 I'm Lewis Metzger. Thanks for coming to this event by BioCaptivate. It's an experiment that we're doing to sort of examine and perhaps change the culture of science. And that's what BioCaptivate, which we're going to set up as a non-profit, is thinking of doing. We want to start conversations about how the culture of biology has come to be the way it has and what we might learn from that and what we could change about it. And the reason we care so much about this is that clearly the engineering of biology is going to drive so many changes in humanity's experience of the planet. And if we're lucky, the improvement of our planet and the fixing of some of the damage that we've done to it, but also it's going to greatly affect every aspect of human life and have ethical implications. And so in this time when biological engineering and biological research is so important, it's perhaps worthwhile to examine the culture of biology and the culture of science and think about how does it evolve and how can we change it maybe for the better so that we can make this biological revolution more effective and benefit everyone. So tonight we have a panel called Politics, Solidarity, Activism, and Science. And we're going to specifically discuss with great panelists some aspects of the culture of science as it intersects with politics and activism and hopefully learn some things from each other tonight. And the other thing I'd like to tell everyone is that this is the first night that we've had all the co-founders of BioCaptivate in one place. So I'm going to quickly ask them to introduce themselves and after that we'll go ahead and get started and we'll introduce the panel. So without further ado, Kira Havens. Hi folks. Thank you all for being here. It's really wonderful to see kind of a full house of folks interested in examining their assumptions about what biotechnology is, what it's for, who's supposed to be using it, how we ask the questions, right? Because we all operate in, you know, if you read David Foster Wallace, you know, kind of we live in the water, right? And you don't really think about the water until you choose to think about the water. So that's what BioCaptivate is all about. We're about helping you see the water for what it is and thinking about, you know, what, how does this impact our actions? How does this impact our decisions? How does this impact the way we choose the questions that we investigate in science? So I hope as you listen to the panel tonight, you listen to your own responses and ask yourself, why is it that this thing hits me there? Why is it that I respond in this way to this assertion or this assumption or this challenge, right? Because we all operate with these unconscious biases of one kind or another and just thinking about them, just opening the door to asking why is it, do I think this way? Huge step forward and kind of helps us have a better conversation about what is going to be a really influential and really impactful technology. My own personal background, I come from, I guess I left the Church of Biotechnology a very long time ago, right? There's maybe a tendency of scientists to think that science, if you just study it long enough, you'll find the solution. And these days, I tend to think science is a tool, it's a part of the solution, but there are much broader, much bigger questions that are maybe better answered by the humanities. And so my interest is in beautiful biotechnology and how do we go about making good technologies, which have an impact that we want them to have, rather than an impact that we haven't thought too much about. So that's where I come from. That's why I'm involved in BioCaptivate and I'll pass this along to Yan. Hi, my name is Yan. Welcome, everyone. And really happy to have all the new faces and old faces. And so my background is in cymolecular biology, but at some point I discovered that in order to solve the most pressing problems in science, you actually need to go outside, like you need to go into networking or psychology or philosophy, et cetera. So that's why I am here. So there are great experts of networking and psychology and political science and there are great experts understanding what other specific problems science is facing. But the thing is we create this vessel to bring the two together to apply the state of the art, networking skills and psychology and political science to change the specific pressing problems within science. And hopefully that also can gain to the wider society. Thank you. And now I pass the mic to Chris. Hi, everybody. I'm Christopher Oaks. So I'm a marine biologist, so I've always been thinking about the water. And I'm also super interested in the business of biology and the work that I'm doing now and the work that I've been interested in all of my life, it intersects with politics and just public perception. And I think that as scientists, we often are not communicating as often and as in person as we should be. It's often about the problem solving and the minutia. And I think gathering people together and talking about bigger issues and higher dimensional thinking is really important. And we've got folks in this group that get that and I'm really proud to be supporting that. So I'm happy to be a part of BioCaptivate. So enjoy the panel. Thanks. So I'd now like to introduce our panelists. And I'm really thankful for the time they've taken to come here. And Mike, one of our panelists also has hosted us tonight. So Mike, thank you for thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, couldn't couldn't get lost. Yeah, so. So first, I'd like to introduce goalie goalie has been a transmitter of state of the art, biotech lab techniques and thinking at City College for 15 years. And I identify with this because in the wake of all that we're learning about, you know, the elite college scandals, I also went to a public undergrad University and think I had a decent education there. So there is really good work being done in our public universities in case anyone doubts that. And goalie really has taken a lot of time in her career to think about the education of young scientists going into biotech, who may be come from a variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds. And I think her perspective on that is going to be really important tonight. So welcome goalie. Fatma is a return panelist who we like so much. No, she's she's great. She's co founder of Farinim, which is a company that is bringing nematode pheromone technology to the market. And she's a scientist entrepreneur. And she's really interested in a number of different aspects of grants, writing, ship, for lack of a better word, and sort of the delicate dance of getting funding in science. And I think she can speak to that tonight. Christine, who we're really excited to have here, co founded two photon art. And it gives scientists a way to express their love of science, but also, in many ways, the intersection of science and and causes that they believe in, through, you know, messages like science needs dreamers and science is political. She's also the founder of the STEM squad, which is an online community for people in STEM whose genders have been marginalized. And she's a writer. I urge you to read any of her writings. And I think she can provide great perspective on the topics that we have tonight. And not least, Mike, Mike Selden, CEO and co founder of Finless Foods. And his day job involves growing healthy marine animal cells on their own instead of live fish. But he has a background in biochemistry and molecular biology. He's spent a lot of time and effort devoted to climate justice and science advocacy, and also advocacy for education that's cognizant of people coming from different socio socioeconomic backgrounds. And so again, I think he'll have many useful contributions to the panel tonight. So I'd like to get started with our questions. And I think, you know, one thing that we might discuss and start off with when thinking about science and politics is each of your opinions about the culture around scientists being activists in one form or another. And my question for you is, how do you think that has gone in your experience? What do you think the expectations are in the field of biology that you've been involved in? And I'm just curious what your comments are about that. And let's start with you, golly. Scientists as activists. So I guess we've all taken some activists type of a role in our careers. And, you know, in some form, you know, myself as as an biosec instructor, I guess I try to bring people up and talking about equity and science for all for all people, not just the elite. But I think it's for scientists is super important to communicate science to everybody, and non scientists. When I was going to school, it was really not it wasn't looked up to people who did that kind of stuff, they weren't really looked up to, right, that they went to the masses and started talking about science. Scientists was somebody who was in their labs, just doing their work, publishing papers and not talking to people, not socializing. And but I feel like that that is changing in our society. And scientists are going out, they are going, they are talking about science. And, you know, we have volunteers going to middle schools, they're going to elementary schools, the high schools, going to communities and talking about science and all the cool things that you can do with science. And just a quick follow up on that. Have you observed barriers, barriers to cultural barriers to scientists feeling comfortable being activists in that way? Yeah, like I said, and when I was in school, that was definitely a barrier. It wasn't. It wasn't a good thing to do, right? You had to be in your lab seriously working 11, 12 hours a day, and not really getting into events like this was not really something that people did. I think the barriers are breaking. It's getting better and better. And people are talking about science a lot more. So yeah, there's so barriers, we still have work to do, but it is improving. Thank you. Fatma, do you? Science is an activist, like she mentioned, when I was in grad school, you were expected to work day and night, but I was very lucky. I had a PhD advisor who didn't actually clock people in or out, but I know some of the labs. I my decision was I was going to enjoy my PhD, and I was going to do it between eight to five. So I organized everything, make the plans, and I knew what I was going to do two