First women

Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green just became the first person to successfully cure cancer in mice using nanoparticle technology, Black Enterprise reports.

Green was first inspired to pursue cancer treatment efforts after watching her aunt and uncle battle with the disease. Her aunt, Ora Lee, eventually lost her battle with cancer and her uncle, General Lee Smith, struggled with the side effects of chemotherapy. Seeing their experiences firsthand motivated Green to find a cure.

Her work began as an undergraduate student at Alabama A&M University where she studied physics and optics. She went on to pursue her masters in physics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and eventually began working at the Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Department of Pathology.

Her new cancer treatment uses laser-activated nanoparticles that were found to successfully cure cancer within 15 days in mice. The treatment doesn’t require chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery and is a revolutionary breakthrough in the field. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded Green with a $1.1 million grant to continue her cancer treatment research.

Breakthroughs in cancer treatment are critical to ultimately curing the disease. With every new treatment, the life expectancy for cancer patients goes up. While people are living longer after a cancer diagnosis, studies still show that roughly 1600 people will die from cancer each day in 2020 in the United States.

Thankfully, because of the work that Dr. Green is doing, we are one step closer to a cure!

Thank you!

Source:Becauseofthemwecan.com

Zaynab Alkali is a Nigerian novelist, poet, short story writer and is regarded as the first woman novelist from Northern Nigeria.

Born in Tura-Wazila in Borno State, she graduated from Bayero University Kano with in 1973 and obtained a doctorate degree in African Literature in English in 1979.

She became the principal of Sakera Girls’ boarding school and went on to be a lecturer in English at two universities in Nigeria. She rose to be a dean in the Faculty of arts at Nasarawa State University in Keffi where she taught creative writing.

Although, Zaynab writes to empower women economically, politically and psychologically, that was not her focus when she started. She was a very bad speaker and had a phobia for public appearance.

“I actually started writing because I discovered that when I was in school and the teacher asked questions, I had the answers, especially in literature, but I was too petrified to put up my hand. So I would right the answers down. Soon, one of the teachers, who happened to be a European, noticed that whenever I had an assignment in literature, I would score an A or B+. Yet, my hand was never up in class,” she told Punch in an interview.

By the time she was 20 years old, married and still a student, she started writing but the stories weren’t for publication. She was just writing to express herself.

Even though she didn’t plan to publish her work, she gave an expatriate, who called for submission of short stories her manuscript and begged him not to show anyone, but, the expatriate went on to read one of the stories read on the British Broadcasting Corporation.

For Zaynab, writing is therapeutic. “Unlike some people who have said that they do not write because of any trauma in their lives, I think that writing has been the only thing that has helped me to pull through a lot of things, including depression. I suffered severe depression in the past. But whenever it happened, I would sit down,” she said.

At first, she wrote only for her own pleasure and benefit. But, when she started getting positive reviews and comments in the newspapers, she had to change her mind.

Black Doctor Becomes First To Cure Cancer In Mice

MEET ZAYNAB ALKALI, THE FIRST WOMAN NOVELIST FROM NORTHERN NIGERIA