Growing up, Sheena Cruickshank's teenage older brother inspires her love of science, but then one summer he returns from university with a lump on his arm.

Sheena Cruickshank graduated in Biochemistry and Immunology from the University of Strathclyde and did a PhD in Immunology with Cancer Research UK at the University of Leeds. She is now an immunology Professor in the University of Manchester and also is their University Academic Lead for Public Engagement. Her research aims to understand how the immune response distinguishes harm from benefit e.g. parasitic infections versus the friendly bacteria that live in and on our bodies. She has a focus on using her research to help develop tools to improve patient diagnosis and management. Sheena is passionate about communicating her research with the public and her public engagement work is very closely linked to her research. She co-developed resources to help educate about parasite infections and their impact with a set of resources called “the Worm Wagon” and focuses on enabling access to science for non-native English speakers. She also co-developed a UK nationwide citizen science project to understand allergies and the impacts of pollution (@BritainBreathing). She was a AAAS Leshner Fellow and has received awards and commendations for her outreach from organisations such as the Royal Society of Biology, BBSRC and NCCPE and has presented her work in the media including the radio and television.

This story originally aired on February 22, 2019 in an episode titled “Inspiration.”

Story Transcript

One of the funniest things I ever saw was my teenage brother Ian trying to catch a flatfish with his bare hands.  He was standing in a rock pool and he had rolled his trousers all the way up his legs and he was frantically trying to catch something that was basically invisible and moved like a streak of lightning.  He had absolutely no chance.  And within minutes, he was flat on his back, soaked, and I stood at the edge laughing, as you do. 

I was about seven or eight at the time and my brother had taken me to the beach to go rock pooling because he was mad about marine biology.  He was absolutely fascinated by it.  We happened to live about a mile or so from the beach.  So we would walk down to the beach, and I probably moaned and I was probably a pain but he put up with me. 

We would get to the beach and he would explain everything that was in the rock pools with so much detail.  He'd tell me about the creatures that were living there, how they lived, how beautiful they were, everything about them.  And we even had a tank set up at home and that tank enabled us to take some of these things home with us so we could study them even more and he could explain even more about their lifestyles. 

We had blennies, guppies, we had velvet crabs and sea anemones, and my favorite things, this has dropped very slightly, were the hermit crabs.  We had two hermit crabs. 

The reason I like them so much was because they looked exactly like a normal shell but then these little legs and claws would appear and they'd scuttle away, and I just thought that was brilliant. 

One day, we came down to look at the tank and there was only one hermit crab and an empty shell.  Ian explained that what must have happened is that the hermit crab had outgrown its shell and it removed the shell that it was inside and gone to look for another one.  Now, in a rock pool there would be lots and lots of shells around so it could have easily found one.  But of course in our tank there were no shells around and there were hungry fish.  So hermit crab became fish food. 

I was gutted.  I didn’t want this to happen again to our other hermit crab and neither did Ian so we had to do hermit crab rescue mission really rapidly.  We went back to the beach to find some shells that we thought might be just suitable for our hermit crab to move into. 

We set up a second tank and we popped the hermit crab in it with our array of shells and some tasty, tempting morsels of chopped up earthworm.  They liked those.  After a while something came out of the shell and it was so weird.  It was kind of pinky, fleshy colored and if I'd seen Alien, but I hadn’t at the time because I was way too young, I think that would have been my reference point because it kind of curved around like the head of alien in a kind of domed way.  It made its way and investigated the shells until it found the shell that it wanted.  It popped it on and it disappeared.  We had saved the hermit crab and my love of biology was sealed.  I was going to become a biologist just like Ian.  I was so excited. 

We kept that tank up all the way through my primary school and his high school, but when it came for me to go to high school, Ian went off to university to study marine biology.  We come from the very remote part of the Highlands so he couldn’t be anywhere near us for his studies.  He was in the city about six to seven hours away so I didn’t see him so often once he went to university. 

He kept in touch, told me what he was doing, very typical student stuff: gigs, beer, girls, more girls.  He was having a great time. 

And he came up one holiday and he showed us something on his arm.  He had this lump on his arm.  And Ian, being Ian, he gave it a name and talked about it in the third person.  I thought it was really cool.  I wanted a lump like Ian’s.  But of course he had to get it investigated so he got it biopsied. 

It was cancer.  Ian had cancer.  This meant that he was going to have to get the lump removed and he was going to have to have some treatment.  He couldn’t have that where we lived because we didn’t have those hospitals, but he could have it where he was studying at university.  So mom and dad did the journeys to go and be with him and I was shipped around from house to house. 

I stayed in succession of my parents’ friends.  In fact, I stayed at one house so often that the owner actually talked about doing up the spare room for me to make it girly, because she thought I'd like that.  I really didn’t care. 

I was pretty confused.  I didn’t really know what was going on with Ian.  Mom and dad didn’t tell me very much.  Ian’s tumor kept coming back.  He kept doing rounds of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and mom and dad just looked tense and grim all the time.  I was scared and I also felt that I really needed to be just quiet and really good because I couldn’t do anything to upset them anymore.  They were under so much pressure. 

