"speaker 1: My name is Matthew Zabel.
We're at the NIH, specifically in the National Eye Institute.
Even more specially at the unit on Neuronal-Glial Interactions in Retinal Disease.
So right now I'm working on a group of inherited retinal degenerations that are called retinitis
pigmentosa.
And basically what happens, there's a mutated gene and this results in blindness, in the
periphery of the retina.
Well I am the first person in my family with a doctorate.
I come from Los Angeles, California.
Actually before all of this I played college baseball at South Dakota State University.
So I'm a transplant from California.
Throughout my college baseball career I decided I wanted to do something different with my
life.
I really liked, really enjoyed science and research, solving problems really talked,
was something I really wanted to do.
A friend of mine was killed in an accident and had a severe brain injury and from that
point on I wanted to basically find cures for right not incurable neurological diseases.
So I started out in Alzheimer's disease and now I'm into vision.
And I do a lot of tissue dissection and preparing that tissue for visualization under a microscope.
Basically stain it with really beautiful dyes and when I look under the laser microscope
I can see everything in bright, beautiful colors.
It's quite magnificent actually.
So right now this in an image, a confocal micrograph of human tissue that's been stained
to view the immune cells of the retina.
And including actual retinal photo receptors which you can see through here and the green
marks the immune cells of the retina which are called microglia.
And right now I'm outlining an orthogonal view where we can see a microglia actually
engulfing photo receptors in this human, piece of human tissue.
At the present there's no cure for any of the diseases that we're studying in this lab
and so the main point is to find out what is going on in these diseases, find out mechanisms
of disease and essentially target certain areas of the disease that will eventually
lead to therapies that we can use in the clinic.
As, if you were to turn your camera all the way to your left you would see a bunch of
other people working on similar problems as I am and we all have something in common which
is to find therapies for people who are ailed by these diseases.
And there's constantly collaborations going on with other institutions.
I'm constantly meeting and networking with new people all the time.
So, yeah.
speaker 2: That's what we want, to see the results, yeah.
And the photo can show us much smaller.
Basically that's the, I believe that's P-26.
speaker 1: These were P-26, I think, right.
speaker 2: So for...
speaker 1: I actually don't even look forward to vacations most of the time because it means
I'm missing out in something in a lab.
It's tough to say but I think with the way that biomedical advances are progressing that
there some day will be cures for these diseases and we learn new things every day, every month.
There's always new papers coming out, always new findings that are giving us a little bit
of a hint on how to combat these diseases.
So that's the short term, is to find out what's going on.
The long term would be to actually implement therapies that could these diseases some day.
The big advice that I would say is learn to network with people.
The mantra of it's not what you know, it's who you know really means something in science
because science is about collaboration and ideas and getting people together to solve
really difficult problems that pertain to humanity and so I would say communication
with other people is a bit, an interest in science but also just communication with other
people."