I'm Brenden Smith.
We are at the Center for Regenerative Medicine here at Boston University and I work megakaryocytes
differentiation.
So a specific type of blood cell that makes platelets.
Science was never my strongest subject growing up.
I really liked English and history and things and going into college, I knew I really liked
psychology and behavior.
I really liked that aspect of science.
And what I found out was that there was a neurobiology, this underpinning of what happens
and I was really interested in that.
Not the behavior itself but why human beings undergo that type of behavior.
There's neurocircuitry.
There's learning and memory.
There's addiction centers in our brain.
There's all these things and that's what really attracted me to science because it's really
the molecular understanding of what we do and everything basically in our world but
I used induced pluripotent stem cells.
So what they are is they are stem cells that we can create from adult cells from any person.
So essentially we can take a person's blood or a little bit of their skin and we can actually,
in the lab, turn them into stem cells like they would be in an embryo.
Cells that essentially can make any type of cell type in the body.
So here at the CREM, people do this in order to make lung, in order to make thyroid cells,
and in our lab, to make various types of blood cells.
The type of blood cell that I try to make is the megakaryocyte.
And in making this cell from a stem cell, I can sort of have development in a dish.
Where I can see the path from the stem cell all the way through to blood specification,
then to megakaryocyte specification.
See how this cell becomes a megakaryocyte in a way that's unprecedented, right?
Because you can do this in a dish in a very ethical way and with an unlimited supply of
cells.
So in doing so, I basically can do a screen where I can add certain drugs and compounds
throughout the process to see if this affects how efficiently the megakaryocytes can be
made.
And so right now, we're really trying to optimize ways to treat preexisting disease later with
genome editing strategies to hopefully be to prevent disease.
You know, I think for high school age kids, what you really want to hone in on is if you
like science, then that's a fantastic foundation.
And what you have to realize is that when you're doing your chemistry lab, or your dissecting
the frog and you're teacher is telling you exactly what to do in order to get to the
end of that experiment, that's so that you have the foundations.
But once you get to this level, you create everything.
It's you who decides your path in what you are trying to accomplish and ultimately what
you are trying to give to the scientific community in your work.
So if you want to have a profession that is particularly creative and allows you to really
think on your feet and to approach problems in a very novel way, this would be the path
you wanna go down.
It's just an unprecedented amount of creative freedom.
And not only is that creative freedom available to you but your PI actually will steer you
down that path.
They want fresh minds to think of things in ways that they haven't thought of.
That's the whole foundation of science really is to bring in people who can give a different
perspective and give different approaches in order to solve problems that once were
thought unsolvable.