Dr. Manners

Good manners make a difference—in science and elsewhere. This includes our social media etiquette as researchers. Subject Categories: S&S: History & Philosophy of Science, Methods & Resources, S&S: Ethics

Elbows off the table, please. Don’t chew with your mouth open. Don’t blow your nose at the table. Don’t put your feet up on the chair or table. And please, do not yuck my yum. These are basic table manners that have come up at some of our lab meals, and I have often wondered if it was my job to teach my trainees social graces. A good fellow scientist and friend of mine once told me it was absolutely our place as mentors to teach our trainees not only how to do science well, but also how to be well‐mannered humans. While these Emily Post‐approved table manners might seem old‐fashioned (I’m guessing some readers will have to look up Emily Post), I strongly believe they still hold a place in modern society; being in good company never goes out of style.Speaking of modern society: upon encouragement by several of my scientist friends, I joined Twitter in 2016. My motivation was mainly to hear about pre‐prints and publications, conference announcements and relevant news, science or otherwise. I also follow people who just make me laugh (I highly recommend @ConanOBrien or @dog_rates). I (re)tweet job openings, conference announcements, and interesting new data. Occasionally, I post photos from conferences, or random science‐related art. I also appreciate the sense of community that social media brings to the table. However, social media is a venue where I have also seen manners go to die. Rapidly.It is really shocking to read what some people feel perfectly comfortable tweeting. While most of us can agree that foul language and highly offensive opinions are generally considered distasteful, there are other, subtler but nonetheless equally—if not more—cringe‐worthy offenses online when I am fairly certain these people would never utter such words in real life. In the era of pandemic, the existence of people tweeting about not being able to eat at their favorite restaurant or travel to some destination holiday because of lockdown shows an egregious lack of self‐awareness. Sure it sucks to cancel a wedding due to COVID‐19, but do you need to moan to your followers—most of whom are likely total strangers—about it while other people have lost their jobs? If I had a nickel for every first‐world complaint I have seen on Twitter, I’d have retired a long time ago; although to be honest, I would do science for free. However, these examples pale in comparison with another type of tweeter: Reader, I submit to you, “the Humblebragger.”From the MacMillan Buzzword dictionary (via Google): a humblebrag is “a statement in which you pretend to be modest but which you are really using as a way of telling people about your success or achievements.” I would further translate this definition to indicate that humblebraggers are starved for attention. After joining Twitter, I quickly found many people using social media to announce how “humble and honored” they are for receiving grant or prize X, Y, or Z. In general, these are junior faculty who have perhaps not acquired the self‐awareness more senior scientists have. Perhaps the most off‐putting posts I have seen are from people who post photos of their NIH application priority scores right after study section, or their Notice of Awards (NOA). When did we ever, before social media, send little notes to each other—let alone to complete strangers—announcing our priority scores or NOAs? (Spoiler: NEVER)Some of you reading this opinion piece might have humblebragged at one or time or another, and might not understand why it is distasteful. Please let me explain. For every person who gets a fundable score, there are dozens more people who do not, and they are sad (I speak from many years of experience). While said fundable‐score person might be by someone we like—and I absolutely, positively wish them well—there are many more people who will feel lousy because they did not get funding from the same review round. When has anyone ever felt good about other people getting something that they, too, desire? I think as children, none of us liked the kid on the playground who ran around with the best new Toy of the Season. As adults, do we feel differently? Along these lines, I have never been a fan of “best poster/talk/abstract” prizes. Trainees should not be striving for these fleeting recognitions and should focus on doing the best science for Science’s sake; I really believe this competition process sets people up for life in a negative way—there, I’ve said it.Can your friends and colleagues tweet about your honors? Sure, why not, and by all means please let your well‐wishers honor you, and do thank them and graciously congratulate your trainees or colleagues for helping you to get there. But to post things yourself? Please. Don’t be surprised if you have been muted by many of your followers.It is notable that many of our most decorated scientists are not on Twitter, or at least never tweet about their accomplishments. I do not recall ever seeing a single Nobel laureate announce how humbled and honored they are about their prize. Of course, I might be wrong, but I am willing to bet the numbers are much lower than what I have observed for junior faculty. True humility will never be demonstrated by announcing your achievements to your social media followers, and I believe humblebragging reveals insecurity more than anything. I hope that many more of us can follow the lead of our top scientists both in creativity, rigor, and social media politeness.     

Work life balance?

There is no perfect recipe to balance work and life in academic research. Everyone has to find their own optimal balance to derive fulfilment from life and work. Subject Categories: S&S: Careers & Training

A few years ago, a colleague came into my office, looking a little irate, and said, “I just interviewed a prospective student, and the first question was, ‘how is work‐life balance here?’”. Said colleague then explained how this question was one of his triggers. Actually, this sentiment isn''t unusual among many PIs. And, yet, asking about one''s expected workload is a fair question. While some applicants are actually coached to ask it at interviews, I think that many younger scientists have genuine concerns about whether or not they will have enough time away from the bench in order to have a life outside of work.In a nutshell, I believe there is no one‐size‐fits‐all definition of work–life balance (WLB). I also think WLB takes different forms depending on one''s career stage. As a new graduate student, I didn''t exactly burn the midnight oil; it took me a couple of years to get my bench groove on, but once I did, I worked a lot and hard. I also worked on weekends and holidays, because I wanted answers to the questions I had, whether it was the outcome of a bacterial transformation or the result from a big animal experiment. As a post‐doc, I worked similarly hard although I may have actually spent fewer hours at the bench because I just got more efficient and because I read a lot at home and on the six train. But I also knew that I had to do as much as I could to get a job in NYC where my husband was already a faculty member. The pressure was high, and the stress was intense. If you ask people who knew me at the time, they can confirm I was also about 30 pounds lighter than I am now (for what it''s worth, I was far from emaciated!).As an assistant professor, I still worked a lot at the bench in addition to training students and writing grant applications (it took me three‐plus years and many tears to get my first grant). As science started to progress, work got even busier, but in a good way. By no means did I necessarily work harder than those around me—in fact, I know I could have worked even more. And I’m not going to lie, there can be a lot of guilt associated with not working as much as your neighbor.My example is only one of millions, and there is no general manual on how to handle WLB. Everyone has their own optimal balance they have to figure out. People with children or other dependents are particularly challenged; as someone without kids, I cannot even fathom how tough it must be. Even with some institutions providing child care or for those lucky enough to have family take care of children, juggling home life with “lab life” can create exceptional levels of stress. What I have observed over the years is that trainees and colleagues with children become ridiculously efficient; they are truly remarkable. One of my most accomplished trainees had two children, while she was a post‐doc and she is a force to be reckoned with—although no longer in my laboratory, she still is a tour de force at work, no less with child number three just delivered! I think recruiters should view candidates with families as well—if not better—equipped to multi‐task and get the job done.There are so many paths one can take in life, and there is no single, “correct” choice. If I had to define WLB, I would say it is whatever one needs to do in order to get the work done to one''s satisfaction. For some people, putting in long days and nights might be what is needed. Does someone who puts in more hours necessarily do better than one who doesn''t, or does a childless scientist produce more results than one with kids? Absolutely not. People also have different goals in life: Some are literally “wedded” to their work, while others put much more emphasis on spending time with their families and see their children grow up. Importantly, these goals are not set in stone and can fluctuate throughout one''s life. Someone recently said to me that there can be periods of intense vertical growth where “balance” is not called for, and other times in life where it is important and needed. I believe this sentiment eloquently sums up most of our lives.Now that I''m a graying, privileged professor, I have started to prioritize other areas of life, in particular, my health. I go running regularly (well, maybe jog very slowly), which takes a lot of time but it is important for me to stay healthy. Pre‐pandemic, I made plans to visit more people in person as life is too short not to see family and friends. In many ways, having acquired the skills to work more efficiently after many years in the laboratory and office, along with giving myself more time for my health, has freed up my mind to think of science differently, perhaps more creatively. It seems no matter how much I think I’m tipping the balance toward life, work still creeps in, and that’s perfectly OK. At the end of the day, my work is my life, gladly, so I no longer worry about how much I work, nor do I worry about how much time I spend away from it. If you, too, accomplish your goals and derive fulfillment from your work and your life, neither should you.     

Alcodemia: are we training our students to be great thinkers or great drinkers?

Academia has fostered an unhealthy relationship with alcohol that has an undeniable impact on the health and behaviour of students and staff. Subject Categories: S&S: History & Philosophy of Science, Chemical Biology, S&S: Ethics

