" Hi, I'm Yonatan, and we're in the De La Zerda Lab in the Biophysics Department.
I grew up in a small town in Israel, right next to Tel Aviv.
My mother is a psychiatrist, my father is an engineer.
I have dyslexia.
It's been a challenge because many people told me that there's some stuff that I would
probably not be able to do.
Sometimes just say that you can't do something or things the way they are, and there's no
reason behind that.
I wanted to do science from when, you know, whenever I remember myself.
I just, I don't know why, but I just love tough problems, you know.
It's because, it's because of the challenge, because you fail so much but once you get
something right it's, I can't describe this feeling.
Getting something right after you failed so long at it is what gets me.
One of the things that scientist discovered is that cancer has this unique property of
learning how to handle our medicine.
And furthermore, they can actually tell their neighbor cells what they did in order to deal
with that chemotherapy.
Once we can actually hear them talk to one another, we can maybe disrupt their communication,
and maybe trick them not to learn how to deal with the medicine the person is getting.
Or, we can stop them from growing.
We are actually building a device, or at least the first step of that device, that will enable
us to actually hear those conversations.
This is a model of cancer cells, and here we're shining lasers on something that's called
silicone beads.
These are very, very small.
They are very, very thin.
Thinner than your hair.
And you can see them move a little bit with the laser beam.
So here you can see the laser is pointing at this point, and there's another laser that's
coming on top, and you can see this crosshair over those beads.
They're starting to move, and this is because we have some other particles on top of them
that are responsive to that.
It's exciting to work with people that have a different background than you, and have
a different way of thinking, and different history than what you've experienced, and
I see that as a wonderful thing.
I find myself a lot, you know, knocking my head and saying you know, gee, I should've
talked about that.
And how, how that person saw this.
[Speaker 2] Do you know what this is, by the way?
[Speaker 3] No, what is it?
[Speaker 2] It's from an electron microscope.
So this is drumming down to those tiny, tiny, tiny secret agents I was telling you about
before.
[Speaker 3] You made some interesting shapes there.
[Speaker 2] It's a heart.
[Speaker 3] Exactly.
You think?
So a few years ago, I started a program that's called Space IL along with two friends.
And our goal is to land the first Israeli and spaceship on the moon.
Okay, so this is a small scale model of the spaceship.
In real life it's about the size of a washing machine.
And this is the smallest spaceship ever designed for lunar landing.
You cannot do like a beta, and test it and see if it works.
You have to make it work the first time.
And we're going to get there – to the moon.
And that's very exciting.
Stanford in general has many, many talented people around here, and these people tend
to ask very good questions.
[Speaker 4] We had a really cool result the other day when we were looking at cartilage,
and I was wondering if you thought, or can think of any other ways to bring in more vasculature?
[Speaker 5] Oh.
I have no idea.
If you stay here long enough, you'll also start asking yourself this, this really amazing
question – why can't we do this, and why is that not working?
And I think that breaking down like this is the main reason science is so successful.
Because people thought why can't we fly, and once the Wright brothers took on this challenge
they figured out well, there's no real reason why we can't fly.
We can actually fly, and today, we all do that.
But it turned to be is that aviation really started the what we call global world.
And we never could've seen the world today without aviation, and there was no way to
see back then what the world would look like after aviation has been invented.
And I think that our field right now is in the same spot.
Success is not a linear graph that you start from here and get there.
It's a very tricky road, and in the end I think it's worth it.
And this is why I'm here.
Don't think about whether or not you can do this.
It's irrelevant.
What's relevant is that you want to do this.
And you're going to enjoy every day in your life doing this.
So why not try it?
I mean, life is too short to not follow your dreams."