You Can Shoot Me Now, I’d Die A Happy Human

I achieved something today, and no one will take it away from me, no matter what. As my About page says, i work in medical research, in particular during the couple of months of my Masters research, I have been tackling colorectal cancer. It’s the first cause of death in both men and women (prostate being the first for men alone, and breast for women alone), and I was given the heavy challenge, by my lab director, to establish something new.

I won’t bore you to death with details, but here’s the small snap of it all. My lab team works on certain proteins who are essential for cancer processes. My wickedly heavy goal is to bring all their 15+ years of work into fruition, by proving that these proteins can be used in some sort of combination therapy strategy with traditional chemotherapy in the future. And today, yes today, I proved it.

I look back at when I first came into the lab, in January, a pharmacist who knew zilch about research. I didn’t know how to hold a pipette, let alone do any of the complicated research stuff. A week later after I joined the team, my lab director talked to me and I found myself with that huge project resting on me, and just me. I don’t know where I got the guts, but I went for it. Even though I received tremendous help from my colleagues in terms of how to actually do stuff, I had to rely on my guts many times a day to establish my own protocols, make my own choices.

I made the decision to carry that project to fruition, and although I hit dead ends and repeated many times, I spent the past 6 months finding ways past the hurdles, and putting everything together. Until Tuesday. Tuesday I launched the first experience that would give me the first answer to my question: “does it work? can we kill more cancer cells by using this new strategy?”. The experience went on for 4 days, and I got my answer today. Hell YES!

Granted, the scientific purists will say that this is one experience and has to be repeated 3 times to be proven valid. Granted, I’m working on mouse cells and not human cells. Granted, I’m working in a controlled environment and not in a living human being. Granted, this is only a proof of concept, the actual drug has to go through at least 10 years of stages before going to market and being used, but everything starts somewhere. This is the start. I MADE THE FIRST STEP.

I don’t pretend to cure all cancer types tomorrow. When I joined medical research, I said to myself that I want to bring even the smallest contribution to whatever disease I end up working on. I achieved that. In 15, maybe 20 years, if I see a drug being marketed for colorectal cancer using this new strategy, I can look back in all pride to today, to all the - TwitPics - I uploaded - from this - experience, to the promising first result of yesterday and finally to the Twitpic I uploaded from the moment of truth, and think to myself: I started it all.

So go ahead, you can shoot me now, I’d die a proud and happy human.

Tags: Cancer, Medical Research, Twitpic