 Hello, and welcome to the National Human Genome Research Institute's sixth event in our genomics and media series. My name is Sarah Bates, and I'm the communications chief for NHGRI. I'm excited to give a short introduction for today's event and to serve as the moderator for our distinguished guest who I will introduce in a moment. Today's topic is bringing science to people through the radio, which nowadays often means through your smartphone. The internet has transformed the way audio stories are told, just as it has so many aspects of communications. 25 years ago, we had to tune in at a certain time to catch our favorite program. Now, we can listen anytime from an app or a streaming service. How has this technology revolution changed the way these stories are told? Or has it changed them at all? For many of us, Joe Palca is the name that comes to mind when we think of a compelling radio story. I have certainly been influenced and inspired by his reporting. His NPR segments open my mind to how fast jellyfish can sting, to the mysterious landscape of Mars, and to the ethics of cell research, among many other topics. Joe Palca is, of course, a science correspondent for NPR, and we have him here for the next hour to answer your questions about how he approaches to science communications work. Before I turn it over to Joe, I want to give you a little bit more background on this series, so you can look at our other videos that have already been posted and also our upcoming event in May. Today's event is one in a long series that features trailblazers in science communications, talking about their craft with someone at NHGRI, and taking questions from all of you. Each guest is an expert in communicating about genomics across various media, from podcasting to preprints to everything in between. NHGRI's goal with this series is to talk about different ways of communicating about the fast-paced field of genomics and other areas of science, to give you behind-the-scenes stories about breaking news, as well as to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities each medium can bring. We've had an amazing lineup for this series. I can't believe we're on our second to last speaker. Our previous guest was podcaster Liz Wayne. Our next guest will be editor-in-chief of Nature, Magdalena Skipper in May. And you can find details at genome.gov.gam. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Joe Palka, Dr. Joe Palka. Joe is a science course learner for NPR. At the moment, he is on a fellowship leave working to create a database of resources for scientists who want to become better communicators. What a mission he comes to journalism from a science background, having received a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he worked on human sleep physiology. So I can't wait to ask about that. Since joining NPR, Joe has covered a wide range of science topics, although for the past two years he's mostly focused on COVID-19. He is founder of the NPR PsiCommerce program, a collective of science communicators. And I was just looking with their Twitter feed. Palka has also worked, Joe has also worked as a television science producer, a senior correspondent for Science Magazine and Washington News editor of Nature. He's won numerous awards, several which came with attractive certificates. I don't see any of those in the background. And he is co-author of Annoying the Science of What Bugs Us. I personally first met Joe in 2005 at the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop where he was mentoring young science writers. So this is really lifelong calling. I distinctly remember both of us at one point running from a wasp while we were on a field trip. Joe, thank you for taking time to talk to us today. We're really excited to have you here. So my first question is, what is not in your official bio? Oh, well, what's not in my official bio? How much time do you have? It's interesting, thanks for that lovely introduction. Yeah, I'm glad that you cleared up the fact that I'm not a medical doctor. And actually that's what I was gonna talk about a little bit just in my own background. So I went to college at Pomona College in Claremont, California intending to be a classics major, but I found out that Greek was taught at eight in the morning and that was the end of my classics career. I got interested in sleep actually as a freshman in college and maybe we'll have a chance to tell the story of why that happened. But I didn't take any, I took psychology classes and graduated with a degree in psychology. And I really was not science, except for social science and physiology, you didn't really do much science. But for some reason I was convinced by a family friend that I wanted to go to medical school and that was the thing I should do. So I went back to school and undergraduate for a year to take all my pre-med classes and then I was out, you know, I had to wait. I've sent in all my applications and oh, by the way, I mean, since I'm not a medical doctor, I wound up not getting in anywhere. But that's okay, I get to go back and learn it over the schools that rejected me. But I had to find work that very first year where I was done taking classes and to wait to see what happened with my med school applications. And a friend of a friend said that there was a need for a, he needed a lab technician. And so I got to be very good friends with two guys who were both postdocs at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in San Diego. And maybe if you can show that first graphic. One, four. Yeah, there it is. So I like this picture. In case you can't tell already, that's me on the far left. And a friend of mine whose first name was Tova, I think, and the last name I've forgotten and I have to confess. And the three people sitting next to me is, well, the guy on the far right is Jerry Callahan. He was a postdoc in mouse genetics. And the guy sitting next to him is a guy named Jim Allison who was doing work on T cell. Well, actually we were doing work on HLA and trying to amass enough HLA to do a protein sequence of HLA9 because there was no DNA sequencing and that's Melinda, his wife on the right. And we're down in Tijuana, Mexico on a, well, we're not drinking Coke. I guess Tova was drinking Pepsi, but the rest of us were drinking beer. You look like you're a band on tour. Yeah, it has a little bit of that quality. And yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I work with Jim for a year and that's actually where I learned a lot about what it means to be a scientist. And it was very, very, very, very rewarding. But he actually became quite famous and I interviewed him a couple of years ago. He actually was very fond of playing music and was playing music with Willie Nelson's band. But now he can show the picture of me interviewing him in the later years. And you get to decide who's who in this picture if we can bring the next one up. That's it. So that's Jim on the right as you look at the picture and me. And the thing that makes that initial year so weird now in retrospect is that many of you probably know Jim won the Nobel Prize in 2018 or 19, something like that for checkpoint inhibitors. So there's an awful lot of people who believe they owe their life to Jim Allison. And he told me after he won, actually after he won the last prize that he was kind of pissed off that he didn't win it for basic research but he won it for applied research because he's always thought of himself as a basic researcher. But anyway, did he tell that to the Nobel committee? No, he just said, thank you, I believe. Yeah, well, yeah, again, it's funny about Nobel prizes and what they do to people but it's interesting. Anyway, so as I told you, I didn't get into medical school, I got into graduate school and I was four years into my graduate degree also working on physiological psychology and not really sure that I had. I mean, it's not a great reason to start graduate school. And I certainly didn't say this on my application. I wanna go because I didn't get into medical school but I didn't really have the passion that you need to complete a lifetime as a scientist. And so I wound up getting a fellowship called the AAAS Mass Media and Science and Engineering Fellows Program Fellowship. Spent a summer in Washington DC at a television station just thought, oh man, this is for me. And it's really nice when you sort of go from, I'm not really sure what I'm doing here too, I know exactly what I wanna do and it's be a science journalist. And through a series of very strange twists of fate I wound up going from local television news to nature which doesn't happen very often. And then from nature to science and then from science I got shipped off to NPR as a one-year replacement in 1992. And the rest is me talking on the radio for 30 years which is pretty stunning. And this room you see behind me and the sound you hear coming through your speakers or headphones now is where you've been doing all my broadcasting for the last year. NPR, I haven't been in the NPR headquarters or any NPR building since March of 2020. And they equipped us with, let's see if I can grab it quickly. This is the tote bag, are you gonna pull up the tote bag? Here we go, see very, very sophisticated looking microphone and these earbuds that keep falling out. That's embarrassing when you're in live radio and your earbuds fall out by the way. And you talk on the radio it's like you're in a studio but you're not. Anyway, that's what the last year has been like crazy but fun and stressful. Yeah, I think a lot of us can relate to that not having left the rooms and much work. So we're getting some questions but I do wanna ask you a little bit more about your background before we get to them. So what really drew you into radio specifically? What was it about telling stories, audio stories that really appeal to you? Well, maybe, I'm gonna give you the honest answer and that's nothing that drew me into radio. I left Science Magazine because I wasn't getting along well with my editor and I would have taken a job as a anything in journalism. It just happened that Richard Harris and I met up when he first came to NPR in 1986 and we met up shortly after that and we'd stayed friends and NPR had an opening and he kept saying, oh, you should come over here you like it and I thought, I mean, at one time they asked me if I wanted to be a science editor and I said, no, I don't wanna do that. I wanna be a star, you know, I wanna be on the radio and but that was only like I want my byline. I didn't wanna be an editor and print either. I mean, I wanted people to know that it was me, I wrote it me and so, yeah, when they offered me this gig as a radio reporter, I took it and I had toyed with radio. I mean, I liked it as I think the main thing that I liked about radio is I like to listen to the radio and I think I've, I mean, I have, you said you can listen whenever you like, which is true. I know that but I listen when it's on the air. I mean, I listen to shows I don't like because they're on the air and the show I do like isn't on the air because I like to listen to the radio and so I think in that sense, I was drawn to radio because I liked listening and I'm one of these people, there are some people who are visual learners and some people who are oral, AU oral learners and I think I'm the latter. So I don't need to see something but I pay really close attention when people are talking to me and I think that's why radio was a good fit for me. How did you feel when people on the radio had to come out from behind the radio? Yeah, I actually thought a lot about that. I didn't like it. I never thought I could be on television because I didn't spend enough time combing my hair. So that was a big problem and I didn't think I looked that good on television. I guess I've gotten used to that as well as my voice but yeah, radio was a good fit. It was a good fit. Well, I mean, no one can look like a young John Allison. Really? Jim Allison, yeah, he was something but yeah, I liked it and yeah, it suited me. So we are getting a couple of questions specific to science communication. One is how have you helped scientists become better communicators with the public? Well, that's actually something that I don't know. I've tried to help. I mean, it's kind of hard to know whether I have helped or not because I don't get to measure very often but the main, okay, there's really, I think, only like a few, they're not even tricks. They're just things you have to understand and the hardest thing and this is, I think this is where my own scientific training, as long ago as it was and as short term as it was compared to the rest of my career, at