Comics With a Cause

Today we talk about those jobs as someone who loves working in their field and is trying to make it just a little bit more accessible for everyone. This season on the show, we're talking to a lot of people who work behind the scenes in tech, people who honestly shape the way that we all live by doing jobs that most of us might not understand. Right. Um, so hi to me. Jay Gardner is one of those people.

Jay Gardner, I am thirty one years old. I am currently a post doctoral researcher at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Okay, so what does that mean? Okay, it's on the most basic level. I'm kind of trying to study the biology of cancer and understand what makes it tick. Jay does a lot of complicated, fascinating things, as you're going to hear in the show. But what she's exceptionally good at kind of her whole thing is

explaining it. So to start, she specializes in pancreatic cancer, one of the worst because it usually gets caught so late. But what's kind of unique about what I do and what I study is that instead of studying the tumor cells themselves, so the cells that are growing uncontrollably, I'm actually studying the cells that are in its environment. So if you think of it like a plant, right, the tumor cell itself can be the seed that's oil around it that gives it the support, is what I'm studying.

So when our bodies are healthy, it's more like an aerage soil that stops that can tank or a seed from growing into a destructive plant, versus when you do have cancer, it's super fertile and rich and has all of the nutrients to give life and support to that seed. And so I'm trying to figure out what's happening when it's in that fertile state and how we can turn it back into an ariage state. You have definitely described that before, that was amazing. Thank you, just you just

made something so confusing makes sense. Talking with Jay, she immediately feels like that science teacher you really wish you had in high school. And I think what makes her so good at teaching is how enamored she is with learning, because that is her job. Yeah, and it's kind of great when I think about it, because how much I wanted to go to school and just what I'm doing now, I just found a way to in school for forever, except now you get paid for it. Yes, now I

get paid for it. Her obsession with school started early. She was a first generation kid raised in Chicago. Both of her parents are from Belize in Central America. Her brother is nine years older than her, and even as a little kid, Jay got super jealous every time she

watched him leave for school. I didn't start school until I was five, but then before that, I would like every day put on my mini mouse backpack and pretend like I wanted to go to school, and I go by mom, I'm going to school now, and pantomime opening and shutting the door, and like to go to this school that I definitely didn't know where it was or how to get to or even really have an idea of what school was like. It was just something that

I really wanted to do. She eventually did go to school, and unsurprisingly, she loved it and was immediately drawn to science. I loved the puzzle aspect of it because I really like puzzles, even just like reading. I love mystery books and trying to figure out who the culprit is or who did it before I reached the end of the book. So it's all very much on brand for me to

do science now. It was also at this young age that her eventual studies and cancer got put into motion after she lost an uncle to call in cancer and watched another uncle and her father survived prostate cancer. So I started to kind of not fully understand what cancer was, but know that it was a bad thing, and start to have these questions like I have an older brother and my dad and his brother's got cancer, Like does

that mean that my brother could get cancer? And those sort of questions started to keep pushing me to figure out who done it. Into high school, she was interested in pretty much everything. She was even so into art and anime and comics. She almost went to college for it, but her early fascination in viruses landed her at McAllister College, where she majored in biology and minored in chemistry. What was it about viruses that was It was such a

pull for you. Just how something so tiny and microscopic and can't survive on its own just find the way to rewire things in the human body for their own purposes. One of the things that really grabbed her and blew my mind is that cancer cells are not technically living things, but are also not technically dead because they can't do things on their own. They require a host, but they do things that living things do, like reproduce and use energy and things like that. Wait, wait, how how can

something be not alive or dead? It probably comes down to what characteristics that define life are the most important to you, maybe, like if you go completely philosophical, okay, okay, so so also the way you talk about them, you're you're obviously fascinated by them. Yeah, do you ever find yourself rooting for viruses? Not rooting, but almost in a voyeuristic way, just like, what are you doing? It's like, tell me more. We'll get back to our story in

