US Vice President Kamala Harris has said that her first job was to clean pipettes in her mother’s laboratory, as she visited the National Health Institute headquarters for the second dose of her COVID-19 jab.

Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris from Chennai, was a breast cancer researcher who died of cancer in 2009. Her father Donald Harris is a Jamaican American professor of economics.

“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 are 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,” Harris said on Tuesday during her visit to the National Health Institute (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

Recalling her visit to her mother’s laboratory, the US Vice President said: “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”.

“And I grew up around science in a way that was taught to me by someone who was so profoundly passionate about a gift which is the gift that scientists give to us in that their whole reason for being is to see why can be unburden by what has been,” the 56-year-old first woman vice president said.

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