Saturday, February 11, 2012

We must celebrate the races and be thankful that America is the world’s melting pot of talented people from all over the world. We are already a country made up of individuals that possess blood line heritages from many countries in one person. But just about 70 years ago many of us were from just one country.
Immigration had given us smart Germans, beautiful Irish, talented singers and chefs from Italy, athletes from Africa, designers from France, dancers from Russia and those incredible Asians meticulous to detail and excellent in math and science. There I said it and call me a racist but I love people from all over the world and like to point out the talents that people from all of the world possess.
And now we can look to an American immigrant to look for this country’s next medical advance and she is only in high school. She is 17 year old Angela Zhang from Cupertino, California born to immigrant parents from China. She has grown to be a typical American teenager with a love for shopping particularly shoes.
There is one thing that separates her from any student anywhere in America. This teen wrote a research paper with a formula to cure cancer and so far it is a good one and has cured cancer in mice. We will wait years with more experimentation on other animals before we try it out on humans but the world is lucky to have this girl and her innate talent for math and science.
Angela simply says, “Why Not?” yeah, why not try to find the cure for cancer. After all, lately it is hard not to find someone you know whether it be a man, woman or child that hasn’t suffered or died from some form of cancer. It is really time for someone to focus and get rid of the deadly thing.
When she was a freshman she started reading Doctorate level papers on bio-engineering. She admits much of it was difficult to understand but she was able to decode the scientific language as if it was a puzzle to solve. In her sophomore year, she was able to talk her way into the lab at Stanford University and by Junior year she was doing her own research.
Angela’s idea was to mix cancer medicine into a polymer that would attach to nano particles that would then attach to cancer cells that would appear on a MRI test so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are. Then she thought , What if you would aim a infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the cancer medicine? Thus, killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely un harmed.
“This is really cool, I want to see if it works.” Angela simply says. Soon she amazingly found out that it did work. It will take years to find out if it works in humans but in mice the tumors almost completely disappeared. Angela recently entered her scientific project in the National Siemens Science Contest. It was no contest. She received a check for $100,000 dollars and promptly bought about a dozen more pairs of shoes. She is a teenager after all.
Angela said, “I am excited to learn just everything possible, everything in the sciences. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering even Computer Science anything that can help make new innovations possible.” Well, with this smart girl, she’ll need pretty big shoes to fill. And with her big monetary award she can go shopping for lots more shoes.
The question is , How will she top her cancer curing discovery? America can’t wait and we are thankful for yet another immigrant family to want to live here in America still the land of opportunity for all people of all races from all over the world. So, don’t say we are all equal because we are not. No one could ever be discriminated against but I think we can give credit where credit is due and notice the unique talents offered to us so coincidentally found in specific races in specific wants and needs of us all.

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