- [Announcer] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(slow piano music) - I'm a hematologist oncologist at Children's Hospital and I take care of children who have blood diseases or cancer.
I work on blood stem cells and I'm trying to understand how they're made and how to use them in marrow transplantations.
I also work on the zebrafish as a model.
zebrafish are completely transparent and you can see all the organs develop and we're studying human diseases in the zebrafish to try to find new therapies for patients who are getting transplanted for leukemia or lymphoma.
Good.
(slow piano music) - When I was in college, everybody had to take a religion class.
Being a trumpet player, I started reading extensively about the ram's horn or the shofar.
These are both shofars.
This is the classical shofar and these are the shofars that we use most of the time in the synagogue.
(Len Zon blows shofar) - About five years ago, I happened to see my canter and I just mentioned to him that I played shofar then he says I want you to come up to my office and try out.
And I said, you know if you're really good you can play any note on the horn and you can play songs.
So I start playing when the saints go marching in on the shofar.
(Len Zon blows shofar) - His eyes just were so big and that started my career in my synagogue as one of the shofar players on the high holidays.
Doing the high holidays is a very positive thing.
It makes you part of the ceremony.
It's also very anxiety provoking.
The big pressure is at the very end, you have to hit a note called "tekiah gadola" or is a big tekiah.
The longer you can hold the note the more happiness the entire audience will have for their year.
So it's very important to play as long as you possibly can.
I've been up to about 30 seconds I can hold the note which is a pretty long time for your typical shofar player.
(Len Zon blows shofar) (slow piano music) - So I'm a hematologist oncologist at Children's Hospital, Boston.
I find when I'm seeing a patient, it gives me an impetus to go back into the laboratory and to find new therapies for that patient.
My laboratory studies the zebrafish.
They're are a one and a half inch fish that you can buy at the pet store for about $1.50.
The gene set that a fish has is very similar to the human gene set.
And my lab was really one of the first to try to model human diseases as a result of the zebrafish.
zebrafish was a very small field at the very beginning.
At that the time it was extremely chancy to actually take on zebrafish.
If you came to my laboratory, you would see a huge fish facility with 3000 tanks.
That's one of the largest aquaria in the world.
You can make mutant zebrafish.
We have red fish, we have green fish, we have blue fish.
This is an adult zebrafish that's completely transparent.
Essentially, we erased the stripes of a zebrafish and we called it Casper.
You can see the eggs inside the females, you can see the blood vessels and it got a lot of press.
- [Announcer] Research is a Children's Hospital in Boston have genetically engineered transparent fish.
- Well, I thought it was fantastic.
You can actually read the newspaper through the zebrafish.
So I love going down into the fish room and actually looking at all the different fish in the tanks.
We have a number of fish that have cancer and we're trying to cure those fish and trying to understand more about the biology of those tumors.
We've discovered a new gene that causes melanoma in humans by our work in the zebrafish.
Really an excellent score for the zebrafish field.
zebrafish has had a huge impact on my life and career.
(slow piano music) - My dad is a rocket scientist.
He often felt that I may not have had the mathematical skills to go into science.
Luckily as a biologist, you may not need exactly those mathematical skills.
Same horn.
(Len Zon blows shofar) - Zebrafish eat brine shrimp or sea monkeys.
We have to feed 150,000 fish in our facility every day, three times a day.
Coldplay.
It's a group that has a wonderful singer and it's very interesting music with a message.
My wife is an allergist by training but she also has allergies.
So we had a frog actually for about 13 years, which was very cool.
Maurice André.
(Maurice André blowing trumpet) - I like Dr. McCoy and Star Trek.
They went back in time and he says, "Oh my God, this woman is dying of kidney failure.
Take one of these pills and call me in the morning."
- What is this, the dark ages?
(Len Zon laughs) - My brother, when I grew up was a child prodigy on piano and a music composer and he is an excellent musician.
Monette trumpet, it's a wonderful horn, plays itself.
(Len Zon blows trumpet)
