Last Shangri-La

Collection of nerd-gasms.

I geek out over: books and libraries, Harry Potter, race and gender issues, microbiology, engineering, biotechnology, and photography.
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Heroification and Silencing

deafmuslimpunx:

disabledtalk:

“Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren.  Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump.  At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life.  Each yields its version of the same cliche.  A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those though taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make is to help another reach true potential.”

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it.  Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history…Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968.  To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist.  She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909…Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps.  She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realise that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause.  Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class.  Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness.  Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see.  Keller’s research was not just book learning:  ”I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums.  If I could not see it, I could smell it.”

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet.  She soon became the most notorious.  Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged….Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her developement.”

Keller recalled having met this editor:  ”At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them.  But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error.  I must have shrunk in intelligence in the years since I met him.”  She went on, “Oh ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle!  Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change.  Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others.  She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s.  She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his compaigns for the presidency.  She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics…

One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions.  Her praise of the USSR now seems naive, embarrassing, even treasonous.  But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media left it out.`

-Lies My Teacher Told Me - James W. Loewen, 2007

READ THE WHOLE THING!!!

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neurosciencestuff: Geneticists Find Causes for Severe Childhood Epilepsies Researchers at the University of Arizona have successfully determined the genetic mutations causing severe epilepsies in seven out of 10 children for whom the cause of the disorder could not be determined clinically or by conventional genetic testing. Instead of sequencing each gene one at a time, the team used a technique called whole-exome sequencing: Rather than combing through all of the roughly 3 billion base pairs of an individual’s entire genome, whole-exome-sequencing deciphers only actual genes, and nearly all of them simultaneously. “My initial hope was that we would find something in one out of the 10 children in our study. But a 70 percent success rate is beyond anyone’s imagination,” said study leader Michael Hammer, who is a research scientist in the UA’s Arizona Research Labs Division of Biotechnology and a member of the UA BIO5 Institute. For Hammer, the research hit very close to home. Just last year, his lab tracked down the mutation that had caused the severe – and ultimately fatal – epilepsy in his teenage daughter. “I figured, if we could do this for one child, we could do it for others.” Hammer explained. “These are children who have had every test imaginable and tried every possible drug combination, and nobody has figured out where their seizures come from and how to stop them.” The children who participated in the study, published online in the journal Epilepsia, all suffered from severe seizure disorders, and most of them started having seizures within the first year or two after birth. Unlike individuals afflicted with epilepsy later in life, many of whom can live normal lives with the right medical oversight and medications, early-onset epilepsy can be devastating. Children often develop other severe complications such as intellectual disability, autism and loss of muscle tone or coordination. Early death is not uncommon. “Because their seizures are not well controlled, and that firestorm of electrical activity in the brain is bad for brain development, the damage can be extensive,” added Linda Restifo, a professor in the UA department of neurology and a BIO5 member who co-authored the study. “The earlier the seizures start and the more severe and frequent they are, the more likely they are to leave the child with permanent developmental disability.” “The sooner we can catch problems in children and understand what is causing them, the better the chance we have to try and correct them,” Hammer added. To identify changes in the DNA that are the most likely cause of the disorders, the team focused on a class of mutations called de novo mutations: “typos” in the DNA sequence that are present only in the child. In order to find such mutations, the study included both parents and their child. Overall, the team found 15 mutations in nine children, seven of which are known or likely to cause epilepsy. No mutations could be found in one of the children. “In four of the patients. we found mutations that were already known to be associated with epilepsy,” said Krishna Veeramah, a postdoctoral fellow in Hammer’s group and the study’s first author. “However, three patients had mutations in genes that were not previously associated with epilepsy in humans but presented plausible explanations for the disorder.” “The fact that we found three genes – in a study involving only 10 subjects – that had never been implicated in epilepsy before suggests that many more genetic defects related to developmental brain disorders remain to be discovered,” Veeramah said. One of the participants in the study was Ashley Wilhelm, a 14-year-old girl from Phoenix, Ariz., whose seizures started when she was only 5 months old. Her first seizures appeared to be triggered by fever, leading doctors to believe they were just that – a side effect of the fever. “But she soon began to have more and more seizures, and they would last half an hour or longer,” said her mother, Ann. “We had all sorts of tests done, but the doctors kept saying her brain was normal, and that they didn’t see any reason she’d have those seizures.” Ashley, whose development has severely suffered as a consequence of the repeated seizures, was enrolled in the study through her neurologist, Dinesh Talwar, who co-authored the paper. Even though her treatment is unlikely to change with the new information, the family said the results brought “more relief than we can explain.” “Since insurance wouldn’t pay for the testing, and we couldn’t afford it on our own, we were very grateful we were able to participate in the study,” said Jeff Wilhelm, Ashley’s father. “If such a test could be done much earlier, it would ease the pain for everyone involved. What if our son had decided not to consider having children of his own out of concern they might have the disorder?” “The results from this study have at last given us a breakthrough,” said the mother of another participating teenager. “We had pursued every possible avenue to understand what might be responsible for his epilepsy – magnetic resonance imaging, CT scans, searches for gross chromosome abnormalities or markers associated with epilepsy – with no success.” “Although the discovery doesn’t yet give us a treatment, it gives us hope for finding one,” she said. “As more research is done on this mutation, drugs to control our son’s seizures will be identified. If more children with epilepsy can be studied and families with children with similar mutations can organize and share resources, there will be more progress.” Hammer said the approach is applicable to other conditions in which conventional genetic testing has failed to reveal the cause. “Our work bridges research and clinical practice,” he added. “We can sequence all the genes in your genome in a matter of days and report it to the patient’s family and the physician. That may make a difference in the treatment and management of the disorder in question.” Centers with the capabilities to do this kind of analysis are few and far between. “Other centers that do this kind of work will sequence your genome and tell you where and what the mutation is in the DNA sequence, but it’s not that simple,” Hammer said. “In most cases, we find a mutation in a gene not previously known to cause disease, so we need to perform a follow-up study to find out what that mutation actually does.” To perform these follow-up studies, the UA team has established collaborations with leading scientists at the UA and at other institutions. “Right now, the benefit to families is primarily to get answers,” said Restifo. “The long-term goal is to collect this kind of information from more children, which will hopefully lead to new research into medications that improve brain development and function.” Hammer added: “In the meantime, a molecular diagnosis provides immediate relief to the unnecessary guilt parents might feel for their role in causing their child’s suffering. They want answers, not endless doctors visits and tests with negative results, or to have their hopes raised and dashed over and over.” Encouraged by the success of their approach so far, Hammer and his colleagues already have bigger plans. “We hope to involve other clinical areas such as cardiology, immunology, gastroenterology – anything that we can apply molecular diagnostics or clinical genomics to at the UA, we want to explore. We want to make the University the core for clinical diagnostics using new sequencing technologies for at least the entire Southwest.” UA pediatric geneticist Robert Erickson, another co-author and member of the UA Steele Children’s Research Center added, “these efforts will be very important in the diagnosis of newborns with unusual birth defects.” Primary source here

