By Long Leak
My purpose in life is simply: To be good cancer. But this purpose works no longer achieving because of the killing fund in research.
I dedicate my life to be a research scientist so I can help improve new therapists for patients with cancers with no good treatment options. As a high school farmer’s farmer, I take advantage of AP Science courses, Science Olympiad Compets, and science research courses, nurturing my early interest.
It took me to the University of Chicago, one of the leading universities in the country. I see myself ready to solve challenging course course because of the support I received from my strong education and extension of Ohio. I took the biological science course and started participating in cancer research in my first quarter of school, and I loved it. Eventually, I have helped to develop a nanoparticle to help deliver cancer treatments to patients living with lymphoma. It’s fun to see how I can use what I learned in class to do something that can save lives.
I want to continue to work on cancer research, and so I decided to continue with a PhD in cancer biology at Stanford University. There, I learned that a molecule was tried with clinical trials as a cancer of clencal therapeutic through a separate mechanism than before, helping us to predict these patients to benefit from this treatment.
Today, I am a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Francisco, where I work to develop therapies for patients with a specific sub-type of lung cancer.
While I am very grateful to everyone who brings me to where I am now, I am afraid that other young students can have the same federal research opportunities in the Federal Institute of Health. At each stage of my career, my research is supported by grants from NIH.
We have already felt the effects of these cuts: My Graduate Program has accepted the few students in this cycle; Gives delayed or canceled again; My advisor told us to slow down our purchase of the necessary supplies for our experiments. If Congress makes these cuts permanently on this year’s budget, then new treatments are more difficult to improve, and many patients die.
I hope you support science anyway. Call your representatives and tell them to turn off the NIH budget cuts. Tell your friends and family about what is going on funding for the research that saves life.
I hope you help me achieve my dream to break this cancer world. But I also ask you for more. I don’t want to be a part of the final generation of American scientists. I want other students like me from the teacher, Ohio to dream greatly and can affect the world, and that happens when it stands, and support science.
Legan Leak is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Francisco studying lung cancer. He is from the teacher.
