 Hello and welcome. Welcome everyone to the National Human Genome Research Institute's first event in our new genomics and media series. My name is Sarah Bates and I'm the communications chief for NHGRI. I'm very excited today to give a short introduction to our new series before I turn it over to our moderator and special guest. Each event in the series will feature a trailblazer 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 media from podcasting and preprints to everything in between. Our goal with this series is to talk about the different approaches for communicating, about the fast-paced field of genomics and 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 have a really incredible lineup for this series from Dorothy Roberts to podcaster Elizabeth Wayne to radio correspondent Joe Palka to preprint expert John Inglis. And of course today's incredible guest, a reporter of Corva Mendeville of the New York Times. Really excited to have you here today. The entire series will run through 2022. You can find details at genome.gov slash cam. And now I will turn it over to our moderator for today, Dr. Chris Gunter. Chris Gunter is the senior advisor and the NHGRI is a senior advisor to the NHGRI director on genomics engagement and head of the engagement methods unit and the NHGRI social and behavioral research branch. You may know her as girl scientist on Twitter. During the conversation between her and Corva, please send us your questions on social media with the hashtag genomics in the media if you're watching on one of our streaming platforms. If you're in the Zoom itself, please go ahead and submit your question through the Q&A feature. The chat feature has been disabled, but please, we're looking for your questions in the Q&A box. Thank you all for joining us here today. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Chris. Thank you so much, Sarah. I am so pleased to be kicking off our seminar series with my friend, Corva Mendeville. I'm going to work in her background throughout the questions and at least some of her accomplishments because there are so many. So for now, let me introduce her as a groundbreaking science journalist who has just celebrated one year of working at the New York Times covering science and global health. She's also, as you can see here, the winner of the 2019 Victor Cohn prize for medical science reporting, which is given out annually by the council for the advancement of science writing. And as that award text said, her work has both depth and breadth. We're going to talk about both of those today, ranging from deep storytelling and long-form stories to short dispatches on breaking issues. And you could argue now even shorter dispatches via Twitter, which may have been foreshadowing for the year we've all had in 2020, shorter attention spans, maybe. She was also praised by the award committee for elevating science journalism for everyone with her advocacy for diversity in professional organizations. So we're going to talk about that as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Corva. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And, Chris, you and I have known each other a really long time. So I'm looking forward to your questions, but also a little scared because you know me a little too well. So everyone again, as Sarah said, remember that we'll be taking questions through the Q&A function on the bottom of the window there. And we're going to talk about, Corva, how you got involved with genetics and genomics and how those have intersected with your career. But let's go back to the beginning. I know you are actually a double master, so to speak, with masters of arts degree in journalism from NYU and a master of science degree in biochemistry from UW Madison. So how has having that equal emphasis helped you in your career? I've talked about science writing before as bringing together the two sides of my brain. You know, how people talk about left brain, right brain. There's a part of me that's very precise, likes order, likes explanations, likes clarity. And then there's a part of me that just wants to run wild. And science writing kind of brings that together for me. My mother is a writer and she's, you know, writer of fiction, short stories, poetry, and I was around that kind of writing my whole life when I was growing up. But I was interested in science and good at science. And so I felt like that is what I should be doing. That's, you know, I grew up in India and that's just what you do in India when you're good at science, you become a scientist. So I had this very clear path in my head of, you know, bachelors in chemistry in my case, and then a PhD and a research career. And it wasn't until I was, you know, most of the way through my PhD at University of Wisconsin, Madison, when I realized, you know, I don't actually just want to study one thing. I love science, but I want to be able to know a lot about a lot of different things in science. And I think that's the part I had not paid attention to yet. And the writing really allows me to do that. The writing allows me to ask the most intelligent, the smartest, the most successful people who are working on science and, you know, demand their time. And it's kind of amazing that that's my job. So I think that in that way, my training has sort of brought me to this spot, this job where I can do that. Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, I think we should tell more people that they should, you know, not to have to worry about getting that PhD or chasing traditional academic success, right? You figured out that's not what you wanted to do. And you are having a lot of success. So I think that's great. So when aspiring science journalists ask you about what they should study, should they study science, should they study journalism, what do you normally tell them for education? It really depends on what kind of career they want to have. I don't think there's one specific path. So for journalism, I went to the NYU Science Journalism program. And when I was there, about half of our class were people like me who had come from a science background, were looking to sort of shed the bad habits of science writing that comes from academia, you know, everything in passive voice and a lot of jargon and all of that, and learning sort of how to write really simply. And then the other half, where people were English majors, and who loved science and decided that they wanted to write about science rather than something else. So people came from all different backgrounds. And honestly, I think if you told somebody that you could go from running an autism news site, which is what I did right before The New York Times, to becoming a reporter at The New York Times writing about infectious diseases, I don't think people would believe you. So I really think, you know, there is no one path. I think you should do what you love to do. And for me, that has never failed me. I know it doesn't work out for everybody, but I've been very lucky partly, but I have been able to turn my specific strengths and my specific interests into a career that works for me. So a lot, I think, and this is what I was not good at when I was younger, is listening to yourself and figuring out, Oh, I like this. I don't like this. I'm interested