A little bit about me, I was raised in East New York with my mother, father, and sister. My sister and I are ten years apart. By the age of eight, I became an aunt. Now I am an aunt to three nephew and a niece. I am the first to go to college in my family.
In 8th grade, I found out I was dyslexic. My parents are Caribbean. There are certain things they weren’t familiar with, so they didn’t know or understand the concept of dyslexia. They believed if I put as much effort into reading as I put into math I would do fine. So, they would force me to read the words that I had trouble with. Of course, there would be word I didn’t know, and they would tell me to sound them out, but the words would still come out wrong. Then they would just tell me the word, but when I came across the word again, they would have to tell me the word again which made them frustrated. They believed I was not trying, which also made them frustrated. This resulted in my hating reading, especially out loud.
I will never forget the first time that I manipulated my DNA. We were in Biology lab and I was told to spit in a cup. Cell samples were needed from the inside of my cheeks. Then, they added some stuff, heated the DNA, spun it around a couple of times, and froze it. We did this to get a closer look at chromosome 16 because it could give a hint of people’s migration patterns. When we finally got our results, one of my lab partners and I showed having the same mutation. I have Caribbean background and he has Greek background; people seem amazed that we would have the same mutation. Being the nerd that I am, I stated it is because of England. England had control over the Caribbean Islands and Prince Philip, who is Queen Elizabeth’s husband and cousin and who also could have been the king of Greece. Also, when I learn about CRISPR it further my interest in Biomedical Informatics because Jennifer A. Doudha, the creator of CRISPR, believed she could find and edit any gene of her choice with CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR was solely created because she believes CRISPR could treat diseases, like HIV and certain cancers; which due to the Human Genome Project, they knew which gene needed to be fixed. In order to cure these diseases, they would need to find the genome responsible to remove it from the person’s body then edit it and put it back.