least it gave me an understanding of what your thought pattern is like when you're talking to other scientists and I promise you it's very different than talking to the public and the problem that many, many scientists have is they can't let go of the fact that the public needs a different level of specificity than a scientific audience and the more you know about a topic in a way the harder it is to report on it because there's so many details that you wanna include and I think certainly for graduate students and maybe for senior people as well, there's this little voice in your head saying, oh, if I say this, somebody who's got the knives out for me is gonna attack and I don't want that so I'm gonna be really careful when I talk about this topic and it's so unfair because it's, I mean, for me anyway, it's three and a half minutes. I mean, how could I possibly include the nuance of 30 years of research in three and a half minutes? It would be insulting to think that everything you'd ever done in research could be explained in three and a half minutes because that would, to me, it would suggest you hadn't accomplished very much so it's letting go of that. And the other thing is, and this is important for people to understand, when you go to a scientific talk, I mean, even the people in this audience, they voted, they said, I wanna hear this, you know? Nobody twisted their arm and said you had to go, it's not like education where you take the class and there's a test later, no test after this, you know? You can listen or not or be playing Pokemon Go at the moment, I don't know, but you don't have to do it. And on the radio, I mean, you can be, they can turn you off at any second. So there's an element of entertainment. I mean, you can't just say you should listen to this because it's good for you because that we call spinach journalism. There's, you have to, at least, at the very least, sound interested yourself. And, but more to the point, you have to try to make it appealing in some way. And I don't, I mean, all I can do really is amuse myself or do it in a way that I find entertaining. And I know, and I think this is why diversity has become such an interesting question, I know that my sense of humor and my background and my ethnicity and my age are gonna create certain parameters that I'm gonna make that sound hilarious to me or powerful to me and they may not to others. And I can try, I cannot try to understand and be broad-minded or ecumenical. What's that the word I want? Anyway, about how I present things, but in the end, I'm gonna look like this and I'm gonna sound like this and there's nothing I can do about that. And so I think the only solution isn't to retrain me, which I mean, I will do my retraining as best I can, but rather to get people from different backgrounds to be telling similar stories and reaching audiences that they'll resonate with more than I will. So I know you've interviewed quite a few NIH scientists in your time and we have a lot of them watching right now and other staff at NIH. What, given all your interactions with NIH scientists, what tips would you have for those who do wanna communicate better with press or with the public? Well- You only have three minutes to sum up. That's fine. No, I don't, as I saw, I was forgot the other thing that I always try to tell people who say they wanna communicate is just do it. Ooh, there's a cat coming in, go away. I left the door open. That's okay, I have a door open. He really wants dinner. You have to practice. I mean, the people go to workshops or go to an hour lecture and I say, oh, do all these things and people go, I'll do it. And then they go out and try and it doesn't work and they get discouraged. My analogy is like, I could tell you how to drive a car and tell you where the mirror is and where the accelerator is and how to steer and all that. Okay, here's the key is go have a good time. It just doesn't work that way. You have to do it and figure out what works for you and make mistakes and hopefully not kill anybody. That's the nice thing about science communication. Usually you don't kill anybody. Like if you're driving, it's not like driving a car. So my tip is get in the game. I mean, if you want to, I've had big arguments with people about, well, what about scientists who don't wanna communicate and who don't feel they're good at it? Fine, I get that. That's okay with me. My only request for those people is don't diss the people who are good at it or do wanna do it. Give them a break. They're doing something that's good for science, good for your science. And will in the end, I believe help you. So don't say if you were a real scientist you'd be working in the lab now instead of talking to the news hour on PBS or something. But the main thing is if you wanna do it, do it. You don't know what opportunities you have. I heard a story. I guess I shouldn't say who was telling the story but he was writing in an Uber the other day and the Uber driver was playing gospel music and he really likes, this guy really likes gospel music. So he started singing with the Uber driver. So you strike up a conversation with an Uber driver about what you do or why you do it and you could talk about your science and you could practice on that person. I'm just saying, nobody's gonna walk up to you and say, hey, tell me about your science. Sometimes they will. It depends on what kind of a party you go to but most of the time they're not but you can always generate some discussion and people will be interested in that science communication because I do it to a lot of people but it's the same as doing it to one person. I just happen to have a lot of people listening when I do it. Yeah, taxi drivers and hairstylists are both really good audience to test whether you're communicating at an acceptable level. So first of all, Joe, we have a lot of fans of your cat. So, very welcome. And we're getting... The screen though. Yeah, animals are always pluses. That's an official NIH statement. So we have a lot of questions coming in. One is related to, I think what you were just saying in a world where misinformation is spreading so fast and things is particularly relevant to your COVID-19 reporting. What should we as scientists, scientists at NIH be doing more of? Yeah. Well, there is a body of research now, I'm happy to say