US Vice-President Kamala Harris, who visited the National Health
Institute (NIH) headquarters on Tuesday to receive second dose of her COVID-19
vaccine, talked about her first job, which was to clean pipettes in her
mother’s laboratory. Her mother was a breast cancer researcher.

During her visit to NIH, she said, “Growing up, our mother would
go… we would always know that mommy was going to this place called Bethesda.
Mommy’s going to Bethesda, now we’re living in California… My mother would go
to Bethesda and of course what she was doing was coming here to NIH. She was in
the biochemical endocrinology section.”

Her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris belonged to Chennai and died of
cancer in 2009, while her father Donald Harris is a Jamaican American professor
of Economics, reported PTI.

The 56-year-old vice-president also recollected her visit to
her mother’s laboratory, and mentioned, “She was a peer reviewer. My mother had
two goals in her life: to raise her two daughters and end breast cancer. In
fact, a little known fact is that my first job was cleaning pipettes in my
mother’s lab. She would take us there with her after school and on
weekends.”

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“It is such a noble pursuit. And the importance of NIH is
that this is about an essential function of government, which is to provide for
the public health. The work that happens here has one goal: to improve public
health and it’s not about profit. It’s about the people,” she said.

The NIH is the top scientific research institute of the
United States, situated in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Harris, America’s first Black and South Asian vice-president who took
over the office from Mike Pence on January 20, received her first
dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on December 29, 2020.

The US is worst-affected nation from the
coronavirus pandemic. Over 420,000 people have lost their lives due to COVID-19
and there are more than 25,293,000 confirmed cases in the country.