Video - Blossom Ball 2010 - Linda G. Griffith
Padma
Linda Griffith from MIT. The Endometriosis Foundation of America is pleased to present Dr. Griffith for her lifetime commitment to the science and treatment of endometriosis. Thank you very much.
[Griffith]
Thank you so much, Padma. I only have a little bit to say. I cannot resist this final ____ at MIT and do not drink that next sip of wine. There is a little quiz. Who was here last year? Okay, supporting this foundation? Pat yourself on the back because now there is a center at MIT that has about $20 million of funding. Begged, borrowed, and stolen from other NIH programs, we called program directors and said hey, we have this project. The focus is on chronic inflammation. Endometriosis is chronic inflammation, right? and I called then about ten of my close colleagues at MIT, people who have huge labs, they study cancer, they study stem cells, and said let us get together and focus on this incredibly difficult problem and I am very, very thrilled and honored to hear Padma laud me the way she did but I think it is actually way more simple. I am not so much of a genius who is good at basic math. About 25% of young women suffer from very serious problems with their menstrual cycles. Hello, this is an impairment to having them succeed in science and engineering. So, I live in an environment at MIT where there is a lot of emphasis on what can we do to get more women involved in science and engineering and it is like, hello, get rid of their menstrual problems, cure their endometriosis, and make them focus on their math problems. So, I am incredibly grateful to all of you who supported this foundation because truly reading the article in Newsweek, ya, I am busy. I have a huge lab. I have lots of things I do at NIH and everywhere else and I was always too busy to do anything substantial for endometriosis. I read this article and I then immediately e-mailed my lab and said, okay, so I do not watch TV. I said who is Padma Lakshmi and people wrote me back instantly. I said we have her up here to help launch this center and there is like oh my god! You are going to have Padma Lakshmi come to MIT. There was this amazing response from students and I was actually kind of nervous. I have never had a celebrity and Padma came and she was incredibly down to earth. All my nervousness melted away because she gave a talk that just hit it out of the park. I got incredible response from alumni, from students, from everyone, who had seen both her beautiful eloquent way of describing struggles with this disease but also time and again living in an environment of a lot of men, very well meaning, they never heard of this, even with me laying crawled in a fetal position and _____ meaning. So, he had no idea of what it was and some now we have had an incredible uproar from alumni at MIT who have been giving money to our center. You know, not enough yet. Ya, but we are very, very grateful for the support of everyone in the room especially again as others mentioned of men who do take the time to realize this is not in our heads. We would really rather be doing statistical thorough dynamics than laying prone in a fetal position on the floor and we hope that within next year, we will have a lot of advances in this disease thanks to the research that you guys have stimulated by coming out and especially to Padma and Dr. Seckin for going public with their story to make the rest of us say, hey I cannot possibly be busier than these people are. I need to get up off my butt and actually do something and together with Keith Isaacson who is my actually endometriosis surgeon, who spent his nights and weekends coming into MIT to help us figure out how we can really take patient samples and do some of these incredible new technologies to figure out why this is a problem that we have not yet been able to solve. So, thanks very much for coming out on a school night and thanks to all of you. It is a really huge, huge honor and pleasure to be here.