"Speaker 1: I'm John Hatch and we're in the laboratory of stem cell and neurovascular
technology at the National Institute of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
I study organ development so we don't have a very good conception of how in an embryo
organs grow and develop so that they can function when we're adults.
So our laboratory studies the mechanisms by which the nervous system and the vascular
systems grow and develop in the embryo to form working organs later on in life.
So I investigate gastrointestinal development specifically, and then I'll use these antibody
chemicals to do a protocol that last three or four days in which I stay in the structures
that I want to look at, and then at the end of those four days I'll take them into our
microscope room across the hall and spend several hours using the lasers in that microscope
to produce three-dimensional images of those organs.
Yeah, I always wanted to be a scientist.
It took me quite awhile to decide that biology specifically was what I wanted to do, and
a lot of that just came out of trial and error.
So I actually grew up right outside of D.C., just about 15 miles from here.
My dad was a science teacher and my mom was a nurse so I was surrounded by science from
a very early age.
I did my first summer in the NIH at a different lab in the Clinical Center when I was in high
school, and then my first summer of college I came to this laboratory and absolutely loved
it and never, decided that I never wanted to do anything else.
I like to play sports, I play in a soccer league outside which is very convenient with
the World Cup going on right now so that's a lot of fun.
I have plenty of time to take weekends off and travel, and I do a fair bit of tutoring
and teaching.
Speaker 2 (group): Happy birthday dear John.
Happy birthday to you.
Yay!
Speaker 1: Surgical technique.
Speaker 3: You were on the ball.
Speaker 1: There's tons of collaboration within work and this sort of scientific environment,
everybody's motivated by their research and by their results.
So you put in hard work and you still have a life outside of the lab as well.
So I'm really excited by developmental biology and the sort of work that we do here in particular
because of our application to what's called regenerative medicine.
The idea that when things start to go wrong with your body, rather than do huge invasive
surgery or replace the organ or give a transplant we will within the next few decades will be
able to teach your body to regrow whatever's gone wrong.
And that I think will be a major shift in how medicine and disease and damage to the
body is treated.
Because if we understand how your organs and the structure of your body forms in the embryo,
we can teach your body to reactivate those mechanisms to repair really anything that
goes wrong, and these applications stretch from diabetes to cancer to traumatic injury.
There's no harm in trying something and not loving the first thing that you try.
There's so many different ways to be involved with science that you want to get as much
exposure as you can to find out what you really like and what really motivates you.
I was so lucky that I was pushed to get involved in high school and then right at the beginning
of college, and I got to try several different labs before I found one like this that I really
loved."