that's trying to understand how you combat misinformation. I don't think they've reached the perfect answer or if they have, they haven't done a great job of disseminating it. I sort of feel like as a journalist and probably as a scientist too, you don't have that many degrees of freedom in how you express what you want to say. I mean, I feel bounded by what we used to call facts. And I don't feel like I can stray that far beyond facts because that's the only thing I'm supposed to be reporting on, same with scientists. So in a way, you have to just stick to explaining things whenever you have the opportunity. And that's part of my interest is getting people to show willing and come out of the lab and talk to people in settings that might make them all uncomfortable. But that's the other thing. I do know for sure, I know that this has been borne out by research that you can't lecture people. You can't raise your voice and say, and please don't say how stupid can you be even if that's screaming in your head. People don't respond well to that kind of a message. And it doesn't feel to me like the people who believe in the goofiest of the science misinformation theories are really interested in information. There's something else going on there. And I don't think any amount of, I don't think any amount of calm, clear, accurate information is gonna change their mind. But I don't know what else we, people who communicate on a factual basis can do or should do or are supposed to do. I just think they're limits into what we can do. So I guess the answer to the question is keep trying because I mean, if we just give up and say, well, you know, believe whatever you want, all this stuff is nonsense. I mean, I don't think that's good either. I think people should be at least informed about what is and isn't known by people who are worth listening to. And that, I mean, again, you mentioned this, Joe's big idea and the psych commerce. So my goal for them, these are, I was trying to help young scientists who wanted to become better communicators, you know, and just talking to them about some of the things we've been talking to now. But my ulterior motive was to build what I think of as a tidal wave of information to push back the tidal wave of misinformation. And so I figured that if I can get thousands or tens of thousands of scientists to tweet Facebook, TikTok, you know, whatever moves them, go to malls, go to meetings, go to Kiwani's club. I mean, whatever circumstance there is, I just thought that that would help push back on the flood of misinformation. And the other thing is that, again, we were talking about identity and identifying with the person who's delivering the message. And it's also clear that people tend to believe people that they believe for other reasons. And so a message for me is going to be believed, you know, by my mother and my aunt and uncle and people like that who know me and think I'm reliable, but it's not going to be believed by people who are watching One America Network because I've been bought by the biomedical establishment, you know, they don't, I don't know, whatever they think. But there are going to be people who are credible for whatever reason to people that I'm not credible to that might be able to give them correct information. And again, that gets back to Dorsey. So, and I also should say, by the way, that the NPR psych commerce are now the Boston University psych commerce. So they've moved to BU. If you go to the NPR psych commerce page, there'll be a redirect to BU. BU is still going strong. I mean, it's, I'm not directly associated with it I'm not directly associated with it anymore. At least I'm not, I mean, it's not an NPR and I am an NPR, but I am really proud of the fact that this has become a force and anybody who's a scientist that's interested in science communication can join it doesn't cost anything. And it's a great way to talk to people who are already trying and will give you advice about what they've learned at the drop of a hat. So if people listening, do you want to join with a go to the website or? Yeah, just go to BU NPR psych commerce and there's a link that says, you know, sign me up or, you know, anybody who wants to can send me an email and I'll forward it, I'm Jay Palca. Actually the best address for me now is Jay Palca NPR at gmail.com. So I'm not, as you may, as you mentioned at the top I'm not at NPR at the moment. And so because I was getting like 300 emails a day I just decided that it wouldn't be really a fellowship or a break from NPR if I tried to read my email so I just pretty much stopped. In fact, if you send me an email to NPR you'll get a very snarky response which I think Sarah you saw. I definitely got it, I definitely got that one. I have an auto out of office. I have it out of office that includes, I mean, most of the email I get is from people pitching stories to me. And I mean, I'm not 100% opposed to it. I understand that's, you know, some of where the stories come from. It's the ones who pitch me stories about musical bands. I mean, why in the world would you pitch a story to me about a new band or a new skin cream or something like that? Just driving back. And those are the people always right to me. The following up circling back on that email I sent you and so anybody who says circle back to me is already in big, big trouble. You just gotta set up some filters. I did, I filtered the extra everything goes to garbage. No, not that kind of filter. Okay, so we have a lot of questions about genomics and then a lot of questions about, you know, the nature of some of the stories you've covered. Boy, where to begin? Okay, let's see, here's a fun one. What science story was the most fun for you to record? Well, well, I mean, it's kind of a cheat because it just doesn't happen very often in science, but I really enjoyed the first Mars landing 1997. You know, there's something to me, and it's funny because seeing the surface of Mars was one thing, but seeing something that was completely, obviously 100% made on Earth on the surface of Mars to me was really a blow you away moment. And it's so, I mean, it's so rare that it happens. And, you know, I actually, it's very funny too because one of the most exciting moments I had in science, I still hasn't gotten on the area in science coverage. I was talking to somebody