 Growing up in Detroit, Michigan, none of my friends in grade school or high school traveled at all. In fact, I could count the number of people that even had a passport that I knew on one hand. I get to college, U of M is very cosmopolitan. You have a lot of New Yorkers, a lot of people from California, a lot of rich kids from overseas who come there. So there are a lot of kids studying abroad, getting travel, all this fun stuff. And I really wanted that. And I was like, you know what? I wanna take a break from school. I'm gonna take a gap year. I'm not gonna apply to medical school. And I wanna travel. How did your dad feel about that? Not thrilled. And he said what I think any blue collar dad at that point, and mind you, he was concerned about his pension now. He was not making money with the city. He was very concerned about himself and making house payments. He said, get a fucking job. Not paying for you to fart around Europe and find yourself. What is wrong with you? So I have this biology degree and I don't know what I wanna do for a career. I know that I wanna make some good money so I can save up to go on this European backpacking trip. So I get a job in a lab doing research. And in undergrad, I really just barely went to class, got good enough grades to test well to get into medical school, but I didn't do any extracurricular activities. I didn't do any sort of research, projects, anything like that in my college career. So now I'm thrust into a lab and the lab that I joined, my boss at the time, my principal investigators, what they're called, he had put together a amazing proposal that got funded to look for head and neck cancer stem cells. So my job essentially was I'd scrub up, I'd go in the OR, my boss would be doing a surgery on someone's head or neck or tongue. It was oral cancers. He'd cut some of the tumor out, give it to me. I'd run down to the animal room, I'd grow it in a mouse and then I would do a bunch of flow cytometry on it and try to target specific cell populations to implant in future mice to see if I could regrow the heterogeneity of this tumor. Fascinating project and I'm basically fresh out of college and I'm doing it. I'm running a $3 million machine. I got this grant that's riding on me and my work and after a little over a year, almost a year and a half, I have six mice. We do a number of serial assays to figure out the small population of cells that were CD44 positive, CD24 negative. For those of you who are total bio nerds, these are cell surface markers that I was basically testing for and I could inject a hundred of these cells and I could regrow a tumor in a mouse. My boss is ecstatic. I'm telling my dad I'm gonna be a published author so all this skipping out on medical school that my dad was worried about, I was like, hey dad, I got a scientific career starting here. I'm still doing it. So I was really focused again on making my dad proud even though I wasn't fully fulfilling his dream for me and I walk into the lab and my boss says, Stanford scooped us and I'd never heard that. I didn't know what that meant and I was very confused. I said, what do you mean Stanford scooped us? He's like, yeah, we're not gonna be able to publish our paper. And I said, what? We're not gonna be able to publish our paper. And he's like, yeah, unfortunately, this really famous stem cell biology lab at Stanford, they also isolated head and neck tumor cells that they think are cancer stem cells and they're gonna publish in PNAS which was a fantastic journal. So basically they've beat you guys to the pun? Yeah.