"Thomas Miller: My name is Thomas Miller and I work at the National Institutes of Child
Health & Human Development, and that's within the National Institutes of Health.
We're trying to figure out, how do STEM cells normally work.
What genes play an important role in these STEM cells around the time of birth, because
that way, in for instance cancer, we can better identify how genes play a role in this abnormal
develop in cancer, and hopefully use that to develop new targets and drugs for targeting
cancer.
I started out in North Carolina.
I lived my whole life in North Carolina.
There, I fell in love with animals in general.
I would do a lot of pet sitting, and had dogs and cats of my own growing up, and that's
what initially got me interested in Physiology, is looking at animal Physiology in order to
hopefully become a vet one day.
That was my original goal, was to become a veterinarian.
My parents are always very supportive in what I did.
They're the ones who, when I was 15, they would drive me to a veterinary office to help
me get started in that work, doing research.
I ended up spending about three summers in the Caribbean doing research on the sex changing
fish, and looking at behavior and how they change sex and the hormones associated with
the behavioral changes.
I fell in love with this idea of doing novel research, that going into this area, no one's
ever done, using animals which are really unique.
So, these are Xenopus Laevis frogs, and these are what we use on a daily if not a weekly
basis.
So these are the adult frogs, these are all transgenic animals, meaning we've somehow
altered their genome to better understand how genes are affecting how they normally
develop.
These are usually inducible, meaning we can turn on the genes that we stick in there whenever
we need them to.
But here's adults, these behave as just a normal, everyday wild type cult animal.
Behind all of these labels, you'll see a lot of tadpoles.
These tadpoles right here I can get down to show you.
These are also transgenic animals, but they're undergoing metamorphosis.
So what you can see here are, you can see animals that have both tails and limbs.
These are animals that are actually undergoing metamorphosis.
This is the change that we actually study, because what we want to understand is how
these animals developed, what genes play an important role in STEM cell formation as they
go from tadpoles into frogs.
I do really enjoy what I do.
I get to make transgenic animals.
What this means is I can insert genes into animals, and turn these genes on and off.
We can also take tissue, and we can section tissues to look to see what's going on inside
of that tissue, using molecular techniques, where we can identify RNA and DNA and protein.
We use this to identify STEM cells and look and see if we alter genes, how that affects
how STEM cells work.
To do this, I use a lot of what's called polymerase chain reaction, so I look to see how much
DNA is being produced or how much RNA is being produced.
All right, so another thing that we need to make sure to do today is we need to add the
buffers.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Thomas Miller: Along with the DNTPA's.
We're going to set up some PCR reactions.
So we're going to look at from the genomic information that we have extracted.
Speaker 2: Right.
Thomas Miller: We're going to use that to actually PCR amplify the region of interest.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Thomas Miller: Then we can use that to see if there's any mutations in the gene that
we're actually looking at today.
Biology is really complicated and very interesting.
It's a lot more intricate and all the pieces fit together a lot more like gears than you
would possibly imagine.
One thing I would suggest is finding out what you really enjoy working on.
Getting involved with it is not as hard as you would think, because there's so many different
labs around you that are looking for volunteers and looking for people to learn.
"