Bill Leinweber: Good morning. Thank you all for being with us this morning, and it’s my great pleasure to welcome you to our Bridging the Sciences forum this morning. My name’s Bill Leinweber, and I’m Executive Vice President at Research!America. On behalf of our Board Chair, the Honorable John Porter, and our President, Mary Woolley, I’d like to welcome you and thank you for participating in what we believe will be a very engaging conversation around a concept that we framed, Bridging the Sciences.

 

Talking about engaging opinion leaders, thought leaders, decision-makers, in conversation about the importance of understanding, and increasing support of, the convergence of the sciences. The life sciences and physical sciences, the social sciences, it’s when all sciences come together that as a nation we will sustain our world leadership, in terms of discovering innovation.

 

And we’ve got a lot of great information to share with you today in that regard, and look forward to doing that. I want to, at the outset, acknowledge our partners in this effort: Abbott, Abbott Laboratories, and thank very much Elaine Leavenworth and Jenny Luray, who’ve been tremendous partners for us, to work through this initiative over the last many months at Abbott. Abbott, as may know, is a global and broad-based health care company devoted to discovering new medicines, new technologies, and new ways to manage health, and we really appreciate Abbott’s leadership and vision in understanding the importance of bridging the sciences, and what all of that means to the future health, economic prosperity, and innovation of the country.

 

And it’s been a great pleasure to work with Abbott, and we look forward to continuing to do so. At the outset, I’m going to share with you briefly some results from a public opinion poll that Research!America commissioned in December. As many of you know... Something’s chiming in the... Somebody’s phone, okay. In any event, we commissioned a public opinion poll in December to provide for us some baseline understanding of American’s perceptions, if you will, of science, its role in our country, its role in our economy, where science is in the educational schematic in the country, and where is the public in terms of understanding at a broad level the interdependence of the sciences.

 

And that can be a complicated concept to throw out to the public, but we tried to do that through some questions, and we’ve generated some data out of the poll that I think you’ll find of great interest. I will highlight for you this morning quickly some highlights from that poll, and we’ll have some slides to accompany that. You have some of this information in the packets that were at your table, so please feel free to take a look at that and follow along. You can also look at the poll in its entirety on our website, www.researchamerica.org. Please feel free to visit, all of our polling is available that way as well.

 

Just to review quickly with you the survey methodology, this was a telephone survey, random digit-dialing survey of 800 US adults, aged 18 and older. The poll was conducted in December, December 5 th through the 14 th, and Charlton Research Company is a company that we work with frequently, among some other companies, with the public opinion polling that we do.

 

Starting out at sort of a macro level here, we asked how important do you think it is that that US is a global leader in scientific research. And as you’ll see, there was strong public understanding and support for the concept of the US as a global leader in scientific research. Not surprising, we found similar results with similar questions over the years. We asked how important is the role that science plays in the following, and you’ll see we start with health, there, at 86%, indicating science plays a very important role in health.

 

A very important role registered by 78% in terms of our national competitiveness, a very important role in education, and that’s a theme that we’re going to talk about and discuss more in detail with the panelists this morning, 70% saying it plays a very important role in our education system. 67% in our standard of living, 66% say it plays a very important role in our economy, and again, we’ll be picking up on that theme through our discussion this morning. And 54% identified it as playing, science playing a very strong role relative to job opportunities. How much do you think research in specific fields impacts scientific advances and discovery in other fields?

 

This was our attempt at getting some baseline sense of, does the public, at a broad level, understand that discoveries in one aspect of science impact discoveries in another, that there is this interrelation and interdisciplinary aspect to science. You can see that 69% said that research in specific fields impacts scientific advances in other fields a great deal. So there is that general understanding of this, the interrelationship of the sciences. That’s good news, that’s something we want to build from, and work from in terms of our outward reach, and we’ll talk more about that today.

 

We asked, what would you say have been the greatest scientific discoveries of the last century? You’ll see here that medicine, genetics, diseases and cures, medical advances, registered very high. We have found this over the years, when we talk to the public in general about science, when we throw the term out there, science, discoveries, and innovation, many in the public immediately make connections with health. That’s often what we see. You see this replicated in other polls across the country as well.

 

There are other things that register as well, alternative energy, space exploration, computer age, there are lots of aspects to science, as we know, and we’ll talk about those, but we do see that health is most often what comes top of mind to individuals. We asked, in what fields or areas do you think the most important scientific research is taking place today, and again you’ll see medicine and health registering very high there.

 

We’d like to, in our outreach to the public, to opinion leaders and decision-makers, our practice and our approach, as many of you know, is to go where the public is. So we, as an alliance to advance medical and health discoveries, will work to do, for our Bridging the Sciences work, is begin to, with the outreach strategies that we’ll discuss today, build on the understanding that health advances that come about really couldn’t come about without strong, sustained contributions from many of the other sciences. We want to, we really want to build on that concept. Medical progress is influenced by research in various fields.

 

Here we honed in on medical research specifically, and we asked, to what degree do you think the following fields affect medical advances? And you’ll see here, and I know we have representatives of many of these sciences in the room, or individuals that represent professional societies that represent these sciences. Chemistry, 83% said chemistry impacts medical advances a great deal.

 

You’ll see computer science, physics, math, engineering, it sort of drops off after that. But there is a level of understanding here to build from, and we believe it’s important to build from this, in terms of people understanding the role of these other sciences, and the contributions they make to medical advances becoming a reality. How much confidence do you have in the following institutions in this country? You’ll see the medical community in the military and scientific community register very high here. We start to get into organized religion, corporations, and we see some drop-off, and Congress and the media a bit lower there, but we do stay in touch with the public frequently, because we often hear, in our outreach across the country, nobody cares about scientists, people don’t trust scientists, scientists are getting a bad name, and we try and engage that.

 

We do see a lot of press around issues that sometimes portray science negatively, but we find, year after year, we’ve not seen significant changes in terms of the regard and trust for the scientific community. Building on that, we asked among the following categories of people and organizations, which three are best qualified to explain to you the impact of scientific and technology developments on society? You’ll see here scientists, medical professionals, and voluntary health organizations register very high, in terms of explaining scientific advances. Moving forward, would you like to see more, less or about the same amount of information about science and research in the media? 70% registered they would like to see more information about scientific research.

 

I had a great conversation yesterday evening with Ira Flatow, our moderator that I’ll introduce here in a minute, about that it’s almost impossible to saturate the public these days, in terms of their hunger for information, in terms of scientific discovery, medical advances, research, and the many mediums through which they can access that information easily make our outreach all the more challenging, but present many, many opportunities, which we’ll discuss.

 

We asked, in general, would you say the average American citizen’s knowledge about science is, and you’ll see, probably not surprising to most of you in this audience, 64% say below average. It’s about 30% saying about average. Do you think the US is performing well or performing poorly compared to other nations in terms of science and math education? Only 15% identified that we’re performing very well. You’ll see there a much larger percentage saying we’re performing very poorly or somewhat poorly. And we’ll discuss that today as well, in terms of what does that mean in terms of the pipeline of human capital for research in the future.

 

What kind of investment are we making as a nation, in terms of investment in science and math education, what are we doing today, and what are the implications of that investment, 5, 10, 15, and 20 years down the road. How important is it for the US to create more opportunities for careers in science and research for its young people? You’ll see 76% felt this was very important. Again, strong support from the public.

 

I want to conclude here by just sharing with you, and you have this sheet, I believe, in your packets, a new 1-page concept that we’re previewing today, and again, we thank Abbott for their support with this, this Bridging the Sciences one-page FAQ sheet that is in your packets is the initial page in what will become a series that Research!America will be developing over the next year or so, and we’re building off of a series that we started a couple of years ago with support from the Lasker Foundation, called “Investments in Research Saves Lives and Money.”

 

If you’re not familiar with that series, you can access that on our website as well. That series is health disease specific, and talks about the health and economic benefits of investment in research. This series will talk about examples and articulate examples of advances in science that are improving lives and contributing to the economy, that would not heretofore have existed without strong collaboration between the sciences.

 

This first page is more of a messaging piece to set the framework of the challenge about interdisciplinary science, why we need to collaborate. We’ve identified on the page, and I encourage you to take a look at it, an example on the back at Stanford University, I believe it’s their bioex initiative. We’ve highlighted Dr. Robert Langer on the front of the page, from MIT, and I know many of you know Dr. Langer, who really is a living example of an interdisciplinary scientist, if there ever was one. And much of the work that he does, and the environment, the culture that he’s created in his lab for success in interdisciplinary science.

 

So you can look for more pages in the months ahead on this series, the audience for this series, as with our Investment in Health series, is Congress, elected an appointed officials, the media. We also distribute this series to all governors, lieutenant governors, and key leadership at state legislative levels. All of our members also receive it, and again, this will be available online. So I encourage you to take a look at that.

 

I’m going to move on now and get to the meat of our program, and I want to start by introducing the moderator for this morning, a person and a voice that I’m sure many of you know. I’m sure many of you have met in person before, and if not, you’re in for a real treat. We have with us this morning Ira Flatow of NPR’s Science Friday, a program that I know many of you are familiar with. Ira’s a veteran National Public Radio science correspondent and award-winning TV journalist. He’s the host of Talk of the Nation, Science Friday. He anchors the show each Friday, bringing radio and internet listeners worldwide a lively, informative discussion on science, technology, health, space, and the environment.

 

Ira’s also the founder and President of Talking Science, a non-profit company dedicated to creating television and internet projects that make science user-friendly, which is of great interest to us in making science more accessible and more understandable to the public at large. He’s shared his enthusiasm for science with public radio listeners for more than 35 years, first as a reporter, and then as News Director at WBFO FM in Buffalo, NY, and then as NPR Science Correspondent from 1971-1986.

 

Ira frequently appears on television, including in the new digital cable-vision program, “Maximum Science,” he’s host and writer for Emmy award-winning “Newton’s Apple” on PBS, and is a science reporter for CBS This Morning, Westinghouse, and on cable’s CNBC. Online, Ira’s hosted numerous science-related webcasts for Discovery Online and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. His podcasts are among the most frequently listened to on the internet, frequently in the top 10 of all downloads on iTunes, and we were thrilled to learn this in our discussion last night with Ira. He’s sharing with us, on average, he has about 10 million downloads of his podcast on iTunes, and we... He did offer to podcast today’s discussion, so we’re thrilled about that.

 

In print, he’s authored articles and commentary for magazines and newspapers, ranging from Women’s Day to the Los Angeles Times, and his most recent book is titled They All Laughed: From Light Bulbs To Lasers, The Fascinating Stories Behind The Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives. Ira, we’re thrilled to have you here, we look forward to continuing our conversation with you, and please join me in welcoming Ira Flatow.

 

Ira Flatow: Thank you, Bill. I always feel like I’m listening to the eulogy at my funeral, when I hear this kind of wonderful thing said about me. It’s a very interesting survey, and I’m glad to see the exact numbers, because it justifies things that I’ve always believed about science and technology and the public, but it’s always hard to quantify it. For example, I’ll just mention a couple of things. One is that, as Bill said, there’s a huge thirst among the public for science. Over the decades that I’ve been talking to the public, if I’m out on a book tour, or a publicity for Science Friday, or whatever, I’d go on these little radio stations or TV networks, and they would do a talk show, and they’d have listeners calling up, and the switchboards would light up.

 

And they were not used to seeing this in midday, you know, in talk radio, and they’d look at me like I had, I’d brought some magic with me, and I hadn’t, and I just explained to them that all we’re doing is talking about things that people are really interested in. They’re all interested in where we came from, where we’re headed, and what we’re doing while we’re getting there. That’s really what science and technology is all about. It’s...

 

Another illustration is the percentage you showed that 64% of the public is not knowledgeable about science. They don’t consider themselves knowledgeable about science, as opposed to wanting to know more. They’re not knowledgeable, but they want to know more. And that knowledge extends to any level of person.

 

It doesn’t matter what grade or university you went to, there’s a very famous experiment that was done in the Harvard graduating class, I think of 1990, something like that. It goes way back. They pulled out 35 graduating members of the Harvard class, and they still had their caps and gowns on, and they had a little TV camera, and they said, can we interview you and ask you one question?

 

They pulled them over to the side, and they had all these Harvard graduates, and they said, can you tell us why we have seasons? Why is it hot in the summertime, and why is it cold in the winter? And they sat there, and they thought about it, and 34 out of 35 got it wrong. They all said, well, the sun is closer in the summertime, so it’s hotter. Then you say, well, what happens in Australia, where the seasons are reversed, then? Why is that? If it’s summer down there when it’s winter up here? And they have absolutely no idea.

 

And I’ll leave the answer to you to figure out amongst yourselves, because I’m sure 90% of the people in here don’t know why it’s hotter in the summertime and colder in winter. The actual, the answer is when you show them that it’s because the Earth is tilted on its axis, and so you get direct rays of the sun in the summertime as opposed to indirect rays, that’s why it’s hotter in the summertime. And actually, the Earth is farther away in the wintertime than it is in the summertime. And it just shows you how little there is of basic science knowledge, but when you tell this to people they’re very interested.

 

They want to look it up, you know, and talk more about it, which shows the other side of the equation, which is how much they really want to know about science. Part of the problem I face, or I have faced in my years as a science reporter, is getting past the gatekeepers. And we’ll talk about this a little bit more, and I’ll ask Christen [ph.] to comment on it. This is...

 

How do you get science, the news about what you’re doing, and what other researchers are doing, how do you get that out to the public? Because the regular news media are not interested in education or educating the public at all. And I say that, I mean, where most people get their news from is from television. The greatest source of news for people in their daily lives is the local TV news at 6:00, or 10 or 11:00 at night. Only a quarter of the people are reading newspapers now, you see newspapers are going out of business because people are not reading newspapers. The Web has, is on the rise, but still, most people get their news from the local evening newscast.

 

If you want to, if you want to look at a real problem, and I’ve tried in many different ways over the years to overcome this, is how do you get science, how do you get news about science and technology on the evening news, a local newscast? It’s like hitting a wall, trying to get stuff on local evening newscasts. And I actually set up a company, many years ago, to do nothing but create free, 40-second, 1-minute newscasts that I would give away to, you know, news departments, local news departments on TV, local news, and it... Just run it.

 

Buy commercials, sell the commercial time yourself. I could never break, like, maybe 30% of the markets. If something really big came up, I would crack it up a little higher, but in general, it was about 30% of the markets when I’m giving it away. Yeah, when I would come to them and describe to them, you know, their listeners or their viewers in detail the objects, or the topics I was talking about, they’re all very interested. I once had an argument, or a frank exchange of views, as we say here in Washington...

 

At a panel discussion, with the editor of the Hartford Courant, which is a very good newspaper, and this has got to be 20 years ago. I was invited to be a panelist, to talk about why is science important to the public. Why is science and health, why is science and technology news important to the public, and why is it important for you to cover it? And I got into a little exchange with the editor of... The Hartford Courant didn’t even think the panel was important enough to send one of their big editors, so they sent one of their urban editors.

 

One of their, you know, the crime editor to come and cover this. And be part of the panel. And I said, how come you don’t, you don’t have one science reporter on your newspaper. He said, we don’t need any. I said, well, how many business reporters do you have? He said, we have nine. I said, where do you think the businesses come from? Where do you think, you know, who makes businesses and new products available? It’s the scientists, and then the technologists who translate it into a business for you to cover, new businesses. Oh, I guess you’re right, you know. Okay, I’m still not going to hire a science reporter.

 

So there is this wall, there is this, for a lack of better word, gatekeepers, who have had bad experiences with science as kids in school or whatever, and who think that no one else is interested in science. And when you find these other peoples, you try to take advantage of them. A few years ago, I was a reporter on CBS This Morning, and I did science & technology, you know, early ‘90s. And one of the only reasons I did that, and I was able to do that, is because the producer really liked science and technology, and he hired me as...

 

But he didn’t like it enough that he was going to make it a weekly feature. It was sort of a biweekly feature. Because that was just too much you could have of science and technology. But he understood, he understood the mechanism of how to get it to work, or how to get his bosses to accept what he liked, and that was to get some science and technology on. So he hired me, and I was working very well doing my reports on science and technology. About six weeks into my gig, I got... Before the show, the producer points at me and says, I want to see you after the program. Which means you’re, you’re toast or something after the show was over, I figured. So I went up into his office, and he’s pacing, and he’s trying to create small talk, and I said to him, I bet you you want to ask me a question. And he said, yeah, I do.

 

And I said, well, I bet you I know the question. He said, how did you know that? How would you think you know that? I said, well, let me give it a shot and you tell me. I said, well, I know what the television business is like. I did six years on Newton’s Apple, I did a lot of television before this.

 

I’ll bet you, because you like science on TV, but because it’s science, you think it has to have a gimmick to it. You know, like Bill Nye, The Science Guy, who does wacky things, or Mr. Wizard did stuff, it has to have a gimmick to it. So what you want me to do is, when I’m doing my science report, you want me to wear a white lab coat, don’t you? He said, how did you know that? I said, well, because I’ve been around, and I figure you have, you know, your other bosses that you have to answer to also, and that’s what they like you to do. I said, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll wear that white lab coat if, when your business guy who does the stock market reports, he puts a green eyeshade on, because he’s a business person, right, I’ll wear the white lab coat. And he looked at me and he said, you know, what you have on now is just perfect. You continue doing what you want. So it’s... Over the years, it’s been a challenge to try to get more science and technology onto television.

 

Now we have the internet, and as Bill was saying, we have new experiences and new opportunities. And hopefully we’ll take even, you know, other chances that we can take to put more science on the internet. But enough about me, let’s talk about the topic at hand today, and that is bridging the sciences. I usually come with a sheet full of questions that I start a discussion, and this is how it happens on the radio, and I never go, I never use the questions. Because the conversation goes so well, and I’m hoping you’ll all jump in, even when I ask someone a question, that I believe the conversation has a life of its own, and it goes in a direction, and if it goes too far afield, I’ll reel it in a little bit and put it back on the road, and I’m hoping we can have that happen here today.

 

And I’ve watched this question of bridging the sciences over the years, up to the point where, when I started out as a science reporter 35 years ago, I had a half a dozen journals to read. Science and Nature and New Science and Science News, and a few other heavy, hard-core science journals. But in the next, over the last few decades, each one of them has blossomed into 6 new journals of their own, and there’s so much to read, and the only interdisciplinary subjects, that it’s hard for one journalist to cover, and that’s why we have a lot of science reporters now.