months earlier. And I went to all of the student clubs and I was in graduate student council. So that's why I know many of the other problems that were associated with the graduate school and graduate students and many of the positives and negatives you hear. But one of the other thing I did in sciences, I've been to many other labs and training was actually quite different in different labs. And one of the labs I've been to, it was a very productive lab. And I actually worked a lot less in that particular lab. And I got more papers out. But they had this really great protocols and everything I did, I learned something about it. And I really liked that strategy. So when I moved to my PhD lab, and I still kept in touch with them. And I, the way they did science was very enlightening to me. And whether the experiment worked or not, I learned something. I knew where I was going. And despite the hurdles, I made progress. So I took that philosophy. And when I had students and I realized many of the students undergrads do not get to have that kind of training. And I did provide that kind of training to them. And the ones who were really interested, many of them actually went to medical school, the last one. And I gave equal opportunity. It didn't really matter what background they have. And the last one I trained, I had a training grant. She got into Lewis Cotts Temple Medical School. And she said, the only reason she got in there is because she worked with me and all of the projects she taught during the interview, she told about those projects. And the only place actually she got, she did a lot of check marks, you know, with the medical schools, you have to do a lot of check marks. And many of the labs she did, they didn't actually provide her actual research experience. And the only place she actually got to do research and how to do research was my lab. And I thought I'm very proud of her. And she got into the medical school. And I believe that she's going to make a great doctor. Sorry about that. Yeah. So, so that's true. So Fatma, you're sort of describing a great culture. And did you feel that freedom to have activism came out of that culture? Or did you feel in those programs that you were sort of stymied by an expectation that a scientist only discusses science, and not, you know, political things that might affect science? Political things that affect science. Now, you have to be careful when you do science. And what you say, you don't want to piss off people, because that might affect your publication. If you're going to publish, and that might affect your future job. So one of the things actually when I was in, got into grad school, one of my advisors said, it's not about just intelligence to get PhD, you need to learn the politics and how to navigate the system. So I think depending on the location, and until you get a graduate degree and the two graduate student in one of the labs I've been to said, Fatma, you can do earth shaking things when you do have your PhD during your postdoc. With the PhD, just learn how to do science. And I've been to both places. And I think that was one of the best advice I got. I actually, my PhD research, I didn't really select any earth shaking things, but it turned out that it got into the textbooks within less than 10 years, I think five or six years after I published it. But the politics I don't really know what to say, you still need to be careful about what you say. You don't really want to offend. So that, you know, that's actually really helpful perspective, because I don't think people realize how there is this unspoken culture of being careful what you say outside the laboratory. And, you know, Christine actually has built a business and a brand around scientists saying things outside the laboratory. So I'm curious what you think about this. So definitely everything that Fama said is true about having to be super careful about what you say about politics. And even at Berkeley, so I'm currently a grad student in neuroscience getting my PhD at Berkeley. And I thought, I should be able to express myself politically here. It's Berkeley. It's neuroscience. But that was not the case. I had a lot of people telling me that I was gonna, you know, I should stop talking about politics, especially after Trump was elected, if I wanted to have a scientific career. And at that point, I decided, honestly, it's not really worth it to have a scientific career if I have to shut up about all the things I care about immigration, gender equity, housing rights, all this stuff. Like this is stuff that I care about as a human. And I was not willing to decide between being myself as a human and an activist and being a scientist. So I got into a lot of difficult conversations and there's definitely a dichotomy. I think people really do uphold this idea that you do have to choose between being part of society and being an objective scientist and observing society. So there is this idea that in order to be truly objective, you should not be a full participant in society. And this was a really difficult thing, especially in the first ever March for Science, which was about three years ago to the day almost, it was Earth Day 2017, I guess two years ago after Trump got elected. You know, a lot of scientists were very energized, mostly by the idea that our funding was going to be taken away from us, unfortunately, but a lot of scientists were galvanized. And the March for Science was originally, I think, the idea and the leadership was predominantly from one perspective, predominantly white and male. And so there was this effort to represent more diverse voices, but that had a lot of pushback from scientists. And they really felt that putting forth black women, putting forth undocumented people, putting forth environmentalists even, was not objective, as if the way to observe and do proper science was the was the way that had been done for centuries, which is extremely problematic. Like we don't have proper representation in our subjects for medical studies. So people didn't understand the heart attack symptoms for women, because we only studied men. And a lot of what we know about how diseases affect people, is not really how diseases affect everyone, is how diseases affect white people in North America. And so this whole idea that scientists are objective, only if they prescribe to the default ideas that science has prescribed, which is usually one that is European or North American, there is a lot of pushback. And so I made this decision that if I had to be this way and pretend to be a white guy in order to be a scientist, that was not going to work for me. And I did not have even in Berkeley the community where I could go to a bar and have a conversation about how frustrated I felt by policy without having to engage in the importance of free speech and all the other buzzwords we have that are used to silence diverse voices. So I decided I'm not going to debate whether or not science is political anymore, which is a debate I got into a lot. I was going to make pins that just say science is political. And I was just going to put that out there. And it turns out that so many other scientists feel the exact same way. And it is totally a thing where you have to decide if you're going to out yourself as someone who believes that science is political or that science needs dreamers, undocumented people or that we should fund different things in science. It is a decision out yourself. And so now like creating pins or creating a way that people that can scientists can express themselves as someone who believes in these ideals has kind of created a community of scientists online that can find each other and to know that we are people that can trust each other to have these conversations and just skip the barrier of whether or not science is political and just get right to how how scientists can get involved in politics and improve things. So I still think it is very difficult to be a scientist involved in politics, even at Berkeley. But I think I do think it's getting a little bit better. Otherwise, I would not be here today. I would not have any presence. I so agree with absolutely everything you just said. And I do want to say especially that like as somebody who like very easily presents as white and male, we are seen as the objective voice all the time. And so it's our absolute responsibility to talk about this shit. Because people like who look not like me, which like, you know, the other three of you have a much harder time and like get really like her rang for stuff that I can just say really easily. And like, as somebody who like is a CEO, has a company, is an entrepreneur and has, if you know me at all, pretty extreme political beliefs. You can get away with that if it's done in a respectful way. People who are like me are seen as like the objective truth holders. I totally agree. There is no objective anything ever. Like no matter what, even if you're stating facts, you're stating facts to support something. And like no matter how you present any given story, you're having some sort of ideology affect that. And I think that that's actually really important to consider in terms of like the March for Science specifically. I have literally like hours of critique on the marks of science. I hate the March for Science as a scientist. Because the March for Science really, really wants to have this sort of idea of objectivity. And so what the March for Science does is it basically doesn't say anything controversial more or less. All the science, the March for Science, like science is good. No one disagrees with that. No one. Like even on the like right, they still think science, they say science is good, right. And so like saying things like that challenges nothing, it challenges no one and it means nothing. And so that's why at the March for Science like, you know, myself and like my friends, we all tried to sort of stir shit. I mean we're, you know, a lot of people who can, well, some of us anyway, can like present white male, like do things like this. But basically we were, you know, more talking about like we're trying to tie, we're basically trying to do sort of propaganda. And where if you just say like science is political over and over again, people start to believe it, which I think is good. We basically were like tying things that people believed in at the March for like science is good, vaccines work, you know, GMOs are good. If you're anti nuclear, you are a climate