Jackson Weir hopes to revolutionize scientific methods that can lead to new treatments of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. The 23-year-old Harvard student got started when a high school science fair led to a national gold medal and meetings with Prime Minister Trudeau and Dr. Arthur McDonald from Cape Breton, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for physics. Although Weir graduated from the University of New Brunswick in 2021, he’s already received an alumni award. Saltscapes spoke with Jackson Weir about luck, curiosity and compassion.
How’s Harvard?
The environment is super enriching. It’s nice to be around people that work really hard on things they’re passionate about. Every day is a new source of inspiration. I spent the day analyzing 20 colorectal cancer samples.
You once said attending Harvard was a distant dream.
So many things needed to go right. A lot of successful people refuse to admit the role that luck played in their stories. If you click replay on my life a thousand times, I wouldn’t be nearly as fortunate.
What was the source of your luck?
I had the coolest childhood ever. My mom’s parents moved to Saint John from Wales and built a little shack. My grandfather’s siblings bought property around this original plot. They own hundreds of acres, so I got to grow up with cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Is your large family the source of your passion for science?
My parents and grandparents fostered a sense of curiosity. I spent my childhood in the woods. I have this deep appreciation for the wonders of the natural world. My grandfather built trails connecting all of the houses. He named the trails and carved his own signs with grandkid’s names. Actually, I might have a sign. (Jackson pulls out a sign that reads “Eagle’s Nest Trail” with his name and an eagle painted on it.) He made us feel like we were contributing to this amazing thing he was doing. I just wanted to be like him.
Tell me more about him.
He was an amazing salmon fisherman, so I spent a lot of my childhood on the Miramichi, fishing for salmon with my grandfather, father and cousins. We used to collect salamanders, caterpillars, tadpoles and watch them grow. I was trained to be very observant.
What did you learn from your other grandparents?
Hard work. When they retired, they bought a blueberry farm. I would spend a week or two picking blueberries, bent over 12 hours a day, seven days a week. You’re paid by how much you produce. That’s a good way to learn hard work when you’re a kid. That’s also true in science.
Did others foster your interests?
My sense of curiosity was reinvigorated by some amazing teachers who showed me that curiosity can also be applied to understanding humanity and the universe.
Did curiosity lead you into cancer research?
I shadowed researchers at Dr. Tony Robbins’s lab at Dalhousie Medicine. He’d seen my grandmother who passed away from cancer. I lost a lot of family members to cancer. It made people I loved suffer. It was a full circle thing to go to a lab where people are researching cancer and treating patients. It totally changed my life. Curiosity has been my driving force, but compassion is a way to channel my curiosity to work on things that will have an impact on the people around me.