 

But I’ve been told by other scientists how hard it is for them to understand what’s going on in the other disciplines. They used to be able to pick up Scientific American or something and read what’s going on, if they were a chemist, they could read what’s going on in biology and get an idea, because the field was so narrow. But now the fields are so fine-tuned that, and the language is so difficult for them to get through, you know, the biotechnology language and others, that they have a very difficult time talking to other scientists and understanding where they work.

 

And I’d like to begin the discussion asking any of our panelists to comment. Do they find that too, in their businesses or industries or talking with scientists? Do they find that scientists are able to communicate with each other and understand what the other one’s talking about so that they would, they could contribute? Now, Apple computer, many years ago, discovered, and they were the first ones to talk about this, that if they want to increase innovation, they put the coffeepot in the middle of the office. You know about this study?

 

They took the water cooler and the coffeepot, and instead of putting one in the development office, one in the research, one in the keyboard office or whatever, they stuck it right in the middle where they all have to go to meet. So that over the coffeepot, these ideas would be exchanged. And new ideas would come up that people had never thought about. Hey Joe, do you think, I know you’ve got this problem with the keyboard. You ever thought about something called a mouse, or something? You know, that sort of thing. I saw this happening. And it wasn’t quite like that, but other companies have discovered this. Finding a way for the interdisciplinary people to talk with each other is... Do you find that to be a problem at all? Are people, Bill Brown, are they able to talk to each other?

 

William Brown: Well, I think like you said, one of the keys, let’s say if you have a project team that’s trying to solve a problem, there’s no substitution for collocation. I mean, you know, we try and put everybody in the same building that’s on the same team, make them sit next to each other, and it really drives that interaction. I think the other thing it leads to in product development, in my group, I think one of the unifying forces is that, let’s say, if you’re trying to develop a new diagnostic test or something like that, is that you go out and you actually visit the end users, and the customers that might use it, and by getting the engineers and maybe the life science people, maybe the manufacturing people to all go and see who’s actually going to use it, it kind of provides a unifying theme that they all kind of rally around. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, to come up with something innovative, you really have to know how it’s going to be used, in many cases, and really understand how a customer would use it, even more than they do. And in addition to that, then you have all this technology, and if you can put the two things together then, who knows, you might come up with something creative or innovative.

 

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg, let’s talk about some instances of success stories, where bridges have really been crossed, or maybe... Or stories where there have been strong barriers to interdisciplinary work, and for bringing government and industry together.

 

Jeremy Berg: Sure. Well, a couple of examples. One, to follow up on what Bill was talking about, I think with respect to the cultural barriers, one mechanism which NIH uses is institutional training grants specifically directed toward these interdisciplinary interfaces. So we support a program on the chemistry/biology interface, and the requirement of the training program is that the chemists really have to, you know, find their way to the biology department, and vice versa, and the product is the students they produce. And we really get sort of twice the bang for the buck, because first off, the faculty get to know each other in putting together the grant application, and running the program, and then the students that they produce have really been exposed to both sides of this interface.

 

We have a new program that’s just starting this year on the biology/behavioral sciences interface, which is modeled in very much the same way. Examples of success stories, I think, one... One example which has really gone all the way out into helping people with health problems, is an AIDS drug called darunavir, which was developed, the idea was developed in academia by a chemist who was interested in intentionally designing drugs that would be less susceptible to the development of drug resistance.

 

So, by looking at the three-dimensional structure of the target protein, HIV protease in this case, which consists of a framework, and then amino acid side-chains around, which can vary. He designed a drug which interacted entirely with the backbone, so there wasn’t really much that the virus could do to escape this drug, and that went through with industrial partners, through all the clinical trials, and was just FDA approved this last year, and is now proving to be another very useful tool.

 

Ira Flatow: Now that we’ve got the discussion going, as we said I’d give you a little tease, let me introduce the panelists on the dais here. I know you have, the sheet’s right in front of you and that’s usually a good way of doing it, but let me make it a little easier. Let me start at the end and introduce you to Dr. Tenley Albright, who is Director of Collaborative Issues at MIT, and is a leading new interdisciplinary think-and-do-tank at MIT called Collaborative Initiatives. Having dealt a lot with MIT lately, I know they’re really branching out into a lot of health research now, aren’t they, and I’d been over there a while and they said, you know, we want to do for health research what we did for rocket science. So you’ve got to watch out, keep an eye on them. Dr. Berg is the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH, and prior to his current position he served for 18 years on the Johns Hopkins University faculty.

 

Thank you for being with us. William Brown, Dr. Brown is Vice President of Diagnostic Assays and Systems Development at Abbott, and Dr. Brown has served in his current role since 2002. And he joined Abbott in 1982 as a research and development projects manager in Abbott’s diagnostic division.

 

Next is Christen Brownlee [ph.], she’s a science writer at Science News. Ms. Brownlee has covered the life and physical sciences for a variety of outlets, including popular press magazines, websites, trade magazines, scientific journals, and children’s magazines and books. If you don’t read Science News, you’re missing a lot. If you want to have, I say this because I’ve known this magazine for 35 years, and people come up to me and say, what should I read? What magazine should I read? If you want to get a lot of news in one spot, and a lot goes on in this town, and it’s based in Washington, I highly recommend Science News.

 

Next to Christen is Alan Merten. Dr. Merten is president of George Mason University. He became president on July 1 st of 1996, so he’s in his 11 th, 11 th year now. He was previously the dean of Johnson Graduate School of Management of Cornell University, so he knows cold. So if you think this is cold, you haven’t been where he’s been. Phil Southerland is president and founder of Team Type 1, 23 years following Mr. Southerland’s diagnosis with type 1 diabetes, he founded Team Type 1, and he works with diabetes patients and educators all over the country, and he is a dedicated volunteer at Camp Kudzu.

 

That’s a camp for children with diabetes in northern Georgia. I want to continue the discussion with Phil, because we were talking before, and I think this is a good time, because would it be fair to say that you represent a success story of the interface?

 

Phil Southerland: I think that would be fair to say.

 

Ira Flatow: Tell us about your story a little bit.

 

Phil Southerland: Well, I guess this success comes from me being here today, because when I was 7 months old, my mother carried me dying in her arms into the hospital, and said, what’s wrong with my child. And they came back and said, well, ma’am, we’ve got good news and we’ve got bad news. Good news is, if you’d brought your son in an hour later, he’d be dead. Bad news is, your son’s got juvenile diabetes, and due to current technologies and state of care for the disease, if he lives to 25, he’ll either have renal failure or blindness.

 

Well, I’m standing here before you today, or sitting, I guess, at 25 years of age, and I can still see, and my kidneys still work, and my team of type 1 diabetics just set a world record in a bike race across America. You know... Thanks to the research and technology from lots of people like you.

 

Ira Flatow: You want to show them your new little toy, at all?

 

Phil Southerland: Sure. I’ve got, one of the new toys out there is a wireless insulin pump, and it’s... Pumps have been something that a lot of kids have afflictions to, because they’re a tube, and they’re attached to them at all times, and so recent years, or as of this year, they launched a wireless one, so that, you know, myself, you don’t have to be attached.

 

And this was coming from one of those water cooler ideas where someone said, you know, they’ve got insulin pumps that deliver machines and insulin in the body. Why don’t we have this one and this one, make them talk to each other, and take out the tubes? And then from that conversation came a lot of engineering and development, and research to making this product come to, and it’s made my life a little bit better.

 

Ira Flatow: So you have a pump inside?

 

Phil Southerland: I wear it on the back of my arm. And that’s... Wear it for 3 days, and dispose of it, and put a new one on. And to me it’s been a godsend, and it’s only one of the major new technologies that are coming out that are just going to make our lives, as patients, easier and easier and easier, and in the long run, eliminate the blindness that comes from this disease.

 

Ira Flatow: So you have... That’s your remote control for the pump?

 

Phil Southerland: It’s my remote control. My friends take it and try to shoot me up...

 

MS: TV.

 

Phil Southerland: I’ve got to stand 2 feet away. I know that if I’m 2 feet away, they’re not going to kill me.

 

Ira Flatow: Dr. Albright, I would think this is like the kind of thing I would think MIT would be interested in these kind of interface science and technology.

 

Tenley Albright: Well, MIT is really a wonderful atmosphere for collaboration and innovation, and some of the successes that we’ve been talking about really have come from the fact that people have talked to each other. But I find that what scientists need is a way that they will bump into each other, where the experts can meet, and they might be experts that are in totally different fields, even outside of science, and it’s exciting to see what happens when they do. Now, I like so much the image of the bridge, because I’d like to think of Research!America as helping to be the architect of that bridge, and it’s a very real thing. I like to think that it’s a two-way bridge, and there’s discussion here, there’s discussion here, and I also like to think as we get further with bridging the sciences, we can include things that are outside of the sciences.

 

And also, think of all ages. Think of K through 12. So yes, MIT is a home for exactly this sort of thing, and I work a lot with Bob Langer, and he has, as you say, been a real representative. The other thing is, we have a new president at MIT, relatively new now, it’s two years, but... Everybody was so excited that there would be a woman president of MIT, and the first time MIT had a president that wasn’t an engineer. What really got me excited was that she said that she wanted her focus to be on the life sciences and collaboration. So I think it’s even more and more what it already is.

 

Ira Flatow: Dr. Merten, let’s talk about George Mason University. Give me some examples of the collaboration that you have with private industry, and how that works out.

 

Alan Merten: I think [unint.] one of the characteristics to start with is that we recognize at Mason and other places, that science is hard. So what we, I think sometimes when we talk about science, we fail to recognize that for people to make successes in the university, or make successes dealing with the corporate world, these are difficult issues. And one of the most recent successes that we’ve had is in the proteomics area. Our ability to hire faculty in the cancer biology area, and these people have come into the university with a desire to work with industry. With the pharmaceuticals, with the equipment manufacturers.

 

We were fortunate to have built facilities in advance of needing the facilities, and I think that’s one of the challenges that we have in science, the capital cost of facilities is so high that you have a tendency to wait too long. And in our case, we... Fortunately we had the ability. That made it easy for the faculty, the students and then the corporate friends to come together. I want to maybe comment on, just make an anecdote...

 

Ira Flatow: Hey, jump in. Anybody jump in if you want to.

 

Alan Merten: There’s a comment that happened yesterday. We’ve grown so fast as George Mason that sometimes the faculty in a given school or college are scattered across the university, and so we were talking yesterday how proud we are right now, we’re building buildings where we can get all the College of Science faculty in one building, and all the College of Visual and Performing Arts in another building, and we, all of a sudden we thought, well, wait a minute. Maybe that’s not such a good idea. Maybe the fact that we have faculty in different schools and colleges next to each other is good.

 

And so there’s, sometimes there’s the unintended consequence of taking all the scientists, or taking all the School of Management faculty and putting them in their buildings that look more and more like silos. So I think we have to be careful. I think Tenley sort of touched on it, is that sometimes putting the scientists away from others is not such a good idea.

 

Ira Flatow: Yeah. Christen, do you think people understand, the public understands what science is? I mean, you deal with the public.

 

Christen Brownlee: It’s an interesting question, Ira. I think that the public, for the most part, has a general understanding of science, but some stories on the media recently have sort of shifted the focus in another direction, calling things that are not science, science. Everyone is familiar with the Intelligent Design debate, which is not really a debate. For those of us who are versed in science, we know it’s not a science. It’s nothing to prove. It’s nothing to investigate. It’s a matter of faith. It’s a matter of religion.

 

But this was really hyped in the public as something that needed to be debated, which I think is unfortunate. There’s lots of other things that people talk about as science, and matters up for discussion, like whether global warming exists or not. I think that the more we educate children on what science is, the more they’ll understand when they become adults and it’s time to decide where money needs to be spent.

 

Ira Flatow: Dr. Brown? Berg, Dr. Berg? Go ahead.

 

Jeremy Berg: Oh. So one example of a program that we’ve been involved in the last couple of years, which really bridges sciences as widely as anything I’ve seen, is the program on modeling infectious diseases. It goes everything from epidemiologists, computer scientists, economists, social sciences, and the idea was to develop computer models that would allow people to model how an infectious disease moves through a population.

 

So you need to know a bit about the infectious disease, a lot about social behavior and how people come to meetings like this and interact with each other, and shake hands, and do all sorts of things which are fun but not so fun if pandemic flu is around. It’s really been very interesting to see the group working together. Some of the leaders in the program were trained as physicists, and cut their teeth modeling atomic particles interacting with each other, and are now doing the same thing with little computer people interacting with each other.

 

One of the challenges when we started the program a couple of years ago was, we were thinking about how we were going to make this, the results of this project, known to policy makers as the tools developed. And what surprised me initially was they embraced it tremendously, and why, I thought, why would policy makers be interested in these very new, sort of cutting-edge models that weren’t all that well-validated, and so on, and the answer was, the alternative was a bunch of guys sitting around a room saying, gee, I don’t know, what do you think?

 

So to have a computer model that it can at least put a straw man on the table that says, based on these assumptions, some of which we believe and some of which are just, we just have to make, here’s what we would expect if you closed schools, or did other sorts of things. And then you can improve the models, and it just, it provides tools for continuing a discussion. The CDC is going to announce later today a new plan, and these models have played a role, among many other inputs in developing the plans.

 

Ira Flatow: Yes, Dr....

 

Tenley Albright: Can I ask, first in a question. You talked about the understanding of science and getting the message out. Two days ago, someone came up to me and he said, I have a 12-year-old daughter, he said, I really want to talk to you, I have a 12-year-old daughter who loves physiology. She wants to learn about the body. She’s always seeking out things. But it’s a little awkward because she’s so good in these things that she’s not as interested in school, she wants more of that, she doesn’t get enough. And what do you... I didn’t really know what to say. I said, well, I’d try to find out about programs, and I wondered, what would you tell someone like that? How do you encourage a 12-year-old who is motivated to find more, but is not getting that in school?

 

Christen Brownlee: Well, it depends where she is. So the magazine that I work for, Science News, is run by a non-profit called Science Service. Science Service has a lot of missions, but one of them is, they run a lot of science fairs. So they run a huge one called the Intel Science and Talent Fair. They’re all...

 

Tenley Albright: What is it called, again?

 

Chriten Brownlee: It’s sponsored by Intel, and I could be totally slaughtering the name. I think it’s Intel Science and Talent Fair. There’s another one called the Discovery Young Scientist Challenge. So this year, I took on a little freelance assignment on the side, where I wrote the book, the book of profiles that is handed out to everyone who participates, everyone who comes to the fair. It’s a list of profiles of all these middle school students who are participating in the fair. I was amazed to see the research that some of these middle school students, 10, 11, and 12-year-olds, are doing.

 

And the reason why they’re able to do this research, which honestly is PhD level research, is because they’re taking the initiative on their own, going to universities, hooking up with professors who somehow find the time and the interest to mentor these young students. But it’s really up to two people. It’s up to the professor to find that time, and the student to have the initiative to seek it out. When I was 12 years old, I never would have thought about approaching a university professor. Who does? These children. They’re the only ones that I can figure. But it’s unfortunate that these opportunities are not open to a broader spectrum of children. Especially children who, you know, might be far, far away from any resources. Children who are out in the, you know, in a rural area, where a university is not going to be geared towards research. They’re never going to have an opportunity such as this.

 

Tenley Albright: [unint.] talk to you more at lunch about how you find the resources for that.

 

Ira Flatow: Well, with... That’s an interesting question about the whole pipeline, you know?

 

Jeremy Berg: What’s the percent of teachers in elementary and secondary education who are teaching science, who are educated in science? I mean, it’s a terribly low number. I can’t remember what it is, but it’s frightening.

 

Ira Flatow: Yeah, well, and the role models are not good. I mean, if a science teacher is a social studies teacher thrown into a science class, and can’t hook up a battery and a light bulb, you know, and the kids are looking at the teacher saying, well, if you can’t do it, why should I?

 

Christen Brownlee: Those mentors are so important. So another side project that I often take on are writing these profiles for scientists for journals. The National Academy of Sciences, their journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has a profile series. I no longer write for them. But they... They would write profiles of new members of the national academies. When I would ask these people, because we start at the very beginning of their life, and sort of follow their career up until the present, I would ask them why they decided to become a scientist in the first place, and a lot of people would say, I had a good mentor, I had a really good science teacher.

 

Ira Flatow: Well, is it then, if the students, let’s talk about the caliber of students that you all need for your industries. Are you finding them here, then? Or do you have to go overseas and hire?

 

William Brown: Well, you know, I think it’s kind of a mix. I mean, obviously a lot of foreign students come to the United States to go to graduate school, so if you kind of look at the hiring population, let’s say in Lake County, Illinois, it’s very diverse. It’s many nationalities. And so I think there’s always going to be a need for talent, okay, and I think there’s going to be a need for talent that basically, especially in industry, is very diverse. I look at, you know, my PhD was in medicinal chemistry, from University of Pittsburgh, and I ended up at Abbott developing diagnostic tests for everything from cancer to cardiac tests, to... My first test was for diabetes type 2, glycated hemoglobin, and boy, it’s amazing now. Actually, with the way that things evolved, I actually have more engineers and scientists that are like software engineers, electrical, than I do life science people reporting to me.

 

Just because of all the automation as an example that’s going on at the laboratory. So I think you’ve got to be pretty adaptable, and I think that’s one of the keys in terms of, you know, as your career evolves, it’s always amazing what you start out in, and what you end up in. My first job was a high school chemistry teacher. And then I just happened to go back to graduate school, and now I’m at Abbott. I would have never predicted that.

 

Ira Flatow: I don’t know very many people who are doing what they started out to do. But Dr. Berg is, probably.

 

Jeremy Berg: Right, so two things. One is, I think the notion of initiative for students is really important. I had the luxury of growing up on a university campus. My father was a math professor. And I think the most valuable thing that that gave me was just not being afraid of university professors. When you see the, you know, the famous scientist down the street shoveling the dog doo off his lawn, it’s hard to be that afraid. So I just went to somebody very early on in my university career and said, I’m really interested in what you’re doing, if you have an opening in your lab, let me know. And started off doing mundane things and got more and more involved, and it really, every step you take, there’s a lot of positive reinforcement.

