Biotechnology is really coming up with new technologies that will aid in biology. Help us understand human disease, how biological processes work, and make people healthier. My name is Tagell Desai and I'm a professor in bioengineering at the University of California, San Francisco. What I do as a bioengineer is create things that will help the human body. We build devices, we build implants, we build structures that will go in and treat disease or help to replace an organ or help to deliver drugs into the body. So one of the things that we work on is nanotechnology, which means that we are creating things that are very, very small. In fact, a piece of hair is about 100 microns and something that's at the nanoscale is a million times smaller than that. So you can't see it with a naked eye. Every time we go into the clean room we have to put on this protective suit and make sure that we don't cough or sneeze or drop anything because that will all generate dust or particles that can ruin our nanomaterial. You need a high-powered machine to be able to see how small these things are. But what's beautiful about these is that we can put them into the body and instead of just taking a pill and hoping it will go to the right place, we can actually direct the medicine to go to the pancreas or the kidney or a tumor site. When you first start out in science, you actually get paid as a student in most institutions. So you may not make a lot, usually around $35,000 when you first start out. But then you become a postdoc and assistant professor up to a full professor. You can go all the way to several hundred thousand dollars a year. So it is a career in which you can grow both intellectually but also financially. There's so many great things about being a scientist. You get to meet people from all over the world. You collaborate with different groups in different universities. We have to go and talk about our work. So we travel a lot. And so I've bought and to see the world just through the science. I don't think there's one quality that makes you a scientist or not. I think it's really about being motivated and working hard and not being afraid to take some risks and not give up easily. So you don't have to get straight A's in math or physics. You really have to just be curious and you know want to pursue an idea that excites you.