"Speaker 1: My name is Daniel Colon-Ramos and I'm an associate professor in cell biology
and cellular neuroscience at Yale University.
I am the principal investigator in a lab that studies the development of the neuro system,
much like circuits in a computer need to be properly connected for the computer to work,
the circuits in our own brains need to be properly connected for our brains to work,
you know?
For example, when they don't happen properly then you end up with problems like autism.
And when they happen properly but then they break down, you end up with problems like
Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.
Here's where we see the main part of my lab, where people do their experimental work.
This is an example of how a bench looks like.
So we work on a nematode, it grows on these plates.
The nematodes are tiny; they're about a milliliter in length.
I think it's about the size of a comma in a sentence.
So we cannot see them very well with our eyes, we use these microscopes to magnify them to
be able to see them.
And then we use these, it's essentially a small pipette, a glass pipette with a wire
and we use this wire to transfer them between plates or put them on microscope slides.
Not everything we do is work, we also eat together, have meetings together.
What we do in this space is to be able to image the animals, the worms.
The worms are expressing fluorescent proteins and so we use light that excites those proteins
and look at structures inside the animal and inside the cells.
So C. elegans is one of the few multi cellular organisms that can be frozen and we can store
them in these liquid nitrogen tanks.
The boxes here are packed full of the nematodes that we have frozen as our experimental work
has progressed and they are crygenically preserved.
Some of them have been crygenically preserved there for close to a decade.
Essentially what this is, is simple.
It's a metal slab that allows us to create a temperature grating.
It goes from cold side here to warm side.
And then we can put a plate in the middle and put animals in the middle of the plate
. The red lights are just allowing us to see the animals.
Now C. elegans remembers if it was fed at a warm temperature or a cold temperature.
So by putting the animal in the middle and then imaging if it moves toward the left side
which is cold or the right side which is warm, so we can essentially use this as a system
to see the memory, to see the animal executing its cultivation temperatural memory.
So I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, my family come from the island.
One side of the family, they were in agriculture.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a carpenter.
I do not come from a family of scientists.
I did not know any scientists growing up.
I went to college, to Harvard University so that's when I moved out of Puerto Rico and
I moved to Cambridge and I there I explored my interests with science.
But I was really intimidated.
I was intimidated by the people doing the work and I was intimidated by the machines.
So I wasn't sure if I could do the work and I was also interested in linking whatever
I was going to do with a social mission.
I'm part of a nonprofit organization called Ciencia Puerto Rico where essentially we have
linked close to 7000 scientists from around the world to impact science as a vocation
in Latin America.
So that's a big passion of mine.
I have three kids, I have triplets, they're three girls, they're turning four in a few
weeks.
Doing science is not for everybody, any more than becoming an architect is for everybody
or becoming a journalist is for everybody.
Everyone has to find their calling and their niche and that's perfectly fine.
But this aspect of scientific literacy, understanding what are the outstanding questions, what are,
I mean how do you take a problem that looks huge, how do we put a man on the moon or a
woman on the moon?
Breaking it down into problems that we can solve should be a fundamental part of our
vocation."