 Thank you to anyone who's joined us for this interview between myself and Linda J. Kenny, who is the FEMS ambassador to the USA in Singapore and professor at the Mechanobiology Institute of the National University of Singapore and also the Tom K. Arnold Chair of Gastroenterology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in the USA. And I believe you're in Texas now. So thanks for joining. The first thing I wanted to ask you, Linda, is can you tell us about your current area of research and what's happening in the world that it can help us answer? Well, my current area of research is on bacterial signal transduction, how they sense environmental stress and change gene expression, which is important in pathogenesis. We study that both in E. Coli and in the pathogen Salmonella, mostly Salmonella typhum but also Salmonella typhi. And we are also using new microscopy techniques, super resolution imaging to try to follow virulence factors, to explore transcription factors. And most recently, we're using genetic code expansion to introduce unnatural amino acids to site specifically label bacterial virulence proteins. And I want to just give a pitch in that we have a recent review that's coming out in November in VEMS reviews on the whole use of this, these enhanced microscopy techniques in bacteria. Okay, so hopefully other people can then use these techniques for their own research. And most importantly now, we are applying these techniques first as a proof of principle using Zika virus. But then our next step is to use to use in COVID-19 to be able to site specifically label viral proteins. And then we can follow them in cells and see who they interact with and what they're doing. Cool. I mean, so what's the kind of resolution of these techniques, these microscopic techniques? Well, we typically can look at things around 20 nanometers. Okay, so very, very small things very, very small. So we can see like, we can actually count how many regulatory proteins of a particular gene, a transcription factor that we've been studying are in this cell. And we can see in, for example, in response to acid stress, these numbers go up and we can count that those differences. And we can see by single particle tracking, whether the protein is bound or it's freely diffusing in the bacterial cell, for example. And this is a separate technique to X-ray crystallography, then. So, yeah, so you don't have to be making massive crystals of proteins to be able to get these resolutions. We're looking at the actual, the number of proteins in a bacterial cell in its native environment. Oh, very cool. Okay, cool. So I look forward to that review. We'll post about it on our social media channels when it's out. I'm sure. So keep an eye out for that. So my next question for you is that, you know, even though this is perhaps an unusual conference in the sense it's virtual, it still might be the first conference for many early career scientists. So what advice do you think you have from your position of experience for any scientist starting their career who might have their first post of presentation in this conference, or might be just doing their PhD or their first post of? Oh, how important meetings are in terms of meeting colleagues and people that are interested in your work that can help you advance your career. And I can say that the colleagues that I met at my my first meeting was the Biophysical Society meeting when I was a first year graduate student. And colleagues that I met at that meeting are still my colleagues and friends that I look forward to meeting up with every year, except maybe not this year. Yeah, well, not in the same way. Yeah, because actually we spoke at Glasgow in FEMS 2019 back, wow, last summer, which just feels like a whole different place. Yeah, in the before times when the world was a whole completely different place. And, you know, that was a big in person conference, 2000 people milling in the exhibition theater. Very different kind of place. So for you and myself, this is our first online conference, perhaps. Is this your first online one? Or have you done another one since? I participated in a talk on the American Society of Microbiology meeting. But in that case, we taped our talks, and then they were posted. So I'm looking forward to this different experience of, in particular, the live COVID roundtable in which we will really so I never saw anybody I don't know if anybody ever saw my talk, had any questions, there's no follow up. So it just feels very impersonal, like you're just posting something out there. And then you have no idea what happens with it. What I'm really looking forward to in this live chat is to be able to interact with an audience that's out there, and to have an exchange of ideas in real time with the participants. Yeah, and a bit of question and perhaps a bit of interaction beyond just watching and listening. What do you think are the pros and cons to this format? Well, this interactive online format, right, you can't meet people, which I think is just such a benefit of a live meeting. And but maybe if you're a first year student and you're feeling shy, it can be empowering. Because nobody really knows that you could, it could be more liberating in terms of being able to ask a question. And and maybe participate more. I think it can allow you to choose more carefully, the talks that you want to engage in and participate in, rather than being distracted by all the things going on at the meeting, that may be, you know, prevent you from actually attending or maybe being as fully engaged in a particular presentation as you might be. And I guess also for maybe the younger scientists, perhaps in