Kill The Cancer, Not Yourself
Hacking Immune Cells to Fight Cancer
Is our body equipped with the cure for cancer? Elizabeth Wayne’s TED talk claims you can hack your immune cells to fight cancer and other diseases. In her speech she talks about how we can bind medicine to our own immune cells to target cancer more specifically, faster, better and more effectively. This is because normally most other treatments don’t work as well, they either don’t target the affected area effectively, don’t get to the tumor or cost way too much and don’t work as effectively as this treatment could.
She establishes ethos well throughout this speech, as she says she’s a biomedical engineer, she works in the field trying to create a more effective treatment. In her speech she talks a lot about logos, about how a lot of money is lost when the treatment is trying to reach the tumor and can’t, a lot of medicine that could be going to the tumor is lost when the treatment targets other parts of the body, instead of targeting that specific area effectively. She also talks about the most common form of treatment today which is chemotherapy, but she brings up the issue that this treatment doesn’t only kill the cancer cells it also kills the healthy cells around the tumor. Finally, she also establishes pathos really well without really needing to state anything, because a lot of people know someone who has died because of cancer, or has some link to cancer.
She makes several assumptions about the audience. First, that the audience cares about cancer and treatment for it. Second, that they have basic knowledge of cancer, and third that they care about the science behind her cancer treatment. She uses visuals like animations to let the audience see how the treatment would work, and she uses a lot of hand gestures to really connect with the audience, and illustrate her points further. Throughout her speech, she talks very well and she really reaches the audience, especially because she talks about cancer a disease that is very hard to treat and is a devastating diagnosis, she shows that it is possible to make treatment more effective. This treatment would be more cost-efficient and a better treatment overall. I chose this video because I am interested in new treatments for diseases that are hard to treat, and this topic was presented in an interesting way.
