Science for Progress

During this season, once every 4 weeks, I pick one of the 13 most popular episodes from the first two years and post the original interview. These extended editions contain a couple of parts that didn’t make it into the final cut and give an insight into the underlying conversation.

Supporters on Patreon have immediate access to these versions, btw. If you are one of them, thank you very much! If not, think about it!

Find the final edition here!

The stereotype of academics is that they live a well-protected life in the ivory tower. But this is not the case for most of them. Maria Pinto from Portugal is a Ph.D. student in marine microbiology in Austria. With the final stages of her work approaching, Maria is beginning to think about the future.

We talk about the many uncertainties in academia, particularly for early career researchers. In general, the salaries are not good, but in poorer countries, where the salaries are particularly low and may not even include social security, there is also an expectation of students to pay fieldwork trips themselves. Traveling in order to present your work at conferences is important to researchers and their careers, but for many, this is not affordable.

Ph.D. students and postdocs are in the typical age for founding families. The academic career, however, demands mobility. For many, this means that they need to move countries several times – a factor that greatly affects life planning security negatively.

And all of this is happening in a climate of increasing Ph.D. graduations and stagnating long-term or permanent job openings.

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Yet, leaving academia is often discouraged. Among early-career academics and their advisers it’s simply expected to try hard for an academic career. This often means that PhDs think about a possible transition outside of academia very late. And then there is always the gnawing question: Do I have any value on the private market?

We don’t have an answer to the problems we highlight, but maybe we can work a little bit against the stereotype of the spoiled academic. And maybe we can push some early career researchers to think about plan B, earlier.

sources: 
• YouTube Channel “Sea&me – Marine stuff with Maria”
• The Stagnating Job Market for Young Scientists
• Why a postdoc might not advance your career
• These studies offer a realistic view of postdoc life—and guidance for making career decisions that work for you
• How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market

The initial statement of Scientists for Future in support of Fridays for Future came out just at the right time. In the public debate, it was a swift response to politicians who were trying to mute the student strikes by telling them to “leave it to the experts”.

In reality, scientists who had been concerned about the climate and the ecological damages human activities for decades had been working on the statement for a while. Among the authors was our guest Thomas Loew.

Thomas Loew is a German researcher who started his own Institute for Sustainability. He studies how companies can and should respond to the risks posed by ecological damages – on a management level. These studies are usually for the German federal government. Besides academic articles, the outcomes of his research are published in the shape of guidelines or recommendations to company managers.

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He finds that companies are ready for a change in order to address climate change. What is holding them back is that regulators hesitate to create market conditions to incentivize change and to decrease the economical risks of investing in new products and production lines.

Understanding that climate action is too slow due to lacking regulation is what brought Scientists for Future together. And they quickly outgrew the initial statement. While not planned as such, some of the more than 26 000 signatories decided to continue and become more active for the cause.

Today, Scientists for Future consists of many local groups that are loosely organized. Although Thomas Loew is officially an organizer of the movement across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, he usually learns about the activities of local groups through the news.

However, to uphold consistency across the movement, Scientists for Future set up a kind of “Carta” that regulates which types of activities conform with the agreed-upon role of science in society: to research, to inform, and to consult.

Resources

In this episode, Bart and I invited PhD candidate Daniela Buchwald from the German Primate Center – a private research institute. We compare how the University of Göttingen and the German Primate Center (GPC) responded to the impending shutdown of most research activities – with a focus on how the animals are being cared for.

The conversation was recorded on Tuesday, March 17, just after the German local government began to take serious action to reduce public life to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Remember that when we talk about news reaching us on Monday, we mean “yesterday” at the time of recording.

Daniela studies the planning of grasping movements in monkeys‘ brains at the GPC. Currently, a thousand monkeys are hosted in the facility and Daniela’s group is working with 12 of them.

Daniela had just defended her PhD thesis  – two weeks earlier than planned to avoid delays due to the lockdown. Other students weren’t so lucky. Their graduation will certainly be delayed. We do hope that potential future employers will take this into account.

But Daniela, too, is facing career difficulties: She had planned to visit different conferences to talk to Principal Investigators about postdoc opportunities. But everything is canceled or postponed.  Hopefully, she will be able to connect with PIs online.

The GPC responded relatively early. They began preparing for a possible lockdown and sent general notices (wash hands, social distancing, home working…). Most importantly: they began planning for the continued care of the monkeys.