 

The workforce issue, I think, is something that NIH is very, very concerned about at this point, both in terms of the quality of the students, but also the diversity of the biomedical work force. And we have programs across NIH that try to provide opportunities for, particularly at the college level and up, a little bit bleeding down into K through 12, for a wide diversity of students to get involved in research, to understand what science is all about. One thing that we’re doing, we started a couple of years ago, is using science on science, basically, so that we have a program with regular research grants for scientists to study these programs, and to ask which interventions really seem to work.

 

So if you look at a program that’s intended to increase the preparedness of underrepresented minorities, does providing extra study sections work, do summer research opportunities work, and really get the data of, here are the number of students that had this intervention, here’s a matched set that didn’t, are the outcomes different? How long did these interventions last? So we’re trying to develop a research base that we can really use to design programs in the future, where we have a better sense of what the scientific foundation is for the approaches that we’re taking.

 

Tenley Albright: But where do the children find them? I mean, my daughter, as a teenager, when she was looking, the only thing she could find was she was invited to be assistant to a shaman and spend 3 weeks alone with him in the woods in Guatemala.

 

Ira Flatow: She didn’t go, I imagine.

 

Tenley Albright: No.

 

Jeremy Berg: Ira, you touched on the issue of, should we grow our own scientists in our education system, or should we take advantage of scientists coming from outside the United States. I think in some sense we’ve gone through a period of time where we’ve made that a discussion of, we’d either do one or the other. And I think that hasn’t helped. In 2000, 2001, I chaired the National Academy of Science study on the future of the IT work force. And we tried to look at, and we did look at, the question of, where do the IT professionals come from? Our school systems, or do they come from around the world?

 

I must admit, I got more hate mail on that issue than on anything else I’ve ever been involved in, because there’s a lot of emotion, I think as Christen was commenting, sometimes when we talk about these issues, they get emotional. I think there’s one where we, it’s great that someone can be educated through an undergraduate degree someplace else in the world, come to the United States, get a graduate degree, and then stay here and help our science community.

 

So that, I think we should do more of that. But on the other hand, I think we’ve got to make sure we do the right things to get our elementary schools, secondary schools, and beyond produce scientists that are US homegrown. But it’s not an either/or. It’s, we’ve got to do both, and we’ve got to do both aggressively.

 

Christen Brownlee: I want to bring together a couple of ideas that we were talking about initiative and collaboration. So, when I first started writing about science, I thought of science as, it’s a whole separate... It’s a whole separate field. I didn’t really think scientists had much in common with other business professionals, but the more I talk with scientists, and I talk with scientists every day, the more I see that it’s like everything else. These collaborations don’t happen by accident, although I think a lot of scientists believe that they should, that it’s serendipity for them to run into that they feel a connection with, and someone that they can do research with. But it doesn’t happen by accident. There has to be just as much networking and schmoozing and shoulder-rubbing and happy hours as with everything else. What do you think of that?

 

Ira Flatow: How do you foster that? Yeah.

 

Tenley Albright: I think that’s really true, but when you’re in a place where there are fantastic experts in very, very different fields within science, and they are experts because they are like a horse with blinders and concentrating, it may not even occur to them to, that somebody way over here might have something that had something to do with it. So they need, it needs to be... We need to help them make those connections.

 

Christen Brownlee: Do you think the culture of getting a PhD somehow dampens that? From what I see with people focusing in such a narrow area for so long, and connections not being fostered, and them not being encouraged to look beyond this narrow focus, do you think that could be harmful?

 

Tenley Albright: Well, I think it’s wonderful to have a PhD. I don’t have one. But I do think it’s changing, and I think we do see a real difference now. Any, when I started in surgery a basic scientist was a basic scientist, and if you asked that person, oh, does that have something to do with something clinical, they’d say, what do you mean? It’s basic science. And that’s not the case now. There’s a real interconnection, and I think that’s terrific.

 

Ira Flatow: Yeah. Dr. Berg.

 

Jeremy Berg: Well, I think, as a representative from a funding agency, we have the advantage of having some carrots to put on the table. So one of the programs that we supported for four years, and are just, have just reannounced, is a program in mathematical biology, which is jointly funded with NSF. And the idea is that a mathematician comes in together with a biological, biomedical scientist, to write a grant proposal together, which is reviewed jointly by NSF and NIH and then funded. And really, you know, from NIH’s perspective, we know that there are lots of really smart people out in math, and physics, and engineering departments, who don’t know how to approach NIH, who, their big cultural difference is one of the things we discovered when the program first started. An NIH grant application, the most important part is the specific aim. You know, what do you specifically want to accomplish? And we first started talking about developing the program, and the response from a lot of mathematicians was, gee, if I knew that, I’d be done. I just want to go off and think about this general problem for a few years, and see what’s out there.

 

Ira Flatow: Right.

 

Jeremy Berg: So they were, you know, the NIH approach was very un-user-friendly from that community. They’re much more used to dealing with NSF, and we’ve tried to sort of bridge the two, allow them in, and hopefully we’ll seduce some of them into doing things which will help the NIH mission.

 

Ira Flatow: Let me get Dr. Brown and then go back up.

 

William Brown: Yeah... At least in our area in time, in terms of trying to develop medical diagnostic tests, it would really be impossible to be kind of isolated. I mean, if you’re trying to develop a diagnostic test, let’s say for a new cancer marker, you’ve got all the things going on in life science, which are things like recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies, and then obviously you have the instrumentation to go do it, so you’ve got all the engineering. Somebody wants the information, so maybe you’re involved with wireless technology to communicate the result, and at the end of the day, if you’re a physician trying to treat a patient, what you’re interested in primarily is the information, but there’s so much that goes on behind that to get to that point. So it’d be almost impossible to be isolated in your field.

 

Ira Flatow: Dr. Albright?

 

Tenley Albright: Well, I want to ask Dr. Merten and Dr. Berg, one of the things that I’ve been puzzled about is, you mentioned getting people from different fields together. Now, traditionally, there has to be one PI. And traditionally, things work against collaborating, because to be promoted for tenure, you need to show your independence. And if you’re collaborating on your papers and things, you’re not showing your independence. So how does that work? I was glad to hear you say that those are funded, with the mathematician and the biologist, but how is that... Is that going to change? Are we going to be able to have several PIs, 3 PIs, whatever.

 

Ira Flatow: Do you have an RFP right in front of you that you’re filling out right now, or something...? I’m sorry.

 

Jeremy Berg: So NIH is just, has a new pilot program on multiple PIs, so we’re trying to do our part to let, you know, make it easier for people to collaborate without these sort of artificial reward systems that are in place. I think the cultural challenges are really pretty substantial at universities, too. When I was at Hopkins, I was the chair of the Professorial Promotions Committee. And this issue of, if people collaborated there was this big disincentive of the committee trying to sort through what was their contribution, and so on, and one of the funniest moments on this committee was, not talking too far out of school, but there’s a wonderful collaboration between Bert Vogelstein and Ken Gensler [ph.], who’s a physician and a PhD pharmacologist, and they’re both in the top 10 most cited scientists in the world.

 

And Ken Gensler was up for promotion to full professor. And the only issue at all, I mean, you had hundreds of fantastic papers, was, the only issue at all was the independence between the two. And somebody had the wisdom to write a letter saying, the only issue is how independent these two are, and what are the relative contributions, and may have made a mistake in promoting Dr. Vogelstein. And everybody realized what a ridiculous conversation this was, and the conversation ended 30 seconds later.

 

Alan Merten: But the culture of the universities, I mean, historically, and the culture sciences, is one that’s dependent on people doing their own thing. And getting, learning more and more about less and less. One of the characteristics, it happened at our university and it’s happening at the others right now, is when you do hiring, you know you’re less likely now, in the sciences and others, to hire an individual. So you’re hiring groups of faculty in a disciplinary team, and who you’re really running against the culture of the university, because you’re now saying to a given academic unit that, at the dean’s level, or sometimes maybe lower, is that who you hire is not necessarily who you want to hire, but who the university wants to hire.

 

And that’s, that causes a lot of angst in the institution. To me, one of the key positions in the university today to deal with these issues is not the president, even though hopefully the president is still left with a job, otherwise I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s the provost. Because the provost operates at a level above the various academic disciplines, and can enforce and can create the incentives to do more interdisciplinary work and more interdisciplinary hiring. But that’s a tough, tough nut to crack in most universities.

 

Ira Flatow: Let me just, this is a lot of [unint.], a lot of heads are nodding, and usually I wait till the, in a conference, till the end for questions, but if you have questions about what we’re talking about, now, and you want to ask them instead of waiting to the end for a couple of hours, I’ll... Raise your hand, and at any time, I’ll take some questions. I see there’s [unint.] universities that obviously talk about this a lot amongst yourselves. So how does anything get done? I mean, how do you, how does a project, and let me start with the NIH. How do you decide on a topic that you’re going to fund, or a subject that you’re going to fund, and how does it work its way up to where it becomes part of a collaboration between interdisciplinary university people and also private industry?

 

Jeremy Berg: So I, you know, the most powerful driver by far for NIH is investigator-initiated research. We open the mail. Or at this point, everything’s electronic, or hopefully in another week, everything’s electronic. So investigators submit applications of areas that they are interested in, and many times there are collaborations already in place. There are some mechanisms that are structured for teams already, so program project grants where groups of, typically, 3 to 5 different research groups come together to solve one particular problem.

 

And we look to see that the projects are really interdependent in a way that’s going, it’s not just five separate grants, but they really are feeding on, off each other. With respect to partnerships further down the line, a lot of times, that takes care of itself. As things move forward, startup companies or larger companies are following the research in the literature, and will, they have people who sort of follow this sort of thing and then will try to start collaborations with the academic researchers.

 

Ira Flatow: Is that a key that it’s working, when somebody shows interest from the private sector? That you, that this was a good idea, and that it’s a successful project?

 

Jeremy Berg: For some things, not for everything. I mean, I think there, a lot of the basic research that we support isn’t going to have anything which is going to interest anybody in industry in the short term. In the long term, the knowledge builds on itself, and it will lead to whole new fields.

 

But in targeted areas, I think one of the big goals of the NIH Roadmap that was announced a few years ago was not to translate everything, but just to provide better paths to, for things which are ready for translation, to try to get rid of some of the barriers that can move things both from basic science to more applied clinical science, but also to make connections with the private sector. There also are specific programs, so the small business innovation, innovative research grants, the SBIR grants, and STTR grants that NIH supports, accepts applications from small businesses to develop projects that they’re interested in. One big example, which is certainly bridging the sciences program if there ever was one, is a program we supported over the last five years or so.

 

There was a physicist at Stanford who was a, worked on linear accelerator, or accelerator design, who came up with an idea where he could make, well, he thought he could make a compact light source for generating x-rays, which are very useful for structural biology, for determining protein structures, but also for medical imaging.

 

You know, rather than having a facility at a national lab that costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build, and tens of millions of dollars a year to support, he thought he could make one that would be sort of the size of this table, and on the order of a couple million dollars to build, that could really be sort of laboratory scale, based on interactions between an electron beam and a high-intensity laser beam, and lots of very fancy physics. We’ve been supporting it, and as of about 6 months ago, it started making x-rays, and they’re just getting ready to do the first experiments.

 

Ira Flatow: Do you have any problem in peer review to convince people, saying, this is a great idea. It’s not a typical NIH sort of thing, but we ought to take a look, give it a shot.

 

Jeremy Berg: Right, no. I mean, peer review is certainly the cornerstone of how we make decisions. On the other hand, the program staff, the scientists who work not doing their own research but reviewing these sorts of programs, are encouraged to make their own judgments about things, and there have been some real success stories.

 

One of the things in the legends of my institute was John Fenn, who won the Nobel prize a few years ago for developing mass spec, protein mass spec. That was actually a proposal that did very poorly in peer review. He was a chemical physicist who didn’t write very good proposals, and one of the program staff at NIGMS said, you know, if this guy can really do mass spec of proteins, this is going to make a big difference. And it worked, and he won the Nobel prize, and now proteomics is entirely dependent on protein mass spec. I mean, it’s one of these techniques where the world has completely changed.  

 

Ira Flatow: Phil’s wanted to jump in, so let me give him a chance to talk.

Phil Southerland: I feel like I’m up here as a different board, different side of the panel in that we’re talking about bridging the sciences, and collaboration, you know, this past year I’ve gotten to witness a lot of collaboration and my doctor, Bruce Bodie [ph.], was able to work with Abbott diabetes care to get my team of type 1 diabetics on the free cell navigator. It’s before we did this race across America.

So, in doing this race, we’re using this investigational device that was, shows you what your blood sugar is, where it’s going, up, down, gives you alarms if it’s not where it’s supposed to be. So for a person like myself, and millions of others like me, it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. But the thing is, we entered this race, the first ever team to do this, and at the end of, you know, we’re in Arizona after our first 8-hour shift, and part of diabetes is recovery, or exercise is recovery. So we do an insulin shot to cover the calories that we’re about to take in.

Well, our nutritionist made a mistake, because mistakes happen. And so instead of getting 135 grams of carbohydrates, we got 35. And we gave insulin to cover 135 grams of carbs. So we all went to sleep that night, half the team, and I think two years ago, if this science, the free cell navigator had not come out, one of 3 things would have happened. We’d have had seizures, gone to the hospital, died, and I guess the fourth thing would, we would have ended the race by Arizona.

But we were wearing this as part of the collaboration between Bruce Bodie, an investigator, Abbot Diabetes Care, the manufacturer, and then us, the user. The end of the bridge, so to speak. And we heard alarms throughout the night. And there were no seizures, there were no hospitals, we went on to win the race, because we got alarms, alarms, alarms. My friend and I, we kept, was that your alarm or was that my alarm? And he went through 25 grams, or 25 glucose tablets, which is 100 grams of carbohydrates, typically for severe hypoglycemia you’ll give a child 2 to 3.

But because of the alarms, we were able to continue using these throughout the night. Now, I say us being the end user, this device is scheduled, it’s under FDA review and it’s scheduled to come out hopefully in the very near future, because it will have that same impact for many people, but when is insurance reimbursement going to cover it? That’s...

 

It’s going to be years before people can actually get this, and it’s the low-income families, the people, the kids, the reason that scientists do what they do is to help people. It’s going to be years before we get to use these and get it paid for, because there’s, they want 20-year studies for insurance reimbursement to make sure it’s economical. Well, 20 years from now there might be a cure for this disease, and 20 years from now, there’s going to be something that’s much, much better. But for the time being, it’s the best, and my question is how can we make changes to speed that process along for insurance so people can get these devices in their hands, and lives can be saved, and parents can sleep with both eyes shut?

Ira Flatow: Excellent point. Why have these products if you’re not going to be able to use them?

William Brown: The question is when does public policy catch up with science? And in some cases, very, very slowly.

Phil Southerland: Does anyone...

Jeremy Berg: Yeah, I think, I mean, in some cases NIH, one of the things that can convince the minds of insurance executives is well-designed studies that really make the case that this really is more effective than existing therapies, and in some cases that it’s more cost-effective. So there is an increasing emphasis on trying to do those sorts of studies in targeted areas where NIH can support the research that will provide the knowledge base that will really put the right sort of pressure on people to do the right thing and make it, make sure that they understand what the benefits, both in terms of quality of life, cost of care, so they’re making knowledge-based decisions rather than fighting with this overflow of information that we all have of all the things that are coming down the pipeline, and trying to sort out what’s real and what’s not.

Ira Flatow: Does the new Congress offer any change in this situation?

Jeremy Berg: Well, certainly the discussions over the last couple of days about the fiscal year, ’07 budget, the Congress has been very supportive of science across the board, I think, and that’s...

Ira Flatow: Dr. Albright?

Tenley Albright: I just wanted to say that this is, from what we’ve been talking about, it, what we’re really talking about is how important Research!America is, and has been as far as bringing attention to this exact thing that Phil has been talking about, to, working to increase funding. And I see Mr. Health, the Honorable Paul Rogers, here, who has chaired Research!America, and I can tell you, he is one person who gets the word out. And I have heard him say, and it makes me think of, I’m going to choke up when I say it, about Phil. Paul Rogers says, without research, there is no hope. And this is a perfect example.

Ira Flatow: Just on this vein, because it just popped into my head, I had Dean Kamen on my show, a year or so ago, the one who invented the Segway. And we were talking about the Segway, and Segway, and what a wonderful device it is, it was, and next I was taking calls on the phone, and the caller called up and said, you know, I love your Segway, it’s a great thing, but we mothers with diabetic children will never forget what you did for us for the diabetes pump. And I don’t care what kind of new object you ever make, we’ll always be indebted to you for that. And there wasn’t a dry eye in the studio. She just stopped the show and she said basically the same sort of sentiment.

Phil Southerland: He’s a wonderful person who did change millions of people’s lives for diabetes by inventing the insulin pump, and then, you know, as you speak of how to get more kids involved and bring more scientists along, he’s got the FIRST program, where he works to develop in competition among youths who are interested in technology, because Dean Kamen is frustrated because all kids want to go out and be professional basketball players, football players, and whatnot, and there’s a lack of knowledge of kids who want to come up and be scientists. And he’s trying to inspire that through competition. Not to mention the insulin pump, which I’m kind of grateful for him for.

Ira Flatow: Well, how do you get the Dean Kamens and the old Carl Sagans and these people as role models? How do we find these? You talked about what do you do for kids, you know, and I think we need, yes, [unint.].

FS: Dean Kamen [unint.] this program called FIRST, which is...

Ira Flatow: Yes, he was mentioning that.

FS: Yeah. It’s really [inaud.].

Ira Flatow: Yeah. But you never see, I can’t think of a science program on TV now, where kids can look up to and say, ooh, I want to be Bill Nye, the Science Guy, or somebody like that, and you know the kids...

Christen Brownlee: Bill Nye was gimmicky, but he...

Ira Flatow: What’s that?

FS: I said, Bill Nye was gimmicky, but he got the job done.

Phil Southerland: It was a fun show to watch.

Christen Brownlee: Yeah. It was a super-fun show to watch, and kids really took to it.

Phil Southerland: As was Newton’s Apple, at that point.

Ira Flatow: Thanks. There was a show on CBS, there was a guy who was a big rat, he played a big rat, now what was his name? It was great, it was a great science show also. Beakman’s World, that’s what it was.

Alan Merten: But sometimes there’s a down side, because the gimmick may hide what science is. And it, and I think what we’ve got to remember, I think it was touched in some of the examples, the most important part of science is not the gimmickal nature, but I... As a relatively new grandfather, my current best example of the impact of science is compare the car seats that were available 30 years ago to the car seats for kids that are available today. And the story that I tell is, that’s science.