in this. That bores me. And I have learned over the years to really pay attention to that and go where that takes me rather than having some preordained path in my mind. Yep. And as we'll talk about, we're going to come to the spectrum news site in a little bit here, but as we'll talk about then, if you don't see the job that you want, help you to create the job that you want, right, which is what you did there. But first, let's talk about nature medicine. So that's when you and I first met when I worked at nature, you were the news editor for nature medicine. And I had the impression at the time that you just worked all the time and did all kind of stuff. But in retrospect, I really realized that you were the news editor, the writer, the hiring and supervising manager, you were collaborating with other journals, you were doing science communication by launching an online blog site. I mean, you really did do so many things there. But what I'm going to ask you about, because our series is about genomics and the media, is that time when you were there was also the heyday of genomes being sequenced and pulverized, but I did when I was at nature is in all that. And it also launched more excitement about precision medicine, right? We hear about that a lot. So when you were at nature medicine, how did you interact with genetics and genomics? So nature medicine is a translational journal, right? It's all about how do you take these basic discoveries and bring them in a clinically meaningful way. So when the genomes were sequenced and people were starting to make better models, animal models for everything, all of a sudden it was like this whole new world of oh, we can really understand diseases now in a way that we've never been able to. In fact, I remember when I interviewed for the Job with Nature Medicine, somebody had just sequenced the mouse genome. One of the questions they asked me was, you know, you're a monthly, how do you cover some breaking news like that? You know, how do you cover the mouse genome after everybody else has already written about it? And my answer was that I want to write about all the people who are now going to abandon their rat models and go to mice because, you know, there was so much excitement. You could really manipulate mice in a way that you couldn't with rats, and they were so excited about this new genome. But there were also pitfalls, right? You could let rats are just a much better model for psychiatric diseases and wasn't necessarily a great thing that some of those people also went to mice. So there was a lot of excitement, confusion, exploration of where genetics could take us. And I was at Nature Medicine from 2001-ish, 2007, something like that. So that was also the era of vital. And we were so excited about this new medication. And then very quickly we realized it was developed in this weird way. It was intended in a weird way. You know, so there was also a lot of promises that didn't come true. And that's the message I really carried from that time is genetics is very powerful. It is going to take us places. But we are going to have to be very thoughtful about how we get there. And we are going to have to know what it is we're trying to do and find the right tool and not get ahead of ourselves and think that we know things that we don't yet. Because we are still trying to figure out how genetics applies to medicine. And it's an evolving process, evolving process. And I think, you know, that's part of what I learned there is to stop and ask the questions. Is this gene therapy really the right approach for this disease? Is it going to be more dangerous than it's worth? You know, is genetically modifying mosquitoes to control malaria a good idea? There were just all these ideas flying around. So I asked, I think I learned to ask critical questions about are we really there? Is the science mature enough to be having this conversation? Yeah, absolutely. And it also seems to me that part of what you saw when you're there as well is it seems to me sometimes that as we make more discoveries that actually opens up more questions in genetics, right? There was the whole missing heritability period, right? There's now we just found out that RNAs or last week RNAs are on the outside of some cells and are glycosylated on the outside of some cells. I mean, that's amazing, right? So I think that's part of the, it's fun if you're able to look at it that way. It's fun to have all these new questions come up, but that must be kind of hard for reporters. It is. And, you know, it also blew my mind a little because I did not know much about genetics at all. I, you know, I studied chemistry and biochemistry. I didn't even take basic biology classes when I was in an undergrad. And so I didn't know a ton about genetics, just the basics. And I just blew my mind, for example, to learn how closely related we are to the apes. Like, I just did not know that. And things like that, you know, when we became aware of how we are not really all that unique in so many ways, that was, I think, a big revelation, not just to me, but from what I could tell also to a lot of clinicians who hadn't really thought about genetics before. Right. And we're still trying to figure that out as well. Yeah, absolutely. So you went from covering basically all of medicine at Nature Medicine to instead focusing very narrowly on one patient community. So from that position, you became the founder and the editor-in-chief of the news website Spectrum, which is run by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative or Safari. Luckily for me, we kept interacting because I then moved into the autism field. So maybe I'm following you. I don't know. And I can attest that the Spectrum site is definitely a go-to news site for covering news and perspectives related to autism spectrum disorder, ASD. I have sent tons of Spectrum links to everyone I know all the time. So what did you learn from being in that position, from being so involved with one patient or research participant community? I learned so much at Spectrum. I mean, from a very personal perspective, you know, a career perspective, since you asked me that question, it was one of the things that I, you know, I learned there is how to look at one single disorder condition, in this case, autism, and look at all the ways in which it intersects with all of biology. So, you know, this is something we used to tell people when they interviewed for positions all the time is you might think you're coming in to write about one condition, but really, you will be writing about genetics, you'll be writing about neuroscience, you'll be writing about cognitive psychology, you'll be writing about behavioral therapies, you'll be writing about drug development. It's, you know, it sort of runs the gamut. And when I landed at Spectrum, you know, I started the website, one of the things I learned right away is how lucky I was to be in that position at that time, because I started there in September, let's say 2007. And right around that time, Jonathan Sabat and Mike Wigeler at Coltsman Harbor Laboratory published this paper, linking copy number variants to autism. It was sort of the first real, you know, this is actually important in autism kind of paper, and everybody sat up and took notice. I think