science denialist and just like tie things together. And like, yeah, not everybody agreed with us, but that's the point. The point of a March is not to have everybody agree with you. It's the to put forth a position that challenges like the air quotes objective reality in case people are like listening to this. So yeah, 100% agree with all of that. And also like, you know, people like me need to talk about that a lot more and not leave it to people who actually probably will face consequences for saying things like that. I would like to add one of my undergraduate students actually went to science policy. I was very happy about it. So many in minute directions, knowing science is good for her to work on it. And that's a step. And the things that work for males not necessarily work for women. And my approach is usually create awareness, because we don't really want to have directly defense because the minute we get defense, people shut down. We want that open mind. So that's, it might be a little subtle, but it is fairly effective. But the things you do and people may not take it as offensive. But if I do the same thing, they will take it very offensive. But we don't really want that because we want to reach out. So our style is a little different. I have something to add to. So yeah, I totally agree that talking about politics, maybe in science is, you know, there are barriers to that, but we can all do our share in our own little roles. So just little examples like learning a little bit about bioethics. So if you're in, you know, in, you know, ahead of a lab, have your lab techs and your graduate students and your postdocs, have them read a little bit about bioethics. If they're working with mammalians, if they're working with human cells, where did that, where did the cells come from? Who did they belong to? You know, these are the things that you need to start thinking about. Or just little things start recycling all those plastic that we generate in our labs, right? Little things or encouraging hiring of, you know, underrepresented people as lab techs and students bringing students or undocumented students to your lab. So we can all do our little share of, you know, of activism. Thanks. Those are really great perspectives. And I'd like to sort of continue, move on to a related topic. And this is scientists having activism that affects them. So I think that my impression anyway has been that scientists are discouraged or encouraged to be dispassionate and, and a step removed from any issue that might affect them directly. And I would argue, in fact, that that's one reason why for the work that they do, scientists are relatively poorly paid, you know, with regard to other professions that require this amount of education or work. And to be clear, I think all professions are important. But I think scientists have done a very poor job of advocating for themselves, because there is a culture in some quarters of this dispassionate keeping a distance from, from, you know, speaking out on issues that affect the scientists themselves. And one, you know, one area that this is becoming important in the Bay Area, especially for scientists, is the rise of the cost of housing. And there's all these IPOs that are coming in tech. There will be a leg phase, but housing will increase in cost. And I was a group leader at a big pharma company, and I had to move around the Bay Area several times just to find somewhere where I could afford to live and sleep at night so that I could be productive during the day. And I'm very curious what the panelists think about activism involving scientists themselves. And have they participated? Have you participated in it? Do you know people who have? What are the issues that you think that scientists should be saying, okay, public, this is getting in the way of us doing our jobs. And it's not necessarily housing, it can be numerous things. But I'd like to hear what you all think about that. Yeah, so definitely housing and the cost of living in the Bay Area is a huge problem. To be honest with you, I mean, I teach at the community college and I mean, we we encourage our students to do well and, you know, go get a job. Great. But, you know, I know deep down that even when they do get that job, it's not going to pay much. And and I always wonder how do they continue living in San Francisco, you know, you know, at age of 30, there's still like living with five other people in the same apartment. So it's just not practical. It's definitely a big issue. We are really trying to encourage the and another thing is that if you know, you go all the way to PhD and then you're still not able to afford a housing, that's really a huge problem. But we are trying to encourage the places like UCSF or or Genentech these big employers to think about hiring people who are not necessarily PhDs and giving them decent salaries so that they can live and they can be productive in their at their works. But it's it's a it's a very complicated issue and yeah, and difficult one. Yeah, so, you know, as somebody who runs a company, we have to pay people and they have to in turn pay for housing. And so it's harder for us when people can't afford housing. We means we need to have like higher salaries, because like if you have people who are commuting an hour and a half to work because they have to live extremely far away in order to afford it. They have to live with their parents. These are people who are stressed at work. These are people who like perform worse and like have a worse time of everything and you end up with lower quality work. So it means that you have to pay people a lot more. I mean, I think public housing should be a right. Incredibly successful companies based companies, God countries. That's an awful slip. Incredibly successful countries have public housing. People point to Singapore as this like model of capitalism, this like beautiful city on the hill. It's market based everything. Eighty percent of those people live in public housing. That's government funded free housing for those people. That's what successful countries do. Housing is a right, not a commodity. So in terms of direct activism that's been done around here, I mean, I haven't been so active anymore because I'm really busy with Finless. But basically, I still am a card carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. So a literal card carrying socialist. And then in Assef, there was I was just trying to remember what the hell it was called because I didn't work on the campaign, but it was called Prop F. Or sorry, question F. And so basically this was a right that SFDSA essentially made up the San Francisco Democratic Socialists. It passed. And basically this new right allows tenants to stay in their homes. And so what it does is if you're being evicted, it requires that your landlord give you written notice in your own native language, whatever that is, that you now have the right to free counsel and then we also got money allocated towards we the chapter got money allocated towards this legal counsel. So basically if you're being evicted, you have noticed that you have access to slash the right to a lawyer who can help you stay in your housing and maybe keep something that's rent controlled, keep something that's cheaper instead of getting evicted. The conversation in San Francisco is one that is really sick. It's one that sort of basically you have Yimbis and Nimbis more or less. You have people who refuse to build housing and they're usually more conservative. And then you have like Democrats who just sort of want developers to do whatever they want. Neither of these are solutions. We're not going to get anywhere with this 20 percent of the housing in San Francisco is still empty. A lot of these are investment properties. America has six times more empty properties than it has homeless people in this country. This isn't a supply problem. This is like a problem with people actually being able to afford places to live. And so we need legislation that can actually get people in housing, keep people in housing, pay for housing, build public housing, stop all the developers building these like gentrification fortresses that only people like me can afford. And like it directly affects all of us, especially us as scientists because these aren't just like some weird like hypothetical poor person. I mean, these are like our co-workers. These are our colleagues at Finless. These are people that I work with on a day to day basis. And so like it does directly affect us. Housing is a really important thing and we really need to basically find a way to push for public housing. And so that's why SFDSA has tried to build basically a FIMB movement, public housing in my backyard, as a means of trying to solve for this and actually get like people in because if it gets too much worse, I mean, none of us are going to have a workforce at all. And like all the things that you and I do on a day to day basis, you're not going to be able to do that anymore. Do you like eating food? Your waiter or waitress has to like live somewhere and like you're going to have to pay more in order to afford like where they live. Like this is a thing that actually does affect everything. It's sort of like, I mean, trickle down is obviously dumb, but trickle up, I don't know. So anyway, there is a way to advocate for this. I do, you know, say that like if you're in San Francisco, the SFDSA does really, really amazing work on housing and they're actually actually plugged into a bunch of other groups that also do incredible work on housing. East Bay, less so. This is a really great question. Like I have just have so many different points running through my mind, like starting from we as a society view doing science as a privilege. And so we are willing to be underpaid for and people don't advocate for better pay. But also many scientists are like generation, like multi generational, like the amount of PhD students who have PhD parents is astounding. So there is just like a difference between the people who do do science and the rest of the population. But also science is something that people do move around a lot for me. We live in a tech, a biotech biology hub. And like by having hubs, we do displace people. And so there's just so much to unpack here. But yeah, I think a lot of what we have to consider is like what is the worth of bringing scientists all together in one place versus displacing the people who are here. I was born in San Francisco in