"Hello.
My name's Kevin Tsui and I'm a fourth-year graduate student at UC Berkeley.
And currently we're at the Hockemeyer Lab, a neighboring lab of the one I work in which
is the Robert Teejan Lab.
I grew up in Taiwan for the first part of my childhood, and then I moved to the Bay
Area, actually, which is where we are.
When I was, approximately, eight or nine I was always scientifically inclined.
That is not to say I always liked biology.
I liked to understand how things worked.
So I think you can say that's more scientifically inclined.
Like I said, I really, I really like mechanical things actually when I was younger because
things just make sense.
You know, when you have a cog, you turn one of these you can see the rest of the machine
work, and you can see individual parts of how they work.
So I always really liked physics and mechanics.
But as I got into biology in high school, it was kind of amazing when I could see in
textbooks all of these things that were described to me that I had never even thought about
before.
You know, all of these little things inside your body and how they come about, that's
not something you can observe by yourself.
Reading and understanding how these things just kind of fit together logically, it was
quite amazing to me and that's really the first step of me really favoring biology over
something like chemistry or mathematics or engineering.
So my lab is actually more interested in what you would call basic science, meaning that
our studies are not primarily focused on individual disease.
For example, some labs revolve around Cancer and they study various aspects of Cancer.
For us, we're more interested in the process called differentiation, and transcription
in that regard.
And what that means is, you know, you have different cells in your body and, for example,
you have a muscle cell, you have your skin and then you have your heart, and your fats,
and your hair, and they're all very, very different cells.
But they all came from, originally, one single cell.
How does this happen?
How do all these cells become different things?
And you can imagine that there are, what you can just refer to as like managers.
Each cell takes on a particular manager that specializes in becoming let's say a skin cell,
or a heart, or a fat, and that's what causes that cell to become certain things.
And what our lab does are studies, primarily, is how do those managers work, and they are
called transcription factors.
If the manager screws up, it's, it's a fairly big effect.
And in fact, there are multiple neurological diseases, or cranial facial diseases that
come from, essentially, transcription factors misfiring or not working as well.
P53 is a transcription factor that's mis-regulating Cancer.
And it's actually, if I remember correctly, it's one of the first transcription factors
related to Cancer that was discovered.
So, it's along those veins, although we don't work on any particular disease.
Being a scientist is not for I would say, the faint of heart, to be dramatic because
you have to realize that failure doesn't mean that you screwed up.
Well, it could but if it doesn't work it doesn't mean that it has to be something that you
did wrong.
And it doesn't mean you can't learn anything out of it.
You take the results and you try to learn what you can and you try to design your next
experiment, and improve upon that.
Any time that I get a positive result during the day is a huge high.
And that's really I think what scientists live for is that one time out of, you know,
a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of days where something works and you just, you just
feel like you're on top of the world and you can do anything.
Science is certainly something I feel like everyone can do, if they want to do it.
Take me, personally I'm the first in my family to graduate college.
I'm the first in my family to go into science and my parents obviously have no scientific
background but science is a very, I think, individual scene where if you're interested,
you can do it.
And, you know, if you read enough and learn enough, you know, I don't think intelligence
nor like innate ability comes into play because when it comes to science it really is about
99% hard work.
You can't be a genius and not do any work and succeed in science.
As long as you're willing to work, willing to learn, willing to fail and learn from your
failures, I believe anyone can really achieve a career in science."