University life has a lot to offer. And, for better or worse, much of it goes hand in hand with a bottle. Believe it or not, I was a bit of teetotaler in my undergraduate days but quickly made up for it in graduate school, where each celebration included inebriation. Indeed, my initial tour of the laboratory I eventually worked in included a refreshing visit to the grad club. Orientation week ended with a marathon beer blitz at a nightclub. The semester’s first invited seminar speaker was welcomed with the sounds of loose change, ice buckets and the clickity‐clack of organic microbrews being opened. Our inaugural genome evolution journal club was such a success that we vowed to spill even more red wine onto our notebooks the following week. In hindsight, I should have realized at this early stage in my studies that I was fostering an unhealthy and unsustainable relationship between biology and booze. Unfortunately, my post‐graduate education in alcohol didn’t stop there.Like many keen students, I arrived at my first scientific conference with a belly full of nerves and a fistful of drink tickets, which I quickly put to good use at the poster session. The successful completion of my PhD proposal assessment was met with pats on the back as I was swiftly marched off to a local pub with no chance of escape. My first peer‐reviewed paper literally arrived with a pop as Champagne was generously poured into plastic cups for the entire laboratory group. My failures, too, were greeted with a liberal dose of ethanol. “Sorry you came up short on that scholarship application, Smitty. It’s nothing a little weapons‐grade Chianti won’t cure.” “That experiment failed again! Come on, let me buy you a lunchtime martini to make up for it.” Soon I learnt that every academic event, achievement or ailment, no matter how big or small, could be appropriately paired with beer, wine or spirit. Missing from the menu were two crucial ingredients for any burgeoning researcher: moderation and mindfulness.But it was the older vintages that really inspired me – the legendary drinking escapades of my scientific mentors, advisors and idols. The tale of professor so‐and‐so who at that epic meeting in 1993 polished off an entire magnum of rosé at dinner and then went on to deliver among the greatest keynote lectures on record at 9 am the following morning. That celebrated chaired researcher who kept the single malt next to the pipette tips for quick and easy access. The grizzled evolutionary ecologist who never went into the field without half a dozen cans of high‐end smoked oysters and two hip flaks, which didn’t contain water. And so, when I was told by someone in the know of how the most famous geneticist on campus wrote that monumental Nature paper (the one I’d read ten times!) while locked in his office for twelve hours with a six‐pack, I bought into the romance hook, line and sinker. The result: I’ve been nursing a recurring headache for nearly two decades and I’m still waiting on that Nature paper. Most importantly, I now realize the various dangers of romanticizing the bottle, especially for individuals in mentorship positions.Like my idols before me, I’ve accrued a cask full of well‐oaked academic drinking stories, except that they haven’t aged well. There is that heroic evening of intense scotch‐fueled scientific discussion, which led to me forfeiting two front teeth to the concrete sidewalk (my mother still thinks it was a squash accident). Or that time I commemorated the end of a great conference in Barcelona by throwing up on the front window of a café while the most prominent minds in my field sipped aperitifs inside (thank god this was before Twitter). Even more romantic: me buying a bottle of Cotes de Nuits Burgundy at Calgary airport on route to a job interview, discreetly opening the bottle in‐flight because economy class wine sucks, and then being met by airport security upon landing. Let’s just say I didn’t get the job. To some, these anecdotes might seem light‐hearted or silly, but they are actually rather sad and underscore the seriousness of substance abuse. Many readers will have their own complicated experiences with alcohol in academia and, I believe, will agree that it is high time we asked ourselves: are we training our graduate students to be great thinkers or great drinkers? Moreover, this question does not address the equally if not more serious issue of excessive drinking among undergraduate students.As I sit at my desk writing this, I think to myself: is it normal that within a two‐minute walk of my university office there are three different places on campus that I can have a beer before lunch, not including the minifridge behind my desk? Is it normal that in my department the first thing we do after a student defends their thesis is go to the grad club where they can have any alcoholic drink of their choosing for free from the goblet of knowledge, which is kept on a pedestal behind the bar? Is it normal that before the COVID pandemic when I was visiting a prominent university for an invited talk, one of the professors I met with offered me a glass of expensive Japanese gin at 11 am in the morning? (And, yes, I accepted the drink.)Of course, if you don’t want to drink you can just say no. But we are learning more and more how institutional cultures – “the deeply embedded patterns of organisational behaviour and the shared values, assumptions, beliefs or ideologies that members have about their organisation or its work” (Peterson & Spencer, 1991) – can have powerful effects on behaviour. Excessive alcohol consumption is undeniably an aspect of collegial culture, one that is having major impacts on the health and behaviour of students and staff, and one that I’ve been an active participant in for far too long. I’ll be turning forty in a few months and I have to face the fact that I’ve already drunk enough alcohol for two lifetimes, and not one drop of it has made me a better scientist, teacher or mentor. The question remains: how much more juice can I squeeze into this forty‐year‐old pickled lemon? Well, cheers to that.     

University campuses need people in them

As COVID‐19 has turned universities into ghost towns, David Smith cannot wait for the day when his campus fills with life again.

In the novel Fool’s Fate, Robin Hobb writes: “Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore.” I feel the same about university campuses.In late August 2020, after months of working from home, I returned to the campus of Western University where I am an associate professor of biology. It was supposed to be a short visit, in and out to grab some notebooks and an external monitor. But when I unlocked the office door and sat in that old wooden desk chair amongst the calm clutter of my workspace, I did not get up for a good two hours. I was comforted by the familiarity of my bookshelves, photographs, and professorial memorabilia, including a large bust of Darwin and a giant whale’s tooth. How I missed this place. And apart from two dead plants and a generous layer of dust, everything was as it should be.Outside my office was a different story. The water fountains were covered up with caution tape. Bright purple floor markings indicated the correct side of the hallway to walk down. Main offices, libraries, and canteens were closed. Large signs on all major doorways reiterated the social distancing policies. And apart from the odd security officer or grounds person, the campus was eerily empty. Nevertheless, I decided that for as long as the university remained open, I would keep coming to my office for a few hours a day, mainly to read and write without the cacophonic company of a toddler, but also to bring back some semblance of normalcy to my work life.The plan started off well. Each morning I would pack a large lunch, walk to campus and enjoy a few uninterrupted hours of academic productivity. But the stillness and emptiness of the university began to weigh on me. I could swear the fluorescent lights in my office were buzzing more loudly than before. Was the central air system always this rickety? After an hour of writing, I would take a quick walk around the department to clear my mind and see if anyone else was in. On my fifth day, I finally found someone: Vera’s office door was propped open! I quickly checked that my mask was on correctly and poked my head around. Small talk—glorious small talk—ensued for at least fifteen minutes. I had forgotten how nice it was to chat with a colleague in person. I went back to my office refreshed and put in another hour of good work. The next day, the building was deserted again. Not a sliver of light beneath Vera’s or any other door.I hoped that maybe once classes resumed in mid‐September, some vitality would return to campus. But, of course, nearly all of the classes were online and students and staff stayed home. Sometimes on my departmental wanderings, I would go into one of the large lecture halls and just stand at the podium. Once I even plugged my laptop into the AV system and practiced a presentation that I was preparing for an upcoming Zoom talk. As strange as it sounds, speaking to hundreds of lifeless seats in that old, stuffy hall felt more natural than talking to a grid of black boxes with nametags on my computer screen.As the weeks wore on and my visits to campus continued, a deep melancholy slowly took hold of me. I would spend hours on seemingly simple tasks, like tidying my office or answering emails. Harder tasks, such as writing a paper or developing a new lecture, felt insurmountable. I started leaving everything to the last minute or missing deadlines completely, which is unlike me. It felt as if my mood was somehow mirroring that of the vacant classrooms and buildings surrounding me. They, too, were paying the price of the pandemic.I have spent most of my life on college campuses. My father was a chemistry professor and often took me to work with him when I was a small child. My first daycare was at a university. As an adolescent and teenager, I would go to the local college most days for after‐school clubs. I learnt to swim at a university pool, became a senior boys 1500 m running champion on a university track, and discovered my love of mountain biking and cross‐country skiing on university trails. I met my closest friends in university residences. And my passion for science and writing was fostered in university classrooms. I love universities. I love what they represent: places of learning, scholarship, and development. I love the palpable emotions that they emit, from the endless possibilities of the first week of classes to the anxieties and sense of completion during final examinations. Most of all, I love the people that make up universities, their eclectic mix of personalities, backgrounds, ages, and beliefs. This might sound strange, but when I go on vacation, I visit universities elsewhere. I will spend an entire afternoon roaming around a campus, reading in the library, or sitting on a bench watching people come and go. This may be why I am so sad that my current institute sits unoccupied, at least in the physical sense. Ironically, enrollment is up. My department has more new undergraduate students than it has had in years.The other day on my walk home from work I ran into a colleague. He described to me how he has been working hard to get the upcoming introductory genetics course online, especially given the increase in students (there are more than 1200 currently enrolled in the course). I said, “You must be looking forward to the end of this crisis when we can start teaching in‐person again.” His response has had a lasting effect on me. “I’m not so sure things will go back to the way they were,” he said. “A lot of students are enjoying online learning—or are at least finding it convenient and cost‐effective. Many are saving money by living at home and by not having to bus into campus every day and buy overpriced food. They like being able to watch the recorded lectures on their own schedule and at their own speed. Even after the current crisis ends, I think there be will be a strong push for continued online learning.” “You might be right,” I said, “but I sure hope not.”When we parted ways, I felt even more downtrodden. I reminded myself that I was lucky to have a great job and that I needed to be adaptable. If the future is online learning, so be it. I can become a connoisseur of Camtasia. I can learn to be creative and engaging over Zoom. I can master those microphone and camera settings. But I could not help thinking this is not what I signed up for. When the pandemic is over, I do not want to exist in a cyber campus with online students and online colleagues. I do not want my home to be a lecture hall. I want brick and mortar and real bums in real seats. I want to stand in line for 20 minutes outside the student union building for lukewarm coffee. I want to waste precious time walking to meetings and making small talk in the corridors. I want the thing that I fell in love with. Until COVID‐19 is defeated, we need to stay vigilant. But when the war is won, will university campuses return to being physical gathering points for learning, engagement and community building or virtual concepts in an online learning space? Whatever the answer, I know that if you are looking for Associate Professor David R. Smith, you will find him holding out in the Biological and Geological Sciences Building, room 3028. The hand‐written sign on the door will say, “Going down with the ship.”     

You are the most valuable reagent in the lab: mental health before and during the pandemic

No one maps out their tenure as a postdoc anticipating a life-altering tragedy. But mental health crises of all kinds affect academic trainees and staff at similar or higher levels than the general public. While the mental health resources available to trainees are often set by healthcare providers, all levels of university leadership can work to remove material and immaterial obstacles that render such resources out of reach. I describe how access to care via telemedicine helped me following a loss in my family.

