Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, in 2007, during a Chinese New Year Parade. — Kamala Harris campaign/AP
ON her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, California, and caught sight of someone beheading a mouse.
The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.