neurosciencestuff:

Geneticists Find Causes for Severe Childhood Epilepsies

Researchers at the University of Arizona have successfully determined the genetic mutations causing severe epilepsies in seven out of 10 children for whom the cause of the disorder could not be determined clinically or by conventional genetic testing.

Instead of sequencing each gene one at a time, the team used a technique called whole-exome sequencing: Rather than combing through all of the roughly 3 billion base pairs of an individual’s entire genome, whole-exome-sequencing deciphers only actual genes, and nearly all of them simultaneously.

“My initial hope was that we would find something in one out of the 10 children in our study. But a 70 percent success rate is beyond anyone’s imagination,” said study leader Michael Hammer, who is a research scientist in the UA’s Arizona Research Labs Division of Biotechnology and a member of the UA BIO5 Institute.

For Hammer, the research hit very close to home. Just last year, his lab tracked down the mutation that had caused the severe – and ultimately fatal – epilepsy in his teenage daughter.

“I figured, if we could do this for one child, we could do it for others.” Hammer explained. “These are children who have had every test imaginable and tried every possible drug combination, and nobody has figured out where their seizures come from and how to stop them.”

The children who participated in the study, published online in the journal Epilepsia, all suffered from severe seizure disorders, and most of them started having seizures within the first year or two after birth.

Unlike individuals afflicted with epilepsy later in life, many of whom can live normal lives with the right medical oversight and medications, early-onset epilepsy can be devastating. Children often develop other severe complications such as intellectual disability, autism and loss of muscle tone or coordination. Early death is not uncommon.

“Because their seizures are not well controlled, and that firestorm of electrical activity in the brain is bad for brain development, the damage can be extensive,” added Linda Restifo, a professor in the UA department of neurology and a BIO5 member who co-authored the study. “The earlier the seizures start and the more severe and frequent they are, the more likely they are to leave the child with permanent developmental disability.”

