Justice: Stories about righteous determination

This week we present two stories from people who stood up against a system eager to tear them down.

Part 1: After a car crash alters Emily Winn's life forever, she must relive the trauma when she testifies in a deposition.

Emily Winn is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and PhD candidate in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. Before Brown, Emily completed an AB in Mathematics at the College of the Holy Cross and spent a year in the Visiting Students Programme at St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie at the intersection of statistics, topological data analysis, and information theory; her current work applies theory from those fields to genomic data. Outside of school, you'll find her erging in the gym, screaming at the Red Sox game on TV, or binging the latest Netflix comedy specials. Follow her on Twitter, @EmilyTWinn13

Part 2: Geneticist C. Brandon Ogbunu contemplates the role race has played in his academic career after he is confronted by the police.

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research focuses on evolutionary genetics and the ecology of disease. A New York City native, Brandon enjoys film, hip-hop, jazz and science fiction. He's an ex-very mediocre light heavy weight boxer, and slightly less mediocre experimental virologist. He has higher hopes for humanity than he does the New York Knicks. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @big_data_kane.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Emily Winn

So my freshman year of college I get a phone call from my mom. And when she says, “Do you have a minute,” I realize something is up. I soon learn three things are up. One, Nana Phyllis passed away. Two, my brother is in the hospital with a collapsed lung. And three, the lawyer called. We have a case and we have a deposition in a couple of months.

I’m pissed. Are you kidding me? I've moved on. I don't want to talk about it and I don’t want to leave school, fly to Delaware and relive it under oath.

When I was 16, two weeks before my junior year of high school started, my mom, my sister and I were sitting at a red light when we were rear ended by a Mack Truck. It was pretty big - think one size down from an 18-wheeler - and its trailer was filled with food for a delivery. My mom and I sustained severe head injuries in the accident. My sister was, thankfully, uninjured. And our car got totaled. The truck driver later pled guilty to two counts of reckless driving, one for talking on his cellphone and one for speeding with an oversized load.

We consulted a lawyer when we found out that the farm had hired this truck driver knowing he had a poor driving record to see if we could file a lawsuit against that farm’s insurance company. And we were told, based on Delaware State laws, that we don’t have a case. Well, two-and-a-half years later, apparently we do.

Now, my mom assures me, “Don’t worry. The lawyer will prepare us, but in the meantime you need to list all of the bad things that happened as a result of the car accident.”

Emily Winn shares her story with the Story Collider audience for Brain Week at Comedy Connection in Providence, RI in March 2019. Photo by David DelPoio.

Well, that’s a depressing exercise. But it’s really easy because I’m really depressed.

So, before the car accident, I was a top student on my way to a Division I basketball scholarship. In school, I aced every course I took and I trained two to three hours a day for basketball. School and basketball were my identity and the car accident shattered that. Within a year, basketball was over and in school my grades plummeted and I had to drop some courses and make them up in summer school.

So in my 18-year-old head I have nothing. I am nothing. So I detail every expense, every painful moment after that car accident because, in some ways, I see this as an opportunity to prove what I had lost and, in doing so, prove what I was worth.

My mom and I fly to Delaware the night before the deposition. The next morning we meet with our lawyer and sort through our lists. And he goes over Delaware State law for suing a corporation. So first we have to do this deposition then we go to arbitration and attempt to settle. If we don’t settle then we go to trial.

Oh, and one more thing. In today’s deposition the opposing lawyer is going to try to provoke us to either lose our temper or contradict ourselves. His goal is to see whether or not we are sympathetic, reliable witnesses because those are the most valuable in court. So no matter what happens, we have to stay composed and we have to stick to our story.

We enter a conference room with a long table. At the head of the table sits the court reporter. My mom, our lawyer and I sit on one side and the opposing lawyer sits on the other. And my skin crawls as he insists my mom go first and I soon realize why.

He interrogates my mom over her decision to travel that day without her husband and how she could possibly claim any worth or income loss as a mere housewife. He pulls out her gynecological records from 20 years ago. He even asks her how her sex life with my dad changed after the accident.

Now, she keeps a straight face through this, as do I, but my blood is boiling with fury because this guy isn’t just questioning us. He is in intimidating us. And now it’s my turn.

