"My name is Peter Grayson and right now we're at the National Institutes of Health which
is Building 1 which is the clinical center where we take care of patients under research
protocols at the NIH. So I'm focused on combating the disease known as vasculitis which is a
family of rare diseases that are characterized by inflammation inside of blood vessels. And
these diseases can lead to life-threatening outcomes for patients.
So I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. It wasn't something that I thought I was going
to be a scientist from the get-go, from birth. I wanted to be a musician and spent some time
playing in rock n roll bands around the country and then kind of meandered my way into medicine
and came at it much later in life.
So vasculitis, among doctors it's a scary disease. It's one that many doctors don't
know anything about because it's quite mysterious. Wherever you have blood vessels, you can have
a problem and you have blood vessels throughout your entire body. So you can get a lot of
bizarre symptoms. And typically what happens to a patient is they get something where they
got a painful red eye and then they lose sensation in their foot. And then they start coughing
up blood, and then all these crazy, bizarre things happen in sequential order.
They go see millions of different specialists. There's a long delay and finally somebody
will put the pieces together and realize that this is a vasculitis. And we have made a lot
of progress in the last 20 years. It used to be that these diseases would kill you with
a few months of contracting them, and now patients do not die from the diseases anymore.
And we're faced with a whole new challenges of managing these diseases if they turn into
long-term illnesses.
So this is the heart and your aorta is this big tube that comes off the heart and comes
down here and splits into the blood vessels of your legs. These are the blood vessels
of your arms and these are neck blood vessels going up to your brain.
For patients that have a type of vasculitis called large vessel vasculitis, they can have
problems and disease in the big blood vessel of their body.
And so if vasculitis affects a big blood vessel known as your aorta, it can cause it to swell
up and form an aneurysm. It can cause things to close down and form blockages. And so a
patient will come in and they'll have no blood pressure in their right arm or no pulse in
their left leg. We can comprehensively image all the blood vessels in their body.
And we do these kinds of imaging studies and figure out where in their vasculature there's
disease. Where we are with these diseases is that people survive them but they relapse
and they relapse unpredictably. And so we're trying to figure out things that allow us
to predict what happens over time. So you're trying to actually figure out something within
an individual patient that you can target treatments to.
And I think in that setting this is kind of a new age of discovery in medicine. Before
we used to be limited with what we could see or a couple of simple blood tests we can do,
but now we're not constrained by hypotheses and by what people have done before us. You
can actually really in an agnostic fashion, yes categorize what's happening at a cellular
level.
[British guy] Wait a little bit longer. The IV contrast gets excreted by the kidneys.
The way things are right now, there's so many different aspects of research that are going
on that you can't know everything. But it's great if you're sitting at a table where you
have representations from all the different kinds.
When you're in medical school, they tell you that 50 percent of what you learn in five
years is wrong, and that's kind of daunting because you're sitting there trying to study
and take all this in and you're trying to figure out which half you really need to know.
But what that means and why that's really cool is because we're rewriting medical history
continuously, you have the opportunity in medicine and medical research to change the
textbooks and to change the course of medical history in a very short time. And that's what
conceptually that really excites me.
If you find something that's surprising and interesting, it opens up a whole new box and
you go down this tunnel and there you're off and running and doing a totally different
thing than you were doing the day before. And that aspect of the job is great. It's
extremely challenging. It's constantly shifting. There's constantly interacting with new people
who are bringing in new ideas. You just don't know what the next day's going to be and that's
really, really fun.
Really, the journey is the destination. I mean you just have to stop thinking about
where you're going to be and what milestones you're going to hit in your career and just
enjoy the ride because it's a really incredible experience. Once you relax and realize that
you know you're in a very fluid field, that sort of rewards creativity and rewards hard
work, and it takes you into just unexpected places, I think we're often trained to want
to hit milestones in our lives.
And once you sort of let go of that a little bit, I think you realize how exciting this
career is."