and honestly at the moment I can't remember her name, but she was working with the gang in England that were studying embryonic stem cells. And she was taking me through this really difficult to follow, but very fascinating set of experiments she had been doing to prove that a particular cell was pluripotent. And she set it up beautifully because at one point, we've been talking for a long time, I have a recording of this. She just said, and then I saw this thing which told me that this cell was behaving like an embryo and it had never done that before, something like that. And I remember thinking, this is amazing. I mean, it's one of those moments when you take the gel out of the machine and you look at it and you go, holy, but see, you know what, just this is it. That doesn't happen very much in anybody's life, but this story she was telling me captured me. But the funny thing is about radio and about reporting is that it was so obscure and required so much explanation that the buildup to the aha moment would just never have made it into an interesting story. It just was too fraught. And even though I would have said, and here's the punchline, everybody would have gone, well, okay, you know, maybe with 10,000 words I could have built it up to something and then it would have been a payoff, but I just didn't think it would work in radio. And so I've never aired the tape, but I've kept it. It was very interesting. Well, they can be in the Jopalka archive. That's right. That's right. The Jopalka time capsule. Well, buried somewhere under the NIH campus. That's right. The new building up under the stone. Okay, so we have a lot of genomics fans on here. So we got to play to our genomics base. And I know you said the Mars landing was the most exciting story you ever wrote, but you really meant the human genome project was the most exciting story that you wrote. I did mean that, actually. Thank you for that correction. No, I was pretty pleased in 1986 to write the very first story about plans to do a human genome. I think we've got a picture of that. I can tell the story of that. I mean, I think it might have been Sydney Brenner who was big fans of nature and was always talking to John Maddox or Peter Newmark, the editor. And he had come back from this meeting at Santa Fe, New Mexico. And he said something like, you know what those crazy Americans are thinking about doing? They're thinking about sequencing the human genome. And so Peter Newmark, the deputy editor of nature called me up and said, why don't you check into this? And he gave me some names of people to call. And yeah, that's what they were proposing. And they did a back of the envelope calculation. It was gonna be a dollar or base pair, which turned out not to be that far off. And so I wrote this article. And I think for a while, I don't know if it's still up. I couldn't find it when I gave a quick look. There was a timeline of the human genome on the NIH site. And this was pictured. Yeah, there it is. Now, the interesting thing is at the time, as you can see from the headline, NIH didn't have a, wasn't in that game. It was a guy named Charles DeLisi who had wanted to do something with a supercomputer because he thought that biology was gonna be computational. And this is 1986. And people said, what do you need a computer for for biology? And he said, you just wait. And oh my goodness, was he proven right? But he left and he was at NIH and went to DOE because they had a bunch of supercomputers. And that's why I was out of Los Alamos or yeah, Los Alamos I guess, because they were talking about, well, how would you piece this thing together? And there'd be a lot of computational stuff and that's where he thought computers would play a big role. And yeah, I mean, I followed the story pretty closely. And I mean, when Jim Watson was named the first head of the genome project at NIH, there was this struggle of the Titans where NIH wanted to be in charge and DOE wanted to be in charge. And I guess in the end, NIH won. And then a funny thing happened, and this is just personal and some people in the audience may know this already, but I stopped reporting on the human genome project almost entirely in the mid-90s because my wife went to work for Francis and Francis Collins and she had a big hand in the lead-up to the announcement anyway, and certainly from the policy standpoint on the genome project. And it was a conflict of interest for me to report on that. So I stopped and it was kind of weird because it was one of the topics that I knew the best and had a lot of contacts and people to talk to, but it was just, it wasn't possible for me to do it. And I remember, I mean, this is a very Washington moment when we were in Rock Creek Park with my son and we're singing Happy Birthday and her cell phone called, this is like 1999 or 2000 and the cell phone rings and it's the White House and they have some detail about the announcement of the completion of the genome project. So it's just the runaway while everybody else is singing Happy Birthday to my kid. So that was a funny moment. Just one of the most historic moments in science and during Earth Day. Yep. Well, I think, so a few more genomics questions. We've got, are there persistent misconceptions about genomics or any that you encounter over and over as you report on science? Well, I think, I mean, I think this is, it's not really a misconception, but maybe a mis-expectation and you'll forgive me, but I think that the promise of genomic medicine has been a little bit oversold and it's such a powerful concept. I mean, I remember in the early days of gene therapy, you could just say, wow, you know, you just fix one gene and then the person is 100% better. Ooh, it was a little more complicated than that and it was a little more complicated to do the fix and it was a little more complicated to figure out how to do the fix. And I mean, it sounded so promising. And then, uh-oh, cat's back. Oh, now my dog's barking, okay. Okay. Oh, God. It turned, I mean, it just, it just felt to me like it was out of balance. And so I'm going to tell my son to feed the cat. He will do that, I think. Please feed cat. Please feed cat. What's your cat's name? Tom. I thought it was gonna be- He had a brother once named Jerry, but Jerry met a fatal accident, very sad. Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, you kind of made that happen by naming him Tom and Jerry. Yeah, I think probably. Yeah. We have a question from Eric Green. I think we have to answer this one. It says, well, first, says, thank you for participating in our series. You're very generous with your time and you looked very, very- Yeah, he likes your hair. Two, serious question. In light of the recent anti-science politics, is the main answer to, is the main answer for more people to communicate accurate science or do we need to prune back some of the people who are communicating science that are highly targeted by some? And then he also wants to know if you've used your microphone to dust around your house or play with the cat. Okay, to answer the last question first, you know, they actually give us, when they give you this, that thing is not, so this is actually, so this is the microphone. This is the windscreen. So the microphone itself is called a directional microphone. So it's a shot, you don't call it a shotgun when you're going through TSA, I can tell you that at the airport, but it's directional and it's very sensitive to wind noise. And so supposedly this picks up wind noise, but they gave us a brush to keep it fluffy. I think it's hilarious. No, I haven't used it to play with my cat, Eric. Hi, Eric, thank you for inviting me, by the way, or thank your staff for inviting me. Yeah, I think we talked about it actually. I, this is where the science of science communication diverges from what I do as a science communicator. There may be an argument in favor of taking some people out of the limelight or out of the crosshairs, as it were, because they've been so radicalizing. And I can think of some people at NIH that that might apply to. Again, I think diversifying the people delivering the message is really what I would have to say, I think is most important. And if it's all gonna be a bunch of people who look like you and me, and by you I'm talking about Eric and Eric is much better looking than me. So I forgive me for saying that we look like each other, but we have certain qualities in common. And I think, I really think that it's, we will do it right, of course. But, and certainly, I mean, none of the people who are speaking on behalf of NIH, I don't think are mistaken. But I think variety is important. And honestly, I've always thought it was important. Francis doesn't wear it on his sleeve so much, Francis Collins, but he is a very religious person. And I think that's important to identify him that way because not that many scientists feel comfortable about talking about their religious persuasion because it's irrelevant. Well, yeah, it is irrelevant or it isn't, but it's important to some people. And so I think when you identify as somebody who's deeply religious and still have a bunch of clarified notions about where disease comes from or how viruses work or something like that, it's a good thing. Yeah, it speaks to your earlier answer about sort of a collective action on the part of scientists and science communicators. Oh, okay. This is a question that actually dovetails with something I learned to ask you about from our previous conversation because I know you mentioned that the way you choose stories has evolved somewhat over the years. And I wonder how, whether that's because you've become more experienced at choosing stories and you've seen which ones resonate and which ones don't, or you're telling them across different platforms and are you telling me, okay, but then. I'll answer, your guesses are wrong, but I'll tell you what has evolved. So I prefer the radio as a platform. Some of my stuff has been on podcasts. I don't, I mean, I'm a little confused about what a podcast is if it's not just a radio story with music, but. Have you heard a podcast? Yeah. Oh, okay. I mean, wait, wait, don't tell me as a podcast sounds just like the radio show. I mean, I'm on up first a lot of the time. It sounds like the first segment of all morning edition, which it is. I'm not, you know, I mean, this American life is different because it's a different topic, but what makes it different from a long radio show is it's a story with powerful music behind it or a radio lab. Also, people talking about science in a different sort of way than I do it, but I could imagine hearing a radio program. There's nothing wrong with having a radio program that's like this American life or a radio lab. It's just that NPR doesn't choose to do that. Fine, okay. That's all right. So more to the, more what's so anyway, so how I choose a story is almost never what I think people want. There are times when I think something is newsworthy and I get it, you know, that people, it's newsworthy that there's a vaccine being developed for COVID-19. I don't know if people wanna know that, but in my opinion, they should know that. So I tell them that. I think it's interesting to understand how vaccines work. I think it's interesting to understand why some of them might cause side effects. I think it's very interesting to try to explain why rare side effects are rare and, you know, more likely as, you know, there's a great story that I like to tell about understanding risk, which is somebody at CERN, the High Energy Particle Collider in Switzerland in France said to me that your chances of winning this lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not. And that's very counterintuitive because everybody says, well, you have to buy a ticket to win. But if you think about it statistically, the chances of your winning are so small that they are essentially indistinguishable from zero. And so it's not the same with the vaccines. There is a chance, I mean, your chance of getting a vaccine associated side effect is zero if you don't get the vaccine. So in that sense, it's true. But if you do get the vaccine, it's not quite the same, but it's more like you're winning, you would be winning the lottery if you got a side effect because of how rare they are. Now, it's not true. They're more common than winning the lottery. But the point is just to understand that people's ability to make judgments based on cuts, size of risk is a little bit, it's not flawed. It's just what we do as human beings. We don't think that like statisticians. But to get back to your question about what I like to cover or what I started to cover is I got tired of