Translator: Alina Tissera Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
As a kid growing up it wasn't uncommon
for discussions of T-cell counts or ACG results
to start up around the dinner table.
Having a doctor and a hematologist as parents,
I guess you could say I continued in the family business
when I decided to become a scientist.
At university I'd studied Human Anatomy and Physiology
and I'd loved everything about it.
I loved learning about the body systems and how they worked.
Because to me, it meant understanding how I worked and how I functioned.
And this excitement led me to begin a research project
in my final year in Human Biology.
This research topic was concerned with designing new drugs for cancer treatment.
And this research topic also required me to learn a small component of chemistry.
Something that, initially, caused me a great deal of worry.
To me, chemistry had always been that extra step further in science,
that I hadn't completely understood.
In my years previous, I'd been required to learn some chemistry
and I'd done alright but by no means
had I ever shined or really felt comfortable with it.
I think it all stems from High School,
where I struggled to concentrate in chemistry
and only scraped together a "Passed".
To this day I am still sure that my teacher had only gifted me the grade
knowing that I needed it to pass that year in school.
So it took the minimum required chemistry at university
and now, once again, I needed to understand chemistry
to pass my research project.
I needed to understand chemistry to understand a fantastic new machine,
that my supervisor, a man named Colin Reston,
had built himself and he'd promised me
it was going to design new drugs faster and cheaper than ever before.
Apprehensively, I accepted the project.
And I was excited to work on something new and cutting edge.
This is it here: a Vortex Fluid Device,
that we proposed would assemble chemical cages
chemical cages to deliver drugs to tumors.
The machine works by rapidly rotating a fluid-filled tube
to drive chemical reactions.
And our hypothesis was that the chemical cages
would assemble due to an interplay between these two lines of forces up here:
the outward centrifugal and the downward gravitational.
I was working late one night by myself in the lab
when I noticed I was getting some very abnormal results.
Suddenly this graph was coming out, without boring you with all the details,
in essence, my graph should have looked like this
but instead it looked like this.
This was not what I wanted.
Now, like anyone who is working by themselves
with expensive machinery,
that doesn't do what it's supposed to,
(Laughter)
I was worrying all night, I sat and I'd thought
of course this graph keeps coming out
as I did it over and over and over again.
Because I'd broken the machine.
I was convinced the only reason we could be seeing these results
was because of me, the novice chemist,
fresh off a mandatory training course to learn how not to break the machine,
had broken the machine.
So I sweated out the night
and I went to see my supervisor the next day.
After a long discussion and a few system tests
we concluded the machine was working fine
and that I was being a drama queen.
(Laughter)
This meant that these results had to be telling the truth.
But what truth exactly? I still didn't know.
What these graphs are showing us is the degree of folded structure
in the protein present.
Now I should say here that this particular night
was the first round of experiments before testing the actual drug
that I intended to use,
which was a particularly rare and expensive protein.
So instead, I was using a pilot protein
called Lysozyme.
Now some of you out there will recognize Lysozyme
as the protein in egg-whites.
And this is a very cheap and commonly-occuring protein
in the labs, that scientists routinely use for this very purpose.
And so I proceeded with Lysozyme throughout the night
getting the same results
and all I could find was that this Lysozyme was folding
as we were going through.
As we look at the graph on the left,
we notice that the normal graph, the protein begins
at zero percent unfolded in its normal or native state.
And over the course of the experiment, we introduce heat energy
until it's 100% unfolded.
The analogy I most often use is
if you imagine a knotted pill necklace slowly being undone
until it's returned to a string.
Well, a similar process is happening here.
But when we look at the graph on the right,
we notice that the protein that's gone through the Vortex Fluid Device
already begins the reading unfolded,
which we concluded to mean that the Vortex Fluid Device
was somehow unfolding or altering the protein structure.
And this amazed us in the lab
because this would be the first example
of laboratory science using mechanical energy to unfold proteins.
Previously we've been able to unfold proteins
with chemicals like acids
or with heat energy like when we cook an egg.
But never before with mechanical energy.
But still, with all this excitement,
we didn't know what to do with these results.
Until a chance meeting between my supervisor
and a guest lecturer, Greg Wise.
Colin talked to Greg about my results
and Greg was equally excited to work on it and explore this further.
As soon as two months later, I was being flown to California
to work in Greg's lab.
There, in a team, I continued my work on Lyzosyme
until we had finetuned a scientific method
to control the folding of egg-white proteins
using the Vortex Fluid Device.
This method allowed us to control a host of different protein functions.
It allowed us to redesolve proteins previously called insoluble.
And it allowed us to restore function to denatured proteins
that were otherwise unusable.
We knew we had discovered something big here, huge even.
The implications of this method could change the way we synthesized proteins -
world over.
But we needed a hook - something to get this publication off the ground
to maybe show off this method and excite people who, well,
may not be as turned on by protein behaviour
quite as much as us in the lab.
(Laughter)
So we came to include an experiment that we would call "Unboiling an egg".
Now, I know, right, it can't be done.
You can't unboil an egg just like you can't unring a bell.
Well, if you'd look up here, I'll show you how we did just that.
We go ahead and break open an egg just like you get at calls.
And we collect the clear eggwhite for processing.
We then go ahead and boil it at 90 degrees Celcius
until it goes white hard.
We take the boiled and tangled protein and load it into the spinning tube,
where the fluid stretches along the walls, and this is where the protein refolds
into its normal or unboiled state and as we've seen here,
out comes the clear protein again, that we can even go ahead and cook
just like we did at the start.
(Applause)
We included this nifty little experiment in our publication to try and make it
a little bit more relatable to people
and maybe gain a little bit of media attention in the process.
But what happened next, I could never have even dreamt about:
the publication went online in late January this year
and almost immediately, it went viral.
Related news articles began to surface
about the scientists that had unboiled an egg.
It was everywhere.
Within two weeks it had become the most downloaded article
in the journal's history.
Newspaper articles, radio reports, even my own facebook feed
was telling me about it.
We couldn't get away from it
until finally all of this hype culminated
in a Skype call that would tell me that our research would receive
the Ig Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
(Applause)
Evidently some people in the room know the award
but I'm stressing that again:
Ig-Nobel, not Nobel.
The Ig-Nobel award is awarded internationally
to research that makes you laugh and then makes you think.
I was amazed to hear that my paper had gone on to receive this.
I was astonished that not only had this paper been so widely embraced,
but now it was being praised.
And that I was receiving an award for Chemistry of all things.
Something that nearly scared me away
from beginning my career in science in the first place.
That's my accidental story.
And if I could ask you take something away from it today, it would be
to try new things, to say yes to new opportunities
and never shy away from your weaknesses.
Who knows, that could just be where you find
your most memorable achievements yet.
Thank you.
(Applause)