Hello. I'm Dr. Francis Collins and I'm the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute
at the National Institutes of Health.
In April 2003,
an international team of researchers finished sequencing that human genome,
the set of genetic blueprints used to construct the human body.
Completing the Human Genome Project launched on brand new era of scientific studies.
We call this the genome era.
In this era, we're going to make revolutionary discoveries, learn more about human biology,
develop medical tests,
maybe even cure cancer.
I invite you to be part of that revolution.
Today as we celebrate National DNA Day,
I'd like you to meet three of my colleagues,
young scientists just launching their careers, here at the National Human Genome Research Institute.
And as you enter their world and take a real-life look into the lab,
I want you to ask yourself a simple question:
Could science be the career for me?
I remember I started my talk with the students asking,
how do you think a scientist looks like?
And they told me, "Well, it's a man, he's around fifty years old,
and he's ugly and he has bad teeth.
And I said "Listen,
I'm a woman.
I think my teeth are fine,
and maybe you don't have the right idea about what a scientist is."
I graduated from the college of William and Mary and
with a degree in French and Art History.
I grew up actually
you know, taking care of livestock. We had like chickens and
donkeys and
other yard animals that
I had to take care of.
I remember very well that my
birthday present when I was nine was a microscope.
Well, my father took me to a place where there was some kind of pond with really dirty water
and we took a sample and put it in a jar
and then we went home and I spend several weeks
taking little samples of the jar and looking at
all the strange creatures that you cannot see with your eyes. Look at this one here.
I find science has always been really interesting to me.
and the sort of problem-solving of
research has always appealed to me.
and
I also like that
I feel like I'm
doing something that will make a difference
in some way to the
general community.
I remember doing things like, you know, looking at our blood under the microscope,
identifying the red blood cells and white blood cells, and
that was
very fascinating for me too, because, you know,
you actually get to see these little cells
outside of the body which,
you know, definitely
heightened my interest in science.
My dad and
an older brother,
my grandfather,
three uncles and a great-aunt who are all physicians. So I always, growing up, thought I was going
to go into medicine and then when I was actually trying to
sit down and and put down on paper why it was that I wanted to
be a physician, I realized that it wasn't necessarily
the role of a physician that I
appealed to me but the
research and
the scientific
field more than that
the patient care.
There's a little bit of a misconception about how hard is science and the kind of people
that actually do science.
I'm doing science. I mean anyone can do science. To be a good scientist,
the most important thing is to be
a very
detail oriented person.
You can join science at any moment in your life.
It's not that you have to know that you want to be a Nobel Prize since you are five.
It doesn't work like that. There's not a single path that will land you
in science and I don't think there's any right or wrong
way to get there. I think the
first thing that it really takes is a sense of curiosity. So don't think that you
need extra powers
in terms of being a genius in mathematics or something like that to be a scientist.
Science has infitine fields. You can always find out one
that fits your abilities and your interests.
I think it's really a strength to have strong computer skills
There is a
huge computer science component to things, a huge computational
side of things. You still have to be motivated because if...
that has to drive, you know, the curiosity that you have,
and, research in itself is quite rewarding.
I was working with the genetic of the inner ear.
The inner ear has two parts, the hearing part and the vestibular system part
is the one that takes care of
telling us what is upside down
if we're moving
or rotating. All those feelings of
where are you positioned
come from your vestibular system.
So David asked me to work with a mouse mutant
that is named "Tilted". It lives in a permanent non-gravity situation because
it has a mutation that
impairs the
sense of balance.
And this can be seen very easily if you compare the swimming behavior.
Wild-type mice, if you just drop them in a pool of water they immediately
in an instinctive way, they know how to go up and swim and they just don't have
any problems.
But the tilted mouse,
the poor thing is completely
clueless. It doesn't have no idea when it's upside down. What is wrong with these mice
is that they are lacking in their ears these tiny little structures named otoconia,
which are like little tiny stones made half with protein, half with minerals,
and they are actually very heavy. So they sit on your ears and
the force of gravity pulls down
and that stimulates some
some little hair cells that are underneath the stones. So I work in this project for four years.
I would like to
tell you about
this one student that I had that was
it was a lot of fun to work with the him
and his name was Xavier and he was coming from Puerto Rico, and
he was only seventeen years old.
