2021.8 by Elleen Xue
When the crystal ball isn’t so clear . . .
. . . one looks to the murkiness in the sphere.
Having one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western one, in real time, afforded me a unique view of the pandemic. I know, I know, you have read a trillion articles on the pandemic (and here I take the liberty of using hyperbole by exaggerating by orders of magnitude the numbers of cases of the crown prince pestilence) but alas I digress…
Just how was it that data scientists in the northeast could predict hospitalizations and deaths down to a US ZIP code almost perfectly ahead of time? Well, having interned for a governmental body, I can only divulge that people were paying attention not just to science in general but to a specific type of science…one that most would consider a literal waste. And it is for this reason that I originally planned to major in Pre-Med at UChicago, but now, plan to explore Pee-Med instead.
What is pee-med? Pee-med is the art and data science of modeling infectious disease outbreaks using genetic sequencing of wastewater. Yes. Yes indeed, it does seem that the crown prince (aka coronavirus), whose due I do bestow, by referencing its crown, can be measured in the local sewage treatment plants. And by thereby measuring, a city or state can project the future of an outbreak given the various metrics and parameters of a virus or other scourge.
How do I know this?
Well, an aspiring high school student can only get some internships on less than plum and certainly not plush assignments, and in my case, the Greater Municipality Transit District, an agency, and internship, to which my peers only said. . . “Oh shit. . .”
Since serving such a local board seemed so boring, the only way to spice it up, it was explained to me, was for President Biden to nominate Pete Buttigieg, to be Secretary of Transportation nationally, and no, I won’t repeat the jokes I heard about “Mayor Butt” supervising the excretions thereof. But (with one T and some pee, no pun intended, or maybe a couple about his buns) it turns out, that coronavirus could be measured in the excrete of human waste: and thus, in the future, I would like to major in Pee-Med as an adjunct to my studies in Pre-Med.
Please let me explain.
Part of this motivation STEMS from my cousin Flo, who, when she was studying forensic science, earning her Masters, decided, paradoxically in my mind, not to enter the hot criminal justice field. I imagine that, like most people, you my reader associate forensic science with blood spatter, semen analysis, and other gruesome crime scenes, such that the forensic scientist is instrumental in solving the crime: who done it, where done it, and maybe why done it. Yet Flo, wouldn’t you know, told me she had no interest in using her scientific knowledge to figure out the identify of a murderer after the fact. Who does that help, she rhetorically asked? But, by studying among other things, what comes out of buts, one can predict before the fact, what is likely to come, and thereby prepare accordingly. Forensic science then, can be utilized not only to solve mysteries after they occur, but offer solutions to what otherwise would be mysteries before they present themself.
Thus, by measuring urine and fecal matter in the waste-water scattered, New Haven, Connecticut, in a collaboration with Yale University, was the first locality in the world to be able to, in real time, measure the prevalence of the coronavirus prevalence on the dime! By doing so, certain campuses, buildings, rest homes, and offices could recommend shut downs, or other preventative measures to slow the spread of the dread and lower the counting of yet more dead.
As I stand then peering through the threshold of a new millennium, I would like to cultivate a collaboration with universities and data centers, as well as sewage treatment plants, and with the help from my dad, who is a biomedical professor and engineer at Tsinghua University, monitor waste for presently known and emerging pathogens. By capturing a spike in a strange and new protein and then sequencing it, we may be able to avert the next pandemic.
Just as Mendel studied peas, and ushered in a ear of Pea-Medicine, I would like to continue to cultivate an era of Pee-Medicine, which could even then be used in the detection of Flea-Medicine (such as Lyme disease in my home state of Connecticut, or worse)
by sequencing the genes flushed down the sewer. . .
. . . when most of us have our jeans crumpled down the poo-er.
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