Name: 【TED】Eva Vertes: My dream about the future of medicine
Uploaded: 2016-07-28T01:54:23.000Z
Duration: 19 min 34 s
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Thank you. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here

Today I want to talk to you about the future, but

first I'm going to tell you a bit about the past.

My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp.

And she was going along the tracks, and the tracks split.

And somehow -- we don't really know exactly the whole story -- but

the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp.

My grandmother survived and married my grandfather.

They were living in Hungary, and my mother was born.

the Hungarian revolution was raging, and they decided to escape Hungary.

They got on a boat, and yet another divergence --

the boat was either going to Canada or to Australia.

They got on and didn't know where they were going, and ended up in Canada.

So, to make a long story short, they came to Canada.

My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto,

and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother,

but I carry on her name -- her exact name, Eva Vertes --

and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too.

I found this passion not far from here, actually, when I was nine years old.

My family was on a road trip and we were in the Grand Canyon.

And I had never been a reader when I was young --

my dad had tried me with the Hardy Boys; I tried Nancy Drew;

I tried all that -- and I just didn't like reading books.

And my mother bought this book when we were at the Grand Canyon

called "The Hot Zone." It was all about the outbreak of the Ebola virus.

And something about it just kind of drew me towards it.

There was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover,

and I just wanted to read it. I picked up that book,

and as we drove from the edge of the Grand Canyon

to Big Sur, and to, actually, here where we are today, in Monterey,

I read that book, and from when I was reading that book,

I knew that I wanted to have a life in medicine.

I wanted to be like the explorers I'd read about in the book,

went into the research labs and just tried to figure out

what this deadly virus was. So from that moment on, I read every medical book

I could get my hands on, and I just loved it so much.

I was a passive observer of the medical world.

It wasn't until I entered high school that I thought,

"Maybe now, you know -- being a big high school kid --

I can maybe become an active part of this big medical world."

I was 14, and I emailed professors at the local university

to see if maybe I could go work in their lab. And hardly anyone responded.

But I mean, why would they respond to a 14-year-old, anyway?

And I got to go talk to one professor, Dr. Jacobs,

At that time, I was really interested in neuroscience

and wanted to do a research project in neurology --

specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system.

So I started that, and worked in his lab for a year,

and found the results that I guess you'd expect to find

when you feed fruit flies heavy metals -- that it really, really impaired the nervous system.

The spinal cord had breaks. The neurons were crossing in every which way.

And from then I wanted to look not at impairment, but at prevention of impairment.

So that's what led me to Alzheimer's. I started reading about Alzheimer's

and tried to familiarize myself with the research,

and at the same time when I was in the --

I was reading in the medical library one day, and I read this article

about something called "purine derivatives."

And they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties.

And being naive about the whole field, I kind of thought,

which is causing the memory deficit, and then you have this compound --

purine derivatives -- that are promoting cell growth."

And so I thought, "Maybe if it can promote cell growth,

And so that's the project that I pursued for that year,

and found that a specific purine derivative called "guanidine"

had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent.

So I presented those results at the International Science Fair,

which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

And there I was awarded "Best in the World in Medicine,"

which allowed me to get in, or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world.

And from then on, since I was now in this huge exciting world,

I wanted to explore it all. I wanted it all at once, but knew I couldn't really get that.

And I stumbled across something called "cancer stem cells."

And this is really what I want to talk to you about today -- about cancer.

At first when I heard of cancer stem cells,

I didn't really know how to put the two together. I'd heard of stem cells,

and I'd heard of them as the panacea of the future --

the therapy of many diseases to come in the future, perhaps.

But I'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time,

Last summer I worked at Stanford University, doing some research on cancer stem cells.

And while I was doing this, I was reading the cancer literature,

trying to -- again -- familiarize myself with this new medical field.

And it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell.

This fascinated me. The more I read, the more I looked at cancer differently

It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury.

If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises.

If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs.

And it was really interesting -- there were articles correlating

if you have a bone fracture, and then bone cancer arises.

Because what stem cells are -- they're these

phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate

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【TED】Eva Vertes: My dream about the future of medicine

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