My name is Tan Truong and I am an upcoming Junior at Cleveland High School. This summer I have been given the opportunity to attend the Fred Hutch Pathways Research Explorers program. The lab experiments and lectures that I attended at Fred Hutch was a great experience that helped me learn more about the process of doing research and opened my eyes to the many fields of science that I could go into after high school. Before attending this program I did not have any experience working in an actual lab and I certainly didn’t get to talk to world renowned scientists. This program was special to me because I got to experience what it was like to be a scientist doing research in a real lab.
I went into this program not knowing what to expect. On the first day, I was running late to the first meeting, and when I arrived at the Fred Hutch Campus I could not find the meeting room. When I arrived at the meeting, the group was playing an icebreaker game. After that, we did a group discussion about what we thought cancer was and did an activity where we compiled words we associated with cancer on the board. We watched a video about what cancer was and the different hallmarks that made it so dangerous. At this point I thought this program would just be another boring summer course where we would just be listening to an instructor talking about cancer, but little did I know what would come next. Things started getting interesting when we were brought to the lab to do a DNA extraction procedure. It was the first hands-on experience that I had working in a lab. Although our final product was not pure DNA, I had a lot of fun working with other people from different schools.
For the next few days we did more lab experiments. One of the ones that stood out to me was the one where we got to work with CRISPR. This stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It is a technology inspired by nature that is used to edit specific genes. It uses a gRNA or guide RNA to match to a specific gene and uses cas9 to cut a specific section of DNA. This technology can be used to edit genes that can cause cancer in patients. Before attempting this, I did not think of gene editing as something that a high schooler who did not have much experience with science could do. Using pipettes, centrifuges, and using different products in the lab taught me skills that I will use in the future even if I don’t go into a science field.
A lecture and tour that stood out to me was one that was given to the session by Dr Barry Stoddard. His lab works with crystallography where he works with crystals to determine the structure of different proteins to create drugs that combat harmful proteins in one’s own body. The lesson I learned from one of his lectures was one of the most important things I’ve learned from being a part of this program. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine the makeup of different proteins and the experiment fails or sometimes other scientists will discover the solution to a problem before you. But the most important thing about being a scientist is not giving up when things don’t work because science is essentially just a huge number of trial and error until you find the solution. This is something that I will keep with me even after this program.
This is a picture of gel electrophoresis. Gel electrophoresis is a process used to separate mixtures of DNA and other proteins according to molecular size.
Me using a micropipette to measure out an exact amount of a mixture for an experiment.
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