Over the years, my siblings and close friends have sought mental health resources like therapy, psychoanalysis, or psychiatry, so I loosely understood their benefits. When I was a PhD student I went to therapy briefly, but my counselor and I decided I could do without it. Since I started my postdoc, stress manifested in some new ways but I managed it well with my usual coping strategies and support. That changed one bright December morning in 2019 while I was preparing for our weekly lab meeting. My phone rang indicating a call from my father, whom I had spoken to the night before to celebrate the news of my nephew’s birth. But the voice on the phone was that of a family friend, telling me that my father had died overnight of an undiagnosed heart condition. In the moment I couldn’t even understand what was happening, saying over and over, “but I talked to him last night.” Soon I was sitting at home, dazed, on a string of tearful calls with family and friends.I often read words like “lifted” or “buoyed” to describe the stabilizing support of a network of loved ones. In my case this network was tethering me to reality over the next few weeks, preventing me from spinning off the Earth’s surface in a storm of sorrow and anxiety. The trauma also took a strange physical form and convinced me that I was suffering from a cardiac condition of my own. I had a panic attack during which I went to urgent care convinced my own heart was about to give way. Night after night these physical symptoms prevented me from sleeping.Graced by many loving connections with my siblings, my boyfriend, and close friends, I was actually weathering the process as well as one can. My PI gave me a firm directive to take as much time off as I needed. These were two key elements early in my healing process: a supportive network and an understanding advisor. The third was getting professional help, which I soon realized I needed. Even if I felt OK one day, I didn’t trust that I’d be OK the next. My grief formed too thick and too broad a landscape for me to navigate without help.Deciding to seek mental health resources and realizing that one needs them are often the hardest parts. Connecting with those resources once the decision has been made should be as simple as possible. I called a mental health number, and a triage counselor noted my therapy needs and verified my insurance. She asked what times and locations I preferred and then searched for an open appointment with a therapist who accepted my insurance. She also informed me that my coverage allowed 12 sessions with no copay, which was a pleasant surprise. The therapist who agreed to see me had very few openings, in part because this all happened in December—the holidays are especially busy for therapists. I was aiming for a time after normal working hours, or in the morning before I would head to lab, but none of those times were available. I didn’t like interrupting my workday to trot off to therapy. Taking a long break once a week meant I couldn’t run experiments or mentor my student during that time. But I made the sacrifice because my highest priority was getting the help I needed. There was no shortcut. Prioritizing mental health over lab work is tough for researchers, and I would never have accepted that kind of weekly disruption before my dad’s passing. But as a wonderful mentor of mine used to say, “You are the most valuable reagent in the lab.” She wasn’t describing mental health at the time, but the phrase now provided a guiding principle for my recovery. My first few sessions were on Tuesdays at 2:00 pm.The afternoon break turned out to be less disruptive than I had feared, because I had recently come back to the lab and was working short days. Had she asked, I would have told my PI where I was on Tuesday afternoons, but she wasn’t normally abreast of my daily schedule, so I didn’t seek her approval beforehand. Coordinating experiments with lab members thankfully wasn’t an issue because my work was largely independent; I simply let lab members know that I’d would be out of the lab for a bit on those days.The weeks went by, and the benefits of therapy accrued, helping me in large and small ways as I grieved. In mid-March of 2020, my therapist followed public health guidelines and asked all her clients to transition to remote sessions. While this was easy and sensible, it was still a little disappointing. Therapists are professional empaths, among many other things, and doing away with the physical presence and exchange with her was a blow. Yet therapy via video felt less odd simply because most of my social interactions were now virtual. Thankfully I didn’t have to move out of state for the lockdown (as did many students living in campus housing), which meant I could stay with the same therapist without any insurance complications.A few weeks into lockdown, I asked my therapist whether we had reached the limit of my 12 sessions without a copay. She replied with the good news that my insurance provider had waived all copays for mental health costs due to the pandemic. By that time therapy had generated a platform and an outlet to explore areas of my grief beyond the trauma of my father’s passing. Without needing to weigh the costs and benefits of this resource, I saw my therapist for another 4 months. I slowly took stock of my upbringing in an unconventional family and the loss of my mother when I was 25 and waded through a series of difficult decisions regarding my father’s estate. My father’s death changed me at a depth that is untouched by any amount of therapy or treatment. I’m not “healed”: I feel aged, more brittle, and a little ground down compared with who I had been. But therapy guided me through the worst of my grief, past the acute trauma to help me grasp what I was going through.Since the pandemic began, the number of people reporting increased stress or mental health issues has steadily increased (information on the impact of COVID-19 measures on mental health: https://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/depression-anxiety-coronavirus.pdf) (also see Mental health resources for trainees). I am fortunate to have affordable health insurance and the support from my lab and my department. The ease of finding my institution’s phone number for mental health resources was itself an important benefit. I share these pieces of my story with humility and understanding that not everyone enjoys the privileges that I do and the knowledge that everyone weathers life’s tragedies in their own way. It is not lost on me that some benefits stemmed from a policy change made by a private insurance provider. The provider made the right decision to waive copays, freeing me from having to choose between cost and my mental health needs. Yet had I been a student who had to move out of state due to COVID-19, access to mental health resources might have been disrupted or cut off. The need for reduced out-of-pocket costs for healthcare is known and needs no repetition, but the benefits of telehealth should be a low-cost component of health plans offered to students and staff (information on telehealth recommendations: https://www.apaservices.org/advocacy/news/congress-patient-telehealth?_ga=2.231013471.1538013741.1619359426-1228006513.1619359425 and http://www.apaservices.org/practice/advocacy/state/leadership/telebehavioral-health-policies.pdf?_ga=2.3385904.1067518037.1620039082-1228006513.1619359425.I’m not a cloud of emotions attached to a pair of good pipetting hands, I’m a human who is choosing to spend my time doing research. This observation is easy to repeat, by trainees as much as by faculty and administrators, but much harder to act upon in the midst of conflicting priorities. Consider my story a success: Because I could access the resources I needed, I was able to prioritize my mental health in the midst of my ambitious research program even during the lockdown.MEET THE AUTHORI have been a postdoc in Stefani Spranger’s lab at MIT for 4 years. Supported by an Irvington Fellowship from the Cancer Research Institute, my work examines the behaviors of dendritic cells in tumors that contribute to productive or unproductive anti-tumor immune responses. My doctoral work examined modes of multicellular invasion controlled by the actin cytoskeleton with Margaret Gardel at the University of Chicago. Earlier I was a lab technician with Thea Tlsty at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I serve on the Committee for Students and Postdocs at the American Society for Cell Biology, where I chair the Outreach Subcommittee.     

Academic motherhood – what happens when you can't make it happen?

We need more openness about age‐related infertility as it is a particular risk for many female scientists in academia who feel that they have to delay having children. Subject Categories: S&S: Careers & Training, Genetics, Gene Therapy & Genetic Disease

Balancing motherhood and a career in academic research is a formidable challenge, and there is substantial literature available on the many difficulties that scientists and mothers face (Kamerlin, 2016). Unsurprisingly, these challenges are very off‐putting for many female scientists, causing us to keep delaying motherhood while pursuing our hypercompetitive academic careers with arguments “I’ll wait until I have a faculty position”, “I’ll wait until I have tenure”, and “I’ll wait until I’m a full professor”. The problem is that we frequently end up postponing getting children based on this logic until the choice is no longer ours: Fertility unfortunately does decline rapidly over the age of 35, notwithstanding other potential causes of infertility.This column is therefore not about the challenges of motherhood itself, but rather another situation frequently faced by women in academia, and one that is still not discussed openly: What if you want to have children and cannot, either because biology is not on your side, or because you waited too long, or both? My inspiration for writing this article is a combination of my own experiences battling infertility in my path to motherhood, and an excellent piece by Dr. Arghavan Salles for Time Magazine, outlining the difficulties she faced having spent her most fertile years training to be a surgeon, just to find out that it might be too late for motherhood when she came out the other side of her training (Salles, 2019). Unfortunately, as academic work models remain unsupportive of parenthood, despite significant improvements, this is not a problem faced only by physicians, but also one faced by both myself and many other women I have spoken to.I want to start by sharing my own story, because it is a bit more unusual. I have a very rare (~ 1 in 125,000 in women (Laitinen et al, 2011)) congenital endocrine disorder, Kallmann syndrome (KS) (Boehm et al, 2015); as a result, my body is unable to produce its own sex hormones and I don’t have a natural cycle. It doesn’t take much background in science to realize that this has a major negative impact on my fertility—individuals with KS can typically only conceive with the help of fertility treatment. It took me a long time to get a correct diagnosis, but even before that, in my twenties, I was being told that it is extremely unlikely I will ever have biological children. I didn’t realize back then that KS in women is a very treatable form of infertility, and that fertility treatments are progressing forward in leaps and bounds. As I was also adamant that I didn’t even want to be a mother but rather focus on my career, this was not something that caused me too much consternation at the time.In parallel, like Dr. Salles, I spent my most fertile years chasing the academic career path and kept finding—in my mind—good reasons to postpone even trying for a child. There is really never a good time to have a baby in academia (I tell any of my junior colleagues who ask to not plan their families around “if only X…” because there will always be a new X). Like many, I naïvely believed that in vitro fertilization (IVF) would be the magic bullet that can solve all my fertility problems. I accordingly thought it safe to pursue first a faculty position, then tenure, then a full professorship, as I will have to have fertility treatment anyhow. In my late twenties, my doctors suggested that I consider fertility preservation, for example, through egg freezing. At the time, however, the technology was both extravagantly expensive and unreliable and I brushed it off as unnecessary: when the time comes, I would just do IVF. In reality, the IVF success rates for women in their mid‐to‐late 30s are typically only ~ 40% per egg retrieval, and this only gets worse with age, something many women are not aware of when planning parenthood and careers. It is also an extremely strenuous process both physically and emotionally, as one is exposed to massive doses of hormones, multiple daily injections, tremendous financial cost, and general worries about whether it will work or not.Then reality hit. What I believed would be an easy journey turned out to be extremely challenging, and took almost three years, seven rounds of treatment, and two late pregnancy losses. While the driving factor for my infertility remained my endocrine disorder, my age played an increasing role in problems responding to treatment, and it was very nearly too late for me, despite being younger than 40. Despite these challenges, we are among the lucky ones and there are many others who are not.I am generally a very open person, and as I started the IVF process, I talked freely about this with female colleagues. Because I was open about my own predicament, colleagues from across the world, who had never mentioned it to me before, opened up and told me their own children were conceived through IVF. However, many colleagues also shared stories of trying, and how they are for various—not infrequently age‐related—reasons unable to have children, even after fertility treatment. These experiences are so common in academia, much more than you could ever imagine, but because of the societal taboos that still surround infertility and pregnancy and infant loss, they are not discussed openly. This means that many academic women are unprepared for the challenges surrounding infertility, particularly with advanced age. In addition, the silence surrounding this issue means that women lose out on what would have otherwise been a natural support network when facing a challenging situation, which can make you feel tremendously alone.There is no right or wrong in family planning decisions, and having children young, delaying having children or deciding to not have children at all are all equally valid choices. However, we do need more openness about the challenges of infertility, and we need to bring this discussion out of the shadows. My goal with this essay is to contribute to breaking the silence, so that academics of both genders can make informed choices, whether about the timing of when to build a family or about exploring fertility preservation—which in itself is not a guaranteed insurance policy—as relevant to their personal choices. Ultimately, we need an academic system that is supportive of all forms of family choices, and one that creates an environment compatible with parenthood so that so many academics do not feel pressured to delay parenthood until it might be too late.     

In conversation with the Chief Editor

An interview with Facundo D Batista, The EMBO Journal new Editor‐in‐Chief.

