 Hello, I'm Dr. Francis Collins, and I'm the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. In April 2003, an international team of researchers finished sequencing the human genome, the set of genetic blueprints used to construct the human body. Completing the human genome project launched a brand new era of scientific studies. We call this the genome era. In this era, we're going to make revolutionary discoveries, learn more about human biology, develop new medical tests, maybe even cure cancer. I invite you to be part of that revolution. Today, as we celebrate National DNA Day, I'd like you to meet three of my colleagues, young scientists just launching their careers here at the National Human Genome Research Institute. And as you enter their world and take a real-life look into the lab, I want you to ask yourself a simple question. Could science be the career for me? I remember I started my talk with the students asking, how do you think a scientist looks like? And they told me, well, he's a man, he's around 50 years old, and he's ugly, and he has bad teeth. And I said, listen, well, I'm a woman, I think my teeth are fine, and maybe you don't have the right idea about what a scientist is. So I graduated from the College of William & Mary with a degree in French and art history. I grew up actually taking care of livestock. We had chickens and donkeys and other yard animals that I had to take care of. I remember very well that my birthday present, when I was nine, was a microscope. Well, my father took me to a place where there was some kind of pond with really dirty water. And we took a sample and put it in a jar, and then we went home and I spent several weeks taking little samples of the jar and looking at all the strange creatures that you cannot see with your eyes. Look at this one here. I find science has always been really interesting to me, and the sort of problem-solving of research has always appealed to me. And I also like that I feel like I'm doing something that will make a difference in some way to the general community. I remember doing things like looking at our blood under the microscope, identifying red blood cells and white blood cells, and that was very fascinating for me too, because you actually get to see these little cells outside of the body, which definitely heightened my interest in science. My dad and an older brother, a grandfather, three uncles, and a great aunt, who are all physicians, so I always, growing up, thought I was going to go into medicine. And then when I was actually trying to sit down and put down on paper why it was that I wanted to be a physician, I realized that it wasn't necessarily the role of a physician that appealed to me, but the research and the scientific field more than the patient care. There is a little bit of a misconception about how hard is science and the kind of people that actually do science. I'm doing science. I mean, anyone can do science. To be a good scientist, it's the most important thing is to be a very detail-oriented person. You can join science at any moment in your life. It's not that you have to know that you want to be a Nobel Prize since you are five. That doesn't work like that. There's not a single path that will land you in science, and I don't think there's any right or wrong way to get there. I think the first thing that it really takes is a sense of curiosity. So don't think that you need extra powers in terms of being a genius in mathematics or something like that to be a scientist. And science has infinite fields. You can always find out one that fits your abilities and your interests. I think it's really a strength to have strong computer skills. There's a huge computer science component to things, a huge computational side of things. You still have to be motivated because that has to drive the curiosity that you have, and research in itself is quite rewarding. I was working with the genetics of the inner ear. The inner ear has two parts, the hearing part and the vestibular system part. The vestibular system part is the one that takes care of telling us what is upside down and if we're moving or rotating all those feelings of where are you positioned to come from your vestibular system. So David asked me to work with a mouse mutant that is named Tilted. It lives in a permanent non-gravity situation because it has a mutation that impairs the sense of balance. And this can be seen very easily if you compare the swimming behavior. Wild type mice, if you just drop them in a pool of water, they immediately, in an instinctive way, they know how to go up and swim and they just don't have any problems. But the Tilted mouse, the pool thing is completely clueless, doesn't have no idea what is upside down. What is wrong with these mice is that they are lacking in their ears these tiny little structures named Otoconia, which are like little tiny stones made half with protein, half with minerals, and they are actually very heavy. So they sit on your ears and the force of gravity pulls down and that stimulates some little hair cells that are underneath the stones. I've been working this project for four years. I would like to tell you about this one student that I had that was, it was a lot of fun to work with him. His name was Xavier and he was coming from Puerto Rico and he was only 17 years old. At the time he came to my lab, I