The institute divided the animal caregiver into 2 teams. These teams will alternate biweekly. So, if one team member becomes sick, the institute will know whom he or she had been in contact with.

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Monkeys can get the virus, too. So – although the monkeys get back on their feet and build an immunity quickly – the researchers decided to halt almost all experiments. Only monkeys with brain implants will still be trained and tested. That is because the implants are very sensitive and, once implanted, can only be used for a limited time. To stop these experiments would mean to lose enormous investments – including the monkey.

At the University of Göttingen, where Bart works with flies and keeps zebrafish for demonstration purposes, things are a bit easier. The flies don’t need any attention for 2 weeks at a time, and the fish can be cared for by just two people. Bart and a colleague freed the students from these duties entirely.

Dennis’s guest for this episode is David Spencer, a researcher

The episode complements the previous one (extended

While wild plants defend themselves against pathogens and insects, our food crops lost their resilience. So, protective measures are needed to ensure yields: pesticides.

When we spray a field with a pesticide, we apply large

This is why David advocates for using genetic

Of course, breeders and scientists need to test the

Not only do these regulations effectively prohibit the

First of all, for the approval of crops, the EU

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Further, regulators try to draw the line at

There are more than 3000 crops in use in the EU that

How does this make sense? Well, it doesn’t.

During this season, once every 4 weeks, I pick one of the 13 most popular episodes from the first two years and post the original interview. These extended editions contain a couple of parts that didn’t make it into the final cut and give an insight into the underlying conversation.

Supporters on Patreon have immediate access to these versions, btw. If you are one of them, thank you very much! If not, think about it!

This time I present to you the full conversation to 11: Genetically Modified Crops and the European Union – with Hélène Pidon

Dr. Hélène Pidon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research. She searches for genes that give plants resistance to diseases. She wants to use these genes to fortify cultivated Barley against these diseases, and thus reduce the number of pesticides used to grow the plant. When the European Court of Justice ruled on the status of crops modified with gene-editing methods like CRISPR, Hélène contacted me to talk with me about GMO crops.

I was curious about the origins of agriculture and how simple artificial selection of nice-looking plants affected their genomes. For Millennia, farmers would choose a particularly good looking plant to sow its seeds in the next season. Unknowingly, they had a major impact on the whole genome of domesticated plants. For example, the size of the wheat genome tripled – a rather drastic modification. Plant scientists often view the cultivated plants as completely new species that can’t reproduce with their wild counterparts. Domesticated crops like these would not be able to survive in the wild and need constant attendance.

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With the population boom at the end of the 19th century, farmers needed to outsource their breeding efforts. Companies stepped in producing fertilizers, and pesticides, and also new breeding procedures. Now, specialized breeders would search for plants with valuable traits. These plants would then cross with the currently used crop plant in order to create a new variety with the new trait. However, if you breed your ‘elite’ plant with another plant, the offspring also inherits many unwanted traits. In order to get back to a plant that has all the traits of the current elite crop, and the additional new one, the plants need to be backcrossed with the elite variant many times. This is a very slow and tedious process.

To speed things up, breeders figured that it would be better to increase the variability in the offspring of the elite crop. This way they could simply select an elite crop with the new randomly added trait. To do so, breeders use radiation or chemicals to induce a mutation rate that is higher than under natural conditions. This method has been very successful. Today, every major crop has undergone mutagenesis at some point.

Today, the latest discoveries in genetics and developments of genetic methods allow identifying the genes underlying the beneficial traits breeders want to add to their crops. With transgenesis, scientists have first become able to introduce complete genes into a genome. The source of this gene is irrelevant. So-called ‘BT crops’ for example, are transgenic plants that received a bacterial gene that makes them resistant to certain insects. The insecticide these plants produce are proteins that act very specifically against specific insect species. This allows the farmers to use fewer insecticides that may not be as specific. While this technique had some problems in the past regarding the positioning of the new gene in the genome, it has been improved greatly since its introduction.

The latest advancements in gene modification are gene-editing techniques like CRISPR. Here, only a few base pairs are changed in a specific gene to change its properties.

It is counter-intuitive, but the EU prefers random gene modification with unknown collateral mutations over highly precise minimalist intervention with known outcomes.

Hélène explains her view on this situation covering topics like the adaptation of agriculture to climate change, glyphosate, and organic farming.

This

Richard Dawkins (a famous evolutionary biologist and member of the royal society) tweeted that, while he deplores eugenic practice, ”it” would still “work”, as “it” would work in farm animals and pets – as if breeding animals was the same as eugenics.

