"My name is Jeremy Horst.
I'm a post-doctoral fellow here in the DeRisi Lab here at UCSF in Mission Bay.
I'm a pediatric dentist and biochemist; putting those two things together I've focused for
a long time on figuring out how to stop cavities from happening, especially in really young
children and disabled people; people for which getting a filling, which is pretty routine
for most of us, would really affect their lives dramatically.
I study the bacteria that cause cavities.
I'm trying to figure out what could prevent them, what could stop them, what we can do
in terms of a natural intervention, such as: Eating more healthy, or taking certain vitamins
that could allow our bacteria to grow in a more healthy way, so in particular the folks
that are really affected by cavities wouldn't have to deal with that.
All the time, kids are put to sleep in the hospital under general anesthesia to get their
teeth worked on.
It's a totally preventable disease so it seems kind of silly.
Here I'm using all the resources that we have at UCSF: Molecular analysis, structure of
proteins, drug discovery, looking at what small molecules, what bacteria, what genes,
what foods we could use to keep people healthy.
I was born and raised here in San Francisco, so it's nice to still be around home.
I grew up doing a paper route and got interested in what it was to work from a young age; talked
to a lot of people about what they did.
I started getting interested in the medical field just because of the ability to help
people, work with people, not sit behind a computer all the time, and ask lots of questions;
I was really curious.
That's why I started going into science was that there was no answer to some of my questions.
Usually in the laboratory, I'm doing two different things: One is I grow these bacteria that
cause cavities, and do different things to them to see how it affects their ability to
grow.
And how they make acid because cavities are pretty simple: Bacteria get exposed to sugar,
they turn it into acid, the acid dissolves the tooth, that hole is a cavity.
I basically grow these bacteria and see how they make acid, how they change the pH.
I might put in a drug or a vitamin or a gene to block some part of their metabolism, I
might put two bacteria together and watch how they grow; those kinds of things.
Specific, I bring it out the freezer, I put, basically, some water on it, get those bacteria
swimming around, and then expose them to broth which smells a lot like Top Ramen; incubate
them, which means just put them in higher temperature like body temperature, then take
out little samples and put them in some of the different machines we have and see how
many bacteria are in there and what the pH is; take a little pH probe like you have in
your high school chemistry lab into the sample.
I also am looking at the genes in these bacteria: How they turn them on, which genes they have.
I'll grow up a whole bunch of the bacteria and take their DNA, then prepare it for our
sequencing machine which will read out every little letter of the genome of the genes that
give the blueprints of life to these bacteria, and see which ones are turned on, which ones
are turned off when they get exposed to acid, or when they get exposed to a drug that stops
them from making acid.
Then there's some time at the computer figuring out how all that stuff lines up, and putting
all the pieces together.
I guess that's missing an important part, which is: Talking to other people.
A lot of the science world is about talking to other people that have other ideas, sharing
your work with each other.
Everyone that I've found has been very welcoming.
If you're curious and willing to work a little bit hard to ask your questions, if you find
yourself curious and you poke around the internet to find the answer to your questions, that's
what we do.
Science is filled with people that just started asking questions, and then it's our job as
maturing scientists, as people a long the way, to take of the new folks.
There's always a continuum of people coming into science, whether they're in high school
or college or after college, and people that are a couple of steps ahead, that bring younger
students along to train them in the specific skills; whether it's moving around little
bits of liquid or it's sequencing their DNA or running computer programs or bashing on
things to see how hard they can take it.
That's what we do.
From professors to research scientists to post-doctoral fellows on down, we all train
each other so it's a very welcoming environment from any walk of life.
So really why I got here was just asking questions and being curious.
I think that's what really defines us as humans: Everybody's curious.
You see something you don't understand and you want to look into it, figure it out.
The amazing opportunity that I think we have in science now: We can ask pretty much any
question you can imagine.
That's why I came here to this laboratory, is that they're famous for asking any question.
If there's no tool to ask it, we'll invent a new tool.
By asking questions I ended up in science.
There's so many opportunities these days to get people that are curious and intrigued
by discovery into the fold.
Come on out.