An interview with Facundo D. Batista, The EMBO Journal new Chief Editor. Facundo D. Batista has shaped our understanding of the molecular and cellular biology of B‐cell activation. In 2016, he relocated his lab to Massachusetts General Hospital/M.I.T./Harvard’s Ragon Institute to explore the translational potential of two decades of basic research in B‐cell biology. The interview was conducted by Thiago Carvalho. Thiago Carvalho (TC): What inspired you to pursue a career in science? Facundo D Batista (FDB): I was very inspired by my undergraduate course on molecular biology at the University of Buenos Aires. The course was given for the first time, and we were taught the basic techniques of handling DNA, producing insulin, and so forth. Two professors in the course, Daniel Goldstein and Alberto Kornblihtt, really primed us to open our horizons and encouraged training in centers of excellence abroad. I did not speak any English at all, and applying to graduate school in the United States and doing the GRE was impossible for me. I would not have passed. Then, an opportunity to go to Italy and get experience in institutes that could provide me with better training came up. If I recall correctly, we were the first generation of Argentinian biology graduates—myself, Pablo Pomposiello, and many others—that left Argentina looking for a PhD. In general, people would try for a postdoc.I applied to a PhD program in Italy. I went with an open ticket for a year. If I had not passed the ICGEB/SISSA (Trieste) examination, I had three thousand dollars to travel around, and then I would go back to Argentina. I had never been in Europe before. So, for me it was an experience. What happened was that I was very lucky to be admitted in probably the first generation of this new institution, the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Italy. In three years, I finished my PhD, and then, to be honest, as an Argentinian in Europe, I did not have many postdoctoral funding opportunities either. TC: How did you move from Trieste to Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology? FDB: I found Michael Neuberger’s laboratory to be very appealing, and I wrote to Michael. He replied to me, in a letter that I still keep, that—if I was able to obtain a fellowship—he would take me in his laboratory. A wonderful thing about EMBO was that it would recognize the country where you did your PhD when considering postdoctoral fellowship applications, giving me access to this important funding support. ¹ It was the very early days of diversity—the notion that people could be eligible for support based not only on their nationality, but also on their “scientific nationality”. It gave me a unique opportunity. TC: It was also an opportunity to meet another source of inspiration for you, César Milstein FDB: César was not well at the time, he had heart problems. But I met him, and I felt very close because Michael was working with César, and he worked next door. For me, walking in those corridors with César Milstein and several other Nobel Prize winners—you know, Aaron Klug and Max Perutz—it was a dream. I could not believe that you could have lunch with these wonderful people, and they would come and talk to you, not as Dr. Klug or Dr. Milstein, but they would be César, Aaron, and Max. That for me was totally mind‐changing, together with my relationship with Michael, whom I love. They completely changed my perspective on science. TC: What do you remember most about Michael Neuberger as a mentor? FDB: What was incredible about Michael was his clarity. You would present any biological problem to him, and he would crystallize in one sentence what the real question behind it was. He was amazing. Michael would enter into a state of thinking where he would stop looking at you and would start looking up at a wall and would start to concentrate for those 10, 20 minutes that you’d explain the problem. Then, he would come up with critical questions and he would be critical to the bones. I think that that is something that science has lost these days. I think that this notion of going deep into critically asking the right scientific questions has been lost as a tradition. It is something that I try to transmit to my postdocs and PhD students: Scientific criticism is not about personal or emotional evaluation. It is really about trying to nail down what the question is and how a project develops. I think that is what I remember most of Michael, his commitment to the people that worked with him and who surrounded him and that deep thinking and constant challenging about what is the next step. TC: In 2002, you started your laboratory at the London Research Institute FDB: I was at one stage considering staying at the LMB with my independent lab, and César and Michael were very supportive of that. But then came the opportunity to join the LRI—which at the time was still the ICRF. I was the last employee recruited (to the ICRF), and it was wonderful. The notion of changing environments again, changing colleagues. The LMB was not an immunology institute. It was a general research institute and the ICRF at that time was similar, with very little immunology. I have always valued the whole spectrum of biology from mathematical modeling to quantitative biology to biochemistry to technological inputs, to development, and so forth. TC: Your LRI laboratory revealed entirely new aspects of the molecular and cellular biology of B lymphocytes—one was the existence of organized membrane structures reminiscent of the immunological synapse first described in T cells that were crucial for activation. What are the implications of the immunological synapse for B‐cell function? FDB: It was a concept that was resisted by the B‐cell field. The notion at the time was that B cells would get activated by soluble antigens. But if you think about it, that does not make any sense. You will never reach a physiological concentration of a ligand that will allow you to engage a receptor in vivo at a low affinity. So in order to reach that concentration, you need to aggregate antigen on the surface of other cells first. And that makes the whole process much more efficient. It not only localizes the process into lymph nodes or spleens, but it also allows focusing the response into what the arrangement of a membrane is. I was not the first—the notion that antigens are on follicular dendritic cells was well‐established by early experiments. But I think our work transformed the field. A lot of laboratories have incorporated the notion that stimulating cells at the level of membranes changes the way that receptors perceive signals. This does not apply only to the B‐cell receptor, it applies to chemokines too, many of them are also coating the surface of other cells and that helps guide the signals that cells receive.I think that it is an important concept that is likely to be applicable to vaccines. There are several papers now showing that helping to aggregate antigens on the surface of macrophages or dendritic cells makes antigens more potent by driving them more efficiently into where they are used in follicles and lymph nodes. TC: What prompted your pivot to translational research? FDB: I had learned a lot about basic principles of B‐cell biology and antibody responses, but on model antigens. I felt at the time that translating that into humans and trying to understand how vaccines could be improved was an important step. I always like to recognize mentors or people who influenced me and one person who really influenced me in this thinking was Dennis Burton at Scripps. He was very early to incorporate into his HIV vaccine and antibody research people like me or Michelle Nussenzweig that were coming from basic B‐cell immunology to try to help to think about how vaccines can be improved. I decided to take a risk. I left a tenured, core‐funded position at the best institution in Europe to lead the Ragon Institute with Bruce Walker—I am the Associate Director and he is the Director—and brought my years of expertise at the ICGEB, LMB, LRI, and CRICK to a unique environment that is based on translational research. There is the incredible ecosystem of Harvard, MIT, and MGH, and the notion is to incorporate technologies and to incorporate immunology to tackle incredible challenges, like COVID‐19 is today. TC: Are there any major initiatives that you plan to focus on at The EMBO Journal? FDB: One of the things that I would really like to do is to involve the younger generations in the journal. I think that we have an opportunity for direct “translation”. I mean, EMBO has EMBO postdoctoral fellowships and EMBO young investigators, involving early career European scientists, but also scientists across the globe. We are discussing initiatives like, for example, inviting postdocs from different laboratories to present at the editorial meetings. The EMBO Journal has an open‐door policy in terms of people wanting to participate in the editorial meetings.I think that we have amazing scientists around the world that can really bring new views as to where the journal should be going. I feel strongly about that and about keeping a real sense of diversity in the journal, in terms of fields, in terms of gender, in terms of race, in getting people involved from Brazil, getting people involved from China, getting people involved from Japan, from across the globe. EMBO is no longer a European journal. EMBO is a journal whose office faces Europe, but it has a global outlook. TC: Early in their career, many researchers do not feel comfortable engaging with editors FDB: I sent one of my first papers as an independent P.I. to EMBO. That paper was editorially rejected. I replied to that rejection, saying that EMBO should stop publishing just biochemistry, and that they needed to appreciate the importance of quantitative cell biology. The paper was ultimately sent to review and accepted. What was also very positive was that a later review of the scope of The EMBO Journal came to a similar conclusion. That resulted in my appointment to the editorial advisory board of The EMBO Journal (I was not an EMBO member at the time). The positive message is that the journal very much welcomed receiving feedback. That was what made me like the journal. I felt that the journal was ready to listen, to change.This is not my journal. It is the community’s journal. I am just playing a role, putting in some time and effort. There are a lot of things that I do not see and other young people could see, and I am looking for inspiration there, to listen and translate those things into good policies for the journal. I think that this is important and I think that this is at the basis of what I want to be as a chief editor.     

After 2 years of a pandemic,students are struggling to find strong reference letters

Writing and receiving reference letters in the time of COVID. Subject Categories: Careers

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message.” —Mark Zuckerberg.

