# 408 Tuesday, January 15, 2007 - OF ROSA PARKS, STEM CELLS, AND DR. COREY HARWELL
“Something in its environment tells each cell what it can beâ€"will it become part of the excitatory process? Or is it an inhibitor?â€, said Dr. Corey Harwell.
It was a wonderful day: trees and sunshine and hundreds of people, everyone dressed to their best, the wedding reception for Bob and Danielle Klein.
Dr. Harwell and his wife Lynn, a young African-American couple, were sitting with Gloria and me.
On the white linen table cloth before us was a small mysterious square box, maybe three inches across, half an inch deep.
Don’t open the boxes, we had been told, not yet.
Lynn Harwell is senior administrative assistant to Bob Klein, Chair of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee for the California stem cell program.
I enjoy meeting any supporter of the stem cell research, and Ms. Harwell is very easy to talk to, with her smile warm enough to melt an igloo.
When I first met her at a CIRM meeting, I expressed interest on doing an article on her personally for this column. She wouldn’t hear of it.
“Oh, no, no,†she saidâ€"“But you have to talk to my husband. He’s a scientist!â€
As we waited for the signal to open our little boxes, of course we were talking stem cells. And as usual when I talk to any scientist, let alone a neurobiologist just starting off in his career, so he hadn’t yet learned the tricks of communication with the general public, I was listening as hard as I couldâ€"and struggling to keep up.
“Mm-hmm,†I would contribute now and then, nodding my head like I understood what he was talking about.
But sitting there in the warm sunlight, waiting for the signal, I had a flashback to the Middle Agesâ€"well, my personal middle ages, when I was an 8th grade English teacher…
I had started a multicultural club, called True Colors, only weeks before a racial incident, a fist fight between an Arab-American and a white kid who had made comments about “camel jockeysâ€. The students were given the choice between expulsion and talking out the situation before a group of their peers, which was us. They had chosen the latter, of courseâ€"discussed the causes of the fight, decided it was trivial--and both joined the club.
We got the idea of putting on a play about the accomplishments of minority Americans, with the ticket proceeds going to charity: in this case the American Paralysis Association.
Our first big play was called ROSA PARKS AND THE RACIST BUS DRIVER.
It opened with a glasses-wearing little girl named Suzie who had Down’s syndrome. She walked all the way from the back of the auditorium, and slowlyâ€"triumphantly-
“True Colors… welcomes you… to our.. play. It is called… Rosa… Parks and the Racist… Bus DRIVER!â€
On the stage in front of the curtains was a row of battered metal folding chairs.
Through the special effects magic of an 8th grade program with no money, the row of chairs became a bus.
Our “Rosa Parksâ€, a 12 year old with glasses and magnificent cornrows, sat down on the fourth chair behind the racist bus driver, which was me.
She talked about her feet hurting.
The driver came and told her to move to the back of the busâ€"and Rosa Parks said no.
The Selma Bus Boycott had begun.
Ten cents a person, that bus ride cost. If a customer refused to ride, that was one dime. But a community? Day after day, dimes become dollars, adding up to financial impact.
But what about the racist bus driver? History does not tell us, what happened to him.
In our play, he got drunk one night, and made an historically inaccurate visit-- to Rosa Parks’ house.
He wanted to know, he said, why had she done it, why had she started this fuss? What had African-Americans ever done that was any good, anyway?
She asked him in.
In her living room, naturally, she had a Magic Mirror, through which the past returned.
Stepping through the empty wooden frame were Asian kids, Germans, Hispanics, every nationality imaginable, but for the purpose of our play, they were African-Americans all.
Like Crispus Attucks, first to die in the American Revolution, his life’s blood sacrificed on the ice and snow, March 5th, 1770, in the Boston Massacre.
Or a genius child, Benjamin Banneker, making a working clock out of wood, and writing an almanac before the age of twelveâ€"as a man, he helped design Washington, DC.
Mary Elizabeth Bowser: in the Civil War, she was Jefferson Davis’s maid-- and a spy for the Union sideâ€"sending General Grant secrets, helping shorten that terrible conflict.
Ralph Bunche helped build the United Nations.
George Washington Carver saved the broken economy of the South, encouraging crop rotation and coming up with an astonishing number of uses for the peanut, including house paint and peanut butter.
