Jaqueline+F’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

Hopefully none of you are noble because I want to get a reaction from you. I know, I know I make these jokes periodically. When I did a job shadow at AMGEN, one of the tour guides who has been an employee since 1983 told us something that stuck with me: When your kids are born, the doctor will ask you if you want your child’s DNA to be sequenced, and he followed up with this question: name one disease in which protein isn’t involved. None of us could answer the question because it was a trick question, the root cause of all diseases has to do with protein synthesis.

Our life expectancy is about 79 years old here in the US. Everyone in this room had gotten some sort of disease in their lifetime. Whether it was just a simple cold or a horrific infection, everyone who is alive today has, is and will get sick, it’s just the fact of life.

In my family alone, we have many issues with our health. My uncle had a stroke, I had a family member who died of ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease - and another one who died of Alzheimer's. My mom’s grandma died of pancreatic cancer, my grandpa without his pacemaker would have died 10 years ago. Both my grandparents have onset diabetes and high blood pressure. My own mother was diagnosed with pre stages of breast cancer and had to go through five different surgeries last year when I was a sophomore. She also has glaucoma which means a nerve in her eye is slowly dying and if left uncontrolled she could be blind in the future.

So what does this mean? Why did I mention protein synthesis and why should I care Jackie, you’re boring me with your science. Well all of you should be worried because I can guarantee you that you will get sick. To what extent, I can’t you, but I can say is that all of diseases have a root cause and it this: it’s proteins. Not the kind you eat, the kind that we all know from physio. And if you’re still sitting there groaning about science let me tell you this, what if I told you that you can your live your entire life and not get sick. I am not talking about immortality, I am just talking about treating the leading causes of death. So what are the leading causes of death? Heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So heart disease, when we hear it, we think of a person who has a poor diet and doesn’t do any exercise. This then leads them to get a heart attack. But is the root cause of a heart attack? The most common cause of a heart attack is CAD or coronary artery disease which is a fancy way of saying they have too much cholesterol in their system. Remember the guy at AMGEN I was telling you about? He was the guy that developed a drug that reduced 65% of plaque in one's bloodstream over the course of the huge timeline of 3 days. How did the drug do it? Pure magic and alchemy? Oh boy I hope not, how the hell are you supposed to tell the FDA that. NO!

The way the drug was able to reduce the plaque by 65% was the drug literally blocking the protein that makes plaque cholesterol. And we know what cholesterol is for, it’s to keep the fluid mosaic model kinky so it can dance around even when it’s cold. The more scientific way of explaining what I just said is irrelevant because it involves organic chemistry and I haven’t been past the first lecture of the course. All of us who took Physiology know that protein is just a bunch of folded polypeptides. In each protein we know that there is a keyhole that a specific key is inserted to cause a reaction.

Do any of you why we get Alzheimer's? I’ll tell you why, there is a protein in your neurons that gets released for whatever reason and blocks brain activity rendering memory loss. There is however a way to stop it, The protein in which I am talking about has a specific key for a very specific molecular compound. So far no scientists has made a key that will fit on to it. Maybe asking a locksmith will help, sodium. If a key is made that actually works, then you have cured alzheimer's. Why?

Because inserting the key renders the protein inert and not cause any damage. That is why proteins are so important for our body. They are the places where trillions of reactions happen each and every second. People shouldn’t brush this off because it’s going to be the way of treating diseases: stopping them at their core.

All of us sitting here are probably thinking, that's nice Jackie please finish and don’t make more chemistry jokes. And you know what, I will continue making chemistry jokes until my body stops making reactions. All of us had some family member die of a disease and we wish they are still with us today, cherishing their lives.

But in all reality, we know why we get sick, we have some idea how to treat it. What is left now is find the specific order of atoms that will fit into these proteins. Who ever holds the key, will hold the key of life.

That’s the kind of America I want to grow old in, the one scientists are in their element because chemists have all the solutions.