"My name is Frank Yang.
I've been working at the laboratory for skeletal regeneration for three years, and I have a
BA in physiology.
My specific area of research would be bone regeneration specifically the role of muscle
stem cells during fracture repair.
As we know, when we break our bones, have an sort of trauma, we want to try to fix that
as soon as possible and without any complications, and what that entails really is just a number
of processes in your body coordinating and having that sort of concerted effort towards
this ultimate goal of restoring function, having regeneration.
From those different factors, I'm studying the role of surrounding musculature specifically
satellite cells which are the stems cells that give rise to new muscle fiber and could
also potentially have other roles.
I'm really just looking at essentially one pathway that's feeding into this whole effort
of regenerating bone as well as regenerating soft tissue so that you can once again be
functional.
I was actually very scientific as a child.
I got really lucky, and I was really privileged in that both my parents were doctors back
in China, and I immigrated here when I was four.
From there, the seed of science implanted in me.
My elementary school was literally six or seven blocks away from the UCSF hub NASA's
campus, and because my parents worked there, I was able to actually sneak into their lab
setting, kind of actually be where I am today, but just as a little tyke running around as
however old I was, like eight or nine.
That was just something that was very novel, very interesting to me took off from there.
I like to think UCSF is the number one hospital in the world.
It's a great place to work.
It's sort of an understatement to say that.
A lot of bright minds come through UCSF and just with the resources that the school has,
it opens a lot of doors especially in science.
No matter what you want to dabble in, there's many branches you can take, and working at
UCSF helps to facilitate where you want to be in my opinion.
As adults, we can heal only up to a certain extent.
Where we're not like all these other newts or animals where if they have say a tail grabbed
by a predator, they can just shed it off and then it grows back again.
As human adults, we're really limited in what we can regenerate, but bone and soft tissue
are sort of the two that are very capable, very able to regenerate almost back to the
original state.
It's kind of like if we were to break a bone, we would put it in a cast.
We would wait and hopefully everything will be back normal again functioning 100%, and
in 99% of cases this is true, and this is very unique, but in those 1% or even higher
chance that something does go wrong, can we find some factor, find what's in that magic
black box that will return us to 100% again in those cases?
As a scientist it's a lot of data collection, and what that really entails is doing experiments,
doing diagnostics, running tests.
If we think that chemical A causes this response, we're going to look at chemical A in the context
of all these different tests that we can build evidence for it.
So my day pretty much comes down to running all these tests, interpreting all my numbers,
and sort of like planting trees so I can see the forest of what I'm going for.
The mark that I would want to leave would just be any mark.
The way that research works is almost like my contributions are drops in a bucket.
It's not in a bad way because a lot of times when people say it's only a drop in the bucket,
it's very insignificant, but as one person researching one project and one aspect of
such a complicated biological process, you really have to think that it's got to be collaboration.
It's got to be a huge world-wide collaborative effort, and you're contributing just a little
bit which might allow someone else to push a little more, and then someone else push
a little more, a little more, and a little more, and eventually you're little, seemingly,
drop in the bucket could pave the way for some revolutionary procedure something that
will change the way people think about this world."