 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Immunity Matters here. Welcome to Research in Minoa on Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. I'm your host. Our show today, we're going to call it an Update on Seymour, or, otherwise, More on Seymour. We're going to talk about the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, U.H. Minoa, with its founder, Dave Carl, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. That's really special. And three organizations, HOT, H-O-T, Seymour, that's the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, and SCOPE, all are interconnected. So if you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can do that. You can tweet us at Think Tech H-I, or call us at 808-374-2014. A guest for the show, a special guest, Dave Carl, director of the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, also a director of Think Tech. Woo! Welcome to the show, Dave. Well, Jay, thank you for inviting me back. It means a lot more to me to be the director of one of the directors of Think Tech Hawaii. This is a fantastic gig you've got going. Thank you very much. And you've been close to us, a friend of Think Tech for well over 10 years, I'd say, from the time we were on Hawaii Public Radio way back when. And I remember so well that you hosted one of our parties and came around and spent time with us. We always appreciate that. More and more as the years go by. Well, Minoa has been a special guest of yours, I know, for several years. And Pete McGinnis-Marc is now running the Research in Minoa show, Mondays, I believe. Yep, Mondays at 2 o'clock. 2 o'clock, so. Make that 1 o'clock. We need to get as many participants as possible to tell the viewers about all the great things going on on the Minoa campus. Yes, it is great. It's an education. I just love that show because you learn so much about what's happening. Actually, right under our nose is it's happening at UH Minoa. All the research, people do not know about it. It's absolutely. And they can learn so much by watching that show. It's really one of my favorite shows. So let's talk about you for a minute. You went to the university. Buffalo took your BA there, or BS, was it? BS. We way back when, 1971, did I get that right? Yeah, well, I actually grew up in Buffalo, New York on Lake Erie, which back then was my ocean. I hadn't seen the ocean when I was growing up in high school. If you can believe that, now I live on it. And I didn't see the ocean until I was 17, until I was a senior in high school. But yeah, I grew up in Buffalo and went to school there. That was an interesting time, of course. That was the hippie movement and Woodstock in 69, the year after I graduated. So I stayed at college there, graduated in three years, didn't know what to do. I was always interested in science, but I really didn't have much of a plan at all. So I taught high school for a year, and that was a great learning experience, a teaching experience, if you will. I was taught more probably than my students about life and about the importance of education, higher education. So I went on to grad school and moved to Florida, and then moved to California, and then moved to Hawaii ultimately for my first job. Gradually becoming more oceanographic and your outlook each time, I guess. That's right, on the Peninsula of Florida. I hope they're all doing well down there. I know I went to Tallahassee, and they were pretty much spared, but I have a lot of colleagues in Boca Raton, and Miami, of course. And they pretty much got wiped out. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a point to punctuate, and that is what you do as the director of Seymour, as a professor in HIG, well, so west, I guess. Oceanography. Oceanography. Involves a lot of travel. Can you talk about the kind of travel and how much travel you do? Yeah, I've traveled to every continent, I might add. I love to travel, and I've been to Antarctica 23 times. A lot of people who do a lot of traveling have been to every continent, but Antarctica. But that was one of my first, actually. Besides North America, my second continent was Antarctica. I went there as a graduate student. And yeah, it's a fantastic place. I've been to Africa, East Africa, been to the Nile, been to the Amazon seven or eight times, mostly on holidays and learning experiences, not on research. But I have done research in the Amazon estuary and off the coast of Venezuela, as well as most of the ocean basins on the planet, the Black Sea. We went there a few times, bordering with Russia and Turkey, as you know. So that was a fantastic place to do research. But I think that this should be on the final exam. If you want to be a successful professor and a director of an important research organization, you need to travel. Travel is really broadening and travel is really something you have to have for that career. Am I right? Yeah, you learn a lot by traveling, but remember, science is international in scope. It's not a local field of study. And there are great scientists around the world and I like to call a lot of them my friends and colleagues. So I could go to most places on the planet and have a colleague there and be able to go and visit their lab and talk to their students. There must be a huge amount of gratification in that, to have a Rolex like that, to have all those relationships worldwide, all in science. Yeah, and it's