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[garage door whirring]
- Adam Perez: When COVID hit, I felt like I was coming home
to expose my family almost every day
because I never knew what's a true exposure, right?
Was it on surfaces?
Was it in the air, right?
So I almost treated it as "It's bound to happen today."
My name is Adam Perez.
I've been a firefighter and a fire medic
for the city of Madison for roughly nine years.
And I'm from the city of Madison,
so it's actually really nice to, like,
represent the community that I grew up in
and, you know, helping people along the way.
A lot of the time, people tend to think that firefighters
are, like, these big, strong-willed,
courageous people willing to do anything.
And when COVID hit, I felt like a lot of people
kinda came into their shell a little bit,
'cause they were like, "What are we getting into?"
This is very foreign to us.
This is something invisible.
We can't see it.
Everyone seems to be afraid of it.
People were dying from this, like, every day.
I felt like it was almost just a matter of time
that I was gonna have an exposure unbeknownst to me,
and then I was gonna potentially expose my family to that.
So for my kids, they greet me at the door
with open arms and smiles,
but maybe my kids wouldn't see me for a couple of days
because I had a pretty serious exposure.
And for that time period, we had to isolate,
and Dad needed to take time
to get rid of all the contaminants
that I was bringing home.
I was taking, like, two or three showers a day just to make sure
that, you know, I'm keeping my family out of harm's way.
Most of the days were pretty sad
because there were a lot of people that were dying
that we had to consider.
It was almost like a triage treatment.
For a virus, how do you tell somebody that "You're safe,"
not knowing that they're safe,
or "You're not as bad as somebody else
that's really, really bad."
And then, going forward, maybe they were worse off
than you thought.
And then even with my crew mates,
we didn't have a whole lot of time to interact.
We had a lot of questions still that needed answering.
We were still very timid and afraid of what
we could potentially catch at work, you know?
So for us, there were some sadder, darker days.
It felt like the whole city was starting to lose its wheels.
Everyone was starting to fall apart.
A lot of the time, we would see people
with difficulty breathing.
We try as much as we can,
but we are limited as to what we do.
There was an older gentleman.
He had some preexisting conditions
due to long-term smoking, but we come to these patients
that just have such a hard time breathing.
And you can see that they're, like, gasping for air.
They can't talk in complete sentences
because they're trying to catch their breath in between words.
It was something that they were very scared about.
It was just very scary to see
because they never knew if this was it,
if this was the end, right?
And you could kinda see that look on their face.
It's one of those things where you're just like,
we got to hope that we can just get these people
to the hospital fast enough
that we still have resources available for them.
We were very surprised how fast it would spread.
We were running multiple calls a day,
and every call was a COVID call.
So it did spread really, really fast.
And for us, we just assumed that everyone had it,
had COVID at that time.
Once more information came out about the vaccine,
there was such a relief that we were over the moon,
I guess about the cases coming down.
And then you would think that like, "Okay,
"now things are gonna start to go back to normal,
but a different normal."
Science has just done so much.
When you start to open up your mind to some of the things
that we have been capable of in history, it's quite amazing.
Like, wow, we're really progressing as people
and that the potential for other cures
and other vaccines are virtually endless.
This is one of the scariest things
that we've had to deal with in humanity.
And we've adapted to it.
Our procedures have changed,
and it's gonna help in the future.
We're adapting and we're getting better.
[gentle music]
- Miranda Ramirez-Vang: Science is just so much more
than just a subject or a concept.
We owe everything to science.
And if something is wrong, you can dive deep
and figure out why it's wrong, and then you can fix it.
[gentle music]
My name is Miranda, and I'm a student
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
studying biomedical sciences.
I was born and raised here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
I was a very talkative child. [laughs]
Someone ate a gummy worm!
And I was very family-oriented, you know, even back then,
I loved playing with my cousins and I have a big family.
So I was always active and playing,
but my parents found something odd.
I was very delayed in developing and they wondered why.
So they took me to the doctor very regularly
to do tests and see what was wrong.
Finally, I had an MRI when I was five years old,
and they found a tumor in my spinal cord.
And it was intertwined with my nerves.
And in order to remove that tumor,
there was going to be some nerve damage.
And so that resulted in spinal cord injury.
I lost most sensation in my right leg,
some sensation in my left leg.
And that led to me, you know, losing my ability to walk.
- Dua Vang-Ramirez: Miranda, why are you here, honey?
Do you remember?
- Um, yes, I'm here for my back, to feel better.
And so, I think that that's what the doctors
were kind of preparing us for.
Saying, "Hey, you know, spinal cord injury
often results in paralysis."
It was likely that I was just going to be in a wheelchair
for the rest of my life.
But my parents and I were like, "Nope." [laughs]
My parents and I refused to accept that.
And so, you know, we pushed.
That's the thing about my family.
We are hard workers.
I was a very curious child, [laughs]
and so I always liked to do a lot of reading.
And, you know, my dad is also very into reading
and learning what's going on in the world.