what is now known as the Zuckerberg Hospital. And I've seen the city change a lot. And I do also want to take an opportunity to plug safe organized spaces and St. Francis homelessness challenge, which is led by Amy Farrow Weiss, who does a lot of work for people who have been displaced, like something like 70 percent of homeless people in San Francisco at one point did live in homes in San Francisco. So these are people who are displaced. So I think it is a responsibility both for us as scientists to advocate for better pay so that people who do come from like low socioeconomic status can enter and sustain themselves in the scientific workforce. But also to think about like what is the impact of when we do create these amazing hubs for research and science and technology? What is the impact of that? Like do we as CEOs or whatever like have a responsibility to try not to displace people who have lived in these communities, but rather just build new places closer to where we work? You know, there's just so much to unpack in this. And it's an amazing question. I think you could have a whole panel just on this point. The housing prices, that's really, really important. One of the reasons actually we moved to Davis, but besides, it's an Ag Hub and we are an Ag Biotech. The housing was very expensive. And it would be very difficult for us. And for the scientist, I think affordable housing should be provided because if your scientist, even if it is educated, if they're worried about how am I going to pay for my rent? You're not getting your full time. Half the day, this person's mind is someplace else. If you want that mind in your work, you might hire them for cheap. You think you're hiring them for half price, but half the time your scientist's mind is someplace else. So your scientist is their part time, physically full time, but reality is part time. So if you want to get full time that our scientists or any of the people who are working, if you want to get them full time, physically and mentally, you have to pay them the proper salary that they can afford. And they don't have to worry about month to month how they're paying. So I totally agree with everyone and Mike Seldin and his efforts. So I can provide a little perspective on this as well. When I was a postdoc at UCSF, I think at that time this typical salary for a starting postdoc was 42 K a year. And that was bad enough that we lived in postdoc dorms. And I was like, oh, how am I 29 years old? What have I done wrong in life? And I'm 29 years old and I can hear people through the walls and I have like a random roommate. This is not good. And what was also interesting about that is that I was lucky because I could and I eventually did say screw this. I'm going to start applying for industry jobs, which is what I wanted to do anyway. And I was fortunate enough to leave after not very long in that situation. However, one thing that I noticed that I really think should be discussed because it's a social justice issue is the hiring of foreign postdocs on visas. And I was at a conference a few years ago, where a very productive professor in the structural biology space was asked at a cocktail hour, how did he get so much work out of his small group of postdocs? And without even pausing, he said, oh, well, I only hire foreign postdocs and I make sure they have families and they know that if I fire them, they and their families have to vacate the country in short order. So he said it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much I pay them. So I mean, to be fair to most of the faculty, I don't think that many of them explicitly do this. But the fact that this is even as a strategy or as structurally possible is something that really needs to change in the culture of how we do big research. So I thought that that insight for those of you that weren't aware of that that sort of thing goes on. So, you know, the structure of our of how we do big science is sometimes fundamentally exploitative. And one thing that bio captivate can do hopefully over time and with connections that you make with each other tonight and other evenings in the future, I hope is address, you know, how can we change the culture? How can we change the incentives that drive this sort of thing? Like hiring postdocs and then threatening to the deport them or fire them and have them deported. And the irony in all of this is that UCSF gave us postdoc appreciation days when I was there and we got a free t-shirt and like and food. And you know, to this day, I will do I will eat any free food as long as it's like not overtly spoiled. So this is what the scientific education does to you. But anyway, next topic. So I think many, you know, the people on this panel have a variety of backgrounds. And I think one thing that's discussed in science inevitably is education because education or training those two are not necessarily the same thing. But these there are long educational and training routes in science. And historically, there have been limitations in industry, at least big, big pharma is one example where volition in science is restricted to people who have earned a PhD, sometimes restricted to people who've earned a PhD and done a postdoc. Perhaps that's changing. And one thing that I wanted to ask the panelists about is what is their opinion of science education in the context of should we be advocating for something different or what changes would you advocate for if you were going to advocate for changes in how we educate scientists and whether we even need to formally educate scientists as far as we do in all circumstances. Yeah, I mean, so at City College of San Francisco, we I would say 50 percent of our students already have a bachelor degree. But they come to us, some of them, their bachelor degree is in completely different fields, but some of them have bachelor degrees in biology and chemistry. We've had even master's people, new people who have master's degree, but they come to us because they know all the theory. They can tell you all about how cells work, but they're not able to work in a laboratory. They've never touched the pipette in their whole four years of education. They've never designed an experiment. They never had to report, you know, and do data analysis and, you know, give a PowerPoint presentation. So that's why they come to us. They come back to community college after graduating from UC Berkeley and UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz. And they come to us because they need to learn the hands on, how do I work in a laboratory? So that's something that needs to be changed. Of course, that would be bad for us, but that's definitely something that needs to be changed. You get a bachelor degree. You should be able to work in a laboratory. But to advocate for people who don't have formal degrees, that's something that we do at City College all the time because the other 50 percent of our students don't have a degree. And we take students who are going through either career changes or for whatever reason that we're not able to finish their college. Education. And so they're now that they're older and most of them are, most of them are in their late 20s, early 30s. They have families. They have responsibilities. They have jobs. But they are at the point in their life that they wanted. They have always been interested in science. And now they feel like I want to do this. I want to do science. It's difficult, right? And they don't want to go get a four year degree. But with just a little bit of training, maybe they won't be PhD level, but they will be able to do, you know, your lab tasks as a lab technician and still contribute to an important research project. And so we should encourage all companies to think about hiring non-PhDs and even non-bachelors as their technicians. If they have the skills and they can do it, there's no need really for that four year degree. Thank you. One thing that I've learned in hiring over the years that speaks to what you've observed is that the best predictor of a good employee is whether they can learn new things quickly and they're enthusiastic. And whether they have a certain skill set sometimes matters. But usually it's the former that's more important. So who wanted to comment next? Christine? It's this question is really interesting because as a current PhD student, there are a lot of people I know who want to go into industry. But oftentimes when you graduate with a PhD and get an industry job, you just start out at entry level anyway. So it's as if the PhD also doesn't matter. I mean, you might get paid more, but your ranking is low because a lot of I think industry employers recognize that like it's great if you have a PhD, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any of your skills or knowledge, like your dissertation might not have any direct relevance to the work at hand. And I also believe that you can basically teach anyone anything, but it's the willingness and the ease at which someone can learn something that makes someone, you know, really great asset to whatever they're contributing to. So I firmly do not believe that there's necessarily any like strict correlation between someone's worth and the degrees that they've earned. But we certainly uphold that. And I think a lot of it might be due to an incentive of people with PhDs to uphold this hierarchy. And like honestly, there is potentially way more PhDs than than there are jobs that pay people accordingly based on the amount of time they've sunk into their education and training. And I don't think that what we're doing necessarily right now is working, but like it's so difficult to imagine a system changing in which where we already have maybe too many over qualified people. Yeah, so I know I'm coming from this perspective where people constantly do tell us that we might be over qualified, which is so hearing this question is kind of interesting. Over qualification, I have something to say about it. So when I had my postdoc and when I was actually looking for positions, it's over qualification for the PhDs science education is important. Over qualification for PhDs, they usually say, oh, maybe should I remove it from my PhD? Would it help me? My decision was, no, I'm not removing my PhD or postdoc. This is what I did. And here are the things what I can do for the science education wise. I think everyone should have right to have a good science education because it has benefits that undergraduate education may not