covering results in science because if you listen to the radio or read the newspaper, you get the feeling that science lurches from discovery to discovery. I mean, there is something new every week. And because it's on NPR and because it's in the New York Times and because it's in the Wall Street Journal, it must be important. I mean, we wouldn't be telling you about it if it wasn't important, but the fact is that 99% of the stuff that we report on isn't that important or it may or may not be, but we presented as this is the big deal. And I felt that it would be more appropriate to tell people about how the process of science and how you get from, I don't know how this works to, now I think I have a better idea of how this works. And so I started choosing stories that had interesting process, but no one could be confused about thinking that they're important. And I don't know if you have time to show this other slide I set you, but I did a story about the electric dipole moment of the neutron. And I promise you, nobody in my 30-year career has ever asked me if I would please do a story on the electric dipole moment of the neutron, but it turns out that it's an important physical property and it might have something to do with why the universe exists. So I didn't know how to start this story. So I thought I'd nail it down to why corned beef sandwiches and the rest of the universe exists. I still like that because I love corned beef sandwiches. Some people felt that was a cheat because they wanted a story about corned beef sandwiches and I was telling them about the electric dipole moment of the neutron. And I apologize to all of them, but I mean, I got them in the door and if I can get their attention for a few more seconds, maybe they'll be interested in what I am talking about. So I just started doing things that I, I mean, I had a story on the air about what you serve a colony of captive locusts and I mean, what you feed them. And oh my goodness, there's another one nobody was ever interested in, but you know, it's a critical thing. If you want to study locusts in a laboratory, you got to feed them. So what are you going to feed them? I mean, I asked the guy, is there locust chow? And he said, no, but well, there is a kind of a locust chow, but it's switch, what do you call it? Something grass, something that's the kind of grass you see in juice bars and things. I forget what it's called. Anyway, doesn't matter. But anyway, I was trying to talk about the things you have to do to be a scientist. It's a little bit like going back to my days with Jim Allison as a lab technician. You know, we used to laugh. Jim was very funny. He probably forgotten he said this, but he used to say, okay, I think we pushed the frontier science back a little bit today. We'd have like this little piece of paper that was the frontier science inched along the table top. It was very modest. Every day was very, very modest. And the number of times you have a breakthrough like he did is like maybe once in a career. And it was pretty spectacular. Not that there aren't steps along the way. And it's the steps along the way that I thought people needed to understand so that they would get the message. I know I'm not going to change the way that science is presented in the media because it is presented as news. And you can't run into the newsroom and say, hey, I've got this story about a small earthquake where a few people were injured. That's just not going to get your editor's attention. So you have to say something like this could lead to or this might help us understand or this might be a cure for this because at some level you do have to explain why you're doing it. But that's why I said this rather obscure search for the electric dipole moment on the neutron isn't just, oh, I want to answer something about physical properties of a small object, but I want to understand why the universe exists. And that's not my moment-to-moment concern, but in the end that's what got me interested in this particular topic. I mean, I'm speaking on behalf of the scientists now. So I mean, we were trying to measure HLA. We were just trying to, because we didn't, you know, we had HLA-9, we wanted to know the protein sequence. Well, it wasn't just an intellectual exercise. At some level, we wanted to know the protein sequence so that we could understand more about the immune system. And the immune system is important. And oh, by the way, if you want to have a healthy immune system and fight off disease, as you better know, it's helpful to know how it works. And it's pretty complicated. So anyway, that's what I started doing. I started doing these stories that said, you know, how'd we get to this? Well, at least that's what I was trying to do. And again, I picked things that I found interesting, curious, compelling, strange, but I almost never picked things because I thought they were newsworthy. There's a lot of pressure in public information offices to frame things as very big or exciting discoveries. So I think the chain is long when it comes to that sort of thing. That's probably why your inbox is so full. Well, no, well, yes, but it's full of people who are trying to get me to do the story because it's so important. And I mean, okay, so I'm a journalist too and I certainly know that, you know, people want to be on the front page. That's sort of what, that's sort of the currency of, you know, you succeeded when you get on the front page. But I had one more slide. I guess this is an excuse to show it. The reason I put this up is the last story I did before I went on fellowship lead. And the interesting thing about these are two scientists, Peter Hotez and Mary Elena Botazi. And I met them when they were both at GW and now they're both in Texas at Baylor and Texas Children's and I actually interviewed them in July about a vaccine they were working on. And I never got around to putting the tape on there because they were telling me, oh, you know, they had a process that they thought was easy, you know, less expensive, older technology, but it would work and it might be good for the developing world and et cetera, et cetera. So it turned out that right around the end of the last year, December, the Indian government decided to issue what amounts for emergency use authorization for this vaccine so that it could be distributed