Episode Notes
For the second episode in a row, we’re turning things over to a guest host for a conversation with Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals.
Talking with Holden this time is Suman Datta, who is Stinson Professor of Nanotechnology in Notre Dame’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the director of ASCENT, a microelectronics research center funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Holden and Suman spoke as part of a recent online series at Notre Dame called The State of Science. This is a condensed version of their conversation, which was recorded on March 1 and focused on the future of scientific collaboration.
Holden brings a distinct perspective to this topic. Even before taking on his current position as editor-in-chief of the six journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including the magazine Science itself, he was an intellectual leader, having served as provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis and as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professor at WashU, holding appointments in both chemistry and medicine.
Holden and Suman talked about everything from the need for academic collaboration that crosses disciplinary boundaries and the very real barriers to achieving it to the way geopolitical tensions hinder knowledge discovery. We started with Suman asking about the generational questions now facing the scientific community.
LINK
- Listen to Our First Episode With Holden: On “The State of Science” (Part 1)
Episode Transcript
*Note: We do our best to make these transcripts as accurate as we can. That said, if you want to quote from one of our episodes, particularly the words of our guests, please listen to the audio whenever possible. Thanks.
Ted Fox 0:00
(voiceover) From the University of Notre Dame, this is With a Side of Knowledge. I'm your host, Ted Fox. Before the pandemic, we were the show that invited scholars, makers, and professionals out to brunch for informal conversations about their work. And we look forward to being that show again one day. But for now, we're recording remotely to maintain physical distancing. If you like what you hear, you can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Thanks for stopping by.
For the second episode in a row, we're turning things over to a guest host for a conversation with Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. Talking with Holden this time is Suman Datta, who is Stinson Professor of Nanotechnology in Notre Dame's Department of Electrical Engineering and the director of ASCENT, a microelectronics research center funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Holden and Suman spoke as part of a recent online series at Notre Dame called The State of Science. This is a condensed version of their conversation, which was recorded on March 1 and focused on the future of scientific collaboration. Holden brings a distinct perspective to this topic. Even before taking on his current position as editor-in-chief of the six journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including the magazine Science itself, he was an intellectual leader, having served as provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis and as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professor at WashU, holding appointments in both chemistry and medicine. Holden and Suman talked about everything from the need for academic collaboration that crosses disciplinary boundaries and the very real barriers to achieving it to the way geopolitical tensions hinder knowledge discovery. We pick things up with Suman asking about the generational questions now facing the scientific community. (end voiceover)
Suman Datta 2:21
What do you think would be the three biggest, or maybe one of the three biggest, scientific questions of our generation, both scientists and engineers, looking 20-year time horizon?
Holden Thorp 2:34
Certainly you have to say something in neuroscience. And I guess the thing that interests me a lot is the interaction of the microbiome and the brain. We're just starting to see signals that suggest that there's--you know, something we've always thought, thinking with your gut, there actually may be a scientific basis for that. So how does that work? Mechanistically, it's pretty complicated to try to figure that out. Certainly, in quantum computing, there's a major challenge to making it work, which is the error correction. And I think there's gonna be some advances on that. So if you wanted to think about, you know, what's the next thing in quantum computing and computing in general, I'd say quantum error correction in quantum computing would be another one. And then in a very applied thing, I think for medicine, inflammation, a small molecule that can modulate inflammation. It's, you know, Humira and Enbrel are great drugs, they've made life better for a lot of people, but they're expensive to produce, they can be immunogenic and cause problems with the immune system. So if you had a small molecule drug, you know, for rheumatoid arthritis and other kinds of inflammatory conditions, that would be a pretty great thing to work on. But, you know, I'm the editor of six journals, and two of them cover everything, so I could probably come up with a couple hundred more if you gave me some time. (both laugh)
Suman Datta 4:32
I can imagine. So, these are big questions, and is there any way you can tackle these things without very large-scale scientific collaboration across multiple teams, multiple institutions, and maybe even crossing geographical boundaries of nations?
Holden Thorp 4:53
No. Absolutely not. And I think that maybe there are a few things out there that are going to be major breakthroughs that are papers with three or four authors that are all in the same department. But that's certainly not the vast majority of what we see coming to us, and especially the things that make it to the point where we think they're going to be so influential as they would be published in Science itself. In fact, we're always working on new ways to change the website so that we can have even more authors. There are a few of our sort of veteran AAAS members who sometimes write to me and say, you know, I don't like it that these papers have all these authors--because that's not the way they remember doing things. Is that going to change? And I say, No, it's only gonna get more, we're only gonna have more.