“The sooner we can catch problems in children and understand what is causing them, the better the chance we have to try and correct them,” Hammer added.

To identify changes in the DNA that are the most likely cause of the disorders, the team focused on a class of mutations called de novo mutations: “typos” in the DNA sequence that are present only in the child. In order to find such mutations, the study included both parents and their child.

Overall, the team found 15 mutations in nine children, seven of which are known or likely to cause epilepsy. No mutations could be found in one of the children.

“In four of the patients. we found mutations that were already known to be associated with epilepsy,” said Krishna Veeramah, a postdoctoral fellow in Hammer’s group and the study’s first author. “However, three patients had mutations in genes that were not previously associated with epilepsy in humans but presented plausible explanations for the disorder.”

“The fact that we found three genes – in a study involving only 10 subjects – that had never been implicated in epilepsy before suggests that many more genetic defects related to developmental brain disorders remain to be discovered,” Veeramah said.

One of the participants in the study was Ashley Wilhelm, a 14-year-old girl from Phoenix, Ariz., whose seizures started when she was only 5 months old. Her first seizures appeared to be triggered by fever, leading doctors to believe they were just that – a side effect of the fever.

“But she soon began to have more and more seizures, and they would last half an hour or longer,” said her mother, Ann. “We had all sorts of tests done, but the doctors kept saying her brain was normal, and that they didn’t see any reason she’d have those seizures.”

Ashley, whose development has severely suffered as a consequence of the repeated seizures, was enrolled in the study through her neurologist, Dinesh Talwar, who co-authored the paper.

Even though her treatment is unlikely to change with the new information, the family said the results brought “more relief than we can explain.”

“Since insurance wouldn’t pay for the testing, and we couldn’t afford it on our own, we were very grateful we were able to participate in the study,” said Jeff Wilhelm, Ashley’s father. “If such a test could be done much earlier, it would ease the pain for everyone involved. What if our son had decided not to consider having children of his own out of concern they might have the disorder?”

“The results from this study have at last given us a breakthrough,” said the mother of another participating teenager. “We had pursued every possible avenue to understand what might be responsible for his epilepsy – magnetic resonance imaging, CT scans, searches for gross chromosome abnormalities or markers associated with epilepsy – with no success.”

“Although the discovery doesn’t yet give us a treatment, it gives us hope for finding one,” she said. “As more research is done on this mutation, drugs to control our son’s seizures will be identified. If more children with epilepsy can be studied and families with children with similar mutations can organize and share resources, there will be more progress.”

Hammer said the approach is applicable to other conditions in which conventional genetic testing has failed to reveal the cause.

“Our work bridges research and clinical practice,” he added. “We can sequence all the genes in your genome in a matter of days and report it to the patient’s family and the physician. That may make a difference in the treatment and management of the disorder in question.”

Centers with the capabilities to do this kind of analysis are few and far between.

“Other centers that do this kind of work will sequence your genome and tell you where and what the mutation is in the DNA sequence, but it’s not that simple,” Hammer said. “In most cases, we find a mutation in a gene not previously known to cause disease, so we need to perform a follow-up study to find out what that mutation actually does.”

To perform these follow-up studies, the UA team has established collaborations with leading scientists at the UA and at other institutions.

“Right now, the benefit to families is primarily to get answers,” said Restifo. “The long-term goal is to collect this kind of information from more children, which will hopefully lead to new research into medications that improve brain development and function.”

Hammer added: “In the meantime, a molecular diagnosis provides immediate relief to the unnecessary guilt parents might feel for their role in causing their child’s suffering. They want answers, not endless doctors visits and tests with negative results, or to have their hopes raised and dashed over and over.”

Encouraged by the success of their approach so far, Hammer and his colleagues already have bigger plans.

“We hope to involve other clinical areas such as cardiology, immunology, gastroenterology – anything that we can apply molecular diagnostics or clinical genomics to at the UA, we want to explore. We want to make the University the core for clinical diagnostics using new sequencing technologies for at least the entire Southwest.”

UA pediatric geneticist Robert Erickson, another co-author and member of the UA Steele Children’s Research Center added, “these efforts will be very important in the diagnosis of newborns with unusual birth defects.”

Primary source here

(via scientificthought)

Photo
The effects of unchecked criminalization: Teen charged with felony for science experiment →

stfusexists:

fuckyeahfeminists:

This is what the school-to-prison pipeline looks like. This is how black youth criminalized.