I regularly teach undergraduate courses in genetics and genomics. Sure enough, at the end of each semester, after the final marks have been submitted, my inbox is bombarded with reference letter requests. “Dear Dr. Smith, I was a student in your Advanced Genetics course this past term and would be forever grateful if you would write me a reference for medical school…” I understand how hard it can be to find references, but I have a general rule that I will only write letters of support for individuals that I have interacted with face‐to‐face on at least a few occasions. This could include, for example, research volunteers in my laboratory, honors thesis students that I have supervised, and students who have gone out of their way to attend office hours and/or been regularly engaged in class discussions. I am selective about who I will write references for, not because I am unkind or lazy, but because I know from experience that a strong letter should include concrete examples of my professional interactions with the individual and should speak to their character and their academic abilities. In today''s highly competitive educational system, a letter that merely states that a student did well on the midterm and final exams will not suffice to get into medical or graduate school.However, over the past 2 years many, if not most, students have been attending university remotely with little opportunity to foster meaningful relationships with their instructors, peers, and mentors, especially for those in programs with large enrollments. Indeed, during the peak of Covid‐19, I stopped taking on undergraduate volunteers and greatly reduced the number of honors students in my laboratory. Similarly, my undergraduate lectures have been predominantly delivered online via Zoom, meaning I did not see or speak with most of the students in my courses. It did not help that nearly all of them kept their cameras and microphones turned off and rarely attended online office hours. Consequently, students are desperately struggling to identify individuals who can write them strong letters of reference. In fact, this past spring, I have had more requests for reference letters than ever before, and the same is true for many of my colleagues. Some of the emails I have received have been heartfelt and underscore how taxing the pandemic has been on young adults. With permission, I have included an excerpt from a message I received in early May:Hi Dr. Smith. You may not remember me, but I was in Genome Evolution this year. I enjoyed the class despite being absent for most of your live Zoom lectures because of the poor internet connection where I live. Believe it or not, my mark from your course was the highest of all my classes this term! Last summer, I moved back home to rural Northern Ontario to be closer to my family. My mom is a frontline worker and so I''ve been helping care for my elderly grandmother who has dementia as well as working part‐time as a tutor at the local high school to help pay tuition. All of this means that I''ve not paid as much attention to my studies as I should have. I''m hoping to go to graduate school this coming fall, but I have yet to find a professor who will write a reference for me. Would you please, please consider writing me a letter?I am sympathetic to the challenges students faced and continue to face during Covid‐19 and, therefore, I have gone out of my way to provide as many as I can with letters of support. But, it is no easy feat writing a good reference for someone you only know via an empty Zoom box and a few online assignments. My strategy has been to focus on their scholarly achievements in my courses, providing clear, tangible examples from examinations and essays, and to highlight the notable aspects of their CVs. I also make a point to stress how hard online learning can be for students (and instructors), reiterating some of the themes touched upon above. This may sound unethical to some readers but, in certain circumstances, I have allowed students to draft their own reference letters, which I can then vet, edit, and rewrite as I see fit.But it is not just undergraduates. After months and months of lockdowns and social distancing, many graduate students, postdocs, and professors are also struggling to find suitable references. In April, I submitted my application for promotion to Full Professor, which included the names of 20 potential reviewers. Normally, I would have selected at least some of these names from individuals I met at recent conferences and invited to university seminars, except I have not been to a conference in over 30 months. Moreover, all my recent invited talks have been on Zoom and did not include any one‐on‐one meetings with faculty or students. Thus, I had to include the names of scientists that I met over 3 years ago, hoping that my research made a lasting impression on them. I have heard similar anecdotes from many of my peers both at home and at other universities. Given all of this, I would encourage academics to be more forthcoming than they may have traditionally been when students or colleagues approach them for letters of support. Moreover, I think we could all be a little more forgiving and understanding when assessing our students and peers, be it for admissions into graduate school, promotion, or grant evaluations.Although it seems like life on university campuses is returning to a certain degree of normality, many scholars are still learning and working remotely, and who knows what the future may hold with regard to lockdowns. With this uncertainty, we need to do all we can to engage with and have constructive and enduring relationships with our university communities. For undergraduate and graduate students, this could mean regularly attending online office hours, even if it is only to introduce yourself, as well as actively participating in class discussions, whether they are in‐person, over Zoom, or on digital message boards. Also, do not disregard the potential and possibilities of remote volunteer research positions, especially those related to bioinformatics. Nearly, every laboratory in my department has some aspect of their research that can be carried out from a laptop computer with an Internet connection. Although not necessarily as enticing as working at the bench or in the field, computer‐based projects can be rewarding and an excellent path to a reference letter.If you are actively soliciting references, try and make it as easy as possible on your potential letter writers. Clearly and succinctly outline why you want this person to be a reference, what the letter writing/application process entails, and the deadline. Think months ahead, giving your references ample time to complete the letter, and do not be shy about sending gentle reminders. It is great to attach a CV, but also briefly highlight your most significant achievements in bullet points in your email (e.g., Dean''s Honours List 2021–22). This will save time for your references as they will not have to sift through many pages of a CV. No matter the eventual result of the application or award, be sure to follow up with your letter writers. There is nothing worse than spending time crafting a quality support letter and never learning the ultimate outcome of that effort. And, do not be embarrassed if you are unsuccessful and need to reach out again for another round of references—as Winston Churchill said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”     

Borrowed robes

Should scientists indulge their fantasies by writing fiction? Subject Categories: Careers, Economics, Law & Politics, History & Philosophy of Science

Like a substantial fraction of the literate population, I have a collection of unpublished novels in the drawer. Six of them in fact. Some of them were composed in barely more than a week, and others I have been struggling to complete for over 10 years: so maybe it is more accurate to say five and a half. Anyhow, most of them are good to go, give or take a bit of editorial redlining. Or, as my helpful EMBO editor would say, the removal of thousands of unnecessary adverbs and dubiously positioned commas.What do I write about and why? My style is not unique but rather particular. I write fiction in the style of non‐fiction. My subject matter is somewhere in the general realms of science fiction, alternate history and political drama. Putting these ingredients together, and taking account of my purported day job as a serious scientist, it is easy to see why my fictional work is potentially subversive—which is one reason why I have been rather reluctant thus far to let it out of the drawer. At the very least, I should take pains to conceal my identity, lest it corrupts perceptions of my scientific work. Even if I regularly tell my students not to believe everything they read, it would impose far too great a burden on them if they came to question my peer‐reviewed articles purely on the basis of untrue statements published in my name, spoken by jaded politicians, washed‐up academics or over‐credulous journalists. Even if they are imaginary. Real journalists are theoretically bound by strict rules of conduct. But imaginary ones can do whatever they like.Today, I noticed a passage in one of these unpublished works that is clearly written in the style of a young William Shakespeare, dealing with a subject matter that fits neatly into one of his most famous plays. In fact, the illusion was such that I was sure I must have lifted the passage from the play in question and set about searching for the quote, which I then could and should cite. Yet, all Internet searches failed to find any match. The character in whose mouth I placed the words was depicted as being in a delirious state where the boundaries of fact and fiction in his life were already blurred; borrowed identities being one of the themes of the entire novel and arguably of my entire oeuvre. But am I guilty here of plagiarism or poetry, in adopting the borrowed identity of my national playwright?In another work, I lay great emphasis on the damaging role of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) as the cause of biological ageing. I have even grafted this explanation onto a thinly disguised version of one of my most valued colleagues. Although there is some support for such a hypothesis from real science, including some papers that I have myself co‐authored, it is also a dangerously broad generalization that leads easily into wrong turnings and misconstructions—let alone questionable policies and diet advice. But, by advancing this misleading and overly simplistic idea in print, have I potentially damaged not only my own reputation, but that of other scientists whom I respect? Even if the author’s identity remains hidden.In one novel, I fantasize that nuclear weapons, whilst they do undoubtedly exist, have in fact been engineered by their inventors so as never actually to work, thus preventing their possible misuse by vainglorious or lunatic politicians unconcerned with the loss of millions of lives and planetary ruin. But if any insane national leader—of which there are unfortunately far too many—would actually come to believe that my fiction in the style of non‐fiction were true, they might indeed risk the outbreak of nuclear war by starting a conventional one in order to secure their strategic goals.Elsewhere, I vindicate one author of published claims that were manifestly based on falsified data, asserting him to have instead been the victim of a conspiracy launched to protect the family of an otherwise much respected American President. None of which is remotely true. Or at least there is no actual evidence supporting my ridiculous account.I have great fun writing fiction of this kind. It is both liberating and relaxing to be able to ignore facts and the results of real experiments and just invent or distort them to suit an imaginary scenario. In an age when the media and real politicians have no qualms about propagating equally outrageous “alternative facts”, I can at least plead innocent by pointing out that my lies are deliberate and labelled as such, even if people might choose to believe them.In a further twist, the blurb I have written to describe my latest work characterizes it as the “semi‐fictionalized” biography of a real person, who was, in fact, a distant relative of mine. But if it is semi‐fictionalized, which bits are true and which are made up? Maybe almost the whole thing is invented? Or maybe 99% of it is based on demonstrable facts? Maybe the subject himself concocted his own life story and somehow planted it in falsified documents and newspaper articles to give it an air of truth. Or maybe the assertion that the story is semi‐fictionalized is itself a fictional device, that is, a lie. Perhaps the central character never existed at all.It is true (sic) that the most powerful fiction is grounded in fact—if something is plausible, it is all the more demanding of our attention. And, it can point the way to truths that are not revealed by a simple catalogue of factual information, such as in a scientific report.But I have already said too much: if any of my novels ever do find their way into print, and should you chance to read them, I will be instantly unmasked. So maybe I’ll have to slot in something else in place of my pseudo‐Shakespearean verse, mitochondrial ROS hypothesis, defunct weapons of mass destruction and manipulated data manipulation.     

Inclusion: an individual pursuit requiring organization-level investment to sustain it

If this was not happening in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I imagine that I would be speaking these words instead of writing them on my laptop. Even so, I am so jazzed for this opportunity! No word or phrase describes what I am feeling in this moment in receiving the 2021 American Society for Cell Biology Prize for Excellence in Inclusivity. It is certainly an honor to be recognized in this way. I am grateful to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for awarding me additional resources to keep on keeping on. My approach to finding the connection between people and their science certainly could use the monetary support. Resources open doors. At the same time that I am grateful for the attention, I am not exactly sure what to do with the spotlight. Importantly, there are a host of other folks out there also doing amazing things who have never been recognized. Let’s work to ensure that their contributions are supported, appreciated, and recognized. Instead of focusing the spotlight on me, I would rather redirect it to recognize my foundational influences. I also hope to encourage the need for institutional approaches beyond celebrating individual accomplishment.