That’s science and engineering. I mean, that, you know, someone sitting in a car seat today is going to survive crashes that they never would have survived 30 years ago, because of science. And I think we need to, often in the public sector and other... Is point out what it is. We need, maybe we need 50 of those kinds of examples, not necessarily a gimmicky TV show, but more and more stories coming from scientists, coming from business, coming from government, coming from other places that really show what it is.

Ira Flatow: I... Go ahead.

Phil Southerland: Along with the car seat, how soon after the car seat was developed was it FDA approved? And how soon after it was FDA approved was it on market and available for people to buy? Because of that car seat, millions of lives will be saved, but it’s because it’s available to people. And I’ve been very fortunate to be involved in research programs and see a lot of the good products that are coming out there, the brilliant people who are working so hard to make my life better, or the lives of people with diabetes better, but there’s so many products... You know, they’re still 10 years away from being able to use some of these things. And, because... It’s just, how can we speed the process, you know, when there’s products that do make an impact, they do change lives, and it’s not just the kids with diabetes, the parents, but it’s our own economy.

Because these lives are going to... These products are going to enable us to have good control, and if on the current pace, people with diabetes don’t take care of themselves, 66% in another 50 years, we’re going to be a $434 billion a year cost to the US government, i.e., the US taxpayer. Us. So how can we get these products on the market to stop that cost before it even happens?

Tenley Albright: Is that FDA, or is it media? What does anyone think?

Phil Southerland: Well, the navigator’s FDA. There’s two products similar to it on the market right now, and they’ve had lackluster success, and I think FDA became cautious because of that, and allowing this one to come out when the tests have been far superior. But then from that, the products that are currently out there and our helping people, like DexCom, and...

Ira Flatow: Well...

Phil Southerland: They’re not being reimbursed by insurance companies.

Ira Flatow: Could it be that you don’t have enough type 1 diabetics? That companies will, ask someone to, Abbott to talk, Dr. Brown to talk about this. I mean, drug companies are interested in pills for the most popular diseases that they can make, you know, sell the most, make the highest profit on these. If you only have a few million diabetics, a few million, you know, they may not say this is something we want to sink our money into.

Phil Southerland: But there is a lot of money being sunk into it, from...

Ira Flatow: Well, from an advertising and promotional point of view.

Phil Southerland: From the research and investigational studies on these products. But where does it become user-friendly to the patient?

Ira Flatow: Right. You know, I saw last night on TV, or this week for the first time, something for an implantable defibrillator. Have you seen this ad? I mean, go in and ask your doctor about an implantable defibrillator. And it’s one of these medical devices that, ask your doctor things. I’m saying, wow. We’ve tweaked it up to a new level. You know, maybe if we had a commercial where type 1 diabetic people say, go in and ask your doctor about this pump, you might get someplace with this. But if it’s not FDA-approved, maybe you have to go a step further and say, go and ask your doctor to ask the FDA to approve it, because it’s not available. So it’s all what’s out, to my way of view, of looking, it’s all what’s out there in front of the public. The squeaky wheel gets greased. Dr. Berg?

William Brown: What I was going to say is, I think the most important thing that we focus on is to really come up with safe, effective products, to do prospective studies to publish on those things, and I think understanding really what will provide benefits to the patient or the clinician, and then making sure that you’re doing all the right studies, making sure there’s awareness through publications and whatnot, you know, those type of benefits. As they’re brought forward, things will move forward.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: I was just, sort of back on the issue of reaching the public about what science is about, I think certainly the importance, and the ability to really help people and have a broad impact on people’s lives is one part of it. The other part, I think, is just how much fun it is to be a scientist. And I’m, you know, that’s something that, it’s hard to figure out how to get that message out in a way that doesn’t sound hopelessly geeky.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: I was just, sort of back on the issue of reaching the public about what science is about, I mean I think... Certainly the importance and the ability to really help people and have a broad impact on people’s lives is one part of it. The other part, I think, is just how much fun it is to be a scientist. And I’m, you know, that’s something that... It’s hard to figure out how to get that message out in a way that doesn’t sound hopelessly geeky and everything, [unint.].

Ira Flatow: Well, there are easy ways to do it. I mean, there are very easy ways to do it. I was asked, about 10 years ago, by the National Science Board at a retreat, to come recommend to them how would they get, you know, the NSF name or science out in general to the public so they’d recommend it. And I said, it’s very simple. Take an ad out on the Super Bowl. Everybody watches the Super Bowl. Everybody makes it a point to watch the ads on the Super Bowl. Take an ad out and promote what you do.

Tenley Albright: And how much do they cost you?

Ira Flatow: And I say it doesn’t matter. You’re getting a big bang for your buck. I said, you know, the advertisers line up for this stuff, because they know they’re going to... I said, I said, what would you say on it? I said, well, look. Look at Archer Daniels Midland. Who ever heard of them, ten years ago? But they now sponsor McNeil-Lehrer, and then... Every night, and they show a little ad that says, they just have pictures that go by. Show all the pictures of the research that you’re involved in. Bing bing bing bing bing. Who makes these things possible? Bing bing bing... And the internet thing, we do.

We’re the National Science Foundation. You don’t have to say anything. Let all the pictures do all the talking. Half the room got it, half the room didn’t, which is typical in committees, you know? It’s a great idea, then half said, well, we can’t take out ads. I said, you’re creative. Call them public service announcements. Whatever you want to call them. That sort of thing. But if you want to reach the public, you’ve got to get into the trenches with the people who know how to reach the public. And that’s the advertisers and promoters and whatever. But I’m sorry, Dr. Albright [ph.]. Did you... You were questioning how much it cost?

Tenley Albright: Well, I see that as, I think we could get all sorts of prevention and health messages and everything out with those...

Ira Flatow: Yes, you could.

Tenley Albright: And it’d be terrific, but it’s astounding. I mean, it’s mind-boggling when you hear the amounts that those ads cost.

Ira Flatow: Well, you... That’s shooting big because you have a huge audience. But per person, I don’t want to get into advertising game on this, but per person, that’s not a lot of money, what they’re spending.

Tenley Albright: No, but...

Ira Flatow: We could work on a smaller level. On the other hand, you could look at it from the other side, what does it cost not to do this? From the health side, Dr. Berg. What does it cost if people don’t... Are not... Don’t go in and get treated for whatever disease [unint.]...

Tenley Albright: So is that the insurers who should pay for it? Who should pay for it?

Ira Flatow: I don’t know. I think the NSF should pay for it at this point. Or the government, the federal government, or NIH, or somebody. If they really... My point is...

Tenley Albright: Great.

Ira Flatow: If we really want to reach the public with a message, there are easy ways to reach the public so that they pay attention.

Jeremy Berg: Right. But I think, I mean... I think the question is, how... Or one of the questions, is how to frame the message in such a way that it comes across as, you know, capturing the thrill of, you know, being the only person in the universe who’s ever known something. And it’s not a simple message, but it’s... We’re certainly trying to do as much outreach and communications to get the public more aware of what fun and how important scientific careers are. But it’s not without its challenges, that’s for sure.

FS: That’s part of the collaboration...

Jeremy Berg: Right.

FS: That we were talking about. Maybe the collaboration is between science and marketing [inaud.]?

Ira Flatow: Maybe you need to bring another collaborator in. Yes, ma’am, who... You had a question.

FS: [inaud.]... I think there’s another issue, as well. I’ve been type 1 diabetic for, oh god, 25 years. And there’s a component... There’s a ton of endocrinologists who are great doctors, but who aren’t given the information on the insulin pumps, or the... The other drugs that actually, when they’re finally approved by the FDA, so if a parent does find out about it, a lot of parents have a hard time convincing their doctors to use it, because they’re not familiar with it. So they don’t want to put a 12-year-old child on an insulin pump if they don’t know how to use it.

So I think that educating the physicians is just as important as educating the public. And there’s so much negative information about type I diabetes that’s out there, which is necessary to get the funding, but so many people that have type 1 diabetes just kind of think, well, I don’t have to see it, it doesn’t affect me until I have a 37-reading blood sugar, and then I just drink a gallon of milk and I’m fine.

And when I got pregnant, there was no positive information out there at all about pregnancies. So I started a group, and there’s 150 of us now, who’ve all had positive diabetic pregnancies, and got through it just fine. But we had to hammer our endocrinologists with information. Bring it in there, and show it to them, convince them to put us on the insulin pump. And it’s not easy, even if you’re given the information and you advocate for yourself, which most people don’t. So I think that’s another problem that needs to be addressed.

Phil Southerland: What is that group?

FS: That I found?

Phil Southerland: Yes.

FS: The Sugar Mommas. We needed a catchy phrase. We’re all type 1 diabetic women who have careers and have had pregnancies.

Phil Southerland: I like it.

FS: Yes.

Phil Southerland: Well, and you definitely struck a chord there by saying the patient... The physician information, and when it comes to type 2 diabetics, who are the...

Ira Flatow: The rising population.

Phil Southerland: They’re the rising population, they’re the future of research, because...

Ira Flatow: Health care. They’re the future of health care.

Phil Southerland: Health care, yeah. I mean, everyone’s going to have it. Or at least, one in three kids born in the last five years is project by the CDC to have type 2 diabetes at some point in their life. Now, most physicians out there don’t know what an A1C is. You know, there’s a lot of type 2 diabetics who go in to their doctor and they say, diet, exercise, and you’ll be all right.

They don’t check their A1C. And an A1C is, for those who don’t know, is a 3-month measure of your cumulative average of how you’ve done with your blood sugar, and... Was it a... DCCT studies said that A1C under 7 for 10 years, you decrease the risk of complications almost close to 100%. So if we have physician education out there to where all physicians are educated on A1Cs, and how to administer them and how to teach their patients what to do, we could see a drastic change in the way that things are run.

Alan Merton: You talked before about getting the media. We had a fascinating experience last March. We had more opportunity to talk about our science programs around the country and around the world, because of our basketball team. But we were ready. Every day in... Dan Walch [ph.] is part of our media group. Every day, we sent out press releases on our science programs and related programs, and they got picked up. Sometimes, when we talk about the media, we talk about being used by the media, but maybe every once in a while we need to use the media.

Ira Flatow: You have to be creative.

Alan Merton: You have to be creative.

Ira Flatow: You have to be very creative. Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So the equivalent of March Madness for us is October in Nobel week. And NIGMS has supported 64 Nobel Laureates over its 45-year history, and every year we’re sort of anxiously... You know, I’m up as soon as the site is posted on the Nobel web site finding out who they are. One of the things that we did this year is, someone in our communications office realized that science writers are in this terrible position of being in the same thing, looking at this thing and having no way of getting information on... You know, there’s fast turnaround about what the science means, who the scientists are, so we were very proactive about offering up resources to them first thing.

So I did... Of this year, about the Nobel Laureate and some [unint.] Laureates in medicine and physiology, and in chemistry, were long-time NIGMS grantees. I did 21 newspaper interviews and 2 radio interviews over that 3-day period, and my favorite moment was when the New York Times reporter asked me, so what is America doing that they’re winning all these Nobel prizes? And I was thinking, gee, if I miss this one I’m going to get fired. Well, I think it has something to do with taxpayer support for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. And that got quoted, more or less, you know, in that form. And it was a great opportunity.

Ira Flatow: You have to know how to... Yeah. Imagine if we could watch the Nobel prizes. I mean, I’ve always thought about if I could get somebody, I would say, let’s treat it like the Emmy. The Emmys, the Academy Awards. Let’s send people to the red carpet and talk to these people, and let’s put it on, you won’t get television to cover it because they’re not in the education business. But now that we have the internet...

Jeremy Berg: Well, it’s on the internet.

Ira Flatow: We can... Yeah. I mean, now, finally, it’s happened, but I’ve said over the years, why not... Let’s send some, you know... If you want to make it look good, if you want to show that it is important enough to treat it like we normally treat something really important, like the Emmys or something.

Phil Southerland: What about getting the Indies, or... Of the Nobel prize, the people who win those awards, and the people who are helped by those awards, to get together and do press stories, and press releases, or you could say, thanks to the scientists, thanks to research, thanks to Research!America and associations such as this, that, you know, I can now live a normal life.

Ira Flatow: Well, what other collaborations do you need... Yes. Let me just ask this question. What other collaborations do you think we need to make? That we’re not making?

Christen Brownlee: Well, definitely one between scientists... Definitely one between scientists and reporters, and that’s something that I see as being valued more and more. When I first started writing about science, sometimes I would call scientists and they would say, oh, I’m not interested. Like I was making some offer to them, like I was a telemarketer, calling them to get them to talk to me. And now I think more and more scientists are seeing, this is how... This is how they’re going to get money to do their research, if the public... If they strike a chord with the public, and people get really excited, well that’s when the grantors also get really excited.

Ira Flatow: Many, many years ago, it was very easy to call a scientist at NIH and talk to him, and you can’t do that any more.

Christen Brownlee: Yeah, no you can’t. So that’s...

Ira Flatow: And that is a big barrier.

Christen Brownlee: That’s something I would like to lodge a complaint about.

Ira Flatow: You know, I remember when... You can’t talk to a... He has to say, I have to kick it upstairs, and get okays, and...

Christen Brownlee: You know, strangely enough, it’s only within the past couple of years that this has become a major problem. I think it’s been ramping up in that direction. I’m not sure what the change was in the past couple of years, but now when I call, it’s very difficult.

Ira Flatow: I think it was five years, to be exact, is what it was.

Christen Brownlee: Yeah, I think so. Actually, I must say, though, NIGMS is one of the best, and your press group? Spectacular.

Jeremy Berg: Thank you.

Ira Flatow: It’s very difficult, because you used to be able to... You know, this is a major barrier. I’ve been doing this for over 35 years, and you used to be able to get a story going, and get a rapport and whatever with a scientist, and you’d follow them over a long period of time, but now you just go to other scientists. I can’t wait, I have a deadline, I can’t wait for these phone calls to go through, and whatever.

Jeremy Berg: Call us.

Ira Flatow: Call us. Yes, you have a question.

FS: Yeah, I wanted to say, [inaud.]...

Ira Flatow: Wait, the mike is on the way.

FS: Thank you. First of all, I think we should stop saying that science is too hard, because then you start from a position of elitism, and who the heck wants to hang out with that. So, I’m a microbiologist by training, not in practice any more, but last week was Occupation Week at my daughter’s day care, and all the parents, because we all work, were asked to come in and talk about what it is we do. And I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to talk to a room of 4-year-olds about microbiology, and being a scientist. It’s the beauty of having a 4-year-old. She thinks I’m cool because I’m a microbiologist, and because I was the drum major in the marching band. I mean, it’s really good for me right now.

But I didn’t go in there and go, it’s too hard, so how am I going to dumb it down for 4-year-olds? Instead I went in, it’s something 4-year-olds need to know about, and then made it, you know, in their life. So we talked about, you know, you’re sick, and you sneeze in your hands, and you have to wash your hands to get rid of the microbes that are viruses and germs, and... It’s not too hard, you just have to make it relevant.

So I think we need to stop saying it’s too hard. It’s just not too hard, okay? And then the other thing. So I’m at Northwestern University, and kind of realized over time that just because the researchers are outstanding at doing the research, they may not be outstanding at teaching the research. Maybe they can do a terrific job in the higher education realm, but that certainly doesn’t qualify us to be the experts at K through 12. And so one of the partnerships, Dr. Albright, who you can appreciate is, we’re not talking with the scientists, we’re talking with our folks, the faculty and the school of education, who deal with K through 12 education curriculum development, and education reform.

And then on the other side of that partnership are the schools, who have the kids, who know what it is and how to engage them, and how to deal with parents, and curriculum, and the mandates of local school boards and things like that. So for us, the bridging the sciences is bridging into a different kind of community. But really, if nothing more, please, everybody, let’s stop saying science is too hard.

Ira Flatow: Well, I think you have a problem that’s related to that, is that scientists don’t know how to tell what they do. They can’t speak English to tell you what they do.

FS: They’ll go, it’s too hard. [inaud.]

Ira Flatow: Because they’re... They’re not trained to talk to the public. And I go around talking about this, and I’ve had various universities... At the AAAS meeting many years ago, I hosted a panel discussion of, you know, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalists at a table, and I had three PhD post-docs stand out there with their overheads, and I had them present to us what you do. And the first person sat there for 40 minutes with slideshows and whatever, and here I’m talking about the best science writers in the country, and after 40 minutes, I stopped him, and I said, we haven’t got the slightest idea, and we’ve been covering this stuff for years, about what you do.

And I said, you know, it’s a molecule, right, of some sort? Yes. Can you put it in a bag? Can you make enough and put it in a bag and sell it? He said, yeah. I said, did you tell your boss that you work on this, and this is what you can do? And he said, no. I said, well don’t you work for a company that makes money by selling products?

He said, yeah, I’m just interested in the shape of the molecule. That’s my job. And he finally tried to explain in English what he did to us, and then the second person came up and saw what had happened to the first person, and was a little better, and she did a little better job of it, but I... We all concluded after this that we don’t think anybody should get a PhD without taking some sort of exposure to being in front of an audience, or in front of a camera, and being able to speak in English what you’re doing. And certainly now that science has to justify itself in Congress or wherever it is, and you call somebody up to testify about why should we fund your line of work or what you’re doing, and you can’t tell us what you do, you know, there should be some sort of training that goes on at the university level.

Alan Merten: I mean, more and more of the universities, we’re taking the scientists and putting them through media training.

Christen Brownlee: Yeah, it’s just very [unint.].

Alan Merten: I think one of the problems with scientists in the media is that scientists, and I’m a computer scientist, we have a desire for precision. And when you deal with the media, there’s maybe less, at times, of desire for precision.

Christen Brownlee: It’s broader brush strokes.

Alan Merten: And so if a faculty member gets quoted in the newspaper, and it’s 90% correct and 10% wrong, he or she is offended. I’m never going to talk to that reporter again, because they got it wrong. And what we have to do more in media training is say, they’re close. Don’t worry that they got 10% wrong. But that’s a totally different culture, between the media and science.

