(inspiring music)
- So, if you could all grab your Bibles and stand.
It says: I will praise thee, for I am fearfully
and wonderfully made.
Thanks be to God for the reading of His words.
- Part of being a molecular biologist is
like a philosopher of sorts of this is you get
you get to really think about inner space.
The magnitude of information that's encoded in DNA.
It's amazing.
And to me, it's really spiritual.
The science that I do, I'm a bit of a unicorn in that sense
but a scientist that believes in God, right?
That was kind of born into it as a kid.
My mother was an artist and we didn't have a lot of money.
My peers could go to summer camp.
We couldn't afford that for me
but my grandmother had a stable job
as a biologist at the NIH.
So my grandmother would take me to lab with her.
She did research on small cell lung cancer
at the National Cancer Institute for many, many years.
And she's one of the first African Americans there.
I remember my grandmother would take a piece
of parafilm and would dot water
with food coloring and make me practice my pipetting.
So I would spend hours doing that.
Oh yeah.
The time I was like nine years old
I probably had the pipetting skills of like, you know
a 20 year lab.
Cause I've been doing it for a long time.
I see the tremendous disconnect
between genomic technology and the communities.
If you look at the standard publicly available,
let's say cancer genomic database,
very heavily homogeneously Caucasian.
Probably in the 90 percents or more.
Whereas the US population is not that way.
- [Interviewer] If a particular group
of people isn't represented, what's the consequences?
- Then that particular group of people, presumably
is not gonna benefit as much.
My goal is to get as many particularly people
of color, minorities, genome sequenced as possible.
Every time I'm in the house of the Lord, I love to
read scripture.
So if you all would indulge me, I'd like to share two
scriptures with you.
That that helped me set the framework
for what, some of the knowledge I'm gonna share.
Hosea, The Book of Hosea, the fourth chapter
and the sixth verse:
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
I'm gonna share with you today some information,
about how God made us we're fearfully and wonderfully made.
And every as medicine gets much more precise
and based on an individual's genetics
we're all gonna have to get a lot more genomically literate.
The knowledge that I'm gonna share
with you today is knowledge that we, as a people
particularly African Americans, cannot afford to lack.
It's the knowledge of who we are
where we came from and what our health future is.
I view science very much as a conversation with nature.
And that is a very special.
And for me, a very spiritual thing.
Nature is something in my belief God created.
Psalm 1-39 for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made.
Marvelous are thy works.
(inspiring music)
There's so much that we don't understand
Who knows the essence of things,
hope for the evidence of things not seen. Faith.
One of my conceptualizations of heaven is when we get there
we'll get all of the
all the answers to all the questions that, that we,
wouldn't have been able to answer as humans.
My grandmother recently passed away at the age of 83
from triple negative breast cancer.
As she, you know, got her diagnosis, I was really
asking her to get sequenced so that her nieces would sort
of be able to ascertain a bit their risk.
And she was very apprehensive to do it.
"I don't these folks having my DNA"
It was hard cuz it was frustrating
cuz I was like, grandma, you know
I was like, you're a scientist.
You know, you've done cancer research.
Having your genome sequence was this new technology
that even, she didn't really understand that well yet
but she wound up doing it.
You have to understand my grandmother was a black woman
first. You know, she knew of folks who actually
afflicted by the Tuskegee city.
They were in her generation; she was born in 1933.
Even with her dedication to research, still a very
robust distrust of the medical establishment.
That's where, you know, folks like me could have a lot
of impact.
As we get more information
about everybody's DNA, your medical treatment is gonna get
a lot more specific, a lot more precise.
A woman that was there,
she might have been in her eighties
and she reminded me of my great aunt,
and she came up and grabbed my hand and said,
"Baby, I love the way you described that."
And that really just, I mean it really, you know
I felt really good in that moment.
I'm breaking through, you know,
if I can get, you know
80 year old church-going black women to understand this
I'm gonna get the whole community, to understand it.
And we'll be on better footing as a patient population.
So this is a saying
I wanna leave you all with. Love thy neighbor, love thyself.
I was thinking:
Know thy genome, know thyself.
Help thy neighbor's better health.
(inspiring music continues)