So if you think about the problems that we just talked about, the gut-brain axis is a problem in gastroenterology, the microbiome, microbiology, neuroscience, behavior. So it's kind of hard to see how that gets solved without a huge team. And certainly a small molecule drug for rheumatoid arthritis, you need medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry. But you know, the truth is we need to know the target for that; I don't think we know what it would be, which is probably why we don't have that. And for quantum computing, that's something that goes all the way from material science to computer science to all kinds of things. (laughs) That's one of the broadest things we have. Yeah, all of these problems are big. And so of course, they're not going to be just in one country. Because science is a global community, and, you know, we've always been able to leverage talent from around the world. And, you know, we'll continue to speak out about how important that is. But yeah, most papers we see now have international collaboration in them.
Suman Datta 7:18
That's right. I was just reading a recent article, this just appeared beginning of this month, it was a researcher from Caltech. She worked at a hedge fund. She left that job, high-paying job, came and started doing a Ph.D. And with with her professor, she wrote--this article appeared in PNAS; it's titled "The golden era of social sciences." I don't know if you got a chance to read that?
Holden Thorp 7:46
Not yet. I need to look at that, though.
Suman Datta 7:47
Okay. And it caught my mind because she was bringing up, in the context, against the backdrop of COVID, that if you are an infectious disease modeling expert, it is not just so much to do the mathematical modeling of the spread of the disease, as we have seen. We have plenty of modelers, and great modelers; we have data collection processes in place. But there was this whole social aspect, the psychological aspects of what people say in terms of curbing the spread, in terms of just wearing a mask or maintaining social distance, practicing some basic commonsense hygiene. So I think that this is the first time, at least for me, and I'm guilty as charged: I'm an engineer, and we are very conservative. We think that once I write my diffusion equation (laughs), I am done--you know, I have captured the problem. But clearly not. How do we still try to break down these silos that come up between this hard science, engineering included, and social science? I still don't see too much interaction.
Holden Thorp 8:58
Well, first thing we have to do is we have to respect our colleagues in social science. Most of them are better at statistics than those of us in the so-called hard sciences. And we've for sure seen that with psychology. Because 25 years ago, psychology was still shocking people and giving them pencils in a room with a one-way mirror. And now it's the study of the brain; it's become a descriptive and quantitative science in every respect. And in fact, I don't know if this has happened at Notre Dame yet, but most psychology departments have changed their name to psychological science or something like that. So I think that trend will continue. And we should welcome these folks to our world because they have a lot to teach us. So you know, it started with psychology, but sociology and econ and political science, these areas, these folks are superb scholars with a lot that they can teach us, and we can teach them; they're part of science for sure. And we publish in all those areas in Science and in Science Advances.
I think the second thing is, you know, we have to--and I didn't do a very good job of this when I was a faculty member--we have to show with our own actions and interests that we care about all this. And again, it gets back to this same thing of trying to get off the treadmill of cranking out every paper in the world. And I realize I benefit from people wanting to do that. (laughs) But we, the institutions and the leaders of science, need to partner to give us a more holistic way of declaring success for scientific research and for scientific leaders, other than just putting a bunch of points on the board, which is easier to tabulate. But, you know, it's kind of gotten us into this situation that we're in. And if anybody thinks that it doesn't need to be fixed, just look at where you started this question with COVID. Of course, what Donald Trump and Mike Pence and their followers did was one of the worst things that's happened in the country in my lifetime. But we can't put all the blame on them. Because we're the ones that allowed a lot of this to happen. We allowed people to believe that science was just something that falls out of the sky in a textbook and not something that is created through messy, fallible interactions by real human beings who propose things, and then when they're wrong, that we correct them. We draped ourselves in all of our degrees, and we don't know how to communicate outside of our world. And worse, we look down on our colleagues who want to try. And to me, that's where, you know, you see the real dark side of academia, when you see faculty members criticizing their colleagues for going to the South Bend Kiwanis Club and giving a talk (laughs), when they should be in their office typing another paper. And we have to figure out how to make space for that, or else we're not gonna solve these problems.
Suman Datta 12:51
The message is very powerful, Holden; I completely agree with you. I think we have a long way to go in this area to get out of our, you know, small bubble and echo chambers. So what about this radical time, that we are all agreeing that solving the big problems of tomorrow will require collaboration across departments, across disciplines. You were in leadership positions, you led at UNC, and then you led at Washington University at St. Louis. Do you think that we don't need to structure ourselves anymore into colleges, we don't need to have these departments, per se? I mean, it's a crazy idea. But do you think that one day--maybe not 10 years, maybe 20 years from now--that we might actually have a much broader way to do this, more holistic way of doing our business?
Holden Thorp 13:51
I hope so. But I don't see the event that's going to cause the transition. I certainly agree that having all of these departments and schools is a very inefficient way to solve the big problems that are facing us all. When I moved, we didn't have engineering at WashU, so when I moved--I mean at UNC, so when I moved to WashU was the first time I had engineering. And WashU has a very good tradition, which is that everybody who gets an endowed chair gives a talk, and all the administrators come and their families come, and it's a really nice tradition Mark Wrighton started. And so I started going to these talks in engineering, and finally, I said to the dean of engineering, Wait, so engineering is just chemistry, biology and physics? And he said, Yeah, we don't tell people that, but yeah, that's what it is. So you know, why do we have separate schools of engineering and science? I have no--I mean, it has to do with the professions and how they grew up and the accrediting agencies and all that kind of stuff. But it's pretty artificial. Because I'm sure I can go to a talk in your school that is closer to the natural sciences than it is to what people think of as in engineering. And I'm sure I can go to your chemistry department or your physics department and hear a talk that looks like engineering. So, you know, it's really unfortunate that we've allowed these ossified structures to build up.
But the problem is that the way we evaluate folks for tenure and promotion, the way we decide whom we're going to hire, the way we sort who goes to graduate school where. The life sciences managed to, for most universities, and WashU was the first place to do it--so I learned a lot about the history of how it happened; I replicated it at UNC--they managed to get their graduate programs into one graduate program for all of the life sciences for the campus. WashU was the first place to do it, but many, many schools have copied it. And it's a good thing. There's no way anybody really knows when they're 21 years old whether they want to do cell biology or microbiology or biophysics. And they've done better at that than engineering and chemistry and physics have. But it'd be nice if it was easier to end up in the right lab and not be hampered by some decision you made when you were 21 years old, which for most of us, is the decision that we made when we were even younger, and we decided whose lab we were going to do our undergraduate research in. I mean, I decided to become an inorganic chemist when I was 19. (laughs) What basis did I have for that? I liked my professor who was teaching the class, so I went up to him afterwards and said, Can I join your lab? That's how I decided to be an inorganic chemist, because he was a good teacher. And I thought he was funny, and turns out he was a great mentor, and he launched my whole career, and it was a great decision. But how did I--but whether inorganic over organic or p-chem? I don't know. I mean, that's how I decided.
Suman Datta 17:40
So Holden, I think part of the issue, as you rightfully pointed out, is the reward system in higher education in general. And I have seen this, I'm in the electrical engineering department, and in many places, electrical, computer engineering, and computer science are all merged together in a really big school, bigger than department. And even there you see the publication culture; do you publish, get more credit by publishing in top conferences versus whether you publish in a journal in your domain? There is all different types of credit and rewards that are associated with being in one versus the other. This comes up during the promotion and tenure process. So unless we have a more mature viewpoint of how to reward faculty, I think it's going to be a very hard problem to tackle.
Holden Thorp 18:40
Yeah, it's a good thing for me that universities don't do more qualitative review of people's research; it's a lot easier for them to just look at where the papers are. And if some of them are in our journal, that's usually a good way to get tenure. And so that means I'll probably make my numbers every year until that gets changed. (both laugh) But do I really think that's a good system? No, I think it would be better if we assessed the research, the institutions assessed the research. But when I was a provost at a big place, because WashU, the medical school, I was in charge of promotion and tenure for the medical school, which is one of the biggest in the world, but I also had arts and sciences, engineering, law school. And so there are two problems. One is I wasn't qualified to review all of that stuff. And the second is, I was old-school, so I always printed them out. And I had a stack on my desk that was three-feet high every spring. How do you solve that problem? Well, right now, the solution to that is we look at the journals where the papers are published, and we've outsourced a lot of the evaluation to the journals and their reviewers, of course. And that's because it's kind of hard to think how you would come up with a holistic assessment for every single discipline at Notre Dame or WashU or anywhere else. But is that the best thing? Well, no, it's not. It would be better if we actually looked at people's scholarship so that whatever inequities are baked into the journals and the reviewers and all of that stuff wasn't propagated into the decisions. And we have a great example right now. Because the person who deserves the most credit for the mRNA vaccines is Katie Kariko, who was denied promotion at Penn. Now, she's a billionaire now, so that's ...
Suman Datta 21:06
(laughs) Worked out well for her.
Holden Thorp 21:07
(laughs) That's a little bit of justice in the world. She's the one who kept saying, and who [for] 20 years, you know, was saying, We can use mRNA to do vaccines and basically the equivalent of gene therapy or enzyme replacement therapy. And, you know, she didn't--Penn thought it was too adventurous or the reviewers didn't publish it the right place or whatever it is, you know, there's always going to be these cases. And that's really because it's easier to count things than it is to evaluate them for their true merit.
Suman Datta 21:44
Yeah, yeah. Coming back to this topic of multidisciplinary research again, and this is about now training of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to get them ready for that next chapter in life. And I have been also caught in a double mind here; maybe you can help me out here. The problems are complex, as we discussed, and you need a deep expertise in a specific domain. I just don't feel comfortable at all if I'm starting my my career again and getting trained as an electrical engineer without having that deep expertise in a certain aspect of electrical engineering; I'll be extremely uncomfortable to go and start doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research. So one of the questions is that, yes, we want these multidisciplinary, big teams to work with each other, but at the same time, we might risk dilution of an expected degree of mastery in a particular subject if they're spending too much time in another field (laughs) that is not directly tied to [the field] on which they're going to write a dissertation. So I have always tried to advise my own students to follow the "T" model--well, it's actually an "I" model where you learn a broad set of things in, as we talked about, linear algebra, statistics, in undergraduate, and then you go up, you specialize, and then you start understanding what value you bring to that particular multidisciplinary team. So I think that one of the key questions I have for you, how does a young researcher balance these seemingly conflicting--I want to do the multidisciplinary part, but yet I'm still developing my core set of skills and deep knowledge in a specific domain?
Holden Thorp 23:42
Yeah, and just to make it even harder, they're doing it in an environment that is tuned to reward a narrow focus. Because that's the fastest way to get your degree, it's the way to produce the most research, probably, that you can write up and that will make your advisor happy. And so those are pretty strong forces to push against. I would love to see us change it so that it didn't have to be that way. But that's going to require senior faculty in the disciplines. You know, going back to the question you asked me earlier of, you know, should we get rid of all the departments and schools? Well, it's easy for the administrators to wax philosophical about why that makes sense. But it's another thing to get the politics of actually doing that right. And we've got a lot of colleagues--I mean, we can't get the organic chemists to stop writing on the board with big chalk and making everybody memorize named reactions. If we can't do that--maybe there are some at Notre Dame who have moved on from that, but I'm gonna make a wild guess and say there are some who haven't. So we have a lot of selling to do to create this collaborative environment that we're dreaming of here on this Zoom call. (laughs) And so I think it would be a great thing if we succeeded, but I don't want to underestimate the challenges that we have with a lot of this baked-in culture that we're working our way very slowly out of.
Suman Datta 25:37
So I'm gonna come back, this pandemic, you know, it has disrupted lives, careers, a lot of disruptions in the labor market that we've already seen. People's lives have been transformed forever. At the same time, we have seen research collaboration at a global scale that I haven't seen before, at least in my lifetime. From the very moment the genome of the virus was sequenced and published online, and everybody got on and started working on the vaccine constructs, and here we are probably five vaccines in our arsenal to fight this disease and put an end to this pandemic. So at the same time, we are also seeing this geopolitical tension, particularly my area that I work in in semiconductors. United States and China, we are at a stalemate in terms of the embargoes, in terms of very strict export controls, a lot of flexing of muscles, and that is not at all conducive (laughs) to this kind of global scale collaboration, and it is spilling into other areas. So do you see, coming out of this pandemic, any silver linings going forward that we'll be able to put aside our geopolitical tensions and start working together again as a global community and do good science?
Holden Thorp 27:12
It's hard to be hopeful about that. I mean, I guess I'm generally optimistic that the world goes to a better place over time. But even though I certainly feel a lot better with the Biden administration and with Tony Blinken as the secretary of state and all the other people, Eric Lander and Alondra Nelson doing the science advice, and all of that, you know, Donald Trump got elected. And I'm in Orlando, Florida; he was down here yesterday doing what he did before and making a lot of people happy doing it. So that didn't go away. And then if you look at a lot of other countries like India, China, the UK, Brazil, a lot of people with similar tendencies are being asked to lead those countries. I mean, just take a look at COVID. It's easy for me to say, Here's all the things the Trump administration did wrong denying COVID. But China also--even though I totally reject the idea that this virus was engineered, or even that it escaped from the lab. I don't--we can't completely rule out the idea that it escaped from the lab, but it's very, very unlikely. As I tell my friends who don't agree with me about politics who want to make that case, I was like, a virus is like a Microsoft Word document where you can't turn off track changes. (Suman laughs) And so if that virus was prepared in a lab, we would know. But we still don't really know what happened. And China has, the Chinese government has obviously deliberately made it difficult for us to find out. My guess is what they're hiding isn't that bad--just, you know, that they didn't do a good job of containing it or recognizing that they had it, probably.
So it's not just the United States that has to get its act together to fix this sort of scientific diplomacy stuff. And I think that it'll certainly help for us to have an enlightened foreign policy. It's certainly not a good thing that we are overdoing it when it comes to making every researcher fill out all the right forms. And we have had some serious mixed messages. Because 10 years ago, we were telling everybody we want all this international collaboration. And then three years ago, we started cracking down on people who didn't fill out the right forms. So somehow the United States government has to tell our researchers who collaborate with China what the rules are in a more transparent way. And that will help. But we also need China to want to collaborate with us. And I have a hard time seeing that they really want the kind of free flow of information that we want. We want the most scientific information to flow as humanly possible so that we can advance knowledge. But there's a lot of nationalism from both parties.
Suman Datta 30:53
So Holden, reflecting back, you know, we started off--you, myself, and many others--as someone's research assistant, or someone's grad student, or someone's postdoc. And in many ways, these are--you talked about as a 19-year-old, how you got this undergraduate research experience in a lab, and that changed life forever. So are there any lessons that you can share with us this evening that stuck with you? You have led universities; I did check up on your Wiki page, which talks about, you had the startups, you have been a busy man. You steward this leading journal, scientific journal, Science. So what are the lessons that stuck with you early on that made a profound impact on what you became?
Holden Thorp 31:53
Well, I had some great examples. My research, my Ph.D. advisor, Harry Gray, was the most--is the most intensely positive human being in the world. And I believe he has more graduate students and postdocs in academia than anyone in chemistry; it's way more than 100. And that's because we all could see what we hoped for in the future for ourselves in him because he's an amazing mentor. We used to kid that he was irrationally positive, that it couldn't be the case that we were all that good--you know, just mathematically, somebody had to be at the bottom. (both laugh) But you would never know it seeing him. And so I guess what I learned from him is always err on the side of being positive whenever you can.
And then I think, you know, somebody who taught me a lot about how universities work is Bernadette Gray-Little, who was the dean who hired me to be the chair of chemistry, and she was the provost who hired me to be the dean. And then when I was the chancellor at North Carolina, she was still the provost for two years, and we worked together every day. And the thing that I learned from her--and then she went to go run Kansas and did a great job there. And the thing that I learned from her was to slow down. Because when you're going too fast, that's when you miss a lot of important things about who's being affected by various decisions and who's being treated fairly and unfairly, and really just your own ideals and whether you're in touch with them. So, you know, I learned from her to slow down and think about a lot of the things that we've been talking about here, which, you know, I didn't really do. If you look at that Wikipedia page, I did a lot of science pretty exclusively for a long time before I started thinking about the big picture, and I would have done better if I'd started doing that sooner. And so I think that's something I learned from her.
Ted Fox 34:22
(voiceover) Our thanks to both Holden and Suman for a great episode. You can find more of their conversation at provost.nd.edu/state-of-science.
With a Side of Knowledge is a production of the Office of the Provost at the University of Notre Dame. Our website is withasideofpod.nd.edu. (end voiceover)