Translator: Isabelle Andrieu Reviewer: TEDx Milano Translators
Good evening.
I'm a scientist, and I do cutting edge research.
What is cutting edge research?
We don't know exactly, there's no definition.
It's surely a new thing.
It was asked to many relevant scientists,
and they could not give a definition.
What can be stated is, it's not quite like traditional research.
Traditional research, also called incremental reasearch,
runs along clearly defined lines of research
based on hypothesis from that field of research,
built on existing knowledge.
These hypothesis are either approved or denied, and it goes on.
Innovative research is not like this.
It provides new paradigms,
basically new lines of research must be discovered.
In the lighting industry, for instance,
the one about candles is a traditional line of research,
and consists in chemists trying to optimize the consumption
of the wax these candles were made of.
Innovative research doesn't go like this.
It creates new paradigms
in order to find new methods to solve old problems.
This is a nice definition,
given by a representative of the Human Fringe Science Program,
an intercontinental programme that funds innovative research.
In the lighting industry,
an example of innovation might be the lightbulb:
a way of solving the old issue of lighting
with a new paradigm.
Physicists study illumination, electricity.
Why is innovative research so important?
Because of globalisation.
Our world is very dynamic,
everything's changing,
frontiers and economy are changing,
politics, culture, everything changes
and so science and technology
have the urge and the desire to keep up with these changes,
so we need new paradigms.
A financing body was instituted in Europe in 2007:
the European Research Council -- ERC.
It was born as an offshoot of the European Commission
and has a budget of about two billions a year
to fund specifically innovative research.
This body's funding policy is also innovative,
much unlike the European commission's one.
It funds individual projects.
Pioneering is thought of as an individual action,
while it's collective in ordinary European projects.
These fundings are large,
an average of two millions for a five year project.
These fundings are very peculiar
because they're "portable", like telephone numbers.
If people can't do what they have to do,
in their current workplace,
they can "carry" it somewhere else.
The critical aspect of these fundings
is that they are highly competitive.
It's really difficult to get them.
The average of success is about 8%,
because they're considered as prizes, awards.
Honestly,
I thought that I could do the things I wanted to do,
my aim was achievable.
After many years of research
I manage to win the first ERC funding,
and so here I am, telling you this story.
My story begins as a person -
I've always been a bioengineer,
who is an engineer
willing to project and develop replacement parts for the human body,
let's put it this way.
When I was a little girl
I was always watching "The Bionic Man" on TV.
I'm not sure you remember.
The Six Million Dollar Man, with high-tech parts only inside his body.
I loved the Bionic Woman, I knew all episodes by heart.
Sci-fi has always impressed me.
I've always loved sci-fi, and not for interstellar travelling,
but because androids are always there.
Also in Blade Runner you have replicants.
Humans with some tech within.
This idea interested me since I was a kid.
In middle school days,
there used to be no such thing as internet,
so I used the newsstand.
I bought all scientific magazines that raised my interest.
I remember a story -
Once I read an article on biomedical nanomachines,
which is the idea of making very small robots
which are miniaturized and can be injected in our blood vessels,
and as they're microscopical they may clean our vessels
to prevent the formation of atherosclerosis' plaqus.
It may seem weird to you, but I thought: "This is so cool!".
I was attending middle school, this episode has determined my destiny.
I decided to do this for a living.
So, I finished my degree in mechanical engineering,
thn I did a PhD in bioengineering and started to do research.
At the beginning I did traditional research,
which I defined incremental.
I studied replacement parts, joints in particular,
orthopedic endoprosthesis,
and I sought ways to make them more and more functional
but also more appealing and developed.
Yet when I was doing traditional research,
a new research paradigm was emerging.
A new, promising and interesting one.
It was the idea of replacing malfunctioning or damaged body parts
with materials that aren't completely artificial.
Partially artificial perhaps,
possibly biodegradable,
but here's the innovation:
powered by cells harvested from the very sick patient.
This also seemed so cool to me.
Especially stem cells.
Stem cells are those cells in our body,
they are everywhere,
that retain their form:
but when needed,
they can differentiate into tissue cells that must be repaired or regenerated.
I started to do this kind of research,
hence I totally converted to biology.
Briefly, I had to do ten years of research on cells,
and I had never saw one cell in my whole life.