O. A. Quintero‐CarmonaJo Rae Wright was my graduate advisor and the model for how I have tried to work with my students and colleagues to support their opportunities while also “doing science.” I wanted to start graduate school as soon as I could after graduating college, so after letting the Cell and Molecular Biology Program at Duke University know that I was accepting their offer, I started thumbing through their program booklet looking for labs with interesting research projects (a web presence wasn’t even really a thing for departments in 1996). I worked alphabetically and contacted a handful of labs one at a time to see whether anyone was willing to take on an early-rotation student. It was an unusual request for the way that the program had operated previously, and Jo Rae was the only person to agree to it. I don’t remember exactly, but she said something like, “We accepted you into the program, so I would be happy to host your first rotation.” The sense that I got was that, within the limits of her time and resources, she was willing to become my mentor because I needed one. She trusted the admissions process, so why not bring an eager student into the lab. I spent the summer settling in to the life of a graduate student—sort of.At first, I was bad at graduate school. I am curious about all sorts of things, which means I am also easily pulled in too many directions. In that first year of school I spent way too much time simply visiting other students in my cohort to see what it was that they were up to each day. I cannot imagine how distracting I must have been to them and probably extremely irritating to their PIs as well. If you were in Cell Biology at Duke in 1996–97, I am sincerely grateful that you tolerated my shenanigans. Where others might have taken me to task, Jo Rae looked for opportunities to redirect my energies more productively. She and another professor, Dan Kiehart, guided me toward participating in the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where I learned what I needed to do to be a scientist in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. While there, I saw PIs working with students chasing the joy of discovery, and it felt like it was purely for the sake of a deeper understanding of biology and preparing the next generation of scientists to do the same. Resources gave us the liberty to focus on scientific discovery with minimal concern for where would be the highest profile place to publish. Although I acknowledge that the summer course environments may not be the most representative of the daily life of a scientist at a home institution, such an opportunity left a mark—I wanted to come as close as I could to emulating that environment when I got back to Duke and (eventually) when I had the chance to run a research group and teach students.Along the way, Jo Rae made sure to include me and my fellow lab mates in all aspects of the science. At national meetings she included us at every step, introducing us to her contemporaries and putting us in spaces where we would rub elbows with luminaries in the field. When we were in those environments, she made sure that I felt like a junior colleague. I cannot recall ever feeling like a “trainee.” Back home at Duke, I had opportunities to do everything that a scientist might do in addition to “sciencing.” Sure, I would write papers, contribute to grants, and be part of her review of papers. I was also encouraged to mentor undergraduates, teach, advocate for federal funding at the time of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doubling, and plan events for Duke’s summer undergraduate research program, if I so chose. Similarly, when I expressed an interest in focusing on science with undergraduates, she was 100% on board with finding ways to combine my graduate school commitments with teaching and mentoring opportunities. Importantly, at a time when expressing interest in an “alternative career” was not always supported by faculty mentors, Jo Rae encouraged me to seek out only those potential postdoctoral mentors who would actively support my goals. Not only that, she went out of her way to find out what options I might have, which led to her learning about the NIH-funded Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award postdoctoral programs in their first year of existence.In a sentence, because Jo Rae was 100% invested in including me in science by finding the framework that best suited my interests and potential, I grew into my success. This was a form of success that wasn’t decided by someone else; I had defined it for myself with Jo Rae serving as a true advisor in every sense of the word—she was in it for me. She helped to build the crucial foundations that helped me find the opportunities that matched my goals. As a result of her influence, I have also had the strength to make some critical, nontraditional choices along the way. Her mentorship style was tailored to each individual’s needs. She invested the time to figure out our strengths, and also learned which levers would motivate us to meet our potential. The members of her lab became successes because she helped all of us to both define success and achieve our own version of it. Such a personal approach is extremely powerful. Jo Rae passed away in 2012, and with her passing I lost the most important influence in my professional life. Duke University and the pulmonary physiology community lost an example for inclusive mentorship and a significant amount of capacity for such an approach. Since her passing, multiple awards have been established to honor Jo Rae’s legacy as an outstanding woman in science. I would argue that mentoring of junior colleagues may be a more significant legacy than her scientific output. Jo Rae is deserving of this award.Recognitions such as this one are an important way to amplify examples of what we often say we hope to achieve as a department, an institution, or a scientific society. However, if our focus is solely on the efforts of individuals, we are missing an opportunity. While I am humbled to be considered in the same league as the previous award recipients, we are each in our own way scrambling to do what we can while we can do it. When individuals have some positive outcomes, our institutions and organizations will celebrate what these folks have done as they have played some role in supporting these opportunities. Although what we do is worthwhile, it is really hard to do it successfully and sustainably without proper institutional support. We each face hinderances that can undermine the work that we want to take on. Burnout is a real outcome of doing the work that we care about and that our organizations publicly state is important. This is especially true in environments where that work is undervalued and underresourced. You do not have to do a very extensive internet search to identify where the institutions that have supported my work also have exclusionary legacies and current negative influences that continue to hinder their potential for broader, more meaningful progress. In many instances inclusion has yet to be baked into institutional culture in a way that impacts how organizations operate. Although I have had some institutional support to develop a career modeled on what I experienced under Jo Rae’s mentorship, the students and faculty at these institutions know that what gets headlines can often be an exceptional situation, rather than a typical everyday experience. Rather than showcasing the good work of individuals in their ranks, an organization should devote itself to furthering the idea that it is willing to make significant institutional investments in that good work. By building the internal infrastructure and capacity to support inclusion efforts, organizations would demonstrate that inclusion is an essential component of the institutional standard practice. The positive outcomes that this award is intended to highlight would then be a shared characteristic of the community. A shared vision paired with shared effort and resource-support might cut down on burnout of those currently carrying more than their share of the load.I imagine that the idea for these awards is to celebrate good work while also demonstrating to other individuals what is possible. With that in mind, if institutions worked at using the example of those in the vanguard as a way to build structures that value and support inclusive approaches, they would increase their own ability to serve their constituents. They may also influence other institutions to do the same. My graduate institution benefited from Jo Rae’s work while she was present and was beginning to institutionalize her view of inclusion in the last years of her life. As Dean of the Graduate School, the model for how she ran her lab informed her vision for graduate education campus-wide. She wanted to build a structure that would identify, recruit, and retain talent. She wanted to provide that talent with opportunities to become expert in how they wanted to contribute to the world. By ensuring that they had access to the relevant experiences and skills, she hoped to support them as they set themselves up for success as they defined it.I accept this award in honor of Jo Rae Wright, and on behalf of the students who have trusted me. All I have ever wanted was to be able to recreate for my undergraduates what Jo Rae had done for the people under her wing. I am building a career around that goal as part of a department keenly supportive of these efforts. My hope is that other individuals will develop their own approaches to inclusion because they find themselves in supportive institutional environments. More importantly, I would like to see organizations begin to truly prioritize inclusive approaches through funding and through policy. Institutions could make sufficient resources available to support inclusive efforts and allow creativity in how faculty mobilize those resources. Just as Jo Rae had the flexibility to adjust to our needs, institutional efforts will benefit when limited resource access is not a hindrance to inclusive excellence. Additionally, it will be critical to acknowledge the time and effort that such endeavors require in evaluating faculty contributions. It can no longer be the icing on the cake of a portfolio—developing inclusive capacity has to be recognized as an essential component of our work. Until these changes take root at the institutional level, this kind of work may shine brightly, but will continue to be stochastic and short-lived. All those efforts “will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” It is on all of us to prevent such a tragic ending.     

Pedagogy of the Black academic

I am just starting my career as a cancer biologist, but I have always been a Black man in America. This means that I have always inhabited a world that generally disregarded my existence in some form or another. It is June 17th, 2020 and protests have been happening for weeks since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The current state of America may be uneasy for some, but for many Americans, the looming threat of exclusion and violence has been an unwelcome companion since birth. This letter is not about a single person, but the Black academic’s experience of race inside and outside of the academy during a time of social upheaval. I have trained in a variety of institutions, big and small, and all the while acutely aware of the impact of my Blackness on my science. The intent of the following is to provoke the reader to reflect on how we as a nation can move toward radically positive change and not incremental adjustments to the status quo. The views expressed are my own and are the result of years of personal experience observing the anti-Black standard in America.

About the AuthorI am currently a cancer biologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School. My lab works to eliminate cancer health disparities in African Heritage communities and investigates the roles of lipids in modifying the immune response in tumors. This is what I do, but not all of who I am. I am also the eldest child of a mother, who managed to convince me that she had eyes in the back of her head (thank you, Mom; it kept me honest). I am a big brother, a husband, and a father. I also consider myself a fortunate Black man in America. I grew up in places where many of my friends did not live to adulthood. If they managed to survive past adolescence, it was usually their dreams that died prematurely. I was lucky to have survived and to continue chasing my dream of becoming a scientist. I never considered myself the fastest, strongest, or even smartest kid growing up, but I was the most determined. Determined, despite the lack of access to role models in science that looked like me or shared my life experience. Now my mission is to increase the number of dreams achieved and impact as many young minds as my time on this planet permits.As a Black scientist, I sometimes have to remind myself that I have never been immune to racism. Because as you spend thousands of hours delving into the microscopic world, the macroworld starts to fade into the background like white noise. And if you get good at it, you almost forget about the strange looks, the excessive questioning, or even the obligatory “tailing” in stores, on campus, or at home. But it is strange to realize how much you have grown accustomed to discrimination and the fact that you unconsciously prepare for it daily, before it ever shows its ugly head, like a prize fighter training months before a fight.This past month, amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the rest of the world has decided to say police are bad, and oh, by the way, Black lives matter too—as if the oppression of Black bodies was new, or as though the recent string of names added to the ever-growing list of innocent Black Americans killed by authorities is an atypical occurrence. Well sadly it is not, and it never has been in this country or any other place with colonial origins. That is the truth, and there is no other way to state it. America is a country built on and driven by racist ideology.So, as a Black American in an “essential” worker role (I am now working on COVID–19-related research), I have physically been at work daily during the pandemic, as the spirit of solidarity sweeps the globe. As much as I want to say this is progress, I find myself asking “why now, and not then?” Why didn’t this happen when Trayvon Martin was murdered; why didn’t this happen when Rodney King was beaten (Alvarez and Buckley, 2013; Mullen and Skitka, 2006)? Is it a sign of the end times, or is it just that racism/White supremacy has finally run its course?I have a theory about why we are now seeing a mass movement against discrimination and police brutality (a.k.a. state-sanctioned murder). My theory states that had it not been for COVID-19 and the nationwide shutdown of normal life, none of this protesting would even be feasible. Why do you ask? The simple answer is that some people with the financial means can normally find ways to distract themselves with various activities, some noble and some … not so much, whereas other folks are less able to disconnect from the drudgery of hand-to-mouth living. Leave it to a global health crisis to reprioritize everyone’s entire life in one fell swoop. Suddenly, people who had vacation plans are stuck at home, whereas people who were just making ends meet are now unable to make those ends meet anymore. The haves and the have-nots are now both in an altered reality. Does this make them equal now? No, but it does allow people to see who their real friends, allies, and enemies are. I suspect that it’s the pulling back of the curtain that has made many people ready to fight, not to mention it is also very likely that many folks, after experiencing weeks of cabin fever, just needed some way to let off all that pent-up energy.Before COVID-19 became a full-time concern, tensions in the United States were already high as the recent killings of unarmed Black Americans (Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery) had gone viral and cries for justice echoed from coast to coast (Lovan, 2020). Once the reality of the pandemic set in and shelter-in-place orders were issued nationally, the situation became a powder keg waiting for just the right moment. That moment happened in North Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. With the release of the video showing the killing of George Floyd, the entire country and much of the world had a reason to go on a “righteous rampage” that has seemed to get the results some thought impossible to achieve. It cannot be overstated how critical social media has been in displaying the oppression of Black Americans at the hands of authorities to the entire world.Now, several months into the protests, the possibility of a “new’’ new normal has people dreaming of singing Kumbaya in technicolor. Yet, as one of the few Black faculty on my campus, I still feel like people are watching me, but for a different reason now. As various reforms are broadcast across the university, the random wellness “check-ins” start creeping in, and the requests for feedback on “new initiatives’’ seem to be like a new flavor of spam in my inbox.Now, I do appreciate the fact that people are starting to notice the oppressive nature of not being White in today’s world (in particular being Black in America), but I have been doing this for a while now, and I am not sure if hashtagged initiatives are healthy for anyone. Plus, it’s kind of creepy watching all of these people jump on the social justice bandwagon, when they weren’t here 4 mo ago or 4 years ago. For many Black academics, it is not about being involved with something when it’s trending; it’s about being “about that life” when it is inconvenient as hell. Again, I do appreciate the fact that more people are willing to fight oppression, racism, and White supremacy (even if only digitally), but you will have to forgive me if I do not trust you just yet. I mean, you are just checking in during what could be the last leg of a marathon, and we’ve been running this whole damn time!Here is a short answer to every wellness check-in email that many of the Black academics I know have received in the last 2 mo: “we were never okay in the first place, but thanks for FINALLY asking!” We don’t need any more bias training, hashtags, or email check-ins. It was a nice start, but it too has become a part of the status quo. The work now and always has been the eradication of underrepresentation, hurtful socialization, and ridiculously skewed power dynamics, not just the awareness of the fact. I don’t have all the answers, but if real change is desired, I think we can first start by teaching history accurately to EVERYONE, no more whitewashing the reality of America’s story and ignoring the contributions of Black academics (and Black Americans in general). Second, stop being silent when you see or hear racism at work or home. If you do nothing when racism shows up, you ARE a racist! Third, the privileged class must relinquish their “privilege” once and for all. That means the powers that were inherited based on historical (and present day) theft and oppression have to dissipate, with the ultimate goal of power sharing. The country club atmosphere of academia and the “fit culture” must erode in favor of true meritocracy. The best person for the job and not “the person who won’t make me uncomfortable by making me see my own deeply held prejudices and fears.”Honestly, Black academics SHOULD not be charged with the task of fixing broken systems, along with protecting themselves and mentees, while working toward tenure. But if we (Black academics) are not driving the car, progress will likely go the wrong way again (getting rid of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima does not correct the underlying pathology). Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed speaks to this in saying, “the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human … the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.” (Friere, 1972, p. 56). This means that if we (Black academics) want to be treated as humans and as scholars, we must show you what that humanity looks like FIRST. Now the question is, are you willing to learn or are you going to co-opt this moment, this movement to make it into something that fits your preconceived notion of the acceptable levels of Blackness in the academy?     