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the job. So while she's objectively fascinated by cancer, she's still trying to defeat it. In her way of figuring out how to is to look at it differently, studying the micro environment around pancreatic cancer. You know that seed and soil analogy from earlier. The micro environment is super super important. If you were to cut out a tumor mass from a patient, the majority of it would be

that soil and hardly any of the plant. Jay's focus on the environment of pancreatic cancer is still pretty new, but she was deeply inspired by an advisor she had going into a PhD, Dr Patty Keeley. She revolutionized how doctors think of the micro environment of breast cancer. But for her story, she had breast cancer at one point in her life as well, and that I think, you know, motivated her to studying that. And I think a lot of people that are involved in cancer research probably have

a similar sort of stories too. They have a stake in the game. Yeah. Well, Jay already had a stake in the game watching cancer affect or family as a kid. It got even more real when Dr Keeley, after surviving breast cancer, was eventually taken by pancreatic cancer. It's it's almost like a badge of honor that I'm one of the final pH d students that kind of she put her seal of approval on to say, yep, you can get a pH d like go forth and and do

something like with that passing the torch. Yeah yeah, that like I also get to do that and then research the thing that ended up claiming her life too, as in a field that she revolutionized. So sort of like in an homage to her as well, this idea of passing the torch and paying homage to scientists you might not know about, that's the driving idea behind another part of Jay's work that you probably wouldn't expect. Okay, so

could you explain what you're showing me. What I'm showing first right now is one that I made just this last month for UM Black History Month, and it's an illustration that I made of Gerald Jerry Lawson. Okay, so what she's showing me is a comic strip that she did with a couple of friends. The comic strip is this wonderful little cartoon of a big, jolly guy, Jerry Lawson holding a gaming console. You may not have known this, but the person that that created our ability to change

games in your home gaming system. So the little cartridges that you have that you can switch out and play whatever game you want, as opposed to buying a device and only having that one game that you can play that's hardwired in. That's all thanks to Jerry Lawson. The comic is five panels and reads kind of like a Superhero origin story. Jerry was a black man in the seventies working as an engineer, and his free time, he

developed the first cartridge gaming system in his garage. It was called the Channel F and it went on to inspire Atari and every single gaming system that came after it.

But probably the most important panel is Jay's illustration of young Jerry in a first grade classroom next to a poster of George Washington Carver, so probably the most prominent black man scientists that every child is taught about um with a teacher saying this could be you write a teacher that encouraged him to saying like, hey, like you want to be a scientist? Like yeah, like you go be a scientist. This is the idea that these comics

kind of came from. Jay channeled her high school love for art and teamed up with a couple of friends to create jk X Comics, comic about science as a way to make it more accessible to people, so changing the language so that it's not overly complicated so that

people that aren't in science can understand it. The comics do this not only by using relatable language, but by featuring relatable living scientists that aren't just stereotypical images of scientists that we might have in our heads, you know, maybe Albert Einstein in a basement by himself yelling Eureka. There are people that are actively doing this and that don't all look like Albert Einstein, you know, like you can't see on the zoom call because this is a podcast.

But I am not a white man with like crazy looking hair. Right. There are people from all walks of life that do this, People like the women at NASA featured in the movie Hidden Figures, whose calculations got humans to and from space. People like kids Mikia Corbett, the thirty five year old African American scientists, who's a huge reason we can get a COVID vaccination more effectively quickly than any time in history. Yeah, and there's so many

people in history that are like this. Yeah, So do you believe there have been many a young scientist or a cancer doctor out there who never really found that that's what they were because the industry itself or the profession just didn't make sense to them. Yeah. Yeah, and you don't know to ask about it, because how can you ask about what you don't know? Now, six years after its founding, jk X Comics launched a successful Kickstarter

campaign and will be a real thing in print. The heroes in the comics are PhD students and scientists working and breaking ground today, like the young scientists uncovering how micro and a squirrels gut is how they survive hibernation. Who thought that's where Jay is now uncovering the unknown day in and day out, whether she's in the lab or making comics, she's asking the same question she did when she was a kid who done it, but maybe

more importantly about everything she does. Her real pioneering is how she makes all the insane things that she's learning and doing easy to understand. Yeah, well, I mean like communication, if you're going into sciences or chemistry, is not a big part of the education or the learning process, and you're saying it it kind of needs to be. Yeah, I basically want to turn everything on its head and

every way possible. For now, she's doing that by putting the things that fascinate her in comic form and putting it in front of young, curious people who probably also couldn't wait to go to school. People that you know may grow up and be like, I want to be a microbiologists and study microbes and squirrels, or because I saw it in a comic, because I saw it in a comic, like and there was a real person that did that, and I didn't know that that was a

thing for On the Job, I'm motus Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were written and produced by me Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. The show was mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at The Loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Find us on I Heart Radio and Apple podcast If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring story about discovering your life's work, Audiation