And he was the one who told me that. you know,
STEM cells are a thing.
"Have you heard about STEM cells?"
And he basically said it's like a clean slate for cells
and they can, they can grow into whatever they want.
I also learned that, you know,
the reason that I wasn't going to get any better
was because my nerve cells were damaged.
That doesn't regenerate.
And so, when I put those two together, I said,
"Oh, that's a key player in something that could fix this."
I was a kid when I learned that.
And so, I didn't know what to do with that information.
All I knew was that there was hope, you know,
and I knew that people knew about this
and that people were doing something about it.
I was in a wheelchair for maybe about a year.
I just always found a way as a kid to participate.
I mean, even when I was in a wheelchair,
in recess, I used to, like, race people.
I used to do like, donuts on the wheelchair
and, like, wheelies.
Like, I was pretty cool in the wheelchair. [laughs]
[playing piano scales]
In elementary school, I always told kids that by high school,
I would be walking again without any aid.
And it was hard once I realized
that I was in crutches for a really long time.
I have had people throughout my journey,
that, you know, didn't believe in me.
People thought that, you know,
things were going to be hard for me,
which they are, but they thought I couldn't do it.
People would stare at me.
You know, students, my peers would stare at me
when I was in class, and, you know,
just all these little things add up, and they hurt.
So there comes a point where too many people are telling you
that you can't do it, and it's hard,
but I was raised, you know, to go against all odds.
And so, I kept going.
I started to reflect on all of the people
that have impacted my life,
all of the health care professionals
that have impacted my life.
I had many physical therapists, and all of them who, you know,
would get together with other physical therapists and say,
"Hey, like, we need to figure out a plan."
And every time I would see them, they'd be excited
and, you know, tell me I'm making progress or, you know,
"Good job, here's a Gatorade."
There are all these people that come together,
and they work as teams and they build communities
to support each other and to make the world a better place.
And I said, "I want to be that person in people's lives too."
And so, ultimately, that's how I've decided
that I want to go into medicine specifically.
In high school, we learned about the nervous system
in our anatomy class.
And we read this article about zebra fish,
that they can, you know, regenerate their CNS,
their central nervous system cells.
And that this was, they were using this concept
to try to apply them to humans.
And so, that article, I said, "Oh, my gosh, you know what?
"I am old enough now that I can start looking into opportunities
where I can be a part of that too."
When I looked at what UW-Madison was offering,
and I saw that they were working with STEM cells
for central nervous system, you know, tissues,
I was so excited.
This is something I have been dreaming of for so long.
And now I get to be a part of that.
And I'm hopeful that with this research there,
it will impact me directly.
But I have let go of the dream to be fully cured
because I have already accepted this,
but I know that if this happened to another kid,
it would be really hard for them.
I mean, it took me 15 years to come to this point.
All that is important to me
is that I can impact somebody else's life in the long run.
We are starting to get a good idea of STEM cells,
but then again, there's so much we don't know.
I mean, we know that we can influence these cells
with different, you know, molecular factors and say,
"Hey, if, you know, if we give you these signals,
"will you grow into what we want you to grow into?"
And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
And so, you have to tweak things
and put 'em in different environments, like,
"Okay, does it, since it works on this plate,
will it work in a human?"
And so, I mean, we've learned a lot,
but there's still a lot more to learn.
So we need more scientists for that. [laughs]
Science is everywhere around us,
and we can come to appreciate that when we have people
that dedicate their careers and their lives and their time
to finding answers and to making things better
for the rest of the world and the people in it.
[gentle music]
[footsteps thudding]
- Shannon Strader: Dear Lauren, the day you left this world,
you took a big piece of me with you.
We were supposed to go through everything together.
The challenges, the heartbreaks, the beautiful experiences,
the milestones, all of it, side by side.
Without you here, these moments are always very hard.
It is impossible to explain how painful it is
to move through the world without your twin.
[gentle music]
- Jeff: Let's see you laugh.
Oh, yeah, there we go! - Shannon: ? YMCA ?
- Mom: She'll only laugh at Shannon, Jeff.
- Jeff:: Laugh please, Lauren and Shannon.
- Mom: Oh, she loves her Shannon.
- Shannon: She's trying to kiss me!
Cerebral palsy is a non-progressive
neurological disorder, and it usually is before birth,
during birth, or after birth,
there's a trauma of some sort that causes a brain injury.
There's a variety of how severe it could be for patients,
whether they're in a wheelchair,
they just need braces to help walk,
whether they have respiratory compromise.
She had the most severe and she required a PEG tube,
so a feeding tube, to help her eat
'cause she did not have enough muscles
and enough strength to swallow foods without choking on them.
The hardships Lauren faced were very hard to witness.
It's the most common physical disability worldwide.
It's also one of the least funded for research.
[gentle music]
Lauren was the absolute best.
She was the best twin I could ever have asked for.
I don't really get to speak about her,
which is hard, but she was very strong.