be able to give. Same thing, PhD. And it gives us to analytical thinking. When you look at things, you look at it differently. And it gives so many different skillset that you can use it in many other places. And actually, if I could pivot this question just a little bit based on where the answers have gone, what do we do with this pool of over qualified or excessive PhDs? I mean, it's a problem that I've thought a lot about because as the biological economy grows, those skills and that creativity that those people hold and bring with them wherever they go, those can be used, those can be used to drive a great counterculture. It can be used to drive entrepreneurialism, can be used to drive a lot of good for society. And, you know, I'm curious and I'll start with Mike. What ideas we might have for sort of draining this huge pool of postdoctoral fellows out of the university and into other opportunities? And I should also note that we're going a little over on the time for the main panel before we go to questions and answers. So if no one objects, I might cut the question section shorter and we can all catch up during the happy hour and sort of dig into this issue because it's really central to the economy of science, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Louis, you and I have like butted heads on this mildly in the past. You know, you're sort of saying like, what do we do with these PhDs? How do we drain them out of academia? And how do we put them into private industry? And my answer is don't. I really think that, you know, real research happens in the public sector. And like when the public sector is well funded, things happen that actually benefit everybody. And like there is a lot of use for that. You know, like my family's from the Soviet Union, like it's one of the like fastest rates of industrialization that's ever happened. And my grandma has a PhD in physics. And like she loved that. And people here are just like, how does your grandma have a PhD in physics? Like, is she some sort of like wild feminist? I'm like, no, no, no, she is not. She's very regressive in like a million awful ways. But she's awesome. She's very smart. But like, you know, voted for Trump. But she doesn't speak English, doesn't matter. But and I love her very much. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, she's like, everyone got a PhD. That's what you did. And like you got to work, you were an engineer, you were a physicist, you built public knowledge. And so like if we actually fund that properly, we can create way more innovation than we ever can. I heavily recommend there's a documentary. It's called The Smart State. It is amazing. And basically it talks about like, we talk about innovation in the private sector a lot. And like everyone's like, Oh, well, you know, you hate private industry or whatever, but you use an iPhone. First of all, I use a Samsung because I hate myself. And second, all of that technology came from the public sector. Steve Jobs put it in a nice little box, but like the GPS, the touch screen, the processor, these are not things designed by Apple. These are not things invented by Apple. These are things invented by people doing PhDs in the public sector. And so for me, I'm just like, fund the crap out of that. There's a ton of work that still needs to be done. We clearly have a lot of technology that we haven't figured out yet. Having it something that's like publicly available and done in a very like meticulous way, I think is hugely advantageous. And like, yeah, there's definitely ways we can incentivize entrepreneurship and stuff like that. I think entrepreneurship has its place, but I think that in America we have a really big funding problem and we should fix that first. So not to start a debate. No, no, actually, I agree. I do wonder, though, if we're going to continue funding science the way that we do, we make universities behave more like universities and less like businesses in terms of converting grad students in postdocs hours into papers which get grants, which then turn into 100% overhead, which hires administrators. And, you know, maybe you don't need that many administrators as we have in many universities. So maybe there's a regulatory aspect to educating scientists, or maybe even a bill of rights for science trainees is something that could have a value. But I would say that I'm not in favor of abolishing or even reducing public funding of science. I've just seen that universities are not set up to discover a therapeutic drug. They just aren't. Their press releases forget about them. They are not set up for drug discovery and design and optimization. For instance, nor are they set up for industrial production most of the time. So I view their symbiosis between academic science and industrial science. And both ecosystems have to be healthy. And one could argue that because of the structure of academic funding right now, and also the dearth of funding in certain areas, it's not healthy. And so the people in industry I think make use of discoveries that companies would not be able to justify the time or the expense of making that academia may you know, these discoveries are made in academia. But at the same time, academia cannot usually bring those discoveries to the point where they are practically useful. And so I think that it's this interplay that's important. But just my opinion, thoughts by others. But like, basically, sounds like you're talking about medical stuff. I come at it mostly from an agricultural perspective and an environmental perspective. I think I agree, medical stuff maybe is overfunded, agricultural stuff, I would say is pretty heavily underfunded in a pretty serious way. So this might just be a different of industries that we're talking about here, difference in industries. So do any of you all have opinions about how we would change, you know, how what would we do with these all these PhDs? I think we need to bring the technicians and many of the things we had in the past that helped actually in science, as opposed to turning everyone into PhDs. If you look at the universities, there is no master's degree in very few universities. And even if you do get master's degree, it's very hard to find a job because even the companies actually turned the master's level positions into PhDs. Way in the past, I had an interview with one of the corporations. And they said, Well, you know, there is not much difference between master's level and PhD in terms of salary. So there are so many PhDs we can hire the PhDs as opposed to masters. But PhD does quite different things compared to master level training. So I think we need to bring all those levels back when we had the healthy ecosystem. And we shouldn't just hire the Oh, the US postdocs are expensive. Let's import the PhDs from other countries. I think that should stop. Oh, you didn't really like the salary and probably paid them proper salaries, as opposed to just keep them continuously on a soft money position and give them proper, you know, respect. And I think one other thing should be added for the postdocs. They should not be called postdocs. They should be called their proper title, the doctor. In that case, it will do one other thing as opposed to the lab head is doctor and their scientists, the postdocs, they're not trainees, they're not treated as trainees, they're treated when it comes to productivity as a scientist. They should also be called doctors. That's going to make a big mind shift. Because currently they are Oh, your postdoc you're, you know, underlying. You're not as valuable as me. But once they're called doctors, now everyone else is going to question, why am I getting that low? But when you call them postdoc, everyone is okay with their salary. But when you call them doctors, you're a doctor, I'm a doctor. Why am I getting to have or quarter of your maybe one tenth of your salary? So that's going to create the questions. I think the postdocs should be called their proper title. Yeah, I totally agree that we shouldn't be creating that many PhDs. And right now their PhD level, people are working lab tech work, just because there's just not enough jobs for PhDs. So so that's one thing. And then when you are in in graduate school, I think something that does not get encouraged is exploring other opportunities. So I think we're all get trained to work in in an academic lab. That's at least when I was in school that that was it. That was what we've trained for. I don't remember meeting anybody from any other industry, even, you know, biotech industry wasn't encouraged at that time. Now it's different. But, you know, I think they graduate schools need to do a better job of, you know, encouraging their students to explore other options like getting into government types of jobs, politics, you know, public health. Other other avenues that they all use science as well, like environmental sciences that are, you know, you're a biotech person, but you are working on the environmental issues. So all different kinds of avenues that the PhD with with the education that they have, they can bring a lot to the table. Christine. So I actually think we should keep giving people PhDs. I love the model that we pay people to do science and become educated. But I also think that we as a society should not view scientists as separate. Like I think we should value scientists who go do things that engage with society. Like we should have public school teachers who are doctors. Like we should value that. We should value YouTubers who do makeup tutorials, who are doctors who tell us the chemistry of the skincare. Like we should actively encourage people to do different things during grad school so they don't feel like they have to continue in this so called pipeline to be continued as a scientist, but rather there's this new saying that people are using as like STEM is not a pipeline. It's a prism where you know, everyone enters in one wavelength, but it separates and we can have scientists in all sectors of society and value them. Because I really do think that there is a lot of stigma and a lot of shame put on to scientists who have doctorates or masters or bachelors who do not continue doing basic research or industrial research, etc. I think we should. One of the reasons why we have such a disconnect between the general public and science is because we continue to uphold this dichotomy between scientists and the general public. We have words that scientists use to describe the rest