I had to start from the very beginning,
I learned how to use microscopes
and still I was charmed by this microscopic world.
A new scientific theory slowly dawned on me.
Although it was a new subject,
I was able to see, thanks to my engineer mentality,
a new feature of stem cells, a new category of problems.
I'll tell you briefly.
You can see on the left that a cell has a nucleus,
which is were DNA is stored, our genetic code.
Yet which genes -- stretches of DNA --
should be expressed -- used or not -- in the cell?
This decision relies on small molecules -- the green dots --
which enter the nucleus with a signaling purpose,
they land on the DNA
and decide the parts of DNA that must be transcribed.
This process regulates the functionality of the cell.
Under normal conditions,
the cell is wadded up and molecules are outside.
Over the years I developed this idea:
the entrance regulation of these dots
relied on the deformation of the cell.
As the cell nucleus has a membrane with holes,
called nuclear pores,
I figured out,
by stretching the membrane pores would have expanded.
This seemingly intuitive notion
is actually a breakthrough.
It's revolutionary,
because biology is still a "chemical" field that walks on thin air,
where forces, deformations, pressures, mechanics in general
is stepping in, albeit slowly.
Thus that was a great idea,
yet at this point I needed to demonstrate it,
I needed to either prove or deny this hypothesis.
And it was not so easy.
I needed a system to control the shape of the cell.
Which is microscopical, invisible to the human eye.
Think of a microscopical water drop.
And I got lucky.
I met, by chance, a group of physicists,
who had developed a very fine technology
to control the shape of microscopical objects.
With this idea I managed to win my first ERC,
and it was a big deal, also for my life.
Like winning the World Cup for a football player.
Which were the ingredients for this result?
I think they were basically three.
I call the first ingredient "mentoring".
I addressed to, and relied on scientists
that were much better than me,
For instance, in the USA
there were people already acquainted with mechanobiology.
I stalked them at conferences, but mostly by e-mail.
I wrote to a very relevant scientist,
by e-mail I wrote her:
"This is my idea" -- that of the nuclear pore.
"Would you like to join me in a Human Fringe Science Program?".
It was a hallucinated project.
Somehow she replied and told me:
"Yes I'm interested, but explain it further".
And she asked me questions that were specific and difficult.
And the answers to these questions
are still central for the ERC project I won.
Other episodes, similar to this one, are fun.
There's one with a geneticist.
He is older than me, much better than me.
I told him: "This is my idea".
He baffled silently for almost a minute, while staring at me.
He's not much of a talker, but there he was speechless.
And then he told me, at the end of this terrible long time:
"Look, it's the most unconventional way I've ever heard of to deal with this.
But you could be right."
These are important phenomena,
situations where a person
that's willing to plunge into a subject that he doesn't master,
connects with mentors, with more knowledgeable people.
They're like a pavement to walk on, so at least you don't freefall.
The other important element is transdisciplinarity.
We are all acknowledged with the notion of multidisciplinarity,
when many differently skilled people tackle the same issue.
Transdisciplinarity is much more.
It's about changing your own field of competence.
Like me, an engineer that became a biologist 20 years ago.
I'm not an engineer anymore, I'm something more and different.
Yet I'm not a biologist,
I speak the "biology language", but I can't become a biologist.
This is another relevant aspect,
speaking another's language and being able to communicate.
The third element necessary for the result is extremely important to me,
it's a thing we call vision, very hard to explain,
yet Lewis Carroll explained it well
in his wonderful book, "Alice in Wonderland".
Alice says:
"There's no use trying, one can't believe in impossible things."
And the Queen, her mentor at that time, says:
"Daresay you haven't had much practice.
When I was you age,
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
So it's all about practice.
Over the years, I practiced this kind of exercise a lot.
and I managed
to find suggestions
on how to practice at best.
A proven strategy is to systematically dismiss
those you call you back to concreteness.
Along with many kinds of discourse,
like -
First of all you have a job, what job is it?
Now it has become "design engineer of organoids".
Then even more recently:
"What are you doing with biology, do something you know.
You aren't respected enough to be published.
No one publish the work you're doing outside you competence."
These statements are falsely sensible,
because they don't bring anything great or new with them.
Paradoxically, in order to overcome some harsh frontiers
the only truly realistic vision is utopia.
Thanks.
(Applause)