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"I'm Nigam Shah, and I am an Assistant Professor of medicine at Stanford University. So I grew
up in India, and I spent some part of my childhood in Africa. And in both circumstances, both
those situations, I grew up in pretty much small towns. My father is a, was a surgeon,
my mother was the principle of the local school. We pretty much knew everybody in the town.
So it was a very close knit community.
Growing up I was pretty into anything related to science. We used to build model rockets,
we actually built a device that would take pulp and make paper out of it. I came into
this country just as an experiment, trying to figure out do I like research or not? And
I just got hooked into the notion of using computers to understand things and medicine.
And then, I never looked back.
So in our group we study how to understand better care using lots of electronic medical
records. But the idea is to enable the experiences of similar patients and forming your care.
I mean, you wouldn't think twice about your doctor looking up 1000 people who are just
like you and based on that saying ""you know, this worked in about 80% of them"" so that's
what we're going to try.
We are 16 people kind of pushed in the same direction. So everybody has their own independent
projects, but at the same time are helping other people on their projects. So that in
exchange, you can ask for their help on your projects. Different people will look at the
same thing and they might have a slightly different interpretation, which might not
be the same as yours. And the most important thing to remember is that if people spend
two or three years with you, doing research with you, it is sort of your responsibility
and your job to make sure that they get to where they want to get or are trying to get.
You can think of a project as something that one person does, and writes a scientific paper,
or you can think of a project in terms of all of the different many experiments you
do, some of which lead to a paper, some of which don't, in order to answer a broad question.
[Speaker 2] We had a really cool result the other day when we were looking at cartilage,
and I was wondering if you thought, or can think of any other ways to bring in more vasculature?
[Speaker 3] Oh. I have no idea.
[Speaker 1] Not everything you start leads to success, not every project leads to a publication.
It's not wrong to fail. At least, if you haven't failed even once, it means you're not trying
hard enough. But when you fail, you have to step back and understand why you failed, so
that you don't make those same mistakes again. In medical research, I would say one of the
most exciting moments, I mean for the first time, medicine as a whole can ask questions
about disease and response to treatment using large amounts of data instead of small samples
of 1000 people or 500 people.
The most important thing about getting into medicine these days is to learn math. It's
kind of surprising, but this science, this field is becoming extremely quantitative and
data-driven. Just like a few centuries ago, learning how to write was a luxury. And then
it basically became a necessity no matter what you wanted to do. Whether you're an English
major or a science major or what have you, you still learn how to write. Writing code,
writing a computer program is going to become like that, or I would say it has even become
that today. You cannot afford to drop your computer science, your statistics, your engineering,
typically called the STEM classes. And then after that, once you've got the basic skills,
follow the question that interests you. You don't have to, you know, study yeast if you
don't want to. You don't have to study mice if you don't want to. The field is much broader
than what you would find based on a few examples and your textbooks.
So talk to your science teachers, go to the local university, try to rotate in labs that
do actual research. Spend summers getting your hands dirty doing research. And then
make a decision what is it that you like or not like. I think the most important characteristic
is to be comfortable in the presence of uncertainty. To be humble about what you don't know, and
not give up."