Grant Earnhart and Diversity in Technology

 

He Jiankui is a controversial figure who I have followed on Twitter for over a year now. He grew up in a broke household of farmers in Xinhua county, Loudy City, Hunan. Purely self-funded, he built his own laboratory on his property. He vigorously pursued the sciences- first astrophysics, then biology- and pushed through his studies with passion from Rice university to SUStech. Having been from a poor family, he is a slight outlier in the scientist population. In 2018 this individual was sentenced to three years in prison for unethical gene editing in embryos, attempting to code HIV resistance into embryos. Although imprisoned for unethical practices, the intent as well as the outcome is my focus. This man was able to push the limits of preventative care to a new level. Because of this, I believe his past actions should be more heavily analyzed and his future plans should be more effectively guided. G.O.A.T. Alert!  Concerning discrimination, he didn't face much if any, though he received plenty of condemnation and criticism for his actions.

    

This post will cover one of the four women from Hidden Figures: Katherine Johnson. She was born 1918 in West Virginia and even in childhood proved to excel in mathematics. She would be a teacher before joining the aerospace program to compute things related to aircrafts. Due to working during the time period of Jim Crow laws, she did not have access to white restrooms and she had to work in the officers for colored individuals. She would have to walk several hundred feet to and from the restroom, serving as a severe deficit to NASA's progress. Her perseverance through this was illustrated in an interview where she mentioned that she does not feel affected by the discriminatory design of the building. She believed that research is research, and that white or black, everybody was doing the same thing. She was a strong woman and was restricted in ability to fight this, but all the same this perspective was a double edged sword. It demonstrated perseverance in the face of adversity while at the same time continuing to live under it in something that isn't quite denial but effectively similar.