Ira Flatow: But they’re going to... I’ll get to you in a second, Bill. What they’re going to ask you more than what you actually do, because they’re really not interested in what you do, they’re interested in what impact it’ll have on people. And if you’re not ready with that answer, they’re going to put the answer in for you. See, and sometimes they’re very, they’re true, and you don’t even realize yourself what the impact of that is, but if you’re ready with that answer, because they’re really interested in the 4-second, 8-second sound bite of how it’s going to affect people. And that’s the kind of cultural change you have to make. And really, you know, they’re not interested in the... Maybe science news is, but the general public media is not interested in the intricacies of... Bill Brown?

William Brown: Yeah. What I was... I think you’re really right on. I mean, the one year I taught high school chemistry before I went back to graduate school, of course being the new high school chemistry teacher, this was in western Pennsylvania, I got all the football players. So I probably had the largest football, I should say chemistry class, in the state of Pennsylvania. But I can tell you, that time was invaluable for me, and probably one of the more critical things that really helped me transition to go work at Abbott [ph.]. Because in that case, I had to explain chemistry to the football players, and when I went to Abbott, I had to explain the science, the same type of thing, only in this case, to business people.

Ira Flatow: So you learned the importance of being able to...

William Brown: It was invaluable. And plus, you know, you’re doing 3 lesson plans a day, five days a week, you’re running the lab, and you’re getting in front of the students, and you have to communicate with them.

Ira Flatow: And it’s a real skill. It’s something you have to learn how to do. You know, some people come by it more naturally.

William Brown: It’s so valuable.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg [ph.], did you want to...?

Jeremy Berg: No, I was just going to say, I mean, one scientist used the term “lying the truth,” where you sort of, you round off the edges enough that it’s still mostly right, and you just ignore the, all the details that matter to scientists and don’t matter to anybody else. It is, no, it is a real... It can be taught, for sure. It is a real skill.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Albright?

Tenley Albright: Well, I’ve heard members of Congress say, why won’t the scientists speak to, tell them we want to hear from them. Why don’t they speak to us? So this would be helpful in that aspect, too. And a number of years ago at the American College of Surgeons, it was pointed out that you could always tell when the presenter was from the Mayo Clinic, because apparently as part of their resident training, there was somebody stationed at the back of the room to comment on their presentations of the case at rounds.

Ira Flatow: Yes.

William Brown: Just one other quick comment. Typically, I mean, if you think of communication as kind of a pyramid of information, typically scientists have a pyramid that’s kind of inverted. They start at the bottom, they give all the facts, and they work their way toward the conclusion. In business, it’s actually the opposite. You know, you start with the conclusion, then you build towards it. So the way you communicate, whether you’re with a scientific group or with a business group, let’s say in my case, is really different. So you do... You need to know different types of communication techniques.

Ira Flatow: And is there a difference in the disciplines about, you know, are chemists more eager to talk, or is a biologist more eager... You could bring them all together here, it would seem...

Christen Brownlee: I think it’s a direct reflection of how much time someone spends in the lab, and how little time they spend actually living their lives. Because I can tell the people who, you know, have families at home, and have small children who are asking what mommy or daddy does for a living, because these are people who know how to explain anything, and anything is not too hard to explain. I appreciate you saying that. Because, I mean, I’ve written about the Human Genome Project for a preschool audience. I mean, honestly, this is something that anyone can get if it’s done in the right context.

Alan Merton: Your comment about the reporters dealing with faculty or scientists, one of the things that we’ve tried to do is to convince the, our scientists, the faculty scientists that when you get a call from someone in the media, they really do have a deadline. You know, that the message to call them back...

Ira Flatow: They do. They do. They’re not thinking of...

Alan Merton: You have to call them back. You can’t say, well, I’ll get to them tomorrow, because tomorrow is too late, and that’s a very difficult sometimes concept to say, well, you know, I’ve got to talk to my scientist friends, and if I have time I’ll call the media. And you call the media, and the article’s written. And you’re not in it.

Ira Flatow: You know, I said before that the most, the greatest source for news is the local newscast at 6 and 11. And I... Years ago, I learned a little trick that I’ll share with you about how to get through the, to get through the gates over there is to call the weatherman. If you have a story and you want to move it along, call the weatherperson. Because that’s the only person who might have some sort of science background on the staff. I’m serious. And they usually are looking for something else to do besides the weather, because they don’t want to just... Four minutes a night, you know? And a lot of them, a lot of people have these noon newscasts now, or the “live at 5,” or something like that, and there are good sources for either taking your idea and you’ve now got a foot in the door, and moving it up to the editor level, or saying, you know, this is something I could do, you know?

Or I could... A lot of them do have, you know, post-graduate degrees in meteorology and things like that, and it’s the only chance they get to do some sciences, is to find something extra. Yes, Dr. Albright.

Tenley Albright: Also, you’ve got the, there’s a real tie-in, the New England Journal right now, of course, which I learned not from reading the New England Journal, but from hearing it on the news, that not only human health and, as human health and environment health, they are, they’ve come together in this article in the New – the current New England Journal about the effect of air pollution on older women, as far as being related to the frequency of heart attacks and stroke. So there’s another, bringing another group together.

Ira Flatow: Yeah. Well, I would think that global warming also offers a huge opportunity to mix all the disciplines. You know, you get a lot of news from NASA about global warming. You would not think that that would be, their website has a lot about that. And you know, Dr. Hansen [ph.] comes from NASA. So they’re, a lot of these disciplines are mixing around, and global warming affects everything from diseases, you know, to mosquito populations, to drought, to everything. I would think that this, especially even Research!America would, you know, use this as a good opportunity to get into disciplinary approaches to these things. Well, another thing that’s interdisciplinary, and I want to bring up another topic, is of... Is nanotechnology. I mean, Dr. Abbott – Dr. Brown, how much of... Having my senior moment, here.

William Brown: I wish I was Dr. Abbott.

Ira Flatow: Yeah, I bet you do.

Jeremy Berg: He’s Dr. Costello.

Tenley Albright: There’s Dr. Health, and there’s...

Ira Flatow: Dr. Shrink. And there’s Dr. Science over there. How much, in the last couple of years, how much is nanotechnology offering an interdisciplinary, or an opportunity here? Dr. Albright, if you want to begin with this?

Tenley Albright: Well, I think about Belanger, because of the new nanotechnology in cancer. And that is bringing together biology, engineering, medicine, all sorts of groups, and it’s also linking multiple institutions, and of course, NIH.

Ira Flatow: Yes, Dr. Brown.

William Brown: I mean, for us, the technology we use in many of our analyzers is to, in order to detect different types of diseases, is to couple proteins to submicron particles. And the reason we do that is because it drives the kinetics and you get quicker results and things like that.

Ira Flatow: Did I see a hand out here? I thought I saw a hand out there. Peripheral vision. Where would be the, if nanotechnology is not it, Phil, did you want to say something?

Phil Southerland: No.

Ira Flatow: If nanotechnology is one area, where would be another really cutting-edge area of collaboration, Dr. Brown?

William Brown: Yeah. Obviously, what’s going on with proteomics. I mean, I think proteomics is...

Ira Flatow: Describe for people what...

William Brown: You know, what proteomics is, it’s really tools and techniques that are being used to identify proteins, through things like mass spec, related to different disease states. And I think, at least for us in the diagnostic field, this is going to be an incredible way to identify new proteins, new biomarkers, so that we can better diagnose disease. I think that’s a very exciting area, and then I think kind of coupled with that is everything that’s going on in telecommunication.

Because at the end of the day, once you’ve got the test result, you’ve got to be able to get the information to someone. So you can definitely see things like wireless technology linking, say, the core laboratory in a hospital to the physician, who’s actually seeing the patient. And any of these technologies, the nanotechnologies, or any of the things that are occurring in basic research, really, I can see in the last 20 years has enabled us to really reduce the time it takes to get the test result or the information. So, 20 years ago, when I started at Abbott or so, it would take 7, 8 hours, so you wouldn’t get it until the next day. Those type of things today, let’s say like a simple pregnancy test, which would be 4 or 5 hours in 1982, today can be done at home, on a strip. You get the information immediately. So this technology is really driving down the time, to where you can get the information and do something. It’s dramatic.

Alan Merton: I would agree on the proteomics, in our case, brings together our biodefense faculty with the bioengineering faculty with the computational scientists. I mean, it’s the place.

Ira Flatow: So just to tease us, Dr. Berg, did you want to...?

Jeremy Berg: I was just going to say, another area you mentioned, just computational biology, computational sciences, I mean, they’re... You know, biology is being overrun with data. There’ve been all these high-throughput methods that have been developed, where you can collect, you know, what used to be sort of inconceivable amounts of data, and it’s much more than you can handle by sitting down with a notebook and going through the data points one at a time, the way a lot of us grew up. So computational biology informatics is just a huge area, you know, developing... Mostly developing software that will allow people to sort through proteomics data, or genomic data, you know, both to just analyze it, but also good user interfaces that people can ask questions and get answers in 2 seconds, rather than a month worth of analysis to come back and say, nah, that’s nothing interesting.

Ira Flatow: Phil?

Phil Southerland: If I could comment on that, when I was a kid, it was 2 minutes for a blood sugar test. You know, if I was going to check my blood sugar 20 times a day, which sometimes is what it takes for great control, that’s 40 minutes of my day gone. You know, now we’ve got machines that are palm-sized, that fit in my palm, and it takes 5 seconds for a reading. You know, and I can check my blood sugar 300 times a day now, if it were that crazy, and it would take the same amount of time it took to check it 10 times, 15 years ago. And that’s, I mean, that’s what you guys do, the scientists do, the chemists, the physicists, to make things like that possible, and just make us, I mean, [unint.] become less efficient at multitasking, because I don’t have those 40 minutes to do that, but life has become better. Its’ better for kids.

Ira Flatow: Yes, ma’am. The microphone will be right there.

FS: The nanotechnology brings up another issue that I think portrays the stumbling block, whether it’s with diabetes or whatever. And it reflects on the need for collaboration. And the collaboration needs to be between industry, non-profit like NIH, etc., and the FDA. You know, whatever we’ve got going on the cutting edge of science, and all the potential products we have coming out, are very slow to get on-market because the science has not reached into the FDA.

And so, in that way it becomes very disturbing to me to see what’s happened with industry collaboration with NIH. And, not to mention the scientist, or scientists, and everyone probably has read it, but, you know, here a scientist did perfectly good science with industry, and because there was a difference of opinion about the study population, I don’t even know what the life of the scientists is like, left at NIH. And so somehow we’ve got to get above that, if we’re going to promote it. And it occurs to me that part of what we’re talking about is this intersection between science and politics.

And unless we examine that on whatever the scale is, science and public policy, science and what’s happening in the Congress between authorizing and appropriating funds, and you know, having a wooly feeling that things are going well, or we’re appropriating... We’re authorizing a lot of money, but it’s not actually getting down there. We need... That’s what part of this collaboration and bridging is. It’s got to include the politics of the event, also.

Ira Flatow: Any comments? Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So I think, you know, you raised the ties between NIH and industry. I mean, think of the conflict of interest stories that hit the press. Dr. Zerhouni took the, I think very wise, view that the most important issue was the public trust in government scientists, and the regulations that were imposed put that as the number one priority. There are still mechanisms, there are lots of collaborations between NIH scientists and industry, they’re just done by transparent mechanisms and the cooperative research and development agreements and so on, that have existed for a long time, and I think there’s certainly a great appreciation for the need for government scientists to be able to interact with private sector scientists, and really pushing things out into the real world.

With respect to the FDA, you know, there are similarly collaborations going on, we just had a workshop in December between NIH and the FDA, and representatives from pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, the HMO research network, on adverse drug reactions, or genetic basis of adverse drug reactions. And that’s an area where we’re knowing... We now know, in isolated cases, certainly, a lot about the genetic contributions to why some people react to drugs differently than others. And what we spent the day doing was trying to figure out where the common ground was between all these different stakeholders, and moving this forward so that everybody’s overlapping but different interests in this problem could be sorted through, to help get this information... Both get the science done, but also to have an implementation plan in place that when the science becomes strong enough, that the FDA and the insurance companies and everybody else sort of know what their plan is, to try to really get this implemented in an effective way.

Ira Flatow: Yes, sir. In the back.

MS: I do government relations for the University of Toledo, in Ohio, and I’d like to comment on both of Dr. Berg’s comment on... The comment about public policy. Because at the state legislature level, it’s all... State legislators are interested in science. They’re interested in supporting science. But the problem that universities have is that it all has to be practical. It all has to be applied. And the board of trustees have bought into it at state universities, and anything you do with science has to have a payoff, immediately. There’s very few universities that... Public universities that don’t have a technology park now. It’s just... Has to come with the territory.

You have to have a technology park, even if it’s just a field with a sign out front, because you need something to drive the legislators by, and say, see, we’re using your money effectively. And it brings a real dilemma for someone to speak personally, like myself, in government relations, because on the one hand you’re at the university talking with scientists who want, it’s very nice to have a large NIH grant, but it’s much nicer to have legislators who are supporting you with tens of millions of science dollars coming through the state university system.

Or maybe it’s nice to have both of those. But it’s a real dilemma for us, and I wondered if, just jumping off on that public policy comment, if we could go down that road a little bit.

Alan Merton: I think from my view of the university’s perspective, we... In general, we don’t do a very good job, we talk about telling the story to the general public, we don’t do a very good job of telling our legislators. And I think more and more, at least in Virginia, we’ve decided we have to spend time with governors, and members of the state Senate, members of the House, informing them of what we’re doing. And we had a breakthrough last year, when Governor Warner put money into the budget that was more directed to basic research.

Now, the question is, are we going to have to fight for it every year, and then every year we’ve got to make sure that we get another, a governor who supports it, and we get more and more members of the House and Senate to support it. It’s not going to come unless there’s really aggressive political pressure, not only placed on them by us, but we use the business community to put pressure on members of the General Assembly to support science. It was raw politics. Raw politics.

Ira Flatow: We saw the... In the survey you took about how the public thinks of science as being health or medicine. Do you, in looking for research, do you have to look for health or medicine topics if you’re going to get it funded in your university?

Alan Merton: I’d say yes.

Ira Flatow: And you can’t start out from the physics or the chemistry side and say...

Alan Merton: You... Nice try, but you’ve got to have a health and medicine component, at the state level. I’m not, you know, I don’t comment on the federal level. But at the state level, if you’re going to push... If you’re going to push the research agenda of state legislators and governors, there’s got to be a heavy health and medical component to it.

Ira Flatow: So you can’t come up with a project, let’s say like the kind of thing that MIT went and worked on, not in the health field, but some other kind of technology, it might come up with a fuel cell, or something for global warming or something else, you have to approach it from the health side.

Alan Merton: Either... Primarily the health science, the health side, and the second would be economic development. If you can show economic development relatively quickly, almost like they give you more leeway on the health and... Or health and medicine side, they know it’ll take a little longer, but if you’re going to try to sell it on economic development, it better be next year.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So. You know, I think the balance between basic and applied science is always a topic of much discussion. The NIH tracks this, and things haven’t changed very much in... Like, last year 55% of the science that was supported by NIH was classified as basic research. You know, it certainly has a health connection at some level, but a lot of it is pretty distant, and that, I think, has paid off many, many times over.

I mean, the... You know, the Nobel prize in medicine or physiology, where Andy Fire and Craig Mello were working on new methods for regulating gene... You know, studying gene regulation in little nematode worms, and they discovered this RNA interference phenomenon, and were smart enough to realize what they had. And over a remarkably short period of time, that’s gone from this sort of odd observation to, you know, a research tool that’s as powerful as mass spec in terms of driving research, but also something which is now in clinical trials in a number of different diseases, completely impossible to predict. So I think you can, you can make those cases of long-term investment paying off. And you obviously intend to, sort of like a mutual fund.

You can’t say, I am sure that this discovery is going to lead to that outcome, but you can say, here are 100 really spectacular scientists who are doing, following their noses, looking at the, what they think are the most interesting questions, and 5 or 10% of them are going to do things which are going to turn out to be, you know, have some more practical economic, health-related implication.

Ira Flatow: Is this... Dr. Merton, I want to stay on this topic a little bit. Is this because the people at the university are looking at it from a purely business point of view, or might I just throw out the idea that if you had a little more science-related people on those committees that decide, they would understand the more importance of basic research? That doesn’t happen.

Alan Merton: Yeah. I think it would help us to have more, both at the federal and the state level, more people who understand science, but I don’t think we can hold our breath on that. I mean, it’s... The numbers are small, the numbers will be, continue to remain small, so you almost have to talk, [unint.] you have to influence the influencers. You have to influence the general public as to what you’re doing with research dollars is important, and then they influence the people who are making decisions, and state legislators.

Ira Flatow: It’s almost the same problem we have in the media. There’s a parallel universe here. Because we don’t have people in the media at the top who appreciate and really understand science, and they’re not interested in putting a lot of it on there, and then again, you say well, if they get more attention, they will be appreciative, but it’s a sort of a circular thing. Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So what one communication approach which we’ve taken is sort of tracing back applied discoveries, and seeing where they things came from. So a good example is magnetic resonance imaging. A lot of people know about it, a lot have had, you know, if you’ve had a knee injury, or more and more in breast cancer and so on, MRIs, and certainly in the brain, is an incredibly powerful tool. It was developed by physicists, who actually, there’s a quote I’ve been trying to find the source for, I’ve heard it from reliable sources, but I’ve never been able to actually get a clear, written version of it. One of the people who did it at Stanford, his, one of his comments was, the nicest things about magnetic resonances was it was pure physics, it would never have any applications to anything. Totally wrong. You know, it has applications to everything. It’s the most powerful analytical tool in chemistry, has huge impact in medicine... But to...

When there is, with legislators or with Congress or with the public, if you can say, here is a discovery, the insulin pump, or whatever, that now is having practical impact, the technology that led to this was, here’s where it all came from, and it all comes together, and you need to have this broad base and mechanism for bringing things together. And that’s what I think today is a lot about. [unint.]

Ira Flatow: That’s right. The MRI story’s even more interesting, because they had to change the name of it.

Tenley Albright: Yes.

Ira Flatow: To get it accepted. It used to be nuclear magnetic resonance, or something, right? And they didn’t want the word “nuclear” in it, so they had to change it to be something else, so that the public would not be afraid to put their head in the machine or something.

Jeremy Berg: Paul Latimer, who... One of the people who won the Nobel prize, his original term for it was zoigmatography, a term that was destined for a short life, I think.

Ira Flatow: So that there are a lot... I mean, you have to bring a lot of partners in on this. You know, even from deciding what to call it. A lot of collaborations have to go on. Let me go back to Bill Brown, because he seems to be like our focal point on what new things are happening. What areas are ripe that have not really panned out yet, but that you see in the next ten years?

