Fishing for Change: How Fish Tanks and Textbooks Taught Me to Fall in Love with Science (and Discover its Flaws)

Jeromy DiGiacomo

I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. It is also predominantly white. As I made my way through the school system, I fit in (at least racially) with the rest of the crowd. My teachers, friends, and classmates all looked like me. The books we read, documentaries we watched, and textbooks we studied portrayed protagonists that looked like me and told stories that could be my own.

In eighth grade, I took a real interest in biology when my science teacher encouraged me to work on an independent project where I investigated the social behavior of neon tetras, a type of fish. Although my experiments back then would be considered unscientific by even the least rigorous standards, I still graduated from eighth grade feeling empowered by my newfound scientific knowledge, curiosity, and research abilities. As I waited for summer to end and ninth grade to begin, I found myself juggling scientific questions in my head without the ability to conduct research or produce answers.

To feed my growing passion for science, my parents gave me a Campbell biology textbook for my birthday. At the beginning of each chapter, there was an image and brief description of a famous scientist credited with a major discovery in the field. After the chapter on evolution, I was presented with a picture of Charles Darwin. After genetics, Gregor Mendel. After DNA structure, Watson and Crick. These people had names like mine, skin like mine, and ancestors like mine. And at the time, I imagined myself as a scientist through these images of famous researchers. I knew that one day, I could be like them because we shared common traits and ancestry.

In most of Fairfield county, guidance counselors start preparing students to apply to college during their first year of high school. As I began my freshman year of high school with a deepening interest in STEM, my guidance counselor assured me that I could pursue science at college. However, there was a catch – I had to prove I was academically worthy. She pointed me in the direction of AP science courses and resumé-building extracurricular opportunities that “demonstrated academic achievement and prestige.” Eight years after those initial conversations and years of preparation, I can proudly say that I am the first person in my family to receive a bachelor’s degree.

Luckily, at Williams College where I completed my undergraduate studies, I participated in the Summer Science Program to prepare for my tough transition into college-level classes. The Summer Science Program is an opportunity where incoming freshmen from disadvantaged backgrounds, including many students of color, can spend their summer living on campus and taking college-level science courses to prepare for their first Fall semester. Although I came from a competitive high school, I was invited because I was a first-generation college student; in fact, most of the students in this program were the first in their family to go to college. That meant that many of us were navigating a completely foreign landscape in one way or another.

Many of my peers and I had never worked on complicated problem sets or used high-tech lab equipment before. Many of us had families who could not financially, emotionally, or physically support us in adjusting to college.

Although we struggled, it quickly became apparent that the difficulty was not because we weren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough.

Rather, entering academia, and specifically the STEM community, presented us with a twofold challenge: not only did we have to excel at the course material (much of which other students had seen already), but we also had to learn to navigate academic and prestigious spaces that were completely foreign to us. We struggled with things like how to ask the professor for help, read and interpret lab protocols, use basic lab equipment, and study for college-level tests when other students already took prep courses. And importantly, we also struggled with how to communicate our science with our families and communities at home – a key feature of research.

Although the adjustment period was difficult, with a lot of hard work, I graduated with honors from Williams College with a degree in chemistry. I also left having learned quite a bit about myself and my relationship to the STEM community.

During my time at college, I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in both medicine and research, particularly in the field of oncology. This decision was in part sparked by my experience shadowing at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA. I had the opportunity to shadow in the emergency room, operating room, maternity ward, and more; I most memorably spent the first two weeks of the program shadowing in the oncology ward where medical oncologists worked alongside radiologists, pathologists, and surgeons to heal patients sick with cancer.

Following that summer, I took a course called “Signal Transduction to Cancer” in which we discussed how mutations in the Hedgehog signaling pathway can lead to cancer. The Hedgehog signaling pathway is a well-studied collection of molecules and proteins (called a “signaling pathway”). Normally, this pathway is involved with normal organismal growth and development. However, certain mutations can cause the normal functioning of this signaling pathway to go into overdrive, leading to uncontrolled growth, a key hallmark of cancer. I was actually quite nervous to take this course because it was based solely on articles from the primary scientific literature, material I had little experience with at the time. After reading a binder full of research articles and teasing out the main takeaways, strengths, and weaknesses for each article, I left the semester with not only a greater understanding of the molecular basis of cancer, but also the basics of reading and interpreting scientific writing and data in the primary literature.

