Started from the Bottom Now We’re Here

 

 

Elizabeth Stout, PhD Candidate

 

Started from the Bottom Now We’re Here

 

This week I was asked to return to my old haunt – high school. I was given a very simple brief, come in and tell the students about what lab life is like and how I went from this very school to being in a research lab.

The words ‘Molecular’ and ‘Geneticist’ are a little scary at first sight. I get asked time and time again why I chose such a ‘difficult’ career. For me, I find the idea ludicrous. I absolutely love my job, and so far, I’ve found that passion gets you everywhere. Regardless, as I was introduced as Elizabeth, alumni and Research Scientist in Molecular Genetics – I was not at all surprised to these thoughts reflected in the eyes of the high school students before me.

I started with a story.

When I was in year 9, two incredible individuals from CSIRO, whom I wish I could thank appropriately, came to show our class the wonderful world of DNA. We performed the age-old experiment of extracting DNA from a strawberry. I distinctly remember being amazed, and brought the tube full of DNA home to show my mum (who was a bit horrified really). It was love at first sight. From then on biology became my favourite subject – which was saying something as I loved school. I know, I know – I can almost hear my family laughing at me for that one, “maybe that’s why after all these years you’re still studying!” I spent time in year 10 reading about monoallelic diseases that are still without cures, and funnily enough this is the area of research I work in today.

Getting to the ‘what do I do’ segment of my presentation, I spoke to the students about how there are individuals in the world who for all intents and purposes should have a blood disorder due to mutations in their adult β-globin gene, but do not suffer symptoms of the disease. These individuals have variations in their genome that protect them from the disease. Studies have shown that these variants cause a ‘back up’ copy of the gene, foetal haemoglobin, to be switched back on. Today, our work involves tracking down the off and on switches in our genome (transcription factors), and figuring out how these variants modulate these switches to reawaken the sleeping foetal globin gene. This is the basis of our research and it’s a pretty good story to tell if I do say so myself.

It’s an incredible thing to be standing where my teachers once spoke about adenine, guanine, cytosine and tyrosine. The wonderful world of molecular biology was right there all those years ago. But you never really think about how those lessons affect you until many years later. I showed the students our sequencing data and how we know that mutations are present. There were some fantastic questions about this, ranging from how we know what sequence is what, and whether we can see the DNA by eye. I personally think it’s amazing that we can be working on something we can’t even see with our naked eyes, and from what I can tell they agreed with me.

Knowing what I wanted to do didn’t make the path any easier, but it did make me even more determined. I had to do three times the amount of work as some people who ‘just got it’. I frequently thought I wasn’t smart enough, but I just kept trying. When I was in year 12, I was told that I would lose at least 5-10 ATAR points because of my hand writing. Aptly nicknamed ‘chicken scratch’, my writing borders on illegible. It’s a running joke in the lab that if there’s a tube you can’t read the label on; the rack is likely mine. I pushed on, and I did just fine. The message here was that we all have hiccups, uncontrollable circumstances and the like – and easy as it is to say, just push through it.

Year 12 was my easiest year in high school. I got to study all the subjects I wanted and I was completely immersed in the possibilities of university and my future career. I don’t think there are many individuals who could say that they didn’t go through periods of crippling self-doubt and nearly overwhelming fear, but I had back up plan after backup plan. I wanted this. And this is what I tried to tell the students.

I want to see more people going in science. Don’t be held back by the stigma. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re not smart enough. I will go back to my high school telling my story every year until the day one of those students that sat before me, sits next to me in the lab complaining that their experiment isn’t working.

At the end of the day, as the groups packed up to leave, there were a handful of students who came up to tell me they wanted to be geneticists when they left school. Maybe there’s hope that dream might just come true.