-: My name is Stacy Weaver.
I work for Dow AgroSciences in Discovery R&D
and my role at Dow is basically I am a molecular biologist
and I work with a lot of team leaders
and basically my role is to work with them
and help them understand different molecular analytics
and molecular analytical tools to help them
answer certain research questions.
So, say if you're a project leader and you
have any question at all resounding around DNA or RNA,
you would come to me and say, "Hey can you develop
an assay or a technique to help me answer
my research question?"
So then I go in the lab and develop these
assays, techniques, and then if it's a huge project
I work with a team of technicians and then
we can deliver data to help answer their question.
Every week I have three or four projects
that need things to happen in the lab
or assays need to be run or assays needed to
be developed and validated.
So I'll be doing all these things to prepare.
And then, meanwhile, I might have some other
projects that are farther along where
there's technicians in the lab workin to
generate data using assays that I developed,
you know, months prior.
So, in discovery R&D, well my area of discovery R&D
is we work to identify or come up with
these different ideas that could be a trait
that would help the plant survive better
without water, or less water, or utilize nitrogen
better, or something that would help the plant
a little bit, be more robust.
So we synthesize all these genes and we put them
into plants, and we have a whole pipeline
where we're able to test them in like a rapid manner,
or we can actually put them in the crop
and we'll grow them in the greenhouse,
and we do all this early phase testing.
And it's a lot of failure, some successes,
and then it's...
The things that fail always give you a lot of
extra questions that you wanna, you know, find out.
So that's the fun part about discovery
is you are open to all of these, I would say
failures, but they're not really failures
they're just, oh okay mother nature is
regulating this gene this way.
Wonder why?
Let me figure that out.
So that's the joy is, you know, it's
learning all these weird things where
you think you can predict mother nature
but she always throws a curve ball.