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- So my entire career has
been chasing the key question,
which is about understanding
and solving the mysteries of life.
And all of us know that the
blueprint of life, which is DNA,
has all these questions
somewhere written in the code,
and that's exactly what
I have been chasing.
And it has taken me places
from plants, to insects,
to kangaroos, potoroos, even humans,
like recently been looking
at the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome sequences.
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They mostly give you opportunities
or ways to solve problems.
My day is super exciting, normally,
like I get out of the
bed super excited to see
what I did yesterday
and how it is looking.
So for example, when you are choosing
the answers to life code,
right, you've assembled,
you got hold up a DNA of
some particular species,
then I do a lot of lab work,
which involves doing some
chemistry, fun experiments,
and mixing solutions together to really
to be able to read that code precisely.
And to be honest,
genomics as a discipline
has come a long way,
it's not a very old discipline,
it's just probably a decade old
that we have started to read
the code of life accurately and precisely.
Just to give me an example on that one,
human DNA took 10 years put together,
and it costed us $2.7
billion, and that was 2010.
We are 2020, now, at DNA
Zoo, we have a technology
or a way to assemble that
whole code for $1,000,
2.7 billion to $1,000 cost,
and to be able to read
that with that precision.
I think we've come a long way
and it's getting even more exciting.
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I'm actually very excited
about all the high quality data
that is coming out from
the life sciences overall,
whether you talk about
biomedical sciences,
like we're doing personalized
medicine these days, right?
So you're reading every single code
from every single individual.
And just to give you an
example, you kind of,
if it's a three GB genome,
which is a human genome,
written in three billion letters,
you have to read it a few times
to get it absolutely correct.
So you normally generate
about 170 to 200 GB data,
gigabytes of data per individual,
and it's billions of us
on the planet, right?
Similarly, for one quokka
I generate about 150 gigabytes of data
to read it accurately, or a koala,
similar sort of mammal genome sizes.
So just imagine if you only
talk about the species,
which are at the risk
of extinction right now,
there's about one million
species which really need
to be decoded and to
have like a better plan
or a strategic way of breeding them
or protecting them moving forward.
So it's huge amounts of data,
and we need the next generation to be able
to sort of make sense out of that data.
So they need to sort of pick
up the skills like programming,
computer sciences, but
also have the understanding
to the fundamental
blocks of life, you know,
to be able to make sense
out of all that data.
So I think it's super exciting,
especially for WA I would say,
we have something like
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
at our doorstep, Pawsey
is mainly being enrolled
for space sciences, and, you know,
we building one of the biggest
telescope in the world,
but having said that that
is an exciting opportunity
for life sciences, because we can use it
in many different ways,
and not just understanding
the space, but also
understanding, you know,
our local environment, our own DNA
and everything else which surrounds us.
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Oh, that would be awesome
if I could go back in time
and probably combine what I
learned in the biological space
with a bit of programming knowledge,
with a bit of like AI
or robotics, you know,
because then you just equip yourself
with so many different skill
sets that you can combine them,
and you can answer all
these exciting questions
which are coming my way right now.
But it's all right, I can't time travel,
but I have the next generation, you know,
who come as students,
and they pick up some
really exciting topics,
and it's so creative.
I'm having a really great time,
especially being at a university
like University of Western Australia,
and getting connected to
all these young people,
it's super fun, yeah.
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My key advice would be
that, it is really important
to have a vision and a focus in that area.
It is quite interesting to have technology
or STEM overall come a long way,
but without having a
problem solving attitude,
STEM can't help you.
And if you do have that
problem solving attitude,
you gotta have a variety of skills,
and data analysis of big
data is definitely something
I would highly recommend for the future.
But having said that, I would
say, there is no shortcut,
or there is no substitute for hard work.
And finding mentors early
on is a very, very good way,
because if you can learn from others
who've been on that journey,
it can save you a lot of
testing and trialing things.
So, yeah, get yourself a mentor,
someone who has been on a path,
which you aspire to be on.
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