"My name is Sebastian Lourido.
I am a fellow here at the Whitehead Institute.
I run a lab that looks at the molecular biology of human parasites.
Specifically a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is a human pathogen in its own
right, but also a fantastic cell biology model for related parasites including the ones that
cause Malaria.
I'm originally from Columbia.
English is my second language.
My mother is a medical geneticist.
So as a kid I was always in her lab.
She would show me chromosome smears and taught me what a gene was.
I think I was a really fascinated - that seemed like such an amazing mystery to look into
and try to understand.
I applied to colleges here.
I got into Tulane University and I majored in both cell and molecular biology and studio
art, print making.
In my case I had quite a bit of independence and I worked on a project that focused on
schalen salmonella.
These are bacteria that also parasitized their hosts that can enter and invade host cells
and setup residences within them and replicate within them and manipulate the host.
I think that got me really interested in these interactions between organisms.
A lot of their genes, we have no idea what they're doing.
They're big, complex genomes.
About half of the genes - they're a black box.
It really seemed like there was a lot to be gained from studying these parasites.
Malaria alone causes close to a million deaths each year.
So when you imagine the depth of the problem I think there's a lot to do from the perspective
of basic sciences.
That really drew me to the kind of problems that now as an independent fellow here at
the Whitehead I have been trying to address through our basic research.
A lot of what we do is to try to understand the cell biology behind that process of infection
that both Malaria and Toxoplasma and all of these other related parasites have to perform.
There are many good reasons for studying Toxoplasma itself.
It infects about a quarter of the world's population.
In most people it's asymptomatic but when it causes disease they're very severe diseases.
There are many clinical situations where Toxoplasma is an important pathogen and we need to understand
better what it's doing.
I do think that there's a real possibility there for Toxoplasma to act as a fantastic
system to understand the biology of Malaria.
We have all sorts of different projects in the lab.
We have six people who are working with me right now.
They take different aspects of those different projects and move them forward.
It's not unlike you trying to solve a problem with one of your friends.
Sometimes there's something you know that they don't know and sometimes you just have
to kind of work through it together.
We're very collaborative and it's a constant back and forth.
People have this perception that science is very cut and dry and you just do these experiment
and get these conclusions.
But sometimes you're just trying things out.
That exploration is as important as when you have the organized preconceived experiments.
It's way more common that you do something and it turns out completely backwards from
anything that you had planned.
Now it's your job to figure out why.
I think more often than not that's how science moves forward.
For really expanding our vision of what living systems can be and what they can do.
I believe being a little bit freer and outside the classical structure of science is something
that can really benefit science.
I think kids should realize the vanguard of science, what we do in these laboratories
is nowhere near that structured, is much more playful, is much more creative.
You gain that structure on its own and after a while your profession becomes how to be
creative within the universe of options that are around."