Joseph Cinque led a rebellion on a slave ship. He was captured, triedâ€"acquittedâ€"until President Martin Van Buren (to his everlasting shame) demanded the case be retried. But former President John Quincy Adams defended Cinque, and he went back to Africa, free.
Elizabeth Freeman was a maid servant in 1781. She saved up her scanty earnings, hired a lawyer, challenged slavery in Massachusettsâ€"and ended it.
Explorer Thomas Henson with Admiral Peary was the first man to reach the North Pole, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Percy Lavonne Julien invented cortisone, first relief from the crippling pain of arthritis.
The play was all in poetryâ€"well, it rhymed anyway! Two African-American cowboys…
One, famous for riding his horse into a saloon (and ordering a whiskey for it) was also a sharecropper who left the fields, walking all the way from Tennessee to Kansas; he worked with Bat Masterson and helped tame the Wild West.
Beside him was William Pickett, the cowboy who invented the rodeo sport of bull-doggingâ€"but he had a variation: the astonishing technique of biting the nose of a steer, and with his teeth, wrestling the animal down.
There was Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in the South, by walking hundreds of milesâ€"and then went back, 19 times-- to help other slaves escape on the underground railroad. She freed 1,000 people, including her father and mother.
And Sojourner Truth, a Dutch-speaking woman, sold to a slave-owner who tied her wrists and hung her from a hook in the ceiling, saying, “I’ll whip the Dutch out of youâ€. That monster made her have five children, four of which he sold, one after another. The last child, she took and ran away. A decent couple found her, bought her freedomâ€"and Sojourner Truth became a champion for the rights of women. She met Abraham Lincoln, who invited her to come and visit him again, after the war, but then was killed. At the age of 84, on her own deathbed, Sojourner Truth told a young friend:
“Why are you crying, honey, I am not going far. I am not dyingâ€"I’m going home, like a shooting star.â€
There was Daniel Williams, former shoemaker, first doctor to sew up a human heart-- and Granville T. Woods, inventor of the subway.
The play ended with a skinny white girl with a painted moustache and booming voice giving highlights of Martin Luther King’s greatest speechâ€"“I have a dream today…when all of God’s children will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character… I have a dream today…â€
Dreams… it was so hard to make them real.
I asked Dr. Corey Harwell, what made him become a stem cell scientist.
He smiled, and all the scientific lingo dropped away.
“My father inspired me,†he said.
“He ran a janitorial service, and he worked like two men. And he said that education was power, a way to live more than just the grinding labor he knew.â€
“At first, I thought scientists were just some old white men in labcoats, doing mysterious things in laboratories.
“I might have ended up a doctor, a good thing in itself.
“But I wanted to do something which would impact more lives, maybe make a discovery, or find a treatment to help heal or cure a disease.
“I had an opportunity to take a summer program on stem cell research at UCSF, the University of California at San Francisco, and that did it for me.â€
He spoke about cells again, and their “nicheâ€, the tiny environment around each one, which determines what that cell becomes.
I thought about his father, who had encouraged him, guiding him on a positive path, and about the government program, which had encouraged him.
A voice rang out across the unfenced back yard, gathering the attention of the guests, there where we sat at our tables, with our little boxes dutifully unopened.
“In the box before everyone is a living butterfly… Make a wish, and set it free!â€
Wow….I opened my box.
Oops.
My butterfly was dead. I blew on it, wiggled its wings back and forth, considered mouth to mouth resucitiation. But the size differential made that a little difficult so we saved it for the scrapbook.
I hoped that didn’t mean my dream was disqualified.
But Gloria smiled at me, and I knew she had the same dream.
She opened her little container.
A bright-winged insect appeared. Fragile, beautiful, it clambered to the edge of the box, perched, stretched, almost seemed to yawnâ€"and fluttered away.
And the young couple sitting beside us wrapped their hands together and smiled at each other, as their butterflies spread wings like hope, and flew…
Today, as a research scientist at the University of California at San Francisco, Dr. Corey Harwell is working with tiny cells that offer hope to millions.
And, in his spare time, he works with a young scientists’ program, encouraging them, so that one day, they too can become part of the excitatory process…
And not an inhibitor. Don Reed
Don C. Reed is co-chair of Californians for Cures, and writes for their web blog, www.stemcellbattles
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