William Brown: Yeah, I... For our area in a diagnostic area, number one is, everything, you know, whether it’s happened with the Human Genome Project, or proteomics, I think is going to lead to a wealth of new biomarkers. They’re going to... That are going to improve both the sensitivity and the specificity for diagnosing disease. I think that’s one thing. I think the second thing is that things are going to become smaller, and they’re going to become more portable, which means that the testing and the information, it’s going to get closer and closer to the patient and the physician who does the treatment.

And I think that that, really, is going to help, as I kind of look at it, reduce the cycle time. Whether, we talked about, Phil talked about the time it took from when he, you know, would prick his finger to when he would get the result, and you know, minutes to seconds? I think those type of improvements, and I think it’s going to be a coupling of the Human Genome Project, what’s happening with proteomics, and then all the telecommunication activity is going to take the testing, which is really just information, and get it closer and quicker to the people that need that information.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So I, you know, one of the other, as I mentioned, I hit at little bit with the adverse drug reactions, but personalized medicine and pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenomics, and it is an area which is just exploding, and going to continue, you know, looking toward the future...

Ira Flatow: Tell us what that is.

Jeremy Berg: So, people respond to drugs... Different people respond to the same drugs in different ways. Some of that’s genetic, some of that’s environmental, other drugs they’re taking, their diet, exercise, whatever. Because of the Human Genome Project, we now have incredibly powerful tools for trying to get at the genetic component of that. So one of the leading examples of this, there’s a drug used for treating childhood leukemia, mercaptopurine. And most people, you know, chemotherapy is always tricky. Sort of titrating up to the dose, you know, the highest dose that the patient could respond to. There were some kids where doses that normally people didn’t have trouble with, they were on death’s door very quickly. And what was discovered is that there is an enzyme that metabolizes the drug, and these kids either had a defective enzyme or didn’t make enough of it, so a dose that would be okay for most kids was way over their threshold. That’s just one example. Blood thinners, Coumadin, warfarin, which is used... There are genetic components of how that drug is metabolized.

So there’s a big arc now to, when you put somebody on blood thinners after orthopedic surgery or other things, you have to get the dose right, and that takes, typically, weeks to months, and lots of cost in testing and so on, to get them on the right dose. With the genetic, you know, being able to genotype them first and saying, here’s your genetic background, we believe, and are in the process of trying to prove, that that can be done much more quickly, more easily for the patients, cost savings for the health system, and so on. But there are... Every drug that you can imagine, we’re all different by .1% of our DNA, and a lot of those differences have to do particularly with the genes that control how we metabolize drugs. Make a big difference on how we respond. So I think the future is fairly clear, that in ten years, we’re going to have a lot of genetic information available, although with public policy about privacy and so on...

Ira Flatow: That was my next point.

Jeremy Berg: High up on the list.

Ira Flatow: Yeah, that’s a big issue with the public, is worrying about what happens to their genome.

Jeremy Berg: Well, I mean, the Congress has been working on the genetic privacy legislation for a long time, and I hope that’s something that will be accomplished very soon. I think, from the point of view of public perception, there have been studies that have been done within the pharmacogenetics research network, the NIH group that’s been working with many institutions on this, and the public actually believes that doctors are already using this information much more than they are. So they’re much less afraid of it, just because they think the medical profession is already doing it. You know, I think the question is really just doing the right sort of science to get the basic science done, and then getting the evidence base to really get into the sort of issues of making the case to insurance companies, and HMOs, and physicians, that this is really something that’s going to allow better patient care and reduce costs. And I think that will happen.

Alan Merton: Another area is the neurosciences. At least, if I look at what I’m spending on facilities for our neuroscientists, hiring neuroscientists, and then I go and I’m on a hospital board, and I look at the number of people that are being hired into neuroscience in hospital, there’s... I don’t know what it all is, but there’s something going on. You probably all know more.

Ira Flatow: Yeah. That’s the hot thing.

Alan Merton: It’s the hot thing.

Ira Flatow: It’s not plastics anymore.

Jeremy Berg: Well I think, you know, coming back, back to magnetic resonance imaging, one of the most powerful tools in the social sciences and psychology is functional magnetic resonance imaging. This is an imaging technique where you can actually see what parts of your brain are active when you’re doing different sorts of activities, and that was discovered completely accidentally by people working on rats, and what they discovered was they had two images of the same rat, and the brain images looked very different.

And it turned out that in one case the rat was over-anesthetized and wasn’t breathing very much, and it was oxygen-deprived, and there were these big differences and contrast. And it turns out that your brain sends oxygen to the parts of the brain that you’re using, and this is now, you know, transforms psychology from a very tough, data-poor sort of science, to now you can have a hypothesis and really develop a much more substantial...

Ira Flatow: You can watch how people are thinking, as they’re thinking.

Jeremy Berg: Pretty close, yeah.

Alan Merton: To show you how far it’s going, we’ve got a group of our economists now working with the neuroscientists, looking at your brain as how you make economic decisions.

Tenley Albright: Yeah.

Ira Flatow: Oh, the advertisers are in there also, watching what lights up. They are.

Jeremy Berg: Oh, absolutely.

Ira Flatow: Stuff... Yes, ma’am, you had a question.

FS: I wanted to raise one of the areas that I think will be equally important, and it has really evolved in the sciences, is the area of nutrition. And you see this news on trans-fat, you see the area of nutrition even in the fashion industry, and we, the scientists, didn’t pick up on that opportunity. There are so many opportunities that are in our current day-to-day living, and I also think it’s much easier to talk to the political world about what they’re having for lunch, maybe, than talking to them about a disease that they might get in the future. So the areas of nutrition, and making it fun and interesting, also for children, that’s become a very hot topic.

Ira Flatow: Nutrition. Dr. Berg?

Jeremy Berg: So I... You know, that’s one of the challenges there, is pushing the science base. So I remember, a couple of years ago at a Congressional hearing, Dr. Zerhouni was asked, you know, what NIH was supporting to prove that the Atkins diet was really a wonderful thing. And his response, or I think Alan Spiegel, who was the head of one of the institutes, was on the spot, and he said, you know, we’re doing the studies, but a lot of times these fad diets turn out not to have a very good scientific basis. And that’s an important issue of saying, you know, here’s something that’s becoming very popular; can we prove scientifically that it is or isn’t helpful in certain ways?

FS: Well, look at the chocolate industry, the wine industry, pomegranate juice. I think that, you know, it’s interesting to see how the food companies could contribute to the messaging, and do contribute to the messaging.

William Brown: Yeah, obviously as part of Abbott laboratories, they have [unint.], that initially started out as infant formula, but it’s been interesting to see how it’s evolved over time to develop specific foods for diabetics, as an example. Snack bars that, instead of having your glucose levels go through the roof and then come back down, kind of control the level of glucose over time. And what I’ve been seeing there, and I don’t work in that area but I obviously get information related to their products, is they’re really starting to develop nutritional products that are specific for certain things. Whether it could be diabetes, recovery after surgery, sports bars, and things like that. So it’s been interesting to see how that has evolved over time.

Ira Flatow: I think another topic I want to talk about... Yes. While you’re getting the microphone, let me just ask, what about a remote diagnosis and treatment, and... In the future. People using hybrid of medicine, and you mentioned the internet and remote scanning and... Dr. Berg, you want to talk about that?

Jeremy Berg: So this is an area that I know mostly, my wife is an MD/PhD pharmacologist who does breast imaging. And certainly in radiology, the ability to transmit images over the internet or over telephone is having a huge, huge impact there, both in terms of getting images to experts, but also just getting the work done, that there’s a whole industry of, you know, night hawks, and people who get to live in Hawaii and work during the day and read the images that are being read in the continental states during the night.

William Brown: Yeah. I was recently at Milwaukee VA, and they had set up a telecommunications center, where they were able to take the digital imaging that they were doing and basically share it across their network of physicians, and it was almost... They’re teleconferencing while they’re looking at the images, and then trying to... Almost kind of like a group collaboration to help with the diagnosis. It was pretty impressive.

Ira Flatow: Would we ever be able to send the imager to your home, and have it done remotely that way?

Jeremy Berg: Sure. Absolutely.

William Brown: They’ll probably have it on a chip somewhere that they have somewhere.

Jeremy Berg: This brings another issue of bridging different fields together. One word which has become incredibly sexy and fashionable, which I never thought it would be around NIH, is ontology. This is just a controlled set of vocabulary and terms that people use for a given field. And it’s so important that, you know, if you’ve got three radiologists looking at the same image, if they see the same things, it would be really helpful if they called it the same thing. And, you know, developing that sort of controlled vocabulary is incredibly important for collaboration.

It’s even more important when you start getting computers involved, because computers aren’t as good as people in sorting this stuff out, and so there now are, through programs that NIH supports and other areas, really looking at the science of how groups of people develop a controlled vocabulary to use. I mean, a good example that the public certainly understands is file formats for sharing documents. I mean, .pdfs have had such a huge impact, because you can send somebody a file and they can actually read it. I remember the days when word processors were new, and everybody had their own, you know, Word, and WordPerfect, and WordStar, and... You know, trying to collaborate, you’d send them a document and they’d say, I can’t read it, and back and forth. That’s happening in medicine and research all the time, and I think we have to find ways to work, you know, with scientists, with industry, to develop standards that everybody can live with, and there’s lot’s of compromises involved. And to try to line up the incentives so that people have a vested interest in developing a standard that everybody can use and build on, rather than the sort of Microsoft model that everybody develops their own standards, that’s intentionally incompatible, because they want to be the one that dominates the whole market.

Ira Flatow: So you’re in favor of open-source science.

Jeremy Berg: Absolutely, where it’s appropriate.

Ira Flatow: Some gentleman... There he is, I’m sorry.

MS: Interested in pulling the discussion back for a moment to innovation, but not necessarily about the medical and scientific innovations, but looking more at this question of effective communication and education, and reaching the public. I’m involved with an effort, many of you may be familiar with, the National Health Museum is a project that Chick Koop, the former Surgeon General, originally visualized back in the 90s, actually. It has evolved significantly in its concept, and we are now looking, not really at a traditional museum facility, a four-wall building alone, but really creating an information platform.

And we’ve already begun doing this with the website for health and biology teachers, it’s pulling in 12 million plus hits a month, we just launched our 2 nd traveling exhibit with support from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute on cardiac health. It’s up in Baltimore at the Maryland Science Center, and will be spanning the country soon, we hope.

But this notion of setting aside some very effective strategies maybe earlier in time, but looking more to a communication strategy that is informed by some bracing new realities in the way people are getting their information. Kids, particularly, how they’re receiving it and using it, and looking outside the box to work together and collaborate on some very effective and very creative information strategies is what we’re about. And as we look towards the future, it increasingly appears to us that innovation in this very question of how you communicate, and educate, and motivate people, is going to be at least as important as the good, hard science.

Ira Flatow: Anybody...?

William Brown: Yeah, you know...

Ira Flatow: The teacher’s speaking?

William Brown: Yeah, the teacher’s speaking. You know, one of the things we’re starting to look at this year is something called open innovation, and some of you may be aware of this, but there are actually internet sites where you can post your problems, it’s almost like eBay for science, okay? And actually, one of my scientists walked down and said that someone had posted a problem on one of these sites that they were willing to spend a million dollars to develop a test for Lou Gehrig’s disease. And so I think, you know, the application of the internet, and this idea of forming communities, I forget – what’s the name of the encyclopedia that’s online?

Jeremy Berg: Wikipedia.

William Brown: Yeah. It’s a great example of, you know, something like that around maybe science themes and whatnot, to get groups that could be targeted towards schoolchildren or things like that, as a way to basically kind of bring communities together, to kind of share what they’re learning. And I think, you know, this idea of being able to apply some of this open innovation, I mean, there are smart people around the world, and there’s so much information. The key is to figure out the right format to really apply the capability of the internet to bring these things together.

Ira Flatow: Oh, the internet is a great spot now for this kind of stuff. There are these social communities like Facebook...

William Brown: Yeah.

Ira Flatow: That we, I know from our show, we had a... I got a, my daughter goes to school at GW here, and she called me up one day and said, Dad, there’s a Science Friday Facebook community. I didn’t even know what Facebook was that many months ago. And people are talking about science on there, and so, you know, you have these college and high school students talking about Science Friday and science and all, and they started it themselves. I said, I know I didn’t even know about it. And I mentioned it on the air, I did what was called a shout-out, that I didn’t even know I was doing. And we got, you know, we have over 500 new members now since I talked about it, and there’s a community of people who are willing to talk... And these are college kids, willing to talk about science, and I’m going to try to use them as a resource, to ask them what they want to talk about. You know, what’s interesting to young people. And there are high school kids on there also. But there is a tremendous opportunity here, because we want to ask them to collect video and audio that they’re...

Go to your university or whatever you do, when you’re interested in science, send it to us, and we’ll put a space on it in MySpace or in Science Friday, and we’ll feature it, and you can start talking to yourselves, and interacting about what interests you in science. So the internet is a... You know, no one knows how to use it yet. And we’re all in this, trying to figure it out together. Oh, let me ask Dr. Berg and then I’ll go to you, Dr. [unint.].

Jeremy Berg: So first off, I agree wholeheartedly, and I think of the number of times that we just don’t think about the target audience and how technologically different they are, in lots of different ways. My brother and I have kids who are now juniors in college, and when they were in high school, I was trying to get... We were both trying to get our kids interested in computer programming, and just having no luck at all, and I was saying, geez, if I’d had a computer like this when I was his age, I would’ve been all over it! And my brother said, why would you be interested in the toaster? Because, you know, it’s just an appliance. It’s...

Ira Flatow: Right.

Jeremy Berg: The second thing is, I think the opportunities for doing science – on science here again – there are programs I know, a program at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where they’re developing a science curriculum that’s web-based, and has a back end that actually really tracks mouse clicks and find out when you have a class doing this, not only are you trying to teach this way, but you’re actually monitoring what the students are doing, and really trying to provide an evidence base for it. You know, this approach works for different populations of kids, or this approach doesn’t work at all, or this, you know, the faculty loves it and the students ignore it completely. Just trying to go in with open eyes and see what works.

Ira Flatow: Well, it’s... You know, yeah, I’ll get to you in a second. No one knows, I mean, this is such a wonderful time now, to be at, right at the beginning of this era, because you can experiment with all kinds of things, and you can try all different things. We’re, we try to, I have my web producer trying an experiment on MySpace. Let’s, we... Let’s take a clip of a science thing, something on a Science Friday, and let’s name it three different things. Let’s give it a sexy name that has something to do with it, but it’s sexy. Let’s call it the real thing of what it is, and let’s call it a neutral name. And let’s see how many hits it gets in different, just the name itself affects it, you know? And whether then once they discover the name is phony, they’re still interested in it, staying with it, watching the whole thing. So we’re going to see how important that presentation is. Yes.

MS: It’s a question for everybody up there. The whole conversation has revolved around human capital development issues, at every level. K to 12, K to 20, whatever. And the power of the internet as a useful tool for interconnecting people. And I was wondering what it would take to have all the various entities, the corporate world, the academic world, the government world, leverage their resources, pool their resources, to provide some sort of infrastructure that would facilitate the use of the internet for the kinds of things you’ve been talking about. For example, USC has had a haptic museum for a long time, so you can pick up a Ming vase in virtual space, and rotate it, and feel the texture of it. So that’s a very powerful learning tool for anybody in rural communities like Ms. Brownlee [ph.] was talking about, who won’t have an access, a chance to go to USC. So what would it take to leverage and pool your resources? The lady up there was asking about who’s going to pay for this. Well, and you talked about why not put money on the Super Bowl...

Ira Flatow: Well, I... I was... The Super Bowl I think is still a great idea, but let me relate to you an experience that we have. We give, we create free teaching material for Science Friday. You go on our website, and you click on the “for teachers” button. And we create curricula within a matter of a couple of days. We have a non-profit organization called KIDSNET that’ll take our stuff and turn it into free curricula that you can use the stuff we give away to teach it in Science Friday.

The problem with... It’s a great idea. The problem with it is that you have to have, teach the teachers how to use the material. You can put it up there, and you have the nice Ming vase up there, but if the teachers don’t know it exists, and even if they know it exists, they don’t know how to use it because they’re not science teachers. You know, there’s a problem in itself, is right at the baseline of education. How do we teach the teachers to teach. Yeah.

MS: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications created [inaud.]...

Ira Flatow: I can’t... We’ll get the mike, give him the mike.

MS: NCSA has created a virtual institute, in which you have a master teacher who is working with teachers all around the country, to do exactly that.

Ira Flatow: But you, my question is even more basic than that. You have to motivate the school districts to get the teachers to go on to find that stuff. It’s a longer row of ducks you have to create. We found that we were actually having to go out and go to the school districts and set up a teacher... Teach the teachers day, where we teach them the simple stuff of how to use the curricula. Because the state of the teaching is so poor that even the science teachers, who are not science teachers but are science teachers, don’t know how to use, or don’t know how to find, or are not motivated because they’re afraid of it. So it may exist, and you may have people to train them, but getting, bringing that horse to the trough and getting it to drink we’re finding is one of the great problems. It’s there. You’re right, it’s all there. Yes, Dr. Albright.

Tenley Albright: I think a lot of us agree about a lot of the things we’ve learned about this morning, but I wanted, could we, before we end, spend a little time on... We have quite a group here, quite a remarkable group with ideas, and I just wonder, with the things we’ve been talking about, what could each of us do when we leave here? How could each of us help make a step toward accomplishing what we’ve been talking about?

Ira Flatow: Any volunteers? Yes, ma’am?

FS: I have a very [inaud.], very tiny steps that I actually take, and I have ideas to use, I think getting kids interested in science even younger than actually having teachers teach the material. How about giving Dora the Explorer an insulin pump, or have Spongebob Squarepants have to deal with some sort of chemotherapy or something that just brings it down to that level?

My 4-year-old can test my blood sugar, and she loves doing it. Anything that pokes me. She can disconnect my insulin pump, and all her friends that come to the house are shown it and given, and they have an interest in it, so they know, you know, god forbid I eat a piece of candy or something, they think I’m sick, but they understand the basic level of what other people are dealing with, instead of hiding it and giving them a sense of feeling ashamed if there is a young child that has that situation, but bringing it even lower, I think, is a really good first step. Because then you’re starting, and you’re building their own individual interest, and by the time she’s six, she’ll probably be researching on the computer herself, anyways. Because kids are so adept at that these days. So I think bringing it even lower is probably a good first step.

