At age nine, Anicca Harriot plans to study both the heart and space, but as she gets older, that plan becomes more challenging than she expected.
Anicca Harriot is currently working on her PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focuses on mechanotransduction – the science of how mechanical stresses and physical forces, like gravity, affect cell signaling and function. Anicca plans to use her degree to explore the effects of long duration space missions on the human body and hopes to someday venture out into the final frontier for herself. Anicca is also the Social Media Coordinator & LGBTQ+ Engagement Specialist for #VanguardSTEM: Conversations for Women of Color in STEM, a non-profit dedicated to lifting the voices of women and non-binary people of color in STEM. In her free time Anicca volunteers with #Popscope, “popping up” with a telescope around Baltimore to promote public astronomy and encourage curiosity.
This story originally aired on April 19, 2019 in an episode titled “Older and Wiser.”
Story Transcript
It’s Saturday morning and I’m seating at the back seat of my parents’ car reading. I’m nine years old and I’m not allowed to leave home without a book. This time, I've chosen a book about a neurosurgeon. As I’m reading, an idea comes over me.
So I close my book and I get my parents’ attention. My dad adjusts the rearview mirror so that he can look right into my eyes, which is one of his favorite moves during car conversations. Seems like all of my most important conversations with my parents take place in the car and I like to think that they choose these moments to impart their wisdom because I’m trapped. We’re in a moving vehicle, there's nowhere I can go.
I remember, I’m looking up at my dad through my purple-wire frame glasses and I tell my parents that I've decided, when I grow up, I’m going to become an astronaut and a pediatric cardiovascular surgeon. In those exact words.
By the age of nine, I've already had plenty of career changes from journalist to writer, news anchor and chemist, but these all came with the full support of my parents. In fact, I fell asleep every night looking up at the laminated definition of ‘passion’ they had taped to the ceiling so that it was the last thing that I saw every night before I went to sleep and the first thing I saw every morning.
They had even already purchased me my very first microscope. And my dad would bring me samples, sometimes human, to look at under the lens. So when I tell them about my new career choice, my parents are pretty unsurprised. And my dad, looking at me through the rearview mirror, says, “I think you can do that. Maybe you can grow up to study the heart in space.”
And I look back at my dad and I think to myself, “That sounds fake.” Even though in that moment I didn’t really believe my dad’s insight that I could combine my passion for medicine with my love for space travel, it still sparked something in me and, from that age, I immersed myself in biology wherever I could. I would go science fairs, magnet school programs, anything that I could get my hands on. I would even fill out the forms myself and bring them to my parents completed for signature check. I knew from that conversation that, whatever I did, I was going to grow up to be a cardiologist.
So I dove into science and I was absolutely thriving. Even though becoming a cardiologist wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be when I was nine years old, I loved every second of it. The only thing I love more than doing the science was talking about it, whether it was the experiments I was doing, the books that I was reading, the robots that I could build, no one could keep me quiet about it.
I was around 15 years old when I started to notice something about the people around me. They didn’t really look like me. In my magnet program for STEM in high school, I could count on one hand the number of black students there were in all four years. My classmates joked that I was like an Oreo, black on the outside but so smart, outgoing, put-together I had to be white on the inside.
Adults told me that I was very well-spoken and, for a black girl, didn’t have to be said to be understood. I didn’t feel any different from the people around me but they kept telling me that I was. That was the first time that I realized that there were people who didn’t think that I'd grew up to study the heart in space not because they didn’t think it was real, like I had, simply because of who I am.
Telling people that I wanted to grow up to study the heart in space started to feel a lot like when a three-year-old tells you they're going to grow up to become president. It’s real cute but pretty silly, so I stopped talking about it.
My priority shifted and, at 15, like many other 15-year-olds, I was more concerned with fitting in and being normal than I was with my science. My parents noticed, especially when my grades started to fall. I'll never forget the car conversation we had after they picked up my report card and I failed Computer Science and just barely passed my other STEM classes because, that day, they did something they had never done before. They pulled the car over. Yeah.
The conversation we had that day was, hands down, one of the hardest of my adolescence. I don't talk to my parents about it to this day because the shame still weighs heavy on my chest. But that day, halfway between home and my small town magnet school, sitting in a literal cornfield was the day that things started to change for me.
I realized that I had to be able to get up every morning and look at the person in the mirror and know that she was worth it. And I had to go to bed every night proud of the things that I had done that day. I had to be able to invest selfishly if I wanted to get to where I wanted to go because, if I didn’t invest in myself, no one else was going to. I had to become the scientist and the person that I wanted to be.
Unfortunately, my high school failures derailed my dream of going to a prestigious college and so I watched many of my peers go off to Ivy Leagues while I went to a brand new science program at a small, practically-unheard-of university in Southern Virginia, but I was determined not to let my failures define my future.
So I’m 20 years old sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s new SUV. She's driving me home from my first day as an intern at NASA Langley. On our car ride home, I tell her about the livestream that I had watched the night before where astronaut and biochemist Kate Rubins was launched to the International Space Station and one of the experiments she’d be conducting while there was monitoring heart stem cells in space.
I tell my mom about this mathematician I learned used to work right there at NASA Langley. Her name was Katherine Johnson. She and plenty other black women were the ones who paved the way to get the first Americans to space.
And I tell my mom that I've spent a lot of time hiding my dream of becoming an astronaut studying the heart in space but I was done because there were too many people who had paved the way for me to get to where I wanted to get. I owed it to them, I owed it to my parents, I owed it to myself.
The next summer, I started my PhD in biochemistry with a new resolve. I went lab to lab searching for an adviser and I would tell them that I wanted to study muscles in space. They looked at me and they said, “That sounds fake.”
They wanted to know how I planned from getting from research conducted on campus to research conducted at least 250 miles above earth, and I didn’t know because I was the student.
Things pretty much continued on that way until, one day, I sat in on a presentation by Dr. Chris Ward and he studies, in his words, “how forces affect muscle function”. As I sat listening to him describe his research, I used a little bit of scientific insight that I had as a first year student to connect the dots between what he found in muscle and bone and what I knew happened to astronauts’ muscle and bone in space. I thought that his research sounded a lot like what I wanted to do but in space.
So a few weeks later, I went to Dr. Ward’s office and I said to him, “I want to study muscles in space.”
And he looked at me and I got a response a lot like what I'd heard 13 years prior. He said, “I think you can do that.” Now, I do.