it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. And it was a big deal that paper, it really shook up the conversation in good and bad ways, as we can discuss. And it really, I think, helped people understand that what we were talking about here was a genetic condition, in a way that even though we sort of knew that, we couldn't really put a wrapper around it. And that paper allowed us to do that. And from then on, honestly, I really think of that era, I was there for 13 years, and that era I think was the golden age of autism genetics. It's just, we went from first thinking, oh, copy number variants might be involved to here are the rare variants, here are the, you know, common, it's the genetics of autism just really took off. And it was exciting too, to see people from all different fields. You know, Matt State, who's one of the biggest autism researchers now came from clinical psychiatry. And, you know, people came from schizophrenia research, people came from all over and autism became this hub of incredibly bright minds applying what they knew. And so it was a very, very exciting time. And I learned so much genetics when I was there. I learned a lot of, a lot of things. I learned a lot about how online communities can spiral quickly out of control. I learned all kinds of things when I was there. So I think, you know, and career wise, I also learned that I like doing that. I like building things from scratch and having a hand and shaping something, you know, taking basically a piece of clay, which is what that was, nothing existed, and really building out this site. It went from me at the beginning to now there are 13 people there. And Ivan Oransky, who's a very respected science journalist, took my job when I left. So, you know, it's, I'm very proud of what Spectrum became. Yeah, absolutely. I think you should be. And I foreshadowed what I wanted to also ask you was, as you know, there's an escalating and changing debate in the autism community about the role of genomics. So many organizations, particularly as you mentioned, funded research with the aim of improving clinical care and learning about basic genomic underpinnings of autism. But they are community advocates who feel that this money should be spent elsewhere, for example, on supports for people who have autism. So, as you worked with the Spectrum site in the community, I think you talked about this a little bit, did your opinion change over time on the value of genomics and autism? Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a science journalist, right? So I've always been firmly on the side of we should do basic research, because that's where the brilliant insights come from. So I was always really invested in the genetics research and why it was important. If anything, actually, I learned more about the other side. I learned about why people are so passionate about wanting funding for services, for example, or for, you know, adults with autism, because all of the research was focused on children, why it's important to really study girls with autism who may have a different genetic profile even. So I learned all of that. And it was very interesting to see how that community evolved as we learned more and more the genetics. I saw groups that were vehemently opposed to genetics research start to accept, oh, this actually might be helpful to us. You know, the conversation went from this is eugenics, this information is going to be used to filter out embryos that have these mutations, and we are going to be erased from there to, oh, we are learning that autism is not a single monolithic thing, it's autism, and there are all these different mutations and all these different genes, and each of them maybe defines a subtype of this thing that we've been calling autism. And that was really cool to see these online communities form around dark 1A or any sort of these genes that suddenly became super important and became obvious that they play a very big role. But then they have this very specific phenotypes. I remember Ray Farnier who's an autism researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle or was, I think he moved now too. I remember he said, I can tell a dark 1A kid when they come into the clinic. I was blown away by that. But it's true. I think when you see the photos of those kids, you see that there is an actual phenotype. And I remember hearing another story about a mother who was actually walking in the hallways of the NIH and saw a bunch of pictures. This might also be dark when I don't remember, but or maybe CHD8. She saw a bunch of photos of people with this particular, you know, mutations in this particular gene. And her daughter at that point had not been diagnosed for anything specific. They hadn't sequenced her genome or maybe they hadn't connected it. But after she saw those photographs, she realized, no, no, that's exactly what my daughter looks like when she was right. So there was a lot of that because those communities could then talk to each other and compare notes. In fact, one of them became, you know, they started a Facebook group and they started to hear from other mothers that all of their children had these problems with teeth. They were following. And then, you know, they talked to researchers and then that became an actual field of study. People started to look into that and turned out to be true and it gave them more clues. So it just opened up research in a way that I think nobody could have foretold when that first paper came out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree. And as you said, sometimes getting the genetic testing or getting a diagnosis is such a relief for the families as well. And it does also let them know about other potential conditions that might be associated with this particular mutation other than the autism or in addition to that. So yeah, absolutely. I think that's great. So we have one question from the Q&A, which seems appropriate here, because, you know, you were talking about autism, which is more specialized. That doesn't apply to everybody. And so someone's asked you, how do you make sure you keep your writing accessible, engaging and interesting for both scientists and non-scientists? Let's take the million dollar question. It's every day, right? Yeah. I think, first of all, I have a very good editor who when I start to really geek out and nerd out pulls me back. But also I think it's a lot of it is asking a lot of questions, understanding everything you need to understand, but not putting all of that into the story. I remember when I was in journalism school, you know, the teachers used to say the question, you know, it's not always what makes a story good is not necessarily just what you put in it. It's also what you leave out. You don't need to see how the sausage is made. You just want to know what this means for this person. And a lot of that is knowing whom you're writing for. So when I was a spectrum, that was, you know, scientists. So everything we wrote, everything we did, we had to ask, does this have a research purpose? Is this moving the field forward? Is it answering any question? And so that, you know, was very important. Now, at the New York Times, I'm at the polar opposite. I'm writing for a very broad audience nationwide, really global, and with all different levels of expertise and understanding of science. And I have to be able to think about what is useful to a majority of those people, if not everybody. So one thing that I find helpful is to think about a picture of an audience member, you know, like, who might be reading this and think about somebody in middle America who is just going about their business and really just wants to know the basics about this particular thing. And you try to give that to them as easily as possible. But then you also give the people who want to know a little bit more, a tiny bit more. I'm very rarely writing for scientists these days, although because I've spent so much of my career thinking about them and thinking about what they're interested in, it does inform the questions I ask when I'm reporting. And it does inform how I think about how the topic fits into the broader picture of science around it. But I don't necessarily put all that into my stories because the average person just doesn't care. And you only have so many words, which is always the problem of words. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. That's really helpful. So people should keep putting questions in the Q&A. And I'm going to go back to one of the questions that I had for you, which is that you are the, speaking of looking at the practice of science writing, you're the founding chair of the Diversity Committee for the National Association of Science Writers, and you also, I'm not sure when you had time to do this, but with a colleague, you also co-founded Culture Dish, which is an organization dedicated to enhancing diversity and science journalism. So I know I've seen you giving in a reason, you talk quite a bit about how that came about and what happened. So what I want to ask you is, have you seen any noticeable changes since then and what still needs to happen? There have been, I think, a lot of changes. One of the things that we were able to do, so I've co-founded Culture Dish with Nidhi Sobaraman, who's also a science journalist and is now at Nature, one of the things we discovered is that there was a real hunger among science journalists of color to find a community. You know, science journalism is a very small community, really. Everybody kind of knows everybody. It's like two degrees of separation. But for some reason, the journalists of color were just outside of the main circles. And so when they came to meetings, they just didn't feel like they fit in. And a lot of them stopped coming to the meetings. And so what we tried to do, and I think what we have succeeded partly in doing, is making the science journalism community more open and welcoming and inclusive of people of color. And I think really key to that is when we first started to form Culture Dish, the Culture Dish came first, and then the National Association of Science Writers asked us if we would start the diversity committee because they saw that there was a real need. And one thing they said to us is, we've really tried to do this. We have tried to recruit more science journalists of color. We have tried to bring more people in. And when I asked, well, who was on those panels? Who was on those committees? All white people. And, you know, you can have the best intentioned white people talking about something, but the thing that's going to make you feel really comfortable coming into an environment where you might be the only person of color is seeing other people say that this is a safe space. You're okay here. So we started a diversity mixer, which was on the first day of the meeting so that people who were new could make connections and have a familiar face later on when they were in the breakfast line or whatever. And it was so well attended that the National Association of Science Writers then decided to make it a permanent part. So now there is a diversity mixer every year. And more importantly, there are also these other things that we've done. We started this and we've handed off to other co-chairs now and they've really built on it is a scholarship for young science journalists who cannot afford to move to New York for the summer and work for nothing. So as long as they could show us that they had an offer of an internship, we paid a stipend of $5,000 for the summer so they could actually come and be here. And when Nidhi and I started, it was just one and now I think it's going to four every summer. So it's building also the pipeline of journalists coming in and making it a little bit easier. I think Twitter has made that easier. And just once some journalist started to see, oh, okay, there are actually other brown and black people here. I won't be alone. More and more started to come. And the last time we had an in-person meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, it was phenomenal. It was so different than when we first started it, which was 2014. I think it's come a long way, which is not to say that the work is done. It's not to say we're all set here because just in the last couple of months, I've had two different publications approach me to say, can you suggest somebody for this pretty high-level job who's a science journalist of color? We want to consider at least some of them. And I really could not think of very many because back then the pipeline was really dry. So even though there are people, it's in positions of leadership, you still predominantly see white men, not even women really, mostly white men still in science journalists. I think that still has to change. It still has to sort of turn, but I think we're getting there slowly. Yeah, I really appreciate that insight as well as obviously the representation matters, which we've heard over and over, but that's exactly what you're saying as well, that's so important. Yeah, and I think when people talk about wanting their teams to be more diverse, I don't think it's ever enough to advertise and say, we put it out there and we just didn't get any candidates. Again, nobody wants to go somewhere that is already very white, if you don't want to be the only person in the room. It's incredibly intimidating, it's uncomfortable. And so you also have to try to reach out through other networks. You have to basically open up your network. It can't just be your network. It can't be based on the 10 people you know, you have to ask, go beyond that and be very active in trying to find people. And part of that is reaching out to other people of color in that community, because maybe they know people. So sort of like these publications approached me, I think a lot of that has to happen because they will know. And then also once you hire them, retaining them is the real issue. You know, if you don't listen to them, you don't promote them, you don't really include them, you don't make them feel comfortable, they're going to leave. And they can advance. Yeah, exactly. And that's been a real problem actually in science journalism, is that people come in, but they often leave because it doesn't feel like a welcoming environment. Yeah. And other places too, I'm really excited because we just appointed Eric Green, our director, is just appointed new acting deputy director, Sir Vince Bonham, who is going to work on our new diversity action agenda to bring more diversity into the genomics workforce. And