Nothing from this class ever really goes away, does it
Wow, I haven’t blogged in ages, but today I was highkey missing my days in AP Lang and Lit and was reminded of just how real and relevant my past two years of English classes were.
Long story short, I walked into my engineering lab this morning expecting to just follow the usual protocol, test some cells for protein expression and all that, and be on my merry way. And then all of that changed when my eye just happened to glance over what my professor had written on his master protocol sheet. Which was how I found out the cells we were working with were HeLa cells. (And those pictures above are ones that my team took after these things multiplied like crazy.)
People around me kept working like it was no big deal, since these were just normal old cells, right? And here I was, knowing this whole story and whole other side to what we were doing that they had no idea about, silently getting distracted by the tiny ethical crisis that was going through my head. It was weird. Kinda surreal. But also really cool to see what we’d talked about in an 11th grade English classroom find its way into what’s eventually going to be my career.
For an engineer, it’s a bit too easy to get caught up in the world of machinery, where everything is clockwork and inanimate, but today I was really reminded of the human aspect of the field - the side that has to do with actual living beings and emotions and ethics and all those things that go forgotten but are so important. And I can honestly say that it’s all thanks to my experience in Kreinbring’s classes.