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Question, Day 2
Aug. 5th, 2010 01:36 amWhy did I decide on cancer research? This one is so prosaic.
I came into college in straight chemistry, because of an awesome high school teacher I had. As one of the requirements, though, I had to take two semesters of Physical Chemistry. Only one teacher teaches it, and she . . . is not good at it. So bad, in fact, that I changed majors after PChem I so I wouldn't have to spend another semester with her. Thus, Biochemistry.
But it turns out that Biochem is really fun after all. We take genes (say, carotene-producing genes) from plant A (say carrots) and put them in plant B (say rice). Now the rice, which is a staple for the vast majority of people on earth, produces carotene, a vital mineral that nearly no one gets enough of. Huzzah!
As to cancer . . . the short answer is the people I liked kept dying of it. My Aunt Gigi, a family friend Len (made so much more tragic by the fact that we regularly got "Lenograms," which detailed his decline), my Uncle Andy just a short time ago. Now Gigi's daughter Allison has been diagnosed with cancer also, and while she's in remission, it never goes away. One day, it's going to kill her.
Another part is that I saved the life of this little girl who had ALL (see the bone marrow tag), and that's the most rewarding thing.
Finally, from a Science! point of view, cancer is a really interesting challenge. It doesn't have just one cause, we seem to have a whole set of genes that aren't useful to anything but cancer*, and being a collection of cells, cancer evolves rapidly in response to anything you throw at it. There was a chart I saw in one of my biology classes, of all the proteins that are ten or more times active in cancer cells than in healthy ones; the vast majority of them just had a long string of letters and numbers, because they'd only been identified by looking at cancer cells that had them and we have no idea what they do. But what they do, and especially how to turn them on and off, is going to help us kick this thing.
Wooooow, I am long-winded. Okay, question time:
What is your earliest memory?
*This is a vast oversimplification. They do other useful things, often during fetal development. Or they're vestigial genes, left over from a time when we were geckos. Or any one of a thousand other things, but cancer makes everything be weird.
I came into college in straight chemistry, because of an awesome high school teacher I had. As one of the requirements, though, I had to take two semesters of Physical Chemistry. Only one teacher teaches it, and she . . . is not good at it. So bad, in fact, that I changed majors after PChem I so I wouldn't have to spend another semester with her. Thus, Biochemistry.
But it turns out that Biochem is really fun after all. We take genes (say, carotene-producing genes) from plant A (say carrots) and put them in plant B (say rice). Now the rice, which is a staple for the vast majority of people on earth, produces carotene, a vital mineral that nearly no one gets enough of. Huzzah!
As to cancer . . . the short answer is the people I liked kept dying of it. My Aunt Gigi, a family friend Len (made so much more tragic by the fact that we regularly got "Lenograms," which detailed his decline), my Uncle Andy just a short time ago. Now Gigi's daughter Allison has been diagnosed with cancer also, and while she's in remission, it never goes away. One day, it's going to kill her.
Another part is that I saved the life of this little girl who had ALL (see the bone marrow tag), and that's the most rewarding thing.
Finally, from a Science! point of view, cancer is a really interesting challenge. It doesn't have just one cause, we seem to have a whole set of genes that aren't useful to anything but cancer*, and being a collection of cells, cancer evolves rapidly in response to anything you throw at it. There was a chart I saw in one of my biology classes, of all the proteins that are ten or more times active in cancer cells than in healthy ones; the vast majority of them just had a long string of letters and numbers, because they'd only been identified by looking at cancer cells that had them and we have no idea what they do. But what they do, and especially how to turn them on and off, is going to help us kick this thing.
Wooooow, I am long-winded. Okay, question time:
What is your earliest memory?
*This is a vast oversimplification. They do other useful things, often during fetal development. Or they're vestigial genes, left over from a time when we were geckos. Or any one of a thousand other things, but cancer makes everything be weird.
