"So my name is Steve Doll and we're in what I call the halls of progress so this is Drexel
University's Papadakis Integrative Sciences Building so we're in the heart of the Department
of Biology.
So I'm a master's candidate here in the Atkin's lab and what we study in the Atkin's lab is
fragile ex syndrome.
So fragile x syndrome is a neuropath of physiology which is most commonly associated with autism
and intellectual disability.
So I am from the Philadelphia area.
I've always been interested in science.
I've always had a desire to kind of explore the universe if you will.
Even from a young age when you, would be asked you know, say what you are interested, what
you would like to be when you grow up and people would draw pictures of police officers
and firemen and what not I would always draw a guy in a lab coat and so I always, from
a very young age wanted to go into science.
I love mathematics and I want to say and kind of just steal this from Neil deGrasse Tyson
so for those of you who think that you're not good at math or that you don't understand
math, that numbers aren't making sense to you, you have to understand that mathematics
is a language and that it takes a lot, multiple years and a lot of time and practice to actually
get good at it.
I inherently was not a gifted mathematician.
Even the people that we consider great thinkers and great mathematician, we think about Albert
Einstein, we think of Steven Hawking, we think that these guys are, they came out of the
womb skilled mathematicians well that really wasn't the case and that's not the case for
anyone so genius isn't born.
And it isn't created.
It's worked towards.
It's a process.
So I, in my neighborhood we actually have two boys who suffer form autism.
And kind of growing up as their neighbors and seeing what they had to deal with, it
was very eye opening and so in science you have people that are interested in exploring
the universe and advancing their own intellectual understanding of nature and then you have
people that are interested in not only that aspect but also in improving human condition.
And I am very much interested in improving the human condition because I have seen how
autism affects people first hand.
So some of the techniques that we use here are, that I use specifically is the polymerase
chain reaction, otherwise known as PCR.
The way PCR works is you have a thermophilic which means a very, a heat tolerant polymerase,
a DNA polymerase which can replicate DNA at very high temperatures.
And so you have your sequence of interests and essentially you introduce this polymerase
interest with nucleotides.
The polymerase replicates your sequence of interest and then you can have essentially
billions of copies in one reaction of a particular DNA sequence of interest.
So lab life has never been a dark room with blacked out windows.
Science is a collaborative effort and it always has been as far as I know a collaborative
effort.
It has always been based around the flow of ideas from one mind to another.
We were always trying to see how other people are thinking so that you can improve the way
you think.
Science is a journey and in order to embark on that journey you need to have the right
backpack and in that backpack what I want you to have is intellectual curiosity.
I want you have passion.
And the most important tool to have is to not be afraid of being wrong and to not listen
when other people tell you know because you're going to hear no a lot in your life.
People are going to tell you that you're not smart enough.
I've been told this myself.
You're not gifted.
You don't have what it takes.
And you just have to say that that's not what it's about.
It's not about the standardized tests.
It's not about the letters that they put on the papers A through F. It's about what's
going on in here and it's about what you believe in scientifically and so that's really what
it means to be a scientist and really what it takes to become a scientist."