[footsteps thudding]
- Shannon: 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,
"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]