  1. She was doing a science experiment
  2. She’s being charged as an ADULT
  3. She’s being charged with a FELONY

If this all goes the way the prosecution wants, this young woman will be LEGALLY discriminated against for the rest of her life. No voting, housing discrimination,  employment discrimination (as if getting a job while black isn’t hard enough), etc. etc.

This is COMPLETELY outrageous. I know of so many white teenage boys who have done similar things (accidentally set off a small explosion, left a burner on so something caught on fire) with no consequence. This shit happens in science labs sometimes. Do we really want to brand this child for life for an accident that hurt no one? Because I know the answer would be no if her skin color were different. 

(via ave-atque-vale)

Link

waveofeuphoriaa:

Pyaar Deewana Hota Hai - Kati Patang

R D Burman + Kishore Kumar + Rajesh Khanna = Awesomeness.

Watching this with my patents right now!

Video
1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013 Flashblog Announcement →

autismpositivity:

We know you have been waiting… and we have been working and organizing behind the scenes. Now we are ready and we are excited to announce the theme for the second annual Autism Positivity Flashblog Event on April 30th, 2013: AutismPositivity2013button

“1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013″

Last year hundreds of bloggers came together in a show of support and solidarity in response to an anonymous person’s Google search “I wish I didn’t have Aspergers”. The posts that came flooding in from all over the world were a beautiful example of the power of strength in numbers. With so much negativity still surrounding Autism and the misinformation and misconceptions that continue to abound, we invite each of you to share one, or two, or more “Ausome” things!

We invite all of you, anyone who is Autistic, anyone who has an Autistic person in their life and all who blog about autism to share a message of support, wisdom, hope, and pride to this year’s flashblog by posting tohttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDdPQjAxV244VjdCcXdYX0pPQ0RBblE6MQ

Please join with us on the last day of Autism Acceptance Month – April 30th, 2013 – in a Flash Blog of Autism Positivity.

To participate:

1. Publish your post on April 30th in the following title format: “ [Your Blog] celebrates 1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013″

2. Share your post on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media site using that hashtag (#AutismPositivity2013)

3. Add your link to the Autism Positivity website (submit here or above) and grab the badge from the page tab above.

4. Share/reblog this message to your blog, page, etc.

cropped-autismpositivitybanner3.jpg

Thank you,

The Autism Positivity Project Flashblog Team, 2013

If you have any questions, please contact us at autismpositivity@gmail.com

We can also be found on

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/ThinkingAboutPerspectivesAutismPositivity

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/positivityautie/autism-positivity-2012/

Twitter: @PositivityAutie

Link
CDC Study Finds No Link Between Vaccines and Autism

ziyadmd:

image

At least 10% of parents of young children skip or delay routine vaccinations, often out of concern that kids are getting “too many shots, too soon.”

A new study finds that children who receive the full schedule of vaccinations have no increased risk of autism.

“This is a very important and reassuring study,” says Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism.”

Read More

Primary source here.

(via randomscientist)

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crookedindifference: First African-American Woman in Space The first African-American woman in space, Dr. Mae C. Jemison was born on October 17, 1956 in Decatur, Alabama but considers Chicago, Illinois her hometown. She received a Bachelor in Chemical Engineering (and completed the requirements for a Bachelor in African and Afro-American studies) at Stanford University in 1977. Dr. Jemison also received a Doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University in 1981. After medical school she did post graduate medical training at the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center. As an area Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, she managed the health care delivery system for U.S. Peace Corps and U.S. Embassy personnel. Jemison’s background includes work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and reproductive biology. She also developed and participated in research projects on the Hepatitis B vaccine and rabies. Jemison was a General Practitioner and attending graduate Engineering classes in Los Angeles when she was named an astronaut candidate in 1987. She flew her first flight as a science mission specialist on STS-47, Spacelab-J, in September 1992. She was co-investigator for the Bone Cell Research Experiment on that mission. In completing her first space flight, Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes and 23 seconds in space. Jemison resigned from NASA in March 1993. In 1994, she founded and began a term as chair of The Earth We Share (TEWS), an annual international science camp where students, aged 12 to 16, work together to solve current global dilemmas. From 1995- 2002 she was a professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. She is currently director of the Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in developing countries. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and several corporate boards of directors on the Texas Governor’s State Council for Science and Biotechnology Development. Dr. Jemison published her memoirs, Find Where DE:the Wind Goes:Moments from My Life in 2001. She currently resides in Houston, Texas.

crookedindifference:

First African-American Woman in Space

The first African-American woman in space, Dr. Mae C. Jemison was born on October 17, 1956 in Decatur, Alabama but considers Chicago, Illinois her hometown. She received a Bachelor in Chemical Engineering (and completed the requirements for a Bachelor in African and Afro-American studies) at Stanford University in 1977. Dr. Jemison also received a Doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University in 1981. After medical school she did post graduate medical training at the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center. As an area Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, she managed the health care delivery system for U.S. Peace Corps and U.S. Embassy personnel. Jemison’s background includes work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and reproductive biology. She also developed and participated in research projects on the Hepatitis B vaccine and rabies.

