Night Science

Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His distinctive painting style blends modernist, abstract tendencies together with references to everyday life and popular culture. Coincidentally, Guy is also Itai’s brother. Together, we explore the many similarities and the interesting differences between the creative processes in art and science. We talk about Guy's creative process of letting art projects simmer inside him for as long as possible – until he feels compelled to execute the result. And we find out that what makes good art may be the same principles that lead to good science, including a focus on becoming rather than being, on process rather than outcome.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A pioneer in the fields of personalized genomics and synthetic biology, he has co-founded over 50 biotech companies. In 2017, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of embracing outliers and taking calculated risks – it's not about never failing, it's about failing a million times a day. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  George argues that you can change the world as long as you don't care who gets the credit. He recommends shooting for the stars – maybe you'll hit the moon. 

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s leading developmental biologists, who has been recognized by the 2023 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize and Science magazin's People's Vote for Scientific Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. In this episode, we explore the relationship between art and science, and discuss how emotions act as a catalyst for creativity. Magdalena reveals that most of the work in her lab starts without a very detailed plan, which leaves everyone open to embrace unexpected observations. Knowing how to invoke lateral thinking helps to find creative ways out of a problem in a time of crisis. Magdalena also talks about her collaboration with John Gurdon, with its complementary sides of rigor and inspiration. 

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole argument for truth – was invented only in the 1700s, championed by the groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton. In the April 1st, 2024, episode of the Day Science Podcast, Sir Isaac looks back on his solitary life, revealing how he came up with science’s counterintuitive, narrow, and shallow concept of explanation. Sir Isaac touches on the infamous apple incident as a metaphor for inspiration, and he reflects on how his diverse interests ranging from mathematics to alchemy to theology, balanced and inspired each other.  He also expresses regret that he tried to unravel the mysteries of alchemy – or chemistry, as we would call it – through mystical and allegorical thinking, rather than through the new scientific method that proved so fruitful with his mathematical physics.

This episode could not have been recorded without Sir Isaac Newton speaking through the voice of a medium who knows his life and works in exquisite detail: Prof. Michael Strevens, from New York University.

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in human evolution. In this out-of-the-ordinary episode, we talk about this specific science project: how did Bo, with Itai’s help, discover the mutation that let us lose our tail?

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he tells us about his artist-in-residence program at the Broad. As its director, he aims to hire researchers who look like they'll be changing fields in the future, combining boldness with humility – the "blank slate" with which they enter the new field is the best recipe for creativity. We discuss how the best projects cannot be designed but instead evolve from the bottom up; and how the worst projects are those that succeed but are so incremental that no one cares.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other people’s music, Sean attributes his own creativity to his insatiable habit of reading about other people’s science – that’s how he “fertilizes his garden”. To tell a good story, he urges us to seek the emotions. But storytelling is not just for communication: in a research project, we also must develop a narrative, connecting the dots.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a “jazz musician”, where collaborators have to develop the beauty of the composition – or here, the science – on the spot. Nigel emphasizes the importance of suspending disbelief in the resulting improvisations, and the need to feel free to say stupid things. He points out that if our work’s impact is measured by the ratio of what we contribute to what everyone else contributed, then the easiest way to make a big impact is by minimizing the denominator – to work on something that no one else is working on. And the three of us argue whether the optimal group size for improvisational scientific discussions is two or three people.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. By talking with other people, we not only pool the information or ideas that each of us individually lacks, but we are also able to improvise new thoughts that are not accessible to us alone. In this episode, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher talk through the ideas in two of their editorials (available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2 and https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-021-02575-w). 

Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often the process that led to a particular result can be more interesting than the result itself – something that is true not only in science but also in fields such as art or writing. He emphasizes that the best research strategy depends greatly on the researcher’s personality. He himself thrives on being on the edge of a field, ideally working on a common question with scientists from different disciplines or even philosophers and historians. Rich recounts how he identifies new questions by finding connections between the edge cases of several papers – observations the authors couldn’t make sense of, but still put in their manuscripts. And Rich and Itai reveal the true story behind one of their joint papers, where the breakthrough came in an open-ended creative meeting from staring at the data – after a first, much more boring draft had already been written!

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .