"My name is Adam de la Zerda.
We're now in Stanford University, in my lab in the Department of Structural Biology in
the Medical School, and I'm the P.I.
here.
So I grew up in Haifa, which is a town in the north part of Israel.
I, my father is a, was a, Is a chemist, and my mom is an architect.
When I came to Stanford I studied quantum physics, and I never took a single biology
course in my life.
Literally a single biology class in my life.
A good friend of mine passed away from brain cancer, and I decided to put all of my history
behind, and all my interest in quantum physics behind, and tried to join the cancer research
community.
What we're hoping to get to or our vision for the future is to be able to create those
tiny little molecular agents that are the size, that are nanometric in scale, so smaller
than one thousandth of the thickness of a hair, and inject these agents by the billions
into our bloodstream, and have them go all over our body, and go cell by cell, and kind
of like knock on that door, and ask the cell, are you of a particular kind that I'm interested
in.
For example, if you're a cancer cell.
And if you are a cancer cell, are you responding to the treatment we're giving you, as an example.
And if the answer is yes, they will bind to it.
If the answer is no, they'll let go.
Those that have decided to bind will now start to send signals to us, and say hey, look at
me.
I'm here.
And we'll be able to receipt that with those special cameras that we're building outside
of the body.
And in fact, when we're looking at a tumor that is really that small, like maybe, like
a garbanzo bean size tumor.
In that particular tumor you can have as many as one billion cancer cells.
When we're actually trying to treat someone that has cancer, for us to cure that person
means to kill 100 percent of these cells.
Not 99.9 percent.
Truly 100 percent of these cells.
And that's very tough.
You can see the ten little particles we created, and what we've done here is we've brought
them to the field of brain cancer.
And that we're able to find the brain tumor, and actually show us exactly where the tumor
is.
And so now if you're a surgeon, and you're trying to cut away only the tumor and leave
the healthy brain intact, you're can actually start doing it here.
What's the most exciting part of being in this lab is that it just doesn't, to me, at
least when I think about it, people too.
It just doesn't feel like coming to work.
That's an electron microscope.
So this is zooming down to those tiny, tiny, tiny secret agents I was telling you about
before.
And interesting enough, they created some sort of a pattern here.
This is a complete mistake.
This is one of those failures that we talked about.
And you'll notice that it actually made some interesting shape there.
[Speaker 2] It's a heart.
[Speaker 1] Exactly.
[Speaker 2] You think?
[Speaker 1] And that concept of work doesn't quite exist here.
For us, we're like kid in a candy store.
I think another thing I really like about this lab is it's very, very diverse.
People are coming from all corners of the world, with so many different backgrounds.
Some are chemists.
Some are physicists.
Some are engineers.
Some are biologists.
Some are medical doctors.
These are really, really good people.
Naturally good people that actually want to, that really care about science and actually
want to make a change, and affect humanity in a positive way.
It's about bringing the absolute best people, but having a very strict no [bleep] rule in
the lab.
It's just a very, very, you know, strict rule.
It doesn't matter how good you are, if you're a [bleep] or not.
[Speaker 2] Right.
[Speaker 1] It's, it's not, it's not gonna work.
Failure is probably the one single most important thing in science, and it's one so, it's the
thing that is so important because frankly most of the time, we're failing.
I would say that, I tell my students that if one out of every ten experiments that they
do actually succeeds, that's wonderful.
That's phenomenal.
The type of things we do here are super high-risk.
Of course if we get there, it is also a huge reward.
But there's so many reasons why we will fail.
You have to be really open about this, and say hey, the experiment failed.
It's not me that failed.
I did not fail myself.
The experiment failed.
And now let's try to learn why is it that the experiment failed, and see what can we
learn from that.
Most times we can learn a lot more from a failed experiment than we can learn from a
successful experiment actually.
We really start from zero, and we try to get here, right?
And this is a huge jump already to do, and one that is not trivial at all, in fact.
Many times there's a good chance that there is no what to get from here to there.
There's no way to get from point A to point B.
In some ways, it's like going to a new type of planet, and you're almost guaranteed that
wherever it is you're landing, there's something interesting that no one has ever been there
before.
And that's the beauty of science.
Now in 2015, I think medical research is probably one of the most exciting places to be.
And that's no, I'm of course very biased but I hope for good reasons.
A lot of things happened over the past 50 years, and a lot of them just came into fruition
recently.
So the type of questions we can ask ourself these days are questions that we never, ever
imagined we'll ever be able to ask.
And there's this general feeling when you go to conferences now, and you talk to other
scientists that actually everything is kind of possible now.
You have to have a very strong self-confidence in you, because most of the times, you will
fail.
And so it's a passion for learning and passion for creating that come together with a very
strong self-confidence, that you know that if you set your mind to something, you will
get there.
If you're really passionate about something, if you really want to solve a certain problem,
if you want to do something that you believe is really significant, really, profoundly
important to you, there's probably nothing that can really stop you from doing it."