Jemison was a General Practitioner and attending graduate Engineering classes in Los Angeles when she was named an astronaut candidate in 1987. She flew her first flight as a science mission specialist on STS-47, Spacelab-J, in September 1992. She was co-investigator for the Bone Cell Research Experiment on that mission. In completing her first space flight, Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes and 23 seconds in space. Jemison resigned from NASA in March 1993. In 1994, she founded and began a term as chair of The Earth We Share (TEWS), an annual international science camp where students, aged 12 to 16, work together to solve current global dilemmas. From 1995- 2002 she was a professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. She is currently director of the Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in developing countries. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and several corporate boards of directors on the Texas Governor’s State Council for Science and Biotechnology Development. Dr. Jemison published her memoirs, Find Where DE:the Wind Goes:Moments from My Life in 2001. She currently resides in Houston, Texas.

(via scientificthought)

Photo
istillshootfilm: Film Photography Submission by:  Ann Le / http://annle.tumblr.com/ Hasselblad 500C, Kodak Portra R.S., San Diego, 2012

istillshootfilm:

Film Photography Submission by:  Ann Le / http://annle.tumblr.com/

Hasselblad 500C, Kodak Portra

R.S., San Diego, 2012

Photo
Submission by M

irresistible-revolution:

I immigrated to the UK in 2004, when I was 8 years old, with my parents and my four year old brother. England was this mythical, magical land that I had always dreamed about where everything was perfect and I would be happy.
I was born in Pakistan, but my parents are both from the Indian side of Kashmir. My paternal grandfather served in the British Army and was deployed in what is now Pakistan when the border closed. He and my grandmother found themselves stranded in a foreign country, with limited grasp of the language and hundreds of miles away from their family with no hope of ever going back. The story for my maternal grandparents is different in the details, but essentially the same.
Fast forward 60 years and we are on a plane, dreaming of a new life, with new opportunities. I was too young then to properly understand the discrimination my parents and grandparents had faced for their faith. Part of a Muslim sect that is a minority and regularly persecuted in Pakistan, my parents not only felt that immigrating to Britain would grant us, their children, many more opportunities, it would also mean that we could practice our faith in peace. Here was a country welcoming us with open arms, with no restrictions on what we could and could not believe in. My parents jumped at the chance.
Even at the age of 8 I was old enough to get the general picture. Pakistanis systematically oppress people of my faith. They are demoted from their jobs, put in prison without any judicial process, and sometimes even killed. They are regularly discriminated against. No person of my faith has ever gained a position of authority in Pakistan. In fact, the only Pakistani Nobel Prize laureate is not acknowledged in most schools due to his faith. His grave was even vandalized a couple of years ago. Can you imagine? I am old enough to understand it all now. My Pakistani passport explicitly states my religious sect and this prohibits me from performing pilgrimage to Makkah. Pakistan’s CONSTITUTION includes Ordinance XX, an ordinance that restricts freedom of religion and has been called to be repealed by the United Nations. People in Pakistan openly and regularly discriminate against Ahmadis, believing truly that violence against us will grant them a place in paradise. It’s only now that I remember my mama sitting me down one day when I asked her why I don’t see any of my friends at mosque, and explaining why I shouldn’t tell people who I am. I remember the look on her face when the owners of one house we rented made us leave when they found out our religion. I remember my daddy coming home exhausted every night, always receiving less of all of the company benefits than the rest of them, even though he was their senior and more qualified.
So I began to hate my identity. I hated Pakistan and what it represented for me. I hated the cursive lines of Urdu and the way it sounded in my mouth. Whenever anybody asked me where I was from, I would point to Kashmir on a map, a land I have never seen or set foot on. Our move to England only strengthened that belief.