especially about the next generation because in some of the countries they don't have the opportunities that we have in the state. So it's really fun to go back and give back because when I was starting my career, I was always getting things from other people. Of course, you get funded as a graduate student by some advisor, some mentor. They give you opportunities, research opportunities, learning opportunities. So now that I'm maybe over the hill in my career, I'm not looking back, but I am looking forward to helping other people. Yeah. Well, it comes into payback time. And you become a mentor for more and more people. That's exactly right. It helps them with their careers. The other thing that all this suggests to me is that if you're going to have all this Rolex all around the world and have these relationships, you have to maintain those relationships. That means you have to be on the internet. You have to be connecting with people. You have to be exchanging ideas and papers and scientific thoughts with them. You spend a fair amount of time with that. Yeah, I do. As I said, I've got a lot of colleagues in Europe and a lot of colleagues in Asia. So any time of the day, you can contact somebody who's at their desk working or in their lab or in the field. So yes, the sun never sets on science, and especially on oceanography. Yeah. And when you say at the desk, it rings a bell in my recollection is that some people sit at their desks. Other people stand at their desks. Dave Carl is one of the latter. He stands at his desk. He's got a desk this high, and he stands, and I guess that helps your circulation, eh? Yeah, it's like paying attention. It's hard to fall asleep when you're standing up. But actually, it's fun for having meetings because otherwise, people come into your office to talk to you, and they immediately sit down, and then there's an hour shot. But if you always are standing up, then they tell you what they want, and they're out of there in 15 minutes. Study of efficiency, that really is beautiful. So the other thing is communication. I remember, for example, I'm always so impressed with the Science Fair at the convention center, part of the Hawaii Academy of Science, as opposed to the National Academy of Science, of which you are a member. Where these kids come out, and they're, you know, the grade school, or junior high school, or high school kids, and they have these poster boards, like all scientists, all scientists must have poster boards, and they are telling you about their project, and they're like 14 years old, and they're articulate, and they're engaging. So I've come to the conclusion that a scientist, to be a scientist, at least now in the 21st century, has to be able to engage and articulate what he's doing, or she. That's absolutely right, and the kids are getting more and more sophisticated, as you say, and yeah, I love the Science Fair. I always have, and you mentioned the Hawaii Academy of Sciences, which I am also a member of, a lifetime member, and that's a fantastic organization, and I bet most of the general public doesn't realize that we have a learned body here in the islands that can help educate the general public, as well as mentor their children. Yes, important for the future. It's on both levels. It's the personal and family level. It's the life and quality of life of that child and the family, but it's also the community in general. And although a fair number you expect are gonna leave town and go do science elsewhere, a fair number stay. And the question I put to you, Dave, is the university ready to accept them? Are there job offerings? Are there research possibilities now at the University of Hawaii, where I can have my kid go through a science program and knowing that there's a reasonable chance he can stay? Yeah, Jay, I'd like to say that there's enormous opportunity at the University of Hawaii, not only for local people, you and I, people that call Hawaii home, but for native Hawaiian scholars, and we've, in the past several years in SOAS, we've hired a great number of incredibly talented native Hawaiian students who went off to universities around the world, some of the top universities in the U.S., for example, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, to name a few. And we've hired them back, and now they're faculty members and they are mentoring their own students, some of them native Hawaiian students. So we have, through Seymour, that we'll talk about in a little bit, we had established very strong connections with Kamehameha schools and a lot of other public schools, and we've made opportunities. For example, we had an outreach program called FEST, the Families Experiencing Science Together, and this is where the only rule of this outreach activity was that the kids had to bring their parents. So this was the idea of the Ohana, families getting together to learn about science, it's just fantastic. Sure, it gives them something over the dinner table, it gives them a common denominator in the family activity, beautiful. There's always opportunities at UH, and I would like to hope that many of the top students in Hawaii look to UH not only for their higher education, but for future employment. So how does that play out with you? And this is research, obviously, and I guess I would say you've been focused mostly on research, but you're also a teacher. And so what's the way that you move