Medical Science Tools

Video Transcript

"These are called pipetters. And they get very precise volumes. We can get down to fractions of a micro liter. Very tiny volumes but do it very accurately. They have a bunch of sizes of these. I would say there's two types of tools or maybe three really. We use a lot of expensive equipment. Some of the instruments that we use might easily be half a million or a million dollars. And they have very intricate parts that are typically driven by computers and software. So that's another set of things that we do a lot of work on is computers. And if you just tour around our work place you'll see computers lying everywhere. Everybody's got a laptop. We've got desktops. All the instruments are run by computers. We have people working on super computers to do modeling. So computing is a big part of it. And I think if you don't like typing or computers or even kind of mathematical concepts you wont do well in this because that's a lot of what we do. And then there are tools that are really more about re-agents. So they're liquids or powders or chemicals or proteins. And we'll have a hundred little bottles all labeled with things and we're mixing them. And it's actually very abstract intellectually because we're mixing in with a pipetter a drop of this and a drop of that and following the protocol and in our mind we see them all interacting and building things that we know are in there. And then we'll using an instrument to report out that everything is assembled correctly but there's nothing to see. It's just a clear liquid sometimes. And so those liquid or powdery agents are also tools that we use. So it all has to integrate. The instruments and the computing and the re-agents into experiments. With the information sort of explosion in the last 10 years there are thousands of journals about scientific experiments in medicine. There are so many we really can't just thumb through and read the journals. Even in our own fields anymore. So there's a transition right now from print journals, and I have a stack of them on my desk across here where I get two or three a day and they stack up. And people used to thumb through them but more and more this is all being done virtually so publications are being put online and then we're doing automated searches around the virus that the work on or the cell that we work on. And any article that's relevant to us comes, it doesn't matter what journal it's in. So journals are still fighting for their survival and they're maintaining and there's some very high, the high end journals, sort of the best journals in our field would be Science or Nature. There's another one called Cell. So those are probably the three top journals where you'd see the very best discoveries being published. But on the other hand most lay people picking that up would not understand the first word of those articles. They're not good journals just to thumb through if you're not a scientist. I think for a lay person Scientific American translates those kind of discoveries into language that you can understand. So Scientific American is very good about writing things in a way that regular people can understand. But we're all trying to push our discoveries in to Cell, Science, Nature and these sorts of journals."