"When most of us think of a science lab we think of test tubes, chemicals, and lab coats.
This is called a wet lab.
But wet labs and white coats aren't for everyone.
I'm Tim Sweeny I'm a post doctoral research.
We're at Stanford University.
I grew up in Boulder, Colorado.
My dad was a lawyer, my mom worked in education.
Mostly I liked to be up in the mountains.
Rock climbing, and mountaineering and that sort of thing.
I liked to build stuff.
Set construction and design and stuff like that in the theater.
I played baseball for a while and was pretty bad at it.
So I stopped.
I had always liked science.
But I wasn't particularly a standout student until pretty late in high school.
I actually, even through college, just planned on getting a PhD and I wanted to do neuroscience
research.
It was while I was in college I met one of the professors of neuroscience there that
suggested I get an MD in addition to the PhD.
Maybe I'd be good at seeing patients.
That's why I decided to go to med school.
I did the joint MD/PhD degree together.
Our lab focuses on integrating public data in gene expression.
You have these processes being called up.
So you have an instance of our studio running four separate R process.
Who knows.
All of the cells in the body have DNA, of course, and the DNA codes for proteins and
the message that codes for those proteins come out in RNA.
There's a technology now that can basically measure all of the expression levels of these
RNAs in the body at once.
Step one is combing through the data to find these genes.
Step two is turning that from an interesting scientific finding to a relevant scientific
test.
That takes a lot more prospective validation, which is testing it again in a new set of
patients and also partnering with engineers and people who know how to actually build
something that a doctor can use.
How would you describe the culture in the lab?
Pretty laid back.
Like, it'll have this kind of pattern but these two are the ones they should be focusing
on.
That they're focusing on the other two.
On the other two, yeah.
I think.
And they're getting things right?
I don't know.
We don't have the...
They're-
Maybe they are getting...
Certainly I found Stanford to be a very relaxed place.
People work at their own pace and it's pretty collaborative.
Someone's working on something in the lab they're always happy to share with others.
Compared to being a surgery resident where you're working 80 hours a week and there's
constant emergencies sitting at a desk and running some math and writing some programs
maybe doesn't feel quite as tense as that.
It's not easy, either.
If you're not working on something that's relevant then sometimes you feel like you're
falling behind a little bit.
I think it's more just that you are at your own pace.
It's up to you.
No one's going to tell you to work faster.
You just don't ahead.
You don't get things done.
Both are part art and both are part science.
One of the key things about knowing how to practice medicine is that it informs more
likely hypothesis.
You come up with some question and maybe you might be more right because you studied how
the body works.
I think more importantly it informs asking good questions.
What you want to do is work on something that affects a lot of people or affects a small
number of people in a big way or affects a lot of people in a big way and can make an
advance that can actually help them.
Science especially has a lot of ups and downs.
The thrill of discovery and then the downside of discovering that your discovery doesn't
hold up in something else.
You have to have some sort of internal momentum that keeps you going and lets you know that
this is still the right path even if it feels like it's not at times.
That does require a willingness to stick with the program even if it's going to be five
or ten more years or something like that.
There's a little bit of maybe innate intelligence.
But mostly it's training.
It's people being willing to do the hard work, to learn the skills, to do the research.
You don't have to know right now where you want to be in ten years you just have to point
your ship somewhere and start sailing.
If you find something that's even better along the way then great.
Track that down.
The more time you spend learning these skills and techniques and training maybe doesn't
sound like a ton of fun but it opens a lot of doors and you never know where you'll end
up."