When Nigerian PhD student Folashade Olabinri describes her journey as a scientist, she exudes a confidence, a simple but palpable comfort with herself.
She had no scientific role models growing up, but she did have an insightful mother.
“I will always want to know, but most of all, I am very interested in what happens to the food we eat,” Olabinri said. “I remembered asking my mother then, what happens when we eat? Is there a mill in our stomach that grinds the seeds.’
Folashade Olabinri’s PhD at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology
in Nigeria are focusing on the effect of agba, a herbal home remedy, on internal
mitochondrial permeability transition pore as a possible drug delivery channel.
At this, her mother laughed and replied, “Looks like you want to be a scientist.”
Olabinri told her mother, “I don’t even know what it means to be a scientist. … I’m just wondering what’s going on? Why do people get sick? What happens to the food we eat?”
Her mother advised her to pursue a science track, one of the three typical tracks for high school students in Nigeria.
Her questions were not encouraged at school. “Seeing my curiosity, I would think someone would train me as a scientist,” she said. However, “I have found that teachers want students to cram and repeat what they have been taught – I can see that I don’t like to cram things. I just like to use my hands to make things and (then) explain what I understand.”
Her grades weren’t perfect, but that didn’t dampen her passion.
“We didn’t have a lot of science classes, but when we did, my eyes lit up, whether it was biology or physics,” she said. “Like, wow — so this is it … science.”
These moments prompted her to decide to study biochemistry at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, a large institution in Oyo State. Chemistry was a challenge. “I saw the (chemical) structures and thought, wow,” she said. “Others complained about it, but I worked on understanding.”
She managed to understand, so she got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in biochemistry. She is now a lecturer and doing her PhD at the same university because, as she said, “I want to be able to ask more questions and learn more to teach my students better. To see how far I can take the research I’m doing.”
The search for scientific discoveries that can help people is the basis of all her research efforts. Her undergraduate project focused on assessing the toxicity levels of several types of Nigeria’s staple food, garri, which is made by grinding cassava and roasting it in a pan for several hours. Proper processing is critical to prevent cyanide poisoning found in raw cassava.
For her master’s project, Olabinri studied how an extract of Kigelia Africana, a plant also known as sausage because of the shape of its poisonous fruit, works against cardiotoxicity caused by the antitumor drug doxorubicin.
Her PhD study focuses on the effect of a mixture of polyherbs on the intrinsic mitochondrial permeability transition pore as a possible channel for drug delivery, particularly in cancer, in Wistar rats. This mixture, known as agbo, is a traditional home remedy in Nigeria made by boiling or infusing the leaves, roots and bark of various trees, depending on the purpose; it is often unregulated and understudied and is associated with severe renal dysfunction.