Importantly, the papers we read in this course reminded me of my eighth-grade science class. They also reignited my desire to follow my interests and parse out my questions through research. I decided that while I still wanted to work with patients directly, I needed to continue exploring my questions in cancer biology through research.

For this reason, I applied to and was accepted to work in a pediatric oncology lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston as a research associate. I currently work in the Bandopadhayay lab where I’m involved with two projects working to find better treatments for 2 kinds of childhood cancers: pediatric low-grade gliomas and diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas. Gliomas are cancers of the glia, which are cells tasked with the vital job of supporting neurons in the brain and across the nervous system. Pediatric low-grade gliomas are curable, but current treatments leave children with devastating long-term neurological effects. Diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas are rapidly-growing and surgically inoperable tumors that grow in the part of the brain that controls vital functions like breathing and heart-rate. Virtually all children with this type of cancer do not survive. Therefore, children that are diagnosed with these cancers rely on our research to bring better treatments we discover in the lab to the clinic.

Years after my first attempt at scientific research in eighth grade, I have finally started working in a real research lab. I secured a seat at the table. Still, something isn’t quite right. Although I am very happy professionally, I realize that I’m here because of the experiences I’ve been allowed as a privileged white man. When I look around the scientific community I’m working in now, I still see people who are predominantly like me; just like I saw in high school and the Campbell biology textbook. Most of these people have had access to some of the same opportunities that helped me succeed in the STEM community.

Cancer presents itself in diverse forms, with a virtually infinite number of mutations that can lead to cancerous growth. If we want to heal the diverse group of people affected by diverse types of cancers, we need our doctors and researchers to bring a similar diversity. Doctors and researchers from diverse backgrounds can approach these complex problems from new and impactful perspectives. Thus, patients should be able to see doctors and researchers that not only look like them, but also fight for them like family.

Over the course of my time at college, it became obvious that the famous scientists highlighted in the Campbell biology textbook I received after eighth grade were grossly misrepresenting the whole of the STEM community.

By highlighting only certain scientists, the textbook reaffirmed science’s long history of only being accessible to wealthy white males. But these people are not inherently more prestigious or high-achieving. In fact, the most inspiring and tenacious scientists I’ve met were women, particularly women of color.

I remember taking a biology course with a professor of color in a tenure-track position. She was extremely well organized. On the chalkboard, she would meticulously draw and annotate the topic we were studying, describing each step as she drew it. Male students would often interrupt her to correct her spelling or other trivial mistakes, or to ask her to speak up or talk more slowly (she had a slight accent). This experience helped me realize why women of color often struggle to find footing in the STEM community, where they are excessively questioned and feel they must convince others they are worthy of being a scientist. Observing this over and over convinced me that the STEM community needs to continue inviting underrepresented scientists into the field to reaffirm that they belong in academia.

In STEM, we need to recognize that huge disparities in access to educational resources and opportunities across communities are inherently racially and socioeconomically coded. By using academic achievement and prestige as measures for an individual’s capacity for entrance and success in the STEM community, we reaffirm the status quo whereby individuals who had access to myriad advantageous resources throughout their lives continue to outshine highly qualified and hard-working individuals from resource-poor settings, often who are also people of color. Furthermore, even people with high marks of academic achievement can be dissuaded from the STEM community if they don’t look or talk like the scientists we see in textbooks.

When I was growing up in Fairfield county, most of what I’ve written here would have never even crossed my mind. But even now, I want to make it clear that I’m far from an authority on any of these issues. I hope that at the very least, my story shows how deeply it pains me to watch as the STEM community (which I revere) fails these communities time and time again. I hope my story can highlight that in all its objectivity, the STEM community is not immune to prejudice or discrimination and that we have a lot of room to grow. I believe anything is possible if we tackle these issues with the intent I had in eighth grade, when I was researching fish and reading biology textbooks with curiosity and ambition.