What we do My name is Jessica Wu from St Cuthbert’s College.
My name is Jessica Wu, and I’m a 15-year-old year 11 student at St Cuthbert’s College. I placed 3rd in the North Island Brain Bee competition and in turn won the Brain Bee internship, which allowed me to have the incredible opportunity of spending a day at the Centre of Brain Research (CBR). This internship has really furthered my interest in medicine, which was something I began to have very early on in my life.
It’s hard to say when exactly I started gaining interest in medicine, but if you were to ask who sparked my interest in it, I would credit my brother, who is currently almost finished with his studies, to become an ENT specialist. He finished high school the year I was born, meaning that the year I was born was also the beginning of his journey in the medical field. Naturally, considering the amount of content within the medical course, he had many textbooks lying around the house, which proved to be very intriguing for a curious baby who found everything new to be interesting. Technically, you could say I was introduced to medicine at the ripe age of…0? I think the content in those textbooks subconsciously went into my brain, because in year 2, I had already decided that I wanted to go into medicine. Fast forward to year 11, and that still hasn’t changed.
My interest in medicine and biological sciences led me to take part in the New Zealand Biology Olympiad (NZIBO) Programme last year. I was lucky enough to score among the top 25 students, allowing me to get selected into the NZIBO Training Camp. In order to get into the camp, I was required to read through the Campbell Biology textbook - an A4-sized textbook thicker than the Oxford English dictionary (although it was quite a bit more interesting than the Oxford English dictionary). In this textbook, there was a unit on animal physiology, and within it, there were two chapters specifically on neuroscience - 48 and 49, two of the chapters I found most interesting in the book. When I learnt about the Brain Bee competition, an interest in neuroscience had already sparked from the Campbell textbook and so, of course, I signed up. With the enthusiastic support from Miss Brown, the teacher in charge of Brain Bee at my school, I studied through the content and got into the top 10 contestants, which allowed me to win the Brain Bee internship.
On the day of the visit, we were introduced to the internship by Professor Debbie Young, the co-ordinator of the Brain Bee competition, and were then led to a simulation MRI room where the basics behind an MRI were explained to us by senior MRI physicist, Dr Catherine Morgan. After that, we went up to the labs, where a PhD student specialising in gene therapy walked us through the process of carrying out a western blot. We were also able to hear about the process of differentiating stem cells (obtained by anti-differentiating skin cells) into brain cells, which I found particularly fascinating.
After having lunch, we had the incredible opportunity of touring the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank – the only brain bank in New Zealand. A senior researcher talked us through how brains are processed after arriving at the brain bank, and we were able to look at the brain bank’s collection of brains, which included brains belonging to mice, spider monkeys, and even macaques! I’d say that the brain bank tour was the highlight of my day, and two particular highlights of that tour was learning about the microtome, a tissue-sectioning machine analogous to a deli slicer, and watching a technician display a 25+ year old section of an XDP-diseased brain’s substantia nigra using water and a paintbrush. Following the brain bank, we went to the AMRF Medical Sciences Learning Centre, which held an astonishingly large number of preserved pathological specimens.
I went into the CBR internship wanting to go into pathology, and I believe that the internship has certainly reinforced my desire to work in that field. Neuroscience appears to have many overlaps with pathology, with one of the Brain Bank technicians mentioning that when they are unable to identify an anomaly in a specimen, it gets sent to their neuro-pathologist.
It was so incredible meeting so many passionate people in their various fields of medicine and research, and I am immensely grateful I had the opportunity to have had this experience. It is one that I will remember well into the future, as both an aspiration and a form of motivation.
Jessica Wu, St Cuthbert’s College
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