[footsteps thudding]
The most frustrating part was, you're given this diagnosis,
but you're not given, like, an army of treatment to back it up.
You're not given options, or at least viable, quality options.
It's just like, this is it, figure it out.
And so, that definitely frustrated me.
I learned about stem cells
when I was a junior in my honors science class,
and I was just fascinated.
I was fascinated by science in general
because of my experiences.
But I did not know that the science of stem cells
was happening during our time.
In theory, all the stem cells can be turned from one cell
to a different type of cell, which is very beneficial
in the science for diseases and disabilities.
In theory, if you take a skin cell from a patient,
could you potentially turn that into a neurological type of cell
to help their disability or injury?
I've always had Lauren on my mind, daily.
Immediately I thought,
"Oh, well, this could be an avenue for cerebral palsy."
So, I was in lecture that day,
and that night, I emailed James Thomson
and I said, "Thank you for your work."
Dr. James Thomson is a brilliant scientist.
He is the first person to drive the embryonic stem cell.
He was coined as the father of stem cells.
The only reason why I came
to the University of Wisconsin-Madison
is to work in the Morgridge Institute
and in James Thomson's lab.
And that's how it all started.
My goal in this life
is to better understand neurological development
in general and cerebral palsy.
The Thomson Lab is very into developmental biology,
so I kind of took that neurological development route,
seeing what goes wrong and what can go right
when you manipulate factors.
What excited me about stem cells is that it's such a new field.
I had always dreamed of becoming a physician,
a clinician, to be with patients.
But the lab researcher is the one changing treatments.
If I'm in the right institution and the right lab,
I can do both.
Stem cells have all this potential
to understand these things that we haven't understood
and the potential to possibly cure,
or at least have an improved quality of life
for these patients.
I think, like Lauren and like patients like Lauren
with disabilities, there's definitely opportunity to grow.
And I think in the future, ideally,
they're going to live much longer, and not only that,
they're going to have much more quality to their life
and hopefully feel a little bit more in control of their body
than they have right now.
I think that's the goal.
[gentle music]
[birds singing]
- Tatiana Maeda: I was always very interested
in protecting forests, and I think data science has helped me
connect with nature in different ways.
[gentle music]
My name is Tatiana Maeda.
I am a Brazilian biologist and PhD student,
and I'm studying tropical forests by their sounds.
[birds singing]
It started from my childhood.
I was living in southwest Brazil
and in a region which is called Pantanal.
I guess what here would be a national park,
where you are surrounded by nature
and you're also aware of many different animals around you.
I would take tourists through safaris
to get to know tropical wildlife or Brazilian wildlife,
like jaguars and ocelots and tapirs and giant anteaters.
And through this experience,
I learned how to identify wildlife or animals
by their sounds,
because actually when you are a wildlife guide,
the best way to identify and to find animals
is if you're able to listen to them.
And so, I was trained by all the wildlife guides and local people
to identify animal sounds.
But I was interested in understanding
how we can better protect wildlife,
and that's why I decided
to pursue a degree in environmental studies.
So I heard about this lab in Wisconsin
that is monitoring biodiversity through their sound,
and I was very interested about that.
So a healthy forest is also a forest that is quite loud
because there are a lot of animals singing.
And as you disturb the forest with logging, with hunting,
animals may start losing their food and their houses,
and the forest starts to get quieter.
Our lab is trying to monitor how healthy rainforests are
by recording their sounds
and measuring how many animals are there.
We basically set up the recorder and put it on a tree,
and just leave the recorder there recording
for a day or months.
The advantage of using this type of recorder
is that it doesn't disturb wildlife.
And then when we get the recorder back,
we can then listen to the recordings
and identify how many animals are singing.
I had thousands of hours of recordings,
and I was only able to listen and analyze
about an hour of it.
So for me, it would be impossible
to listen to all these thousands of hours that I had,
and that's where I needed the help of data scientists.
And I met Yuren.
So Yuren's a data scientist,
and she is helping me, building this program
that will help me to analyze all this data.
And basically what Yuren's doing
is taking all this information that I gathered
and basically teaching computers to do the same thing,
so identifying animal sounds.
The program that Yuren's developing
will be able to help me process the data faster.
I'm very excited about this program
because I am trying to understand the impact
of sustainable logging on the biodiversity.
And I'm investigating how long it takes
for the biodiversity to recover
after the sustainable logging happens.
It would probably take me my entire life
to listen to all the recordings
and identify all the different sounds,
while this program will do it in, like, a week.
It will definitely help scientists to understand
what are the different conservation practices
that are working to protect forests
and conserve biodiversity.
Data science is important
because it helps scientists like me to analyze more data
than they are able to handle,
and it also helps us to see a bigger picture.
[birds singing]
[rousing music]
- Announcer: PBS Wisconsin Education
leverages the power of public media
to spark curiosity and ignite learning
in Pre-K settings through 12th grade.
Be part of our service
by sharing with an educator you know today!
Pbswisconsineducation.org.