Hi my name is Jessica Huang and I'm a first year student studying biochemistry here at
UCLA. I'm part of IGEM which is an undergraduate research team. It's really unique because
it's the only team that's not professor-led, instead it's student-led. And we work on synthetic
biology. Which I like to make the analogy that it's like being a kid in a candy store,
where you don't know which combination of flavors and textures will be the best one,
but something exciting always waits to be discovered. I was actually born in China and
my parents and I emigrated to the US when I was four years old, and I'm originally from
Boulder, Colorado. My parents are not scientists, they come from a pretty humble background
in China and so they grew up on a farm and raising rice crops, and so they never actually
have a chance to pursue secondary education at a university setting. And so they always
had high hopes for me to pursue a higher degree of education. And so they're just happy that
I'm in an industry where there's always something to be discovered and it's a really sustainable
job industry as well. My mission in the lab is to extract proteins and to purify them,
to make them ready for processing. So my entire team works with synthetic silk inspired by
honeybees, silk worms and spiders. And so once they make the cells with specific genes
or proteins that they want to express, I take the cells, I lice them, and I extract the
proteins from them and then I will go through a process of purification to make them ready
for materials processing. In the lab there's a giant shaking incubator that I use all the
time to grow up my cell colonies, so when I grow up start-up cultures I'll put them
in overnight and it's this huge machine that's kept at 37 degrees and it just shakes my bacteria
and helps them grow. The really fun application is that we can use them as michors in search
co-applications, so for example because silk is such a strong fiber they can be used for
medical purposes like when they sew up wounds. But if for example they need to know where
the sewing is done inside, in an organ or something, if it glows in the dark, under
blue light you can detect the exact place you made the stitches, for example. What motivated
me to go into science was how it brings people together. A lot of the times, our world can
have different opinions on things but science really is a universal language. Where everyone
collaborates together in this really cooperative environment and we're all searching for the
same answer. Because the universe is a mystery to everyone around us. So many things happen
that are so microscopic and you can't see, and the only way to figure out what's going
on behind diseases and the only way to combat diseases and deadly viruses is to join forces
and work together to find out the answer. Science is a place that brings everyone together
to pursue one goal. It's like a microcosm of how the world should operate.