had narrowed my search for the gene for Tilted to five genes. So I knew it was one of the five but I didn't know which one of them. So Xavier was to screen all those five genes and see if he could find any tiny difference in any of them when he compared the wild type mice with the Tilted mice. And when he was halfway screening the last one, his summer program was about to end, so he just extended his program for one more week and he got it. He came one day to the lab and he said, I think I found a difference between the wild type and the Tilted mouse. And he showed me these little printings with all the sequencing data from both genes and there it was. It's fun, you know, in a weird way. It's fun. I mean, I enjoy coming into the lab. There's sometimes when I come in on weekends, which I actually do enjoy coming in on weekends because it's usually a lot quieter. I usually turn up my music. I literally blast the radio and I'm literally dancing and the bass. The life of a scientist person in general, not only a geneticist, I think it's, in a way, it's relaxed because it's not like a nine to five work. Yeah, there are a lot of cute guys in science too. I mean, I really love what I'm doing right now and I certainly would want to continue. You know, there's always people who are interested in the work that you're doing and we go to tea on Tuesdays and people just, you know, there's a strong sense of camaraderie. I found that people have been really supportive and encouraging and that's been really fantastic. I usually come around eight in the morning to my lab. I check my email, I check quickly what do I have to do during the day. Because I work in a laboratory that is mostly bioinformatics, I spend most of my day in front of my computer. What really appeals to me about it is being able to set out a problem and try to solve it. I have a lot of talented coworkers that we have a lot of fun discussions because everybody knows a little bit more about one thing than you. So if you have any particular question, there's always going to be around somebody that can give you a hand with the knowledge you are lacking. So it's a very collaborative atmosphere. You know, I think that's a really big misconception. You know, scientists aren't all geeks or nerds. You know, I tell people to, and one of the reasons why I come in on weekends is because there are times when, you know, I just think about the experiment that I have to do today and I'm very excited to come in and actually do it because I know if it works, I'm going to find out something. Ultimately in life, you have to find something that you are passionate about. It's really been remarkably helpful to have the human genome sequence. I think it's important to know how genes are turned on and off. I'm currently working also on a melanoma study. Our lab here is more focused on leukemia. Melanoma is the most deadly type of skin cancer and I'm trying to identify genes that make an individual more susceptible to developing melanoma. I'm hoping to establish cancer model in zebrafish. We have collected about 150 families that have multiple cases of melanoma in them and we're trying to identify the regions in the genome, so across all of the different chromosomes where the affected individuals are more similar than the unaffected individuals. The idea there is to generate a line of fish that can get myeloid tumors. If I found a region that was interesting, say on chromosome 1, I can go to the human genome sequence and I can say, okay, tell me all the markers, genetic markers that are known to be mapped to this region. And the idea there in terms of the therapeutic is to look for a molecule that can either modify the rate at which you get tumor progression. I think we're just starting to understand how important genetics are and how important it will be to see how your genes interact with the environment. I actually strongly encourage all the students that are coming from underrepresented minorities because I know from my talks with minority students in the past, I know that many times they share a feeling of isolation, they feel I'm the only person that looks like this or I'm the only person that is coming from my tribe or it's kind of hard when you don't have a lot of role models to think they're going to fit in. And that's one of the nice things about being in a laboratory in the United States because frequently you do have visiting scientists from all over the world. If you see people doing what you want to do, you're more inclined to think that you can do that. I do think it's important for minority kids to see other minorities doing science because then hopefully can also motivate them to think that if Milton's doing science, then that means there's something that I can do. But actually the good thing about the scientific environment is everybody fits in because everybody is different. It's like one coming from one country and coming from another, one with great English, one with bad English. There's not two people alike. If you're a minority student, you will feel almost that suddenly you're not different from anybody because everybody's different. I hope meeting my colleagues and taking a look inside our labs has given you a better idea of what it's like to be a scientist in the genome era. And I also hope it inspires more than a few of you to say yes to science as a career.