countries with less good funding, these are cheaper, I think, to access than if you need to fly and get accommodation and all this kind of stuff. So perhaps in that aspect, there's some advantages for kind of, you know, opening up the conference space to as many people as possible. Right, which I think is a good thing. And also, I mean, I think it could, so you could still use it as an opportunity to meet a colleague, a scientist that you admire, that you then could then engage by email or Zoom or Skype or another way afterwards. And that it might be less scary than actually doing it in person. But I guess the con is that you don't get to visit wonderful, beautiful places. And this brings me on to my next question, you know, or go have a drink with somebody. Yeah, have a drink with someone. Because yeah, I mean, science is an international community. There's tons of globe trotting and visiting different people's labs in countries and institutions and conferences. In your career, which place has left its biggest impression on you when you think back like, oh, that was just a stunning place. I'd love to go again. Well, one of the places actually that spring brings to mind, I mean, there's been so many wonderful exotic places, Bangalore, for example, or the Gordon conferences in Tuscany that are spectacular. And a place that we went to for a number of years was in Cuernavaca. And we stayed. So Cuernavaca is sort of like the San Diego of Mexico. And it's about 60 miles south of Mexico City. And Cortez's summer palace was there. And there's Diego Rivera murals in the palace. And the food is outstanding. And the people are beautiful and colorful. And there's old ruins nearby. And it was just such a fun place to engage with our colleagues. And Popacatepital, the volcano was smoking in the distance. And wonderful. Yeah, it was magical. And and we haven't gone back there for a number of years now because of the violence in Mexico. And that just just heartbreaking about what's happened there. Okay, well, at least you did get to visit when it was possible. Yes. And hopefully in the future, travel again. Exactly. So this is something I've been asking a few different people. Obviously, everyone in this conference is hopefully a microbiologist in some way. What was it as a child that got you excited in, you know, microbiology, tiny things, the science behind life at this tiny scale, which you can't see, there's any moment or, or facts that you remember sparking your interest as a young child. We know when I saw your list of questions like that, oh, I'm not sure if I should answer this, because it's different from most people in that I really was not fond of science as a kid, because apart from my seventh grade biology teacher, I never really had good teachers that inspired me to be in science. And when I was an undergrad, I was interested in studying medicine, and I was working as a waitress to put myself through college. And I was always getting fired from my waitress jobs because I had a bad attitude. Or I think that's an important thing to have as a scientist. But anyway, so I was looking through the daily Iowan, I was an undergrad at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. And I saw this ad and it said, I am transport and turtle colon. And I thought, well, that sounds like an interesting job. And so I applied. And it was electrophysiology lab. And so I had no laboratory experience. And the guy didn't hire me, but he gave my name to someone else in the department. And so I started working in the lab as a tech. And then the lab moved to Philadelphia. And I moved as a technician after I graduated. And I started really running the laboratory. And then I went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. It was really when I came into the lab, that I found this complete passion. I mean, I had never really understood that there was a whole PhD thing as a line of study. And I think a lot of kids who, unless you have academic parents, don't really appreciate this career path. So that moment really changed my life. And so it just became the most wonderful thing that I wanted to do. So I found, having asked this question, so many people are like, Oh, I never really thought about being a microbiologist. It all happened by accident. And now I run the microbiology department in a big university. I never thought it would happen. And it's quite funny to think how sort of serendipitous people's paths are through, you know, jobs in academia, and then they end up in the world of bacteria. And they're like, I never thought I'd be here. Right, exactly. And I studied the sodium potassium ATPase as a PhD student from red blood cells and dog kidney outer medulla. And so again, I was a physiologist by training and working on eukaryotic systems. And then as a second postdoc, really, I went to the Sulhavi lab, who's a bacterial geneticist, and he had this system that he was studying, which was signal transduction. So the advantage that bacteria had over red blood cells is that they had DNA so they could regulate genes and that they were involved in osmoregulation, a topic that the sodium potassium ATPase is also involved in. And one of the intermediates was an aspartyl phosphate intermediate, which is also the sodium potassium ATPase is an aspartyl phosphate intermediate enzyme. So it had these parallels, but it had more because it went from the outside of the cell to the DNA was regulated in a series of phosphorylation events. And it just seemed like as a problem, it had, you know, almost everything that could capture one's interest. Fascinating. Well, this is kind of touches on my next question then, because, you know, your research