"speaker 1: I'm Katy Blumer.
We're in the Douglas Lab at UCSF and I am volunteering for the summer.
I basically e-mailed Sean and asked if I could work for him for the summer because I thought
his research was really cool.
I have partly been working on code for him and partly been making nano structures.
speaker 2: So my name is Sean Douglas and I'm an assistant professor.
One thing that we're trying to address is how to build chemo therapies or better cancer
therapeutics.
You would want it to be safe and effective and you'd actually want to destroy only the
cancer cells and leave everything else along.
So you want to spare all the healthy cells.
speaker 1: I actually went to college wanting to work at the state department.
I wanted to be a translator.
I ended up taking science my first semester because I just, I couldn't imagine not taking
a science class anymore.
And I was trying to sort of narrow down what feel I liked and I all thought they were really
cool.
But I wanted to pick the one that I thought would have the most impact on the world at
large.
And I think nano tech is very clearly that because if you can manipulate matter at like
the smallest scale, which if he succeeds in making his nano pods he could, you can do
anything you want.
Like, you wouldn't have waste anymore because you could just recycle anything into anything
else.
And you could have better medicines.
I don't know, I always liked science but I never really saw it as something I would end
up doing.
Like I wasn't the sort of person who ended up being a scientist.
But I just kept doing it and then I became a scientist.
I'm working on one program to help stuff on design sequences for something he's working
on.
So that's a lot of just like looking at DNA strands and doing things with them.
And then also I'm working on another project where I get to make my own DNA nano structures.
And so for that Sean wrote what's actually the, I think the main program in the field
for DNA nano structures.
So basically we use this program called CAD Nano where you just sort of route the DNA
strands in this interface that he designed and it does everything for you and it can
output the sequences you need once you've sort of drawn what you would like to happen.
Well, we're working on the precursor.
It's a part to larger things.
A lot of the products I'm working on have to do with making it easier to produce nano
structures.
So like larger scale structures or making a lot of them.
I think they wanted to be moving into clinical trials in the next couple of years.
And so when you do that, you have to be able to, if you're making a medical device you
have to be able to make a lot of it so that you can inject it into someone.
You can't just like give them one nano structure.
So it's very important to be able to make a lot cheaply.
So that's one thing we're working on.
One of the reasons I like nano tech is I read this one book where they like, they just had
these nanobots that could cure anything and they could stop people aging so like they
just kept you in perfect health forever.
And I think that is probably I mean eventually possible right.
Maybe not exactly soon but I think that's a pretty good goal, to have everyone in good
health."