Ye Tian: Surveilling stress to live longer

Ye Tian investigates how mitochondrial stress signaling pathways regulate longevity using C. elegans as a model system.

An avid reader, Ye Tian used to save up her child allowance with the sole purpose of buying science fiction books. Reading and solving mathematical problems were her favorite hobbies; indeed, she liked mathematics so much that she was about to enroll herself as an architecture major but finally chose biotechnology. Ye moved from her hometown in the Northwest of China, Baoji—famous for housing the Zhou dynasty’s bronzeware and being close to the Terracotta Army—to Beijing for her college and graduate studies.Ye is proud of being among the earliest researchers working on Caenorhabditis elegans in her country; for her PhD studies, she joined the lab of Hong Zhang, who at that time has just established the first C. elegans lab in China at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. Ye identified epg-2 as an adaptor for cargo recognition during autophagy. In 2010, she crossed the Pacific toward the U.S. West Coast for her postdoctoral training in the aging field with Andrew Dillin, first at the Salk Institute in San Diego and then at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she discovered that mild mitochondrial stress during development in worms rewires their chromatin landscape to establish specific gene expression patterns throughout the lifespan and promote longevity.Ye Tian. Photo courtesy of Ye Tian.Ye came back to China at the end of 2016 to start her own lab at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research team studies mitochondrial stress signaling pathways and their interplay with aging. We chatted with her to learn more about her next scientific plans.What interested you about the interplay between mitochondria and aging?I became interested in mitochondrial biology during my postdoc in Andrew Dillin’s lab. Since the origin of eukaryotic cells, mitochondria have been a driving force of evolution. During reproduction, mitochondria are passed from the mother to the offspring through egg cells and they exhibit a unique inheritance pattern. As essential hubs that dictate cellular metabolism, it is clear now that mitochondria and the nucleus maintain a bidirectional communication. Early life “stressed” mitochondria communicate with the nucleus to induce gene expression changes that are beneficial on longevity and persist throughout the lifespan. The fact that mitochondrial function is crucial to aging fascinated me; I wanted to continue exploring that topic further, and that’s why I established my lab around the question of how mitochondrial surveillance mechanisms regulate the aging process.What are you currently working on? What is up next for you?My research team focuses on the interplay between mitochondrial stress signaling pathways and aging. The first work that my lab published was a project that I started during my postdoc. The Dillin lab reported a phenomenon in which perturbations of mitochondria in neurons induced a mitochondrial stress response in the peripheral tissues and hypothesized that a secreted signal molecule, named after mitokine, is required for the cell non-autonomous regulation (1). The identity of this molecular signal remained elusive for almost ten years until we found that a secreted Wnt ligand, EGL-20, functions as the mitokine to coordinate mitochondrial stress signaling across tissues and promote longevity of the organism (2). We are also interested in how the crosstalk between mitochondria and the nucleus influences lifespan. We found that mitochondrial perturbations alter the nuclear epigenome to induce longevity via the histone deacetylation complex NuRD in response to cellular acetyl-CoA levels, the key metabolite at the entry point of the Krebs cycle (3).Lab group picture; current lab members (2021). Photo courtesy of Ye Tian.Our latest work stemmed from a serendipitous observation that neuronal mitochondrial stress is sensed by and transmitted through the mitochondria in the germline. Intergenerational, maternal inheritance of elevated levels of mitochondrial DNA via the mitokine Wnt/EGL-20, which causes the activation of the mitochondrial unfolded protein response (UPR^mt), provides descendants with a greater tolerance to environmental stress. This makes the offspring live longer (4).Among our short-term scientific plans, we’re determining how mitochondria functions during the aging process at both the genetic and biochemical levels and searching for ways to apply our findings from C. elegans to neurodegenerative disease models in mammals.What kind of approach do you bring to your work?The curiosity about how things work drives me; what I enjoy the most is when I see things happening in front of my eyes and when I figure out why they occur that way. That enthusiasm is what I try to spread to my team every day. In the lab, we rely on C. elegans as our model system and on genetics to dissect complex biological processes like aging. We have also adapted modern biochemical and imaging techniques as well as bioinformatics to complement our genetic studies. I’m a geneticist at heart, and I like to initiate a project with a well-designed genetic screen. The best part is that the screen often leads me to answers I was not expecting, and that’s genuinely inspiring!What did you learn during your PhD and postdoc that helped prepare you for being a group leader? What were you unprepared for?Like most scientists, my research career has gone through ups and downs. I had to change my research project in the last year of my graduate school; that was nerve-racking, but I eventually managed to redirect my thesis and get exciting results under time pressure, thanks in large to the support of my parents, mentors, and lab mates. That helped me prepare to become a principal investigator; I gained confidence in problem solving, and since I’ve experienced the stress of dealing with last-minute scope changes firsthand, I connect better with my students.I guess, as many other non-native English speakers, I wasn’t prepared for writing grants and papers fluently in English. This issue wasn’t obvious during my graduate and postdoctoral studies, as my mentors were always there for me and proofread and edited my writing. Now I have to stand up for myself. I spend most of my time writing; I’ve improved my writing skills but it’s still an ongoing process.Reconstruction of the nerve system of C. elegans by confocal microscopy. Green corresponds to YFP-labeled neuronal specific marker Q40, and red labels germline specific mitochondrial outer membrane protein TOMM-20::mkate2. Image courtesy of Ye Tian’s lab.What has been the biggest accomplishment in your career so far?My very first PhD student, Qian Zhang, graduated with two first-author papers and decided to pursue a research career in academia. Being responsible for someone else’s career is challenging but also rewarding.What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?I use the model organism C. elegans for my research in aging, so from time to time, peers criticize the relevance of my work to human health. I’m used to justifying my scientific approach to funding agencies and peers in other fields, but sometimes it’s exhausting or not pleasant.Who were your key influences early in your career?My PhD mentor, Hong Zhang. He is very passionate about the science he does, and he is courageous to shift his research directions to answer new biological questions.What is the best advice you have been given?I think the best advice I’ve gotten is that “tomorrow is another day.” It reminds me to keep going and be optimistic.What hobbies do you have?I love art and music. When I was in San Diego, I used to play in the Chinese Music Band; I miss my musician friends over there. In my teens, I used to hike mountainside trails along the river with my parents. Now, running has become my new favorite hobby. I enjoy the tranquility and peace of mind while running; it’s soothing.     

Elda Grabocka: Stress-buffering comes in granules

Elda Grabocka investigates the role of stress granules in obesity and cancer.

