Wow! That was great!
My name is Audrey and I'm a neuroscientist at Caltech.
And I want to tell you about what I work on here at Caltech.
So, what I work on in my lab
is, we actually study sleep.
Let me ask you a question:
If you want to study the brain,
do you want to look at it
where it's kind of enclosed
in a skull you can't see through?
Or do you want to see it in a transparent box?
I think it's a transparent box!
So, one thing that's really good
is that we actually have this already in nature.
We have a brain in a glass box.
We have something where we can see
straight through an organism and see their brain.
What we can do is zoom in on their brain
and look at these neurons.
What I'm showing you here are neurons,
and each one of them is a different color.
They're neurons in Technicolor.
These neurons are hypocretin neurons.
Does anyone know anybody with narcolepsy?
Have you guys heard of narcolepsy?
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder
where you're always kind of sleepy,
and when you get stimuli that excite you,
or something that is, I guess, your brain food,
instead of being excited,
which is kind of the normal thing to do,
you actually fall asleep.
These neurons I'm showing you here
are the neurons that are involved in that.
So, when we have all these neurons in different colors in the brain,
the important thing is:
How do they connect with one another?
You have all these tracks--
how many of you guys here have taken public transportation?
When you have public transportation,
what's important is where those points of contact are,
and where all those different tracks lead.
And so, similar to that,
we are constructing a system map.
One of the ways we want to do this,
is to take cues from how we interact with other humans.
When we have another human,
one thing that we do is give a handshake.
So what professor Cori Bargmann did
is that she designed a way to do a molecular grasp.
So for example, I'm neuron Audrey,
this is neuron Ella,
and we each have a glove that's not lighting up.
But when we make contact,
we actually have our gloves lighting up.
And when we are further away,
the lights go off.
So, this is a way to figure out
how those neurons are connecting to one other,
and we can actually see...
(Audience laughs at off-camera event)
[Cori and her friends Molecular Grasp]
...we see when the neurons are talking to each other,
when they're close enough to one other,
and when they're further apart from each other.
I want to talk about my motivation to study science.
I want to study science
because I like to test ideas and observe what happens.
What we want to do is make sure we're making a fair comparison.
When we have an apple, we want to compare it to an apple.
When you make a comparison, you want to make sure
you're comparing an orange to an orange.
So in controlled conditions, we have lots of different controls.
We have positive controls and negative controls;
you have positive controls to make sure
when you're actually testing something, you can see an effect.
You have negative controls to make sure you don't have auto-activation,
so that when you don't have introduction
of the experimental condition or stimuli you're testing,
it's not going to just go off.
And then you have your experimental condition.
And when you design an experiment,
you have lots of positive controls,
you have lots of negative controls,
and you have your experimental condition.
One trend that we're seeing in neuroscience
is that we can observe and test our idea.
And what we scientists are,
is we're kind of like little ninjas,
just quietly looking at the brain.
And that's what Alex and his friends have done.
What they do is take these brains that are in glass boxes,
and the brains are swimming, or sleeping,
or doing whatever they want,
and the team, meanwhile, captures the neural activity.
The way they do this
is that they've genetically engineered
each of these neurons to give off a photon of light,
and the more active these brains are,
the more photons come out,
so you see a greater luminescence.
And so, while these fish are doing their regular business,
while these brains in glass boxes are doing their regular business,
and we can observe the neural activity.
Let's say we want to take this a little bit further,
to the entire human population.
What if we look at the entire human population,
in your native environment,
and let's say we take away those positive and negative controls
and just have experimental conditions?
What if we have something like a wiki log,
a wiki lab notebook,
where everyone contributes their ideas,
and as people are contributing, everyone writes over one another,
kind of like Wikipedia. Who would have thought
that WIkipedia would have taken off the way it did,
with all its success? But it did.
And what if we could apply it to science?
It's slightly different than how we think about things now.
We have these apples and oranges,
and usually we can't compare them to one another.
But now we have all these different conditions,
and things like maybe weird fruits,
like dragon fruit,
and we want to compare those.
So, I want to give you a challenge:
to be the ones, to be the mathematicians
and the statisticians to design
these types of algorithms;
and to decide whether or not
we can extrapolate trends
and figure out the observations without all those controls.
So, change the way we do science. Go change the world.
Thanks!
(Applause)