His tweet –

Bart acknowledges that certain opinions based

In the end,

Bart and

On the one

Dennis points out that the journals

It also comes at no surprise that

At least

On the

High school

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For the talk

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But, wait! There is more! Dennis is working to get another series running:

We are therefore moving from two episodes a month to three. But three is weird. Because of that, Dennis also plans to publish the extended version of the 12 most popular episodes of the podcast, which so far had only been available on Patreon!

For this episode, Dennis talked to Upulie Divisekera, the Australian molecular biologist and accomplished science communicator who co-founded “@RealScientists”. She shares how she got access to platforms with large audiences, and lessons from her SciComm experiences: that you should use storytelling and never underestimate your audience.

If you are on Twitter and like to learn about science and the people behind it, you probably know @Realscientists, the Twitter rotating curation account. There, real-life scientists sign up to talk about science and their daily lives for a week at a time; showcasing the diversity of scientists, and breaking the trope of academics as an elitist group.  

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Beyond @RealScientists, Upulie Divisekera wrote articles for mainstream Australian newspapers, gave talks at cultural events, and partook at the first science panel of the TV show “Questions and Answers”. One of her many fascinating stories took place in 2011. Following the discovery of the first feathered relative of T. rex, @Upulie – as she is called on Twitter – both ranted and cheered for the new discovery. This got her invited to give a talk at TEDx Canberra! She doesn’t have a background in paleontology, but communicating the scientific results wasn’t the point.  In our imagination, the past was populated by enormous reptiles with big pointy teeth. But suddenly the new discovery forces us to re-imagine them as big fuzzy reptiles! The message: Science makes us re-evaluate our views of the world, past and future!

In this episode, Bart and I talk about Wissenschaftsbarometer or “science barometer”. This annual survey in Germany and Switzerland is about the public’s trust in science and scientists. Afterward, we talk about a similar survey in the USA, published by the Pew Foundation a few months earlier. For each survey, we picked a couple of questions and interpret the answers. 

As a side note: The extended version of this episode has two parts. Each one is more than an hour long. You can access both parts by becoming a supporter on Patreon. In the past, we asked for a minimum pledge of $5.99 per month for this perk. But now, any pledge will grant you access!

(find the links to this survey in the sources, below)

How much do you trust scientists and other public professions?

Respondents trusted scientists at public research institutes and universities the most when compared to scientists in industry, the media, and politics. However, it’s still just about 56%. Maybe it’s because for some people it depends on the fields of research whether they agree with the scientific consensus.

Would you want to see how scientists work?

An astonishing amount of respondents would like to watch scientists work in the lab (65%). Bart and I wonder how this could be made interesting. Most days in a scientist’s life are rather boring for the typical spectator. It’s refreshing that open days at universities are indeed visited well. Bart also mentions an uplifting study about how interested people with different political views are in science.

Is the public sufficiently involved in decisions about science?

51% feel like they should have more say in this. This reminded Bart of the project “Fit for Responsible Research and Innovation”. They are promoting the involvement of stakeholders from society in research from the beginning (see sources). The discussion leads us to acknowledge the constantly changing economy and job market, and how this needs to be addressed. But overall it might be overkill to ask the public for permission for every little experiment.

What are we taking out of this?

What stuck with me was that most people do claim to trust in science. But Wissenschaftsbarometer does not investigate possible reasons why still a large proportion of citizens don’t.

(link in the sources)

Confidence in scientists to work in the public interest is rising. But views on environmental research scientists, in particular, are a bit confusing.

We were surprised to find so much less confidence in health specialists and environmental research scientists than in scientists in general. The respondents consider environmental research scientists “good people”. Yet, at the same time, they have little trust in environmental scientists to communicate their findings, to admit possible mistakes, or to reveal conflicts of interest. I try to explain it with the often encountered argument that environmental scientists had financial pressures. Something about which Americans seem to be more forgiving than Europeans … Maybe? 

A major problem – in my opinion – is that identities often dictate which scientific facts people are comfortable accepting. Many science communicators provide facts nicely packaged for lay audiences and point out the benefits we all enjoy thanks to scientific progress. But they almost exclusively reach those who are already convinced. 