So I was very withdrawn.  I think I kept myself very much to myself so that nobody really noticed me. 

Ian kept up with the girls, amazingly, through all this therapy and his studies.  He was so pleased when he could actually start growing his hair back because you could imagine he was about 19 or 20 at this point.  Although he was still tall and good looking, he was very thin, he was very pale.  He had scars all the way up his arm and all the way down his leg where he did surgery and skin grafts to repair the wounds. 

And he was bald.  I think that was the bit that annoyed him the most because he wanted to have a cool haircut and wear nice clothes.  We really didn’t have many fashion shops back in the Highlands where I came from so this was something pretty aspirational for us. 

So he was delighted when he had a break in his chemotherapy and his hair grew back and he could finally grow it and cut it and style it.  He came after Christmas to show us his new look, and he was so chuffed.  He was really pleased. 

We all sat down at dinner and we’re chatting and I noticed something on the side of his head.  I don't know why but I said, “Ian, what’s that?” 

And Ian reached up and he pulled.  It was his hair.  It was a large chunk of his hair.  And he screamed and he cried and he pulled out more of his hair, and more of his hair.  And I just felt like such a bitch.  I couldn’t believe I had been so insensitive.  I really wish I hadn’t said it.  I know I was only about 13 but that really didn’t feel like an excuse. 

He distracted himself from all this therapy by getting some pet gerbils.  He had one brown gerbil and one white gerbil, an albino.  They're supposed to be males.  They weren’t.  Gerbils breed really, really fast.  But this was an opportunity now for Ian to start teaching me about genetics and it seemed way more exciting to see cute fluffy animals than read about pea plants in a book. 

So the albino gene was clearly recessive and we could see the one-in-four chance of getting albinism through the gerbils.  Interestingly, also the male albinos had a balance problem and they'd sway like this, but the female albinos never had it.  So we could construct an idea that maybe this was both linked to being an albino but it might be on the y chromosome.  Obviously, we’d need a lot more gerbils to test that and we weren’t about to test that. 

Ian kept his studies up and got an ordinary degree in marine biology.  But just after his 21st birthday, he came back to live with us.  I didn’t know that it was because he had just been given a few months to live and I’m not sure he knew that either. 

I was just 14 when Ian died and that whole period that he was sick was one of the hardest things I've ever been through and I was so mad.  I was so confused.  I didn’t know what was happening for that whole time.  I couldn’t understand why his body didn’t reject the tumor, why his immune system didn’t fight back, what was going on?  Why did the chemotherapies not work and why did his hair fall out? 

I was also hearing about AIDS which was another disease where your immune system didn’t seem to be working.  Why was that happening?  I had no reference point to find out about immunology at all in my high school studies so I began to get really curious about this idea studying immunology. 

This took my parents rather by surprise because as I investigate the courses for immunology, it dawned on me that this was such a new subject, or considered so at the time, that there were very limited options to do it.  I was going to have to do a joint honors degree, i.e. double work.  I wasn’t a particularly diligent student, and I wasn’t top at science.  In fact, I was quite musical so I think mom and dad though I might go and do that. 

But I was fairly determined I was going to go and study immunology even if it was going to be double the work.  They were terrified that it was just because I was trying to live out Ian’s ambitions of being a scientist and a researcher.  I brushed this aside.  They were also terrified that it was because he was sick.  They may have had a point there but I wasn’t about to tell them that. 

So I went to university miles away from home again, and I loved it.  I loved it when we did the immunology.  I'll be honest.  I didn’t like the other joint honors part so much, but I loved the immunology and I knew it was the right thing for me.  I liked all the scientists that I was mixing with, hearing about all the different experiences, but I also liked the fact that most of my flatmates were Humanities students. 

Although it kind of pissed me off that they only had three lectures and I had 15, I still really enjoyed hearing about their courses, hearing about what they were doing.  I loved hearing about it.  It reminded me all the things I was interested in.  And I couldn’t work out why they didn’t love hearing about my course.  They didn’t want to know anything about immunology.  They said science is too hard.  It’s not for them.  It’s just for geeks. 

And I thought, well, that’s not right.  Science is so beautiful.  It’s everywhere.  It’s all around us.  It’s part of us.  Then I realized they didn’t have Ian.  I had Ian telling me, spending hours with me telling me all these wonderful stories about science, getting me excited about science.  And I knew that I'd been so lucky having that.  I think that was the point that I realized that I would be really keen to do science communication as well. 

Now, it’s a long time, a very long time since I was a student.  I’m really lucky because I have my own immunology lab and I’m doing research that I love.  And I do science communication too through my public engagement work so I’m really lucky that I've got to live that dream. 

I also go rock pooling again now, but with my children.  And I've been that person flailing around in a rock pool, up to my waist in water, trying desperately to find something cool for them to see.  And you know what?  No matter what I do, I will always find them a hermit crab.  Thank you.