Very often I get that ever-popular question, “So what do you do?” Sometimes I wish I had an easy answer like car mechanic that explains itself. I never know what to say really, I’ve tried everything from lab head, lab investigator, neuroscientist, professor, to the always-boring-and-vague scientist. Now, I love what I do, and am proud to be a scientist, but that word really doesn’t convey the magnitude and scope of what we biomedical researchers really do. Just recently, I settled on a new answer that I plan to start giving people when they ask me the question, “So what do you do?” My reply will gladly be, “I create hope.”
The day to day of science research can be frustrating and intellectually exhausting. Experiments frequently fail, grants always are being written, and managing graduate students and post-docs to work together yet maintain some aspect of individuality proves to be quite difficult. However, what keeps us going is the endpoint, no matter how far off it may be: discovering a new way to help sick people get better. And I must be honest—a lot of the time we get distracted from this and lose sight of this endpoint as we get caught up in the business that is biomedical research. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in one day, and neither was a new drug to cure Parkinson’s disease. And it’s because research is such a gradual process that we can easily lose sight of our goal. But while we may not be producing a new therapy every year, what we do and can provide is hope to millions of sick people, and hope can be a powerful, powerful thing.
Recently I was fortunate enough to meet a man, the father of two children, who called our institute to find out more about our research. Turns out his teenage son has a blinding disorder that has already cost him 30% of his vision. He began telling me about his remarkable son, how he starts for his baseball team and never feels sorry for himself. This man then went on to tell me that as a father, he invests a lot of his free time in holding fundraisers to generate money for research so that one day his son and others like him will have a therapy that will help preserve the rest of their vision. He says that in doing this, he is providing his son with hope and the idea that something is being done to help, beyond just going to the doctor for eyesight tests. That’s pretty amazing, if you ask me. When he came into the lab and talked to us, it immediately put what I do every day back into perspective. I am providing hope for this young boy and his family, and all the others like him.
Now, as providers of hope, we must always be careful that the hope we offer isn’t false. I truly believe the field of stem cell research holds great promise and will offer cures for some of the most devastating diseases, but I am always careful as to offering a discrete time frame for this. Being honest and straightforward is the best medicine in this situation, and in most cases, people really appreciate this and thank me for providing them with the hope that one day we can help them.
Our motto at the Neural Stem Cell Institute is “Providing Hope Through Ground-Breaking Discovery.” I really love this. I believe it summarizes exactly what we do. It is truly an honor to be a provider of hope, and my hope is that one day I can transform hope into a cure for many of these remarkable sick people.
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