A Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a Single Step by Daniel

A Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a Single Step by Daniel - January 2017 Scholarship Essay

A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of forests. I too will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high. - William Sharp, The Winged Destiny

I stood at a lab bench, a tiny reaction vial clutched in one hand and a micropipette in the other. As I glanced over my protocol, a step stood out to me:

Add 0.5 µl of CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme to your reaction.

“Zero point five microliters?” I thought. “Isn’t the Cas9 enzyme the most important component in this protocol? I can’t even see the liquid in the tube!”

Imagine serving a two-liter orange soda to four million eager toddlers, each demanding their fair share. Considering your limited ability to accurately examine such small amounts with the naked eye, how could you convince them that they had each received their 0.5 µl allowance?

That afternoon in a lab meeting, my professor, Dr. Grompe, asked me if I could make him an NTCP knockout mouse. Having known graduate students whose 2-3 year research projects were to create a knockout mouse, I was shocked by his request. In preparation for my lab work, I spent many hours poring over scientific papers, and I was amazed to find that a single Cas9 enzyme, which is 1.5 quadrillion times smaller than an average skin cell, has the potential to save the lives of millions of humans afflicted with diseases such as diabetes and hemophilia. Upon reading some of Dr. Grompe’s publications, I learned that the recent discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 had decreased the cost of knockout mouse generation from $45,000 to $6,000 and increased the speed of the process from ~2 years to ~3 months. However, the time and cost for this procedure still remained significant.

Aiming to streamline the process, I challenged myself to engineer a more cost and time-efficient method. Guided by my previous experience with experimental design, I invented a novel knockout mouse protocol by manipulating available CRISPR-Cas9 kits. With this new methodology, I successfully created, with only $3,300, a knockout mouse in 2 months, which is 1.5 times as time-efficient and 1.9 times as cost-efficient when compared to the current method. This discovery will significantly improve the field of molecular biology by lowering incentives to monetize knockout mice and by promoting collaboration among scientists.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” my grandma once told me. Achieving the utopian dream of eradicating disease is no easy feat for a single person, but just as the CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme is minuscule compared to the genetic code, an individual can enable changes that impact an entire field. I hold fast to a sincere and audacious hope of making a significant contribution. Even though I am but one of the 7.5 billion people in the world today, I too will set my face to the wind and throw a handful of seed on high.