investigates signal transduction and, you know, how it regulates gene expression in prokaryotes. So if I have to force you, which macromolecule do you find more amazing proteins or DNA? I'd have to say proteins, in part because we have better ways of understanding their shapes and their conformations and their structures now, so that we can really begin to say, you know, and I think we're dissecting our histidine kinase, which is a membrane protein. We're really starting to understand how it changes at a structural level. When we put bacteria, when we switch them from a low osmotic environment to a high osmotic environment. And what was surprising is that actually it was inside the cell where the most important changes were occurring, something we totally didn't expect at all. Now, I was hoping with super resolution that we could really begin to look at more ultra structure of DNA so we could appreciate more features of what happens when proteins bind to DNA and how the nucleoid changes, say in acid stress conditions or high osmotic conditions. And we can move from just a big bag of color to more features, but they're really not yet subtle enough, in my view, to really enlighten how we think about regulation at a very, you know, molecular level. Because I mean, I mean, the bit of science that I studied when I was in my undergraduate was kind of looking at the active sites of proteins and how they like interact at the chemical level within any kind of enzymatic chemical reaction. And I just found that so impressive that there's just this tiny chemical toolkit that they use to change molecules atom by atom. So I think I would agree proteins are more, you know, they do more. I know DNA is the kind of famous one that's got into popular terminology. It's in my DNA and so on. But maybe we should make proteins just as well understood by the general public. Well, I think what we need is we need a new eighth day of creation from the perspective of proteins, right? Because what makes that such a compelling piece of work is it's like a detective novel of all of what these different scientists are doing in the race that they're on to try to discover the structure and, you know, the competition between various people, etc. And I think I can't think of a great example where we have that with certain proteins where you get that same sense of discovery and how monumental it was and all of the various people that participated along the way. I wanted to ask you what do you think that this pandemic has taught us about how we deal with public health and public health response? How incompetent and inept we've been, I think, mostly, especially in places, interestingly, where we are more have more open societies, then people are less willing to follow the rules. And they consider wearing a mask, you know, an intrusion on their freedoms instead of participating in activities that will make everyone safer. You look at Asian countries where there is a more tradition of wearing a mask when you're sick, then those places in general have been able to do a better job of controlling the virus. And also, I mean, I look at Singapore as an example, too, which is has is very rigorous in enforcement. And so people will allow themselves to be tracked. I think Americans and maybe Europeans as well are more resistant to surrendering their cell phone information. In Singapore now, if you arrive, you are sent to a hotel for a two week quarantine. If you leave the hotel as identified by your cell phone movements, you'll be sent out. I mean, that's it. It is not up for debate. It's, you know, and so I mean, that's harsh. And we don't like, you know, those restrictions on our behaviors, but it works. So I guess, you know, we're always taught and preached the pros of the kind of hyperliberal, small government approach to economics. But I guess we can also see the flip side of not having powerful centralized organization in response to crises. And we're kind of seeing this play out country by country in this crisis, I think that we also, unlike in the US, you know what, when we have a huge anti-vaxxer movement. So how are we going to deal with that when we actually have a vaccine? And also we had plans for a pandemic that were dismantled. And I think part of the conversation is those plans for a pandemic have to be constantly upgraded and revisited because I think people weren't expecting necessarily that it would be a coronavirus, that it would be this spreadable and infectious that is, you know, aerosolized etc. And yet this is what we have. And we just weren't ready for it at all. And I think also there's a lot of, you know, variety in how the symptoms or asymptomatic people display. And I don't think any at the beginning of this whole pandemic that, you know, how do you deal with something that is asymptomatic for three weeks? And then it also has so many different kinds of effects on people that we don't understand very well, you know, there's long COVID, there's asymptomatic COVID, there's very severe cases that hospitalize you. Yes, it's more serious when you're old, but you can still be hospitalized at 25. There's just all of these little caveats, which I don't think we knew or expected at the beginning, which has taken all the health systems by surprise. And it's led to mixed messaging in the beginning, which has also kind of been haunting when you now early on, Anthony Fauci came out and said, you know, he was trying to preserve masks for the health care workers. So, you know, you don't need to wear a mask. Well, that was completely wrong. And so then the public sees him as flip flopping. So then maybe that he's untrustworthy. And so the messages that change