Half of my brain is thinking, “Oh, my God. What does this guy have on me?” And the other half is thinking, “Bring it, jackass!”

He starts by having me relive the accident. That part is quick because my account lines up with my mom’s. He then asks if I have any lingering symptoms. I say, “Yes.”

He says, “Well, your neurologist said you shouldn’t have any more so you're contradicting a doctor.” I tell him doctors are human and sometimes humans make mistakes.

So he says, “Fine. What are your symptoms?” And I tell him about my headaches, how I’m light and noise sensitive, how I sometimes slur my speech, I sleep more than most people do, I struggle with depression and he cuts me off. He says, “You can’t cite depression. You were diagnosed with that before the accident.”

Okay, like getting hit by a truck doesn’t dampen your mood? Regardless, he was wrong. That diagnosis he was referring to was a misdiagnosis.

He continues with my medical history, which isn’t a surprise because I've had three other concussions. So when I was five., I slipped on black ice and smashed my head on a slate stair. A few hours later, when I started vomiting, my parents took me to the hospital and there a CAT scan revealed I had a fractured skull and golf ball-sized blood contusion on my parietal frontal lobe. That was physically the worst of my four brain injuries but emotionally the easiest.

I don't remember much. I remember getting get-well cards from my kindergarten classmates. I remember I couldn’t go to recess for a few months, but after that I was fine and my head didn’t hurt again until the accident.

When I was 16, this is my junior year of high school, about five months after the accident, I was in a basketball game and I took an elbow to the jaw. That concussion was easy. It only took six weeks to recover. Senior year, when I was 17, this is about a year after the car accident, I dove for a loose ball in a basketball game and I took a knee to the face. That one took three months to recover and it officially ended my basketball career.

Now, I acknowledge that both of these concussions had contributions to my long-term symptoms but the fact about concussions is the more you get, the more susceptible you are to get more. I've taken plenty of hits throughout my 12-year basketball career and none of them resulted in concussions until the car accident.

And now for his lawyer ambush, “Do you drink?”

“No.”

“Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Then what do you do for fun?”

“I work in my school’s cafeteria and tutor children from low-income communities.”

This is where I remember, “Oh, that’s how being a dork pays off.”

He continues to attack my social life and at one point he goes, “Well, if you've never had a boyfriend, how do you have friends?”

And I explain to him that having friends and dating are, in fact, different. But deep down his words sting because I already know I’m an awkward, gangly, loud-mouthed, never-been-kissed 18-year-old woman and I really don’t appreciate his reminder of that.

He moves on to pick apart my basketball career and my scholarship prospects there. And he asks, “Are you sure you were that good?”

And I give him a confident, “Yes,” only because I'd rehearsed it ten times that morning with my lawyer.

I’m told by people who saw me play that I was good enough to play in college but I still feel like, since I never actually played in college, I failed to reach that level.

He finally pulls out my high school transcripts and he asks how much school I missed. Totaling absences, tardies and early dismissals I probably missed about a hundred days of school in my last two years of high school.

And he says, “No, you didn’t. Your transcript shows no more than 50.”

He thinks he's caught me lying, but junior year an administrator pulled me into her office and explained that when a student misses a lot of school, state law requires her to call Child Protection Services and inform them to open an investigation into the student’s family for abuse. And my heart stopped because my parents were going to be questioned by state authorities just because I couldn’t heal fast enough.

So she made me a deal. As long as I made it to school for half a day each day, she would override the rest of my absences. So from then on, only total absences were counted on my transcript.

After the deposition, my mom and I got Wawa, cheesesteaks specifically. We sat in the parking lot and we cried. We felt so violated by this lawyer’s relentless scrutiny. I mean, who was this guy to pore through our entire medical history? What did my love life have anything to do with the car accident? And why did Delaware State law force us to endure a humiliating interrogation just to seek justice? I know that lawyer was doing his job but I think we can agree he was a slimy dick.

His treatment of me wasn’t unusual, however. In high school, teachers, staff, parents, classmates all accuse me of faking my injuries for my own benefit, whether it was to skip school or miss homework assignments. One teacher even told me to drop out. Once I was no longer a top student or a star athlete, I couldn’t get good publicity for the school so, to them, I was worthless, and it didn’t matter how much proof I had.

