Science Couldn't Save Her, So She Became A Scientist

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The first time Sonia Vallabh understood something was very wrong with her mother Kamni was on the phone on her mom's 52nd birthday. She wasn't herself. By the end of that year, after about six months on life support, Kamni had died.

The disease she died from would upend Sonia and her husband Eric's lives, and send them on a careening journey toward a completely new calling: to prevent or cure the disease that's stalking Sonia's family." Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel join Short Wave to tell their story in this second of three episodes on prion disease.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:04.3	Hey, Shortwavers, Gabriel Spitzer in the host chair today here.
0:08.7	So let's say you've got some really, really bad news that you may have inherited a genetic
0:13.8	mutation that would in all likelihood cause incurable fatal disease.
0:19.2	But you don't know when.
0:20.5	So how would you react?
0:21.8	Well, Sonya Vallebe and Eric Minicoe were newlyweds starting promising careers in law and urban
0:27.6	planning when tragedy struck Sonya's family.
0:31.5	It came in the form of pre-on disease.
0:34.7	Now we dug into these strange infectious agents in our last episode.
0:39.2	Pre-ons are self-replicating proteins that can cause devastating brain disease.
0:44.5	And while science has learned a lot about what they are and how they work, there's no
0:47.8	known cure or treatment.
0:51.0	But back in 2010, Sonya and Eric didn't know any of that.
0:54.5	Really what I remember about that phase right after we got married is how brief it was.
1:01.4	You know, we'd already had a courtship.
1:03.3	We'd already fallen in love.
1:05.4	And after we got officially married, it was really only a few months until some things
1:11.1	really started to change.
1:12.7	My mom was...
1:16.3	She was a person who really loved being a mom.
1:19.3	She really loved sort of lavishing care on other people.
	...

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