Alan Merton: You know, one thing we can do, and I remember years ago a meeting at Jamie Houghton, who at that time was the CEO of Corning. He said that he had 3 themes that, no matter what someone ever asked him to talk about publicly, he always raised these three issues. And I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I think... But he had them. And I’ve developed two or three for my... And no matter what your title of your talk is, no matter what you’ve been asked to talk about, you get five minutes or fifteen minutes in front of a group, if we talk about the issues associated with science, we could make a difference.

Ira Flatow: Well, you know, this is... I mean, I’ve followed this issue for many, very many smart and well-educated people have tried to tackle this over the last 35 years, going way back. How do you get science a topic of discussion on television, in sitcoms, in movies, whatever. When it is talked about, when there are major issues like, you know, when 3-Mile Island happened, followed by the China Syndrome, when these topics of discussion, and the films have been very effective.

And that has motivated a lot of scientists, and I can think of one in particular, named Leon Lederman, who’s a Nobel prize-winning physicist, who spent decades, decades, and I know him very well, because I used to collaborate with him with these bang your head against the wall efforts going to Hollywood and meeting with some of the biggest producers in Hollywood. And I remember, for example, he would meet with Norman Lear, many years ago, who created “All In The Family” and some of the biggest sitcoms, and he’d say, can’t you just create an episode that deals with this issue? Or, can’t you just... What keeps you from creating a TV series that’s based in a laboratory someplace? And you can make it as kooky as you want to, you know. They have all these hospital series going on now, why not make one in a lab and have kooky lab people, but at least we’ll see them doing research. And we’ll see that this is what scientists do, and it’s okay for kids to do this. And this has never happened, because unfortunately the media doesn’t see itself as an educator. They’re not interested in educating your 3-year-old about anything. They’re just...

And it’s just been told to me, direct to my face for so many years, that they say, we are in the business of selling soap to an age group. An advertiser will come to me and say, I want to sell a product to between the magical 19 to 34-year-olds, and we don’t know why they’re a magical group because the research doesn’t show anything to back it up, but that’s the Madison Avenue handed down from generation to generation.

You want to sell this product, we want you to make us a show that we can sell the product for. And they’ll go out and do what they think is the lowest common denominator to reach men aged 19-34, and you know what that is. So they’re not interested in creating anything of any educational value. And that point was driven home to me by a physicist who, many years ago, saw on a box of cereal a freebie given away. It’s a piece of... It was a little cup-shaped piece of plastic, and you press down on it and it popped up. You pressed down on it, and it popped up, and it was given away in the box of cereal.

And he thought, he was a physicist, very well known, and he said, what a great idea to teach some science. I’m going to go see if I can get an interview with the head of the company that makes the cereal and say, look. Kids are going to play with this thing, and they’re going to look at the box of cereal and read it, can you just put a little reading square on the box of cereal to explain the science behind why this thing pops up by itself? And we’ll get millions of kids to have a little science lesson every morning.

Wouldn’t that help America out a little bit, just a tiny fraction. So he had a meeting with the head of this, the cereal company, the chairman of the board came in, and... Big boardroom in Michigan. And he sat down and he said, he explained the idea to him, and the guy said, I think this is a great idea. Let me send you to the head of marketing, you tell him exactly what you told me. So the doors, panels opened and the... And another guy comes in and sits down and says to the physicist, I don’t know what you’ve got to say to me, but if it doesn’t sell one more effing box of cereal, I’m not interested in it. Physicist just got up and walked out.

I mean, that is the state of where our corporations and business is today, unfortunately, especially the media. They’re not interested in... We have to do that ourselves. We have to find the money, and the resources to educate our kids, you know, in channels that we can. Whether on public TV, which is a little better, public radio, or any... On the internet now, because they’re not going to do it for us. And it’s a... It’s just a sad state of the world and how it works. Dr. Berg.

Jeremy Berg: I’m going to argue with you.

Ira Flatow: Go ahead.

Jeremy Berg: I think “CSI:” is an example of a current show that may not have been designed to teach science, but I think part of its attractiveness is science.

Ira Flatow: You could say “Numbers” is the same thing.

William Brown: Well, what I was going to mention was, you know, medical shows. “Grey’s Anatomy.” My daughter knows everything there is to know about “Grey’s Anatomy,” if we could just figure out a way to get, you know, in addition to the interns that are maybe collaborating with a PhD on a research project, and seeing a patient, and trying to get them involved [unint.]...

Ira Flatow: Bill Nye has joined the “Numbers” show. I mean, he’s like a contestant. And in fact, you’ll see the little bit of imprints by people who get it. You know, for example, there was the, an episode on three, the first – “Numbers,” I keep seeing the three – “Numbers,” where they had the Fibonacci series explained in a flower. Remember that? And then a few weeks ago, they had that Mentos experiment in the Coke bottle? You know, the thing goes flying up, and they talked a little bit about it. So you can see the influence of some people who are really interested in it. But you have to really work hard to find those people. There’s not the attitude in general out there that we have to, we’re all in this together, it’s really the work of just a few people who are holding up, or raising the flag for the rest of everybody.

MS: I’d like to comment on [inaud.].

Ira Flatow: Yes.

MS: “Numbers.” My name is Tony Chan, I’m from the National Science Foundation. I, my home institution is UCLA, so I live in Hollywood. So, I actually was the math consultant for “Numbers,” for the pilot. As you know, it’s... It was loosely based on Cal-Tech.

Ira Flatow: Right.

MS: They actually, I think that series proved that the general public is interested in math and science. I think Hollywood is not in the business of education, as you said, but if they see an opportunity they make money, and also, seeing science as a vehicle to make money, why not? The writers are, is a husband and wife team for “Numbers.” They are not scientists, but they are very smart people. They understand the importance of this. In fact, Texas Instruments has, you know, picked up the patent.

They have organized a national organization of math teachers, I forgot exactly the term. And so if you go to the CBS website, to “Numbers,” you will see that the math teachers, K-12 teachers, are using “Numbers” as a teaching vehicle for their K-12 students. Last year, the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, I actually was one of the organizers of a session on “Numbers.” I have to tell you, we drew more people than the NSF session. I mean, I can tell you that. So...

Ira Flatow: I believe it. You know, I believe it.

MS: Yeah. And this year, we’re doing one in San Francisco on Pixar, and IOM, and things like that. So I think the Hollywood should not, you know, they’re not in the business of doing science, but they often are always blamed for ignoring science. And the truth is somewhere in between.

Ira Flatow: Well, they’ve ignored it until recently, but this is a fad. I mean, those TV series will run their, you know, their series, and “Numbers” will have its run for seven years until it goes into, makes enough money to go back and to recycle them. But what’s going to... Will they stay this way? It’s good to see this. And I have noticed this myself, recently, and this is a new phenomena. But how long will this, you know...

MS: That’s the real test.

Ira Flatow: Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be, what’s going to come after this. And all these, all these doctor shows, and I agree that, you know, it would be great to have some other focus in... Or something on “Scrubs” or something like that, you know? We get a little broader in the sciences there.

FS: Good morning. I’ve heard a lot of great ideas, but I want to get back to what can this group do to push the ball here. And I’m concerned that we haven’t sort of brought up what’s out there, which is we’re in a global, competitive economy, and I for one am very concerned about kids and science and math, not just science alone, because they go hand in hand. I’m also concerned about the demographics of our nation, and ensuring that women and underrepresented ethnicities, whatever you want to call them, minorities, are actually represented as the face of America.

And research in itself is an exciting part of the tool of science and math, but really it has to start with children, because that’s where most of our pipeline’s going to be, despite of the immigration issues, because not always are we going to get the best scientists, because that creates also a global problem in countries that are trying to send them here to educate them, to send them back, and have some fairness in that as well.

Public policy issues, I work with that day in and day out, but if we don’t have a pipeline that represents our nation, and we have equal representation in gender and ethnicities, you’re not going to get what you need in terms of studying the people delivering the drugs, the sensitivities to genetic differences and gender differences as well, so what I want to hear is, what is this group going to do with the influence that we have, to reach out into whether it’s science and teachers community, Department of Education, state legislatures that, most states fund their education process, that’s where it happens.

The federal government has some guidelines, but that’s not really where it happens. PTA systems, working mothers of America, corporate America understands this, and we have many shows, “Sesame Street,” I mean, if we want media, there’s many media. But the point is, the focus isn’t there to really bring this home. Corporate America, there’s a lot of focus, but it’s also the end product.

But the people that are going to create that, the people that are going to be the teachers, those of us that work in academia, in and out of our lives, I’m very concerned with the number of PhD students coming into programs. I’m concerned at the caliber of medical school applicants and nursing school applicants. I’m concerned we don’t have nurses for the demographics of our ageing of America. And yes, technology will help us, and we need to bring that more in, but I’m not seeing, you know, how come... What’s his name, from Apple, Steve isn’t here talking about how are we going to help the ageing of America, which all of us are going to be there in 25 years, to translate into life, and that is science. All of that is science. So I want to hear, what’s the next step of getting this ball out?

Ira Flatow: Anybody in the audience have a suggestion?

Alan Merton: Well, I think with respect to K-12, most of the stuff that we find ourselves doing is really at the local level. There’s not much, I don’t think you can change much at the state level, you clearly can’t... In a... In the long run, at the federal level. But at, it’s at the local level. And I think more and more universities have to engage people in the local school systems in these issues, and I think some of us are, but it’s, that’s where the action is. And if there’s slow movement sometimes at other levels, there’s very slow movement at that level. I...

FS: How can we help, as a group of people who want [inaud.] and we’ve obviously got influence.

Tenley Albright: That’s an idea.

FS: How can we help, like university presidents? I mean, what projects can we look at, to start creating and helping folks that definitely we support having ideas, but sort of help spread it to the masses? I mean, we can’t reach America if we can’t even reach between ourselves. That’s what I want help reaching right now. How do we, between ourselves, say how can we help each other, and you’re a great example, being president of George Mason, and having a relationship with other presidents, [inaud.]... Or, how can we help? Say, use this influence and create a [unint.].

Alan Merton: I give you one place. The science education activities of colleges of education. I mean, there’s a place where we can make more difference, you know? There’s arguments as to what some of these schools are, but I’ll tell you, the amount of effort that many of the university presidents that I work with is to improve the science education component of our schools of education. And we need help. We need help there.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Berg, and then I’ll go to Dr. Brown.

Jeremy Berg: So with respect to gender issues, I think it’s been encouraging to me as I, as I said, I grew up in chemistry departments, where the gender representation, particularly on the faculty, was somewhere between atrocious and disappointing. There was just a workshop that took place last year that was co-sponsored by NSF, NIH, and DOE, that was really organized by chemistry department chairs, called “Building Better Chemistry Departments Through Gender Equity,” and I think what has happened is, the chemistry departments’ faculty have realized that, first off, about half their graduate students are women, and secondly, a lot of the really super-talented graduate students are women, and they’re just not recruiting them effectively into their own departments into academic careers.

So I think they’re working, Dr. Zerhouni just appointed a task force and we met for the first time a couple of days ago, on women in science issues, in response to the recent National Research Council report, to try to really push the ball down the field. I think it’s... We’re all sick and tired of the reports that sit on shelves and get rewritten every five years with not much progress being made.

I think things are really coming together, and the good thing is that it’s not just a, you know, this is the right thing to do, social good sort of, more ethereal argument. But it’s really a realization that there’s this tremendous talent pool out there that we’re not capturing, and that we need to do a lot of self-examination, really understand unconscious bias and all the sorts of factors that, you know, family-friendly practices, etc., etc., which are really impacting recruitment and retention of women.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Brown?

William Brown: Yeah. What I was going to say, I was thinking as you were talking of some of the things that Abbott does in the community. Things like after-school programs with the Chicago public schools, science competitions they support. We actually have a program in the diagnostics called “Labs Are Vital,” where we’re trying to encourage people to get into medical technology and things like that.

FS: How are you evaluating outcomes? Are you seeing the scores in your public schools raising in those areas you invest there? I mean, how are you evaluating outcomes and, to see what you’re doing really works, or should we try something different.

William Brown: Well, what I would say is an industry supporter, we kind of look to the schools to kind of do that, but we try and connect with them on programs that they think

William Brown: People to get into medical technology and things like that.

FS: How do you evaluate outcomes? Are you seeing the scores in your public schools raising in those areas you invest there? I mean, how are you evaluating outcomes and, to see what you’re doing really works, or should we try something different?

William Brown: Well, what I would say as an industry supporter, we kind of look to the schools to kind of do that, but we try and connect with them on programs that they think would be helpful, like this after-school program, science competitions, and things like that. In the case of summer interns, things like that, we’ll actually pull in summer interns into Abbott for the summer. As well as, I’m thinking of one thing we have going on with Northwestern University where they actually got a grant at the Gates Foundation to develop simple, rapid HIV testing. We’ve given them access to all of our scientists and our IP.

Ira Flatow: Phil had the first word, and I’m going to give him the last word today. Phil?

Phil Southerland: Thank you. I mean, real briefly, competition breeds success, and if you look at the youths of America, they have 8 opportunities to play football games in the spring, and then they’ve got 20 baseball games they can play. They’ve got opportunities and no matter what team they’re on, they’re always going to win at some point. What if you had a science fair, or math fair, you know, some sort of competition in that field, once a month, or once a quarter, something so that it was happening more often...

You know, it would give people, women, children, people who are not typically might not be competitive in the sports realm, not able to succeed there, and opportunity to succeed in the math, the science, and then get that competitive edge where, hey, I want to win, and so they keep striving to be better, and next thing you know, they’re curing cancer in 10 years.

Ira Flatow: That’s a great way to end note. Thank all of our panelists for taking time to be with us this morning. Thank you, Bill.

Bill Leinweber: Thank you. And I want to thank Ira, too, for his great job that he did. Thank you. We’re going to break, we’re going to break for lunch in just a minute, but before, Dr. Albright very kindly acknowledged somebody that joined us that I want to take a minute and certainly acknowledge our Chair Emeritus of Research!America who joined us, the Honorable Paul Rogers, also known as Mr. Health. For those of you that have not had the good pleasure of working with Paul in Washington, let me just tell you a little bit about Paul. He’s a former US Congressman from Florida, who served in Congress from 1955-1979. He served as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment from ’71-’79, before joining Hogan and Hartson, a large law firm here in Washington, where he’s a partner.

He sponsored or played a major role in enacting major health legislation initiatives that have impacted, I would imagine, most of you here in the room, including the National Cancer Act, the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, the Health Maintenance Organization Act, the Health Manpower Training Act, the Research on Aging Act, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention & Control Act, the Emergency Medical Services Act, the Medical Medicaid... Medicare/Medicaid Anti-Fraud and Abuse Amendments, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Radiation and Health Safety Act. Paul has been prolific in terms of his support for health and research throughout his career. He is, in large part, responsible for much of the success that Research!America has enjoyed and continues to enjoy, so Paul, would you stand and let us acknowledge you.

Paul Rogers: I’d like to respond, [inaud.].

Bill Leinweber: Sure.

Paul Rogers: First of all, I want to say that Bill and the crew here from Research!America, who combined with all you and Tenley Albright, who kind of started for all of us an initiative on being collaborative, we all need to be advocates. And we are. You demonstrated that. And if you don’t belong to Research!America, you ought to join, and get your organization to do. Be an advocate. And that’s what we’ve been talking about today. Now, let me just give one or two examples of what I think we could do. Where is the AAMC? Have we asked them to come in, get with us, be collaborative? They’re the medical colleges, where a lot of PhDs are trained.

We can get all of the various groups to be collaborative. Also, I think we can find the Congress will be interested, if we can get enough talk going about a lot of these interests, which many of you have been talking about and do such a good job... And this was a wonderful panel today, Bill. I think, too, we need to have... Be talking and have in our minds how NIH can get scientists out talking. And one way may be if we could have, as a requirement of an R01, that you have taken a course, which we hope AAMC or other schools of education would adopt, get collaborative, to talk about, and hear, and have an interchange with press people, so that they know what they’re looking for, what they want, this could be done.

But it’ll take a little initiative. A little collaboration. So, this has been a wonderful meeting, and I think we’ll see from this meeting many efforts to be more collaborative, and to really get some things going. They talked about basic research, you know. Well, it’s true, the federal government has had that responsibility and in most states, it’s been pointed out, want an immediate reaction. The federal government fortunately has been able to say, well, we really need the basic, we’ve got to have that basic science, basic research.

But if it’s a really important issue, and there are real good advocates, look what is now happening with stem-cell research? California – the state, not the federal government – put in 3 billion. And you go around, and this is being picked up by the... So, advocacy, being collaborative, I think we’ll all be surprised what we could accomplish. Thank you very much.

Bill Leinweber: Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Most of you, if not all, that registered to attend today’s program, we have your email addresses, and you’ll be receiving opportunities from us to be on our e-advocacy network. We certainly would encourage you, as a simple first step, to participate in that effort for sure. We’re going to break, and we’ll need to step out so they can set up for lunch for about 10 minutes, if you could take your things. Dr. [unint.] will be with us, and is here, has been with us most of the morning for the program, he has some great remarks that he’ll be offering at lunch, and we’ll be back in the room in about 10 minutes. Thank you.

END OF PANEL

Alan Leshner: Knock, knock. Good. That was pretty good. You’re pretty compliant at this part of the day. Good afternoon. I’m Alan Leshner, I’m a member of the board of directors of Research!America, and in my day job, I’m the CEO of AAAS and the Executive Publisher of Science magazine, and I’ve been given the pleasure of introducing our speaker, Dr. Arden Bement. Before I do that, I want to once again thank Abbott Labs for their foresight, vision, and their generosity in sponsoring this event. We all appreciate it greatly. So I can’t imagine that there’s anybody in the room who does not know who Arden Bement is, and therefore I dithered all morning about how I was going to do this. What I’ve decided to do is to just read a little bit from an article written in the April 9, 2004 issue of Science, big surprise, by Arden’s favorite Science magazine news reporter, Jeff Mervis.

And, for those of you who don’t know Jeff by his byline, he’s not known for what I’d call gratuitous cuddliness. And therefore, this really is a telling statement. The article was entitled, “A Gentlemanly Workaholic Fills In As NSF Director.” That was when Arden was made acting director of NSF, and still was the director of NIST, the National Institute on Standards and Technology. I’m reading.