At the time he came to my lab, I had narrowed my search for
the gene for Tilted
to five genes.
so I knew it was one of the five, but I didn't know which one of them.
So the project of Xavier was to screen all those five genes and see if he could find
any tiny difference in any of them
when he compared the tilted mice.
When he was halfway screening
the last one,
his summer program was about to end so he just extended his program for one more week,
and he got it.
He came one to the lab and he said, "I think I found a difference between
the wild-type and the tilted mouse" and
he showed me these little
printings with all the sequencing data from both genes, and there it was.
It's fun,
you know. In a weird way,
it's... it's fun. I mean I enjoy...
I enjoy
coming into the lab. There are some times when I come in weekends
which I actually do enjoy coming in on the weekends because
it's usually a lot quieter.
I usually turned up my music.
I literally blast the radio and I'm literally dancing down the...
dancing in the bass. The life of a scientist person in general
not only a geneticist,
I think it's in a way it's relaxed because it's not like a nine to
five work.
Yeah, there are a lot of cute guys in science, too.
I mean, I really love what I'm doing right now,
and I certainly would want to continue.
You know, there's always people who are interested in the work that you're doing, and
we go to teas on tuesdays and people just, you know,
there's a strong sense of camaraderie. I've found that people have been really supportive
and encouraging, and that's been really fantastic.
I usually come around 8:00 in the morning to my lab. I check my e-mail.
I check quickly,
what do I have to do during the day.
Because I work in a laboratory that is mostly bioinformatics, I spend
most of the day in front of my computer. What really appeals to
me about it is being able to set out of a problem and try to solve it. I have a lot of talented
co-workers that we have a lot of fun
discussions because everybody knows a little bit more about one thing
than you, so if have any particular question, there's always going to be around somebody that can give
you a hand with the knowledge you are lacking. So it's a very collaborative
atmosphere.
You know, I think that's a
really big misconception, you know.
Scientists aren't all geeks or nerds.
You know, I tell people one of the reasons why I come in on weekends is because there
are times when,
you know, I just think about the experiment that I have to today and I am very excited to
come in and actually do it because I know if it works, I'm going to find out something.
Ultimately in life
you have to find
something that's you're passionate about.
it's really been
remarkably helpful to have the human genome sequence I think it's important to know
genes are turned on and off.
I'm currently working also on a melanoma study. Our lab here is more focused
on Leukemia. Melanoma is the most deadly type of skin cancer and I'm trying to
identify genes that make an individual
more susceptible to developing melanoma.
I'm hoping to establish a cancer model
in zebra fish.
We have collected about 150 families that have multiple cases of melanoma
in them
and we're trying to identify the regions in
the genomes across all of the different chromosomes
where the affected individuals are
more similar than the unaffected individuals.
And the idea
there is to generate a line of fish that
can get myeloid tumors. If I found a region that was interesting, say on chromosome one, I can go to the human
genome sequence and I can say
okay
tell me all the markers, genetic markers, that are known to be mapped to this region. And the
idea
there in terms of
the therapeutics is to look for a molecule that
can either modify
the rate at which you get tumor progression...
I think we're just starting to understand how important
genetics are
and how
important it will be to see how your genes
interact with the environment.
I would actually strongly encourage all of the students that are coming from under-represented minorities
because I know
from my talks with minority
students in the past,
I know that many times they share a feeling of isolation.
They feel "I'm the only person that looks like this" or "I'm the only person that is coming from my tribe"
or it's kind of hard
when you don't have a lot of role models to thin they're gonna fit in.
That's one of the
nice things about being
in a laboratory in the United States because you do have
visiting scientists from all over the world,
If you see
people doing what you want to do,
you're more
inclined to think that you can do that. I do think it's important
for minority kids to see other minorities doing science because,
you know, that hopefully can also motivate them to think that well, you know,
"If Milton's doing science, you know, then that means it's something that I can do."
But actually
the good thing about the scientific environment is everybody fits in because everybody is different.
It's like one coming from one country, one coming from another.
One with great English, one with bad English.
There's no two people alike.
If you're a minority student,
you will feel almost that
suddenly
you're no different from anybody because everybody's different.
I hope meeting my colleagues and taking a look inside our labs has given you a better idea of what
it's like to be a scientist in the genome era.
And I also hope that inspires more than a few of you to say "Yes"
to the science as a career.