MIT: Building with Biology

Ritu Raman leads the Raman Lab, where she creates adaptive biological materials for applications in medicine and machines.

It seems that Ritu Raman was born with an aptitude for engineering. You may say it is in her blood since her mother is a chemical engineer, her father is a mechanical engineer, and her grandfather is a civil engineer. Throughout her childhood, she repeatedly witnessed firsthand the beneficial impact that engineering careers could have on communities. 

In fact, watching her parents build communication towers to connect the rural villages of Kenya to the global infrastructure is one of her earliest memories. She still vividly remembers the excitement she felt watching the emergence of a physical manifestation of innovation that would have a long-lasting positive impact on the community.

Raman is “a mechanical engineer through and through,” as she puts it. She earned her BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering. Her postdoctoral work at MIT was supported by a L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine.

Today, Ritu Raman leads the Raman Lab and is an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. However, she is not constrained by traditional ideas of what mechanical engineers should be building or the materials typically associated with the field.

 “As a mechanical engineer, I’ve pushed back against the idea that people in my field only build cars and rockets from metals, polymers, and ceramics. I’m interested in building with biology, with living cells,” she says.  READ MORE...

Kenya: Ending FGM

IMAGE SOURCEGETTY IMAGES

John can barely remember a time when having sex with his wife did not end with her in tears.  It was just too painful because she had undergone female genital mutilation (FGM).  "Anytime I go to Martha, she recoils, curling like a child. She cries, begging me to leave her alone. She doesn't want to have sex any more," the 40-year-old says. John and Martha come from Kenya's Marakwet community in western Kenya.

Although FGM is illegal in Kenya, girls in their community often undergo FGM between the ages of 12 and 17, as a rite of passage in preparation for marriage.  Martha was cut when she was 15.

Sex as an endurance test
"It is painful when we have sex. I wish this practice would end," she says, adding that it had also made childbirth very difficult for her.  Recounting their first sexual experience, the couple describe it as traumatising.  Martha says she felt a lot of pain and it is not how she had imagined sex would be. She had to ask her husband to stop.

"I didn't realise a part of her [vulva] had been stitched, leaving only the urethra and a tiny vaginal opening," John tells the BBC. "I try to be very compassionate with my wife. I don't want her to feel like I don't respect her, yet we are a couple."

They lived in agony with little hope that things would ever change - not just for them, but they feared for their young daughter as well.  That was until John heard of an anti-FGM campaign meeting in his village, targeting men.  READ MORE

Worldwide Protests Reappearing

When the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading across the world, an early victim was the wave of protests that had roiled many countries in recent years. Lockdowns imposed on public health grounds restricted citizens’ freedom of movement and assembly, while fear of contracting the virus discouraged many from publicly gathering. Consequently, major protests in countries like Chile and India have gone silent during the pandemic.

In some countries, illiberal governments have capitalized on the chaos of the pandemic to persecute critics, criminalize dissent, ban public demonstrations, and further concentrate political power. In Hong Kong, the introduction of a controversial new national security law and arrests of prominent dissidents could silence one of the world’s most significant recent protest movements. Meanwhile, in Algeria, authorities have detained several leading figures of the Hirak protest movement in recent weeks...

The protests have also reverberated beyond U.S. borders. At least sixteen countries—ranging from the UK and France to Australia, Brazil, Japan, Kenya, and South Africa—have seen major demonstrations over police violence against Black or minority populations and related issues, such as systemic racism and the legacies of colonial empires. In France and South Africa in particular, the pandemic has served to only crystallize the problem of police brutality: authorities enforcing lockdown regulations have disproportionately used force against Black citizens.           

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