55 lines
4.1 KiB
HTML
55 lines
4.1 KiB
HTML
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<title>Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston</title>
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<p class="photoTitle">Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston</p>
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<!-- BEGIN DISPLAY OF Transcript -->
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<p>One day I was in the living room with my mother. I grew up in the projects,
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which is what used to be called low-income housing for poor people. And we only had three small rooms,
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and that day she fainted in the living room. And I had no idea what was wrong.
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It was very frightening to me, and back then we didn’t have 911 and so I didn’t really know what to do.
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But the long and short of this is that she had cancer of the cervix.
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We were poor, we were uninsured, she was not getting health care.
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And from that point on, I knew that I wanted to do something to change that situation.
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At that time there were not many women in medicine. There certainly weren’t many African Americans.
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So I had no role models, and I had no encouragement to go into medicine.
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My counselors all said, oh, no, don’t worry about that. You’ll never get admitted as a woman.
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You’ll never get admitted as an African American, or as an African American woman,
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and besides, you’re too poor to go. You know, you’ll never have the money.
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But the motivation—I knew I really wanted to do this. And I had wonderful mentors that said, don’t let your dreams go.
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And I guess in all fairness, back then, it did seem like an impossible dream at the time.
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So that these issues were very clear early on to me, and they have remained prominent in my career.
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And I have spent a career trying to change this, and trying to get health care
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to disadvantaged, underserved people throughout the nation.
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I spent some time at the National Institutes of Health. And one of the projects that I did
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while I was there was working with sickle cell disease, especially looking at the problem
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that babies with sickle cell disease die very suddenly—especially they’re at risk in the first three years of life.
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I led a study where we looked at can’t we prevent this? If by giving babies penicillin prophylactically,
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before they get the fever, before they get the infection—can’t we save some lives?
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This study was so successful we stopped it midway—because the results were so compelling.
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The babies that got the penicillin prophylactically definitely did not have the infections, and it was a study that saved lives.
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And it is saving lives now. Worldwide. You know, because sickle cell disease is a worldwide problem.
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I always tell students that your heroes and your sheroes are not just in the history books, they’re not just on TV,
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but they’re all around you. And to look for them, and to ask them to mentor you. Don’t just passively
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and say, oh, I wish I could have that person, ask them. And I always remind them, you know, that they’ll always say yes.
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Because we’re always so flattered, and we say, oh, yes. I would be glad to be your mentor.</p>
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