between those two poles, the way you handle both of them at the same time? What's more important for you? What's more important for somebody in the university in science? Yeah, there's really three pillars for faculty members. There's the research, all faculty are expected to create and disseminate knowledge, whether it's through dance, music, theater, or basic research, as I do. Then there's also education and mentoring, and that can take on many forms, formal classroom education, less formal education, one-on-one mentoring in the laboratory or in the field, which is what I do a lot of. And then there's community service, and that's everything from testifying at your local legislature, tending meetings in the general public, everything in the Chamber of Commerce to business community, as I know you have done many times downtown, and also international and national public service, serving on international committees, working for professional science societies, serving as an editor or an editorial board member for international journal, and so on. So we are actually expected to do quite a bit. I don't wanna complain about the workload because I don't feel I've worked a day in my life since I was hired at UH, although I don't tell President Lassner that, but it's incredible to come to work, quote-unquote work, do what I've always wanted to do my entire life and get paid for it. Lovely. It's great. Lovely, but you do a lot of volunteer things too, and you know, those papers, and I was telling Dave before the show that I have a slight arthritic disorder in my index finger for rolling the mouse on his CV because it got so tiring. I didn't get to the end of it either, but one part that struck me was the part where you are a reviewer. Aside from all the papers, hundreds of papers and collaborations everywhere, you are a reviewer, a very long list of things that you review. What is that about? Well, you know, the peer review system is one of the basic tenets of science. That's where a scientist like myself or my students would put together a scientific paper and we'd send it in for publication consideration, hopefully to a top tier journal. Those papers are then screened by an editorial board and a small subset of them are sent out for what we call peer review. This is where our peers, other scientists working in similar fields of study would have a chance to tell us why we're wrong. And they do, of course. And typically a paper, a scientific paper, would go out for two or three independent peer reviews. They come back to the editor. Any editor makes a decision on whether that paper should be revised, rejected, or published as is. It's very rarely published as is. So for every paper I publish, there's three or four people that have worked on my behalf to get that paper published. I've published over 400 papers. So that's an awful lot of people that have helped me with my work. So I return the favor and I review their papers. Yeah, that's great. And I think the other point, this will be on the final exam also, is that you have to participate in the community of science. You have to be out there at the front end. You have to be talking with the people, helping with the people, getting help from people involved in the conversation of science right at the cusp. Am I right? And you have to spend time doing it. You're absolutely right. Science is a team sport. It's built on community interactions. Very few people do anything in isolation. This is in contrast to 15th and 16th century science, which was really done by wealthy people or people in the clergy or people at universities, those that existed in the 15th and 16th century. People worked on their own. They made fundamental discoveries, thinking of people like Joseph Priestly, for example, who discovered oxygen and led to the whole study of photosynthesis and plants giving off oxygen. That was something an individual did by themselves. And there's many, many other examples of that. Today, science is much more community-based. It's based on collaborations, a lot of them international. A lot of the problems that scientists, at least earth scientists are attacking today in the ocean, in the atmosphere, on the planet, on the solid surface of the earth are too big for any one scientist to take on by themselves or too big for even a small team of scientists. So we need these large collaborations centers, like the Center for Microbiological Oceanography, to address really challenges that are global in scope. Yeah, and moving faster, isn't it? And moving faster. Very exciting, gee whiz. So we're gonna investigate, I hate to use that term, because that's a scientific term, but we're gonna investigate within the social sciences anyway, three organizations that Dave has involved in. One you've heard about, and that's Seymour, the Center for Microbiological Oceanography of Research and Education. We're also gonna talk about HOT, H-O-T, second one, and the third one is called SCOPE. And all three are active and all three have issues about what are we searching for? What are we finding? What facilities and equipment we have? What funding we're getting? And the life of that funding. We're gonna do this all in 15 minutes right after this break with Dave Carl. We'll be right back. She said, all the better to see you with my dear. What are you doing? Okay, cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh yeah, this