This week we had the opportunity to speak to two professionals doing work related to our GI Cancer study: Dr. Xi He, an expert on Wnt signaling, and Dr. Donald Coen, a virology department faculty member at Harvard. Both had incredible insight for our project and were able to provide a lot of great feedback for our team.
That said, speaking with them also made me wonder what on Earth we were doing.
Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is that I had no idea how much we still had to cover for our project to even be close to a feasible solution. It's one thing to go online and read literature about a biological system, it's another thing entirely to hear from someone who has spent their entire life researching that system. Sure, both posed many questions we were prepared to answer, but many times their feedback led us to more and more that we still had to look into. For example, in my last post, I raved about the EBV virus. From Dr. Coen's input, it turns out that there are many far better options that I have to look into! Similarly, Dr. He outlined four clear cellular malfunctions that can lead to the development of GI cancer, which we had previously not looked into.
By no means is this a negative thing. Seeing how much work is still to be done was certainly shocking, but now we have the opportunity to improve our system significantly thanks to the opinions of the experts. Getting clear feedback was hugely important to making sure we were on the right track, and though we still have a lot to do, I think we are definitely getting there.
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