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The round things are the virus I discovered

Some of you may know that I used to be a scientist. I was in grad school, studying viruses in the hot springs of the Yellowstone National Park and I discovered a new species of virus.

I recently interviewed my academic mentor and adviser, Mark Young, and he talked about his discoveries. Now, I want to tell you about how it was for me.

I was sitting there in a dark microscope room, looking in the electron microscope and I am looking at this very thin gold-coated surface, looking for geometric patterns – that would be a signal for a virus. All of a sudden, to my field of view, there were polka dots, full of hexagons. I jumped out of my chair! THIS IS IT! I just discovered a virus!

That was a single, exciting moment that was only possible with the year and a half of preparation and was only provable with another year and a half of research to back it up.

So, when you see something, and you see that it is a new discovery, you still have to prove and characterize it. You need to describe and learn more about it.

Discovering it was a big process. We designed an experiment explicitly to discover new species. We went out to over a hundred different hot springs and took samples and spent over a year trying to grow microorganisms. Once I was able to grow them, I had to concentrate with the living material from the vials.

I began to think, I could, maybe, find something new.

I spent time screening through the samples over the microscope and didn’t find anything. But because I had seen viruses, I knew what I was looking for. And so, after I saw it, I quickly took photos and there were just lots of virus particles. I took them to my colleagues and advisers, and we all looked at it. Did it look like something already discovered? It looked different enough that we decided to characterize and describe it. One of the most important things is to see what the genome is, because once you understand the DNA or the RNA of the genome, you can compare it to all other known viruses.

So, all this took a really long time. It was emotional roller coaster! When you see the thing right there, there is nothing like that feeling of knowing you are the first person to look at it, and just knowing that you found something new. To the long hours of manipulating things in the lab, trying to take some evidence, learning some technique, and failing it, until you finally get a new piece of evidence – that’s  what a lot of people don’t see in research. There are months of trying things. Trying to get a little piece of information takes so much work, and that was really hard for me.

I’m really glad that I had the chance to work as an academic scientist because there is such rigor and it’s a phase wherein you really need to put in a lot of work. Having that long-term focus really translates to almost anything else. It’s very similar to endurance sports – you train for several years and you still won’t hit the peak of your ability. A long-term thinking is involved. You build something over the long haul.

The other best part of it all is going out into Yellowstone and setting up an experiment where you have to go on an adventure!