is the starting line. Hush, this is over, you're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Don't forget to check me out right here, the Prince of Investing, I'm your host, Prince Dykes. Each and every Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Hawaii time, I'm gonna be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe. And real estate, finances, stocks, hedge funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. Okay, we're back, we're live. We're here on Research in Manoa with Dr. David Carl. He's the director of the Center for Microbial Ocean and Research and Education. And we're gonna talk about his organizations now. Let's start with HOT, H-O-T. What is that, what does it do? Okay, if you want a little bit of history here, Jail, go back if I may, even a little bit before the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program, or HOT, got started in 1988. I'd like to turn the clock back to... That's 30 years ago. I'd like to turn the clock back four billion years to the formation of the Earth. It's gonna be a long show. To the formation of the Earth. And we'll fast forward to about three billion years ago to the evolution of life on Earth. And that first life was microbial life. So for three quarters of the history of our planet, these microorganisms have been evolving, have been becoming better at what they do. And that has led us to the present situation in the ocean because life originated in the ocean where we have a very complicated and complex assemblage of microbial life. And that's really what all three of these programs are studying. How is the microbial life assembled? Who are they? What do they do? How do they affect the cycling of carbon and other bio-elements? How much energy are they harvesting from solar energy from sunlight? And how does climate change affect them? And how does climate change affect these ecosystems? How adaptable are they or how sensitive are they to sudden changes in our ecosystem? So the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program, as I mentioned, got started in 1988 with a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation. And that five-year grant has been parlayed into 30 years of continuous funding from the National Science Foundation. The government agency. That funds basic research in all fields, except for biomedical research, which is funded through the National Institutes of Health. So NSF is really the bread and butter of many scientists at Manoa, for example, who work in basic science, engineering, and STEM disciplines. Now the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program is cited at a location called Station Aloha. Aloha is, in this case, an acronym for a long-term oligotrophic habitat assessment. And the ocean around Hawaii is oligotrophic. By that we mean it's very low in biomass, very low in activity, and it's got very low nutrient levels. So we're trying to understand how these extremely oligotrophic or extremely low nutrient and low energy ecosystems are able to sustain themselves. So we put in a proposal to establish this site, and for the last 30 years, we've been taking our ship, our research vessel, up to Station Aloha on a monthly basis. So every month for 30 years, we've been going to sea for four days to learn what the sea is telling us about its existence and its future. And that program has built an incredible foundation for other programs to grow from. So the three programs you've mentioned, Hot, Scope, and Seymour, are really evolutionary in nature. We built Seymour, the Center for Microbial Oceanography, on what I call a hot foundation. That's a double entendre that the foundation is the research being done in the Hawaii Ocean Time Series Program Initiative. So Seymour was also looking at microbial life in the sea. All three of these programs are, but we got ever more sophisticated because Seymour was created shortly after what we call the molecular revolution that was partly due to the human genome, sequencing the human genome. But once the human genome was sequenced, scientists looked around and said, well, what's the next challenge? Well, how about the ocean genome? So we have been studying the ocean genome and its derivative implications, its consequences ever since 2006 when the Seymour program got started. Again, it's funded by the National Science Foundation, but in the case of Seymour, we brought scientists, a team of scientists from around the country. We had six partner institutions on the US mainland, as well as Hawaii, which was the host of this center. And it's still going on. The funding from the National Science Foundation was one decade, no more, no less. So we had to deal with losing our primary funding from the National Science Foundation, but we filled it in with additional National Science Foundation grants. And then in 2004, we created the Seymour's collaboration on ocean processes and ecology or scope and other acronym for our work, which is an ever more sophisticated analysis of time and space in the ocean. We're looking at four-dimensional complex arrangement of organisms, both the X, Y, and Z space, as well as time. So that's how we get our at all four dimensions at all depths from the sea surface to the great abyss at 5,000 meters at Station Aloha. We're looking from satellites. We're using in-ocean drones to collect data when we're not there. We have shipboard experiments. We have