in England, in India and there were like 100,000, no 100 million doses that were gonna be made. And suddenly this story was sort of which was so unimportant in the sense that I didn't even think I had to put it on the air and if I had, it would have sat around, became the lead story for that day's news because I was able to tell it and there was a news peg. And to me, I just think it's funny that you can do the lead story using tape from the six month old tape. I also had tape that I just gathered. So I had something new about it, but that was the, and I'll tell you one other funny thing, this page on NPR, I haven't looked in the last month or so, but before that, it was the most viewed page on NPR by one million, even more than Steve Inzki talking to Donald Trump. So I was pretty pleased about that. That's pretty incredible. So a Texas team, see, that's the headline. And the key word for me is could, right? In the end, it may not be. And that's why I feel we're always sort of raising expectations and I did this too. I think it's an interesting story what their vaccine is, but it wouldn't have gotten on the air. And it's partly, I mean, getting stuff on the air is more difficult in the COVID time because there is so much science news that people want COVID, COVID, COVID all the time, or at least our editors do, it seems like. But this was, in essence, here's an idea for a vaccine that's different from everybody else's idea and here's how we went to work on it. And this is why people didn't want to support it to begin with. That was the story I came back with. And then I had a news peg and suddenly I can say, could be a global game changer. Well, thank you. Somebody said that to me, you know, you can always, yeah, stop talking Joe. That's my other piece of advice to people. When you've run out of things to say, stop talking. Well, we will have to stop talking about it because our time will be up at that point. But so we have, I think, time for maybe one more question and then we'll, you get to say whatever you would like to say that we didn't get to. Okay. So this question came in actually earlier and I think it's a good question. And I think a lot of NIH scientists would be curious about this too. So do you find interviews with scientists to be enlightening or do you find that you already know through preparation for the interview that you know what the scientists will say? No, I think I always learn something. And I have to say in a mixture of sloth or sloth, and considered spontaneity, I often don't go into interviews with a whole lot of background. And I kind of, I justify this by saying that's what Alan Alda does. He doesn't wanna know because he wants to be able to have that air of or asking the questions. Sometimes when you know a lot about a subject, you forget to ask the questions that spring to mind when you don't know a lot about a subject. So because I've been doing this for so long and because I know a little about a lot, I can go into an interview and I'm not saying fake it, but I'm not as well prepared as I think scientists would, certainly a scientist would hope a postdoc or a graduate student would be when they walk into an interview. And so yeah, I mean, again, how do you do science reporting? Well, you think of something interesting that you wanna learn more about and then you ask somebody to explain it to you. And if you don't understand it, you ask them a question. And if you do understand that you say thank you very much and then you're done. So yeah, I love, I mean, the interviews are great. I mean, if the people are friendly and eager to talk, there's nothing more fun than that. Yeah, that's true. I will second that. But just being willing, I mean, that's my, it's what did they say, the most important thing is showing up. I think that, and the scientists, one other piece of advice is for me anyway, don't worry about polished phrases and all that stuff, that's my job. Your job is just to talk, talk about something, be interested, be animated, be enthusiastic, be real. But don't worry about the well-rounded prose or something like that. It's hard to do spontaneously. I don't do it spontaneously. They go back and write and think about it. So we have one minute left and I would like to end on an optimistic note. So what really gives you hope and happiness thinking about the future of science communication? Oh, that's actually a good one because I'm discouraged about a lot of things, but I'm very positive about the next generation. I think NPR has got some fantastic young reporters on the science desk that are just gonna do great things going forward. And when I meet, when I look at the applications for internships, I think, good Lord, I would never have gotten a job if I were applying today. These people are talented, they're motivated, they've done a lot of pre-work that I hadn't done. There is a wealth of passion and interest and ability. And I just hope that there's enough opportunities out there and opportunities that pay a living wage so that these people won't be discouraged from pursuing science communication because it is, for me anyway, it's been a fantastic career. And I'm sure others will find it that way too if they can make it happen. And I know from looking at the Sycommer Twitter feed that you have a list of science communications people to follow on Twitter, is that a good way to find some of those folks? Sure. Sure. I have like 400 people on it, so. Oh, yeah, well, listen to NPR too, you know, or listen to the shortwave podcast that they all show up on that from time to time, they're good. Awesome. Well, is there anything else you wanted to add? No, I'd just like to apologize for my annoying cat. Honestly, the cat was the second best part. Oh, okay. All right, well, I want to thank everybody for joining us. I, we try to get to as many questions as we could if you still want to have your question answered, please go ahead and tweet it to us or you can email it to us or you can save it for the next guest speaker. We're going to have Magdalena Skipper from Nature joining us in May. So she will be talking about a lot of the editorial processes at Nature and the role that journals play in the scientific ecosystem. All right, well, thank you again, Joe. You're welcome. All right, have a good evening. Thanks, talk to you all later. Thanks for coming.