we're tackling some of the exact same things that you say, we can't retain people, right? We have to make it easier for them to stay in the pipeline. They also have to bring them in like, yeah, so many things are on that. So we could talk about that forever, but we do have one question that is semi-related to that. So we're going to get to talking about India and Covay, which you're doing now in just a few minutes. But first, the question is semi-related, which is, do you think diversity in science communication might also help boost diversity in clinical trials and research? Minority groups are often vastly underrepresented in the data, as you probably know. So analysis of such groups in my current project has been challenging, that was the question. Absolutely. I think if you don't have a journalist of color in newsrooms, you're not hearing those stories. You're not getting the reporting that you need. You're not thinking of those ideas even. For example, I think the Moderna trial, to use a very recent example, did not have enough minorities in the trial at first. And it wasn't until some journalists wrote stories and there were some fuss that was kicked up that they started to open up. And you need people to kick those tires. And you need, and often that has to be, and that is somebody who thinks of that issue because they have some experience and connection to it. And you also really need them to be in the newsroom so they can sort of flag things like, oh, this is actually offensive. You may not realize it, but let's not put that in the story. Or let's not use this photograph. I can think of one illustration that we were trying to do where it was about vaccine hesitancy, I think. And they had a black doctor in this illustration wearing a lab coat. So he was clearly the doctor. And then on the other side, there was a woman with a baby and she was sort of trying to keep the baby away from this doctor. And I think the intention was good. They were actually trying to put in some diversity by saying, you know, we should have a black doctor and we shouldn't always just show like white men as the doctors. But in that particular context, it kind of looked like he was trying to take her baby away. Yeah, so no matter what. Yeah. And it made it through various levels until it got to me. And I was like, no, no. I have some concerns. So, you know, you don't know what you don't know, basically. And you don't even know what you're not asking or what questions you should be thinking of. So it's important to have a diverse newsroom. It's important to have diverse communications. If it's, you know, for the NIH, for example, for the NHGRI, you need people who are thinking about these things. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's something that we're taking serious as well. Yeah, I appreciate that. So let me switch gears a little and talk about one of the stories that won the award that I mentioned at the top, which was several years ago, you went on and I remember you talking about this at the time, an extensive reporting trip throughout India to follow up on the Bhopal chemical gas leak disaster over 30 years after it happened. And the resulting award winning story, which was published in the Atlantic, showed, as it said in the title, that the world's worst industrial disaster is still unfolding, which I think many people did not understand. So you've said that you grew up in India and you were 11 at the time. And then this major gas leak, since you were 11, it was old enough for the images from it to be burned into your brain, which really stuck with me when I read that because I think a lot of us are seeing images now from India. And some of those are definitely burning migraines for myself. How what kind of lessons did you learn from that story that you find yourself going back and thinking about as you see what's happened there now? The biggest lesson I learned from reporting that story is don't think you know what the story is before you get there. I had this idea that what I would be reporting on is how people who survived the gas leak were doing now 30 years later. But when I actually started to really do the reporting, it turned out that the bigger story was all these people who weren't even there at the time of the gas leak, but had moved in near the factory after it shut down because land was cheap. And we're living all around this abandoned site. But the factory itself had never been cleaned up. So there were still these chemical tankers that were just left half emptied and nobody really bothered to take them away. And so over time, those chemicals were leaching into the groundwater and slowly poisoning all the people around them. I spent a lot of time in this one community on this one street. This is one of these giant stories. So that's another, it's more of a journalism lesson, but it's really the bigger the problem, the smaller you go. Because people can't really fathom numbers and very big things here. You sort of need to zoom in and make it very real by going into people. So I spent a lot of time on this one street. And every single family on that street had some condition that was related to birth defects and cancers and miscarriages and infertility. And it was just really just horrific things happening on that street. And nobody was doing anything about it. And nobody still is. So eventually the government started to supply clean water to some of those places, but there's still a lot that don't have it. And I didn't know any of that when I started reporting. So that was a really big lesson to not make up my mind about what it is I'm looking for. So I think when I go this time, because I plan to go to India sometime soon, as soon as it's calm down and go report on COVID there, that's one of the things I want to see is what story has not been told about India? Because almost everybody's telling these stories from a distance. In terms of the Western media, there are of course lots and lots of papers in India that are covering it. But if you think about the times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Washington Post kind of papers, there haven't been that many stories that have come out from people who are there. We have a Delhi Bureau and they're reporting some things, but they're not science journalists. So I've collaborated with them on a couple of things and helped out on a couple of things. But they're not looking at the very sciencey story. For example, I just had a query from somebody on the Delhi Bureau wanting to know, is India not sequencing enough samples? And is it basically their fault that they're not sequencing enough samples and that's why we don't know anything about these variants? And so I was like, well, that's true, but also nobody is. It's not like it's the only country. So that's the kind of context I think you don't necessarily have if you're not a science journalist. So I am looking forward to what I will find out are the stories that didn't happen there. I'm also hearing, for example, that Ivermectin is being given to everybody and I want to know how is that working out? I mean, obviously not well, but so there are these more sciencey medical stories that I don't think that my colleagues in the Delhi Bureau are necessarily chasing. And so I want to go there and see