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Writing Prompt 8: A conversation about vaccines and cancer with my sister

Chloe Biggs

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

3/27/18
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My semester long topic has a lot to do with a topic my sister and I are both passionate about:

medicine. My sister, Ashley, graduated UNCC with a bachelor’s of science in biology and a

bachelor’s of art in Spanish. She is currently in a graduate physician assistant program. She was

able to check the sources and specific facts that I included in my presentation so far. Most

importantly to me, she was able to make sure I could paraphrase somewhat complex scientific

concepts in a way that is appropriate for an audience of non-science majors without losing

academic integrity. I knew that we would easily have a thirty minute conversation about any

medical topic. I also knew that a conversation with her could easily slip into a very off topic rant

about puppies. To avoid wasting both of our precious time, I headed the prompt and reviewed

conventions an interview. I constructed an outline of questions to guide our discussion and left

room to jot down her remarks or additional questions that popped up.

To begin our discussion, I asked some vague questions. I asked how familiar she is with

vaccines. Ashley humbly admitted she was very familiar with them and had recently been

focusing more on who gets what vaccines and when. She went on to provide useful definitions of

the different types of vaccines that I want to include in my presentation. She explained how

vaccines can be passive or active acquired, or our body can rely on our innate immunity process.

I then prompted her for a brief explanation of how cancer occurs at a cellular level, as this is

what I’m most worried about conveying to my audience without getting too tied up in scientific

jargon, being boring, or unclear. I really admired one specific phrasing she used to summarize

cancer. She stated, “Cancer results as a loss of cancer suppressing genes or “DNA proofreading”

which leads to an unchecked proliferation of cells with mutated genes” (Biggs, 2018). I was also

curious if she’d heard about a cancer vaccine in her graduate studies. She said she wasn’t aware
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of anything specific. I went on to briefly explain a study on tumors in mice that Amanda

included in our presentation already and I asked Ashley if she thought it was feasible and could

be successful in humans. She went on to enlighten me about the cellular agent being used in the

studies, a T-cell. She said,

A T-cell is a part of our adaptive immunity. A T-cell has to be sensitized to a specific

tumor antigen which creates T-cell that are trained to attack only cells presenting that

specific tumor antigen [cancer cells]. Obviously this is much more beneficial than current

chemotherapy that target all fast-producing cells, like the GI tract and hair, almost

indifferently (Biggs, 2018).

To my question of whether or not the vaccine would translate to humans, she said she would

need to review the details of the study herself. One of the last things we discussed was her

opinion on child vaccination and the current pop culture trend to neglect child vaccination. We

have both studied what makes a study fall into the dishonorable category of “pseudoscience” so

we are hyper aware to not believe every hollywood star that claims a vaccine gave her child

autism. She was adamant in the importance of this preventative measure. She went so far as to

say, “Even if you don’t care if your kid gets polio, it is socially and ethically irresponsible to

endanger other people’s immunodeficient babies” (Biggs, 2018). The topic of people not wanting

to vaccinate their children has been coming up more and more which has made me want to put

more of an emphasis on debunking the fear of vaccines, which has no factual or scientific

support whatsoever, during our presentation. My sister mentioned the need for “herd

vaccination”. If we aren’t all on the same page with vaccination, a rise in previously eradicated
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diseases (like Smallpox in California recently) could begin killing defenseless infants. I want to

add this Smallpox example, and a source to back it, to our presentation.

Overall, this was a useful discussion to clarify and perfect the science side of my

presentation. I would like to hold more discussions or peer edits with people from a no-science

background to see how that audience perceives the information. I am also worried that people

will feel like it is too academic and get bored since medicine isn’t everyone’s passion. I think

discussions like these definitely need to be had with a variety of people before our final

presentation.
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Resources:

Biggs, A. L. (2018, March 27). A conversation about vaccines and cancer with my sister

[FaceTime interview].