line.  Given the opportunity, they will catch the ball thrown by previous generations and hurl it through this solar system and into the vastness of space beyond. 

They are the new millennium!

By Stephanie Langson Canter