"speaker 1: So my name is Chris Hourigan.
We're currently in my office in my lab at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute
which is in the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
speaker 2: So Chris, what do you want to do?
You want to come represent the case or you want to just talk about it?
speaker 1: So, I'm a scientist.
I'm also a physician so physician scientist.
I'm looking at, in humans who have a blood cancer, a specific kind of blood cancer called
acute myeloid leukemia.
And we're really looking at two things.
One, can we get better at diagnosing and tracking that disease over time?
Can we do more high sensitivity ways to look for that disease and can be find new ways
to treat that disease beyond what's been done previously.
I've worked other jobs.
Not all jobs are fun.
Science is something that's fun for me.
Every morning I get up.
I'm excited.
Sometimes at night I can't go to sleep or wake up in the night thinking about science.
You know, looking back my parents were actually really smart.
They always told me you can do whatever you want to do once you've finished college.
It was never if you go to college.
It was always once you finish college.
It wasn't until I got to college I actually realized none of my family had been to college
before.
I was the first member of my extended family to actually go through college.
I spent a summer in the lab and thought wow, this is great.
This is different to school.
I really didn't like school but I loved being in the lab, asking questions and really looking
things up, trying hard and you actually work things out rather than memorizing what someone
else has done.
speaker 2: It's an i for error i6.
I saw the band but the band is bigger than we expected.
Do you see there are a lot of bands?
I don't know which one.
Maybe I can use the ip, use a ??[01:58] to ip and it becomes a single band.
Yeah.
I think a lot of the buzz, you get from sports actually you can get from science.
It, the thing people don't really know about science is it's incredibly exciting.
It's addictive.
You get the, just the feedback of just finding these incredible things which is similar to
the kind of buzz we used to get when we used to win a game in sports.
And so I'd hope in ten or 15 years time there are other things that come with science.
You publish papers.
You give talks.
But really what we'd like is if someone is diagnosed with a disease that we study, in
ten or 15 years time, their life is going to be better because of work we've done.
That's really the only end game is that we improve the outcome for people who have this
disease we're studying.
Hey guys.
??[02:49] working.
We talk about on a small scale, the experiments we're doing at the moment.
The experiments for the day.
We'll run through.
We'll talk about the experiments where we're planning for this day and why they're important.
They things we've got to look out for.
Any additional controls or extra piece of information we'd like to get from the experiment.
We'll talk about the experiments we've done previously and we'll go through that data
they generated and try and work out what it means, what we do next, what's the experiment
we now need to do to work out what's missing from that picture.
And so really we're always building on the previous experiments.
There's never a total eureka moment where it all falls together and there's no more
work to do.
We're always improving that experiment we did last time with another experiment and
getting closer and closer to what we think is the truth.
We're really trying to move away from a kind of medicine where it's one size fits all.
You have a disease, we put a label on it and we give you some therapy that works on average
for average people and try and get down to specifically for you what's the treatment
that's going to work for the disease you have and the person you have.
And that's really the personalization we're trying to get at.
Don't be dispirited by the kind of, the classes you've had in high school or the classes you've
had in college.
The actual doing science is very different to that.
I didn't enjoy college.
I didn't enjoy my college science classes but I love the work I do now as a scientist.
It's really a great opportunity.
It really is an honor and a privilege to come to work every day and try and do something
good for humanity, for people.
That's great that I can come in and do that and it's fun.
It's incredibly exciting.
So I'd say you don't have to be the smartest person in the world.
What you do have to do is you have to care and you have to stick at it.
If you've got that drive, I think it's possible to have a very fulfilling time in science."