what are the stories that are unfolding. Yeah, absolutely. And you foreshadowed exactly what I wanted to ask you, which is that a recent story in the Washington Post said that we're only doing genome sequencing in the US in about one percent of COVID cases and in India it's 0.06. So yeah, you're going to look into that. And maybe we could talk about some of the reasons why India is lagging in this area. I know that you had recently, not recently, but in 2016, I think, had a column about India's anti-science movement. Are you still seeing that? Do you think that's part of the reason? It's part of the reason. Yeah. I mean, I think the Modi administration just doesn't care that much about science. They've been very anti-academic, anti-science. They have this very vested interest in making old Indian science seem better than Western science. So there were some crazy theories. I remember when I wrote this blog that people were saying things like that there was a character in an Indian myth and they were saying that that was proof that Indians had invented airplanes, you know, whenever well. So there were just these insane stories that were being planted by Hindu fundamentalists and it has not helped science in India. And they've really tried to silence a lot of economics who have spoken up against it. So that's a definite issue. But also I think, you know, I don't think we should single out India because for a country of that income, for a country of its size, you know, it might be sequencing 0.06 percent, which is like very, very little. But 0.06 percent of an Indian population is probably not that many samples different than 1 percent in America. So they're not doing enough by any means. But I think everybody was sort of caught with their pants down when this virus started to come around. Really the only country that was sequencing enough or has been is the UK. And that's why I think they were in great shape to recognize B117 when it came around the variant that was first identified there. And they, you know, everybody benefited from them doing that. We all knew Europe, new America knew that B117 looks like it's more contagious. It looks like it's something we have to take seriously. And if they hadn't been sequencing, none of us would have known. And the US didn't really start to ramp up until it looked like B117 was going to come over here and we needed to, you know, get on with it. And of course, we also had a regime change here. And it wasn't until the Biden administration came in that those sequencing efforts started to really ramp up. So they're still not where they need to be, but they're better than they were. And they're starting to ramp them up. And one of the things I think that has really been underappreciated is why there's not more sequencing. It's not, as we know, sequencing is super easy now. It is not complicated. It's cheap. It's fast. It really should be done. But the problem is that there's no link between the labs that are doing the actual testing for the virus and the public health labs that would be doing the sequencing. The labs that are doing the testing don't have the capacity to sequence. The public health labs don't have the access to the samples. And the connection is completely broken. And there's no pipeline to take the samples all the way through to where they need to be sequenced. And that's something that I think the current administration is planning to work on. They want to bolster the public health infrastructure. And that's one of the things they want to improve. So maybe we'll learn this lesson for the next pandemic. But this is a case where almost everybody, oh, and I also want to give a shout out to South Africa. They were amazing. They also were, they were actually, South Africa was sort of the leader, but there were a bunch of African countries that also really came through with excellent sequencing and surveillance. Which is why we know about B1 through 5.1. So it's, I would say it's the norm to not have good sequencing rather than the exception. Right, which is, yeah, that's something we'd like to work on. And so briefly, you already talked about some of them, but what is your, and I wouldn't be asking this, what is your sense of the current set of variants circulating in India or anywhere else? And how concerned people should be about those? I think that there's, this is a tricky one because it's, this virus has proven us wrong so many times that I don't want to say something that ages badly like three days later. But this story, okay, so this story is actually a good way to get into it, which is India started to blame B1617, the Modi administration immediately. It's because of this variant. That's why we're seeing all these cases, blah, blah, blah. And there may be some truth to that. It's starting to look like one sub-lenation B1617.2 is maybe particularly problematic. We don't know exactly how much or in what ways, but, you know, we're getting there starting to understand it more. But the bigger issue was that the country was not taking COVID very seriously anymore. There was this myth, right, that the COVID is done. It's some resistance to this virus or that it's already been through everybody and we all have herd immunity now or that it's because of the BCG vaccine. We have, you know, extra immunity. There were just all these crazy theories about why India didn't have more cases. And so there were a lot of societal reasons why the virus took off that had nothing to do with this particular variant. I'm sure the variant didn't help and I don't think B117 helped because they were both starting to take off, but neither one would have if they had had precautions in place. So I think that's the biggest lesson is none of the variants we've seen so far are behaving like a completely different virus. The things that we know will work still work, asking, hand washing, the social distancing, you know, all of that still applies to all of the variants we've seen. Scientists that I have spoken to are sort of divided on what they're more worried about. Some people are more worried about the ones that seem more contagious because they'll quickly go through a population before maybe they have had a chance to get vaccinated. Less and less of an issue now in the United States. But the one that I think keeps some scientists awake and it definitely keeps me awake is the idea of a variant that is not very sensitive to vaccines. And I know we keep saying that the vaccines work really well against the variants and they do in terms of preventing severe disease and death. But we don't really know and don't have a lot of great evidence for how well J&J and AstraZeneca do against all the variants. We know that the mRNA vaccines do well. But we don't know that for the other vaccines. And they're starting out with a much lower efficacy. So there's less wiggle room. And it's possible that we'll need boosters within a year. And there's a lot to learn and to be vigilant about. And we really can't just rest on our laurels. I mean, of course, the average person can and they should relax. But scientists can't really relax on these variants yet. And neither can science journalists. And that's how it goes, right? I mean, and that actually perfectly segues into the next question I want to ask you, which is, I