Cell Death & Certainty

Abstract

I’m Diya Mukherjee, a high school senior based in San Jose, CA with an interest in computational biology and public health. The summer of 2023 marked a turning point for me that is familiar to any science student: my first wet lab experience. I was given the incredible opportunity to participate in the Summer Science Research Program (SSRP) at Rockefeller University in New York, NY, working with research mentors from the Fuchs Lab of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development on a project about the role of inflammation in skin cancer. Cell Death & Certainty depicts an incident from my third week of the program, in which many of my cell samples began to mysteriously die overnight. I deliberately wrote the story with a melodramatic tone, because I think that science so often feels that way.