of the humans, you know, lay people, whatever. Like we need to actively, you know, mix everyone together. Like I don't know why we still feel like scientists should be separated. Like we should have doctorates everywhere, you know, like and not and not shame people for or question a decision to leave academia. Like we should not value people in that way. Like I think we would be so much better off if we had people trained in rigorous scientific analysis and methods doing all sorts of things, whether that's even like opening a bakery or running a daycare or anything like that. And this is especially important because most of the people who leave STEM after receiving a PhD are women who have children. So it's like we have this entire way that we devalue people who leave STEM, devalue mothers and everything and the kind of work that women do. And I think we really need to overhaul what we how we value people who have different backgrounds and stop stop only valuing people who who continue in what we think they should be doing. Thanks, that's really insightful, much appreciated. So I'm going to have one more question for the panelists and then we'll probably we're probably still under an hour, but we'll have a few questions. But this last question sort of gets to the heart of the topic of this panel, you know, activism and science and politics and science. And I'm curious what each of you thinks about the appropriateness. Is it an obligation of scientists to call out people that are pushing pseudoscience and do so rigorously, even at the risk of their own reputations. And you know, I'm sure you can all think of examples. James Watson, who's a racist, you know, has not been told to be not been told to shut up by as many senior scientists as you'd think should tell him to shut up. That's one example. Kerry Mullis, who actually invented PCR just down the street here, which was a great invention is an AIDS denialist. People still invite him to events. Why people who should know better, who are scientists? So obviously you see where my position is. But but even you know, even when the anti vaccine craze was really big, I remember having just just pretty vicious arguments. In fact, it ruined some friendly acquaintanceships and friendships, even with people who are otherwise educated, but not in biology, and just thought that, you know, maybe, you know, in one case, you know, some married engineers, they were not going to have their kids vaccinated because of the pseudoscience. And, you know, I felt obliged to say no, that has no basis in reality at all. And, you know, there's a cost to that. And I'm just curious, if any of you have found yourselves in the position of having to really try to smack down something that, you know, is pseudoscientific or a scientist who's has fringe opinions that they're passing off as science? And what is our obligation to do that? Or maybe not. I mean, where do you, where would you draw the line? So actually, yeah. So there's a lot of clinics out there claiming that they're going to cure all diseases using stem cells and super expensive and they get people's hopes high. So that's something that has come up in classes that I teach. And so we had enough of this discussion that I decided to make it an assignment for my students for some in one of my classes that, you know, go do a little bit of research on these clinics that claim to be able to cure all diseases with stem cells. And then, you know, just write a report just just so that they're aware of that something like this exists. And as people who are studying biotechnology, they need to be aware of it. So they can tell others, they can talk to their parents who may be thinking of going to these clinics or their, you know, relatives and friends. So yeah, it is important for us to speak about it and try to educate others. I agree with her that education comes first. And that's why science education is really, really important. It's important at an elementary school, middle school, high school, throughout the education system. We can't really fix it overnight because it's a belief to the science people who believe it's a belief. It's very difficult to change the belief, but creating awareness and education, not just in the college throughout the education system is going to be able to fix it. I don't think it's going to fix everyone, but at least creating awareness. Like golly said, it's really important. At least that is on our side. I think we can do and maybe have a marketing person. They're very good at getting the message. And that comes with the marketing pseudoscience too. I think the question posed is very interesting because you used the word call out. And I think some people should some scientists should call out people who, you know, profit off of pseudoscience, but there are also some scientists who should call in some people who should just educate, some people who should just inform, some people who should do it through empathy, some people who can do it through debate. I think not necessarily every scientist should engage with pseudoscience like in one prescribed way, but we are all people who can communicate with other people in the way that's most effective. And there's a lot of really great research being done currently to understand how misinformation or dis information is propagated, what the intent is behind this information. And I think it is our collective responsibility to combat these these ideas that are patently false, but there's lots of different ways that we can do it. I think we have to be really thoughtful about that because the whole thing where if you call out someone and go immediately on the offense, they can shut down and be defensive. So you really have to think about it as a two way communication street and and really do our best as scientists, not just to, you know, provide a battery of facts, but to be empathetic and communicate as fellow, you know, citizens as mother to mother, father to father kind of thing. And I think there's different roles that each of us can play in terms of combating this, but it might be different for every person. So I hesitate to prescribe and say that every scientist should do something. But I think that every scientist should do something. Yeah, I think it's kind of hard to go last, I think. But I think there's a lot of different types of pseudoscience. And that means there's a lot of different types of people who talk about it. And I think the different approaches are definitely merited. I mean, you have like the the Vani Hari's of the world food babe, who's just like a huckster who like knows what she says is bullshit. And she sells books on it and she makes money, that kind of stuff called out. There's racists, there's like the alt right, you know, people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, these are people who are like maybe hucksters, maybe just dumb, but definitely racist. And so like those kind of people can be called out. But there are definitely people who who I have to interact with a lot who delve into pseudoscience and I think that their perspectives are kind of not being like understood from their point of view. So like for example, I do a bunch of work with like the or I've I had been before I got too busy. I don't want to pretend I'm a big political activist anymore. But like the Ecosocialist caucus and the SFDSA and the city talking a lot about like agricultural things and environmental issues. And so a group came to us that was mostly an indigenous group and they were talking to us about like the cause that they were working on and they were trying to get basically a GMO crop band. And like these are not hucksters. These are not racist. These are people who have had a really, really long history of being fucked over and who like deserve to be heard. And so like when scientists come to these people and they start saying things that aren't right. And all we're doing is like correcting their vocabulary and like picking them on things that they've said that are not scientific. That's not helpful. And so like these are people that really I think can be spoken with. But you really do need to let them know that you understand where they're coming from. I mean like you definitely can't separate for them. I mean I'd say for all of us. The idea of basically like their inherent distrust of a genetically modified crop and like the genocide of their people, much of which was definitely based on like a denial of food in a lot of different situations and like the American governments like sort of programs where basically we send them these food in like little boxes because we've taken all of their land from them, all of their assets, absolutely everything, shove them into the middle of the desert and then give them these little food boxes that like suck and are nutritionally deficient. And then we're trying to sell them other food and they're like obviously distrustful of that. That makes total sense. And like yeah, the fear of GMO is unfounded, but their fear of Americans is not. And so like I really think it's important for scientists in particular and science communicators to sort of learn a bit of the language there and sort of learn the place that you're coming into, especially people like me, to be able to talk about it in their language. And there's tons of times where I've been in like a far left organizing situation where someone has said something anti GMO and I'm just like, because I like can sort of frame it in this way and be like, yes, definitely, you know, like Monsanto generated Agent Orange. And that was a like human rights disaster and what they did to Vietnam as a war crime. Like and being able to talk about the issues that they know about and talk to them in the language that like they actually use to discuss issues that are definitely real. You can gain a lot more trust and actually get people to be convinced away from these sort of pseudo scientific ideas when you convince them that you're on the same side. And but first you need to genuinely be on the same side. You can't just pair it the language. And so I think it's really important to learn the vocabulary, not with the air of teaching, but first with the with the idea of understanding. And then eventually when you feel you've understood, then you can engage in a conversation. And I wouldn't even say that I'm 100% good at that. There's definitely times where I've been bad at that. Yeah. All right, we want to be respectful of time. I think we can probably