The Value of Basic Science | David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

There's never been a more exciting time to do bioscience research than today. There are such powerful transformative new technologies that allow us to explore amazing biological mysteries, next generation sequencing, new advances in imaging, gene editing. These all allow us to address incredibly important questions that previously were just deep mysteries for us. You get up in the middle of the night and you can't fall back asleep because you're so excited about an idea, you just want to go in the next day and get it started. That's generally a good thing. It was 6 a.m. I'd been in lab all night. I was analyzing data, I could see the sun coming up, and I found out something completely new and it's kind of an indescribable experience to learn something and know that no one else in the world knows that. You were the very first person to discover it. That made it all worth it. One of the big things about UCLA that I really enjoy is that they want you to grow, they want you to learn, and they want you to do something with your career. The collaborative environment, the support that we get from our program and from our PIs is really great here. Researchers and clinicians are right next to each other on this campus. In this building I'm sitting in right now, I can see engineering over here, physics over here, chemistry over here, biology over here. There's a huge hospital connected to this research school and that's been pretty awesome for someone like me who's interested in how research is going to turn into patient care. One of the great advantages of philanthropic support of scientific research is that it provides a level of freedom for our scholars to really undertake their most creative, potentially high impact, high risk type of research. That's the kind of research that's most likely to give rise to breakthroughs in healthcare. Many times it's those projects that are the riskiest projects that bring us the greatest successes and the greatest advancements and this is where money outside of government is able to make a huge difference. You're able to rescue ideas that would be ordinarily lost and these ideas could be huge and transformative. It's so important to put your money into UCLA because the students here are genuinely working towards expanding the boundaries of what we know. Last year I actually lost my grandfather to cancer. It was very, very close to him. It was really, really hard for me, especially working in a lab on cancer really drives you when you lose someone close to you and you're working on something that maybe could have saved them. That's been a big drive for me to continue that, kind of try and dedicate my research to him and try to prevent that from happening to somebody else. Now more than ever we need brilliant, passionate, motivated, creative, young scientists who are going to dedicate their careers to investigating the natural world, to understanding biology, to finding cures for disease. Let's beat Zika virus by understanding the virus and creating cures. Let's conquer cancer by understanding the immune system and using it to combat cancer. Let's understand the brain so that we can live in a world that doesn't suffer from psychiatric illness. Let's be able to develop cures for each and every individual and let's dedicate the very best part of ourselves, our ability to think deeply and really transform the world to make it into the place that we can dream it could be.