Then one day on an English playground a boy laughed at the way I spoke, my pronunciation of the word “war” with a “v” was hilarious and so weird and for the first time I felt those feelings of rejection yet again. I was bullied for being one of two brown kids in the whole school. I was the typical Indian/Asian stereotype: submissive, smart and to top it all off I wore my long hair in a braid, and brought curry to school for lunch. My mama and my baba were working constantly because we were receiving no welfare benefits, we had immigrated on a skilled migrant program and we had to survive on our own. My mama would walk from one side of town to the other with us to our primary school, no matter the weather because we couldn’t afford a car. We’d wake up when it was dark and we’d get home when it was dark. We worked hard and at one point, my dad had to have a major operation for a neurological disorder (hydrocephalus) and was without a job. We lived off barely nothing for six months. And yet still people called us “dirty immigrants stealing our jobs and our money” and “living off our taxes” when we hadn’t received a single penny from the government, assuming we were asylum seekers. One time me, my brother and my mother got on a bus and a woman loudly said “it smells like curry in here, I hate that f*cking smell”. Racism was something I had never experienced before.
It felt like no matter what I did, no matter where I went, I wouldn’t be able to escape this feeling of rejection for being WHO I WAS. So most of my teenage years I spent being disconnected from my culture. My friends were mostly white and I felt like they couldn’t (and wouldn’t) understand a lot of my culture. I was trying so hard to fit in, not bringing curries to school and anglicizing my name. In my head, I felt like I was white too. I rejected my culture, referred to any religious festival as a “religious thing” and any cultural object as a “cultural thing”. I didn’t realise how ashamed I was of my culture and religion and therefore, of myself.
And then a couple of years ago my mama got made “redundant” from her job. She was the only one, and no other cuts were made to the whole staff. It gets interesting here, because she was the only POC working there. Next thing you know, she’s checking job sites and there’s an application from her employer FOR HER EXACT SAME JOB HE MADE REDUNDANT. I realised then that it wasn’t going to get better. I wasn’t going to be taken as “white” and “English” because every time someone looks at me, it is obvious to see that I am not. I will never, at first glance, be English to someone, no matter how badly I wanted to identify as that. My mama filed a lawsuit against the company that took two years and was settled out of court. She told me every detail, every microaggression she had faced at work every single day and it broke my heart. It could make the most peaceful person violent, hearing about how badly some f*ckers treat your mama just for being brown. I wanted to burn them all on the stake. I wrote it all down, trying to be as articulate as I could because she said her English wasn’t good enough, while I felt my heart break and my empathy for them dissolve. My mama is a graduate, she has spoken English from age 6. And yet these people, made her feel like she couldn’t speak, couldn’t articulate her thoughts except for at home. How must it feel, I thought, to think in one language and speak in another, and yet still have people make fun of you? To be trapped every day inside your own head, people deliberately misunderstanding what you’ve said just to spite you? I understood what my parents had done then. They had been discriminated against before, but that was different because it was their home and their people and their language. They had given up everything: their family, their home, everything they had ever known for us. They had given us everything, and I was repaying them by rejecting what they held most dear.
Now I have embraced the culture of my parents and my ancestors, and I realise how beautiful and special it is, but I am still in limbo. The countries I belong to do not want me. It is in light of terrorist acts by extremists in both countries that I realise that I am not wanted anywhere. And it tears me apart trying to figure out where I belong. A part of me is Pakistani by birth, by culture and by language. Another part of me is English, the majority of my life now I have lived in England - so much so that my thoughts are in English. Yet another part of me is Kashmiri, wholly longing for the land my grandmother described as “paradise” and wearing pheran and drinking Kashmiri chai at Eid.
Cultural identity is a difficult, constantly evolving thing. I don’t know where exactly I belong yet, but reading the stories of other immigrant kids and how they have faced adversity is inspiring and humbling. I feel a lot less alone because of you all sharing your stories, so thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you for sharing this. You are amazing!

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In two recent peer-reviewed journal articles, the team reported successful animal testing of the tiny tools, which require no batteries, wires or tethers as they seize internal tissue samples. The devices are called “mu-grippers,” incorporating the Greek letter that represents the term for “micro.” Instead of relying on electric or pneumatic power, these star-shaped tools are autonomously activated by the body’s heat, which causes their tiny “fingers” to close on clusters of cells. Because the tools also contain a magnetic material, they can be retrieved through an existing body opening via a magnetic catheter.

The microgrippers have come a long way since my roommate’s clay models of liver tissue.

Primary sources here and here.

Video here.

NPR interview here.

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