"Speaker 1: Here at the Miller School of Medicine in Florida lies the Miami Project to Cure
Paralysis, a groundbreaking new study to find a permanent cure for spinal cord injury, thanks
to the efforts of several talented medical students.
Speaker 2: My name is Hassan.
I'm from Lebanon.
Speaker 3: My name's Saloni, and I'm a first year graduate student at University of Miami.
Speaker 4: So my name is Sam Beckerman.
I'm a MD-PhD student here at the University of Miami.
Speaker 2: I'm interested in everything almost.
My biggest passions are understanding how life works on the molecular level, and figuring
out how to put different scientific disciplines together to create new knowledge.
Speaker 3: I'm working on looking at transcription factors that regulate axon growth after spinal
cord injury.
Speaker 4: I study spinal cord injury research, and specifically I'm interested in some cells
that I find fascinating called astrocytes.
They're sorta ubiquitous cells in the central nervous system and after spinal cord injury
they are involved in the glial scarring process, so they create the scar tissue in the spinal
cord that we believe is inhibitory to axon regeneration, and so I'm studying these cells
and trying to find ways to manipulate them so that we can permit functional recovery
in axon regeneration after spinal cord injury.
Speaker 2: I've always been interested in nature for as long as I can remember, and
as a child anytime my parents would take us outside I would come back with something -- a
lizard, or a tiny plant I've never seen before, or just a sample of dirt to watch -- and I
think my parents recognized in me that interest in science.
And I think it was for my tenth birthday they got me a chemistry set, and my grandfather
got me a light microscope, and as soon as I put my hands on these things I knew that
that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Speaker 3: I've always thought science was really interesting.
I got into science when I was in high school and I was in a biotechnology program, and
we had little research projects like looking at transference of MRSA between dogs and their
owners.
And then when I went to college I was a biochemistry major and started working in a neuroscience
lab, and thought the brain was super cool.
And when I came here, the Miami Project has incredible research at spinal cord injury,
and you can help people that have these spinal cord injuries eventually with the research
that we do here, which is amazing.
Speaker 4: I was actually an EMT first and saw lots of patients who had traumatic brain
and spinal cord injuries in the clinic and in the emergency room, and there was just,
there aren't treatments available for those people.
And I was lucky enough to connect with some good people at Emory who were doing traumatic
brain injury research at the time, and started working there, and just became fascinated
by it.
Speaker 2: For me the best part is being able to do what I truly enjoy, day in and day out,
and know that it can have a positive impact on the health and the quality of life of other
people.
Speaker 3: This is the kind of research that helps people and gives them hope of having
better therapies and better outcomes for stuff.
Like when you get a spinal cord injury right now there's nothing that can help you with
the paralysis that much, and eventually we would hope to help them in some way.
Speaker 4: There are lots of great things about it.
I think the top two are the people that you're surrounded with and that you get to interact
with and work with on a daily basis.
Everybody's unbelievably intelligent, and dedicated, and super passionate about what
they do.
I think you have to be to do it.
But the people are great, I love learning and teaching, and I get to do both of those
in my job now.
And then the other thing that is probably the biggest thing for me is, you know, I'm
constantly challenged.
No day is the same, every day I learn something new, sometimes multiple new things every day,
and so it keeps me on my feet and, you know, it keeps me off the streets, which is the
goal.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of different kinds of research.
You can always find something that interests you.
It's always moving forward.
You're always learning something new, doing something exciting.
You're at the cutting edge and it's great.
Speaker 4: I don't that there's a more rewarding career out there in terms of it's a job so
you get paid and you can support yourself and support a family.
And when you go to work every day you're going to ultimately help people, or to try to create
new knowledge and understanding about how, you know, the world that we interact with
works, and so, you know, the combination of being able to help people and still make a
living and be successful is I think probably, you know, it's an ideal career.
Speaker 2: Obviously I think medical research is not something you get into unless you're
interested, but if you are I think there's nothing more exciting than being able to come
up with hypotheses about nature and human biology, and test them on your own.
Basically we're spending our day solving puzzles, and playing with expensive equipment, and
cutting end technology which we would not otherwise have access to.
And then we get to go home and call it a job, and get paid for it.
It's almost unfair."