Language

The Temperature's been hovering near freezing point all day long, I welcome this chilly weather that was much dreaded. I'd attended an invited talk yesterday. The talk focused on extremely rare diseases, genetics and data behind. My interest shrunk as the voice was unreachable and being a back bencher I registered very less amount of her words but I was interested in the study, design she'd conducted. 

She had worked with/on diseases in Hungarian gypsies, fascinating, I know right? She did her education (Phd) back in Belgium. Also, the research was narrowed onto pediatrics; she worked closely with clinicians, helping parents to curate diet for affected children, develop personalized medicine by zooming into the cause of disease. She worked with such rare diseases ( for example  - a form of progeria) that case (affected individual) count of two was great. To give an idea my research is conducted on data that include 10,000+ people. Her research worked with families affected too, that is, inheritance that led to terrible diseases to parents and children. The talk moved about zebra fish, some live tests in the conference hall about hearing where she played few frequencies (sound) that were to be audible for folks below 24 years of age, none! She also worked with rare diseases that caused hearing loss. By the time talk was nearing its end I realized her research was on multiple interesting things, duh! This picked up my interest and the talk drew to its end. 

Questions were allowed where someone had asked how it was to work, or if she worked with students with hearing loss. A particular instance she shared for which I'm writing post

She'd an opportunity where she mentored students with hearing loss (disability). We're speaking of students doing research that involves gene, biology, computers, genetics. One of the students she worked with such disability had inherited disease from her parents. Her parents wanted her to be a normal kid. I think that was what brought her to the field. She was eager to unfurl the cause as she didn't want have her kids affected; girl's boyfriend had hearing loss due to an infection, not by birth. During the course of internship she figured out the cause of the disease in her family, got her boyfriend tested and hopefully, she is less likely to pass down the disease to her progeny.  From the experience of invited speaker, I understood that it's difficult to work with students with hearing loss: the first language kids have is sign language. The second language was Dutch and third language was English. Science across the globe is in English, so working with a translator for Dutch, sign and English language and finally science I think it's extremely hard. All the kudos to the speaker.!

During this short story of less than five minutes I felt bit weak. Not because of the obstacles the speaker had faced to translate but for the sheer dedication of internee. The amount of resolve she had had to nail down cause of disease in her family was phenomenal. It was touching to see someone with such a will power to overcome mountainous hurdles.