First Day: Hooray!!! (Bare with Me and the Corniness)

7.29.10


After a few shifts in my placement and a week away from the Pipeline program due to prior engagements that I committed to way back when, I can finally say that I've completed my first day with my researcher :)

I've been placed at Cal State Fullerton with Ruth and Sora, alongside a few of the other interns. To make sure that I complete my hours in a timely manner, I arrived at CSUF at 8 in the morning so I could get a full day's in. When I arrived, Mia and Lala (2 of the other lovely interns with the Pipeline program) were typing away at their computers. I met with Ruth to formally introduce myself and go over what projects she had in store for us during our time with her. We talked about transcribing interviews, a storyboard project, and an accomplishment binder for the organization she's affiliated with called WINCART, among other things. For the remainder of the day, I helped organize the files on Ruth's computer that pertained to the cancer research that was stored in libraries within the network, as well as did some research on a womyn named Henrietta Lacks and something called Hela cells. In my research, I learned that Hela cells, named after and found in the body of Henrietta Lacks, are the 1st human cells from which a permanent cell line was established, thus helping to shape the way medicine moved in the 2nd half of the 20th century and 1st decade of this one.

You see, ordinary cells kept in a lab have a limited life span...but immortal cells like Hela cells is cultured in a particular way so it has the ability to proliferate indefinitely (information taken from the internet).

Henrietta Lack's cells were changing the face of medicine, making way for things such as polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, and gene mapping.

The problem: neither Henrietta or her family knew ANYTHING about ANY of this.

During a surgery prior to her death, doctors took her cells and used it for research without her consent, and to make matters worse, her cells were used to develop medical treatments only available to those who could afford medical insurance, not low-income families like the Lackses.

I urge you, reader, to take it upon yourself to do your own research on the life of this womyn. It's stories like hers that make the medical field a challenge to challenge, but necessary nonetheless. To humanizing the medical world and beyond...
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More blogging to come. I'm catching up!!!


Alofa Atu,
Risa