When the science interferes with people’s identities, interests, and convictions – and those are the people who we’d like to convince – getting their attention is a major challenge. In the interview with Deboki Chakravarti (see sources), she points out how she was able to reach her audience on YouTube. Her subscribers didn’t know her as a scientist but as a book lover. Other examples are communicators like Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, or Prof. Amanda Glaze, who talk about climate change and evolution, respectively, from within conservative Christian communities.

This is not to say that without such ties your science communication was useless. The more accessible you make science the more likely you will reach some of the hard cases. 

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Also, repetition works. The more often you hear an opinion, the more likely you will – intuitively – accept it. Political populism utilizes this human weakness, so why not use it to our advantage, too. Promote scientifically informed opinions publicly, as often as possible!

Life as an Early Career Researcher is rather uncertain. The conditions for most postdocs aren’t really great and the availability of professorships isn’t increasing at the same rate as the number of PhDs entering the academic career path – we talk about this, regularly.

So it makes sense to seriously consider other career options, and we do so every now and then, too.

For this episode, I talk to Dr. John Stowers, engineer, neuroscientist, and founder of “LoopBio”, about the transition from postdoc to technology business founder!

After being hit by a natural disaster in New Zealand, John left his home country for a postdoc in Austria. He didn’t just switch countries, he also switched from engineering to neuroscience. In his time in Vienna, John developed experimental setups far ahead of the curve in terms of complexity. As other laboratories kept asking for his help with their own setups, he realized there was a market for a certain subset of the technologies he used for his own research.

When his adviser was about to leave Vienna, John faced the decision to either look for another postdoc position in Vienna, where his now-wife was still working on her Ph.D., or follow his adviser to Freiburg in Germany.

He did neither. Because the postdoc came with many uncertainties and he didn’t see postdoc opportunities that he considered a step up in his career, he decided to become an entrepreneur, instead.

After googling “How to found a company in Austria”, John and his partner got themselves legal and financial advice and founded LoopBio.

They used their professional network and the reputation John had gained by publishing an impactful paper to find early adopters. Those were laboratories in their field willing to invest resources in LoopBio in return for John and his partner to develop custom solutions for their high-end requirements. By focussing on exclusive customized systems for scientists in a narrow niche, LoopBio gathered experience and a reputation. 

Now, a bit over three years later, John is satisfied with the course the company is taking, and they are looking to widen their customer base by investing in promotion at the leading neuroscience conferences.

On the personal side, John is very happy with his role as an entrepreneur. He says it gives him the freedom to choose his battles and to develop the products the way he wants them to work, which is particularly satisfying. Of course, there is still a good amount of stress involved, but it’s stress about different things.

He urges early career researchers to realistically think about the uncertainties that lay ahead. Making clear career decisions every now and then is probably better than getting stuck in one career path for too long because one is trying to avoid them.

They have two open positions:

* Sales / Administrative Assistant
* Junior / Front-end Developer

Both would be perfect for a scientist/programmer or science lover looking to transition to industry. All the fun of keeping up with the latest cool advances in behavioral (science) experiments without the burden of writing papers.

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In this episode, I talk about the science fiction movie ANYA with its creators, Anthropologist Dr. Carylanna Taylor, and Jacob Okada of First Encounter Productions (not a sponsor).

The plot of ANYA could happen today! It all starts with a couple in New York that has difficulty having a baby. The groom is a member of the Narval People who keep to themselves – mostly because they think there is a curse that prohibits them from having children with anyone but other members of the community. They bring in a geneticist to find out why they are having problems procreating, and this is where the story becomes interesting.

As his assistant accidentally analyzes the genome of Marco (Gil Perez-Abraham), an expert in neanderthal genomes Seymour (Motell Foster) finds a mutation that may explain the problem. The change in the genome happened in an “Ultra-Conserved Element”, a real genetic phenomenon where certain regions in a gene never change. His hypothesis is that such a mutation may prohibit procreation with someone who doesn’t carry the same mutation.

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A population of people who can have viable offspring with each other, but not with other populations is considered a distinct species. Did Seymour discover a new species of humans? What does this mean for the Narval, the people named after the small island in the Caribbean on which they originated?

Seymour suggests applying gene editing to allow Libby (Ali Ahn) and Marco to have a baby. This leads to a whole list of ethical questions that the movie wants to raise. And we talk about these issues in the episode.

ANYA is being released on November 26th for download from Amazon, Apple, Google Play, vimeo and Hulu, and you can also order it as DVD.

And the next big screening will be on November 30th at the SciFi FilmFest in Berlin!

LINKS: