One of the favorite events of the year for the team here at CIRM is our annual SPARK (Summer Program to Accelerate Regenerative Medicine Knowledge) conference. This is where high school students, who spent the summer interning at world class stem cell research facilities around California, get to show what they learned. It’s always an engaging, enlightening, and even rather humbling experience.

The students, many of whom are first generation Californians, start out knowing next to nothing about stem cells and end up talking as if they were getting ready for a PhD. Most say they went to their labs nervous about what lay ahead and half expecting to do menial tasks such as rinsing out beakers. Instead they were given a lab coat, safety glasses, stem cells and a specific project to work on. They learned how to handle complicated machinery and do complex scientific experiments.

But most importantly they learned that science is fun, fascinating, frustrating sometimes, but also fulfilling. And they learned that this could be a future career for them.

We asked all the students to blog about their experiences and the results were extraordinary. All talked about their experiences in the lab, but some went beyond and tied their internship to their own lives, their past and their hopes for the future.

Judging the blogs was a tough assignment, deciding who is the best of a great bunch wasn’t easy. But in the end, we picked three students who we thought captured the essence of the SPARK program. This week we’ll run all those blogs.

We begin with our third place blog by Dayita Biswas from UC Davis.

Personal Renaissance: A Journey from Scientific Curiosity to Confirmed Passions

By Dayita Biswas

As I poured over the pages of my battered Campbell textbook, the veritable bible for any biology student, I saw unbelievable numbers like how the human body is comprised of over 30 trillion cells! Or how we have over 220 different types of cells— contrary to my mental picture of a cell as a circle. Science, and biology in particular, has no shortage of these seemingly impossible Fermi-esque statistics that make one do a double-take. 

My experience in science had always been studying from numerous textbooks in preparation for a test or competitions, but textbooks only teach so much. The countless hours I spent reading actually demotivated me and I constantly asked myself what was the point of learning about this cycle or that process — the overwhelming “so what?” question. Those intriguing numbers that piqued my interest were quickly buried under a load of other information that made science a static stream of words across a page. 

That all changed this summer when I had the incredible opportunity to work in the Nolta lab under my mentor, Whitney Cary. This internship made science so much more tangible and fun to be a part of.  It was such an amazing environment, being in the same space with people who all have the same goals and passion for science that many high school students are not able to truly experience. Everyone was so willing to explain what they were doing, and even went out of their way to help if I needed papers or had dumb questions.

This summer, my project was to create embryoid bodies and characterize induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from children who had Jordan’s Syndrome, an extremely rare neurodevelopmental disease whose research has applications in Alzheimer’s and autism.

 I had many highs and lows during this research experience. My highs were seeing that my iPSCs were happy and healthy. I enjoyed learning lab techniques like micro-pipetting, working in a biological safety hood, feeding, freezing, and passaging cells. My lows were having to bleach my beloved iPSCs days after they failed to survive, and having unsuccessful protocols. However, while my project consistently failed, these failures taught me more than my successes.

I learned that there is a large gap between being able to read about techniques and being “book smart” and actually being able to think critically about science and perform research. Science, true science, is more than words on a page or fun facts to spout at a party. Science is never a straight or easy answer, but the mystery and difficulty is part of the reason it is so interesting. Long story short: research is hard and it takes time and patience, it involves coming in on weekends to feed cells, and staying up late at night reading papers.         

The most lasting impact that this summer research experience had was that everything we learn in school and the lab are all moving us towards the goal of helping real people. This internship renewed my passion for biology and cemented my dream of working in this field. It showed me that I don’t have to wait to be a part of dynamic science and that I can be a small part of something that will change, benefit, and save lives.

This internship meant being a part of something bigger than myself, something meaningful. We must always think critically about what consequences our actions will have because what we do as scientists and researchers— and human beings will affect the lives of real people. And that is the most important lesson anyone can hope to learn.

                                                                                                   

And here’s a bonus, a video put together by the SPARK students at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.