Len Zon: Fishing for Answers

(techno upbeat 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.

(camera clicking) They're a one and a half inch fish that you can buy at the pet store for about a dollar 50.

The gene set that a fish has is very similar to the human gene set.

And my lab is 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 that the time, it was extremely chancy to actually take on zebrafish.

(soft upbeat music) 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.

(soft upbeat music) 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 erase the stripes of a zebrafish and we called it Casper.

(soft upbeat music) You can see the eggs inside the females.

You can see the blood vessels and it got a lot of press.

(soft upbeat music) - Researchers at 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.

(soft upbeat music) 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 was trying to cure those fish and trying to understand more about the biology of those tumors.

(soft upbeat music) 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 is had a huge impact on my life and career.

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