My name is Stephan Sanders.
I am an Assistant professor at UCSF and I work on trying to understand the genetics
of autism.
Autism is a common disorder of children and we know that it's genetic but we don't know
what it is.
We don't know what genes or what genetics is involved.
So we're trying to identify exactly how people get autism.
And the hope is that if you can understand the true cause of autism then you can start
to think about what might modify that and potentially in the future, create therapies.
Yea, I have always been interested in science.
Certainly at school, it was the thing which I naturally gravitated towards.
I found, particularly the principles of how things worked rather than all the facts.
Certainly the facts are fun sometimes but the end-of-line mechanisms of how the world
works and how people work, I always found absolutely fascinating.
So when I was at school, my reaction to that was that I wanted to be a doctor, as in a
doctor treating patients.
And so, that's what I went into, so I finished high school, took a year off to travel the
world and enjoy myself and then after that, I went to try as a physician and at Nottingham
in the UK.
So, yea, went there, was at medical school for 5 years and then after that, I worked
at the emergency room and then specialized in pediatrics, and then I had the opportunity
to move to America.
Matthew State was kind enough to hire me into his lab and I thought, seeing as I was at
Yale, be a good place to try some research.
I started working with using computers and programming computers to understand genetic
information and it was like discovering this language I'd always wanted to be able to speak
but had never known.
And basically just got hooked.
It was just the most interesting thing I'd ever done.
We have this huge, huge amount of data sitting at our disposal, so this is genetic information
for a large number of children and their parents with autism.
And so, buried within that is the cause of autism.
And we just don't know where it is.
And so to actually get a hold of it, there's so much data you can't look at it yourself.
There's literally billions and billions of data points.
So what you have to do is design a computer program to do that analysis for you.
You can make computers do anything you want.
And so stuff which might take you a day or a month, you can make happen in seconds and
minutes.
The next time you need to do it, it's almost instant, cause you just press Go.
And genetics really lends itself to this, because in genetics you're trying to understand
the code of life.
So everything is there, you've got the whole of human evolution mapped out and it's stored
some in our genes.
Everything about our appearance, about why we get ill.
And possibly even about who we marry, all of that, there's information contained within
our genome.
We just need to unlock it and understand it.
So then it gets quite geeky, for want of a better world.
It involves sitting there, playing with computer programming, which is a lot of fun.
It's a lot like solving a sudoku or logic problem and then hopefully that will give
you some results which you might need to think about in the context of â€˜Does this make
sense for the question I was asking?'
And, I suppose like any good question, if you ask the right question you just find there's
far more questions to answer afterwards.
The other side is talking to other people, say I think one of the really great things
about science, is you're just surrounded by these passionate, interesting and very intelligent
people who just can just give you great ideas.
And so one of the real joys day-to-day is taking the stuff you found and sharing it
with other people and seeing what they think, cause everyone has their own [audio skips].
And then, the other part is trying to think about being fair.
So, to be really rigorous in science, you need to think about how to do the analysis
in a way where you're not biasing the results.
Finding stuff can be the easy part, the rigor of trying to make sure that you're not cheating
yourself.
That's where it gets really, really hard.
And that's what we need to actually progress from where we are now to getting a treatment
for autism and for other neruodevelopmental disorders.
It really needs that every step needs this really solid bedrock, where we know exactly
what we're looking at.
So what I would really like is to see a meaningful therapeutic for individuals with neurodevelopmental
problems.
So something which really, really makes a difference.
Like antibiotics, where you give it to a patient and the next day you think, â€˜Wow!
That's transformed what was going on.'
I would like to see something like that which affects autism or intellectual disability.
The potential through science is incredible.
And we can actually, not just treat one person, but we can completely transform the health
of people.
There's this potential to really cure something going on in 1% if we can put our minds to
it enough and work hard enough.