When one thinks of high school, sharing hallways with students from 80 different countries is not the usual image that springs to mind. This was indeed Elda Grabocka’s experience. She grew up in Pogradec, a remote town in Albania—her parents, both physicians, were assigned to this location by the state. Elda won one of the two spots available for Albanian students in a national competition to attend the United World College of the Adriatic in Trieste, Italy, a high school focused on social change that brings together students from around the globe to promote intercultural understanding. Elda still remembers, with a smile on her face, the first glimpse at the laboratories as the senior students were working on their thesis projects: “That was exactly what I wanted to do!” She barely spoke English at the time and had to catch up to the level of her peers, but her perseverance and passion prevailed, and she obtained the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD). For the independent study of the IBD program, she submitted a research project in chemistry, which ended up being an important learning and life lesson: “That helped me understand that I was more suited to biology! In hindsight, it was great to have that experience so early; I certainly had no awareness then how essential failing and then learning from your failures is to science, but having a level of comfort with it from the beginning was probably a bonus.”Elda Grabocka. Photo courtesy of Chris Hamilton Photography.But science was not the only professional option Elda contemplated—her volunteering experience with relief organizations in various refugee camps made her consider a career in public health and humanitarian relief efforts. She finally sought a PhD degree in molecular pharmacology and structural biology in the laboratory of Phil Wedegaertner at Thomas Jefferson University. After studying heterotrimeric G-proteins and how the subcellular localization of their exchange factors regulates function, Elda felt the need to seek greener pastures. She went on to do a postdoc on one of longest-studied oncogenes, RAS—her choice wasn’t motivated by the field, but by the mentor, Dafna Bar-Sagi. Elda’s admiration for Dafna is notable when she speaks about her time at the New York University Langone Medical Center: “It’s remarkable how many novel aspects of RAS biology that have shaped and then re-shaped our thinking about this oncogene have come out of her lab; I felt there was a depth and breadth to her approach to scientific research that if I could learn, I’d be able to see more of the angles, so to speak, ask better questions; she has really expanded my mind in all those aspects.” Elda’s work focused on the interplay between the mutated forms of RAS and the wild-type isoforms, which she and others have shown is context dependent, with the wild-type isoforms acting as both tumor suppressors and tumor promoters (1). While still in Dafna’s laboratory, Elda pursued a more independent scientific interest: the role of stress granules in mutant KRAS cells. In 2016, Elda returned to her alma mater, joining the Department of Cancer Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson as an assistant professor, with stress granules in cancer as the focus of her laboratory. We contacted her to learn more about her research journey.What interested you about stress granules and their connection with obesity and cancer?I became interested in stress granules and their potential role in cancer early in my postdoc. I read a review by Stephen Elledge’s group where they described the “stress phenotype” of cancer as an important player in tumorigenesis. I realized that cancer cells exist mostly in a state of stress—for example, mutated genes, like oncogenic RAS, are potent inducers of many types of cellular stresses. I was working on a RAS ubiquitination project, and one of the candidates for a RAS de-ubiquitinating enzyme we were looking at was implicated in stress granule formation. Little was known about stress granules at the time—they are induced by types of stresses associated with tumors (hypoxia, oxidative stress, osmotic pressure, proteotoxic stress, metabolic stress, etc.), so the question I asked was whether stress granules could function as a stress coping/adaptation mechanism in cancer. Indeed, I found that stress granules are prevalent in tissues from patients with pancreatic cancer and mouse models of pancreatic cancer. Remarkably, not all cancer cells are the same in their capacity to form stress granules—all cells will make stress granules under stress, but KRAS mutant cancer cells have a heightened ability to do so because signaling from mutant KRAS enhances the levels of a critical molecule to stress granule formation, 15-deoxy-prostaglandin J2 (2). This enhanced capacity to make stress granules, in turn, renders KRAS mutant cells more resistant to stress and more dependent on stress granules; inhibition of stress granules leads to increased cell death in KRAS mutant versus KRAS wild-type cancer cells.Immunofluorescence staining of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tissue showing cancer cells in red, stress granules in green, and nuclei in blue. Image courtesy of the Grabocka laboratory.The work establishing this dependence was in vitro, so the primary goal when I started my laboratory was to determine their relevance in tumorigenesis, which led me to explore their connection to obesity and cancer for several reasons. First, obesity is a major predisposing factor for several cancers, including pancreatic and colon, which are prevalent KRAS-driven cancers for which treatment options are limited. Second, obesity is a complex pathology which likely impacts the pathobiology, the therapy response, and even the evolution of cancers that arise in this setting. Given that cell stress and inflammation are key features in obesity, this would make the ideal background to study the contribution of stress granules in tumorigenesis. I think this pre-existing stress [obesity] might necessitate the engagement of stress adaptive mechanisms from the early stages of tumorigenesis and may also lead to a high dependence on these processes.What are you currently working on, and what is up next for you?It’s a very exciting time to be working on stress granules! The field has grown significantly over the past 10 yr or so, especially with the renewed interest in phase separation. As organelles that form via phase separation when a cell is under stress, stress granules are perhaps one of the best examples of phase separation in vivo and a great platform to understand its relevance. The recent advances in defining the composition, as well as key molecular drivers and their functional domains in stress granule assembly, have been of great benefit. We are now better positioned to define the stress granule–specific functions in health and disease. Because stress granules are induced by various types of stresses, they could function as a pan-stress adaptation mechanism in cancer. This is a very appealing angle, as if we can solve how stress granules enable stress adaptation, which is a major focus of my laboratory, we could have better anti-cancer therapies.The composition of stress granules, comprising hundreds of proteins and mRNAs involved in several aspects of cell biology, prompted me to ask whether cytoprotection under stress is their main and/or only function. What other cellular processes stress granules regulate, whether these vary with the type of stress, and how such processes are integrated into the stress response of cancer cells are burning questions we are currently working on, as the answers will advance our understanding of the role of stress granules in cancer. The “chronic stress” of cancer is heterogenous in both spatial and temporal terms, as well as in the type of stress and intensity. I am also very curious to see if and how heterogeneity in stress stimuli impact the composition of stress granules and the processes they regulate, and how this may affect tumor evolution. Also, cancer cells are not the only cells in the tumor that make stress granules. As a matter of fact, we reported that KRAS mutant cells can stimulate stress granule formation in a paracrine manner. An ongoing project in the laboratory that I’m very excited about is focused on understanding the contribution of stress granules to the pro-tumorigenic microenvironment.What kind of approach do you bring to your work?My approach is very hypothesis and observation driven; the latter in the sense that it can often be that initial spark that inspires an idea, draws connections, and looks for context and meaning. I also find that sometimes the answer to my next question or the question I don’t know to ask yet is hidden right in front of my eyes, so paying careful attention to the data is key. It is also where objective and critical evaluation of experimental results starts. There’s one line that’s firmly ingrained in my mind from my postdoctoral training, which is “Science is self-correcting.” It’s a note of caution that if you don’t pay attention and see only what you want to see, it will still eventually prove you wrong, and you’d have wasted a lot of time in the process. So I try to minimize that waste as much as possible—unavoidable entirely, having a favorite hypothesis is part of the scientific thinking process, but crucial to remember to follow the data and not just convince yourself.What has been the biggest accomplishment in your career so far?I’m still quite early in my career to start listing accomplishments. I feel privileged to do the work I do; I essentially get funded to pursue ideas that I find interesting. So I have a hard time with this question because it has a hint of pride, and when you start adding pride to privilege, as a junior principal investigator especially, it gets a bit too self-serving. I hope that the work we are doing stands the test of time and leads to or helps lead to a meaningful impact on patients’ lives—that would be a great accomplishment.What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far?The past two years of COVID have certainly been a different reality, and a constantly shifting one at that. From a career perspective, so much of a scientific career happens at the bench: experiments happen at the bench, we train at the bench, animal work is long and requires multiple dedicated essential personnel and facilities, so inevitably, remote work, or shift work, limited occupancy, and the shortages we are now seeing in the supply chain have been a major challenge for everyone. I do think junior laboratories like mine experience that a bit harder. The bandwidth to absorb these challenges is much smaller if you’re just starting out, or if you’ve had a laboratory for a couple of years and are just ramping up. I must say though that it has made for stronger teamwork in the laboratory, and we’ve had to be really focused and efficient—so there’s an upside!Out for a paddle. Photo courtesy of Elda Grabocka.Any tips for a successful research career?Hard to say, because certainly it means different things to different people. The only tip I would give perhaps is to define what that means, what that success looks like for oneself, and be true to that. I expect how each one defines it also changes with time and experience, but I do think it’s very important to identify what success means as early as possible and let that be what you measure your efforts against. It’s easy to get distracted, overwhelmed, or even disheartened otherwise. My own definition is quite simple: success is doing what I love to do, working toward answering a meaningful scientific question, and enabling/supporting my trainees to reach their potential—keeping that in mind has been very important and helpful.     

A CRISPR response to pandemics?: Exploring the ethics of genetically engineering the human immune system

Ethical challenges should be addressed before gene editing is made available to improve the immune response against emerging viruses. Subject Categories: S&S: Economics & Business, Genetics, Gene Therapy & Genetic Disease, Immunology

In 1881, Louis Pasteur proved the “germ theory of disease”, namely that microorganisms are responsible for causing a range of diseases. Following Pasteur’s and Robert Koch’s groundbreaking work on pathogens, further research during the 20^th century elucidated how the immune system fends off disease‐causing microorganisms from a molecular perspective.The COVID‐19 pandemic has again focused scientific and public attention on immunology not the least owing to the race of employing vaccines to halt the spread of the virus. Although most countries have now started vaccination programs to immunize a large part of the world''s population, the process will take time, vaccines may not be available to everyone, and a number of unresolved issues remain including the potential contagiousness of vaccinated individuals and the duration of protection (Polack et al, 2020).It would therefore be extremely helpful from a public health perspective—and indeed lifesaving for those with elevated risk of developing severe course of the disease—if we could boost the human immune system by other means to better fight off SARS‐CoV‐2 and possibly other viruses. Recent studies showing that some individuals may be less susceptible to contract severe COVID‐19 depending on their genetic status support such visions (COVID‐19 Host Genetics Initiative, 2020). This could eventually inspire research projects on gene therapy with the aim of generally enhancing immunity against viral infections.

It would therefore be extremely helpful from a public health perspective […] if we could boost the human immune system by other means to better fight off SARS‐CoV‐2 …

The idea of genetically enhancing the human immune response is not new and spread from academic circles to policymakers and the general public even before the pandemic, when He Jiankui announced in November 2018 the birth of genetically edited twins who, he claimed, were resistant to HIV. The public outcry was massive, not only because He violated standards of methodological rigor and research ethics, but also because of fundamental doubts about the wisdom and legitimacy of human germline manipulation (Schleidgen et al, 2020).Somatic gene therapy has been met with a less categorical rejection, but it has also been confronted with skepticism when major setbacks or untoward events occurred, such as the death of Jesse Gelsinger during an early clinical trial for gene therapy in 1999. Nonetheless, given the drastic impact the current pandemic has on so many lives, there may be a motivation to put concerns aside. In fact, even if we managed to get rid of COVID‐19 owing to vaccines—or at least to keep its infectiousness and mortality low—another virus will appear sooner or later; an improved resistance to viral pathogens—including coronaviruses—would be an important asset.Interventions to boost the immune system could in fact make use of either germline gene editing, as has been the case of the Chinese twins, or through somatic gene editing. The first requires time and only the next generation would potentially benefit while the latter could be immediately applied and theoretically used to deal with the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic.

Interventions to boost the immune system could in fact make use of either germline gene editing, as has been the case of the Chinese twins, or through somatic gene editing.