From making fantastic beasts to meeting fantastic beasts

I’ve heard so many good stories about why people do science. For me, however, the story is totally out of left field and so far, climaxless. It may be bad for my publicity but I have to admit I’ve always been in the 95th percentile for eccentricity among my academic peers throughout my career stages. My career really started before my tens, sometime in the 2000s, when I decided my biggest dream was to make mystical creatures, hybrid creatures, and fantastic beasts. This was after the way too many films and documentaries I had watched^1-3.

I competed in the China National Biology Olympiad in high school, for which I studied many various college biology textbooks, mostly by myself, as the Olympiad was not something my high school was fond of. Ranked the 22^nd in my province and failing to join the 16-people provincial team, I went back to the dull National Exam pathway for college entrance after more than a year of skipping classes, and was later admitted by my alma mater but reassigned to the School of Physics due to my 5-point-lower grade compared to that of another student who claimed the admission quota. Before my enrollment, I insisted I wanted to study in the School of Life Sciences, and the administration office eventually allowed it.

In college, I started to become aware of the research ethical concerns associated to, say, creating fantastic beasts, and decided perhaps I should work on transgenic plants first, instead of transgenic hybrid animals. On a side but related note, I really hate to become one of the villain scientists in the sci-fi movies, but the movie industry really needs to stop portraying idiotic evil scientists; most of us are not that evil. As an intern, I joined the only lab in the school that listed “transgene” as a keyword in their website, being naïve as I was as a college student, not knowing that it simply indicated they used transgenic technologies as a research methodology rather than aiming to create fantastic plants. The lab actually worked on transcription factors, and I mostly worked on the good old Arabidopsis thaliana with the good old promoter-GUS transgenes.

At the meantime, I also participated in the iGEM competition, firstly as a team member then the team leader, for which I learned the basic principles of synthetic biology, which as a matter of fact, was perhaps more directly related to my “fantastic beast” dream, since we indeed created fantastic microorganisms.

These research experiences won me a chance to do my honor study at University of California, San Diego, where I worked on OCT4, one of the most famous transcription factors. I called this a win not only because the lab was one of the best genomics labs but also because that this of course moved me a step closer to my dream by changing my model organisms from plants to animals, humans, to be more specific.

Naturally, I later worked in a human genetics lab at Yale for my PhD training. At the time when I just finished my rotations and joined the lab, what I was actually thinking was developing gene therapies was basically creating transgenic humans so it’s somewhat similar to what I want to do, but with time, I found another purpose, a higher calling some may say, to help people. Helping people was something I had always enjoyed to do outside of my academic career, but my research in the rare disease field made it also a mission for my academic career.

Then I was, almost seeing the finish line of my PhD training, saddened by the heartbreaking outcome of a gene therapy trial I had been so deeply and personally involved, eager to contribute more to improve gene-specific treatments while growing more and more impatient, feeling I had drifted further and further away from my initial interests and dreams. There was an internal urge in me to pivot to something else for my research career.

I stress-watched more films and documentaries^4-8, because that’s what I do. I stress-watch movies. It was at that time I was reminded that the real-world creatures were already pretty fantastic, so instead of trying to make fantastic beasts I should perhaps try to meet the fantastic beasts in the real world. Years of training in genetics had conferred on me a habit to ponder the molecular genetic mechanisms behind every symptom and every trait, and I was motivated to learn from the fantastic creatures, learn what they can do and we humans cannot, and use the knowledge to improve human health care.

I felt a sense that all my purposes and dreams had been unified, and I did my post-doc research in an evolutionary medicine lab, equipping myself with necessary skills I needed to conduct the translational evolutionary research I want to do.

To be 100% honest, I now still believe creating fantastic beasts is a wonderful dream to have, I am still drawn to the visions of creating something unusual and magnificent, and I still now and then think of feasible ways to make a horse grow a pair of wings, but I see more clearly now what I can really contribute to, with all my eccentricity and imaginations.

I can help identify the opportunities and make them applications. I can see what is beautiful and help have the beauty seen. I can meet what is fantastic and help make what is equally so.

I approached stealthily so as to discover what bird was at work, and behold it was a squirrel.
–Charles Darwin

From making fantastic beasts to meeting fantastic beasts

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