“Arden Bement is acting director of the National Science Foundation, thanks to a $75 wager with his foreman at a Colorado molybdenum mill more than a half-century ago. Well, maybe it’s a little more complicated than that, but if Bement hadn’t accepted that bet from a supervisor who offered to pay his first semester’s tuition to get him off the midnight shift on the mill floor, he might never have gone to college.

‘I could keep the money if I finish the semester, and I could pay him out of my wages if I dropped out and came back to work. I had never thought about college, but I couldn’t refuse the challenge,’ said Bement. A distinguished 50-year career as a materials engineering researcher and science administrator in academia, government, and private industry followed.” Jeff went on to write, this’ll be short, don’t worry. “Despite a full-time job as Director of NIST, Bement didn’t hesitate when the White House called.

Six weeks later, his self-effacing manner, ability to soothe rather than create tensions, and familiarity with the US scientific establishment, have already won him plaudits in the science policy arena. ‘I think that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard from a witness,’ enthused Representative James Walsh, Republican of New York, Chair of the House Spending Panel that oversees NSF, after Bement responded to a question last week on the agency’s budget.” Well, I’ll stop reading at this point, but I do think that these kinds of words well characterize Arden Bement, with the exception of one more phrase that I’ll add: Quiet, visionary leadership. Over the last couple of years, Arden has clearly put a stamp on NSF and on his programs, characterized, I’d say, by his belief that NSF should only be funding science at the cutting edge.

He does seem to like just plain old good science, but he only gets excited about, and he only puts his weight behind research that people would characterize as at the frontier, or to use that new, trendy word, transformative. Importantly, he’s also done a superb job recruiting absolutely first-rate people to the senior staff of NSF. Dr. Bement has wonderful credentials that you all know, he’s received virtually every major honor we would like him to receive, and he continues to lead NSF in that quiet, workaholic and very effective leaderly mode. So I’m delighted to give you Arden Bement.

Arden Bement: Alan, I’ve had many introductions that have been lengthy, comprehensive, but I would say this is the first one I’ve had that was affectionate. Thank you, and thank you all for the warm welcome. I particularly want to thank Research!America for inviting me to speak today. One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is being able to engage in dialogue with creative and passionate advocates for science and technology. When I thought about my remarks for today, I realized that I would follow what was certain to be a very lively discussion on research and innovation. And also a very hungry crew.

And sure enough, I was right. I see you are well on your way to satisfying your hunger. So I’ll turn my full attention to the issues, but before I do that, I wanted to comment on a few questions that came up during the panel discussion. With regard to Super Bowl ads, NSF is piggybacking on Coca-Cola. If you recall their ad with the polar bears and the penguins, that’s our space shot. And it represents both poles. The Arctic for the polar bears, and the Antarctic for the penguins.

And we’re going to capitalize on that during this next year during the International Polar Year. Nematodes came up. Many of you may or may not know that nematodes thrive in the Antarctic, in the dry valleys. And nematodes and other organisms in the soil below the surface in the critical zone actually sequester more carbon than all the plant life and trees above the ground. So be careful where you walk, and be kind to the nematodes. Now, the question came up, how to sell science and engineering to women and underrepresented minorities. That was your question.

I think the key is, selling social relevance. Women and underrepresented minorities have a very strong social outlook. And only a small fraction of students in school today thrive on abstract learning. And if you don’t get across the social relevance of science and engineering, if it comes across as an abstract subject, you’re going to lose them every time. So I could go on, but I thought I would venture further afield and speak briefly today about the larger context for bridging the sciences. And I hope we can have some discussion.

As Director of the National Science Foundation, I have a big stake in this discussion. You might say we’re a small agency with a big mission. Although our budget constitutes only about 4% of the total federal spending on research and development, NSF funds nearly 20% of all research conducted in colleges and universities, in the physical and computer sciences, engineering, social sciences, earth sciences, and the non-medical life sciences. In fact, the National Science Foundation is the only federal agency with an overarching mandate and horizon. Part of our job is to keep all fields and disciplines of science and engineering research healthy and strong.

But strong is not enough. Because the flip side of what we know in science and engineering is everything we don’t know. So NSF must continually focus on the frontier. Above all, we must generate ideas, mark out the creative path, or solve a fundamental research question. And if we let our focus shift away from the frontier, we would leave a vacuum in America’s research future, because there is no other federal agency that has this across-the-board research mandate.

In a science and technology-based world, to retreat from the frontier is to put the nation at peril. In order to emphasize our quest to support basic transformative research at the frontier, the National Science Board will be issuing a report, now in draft form, on transformative research that will further clarify our direction and determination. And relative to that, there’s an Einstein story that captures the pursuit of transformative research better than any definition. Dr. Einstein and another professor are listening to a research proposal from a student. The student leaves. The professor says, you know, that’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. Einstein says, you know, it may not be crazy enough.

Now, we look after the Einsteins. The nation needs bold efforts at the most demanding levels of creative enterprise, to sustain a leadership role in the global economy. We have always been remarkably adept at this in America, and now is not the time to be complacent. Research and innovation are key to this endeavor. We know that research is the most powerful force driving innovation and productivity in America, and around the globe.

Economic returns to R&D investment are significant, and growing. Only recently, the Bureau of Economic Analysis used NSF’s data to determine the impact of R&D on the US economy. The Bureau concluded that R&D contributed 6.5% to economic growth each year between 1995 and 2002. Our nation’s science and engineering talent and research investments, both private and public, are clearly America’s hidden savings. America faces new challenges in this era of global transformation and integration. Discovery and innovation, the forces driving US economic growth, take place in a dynamic, complex, and competitive international environment.

Other nations are raising the ante, with heavy investments in research and education. In this climate of red-hot competition, business as usual is simply not good enough. Maintaining US leadership in science, engineering, and technology is critical for our future prosperity and quality of life, and fundamental research across all disciplines is vital to that leadership.

And it’s not just economic return on the investment, it’s also social return. In terms of a sense of awe, a sense of adventure, and quality of life. At NSF, we often talk about the contributions to medical progress made by fundamental discoveries in the physical sciences and engineering. Such fundamental research laid the foundations for the development of MRI, as Arty [ph.] mentioned in the workshop, or the panel discussion, and precision laser eye surgery, as examples. To cite a more recent case, the pace at which scientists were able to map the human genome depended directly on the pace at which computer scientists were able to advance the speed of computation.

The contribution of mathematical research, especially network theory, to the field of bioinformatics is another case in point. This pathway, between fundamental research and sometimes surprising and unexpected applications in other fields of research, is still alive and well. But a sea change has occurred in the conduct of science and engineering that is not only shortening the time between fundamental research and its application, but blurring the boundaries between the two.

More and more, fundamental research at the interface among disciplines is proving to be the most fertile territory for discovery, due in part to the power of our newest information and communications technologies, interdisciplinary research and collaboration are becoming the norm, rather than the expectation in many research endeavors. Let me give a few examples. A significant number of new, hybrid interdisciplinary fields emerged during the latter part of the 20 th century. In the biosciences, they include biophysics, biochemistry, biomaterials, bioinformatics, Jeremy mentioned mathematical biology and computational biology, but also bioengineering and biogeochemistry.

And similar counterparts are found in the neurosciences, such as neurophysics, neurochemistry, and neuroeconomics. You know, even in the 21 st century, as young as it is, there have been some new emerging entrants, such as neuromorphic engineering, social cognitive neuroscience, and nanoecotoxicology. So the white space is getting more and more occupied all the time.

Likewise, one now finds mathematics originating from the physical and social sciences, especially economics, being applied to a wide range of inquiries in the biosciences, from the molecular to the organismic scales. These include statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, information theory, game theory to include Nash equilibria, graph theory, network theory, and advanced algorithms for computer modeling simulation and visualization. Combining network theory with statistical mechanics, we now have a study of contagions, and here I’m not talking about just the propagation of diseases, but the propagation of ideas, fads, and misinformation. Another example, such fields not only span disciplines, but also cross sectors, they also cross sectors and national borders.

Overarching IT technologies have increased the pace of discovery by orders of magnitude. And more importantly, they have increased the level of complexity we’re able to investigate and understand. One example is the Ecology of Infectious Diseases program, jointly sponsored by NSF and NIH. The program funds interdisciplinary projects to study how large-scale environmental events, such as habitat destruction, biological invasion, and pollution, alter the risks of viral, parasitic, and bacterial diseases emerging in humans and animals.

The studies help public health officers, wildlife managers, and farmers to control the spread of diseases among humans, domestic and wild animals, and crops. This fundamental research is producing new knowledge in the field of ecology and biodiversity, as well as epidemiology and medical science. Just this past March, for the first time, researchers visualized the changing atomic structure of a virus by calculating how each of the virus’ 1 million atoms interacted with one another every phentosecond. Now, that’s one millionth of a billionth of a second.

The work involved collaboration between researchers at the NSF-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and researchers at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, supported by NIH. Advanced techniques such as this require the expertise of computer scientists, biologists, engineers, and mathematicians. I should also mention the program on health and environment implications of nanotechnology, which also came up during a question to the panel.

This is a very active collaboration among NSF, EPA, NIST, NIH, and USDA, and is trying to provide scientific knowledge and data that will inform policymakers with regard to environmental and health impacts of nanoparticles. The Biomedical Infomatics Research Network, or BIRN, funded by NIH, is in innovative, geographically-distributed virtual community of shared computing, networking, and cyber infrastructure resources. BIRN offers tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In one project, researchers at BIRN are using the resources of two NSF-supported supercomputing centers, and the Terragrid network, supported by NSF, to identify brain disorders.

NSF is now developing a national strategy for petascale computing, to give scientists and engineers the resources needed to tackle the most computationally intensive research problems. The point is straightforward. In today’s research environment, we can’t afford to neglect any avenue of discovery. Well, I could provide many other examples, but I want to venture much further afield. In fact, all the way to the polar regions.

Only days ago, I was on the ice. Now that’s how old hands like Alan and I refer to being on the continent of Antarctica. I was actually there with Sir Edmund Hillary and Prime Minister Helen Clarke [ph.] of New Zealand, among others, to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year. As part of the IGY activities in 1958, Sir Edmund led the expedition that successfully completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica, that was first attempted by Shackleton, and that was by way of the South Pole.

I have to also share credit with Sir Vivian Fuchs from UK, who came in from the Weddell Sea area, but it turned out that Sir Edmund got to the Pole first. The IGY also marked the founding of New Zealand’s Scott base, and US McMurto station, two of the many such stations dedicated to international cooperation and scientific research. IGY entranced America’s youth, and galvanized America’s innovative powers in ways that created a legacy that lives on today.

That legacy ranges from scientific Earth satellites, to the development of a generation of world-class scientists and engineers, who drove our knowledge-based economy forward for the next half-century. As importantly, perhaps, IGY established the notion of scientific diplomacy, the idea that scientists and engineers, working in international partnership, could solve problems of mutual concern, and could further the interests of peace and cooperation among nations. And that cooperation continues today, and will only be strengthened during the International Polar Year. In February, the US will launch International Polar Year, which is actually two years, from March 2007 to March 2009.

As a lead agency supporting polar research, NSF will provide US leadership for IPY activities, through support for an intense research and public education effort. And that’s already starting. You may be wondering how polar research relates to the topics we’re exploring today. Well, let me explain. One focus for NSF research during the IPY will be Life In The Cold And Dark. The title refers to research on the microbial and other life that thrives in polar climates.

Understanding the mechanisms that permit this adaptability could have far-reaching implications for medical science and industry. It was one such extremophile, discovered in the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park, that made possible the use of polymerase chain reaction for replicating DNA, a major contribution to the biotechnology industry. But there are other, more immediate, and broader reasons for our interest. In the polar regions, we are discerning the outlines of environmental change. From sea ice extent, retreating glaciers, shifting patterns in flora and fauna, to environmental observations by arctic natives. What is more, such change, whether environmental, biological, or social, has implications for the rest of the globe.

Polar change ripples across the planet on a spectrum of time scales, through the atmosphere, oceans, and living systems, including humans. We don’t yet fully understand the causes of what we’re observing, but now is the time to change this. New tools make possible the needed observations and synthesis of knowledge. They range from satellites, to ships, to sensors. And from genomics to nanotechnology, information technology, and advances in robotic technologies.

For these reasons, climate change research and environmental observations will be a major focus for NSF IPY activities. In most cases, US scientists will collaborate with scientists from many other nations. We are only beginning to understand the full extent of the impacts that climate change may have on human health, the spread of infectious diseases, and the economy. Some recent studies also show that cyclical events can also play an important role in extreme weather frequency and intensity. Just recently, NSF-funded scientists have presented substantial evidence that rising sea surface temperatures can increase the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.

Clearly, the bridges between climate research on the one hand, and human health and economy on the other, are well worth exploring. I’ll conclude with one further thought, and this is amplifying what’s already been well-stated previously, this morning. The Research!America report released today adds weight to the notion that the public is increasingly savvy about the importance of a strong science and technology enterprise to our nation’s future.

This recognition of the benefits that research and innovation deliver to Americans is very encouraging, and I applaud Research!America for its efforts. But a troubling dilemma remains. Despite this recognition, American children are performing below international averages in science and mathematics proficiency. Everyone here knows that. Furthermore, fewer students are opting to pursue degrees in science, particularly in the physical sciences and engineering. Meanwhile, science and math skills needed in the contemporary work force are rising rapidly, while at the same time, young people are adopting the newest information and communications technologies at an astonishing rate.

There’s a profound disconnect here. Namely, embracing the benefits of science and technological innovation without understanding and valuing what is required to produce them, and more importantly, not participating in their discovery, development, and production. Science and engineering education have always been part of NSF’s mission as an equal partner to the research we support.

The challenges ahead are very steep, and we will need the resources and expertise of the public at large to meet them. As we all consider how to increase innovation, we should also address the need for innovation in education. This may take us out of our comfort zones, but that, after all, is what innovation is all about. Thank you.

Bill Leinweber: Dr. Bement, thank you for those great remarks, very inspiring and thought-provoking. We did want to offer the opportunity for our audience today to engage in any questions or discussion that folks would like to pose. Is that all right with you, if we...

MS: [unint.].

Arden Bement: Go blue.

MS: [unint.], go blue. A victory yesterday, when the House passed the appropriations, the additional dollars for NSF, among other science agencies that received support. Your budget comes out on Monday, I know you’re probably can... Any sense of what you can tell us now about what you’re looking at for ’08, and your thoughts about how Congress is reacting to these increases. I assume this is a positive sign, in terms of how they responded, and how they’re viewing these things.

Arden Bement: [unint.] that you should even ask. Yes, this is a happy new year. The advocacy that we received over the last 3-4 weeks has been enormous, and it’s included strong efforts on the part of the Congress itself, both authorizers and appropriators, from consortia, from the community, from corporate CEOs, and also from the administration that wanted to retain as much of the ACI as possible. So, you know, it was not just a drum roll. It was the whole brass band. And it just shows you the effectiveness of good advocacy in getting the message across. We were competing with law enforcement, with defense appropriations, VA requirements, a whole range of housing issues, transportation, and I would have to say that science did very well.

So almost all the inquiries was in our research and research-related account, this will allow us to continue with our petascale acquisitions, if it’s passed by the Senate. We still have a week to wait, or so. So we’re not counting our chickens yet, before they hatch. But we’re very hopeful that we can persuade the Congress to allow us to start new initiatives that this increased funding will permit.

MS: Have you seen any change in the way American scientists interact with scientists from around the world? Have you seen any change in how American scientists interact with scientists from around the world? Are we, are American scientists working more with scientists from certain parts of the world and less with others? What’s your predictions?

Arden Bement: No, the amount of collaboration and the pace of cooperation has increased dramatically. Let me just give you a benchmark for China. Five years ago, the number of collaborations we had in China, with US scientists, were about 250. Now they’re 850.

MS: How many?

Arden Bement: 850. And you see that trend around the world. I have people in my office every week. In fact, this week I had the Director General of the European Commission, this afternoon I’ve got the ambassador from Korea, they all want to collaborate. We have some real advantages, incidentally, in the way we conduct research and the way we fund research. First of all, we integrate research with education. Now, why is that important? What it means is that at the same time we’re educating through research, we’re providing graduate students, not just for academia, but for the private sector, and that’s a direct technology transfer.

And it really shortens the time span from concept to application. So that’s one advantage that we have. In many countries around the world, the Ministry of Education is over here, the Ministry of Science is over here, very little connection. Another advantage we have is that we offer grants, we don’t offer contracts. And what we’re interested in is buying creativity. So we judge the value of the proposal on the basis of scientific merit, but we don’t necessarily expect that the scientist is going to be constrained by the proposal. If there are fruitful avenues to pursue, we encourage them to pursue them.

And that’s different than in many European countries, where that proposal is a contract, they have to deliver on what they promise. So that’s the difference. Peer review is different. As a result of our rigorous peer review, many research councils around the world are establishing NSF-like organizations, the latest being the European Research Council, which wants to be very much like NSF. And the president of the European Research Council, Ernst-Ludwig Winnaker, is a very good friend, he knows NSF very well, and I can pretty well guess how he’s going to operate that organization.

Well, what that means is that the efficiency in which research and development is going to be funded, and the increase in funding for research around the world is going to increase. The opportunities for collaboration are increasing rapidly. But because the world is getting a little bit flatter, maybe a lot flatter in some regards, we’re not always going to see the frontier from our vantage point, here in the United States, as we did in the past, where we led in almost every field of science and engineering. The next big thing may occur somewhere else in the world, the next big push of the frontier. And if we don’t stay connected, and if we don’t monitor that, we’re going to get blindsided. And so that’s why international programs are so important.

FS: On the budget issue, could you tell us what your... On the budget issue, can you tell us what your percent increase was over last year?

Arden Bement: Well, in the R&RE account, it’s about 6.8%. Reckoned against our whole budget, it’s about 5%. Still a very healthy increase, especially in this budget climate. And no rescissions, as yet. And some of the federal agencies will do better than the numbers indicate, because of the moratorium on earmarks. Especially...

Jeremy Berg: I was going to... On the NIH side, too, there was very good news in the bill that was passed yesterday that it’s about, a bit more than 2% across NIH, and our expectations were much lower than that, so we’re thrilled.

Arden Bement: Well, so were ours. Thank you.