Every day for two years I had to fight accusations that my concussions were a lazy millennial’s pathetic excuse for mediocrity. Is that different from a lawyer trying to brand me as a spoiled college drunk using concussions for free money?

It took years and a lot of therapy for me to realize that my worth is not determined by the length of a CV or the amount of money won in a lawsuit. My worth is inherent with my human dignity. My worth also shows in my resilience. I didn’t drop out of high school. I graduated on time. I went to college and now I’m doing a PhD in Applied Math.

There are days when I have to leave my office early because of a migraine. On those days when light physically hurts and it feels like someone is tightening a metal clamp around my skull, I resent my brain for being temporarily unable to work. But it’s on those days that when my phone rings and I see it’s my mom that I feel a rush of relief because I know that I’m loved no matter what my brain can do. Thank you.

Part 2: C. Brandon Ogbunu

Rule number one. When you see the lights at your back or in your eyes and they're unmistakable, stop moving. Raise your hands slowly from their side, five fingers extended so that they know that there's nothing in your hands. Stop, wait for instructions. You see, you have to think about the police report. You don’t want it to say that ‘he lunged’ or ‘he reached for something that looked like a weapon’ or, the mysterious, ‘he made a menacing gesture’.

“No, officer. I’m not carrying any weapons.” That’s rule number two. Use ‘officer’ early and often. Why? You have to let them know that you know the power dynamic. After all, they got the badge and the gun. You, you were just born with the wrong set of physical traits.

Officer Number One stood with the gun loaded, pointed towards me, ready to go, ready to be a hero. Officer Number Two approached, “Are you carrying any drugs, sir?”

Sir? I guess I would respect that. “No, officer.”

After a thorough search, and I mean thorough, the interest turns to the contents of my backpack, a black JanSport that had some bad graffiti on the small pocket.

C. Brandon Ogbunu shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Evolution 2019 event co-organized by the Diversity Committees of the ASN, SSB, and SSE in Providence, RI in June 2019. Photo by Davide DelPoio.

I was a senior at Howard University, a Chemistry and Mathematics major at the time. And like most people at that stage, my backpack told a lot about me. There were some moldy potato chips, some sketchpads and some notepads, a copy of sorts magazines, a couple of mix tapes. I mean real mix tapes, not the stuff that you guys talk about. And much, much more.

Officer Number Two had to sift through the contents and I heard all the ruffling. Eventually, Officer Two emerged with an object of interest and slammed it on the hood of the car and under the flashlight it went, Lehninger, Nelson and Cox, Principles of Biochemistry, Second Edition.

Officer Two was persistent, however, and raised the book and shook it out trying to find the contraband. And Officer Two was successful. Down went several note cards that were placed in the chapter on Michaelis–Menten kinetics.

Officer Number Two was persistent, still, and ruffled through the contents of the bag and emerged with another item, a little bit smaller, slammed it on the hood of the car. A draft of my senior thesis, highly annexated with the title The Liberation of RNA.

Now, in this thesis I argue, in hindsight fairly correctly, that breakthroughs that were new at the time, like RNA interferences, ribosomal RNA, ribozymes and small RNAs had expanded our view of what was possible with regards to RNA. We had historically put RNA in a box, but RNA was bigger than that.

I conducted this research in the laboratory of Susan Gottesman at the National Institutes of Health. To this day one of my truest scientific heroes, both maybe the nicest and the smartest person I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, let alone working. She might have stood five-foot-three but she towered over the field. Her work used bacterial genetics to understand the kind of basic questions of bacterial physiology. And recently, she had discovered several small RNAs in bacteria and in E. coli. And I focus a lot of my work in my lab in that.

I owed a lot to Dr. Gottesman. She saw talent in me before I did. She believed in me and gave me an opportunity. And a lot of the greatness of Dr. Gottesman came out in my failures. I was coming from chemistry where like, yeah, you might have an explosion but there was no contamination, you know.

So I had fairly heavy hands in the laboratory and she would say things like, “You being smart is not going to make a correct bacterial growth curve, Brandon.” Or, even better, “Yeah, I think you l be a good theoretician one day.”

But I owed everything to Dr. Gottesman. I was young and naïve at the time but I understood that I was working for somebody very special and I was honored to be connected to her.