can't even imagine you jumped on this train at New York Times. And oh my gosh, the year that you have had there, you just celebrated your first year there. I want to ask you about a specific aspect that I'm curious about. So I use Twitter sometimes as well. But for me, it's more about kind of sharing information after the main value. I feel like I get on Twitter seeing diverse perspectives that I wouldn't be exposed to otherwise. So definitely in the last year, that's what I've enjoyed about it. But how do you, does social media enhance or maybe detract from your routine work process? How do you work it in? On balance, social media helps. On balance, it really helps my reporting. I cannot imagine how I would have reported on things in the early days of the pandemic without Twitter. Because the usual means of getting in touch with scientists were somehow just not as effective anymore. You could email people, but people were at home and they were taking care of their kids or whatever. And you couldn't necessarily reach them very quickly that way. None of the office phones were going to work because everybody was home. And really, Twitter was where all of the conversation was happening. And more and more scientists were joining Twitter and starting to really discuss science very openly. And for a science journalist, this is like a gift. It's like instead of going to 20 Keystone meetings, you just hang out on Twitter and listen to them talk to each other. And then they're often talking about things that they may not even realize are super interesting to me. But the stories come through listening to that. And I've also found sources. When you start to see people talk a lot about things, you get a sense of like, oh, this is a solid researcher or this person is just in it to get the likes. Or you start to get a sense of who people are. Because again, in the early days, there were no COVID experts because it was so new. So of course, you could go to virologists. And I went to a lot of the HIV virologists. I knew we're starting to work on the coronavirus. But it took a little while to figure out, for example, epidemiologists, who was really going to be good for COVID and who wasn't. But I think Twitter was great for that, because it really made it easy to see what the expertise was, but also what they were thinking and saying and where the stories were going to be next. So that's the science part of it. But also interacting with readers, you can see sort of where the information is missing, because that's where people are most confused. And when people ask me a lot of questions about something, it gives me an idea of like, okay, this is something that's confusing to people. It's probably worth writing about. So it's also been really helpful in that way. Yeah, absolutely. However, there are other ways in which Twitter is not always so helpful. So let me ask you about one of them, which is you pointed out recently that when in a specific example, I have in mind when you and your male colleague made the same point or tweeted the same way or tweeted the same article, the tone and or the volume of the responses to you, it's quite different than what he might receive in response. So why do you think that is? And then what can we do to call attention to that and work to change that culture most importantly? Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about what happened here. What this was about. This was when the variants were just starting to come up in the United States. I'm looking at the date here, February. And Carl Zimmer, who is not a staffer at the times, but writes a lot for us, was writing about this California variant. Now we know that it's kind of died a quiet death in California. But at the time it was new. And he was writing about, what does this mean? Is it a, should we worry about this? And it was based entirely on the scientist talking to the scientist Charles shoes at UCSF. They had actually reached out to me and I was deep in another story. So I passed it on to Carl and he talked to Charles and got this information about this variant. But there was no preprint to look at. There was no data to look at. And so people were not all that happy about it. But then very next day, I found out about this New York variant. And this actually, there was a preprint for and the people who had the preprint sent it to me early and said, we think this is something to worry about. We should look at it and we've tried to get the New York City Department of Health to pay attention to it and they're not. So that's my story. And so that's what the story said. There's this New York variant that people are, the Department of Health is looking into it, but hasn't really been very quick on the uptake yet. And there were two different teams. Actually. So one preprint was already up when the story came out and the other one came out 12 hours after the story came out. So they were, I knew that the second one was also coming up. And I'd seen both manuscripts and I'd sent both manuscripts out to a bunch of scientists. The way you think is as legit as a scene. And I talked to those scientists and they were quoted in the story. So Carl tweeted his story. People asked questions very respectfully, you know. Oh, so what do you think this means, Carl? And then I treated my story. And I don't think you can see here how many times it was, you know, we tweeted or liked or whatever. But the responses I got were just, I'll be nice and say disrespectful. They were disrespectful. They accused me of fear mongering. They accused me of writing about things that scientists had not yet had a chance to vet. They were actually implying, in fact, that we should have waited until the preprints came out. And the entire community had had a chance to look at this preprint and decide what they thought about. I mean, this is not journalism. That's not how news works, right? It's not. It does not work at the pace of science. Science has to sometimes work at the pace of real life. And, you know, I'm all for rigor and I'm all for validation and replication and all of that. But when you have a variant that's circulating in one of the biggest cities in the world, and people are very worried about it and the city's Department of Health is not paying attention, it's a story. So I was most taken aback by the pushback I got from scientists because I expect to patrols to behave badly. I expect them to get nasty, but I don't expect scientists to do that. And this was a case where there were scientists that were incredibly disrespectful to me and I ended up, you know, muting them or blocking them or whatever, which I don't like to have to do, but sometimes you end up having to do that. And it was just, the difference was just very striking in how it was. And disappointing. Very disappointing. Yeah. So we are, I'm sorry that you had to go through that. That's not good. We're running out of time here, so I'm going to try to sneak in a few more last questions that we got from people. So one of them is what is something that you would like to see institutes like NHGRI do better in order to improve how science journalists and scientists communicate about basic genomics research? So one of the ways in which we learn about things, science journalists learn about things is the press releases