open it up to questions for our panelists and we don't have any roving mics. So I'll just, you know, hand the mic off to whoever has a question. So is there anything that any of you would like to hear our great panelists talk about? Or Oh, you don't have questions. Okay. Two questions total. Okay. Thank you. So I think most of us are scientists here, and we I think I don't want to speak for everyone, but we tend to gravitate towards evidence based and fact based kind of analyses of a situation. And I'd like to ask our panel, how do you respond to when these sort of evidence based approaches don't seem very effective in say the political sphere? And on the one hand, how can we incorporate other types of approaches that might have a broader appeal? And on the other hand, you know, how to overcome or should we overcome this resistance to an evidence based approach? And I particularly liked Christine, what you said about having to approach people with empathy. And Michael, you said about understanding people's perspective before jumping in with with the facts as it were. Thanks, that's a great question. Who wants to start? So I'll I'll speak, answer this question from a little bit from experience and a little bit from what people have done research on, particularly with people who are anti vax. I think that is especially a population where we need to understand where these parents usually are coming from. They truly want what is best for their children, but they don't know necessarily the science behind how vaccines work to them. It really is just a needle administered by a doctor who is really busy, who doesn't really have the time maybe to listen to all their concerns. And to them, this is science, right? They have seen a lot of evidence online in their parenting groups or whatever of correlation that symptoms for disease or disorders like autism emerge sometimes hours after a dose or a routine vaccine. And so to them, this is science, right? Like this is basic science. You you observe an event and you correlate it with what seems to be an outstanding precipitating factor. And because babies get so many vaccines early on in life right around the time that we see a lot of symptoms emerge for for life altering disorders, this is science to them. Like this is I know we like as scientists learn that immediately correlation is not causation, but for someone who does not have a lot of experience doing controlled experiments. And even just in human research, like the best we can get a lot of times is correlation. So when you cite a paper to them, that is not the same thing as them seeing, you know, their cousin's child have a seizure three hours after visiting the doctor. So I think we definitely need to understand where these parents are coming from and even ask them about their experiences. Like why? Where did you get this idea? Where did you learn this information and become a trusted source to them and not like, you know, yell down from the ivory tower, but really understand like this fear that they have that something that they're going to give to their child, whether a bunch of experts recommended or not is going to harm their child. I think that's, you know, their motivation number one and and really talk to them from there as someone who also cares deeply about their child and then answering their questions. So instead of just giving people a list of facts, like common myths, like ask them, like what questions do you have? Like can I just sit down with you and explain to you the immune system and like how vaccines work, how antibodies work? Like can we just have a discussion about this? And I know that there is actually a friend of mine who's a chemist, her brother recently had a baby and he was not going to vaccinate. But what changed his mind was her suggestion to do a little bit more research and then a Netflix Bill Nye episode. So like as much as some of us scientists don't really love Bill Nye, the communication that works, that resonates with people, like often does come from a trusted source and a lot of people who are our age now view Bill Nye as a trusted source because he was in our classrooms telling us about momentum, talking about all this stuff. So I think trust might be the number one thing and we are trained to trust citations and experiments and controlled studies but a lot of people don't have this science education, this training to trust just words on a paper and they believe what they can see and they believe what people say that they know truly have a vested interest in the wellness of them and their children. I would also add to that that you know facts are great and I have a science background. Actually I'm the only person who doesn't have a PhD and also isn't trying to get one so probably the least science background but facts are good but I think it's important to also listen to emotions and to even use that sometimes in your messaging you can't like there's a lot of there's actually a lot of evidence and this is a little ironic that facts don't convince people and that telling people stats doesn't convince them and so I think it's a little while that as scientists people who base ourselves on evidence we then try and use facts when we know I saw a lot of people nod that doesn't work so like why do we keep doing that? I think you should use a little bit of emotion in that and sort of make it something that's very personal for people like when I really talk about the anti-vaxx stuff and I do know some anti-vaxxers being in the political circles that I'm in I talk about I'm like hey like you know someone in my really close nuclear family is diagnosed autistic like do you think it'd be better if he was dead like this is a really personal thing for me like when you're talking about this you're saying it's better to be dead than autistic that's a pretty strong thing I mean I also have a good friend who does a lot in terms of like autistic activism and one of the things that this person says which is really awesome I think everyone in this room if you haven't you should go online and look at what the symptoms of autism are you probably take a lot of the boxes like and this isn't just because it's a room of scientists autism is a very a very broad thing like I take a lot of the boxes for autism and I know that's sort of like telling on myself but like I think a lot of people do and this person does this advocacy basically what they're saying is like pretty much everyone is autistic one way or another it's a very broad range of symptoms that honestly a lot of them don't have a lot to do with each other and two people who have autism have nothing to do with each other so it's like talk to people about that but like hey maybe we're all autistic maybe I'm autistic maybe autism isn't a hundred percent real a lot of the time and like maybe it's overdiagnosed a lot of people have people in their family that are autistic and like to say that being dead is better is like a pretty strong thing to say I would say did we address your question somewhat so we we've one more time for one more question and then after this there will be mingling and curated conversation as it were so there's plenty of time to talk but I saw a hand so my question has to do with the accessibility of science so a friend of mine recently who's not a scientist he wanted to learn about nutrition and so he he sometimes like go look at journals and wonder who pays the thirty dollars to read the papers he paid thirty dollars to read some random nutrition articles and not a trained scientist so he didn't wouldn't didn't know like you know when you read a scientific paper not all of it is exactly facts right they're just like somebody's ideas and so he asked me because I was making fun of him and he asked me he was like well what am I supposed to do if I want to learn about nutrition and read like primary literature and I don't want to read any sort of secondary literature that's going to already like piecemeal where where the actual data comes from I actually had no answer for him and I'm wondering sort of what the panel thinks about that so people just the general public that they don't have access to all of the scientific journals that we do with scientists but be also can even if they did have access can necessarily don't can't distinguish between good science and bad science and also with nutrition it's very difficult to do so any opinions in that realm how can I answer my friend's question please good you okay so at least this is true for UC Berkeley but the UC Berkeley university libraries are also public libraries so your friend can literally go go into the campus libraries and ask help from a librarian to also number one get the primary research articles for free and then also just for some help on parsing through that literature so there are some great resources where scientists are doing some writing that is more accessible particularly through this group called massive science so they do a lot of stuff but their their topics range everything from GMOs to psychedelics to nutrition and they're only building up so they don't have a great archive yet but I would recommend that your friend try to find like even if they find like a research article primary research article they're interested in to find if there's a university press release or anything like that where the information is free and often the the authors have some sort of role in writing up that press release and try to at least make sure it's not over like exaggerated in terms of the claims because they do know that people outside of the immediate field are going to be reading it so those are the two main things I suppose I would recommend however I acknowledge like it is completely terrible out there for anyone who does want to do primary research reading and this is super true for parents who have children who are suffering from different disorders they try to read a lot of primary literature and they often pay hundreds of dollars in these fees just to try to learn about new clinical trials and things that are going on so that I think it is slowly happening that we will have open access primary literature pretty soon the entire UC system just terminated a huge like billion something dollar contract with Elsever so I think this hopefully you know will no longer be an issue like 20 years in the future but right now yeah it's it's pretty terrible so thank you for the question another good source is of course plus one so plus one is an online you