I Saw It, So I Became It is a series recognizing amazing people who were inspired to go into their chosen profession in real life after watching a Shondaland show. I Saw It, So I Became It: Doctor Edition introduces you to the people who entered the world of medicine after watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Hopefully, you won’t ever need Dasia Taylor’s groundbreaking medical invention, but heaven forbid you one day require sutures on a wound, you may have Taylor to thank for ensuring the sore spot stays infection-free. Taylor, who is going into her senior year as a student at the University of Iowa, where she currently lives with her family, created an innovative product when she was in high school: sutures (the threads used to keep a wound or incision closed) that change color when an infection is present. And it all started with watching Grey’s Anatomy.
A cousin introduced Taylor to the series in her freshman year of high school, and they binge-watched the first few seasons during spring break. “I was really inspired by the portrayal of women in the series,” Taylor tells Shondaland. “Just seeing women be so powerful in a male-dominated field, doing whatever they want, for better or for worse, but also following their gut and their passions.”
In her junior year of high school, Taylor got wind of a science fair happening via her chemistry teacher. “I was the only student from my class who raised my hand. I said I’d never done anything like this before, but I’m a huge Grey’s Anatomy fan, and I think that I want to do something in medical science. I told her that, and instead of looking at me like I was crazy, she was like, ‘Well, we’re going to do something in the medical sciences [then],’ and we just took it from there.”
She knew she wanted to do something “hands-on,” as she describes it; she wanted to make something tangible and real. “I knew that surgical site infection rates were really high. I did not know that they were highest in cesarean sections in low- and middle-income countries where they don’t have consistent or strong healthcare infrastructure. So I put all of those things together.” She landed on a suture that could detect infection before becoming deadly. Some scientists, she learned, had created a type of stitch that could connect to a smartphone, but Taylor knew this tech would be cost-prohibitive for the very low- and middle-income patients she wanted to help in the first place. She started spending more time in the chemistry lab.
“The sutures,” she explains, “rely on the basic scientific principles of pH. Our skin is naturally acidic. When we have infections at wound sites, the pH increases. When you think about regular signs of infection, you’ve got reddish skin — maybe it’s sore to the touch — and with severe infection, you have pus and everything like that. We used beets to essentially coat the suture, and they are able to change color when the pH reaches a certain level or higher. With that, you’re able to say, ‘Okay, something is not right at the wound site, and if you are able to detect it earlier, then you’re able to treat it earlier.’ That’s a little of how it works.”
Her initial prototype took about eight months to create. Taylor says that though she knew judges would be blown away, feedback made her aware she’d perhaps underestimated how much of a breakthrough she had made. “I had doctors and health professionals messaging me like, ‘Wow, this is really incredible.’ That’s when I started to really realize that this is much larger than me, and much larger than what I thought initially. When I got to college, I was a political science major. I’ve always loved social science, and I got into it. I ended up switching to global health in the spring semester of my freshman year. It’s the intersection of physical sciences, biology, chemistry, social sciences, psychology, and anthropology to solve the world’s greatest health problems. That fits me very well.”
“Cristina Yang, Meredith Grey, Dr. Bailey… I saw elements of myself in them even at a very young age. They were about leaning into and owning your power. All of that is important to me.”
Not only was Taylor inspired by Grey’s, but she’s been equally — or perhaps even more so — inspired by series creator Shonda Rhimes. “Her TED Talk is my favorite TED Talk on the planet. I listen to it at least three or four times a year.” She read Year of Yes earlier this year and says the book has motivated her to break out of her own comfort zone. “A lot of my college experience and even my [general] human experience has been wrapped up in my business and entrepreneurial life, and I felt as though I was having this personal human development deficit because of it.” In other words, she’d been so hardworking and focused for so long, Taylor had sort of neglected the other essential part of life, especially college life: fun. Socializing. Making friends — perhaps even a few questionable decisions that lead to memories and lessons learned. “Shonda Rhimes put a lot of things in perspective for me on the human side, because I feel like that was also part of her journey — that she was wrapped up in her career and being successful and loving her career so much that she needed to reconnect with family. I never wanted to get to my late 20s or midlife and not have a genuine, authentic human experience. I really resonated with her story.”
At present, Taylor’s invention is in the research and development stage, ensuring that the product is commercially viable and FDA safe. There’s a potentially nice windfall in the future, but more importantly, an affordable product that can save lives and serve as a launchpad for a career full of more ideas to benefit humankind. And a lot of her ideas and ingenuity came from Grey’s Anatomy. “Grey’s was very inspirational for me because I liked seeing women doing what they loved and being experts at it, and I had this love for science. Cristina Yang, Meredith Grey, Dr. Bailey… I saw elements of myself in them even at a very young age. They were about leaning into and owning your power. All of that is important to me.”