that come out from the institution, right? And sometimes they're of interest, but often they're just speaking to other scientists. And I think there could be a better separation between what is interesting to when you're trying to get journalists to pay attention to something versus you're just communicating with the rest of the community and saying, hey, this is going on. So the fact that the same email chain tells you about new grant opportunities and also about new papers is not necessarily all that helpful because at some point you stop paying attention when you just see things about grant proposals. So I think one of the ways in which you can help mediate that communication between scientists and journalists is things like this, you know, where maybe scientists can learn more about how journalists think and why we cover things before maybe the pre-print is out. And also to facilitate, you know, to maybe do sort of mini courses like, you know, I know that NHGRI does do them, what's whole does them, you know, these courses so that journalists who are at papers where maybe there isn't a science desk can come learn the basics of DNA or whatever the case may be sequencing how it works. I think things like that would be very helpful and just, you know, finding more opportunities for them to talk really face-to-face or zoom-to-zoom. Or zoom-to-zoom, right? That's exactly right. Okay, so we have one more serious question and one more fun question. So when you're reporting the science aspects around COVID, what aspects do you feel like were the most surprising or unexpected to you, or specifically around the science they're asking? The thing that has surprised me the most is how quickly the variants have come up. I think, you know, when we first started hearing about this virus, everybody kind of thinks of coronaviruses as slow to mutate and of course you expected mutations to come up, but nobody that I spoke to and certainly not me expected to see variants that were going to just take over the world like B117 has this fast. So that was a real kick in the pants. And I think the fact, you know, seeing something like B1351, I personally, for me, that was a real like stone in the heart moment, like, oh my god, we already have this mutation. You know, that mutation had been predicted in models, but to already see it and to see it over and over, it was like conversion evolution, so many different variants with that mutation come up so quickly, it was a bit of a shocker. Yeah, so again, maybe possible by genome sequencing, but yeah, absolutely. Okay, and the more fun question is those of us who follow you on Twitter know that you are an avid devotee to the New York Times spelling bee. So this person is asking what New York Times spelling bee word are you proud of stuff? I know that's going to be hard. That might be the number. I can be, I do a spoiler today and say that I finally have remembered that pound it is a word. It's a word that I never heard of before I started playing spelling bee. So you know, it doesn't stick in my head because it's not a word that's in my vocabulary. But today, for the very first time, I remembered that is the word that the spelling bee considers a word. I was very excited about that. Yay. How many times have you gotten queen bee then? Oh, a lot. I would say on average, maybe once a week, twice a week, something like that. Wow. Yeah, that is, you're making a lot of people jealous out there right now, probably. So and then I'm going to end actually, since we have another minute with another question, which is we talked a little bit about in the beginning about how our institutes monitor and our new strategic vision is to be at the forefront of genomics, as you can see. So I'm really interested as someone who doesn't live in genomics every day like we do, what excites you about the future about genomics? I'm really excited to see more along what we've been learning about viruses. I've never learned this much about viruses. So for me personally, I'm going to be an infectious disease reporter. I will not be writing about autism anymore, although I will be looking to see what's happening there. Even now when I see papers, I get a little excited. But since I'm going to stick very much into infectious diseases and global health, one of the things I'd like to see is more, learning more about these viruses and learning more about zoonotic viruses in particular, because those seem to be the ones that are going to cause problems. How those viruses are changing. How can we learn a little sooner that new ones are coming up and how they're changing in ways that make them more infectious to people or allow them to go back and forth between animal hosts and people. So more understanding of that. And also on a global health level, I think it would be really helpful to know how genomics can help sub-Saharan Africa, for example. There are some newer studies now looking at sort of determinants of responses to medications that people really only use in sub-Saharan Africa or in India and places like that. So a little bit more focus on making sure that genomics is applied to not personalized therapy. I don't know what the right word is here, but just to make sure that it is targeted to the right populations. That we're not trying to deliver a medication that doesn't even work in a particular population because it happened to do well in a clinical trial for white people. So that, I think, can be incredibly helpful to have genomic studies that are in Africa and led by African researchers so that they can sort of build on those efforts and take it to other diseases that maybe the scientists here didn't even think about when they took the initiative there first. Absolutely. And I've partnered, we at the Institute have partnered with a large effort called H3Africa, run by NIH, and I retweeted just, I think yesterday or today, that days all run together. They're having a big bioinformatics conference that anyone in Africa can sign up to attend. So absolutely. I agree with you, totally support stuff like that. And that gets to what you were saying earlier about the importance of having people of color not only doing the science, but working with populations and also covering them as science journalists, right, and asking the right question. So this has been awesome. It's been so great to see you. I'm going to turn it back over to our communications chief, Sarah Bates, to take us out. That was truly a fascinating conversation. Thank you both. It was really exciting. Thank you, Aporva. Thank you, Chris. And thank you everyone who sent in questions. We got a lot of questions. If we didn't get to them all, please do send them on our social media with the hashtag genomics and the media, and we'll try to get to them at least on Twitter. And look ahead to our next event with John Inglis, the executive director of Cold Spring Harbor Press and co-founder of BioRFive and MidRFive. He's going to be joining us on July 28th at 5.30 p.m. That's a Wednesday. If you weren't able to tune in today and, you know, I'm talking to people who were, we are going to be archiving this on our YouTube channel so you can catch it later. In the meantime, go ahead and start sending in our questions for John and we'll get to them. Thank you all for joining us.