when doug melton first got funding, he was studying the development of frogs. son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. >> i stopped working on frogs and asked my colleagues to join me in working on the problem of how to make the cells that are absent in juvenile diabetics. the howard hughes medical institute was perfectly fine with it. i told them what i was gonna do. they said, "sounds interesting to us. go for it." >> now, do you think, for instance, if you'd had a grant from nih that they would have reacted that blithely? >> no, the nih doesn't work that way. >> but because hughes does, doug melton has since become one of the leading diabetes and stem cell researchers in the world. >> and unfortunately, my daughter contracted diabetes just last year. she's older than my son, but so now my efforts are redoubled, in a way. i'm really committed to try to solve this problem. >> are you basically encouraging your investigators to take risks, to go over to the edge of the ledge and peer over? >> to take risks in the sense not just of doing something that has a lo