Asha de Vos (TED.com) Hasini Jayatilaka (Twitter)
Two Sri Lankan women, Asha de Vos, a marine biologist and Hasini Jayatilaka, a cancer researcher, have become global stars in 2018 for ground-breaking research in their respective fields.
Asha de Vos loved the oceans since she was a child and when she was about 10 she was fascinated while flipping through National Geographic magazines sparking an interest in her, to be an adventurer scientist someday, according to a speech she had given before a Sri Lankan audience.
Her parents wanted to give her the best education as they knew she, as a woman, would have lot of hardships stacked against her in a male-dominated Third World society. “We are not worried about your brother as he can find his way even if he works as a garbage truck driver!,” they said. She realized the meaning of what her parents told her as she was trying to achieve her dream in life.
Asha had her primary education at Colombo Ladies’ College and moved to Scotland for her undergraduate studies in marine and environmental biology at the University of St. Andrews. Later, she studied for her masters in integrative bio-sciences at the Oxford and obtained a PhD from the University of Western Australia becoming the first and only Sri Lankan woman to obtain a doctorate in marine mammal research.
After graduating in Scotland, she worked in a farm digging rotten potatoes to save money to go to New Zealand where she lived in a tent for six months working on conservation projects waiting for her break.
She wrote to a team of whale researchers bound for Sri Lanka on a vessel but the reply was a heartbreaking ‘sorry’. She continued to write to them every day for three months and finally, on her spirited insistence, she was taken as a deckhand on the ship where she had to clean toilets, polish brass and cook for the crew.
She says the offer of work on the research vessel took a long time as a Sri Lankan man was hampering her efforts for his own advantage, making true her parents prophesy about the patriarchal society.
After hard work on the deck she became the team’s science intern marking the beginning of her whirlwind career which led her to world recognition for her contribution and passion to save the whales, becoming one of the most influential women in the world in 2018.
The BBC has recognized Asha as one of the most influential 100 people in the world from a group of men and women between 15 and 94 years from 60 countries. While honouring her, special attention has been paid on her study of Sri Lankan blue whales which has taken about 10 years of her career.
She prefers to call the mammals living around the island Sri Lankan Whales because the surrounding maritime area has become their habitat throughout the year.
Asha had served as a Senior Programme Officer in the Marine and Coastal Unit of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and founded the Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project in 2008 which forms the first long term study on blue whales within the Northern Indian Ocean. ‘It’s clearly an area that they rely on for their feeding, breeding, and calving needs and being an ecological cul de sac, they have nowhere else to go’.
Through her research, the International Whaling Commission has designated Sri Lankan Blue Whales as a species in urgent need of conservation, focussing on increasing incidence of whale deaths by ships off the island’s coast.
In a speech she had said in the 1600s there were so many whales in the Cope Cod Bay of the US and one could virtually walk on their backs to one end of the bay to the other. “Today they are numbering in their hundreds and listed as highly endangered. We find whales still surviving in our oceans today, albeit in smaller numbers, mainly because of the Save the Whale movement that began in the 70s”.
She describes whales as ‘eco-system engineers’ helping to maintain the stability and health of the oceans, describing whale poop as an important element as it releases enormous amounts of nutrients to stimulates the growth of planktons, the base of all marine food chains.
Even whales’ carcasses ‘do a great service to us while descending into the ocean providing food for a large number of species that inhabit the depths of the oceans’. Two hundred years’ of whaling has dwindled the whale population driving many deep sea species into extinction as they were unable to survive against the lack of natural food sources.
Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbons a year which is equivalent to carbon produced by 80,000 cars, to the atmosphere in the deep oceans. Carbons trapped in the deep sea helps to delay the global warning, protecting the environment. Sometimes these carcasses wash up on the shores providing food for a number of predatory species on land. Mass scale whaling has resulted in reducing its population from 60 to 90 per cent. Asha has also campaigned to relocate busy shipping lanes away from the Sri Lankan coastal areas where the whales live, to avoid them being victims of ship hits.
Blue whales though weighing around 108 tons survive by consuming schools of tiny shrimp like creatures about 1.2 cm in size.
When she went abroad to study her friends and relatives thought that she would never come back but she proved every one wrong by returning to serve Sri Lanka which has given her so much. But there have been problems from some quarters. When she sought the approval from a minister for one of her projects, it had taken 12 years for an appointment to meet him. These are obviously the problems that women professionals have to face in a male dominated society, and with Asha making waves on the global stage she has the capacity and the power to change such parochial attitudes.
Hasini Effect
Hasini Jayatilaka is a young scientist who finished her PhD in 2017 and achieved remarkable success within a comparably shorter time by discovering a mechanism that breaks cancer cells spreading the disease to other parts of the body.
Her revolutionary discovery earned her a unique place in the world when she was honoured by Forbes as one of the best 30 young scientists under 30.
Hasini was born in Australia to an engineer, Sarath Jayatilaka and a lawyer mother, Shiranthi, and like Asha de Vos had her education in Sri Lanka. Hasini studied at St. Bridget’s Convent and Stanford International School in Colombo. She entered John Hopkins University and completed her BSc and PhD in Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering in 2017. Her research paper, published in Nature Communications in May 2017, has been described one of the top-read articles in the journal’s history.
Addressing a TED gathering, Hashini said the people had been fighting cancer for centuries and though there have been some advancement in the battle against this dreaded disease ‘we have not been able to defeat it completely’.
Two out of five Americans tend to develop cancer during their life time and about 90 per cent succumb to the disease through metastasis which means the development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer.
A woman who does not die just because she has a mass on a breast but can succumb to the disease as it spreads to the other organs of the body becoming untreatable. In her research over the years she had discovered that cancer cells communicate with each other and coordinate their movements based on the fact how closely packed they are in tumour micron environment.
Explaining how she stumbles on this discovery she says that all began in 2010 while as a sophomore in college. She had just started working in Dr. Danny Wirtz’s lab at John Hopkins University. “I was a young naïve Sri Lankan girl with no previous experience and I was asked to look at how cancer cells move in a 3D collagen 1 matrix that recapsulated in a dish in the conditions that cancer cells are exposed to in our bodies.”
It was at this time that she attended a seminar by a Princeton doctor who talked about how bacteria cells communicate with each other. “It was at this moment that a light bulb went off in my head (wow) I see this in my cancer cells every day and the idea for my project was thus born,”
She couldn’t do it alone. She recruited undergraduates, graduates, post-doctoral fellows and professors from different institutions and multiple disciplines to ‘work on the idea she conceived as a sophomore in college when she was just 20 years old,’ she said adding that she found someone ‘who gave her lot of freedom and was ready to run with her crazy ideas’.
After merging different ideas and perspectives her team discovered new signalling pathway that cancer cells used to communicate with each other and move on their cell density, earning the name Hasini Effect for her project. Looking back at how her team discovered a drug cocktail to fight cancer, she thanks her incredible team and her sidekicks who supported her through her odyssey to bring hope for patients afflicted with cancer adding that ‘collaboration is the human super power I turned to fight cancer.’
The first Sri Lankan woman to make it to BBC’s best hundred 100 women of the year was Jayanthi Kuruuthumpala in 2017. She was the first woman from the South Asian nation to conquer Mount Everest. – newstrails.com