Fifteen or so years later, I’m sitting on a sectional couch in front of 60-inch HDTV 4k, at home. It’s January 2019. I got olive tapenade hummus, cauliflower chips and a local root beer, and I’m tuned in to watch a movie, PBS American Masters: Decoding Watson.

This documentary was about James Watson. Now, James Watson has been an asshole for decades and, presumably, I was tuning in because this is a good series. The American Masters series have been good and you can learn. There's always something interesting to learn about people. But, really, I confess that I was tuning in kind of like most people tune in when they're watching boxing. You can say, “Well, I want to see a match of styles,” but you want to see a knock out. You want to see something kind of dramatic happen, and James Watson delivered.

Doubling down on his 2007 comments where he said, “Though I hope people are equal, people who have to deal with black employees don’t believe this to be true.” He had further things to say about black people and white people, differences he attributed to genetics.

My visible demeanor oscillated between kind of horrified shuddering and kind of uncomfortable laughter, but inside I was hurting.

Interestingly enough, however, those comments were not the most notable part of that documentary film. What I noticed was several notable female, women scientists were in the film and had passed through his lab at various points, and we’re talking famous people. I was like, “Wow, this is very interesting,” given Watson’s similarly problematic past when it comes to gender and other topics, so I said that doesn’t quite fit my narrative. That’s pretty interesting.

And, to his credit, none of the women scientists said that working for him, that the environment was particularly toxic. They kind of had interesting things to say about his personality but I found that to be very, very interesting. So when the question emerged in my head, I wonder how many other famous women scientists worked for James Watson, I took my inquiry to Google.

James Watson academic family tree. Now, there are websites dedicated to be able to attract a genealogy academically the same way that you do with your family and there's this Academic Family Tree.org, I believe. I click on it.

At the top of the page, one of those classical James Watson photos with the insufferable smile and the bad hairline, right? My eyes went down the page. It said ‘Parents’. One of the parents, Salvador Luria. I said, “Oh, I didn’t know Watson worked for Salvador Luria. Interesting.”

My eyes scrolled down the page and it said ‘Children’. And the first name in the Children Section, Susan Gottesman, Research Assistant.

Now, my response was in my mother tongue, a highly technical language. “Get the fuck out of here! Wait. It can’t be true.” But it was true.

There was no section that read ‘Grandchildren’ because if there was, and there was no section because his grandchildren likely number in the thousands at this point. But if there was, one of them would have been an evolutionary systems biologist at Brown University who likes long walks in the park and open world video games, and whose mother experienced the the Jim Crown South and whose great-grandmother was born a slave.

But what are academic connections anyway, really? Like I don't know him. I hope I never know him. The connection is kind of nebulous and tenuous in these types of ways that kind of don’t matter, right? But the connection between me and James Watson is about more than the profession. And the connection between all of us and James Watson is about more than science.

James Watson was officers Number One and Number Two. James Watson is why you feel unwelcome in your job. James Watson makes you feel like an impostor. And, more broadly, James Watson tells people they're illegal. James Watson separates families. James Watson puts children in cages. James Watson, my academic grandfather.

The contents of my backpack was spread all over the hood of the police car at this point. Officer Number One and Number Two looked at each other what look like, “What the hell do we do now?”

Eventually, Officer Number One said, “You can get your things and go.”

Now, this was supposed to be humiliating. Here I am minding my business and I have to stop and put all my things back into the bag. But sometimes resistance is best dealt quietly, and so I figured out a way to make this work for me. I took my sweet-ass time putting my materials back into that bag, one by one. And with it I was saying two things. a) Them hands y’all got with no guns could help me put these things back in this bag. And b) The things I’m putting in this bag, the ideas they contain - some are mine, some from others - are valuable. I have people in the world who love me. I have dreams of one day being a great professor. And I had to be at work in the morning in the Gottesman lab.

As I was completing the process of putting the things in my bag, I looked at the last item, that thesis, The Liberation of RNA, and I put it in the bag and zipped it. I didn’t miss the opportunity for one last slam dunk.

I turned my head to the officers, said, “Have a good night.”

I slung the JanSport around my shoulders, I eased into a deep, New York strut on the road to a career in science, a very rugged fitness landscape full of peaks and valleys, successes and failures, friends and enemies, Susan Gottesmans and James Watsons.