as we learn about how the coronavirus is working is it's hard to get that across to people like that that this is new information and we need to adapt accordingly. I mean, science we know happens in a messy back and forth way, right? And in this case, the whole public is getting to watch science happen in real time. And that isn't always how they expect it to work. And like you say, messages change, new information makes old information obsolete. And we have to update how we do things. But that does sometimes come across as you said this completely different thing. I can't trust you at all. Why aren't you giving me one piece of information that's right forever? And of course, we know science doesn't deal in certainty. But often people think it is about certainty. And I think that's been quite difficult to communicate. And I think I think maybe we need as scientists to try to communicate that better about how discovery works and how we learn something new and it changes our interpretation. And some people are more reluctant to adjust to this new to new information than others, even scientists. And so there's disagreement about what that new information means and how it should be treated. And so it is this iterative process. And it's all creating huge challenges for the general public to accept what we're learning. So my next question for you then was, how do you think that the scientific community this crisis? I mean, it's affected how we do science a lot. We can't meet. We can't do the normal kinds of ways we'd exchange information. But more than ever, it's been relying on scientific progress to kind of respond to this crisis. So do you think we've done a good job? Do you think we could do things better or worse? Well, I think we could always do better, right? But I think I think we've done a phenomenal job. I mean, look at how many vaccines do we have in in stage three trials already when we're not even a year into this pandemic? So that's remarkable. And the cooperation between virologists and biochemists and multidisciplinary approaches have pushed this at a much faster pace than we could have imagined. And I think also the information that we gained with SARS and MERS left us further ahead. So even though like we didn't really have to worry about the SARS vaccine because it died out, those preparations were in the wings. And the information that people gained studying SARS was beneficial to jumpstart the COVID response. And so I think we can do a lot when we put our resources to bear and when there's a united cause that brings us together. And I'm a huge fan of my whole career of a multidisciplinary approach to science. I think it's absolutely essential and we're seeing that happening in the response to COVID. And so for the next stage of the interview to have two more questions for you. And it's a bit about internationalism and science. So in this era, there's a lot of nationalist tendencies amongst governments and politics. But how important do you think the international nature of science is to its effectiveness and how can we defend it? I think it's essential. And I like I look at my own career and I would tell young people that to be a scientist, you really need to be a child of the world and and to go and work where your opportunities are. And I I'm I'm really disheartened by the clamping down on interactions between Chinese scientists and Americans that has been playing out over the last year or so. I think it's essential that we get gather either virtually or however we can that we cross borders, that we cross cultures, that we share information. And I can't emphasize that enough. So yeah, my final question of the interview is so you are the FEMS Ambassador to the United States of America and Singapore. But at the moment, how do you think we can best build bridges between American science and the rest of the world? So you mentioned that there's a particular difficulty engaging across America to China. But you know, what are the best ways that American science can reach out or we can reach to American science from the rest of the world? I think meetings like FEMS are a terrific opportunity. And I think even more advertising would be helpful of making our meetings truly international. I think it's unfortunate that the American Society of Microbiology is called the American Society of Microbiology because it's an important international society and international membership is a huge part of the society. And I think we need to ensure when we plan meetings that we have strong representation globally. And allow for travel awards. And that's where I think FEMS does a fabulous job in the old days when we gathered of making it possible for people to travel from all over in order to attend the meeting. And I'm sure that's happening for people to virtually register for the meeting all over. And so I think we have to continue this effort and having people again in the organization at higher levels from all different areas ensures that they're strong and broad representation. Great. Well, yeah, thank you for your perspective and answers today. And I look forward to seeing you again on Saturday and yeah, watching the watching the COVID-19 roundtable. I'm going to say thanks for joining me and I hope you enjoy the conference from your from your home in Texas if not anywhere physical. I mean, I was excited to go to Belgrade, but this will have to do instead. But I think we've got such a nice collection of scientists there's still going to be some amazing things to discover. So thank you very much. And we'll see you soon. Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to talk to you. No worries. Absolutely. See you soon.