laboratory experiments that are being done in support of the seagulling hypothesis testing. And this has been an enormous, we're in our fourth year of funding from the Seymour's Foundation. Now- This is not government. This is not government funding. So we have this beautiful private public partnership of the government funding for the Hawaii Ocean Time Series and this private funding from Jim Simons and his organization, Maryland Simons, in New York City. It's a very large philanthropic organization and without philanthropy in science, we wouldn't be very far because before the National Science Foundation was even started, and I should say it got started in 1950, my same birth year. That was just coincidental, I guess, but when we built our new building on the University of Hawaii campus, we picked 1950 as our address. This is the Seymour building? The Seymour building, 1950 East West Road. It's a beautiful building. And we picked it because of this connection with the National Science Foundation. Very few people know the history of picking an address, but we were able to pick within a range of numbers. And I said, how about 1950? So the philanthropic support of science goes way back in our country, as I said, way before government funding pre-World War II and even at the turn of the 20th century, people like Rockefeller and Johns Hopkins and Carnegie. These are people that set up institutions of higher education, University of Chicago, Carnegie Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Stamford University. These were all set up with private foundation support, private individual monies that were allowing scientists or science to be done in our nation before the government found it worthy of their support. So they existed before the government got involved with the National Science Foundation and so forth? Absolutely. So this is so very interesting that now, and we really need to talk about this now in the day of the Trump administration and the denial of climate change and all that, the denial of science in many ways, they become these organizations, these non-government organizations become more important. You are absolutely right. They have always been important. They have become more important. We are fortunate to have funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, from the Agron Institute, from the Packard Foundation, as well as from the Simons Foundation, supporting our work at Station Aloha. It's been irreplaceable. We couldn't have done what we have done in the ocean, in the ocean, in oceanography, at Station Aloha, without this public-private partnership. And I should mention state support. I'm at a public university, the University of Hawaii. They pay my salary, the state, the taxpayers. Thank you so much. And they provide buildings and they provide services. They operate our research vessels. So without the triad of state, government and private funding, science would really be shackled. Yeah, it's so important now too, because as we discussed, things move faster and they are more important, especially because of the changes in the planet. Absolutely. And another thing about the private foundation and philanthropy is that they're a lot more able to respond quickly. So, you know, the government moves slowly. It's hard to change the direction of an entire organization like NIH or the NSF or NOAA. But private philanthropy can say, well, you know, I want to fund this and tomorrow the money can start showing up. Nimble, it's really important. So my last question for you, Dave, here is that I'd like to know what you see in the next five years. These three organizations, Hot, Scope and Seymour, how are they doing in terms of their future funding and their future activity? And what else is on the horizon for you and for so as to your area of microbial oceanography? Well, it's just beginning. It's gonna be an exciting next decade, Jay. You can mark my word for that. We are finding so many new discoveries in the ocean, in microbial populations in the ocean that I don't think we've even scratched the surface. I think it's fair to say that our level of ignorance exceeds our level of knowledge with regard to the microbial oceanography. So we're looking forward to our students becoming leaders in tomorrow and then their students carrying on for, I would say at least another century of hard work is ahead of us. Yeah, and it sounds to me like University of Hawaii is at the forefront in this area of science. And in the next five or 10 years, we'll see it emerge even further, no? Yes, it started with location, location, location. We're sitting here in the middle of the most important ocean. But now people are coming here because of the intellect that's here and the physical plant that we've created, the infrastructure for doing research in the open ocean with Seymour, hot and scope. So we are very proud of that and we're very appreciative of the support that we've gotten here in the state of Hawaii, helping to make University of Hawaii one of the top earth and ocean science universities in the world. Yes, absolutely. Everything we find is to that effect. Well, thank you, Dave. Dave Carl, the director of the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education and also HOT and also SCOKE and the director of ThinkTech, wow. Yeah, it's a long list, but ThinkTech's equally important. So nice to see you. Thank you, Jay. Aloha.