know and the papers are all free also in PubMed you know you search there are some of the articles are free not all but some of them are free but yeah I mean there are a lot of resources universities are great so if you find someone a scientist who's actually doing work on that field just go to their website and then see what they have there and then maybe you can even arrange a little informational interview with a person who's actually doing the work so there are some resources but I do agree it's it's difficult for someone who's not in science so so to comment on a few different issues I think that that as Christine noted there is a move towards publicly funded research being absolutely publicly accessible now that doesn't help with the interpretation but that's probably coming I mean I don't understand how research that gets one dollar of the people's money should be behind a paywall and hopefully one of these days we can get Randy Scheckman here who believes in open access public publishing and is a Nobel laureate and founded E-Life a journal that is open access that's a really important issue but in terms of like trying to parse the meaning and even in complex fields there's just this deluge of papers and the people who've been in the field a long time I mean even from a even biology PhDs have trouble parsing the literature of a new field and when we have to pivot to a new field in our work sometimes it takes a long time just to figure out what lines of research are deprecated and which are not because most of the deprecated research isn't retracted it's just buried under the pile of more recent literature and so there's actually there might be some uses for machine learning in helping to understand scientific literature of course it's early days but that's one natural thing that could help everyone including scientists because it's too much to assimilate but there is another thing and I think that it gets the responsibility of people who are receiving advanced training or education depending on how you look at it in the sciences you know PhD is the D is doctis which is Latin for teacher and in the end of the day PhDs have the obligation to help teach people their subject matter at a level that rises to philosophy and so if that means helping a member of the public understand their field and best the best understanding of their field they should take the time when they can to do that now what does it look like for your friend well I think one thing is to reach out to non-profit subject area associations so maybe an association having to do with a you know a disease or disorder that you're interested in that is not funded by a commercial interest often that's a good starting place and people working in the office there can make referrals and often help summarize the literature but also yes you could go to university websites and reach out to subject area experts themselves now they're going to be deluge they have a deluge of work and emails but sometimes they will respond and especially I think all of us should try to respond to help people understand our fields because the you know the privilege if it is a privilege of having a PhD is that you have to teach in my view I just want to add one more thing fortunately scientists are most of them most of us do like to talk about our work and educate others so I have my students do informational interviews all the time and you'd be so surprised that how many responses they get you know at first they're all scared oh I'm going to email this complete stranger they're not going to read my email but you'd be surprised they all reply and I tell them you know your interview should not take more than half an hour these are busy people but a lot of them come back and say oh we talked for two hours I'm like gosh that's great so yeah people are usually happy to talk about their work I just want to add one thing if your friend or anybody usually just emails one of the authors to the paper they'll just send the PDF for free so that's usually just like step number one yeah just to read it into the record because that was a really good point I actually wanted to say that for like the past five minutes yeah the other thing you can do is ask a scientist who's at a university like you said and just be like hey can you get this paper for me like if your friend is your friend and you are a scientist or if they know other scientists you can get it for them for free but yeah I do that all the time and I know that we're like a private company and we should be paying people for their work but scientists don't get paid when you buy the papers so it's like just ask the scientist they'll give it to you for free it works it's worked every time I've done it and I've done it a lot oh sure of course I think your question gets to the heart of a really important aspect of what we're working on doing here and that's integration right a lot of molecular biology a lot of nutrition information a lot of scientific experimentation is all focused on reductionism right drilling down into that one specific aspect that you're studying and focusing on how that particular aspect changed in that particular way results in whatever your data generates right but bringing that reductionist perspective out into an integrated understanding of what does the rest of the body of literature tell us right what is this how is this applicable to you personally to this industry to this aspect of existence that sort of conversion from reductionist perspective to integrated perspective is a really important one and I think that's why there's so many comments and thinking and how do we go about facilitating this back and forth between the curious and the researchers because it's not just the researchers that are dispensing information it's the curious that are provoking new questions right and I think that's a really critical part and maybe something science doesn't always do a good job of encouraging or welcoming or bringing into the fold so I really appreciate you asking this question and in addition to all of these answers where the researchers really do want to talk about what they do and how they do it and why it's interesting and probably a lot of unrelated things that don't actually get to your friend's question right I think there also needs to be a recognition that there's a need for people who synthesize there's a need for people who bring together different aspects in different areas of research and in application to provide this cohesive picture because it's probably not gonna come from that one specific basic research scientist who is really focused on the thing that they are really good at it's probably gonna come from outside from someone who has made connections in other fields who is thinking a little bit more broadly about what does it mean that I'm asking this question and what does it mean that this particular result showed up here right so I'll make sure that BioCaptivate tweets out there's a data scientist who actually does a really good job of compiling nutritional information in a way that makes sense where the total number of studies on a particular, let's call it an ingredient and how it relates to a specific condition is all captured in one graph in circles and different sizes and colors and it's brilliant but that is its own specialized field of study and right now basic research doesn't do so well in integrating that and I think we could build a lot more connections there so thank you so much for letting me jump in. Very insightful and I actually think that in many ways you sort of summed up the purpose of the evening which is to address some topics ones that you maybe don't always think of in the context of science and scientists which is activism and also to make unexpected connections between the housing crisis and the people's ability to be creative and issues in education, industry versus academia how do we do it more fairly what roles do scientists have in the world of activism and politics and so I'd like to thank all of the panelists who just did a wonderful job and we're so excited to have you here today and I'd like to thank the audience for the great questions and also invite all of you to mingle we do have a rule though we do not want people to be talking about what the president tweeted today or some outrageous thing that happened in Hollywood you know, Yen who's in the back has some mind muse papers and these are quotations that I don't know, help set the stage for the conversation and did you want to explain that Yen? Okay So no small talk and talk about your deepest longing, your drive and networking is all about expectation like why networking is no circular logic it's not networking so you can mingle or trade business car the purpose of networking is to really to bring you together those people who can help you to accomplish something that you currently are privities could not so I really love the idea of a half baked cake you should sell half baked cake just be honest about it and so it's not like foreign notes but the thing is like don't be afraid of speaking about like half baked ideas and then don't be afraid of speaking of your needs and your vulnerabilities and like what kind of path that you want what kind of resource that you want and has the expectation that you will find the community and the family that will bring you to your next stage of your new chapter so this is my advice which is no small talk and talk about something that you don't talk about in your day job and embrace yourself and discover your true self together and also then I have some print out that will help you do networking you can talk about some of the quotes that you like and but you don't have to or you can talk about other things but I really like the things that I select so a little bit self congratulatory but thank you Thanks Yen and so let's build this community and thanks for coming everyone Oh and I do have a shout out to Alan and Simulation Podcast so they have done the AV tonight this panel and question and answers but not the happy hour will be broadcast or will be available online and you really should, tomorrow and you should really listen have a look at Simulation Livestream it has hundreds of really interesting interviews and Alan has curated all these really cool people and groups of people and many different ideas so I encourage you to have a look at what he's done because it's pretty magnificent and thanks again Alan much appreciated so goodnight everyone