Things of Interest

#049

Science is Broken (feat. CRISPR babies)

00:00:00 // 00:00:00
7 January 2019

Happy 2019! Science’s funding model is fundamentally broken! Meanwhile, someone used CRISPR to edit germ line genes and we potentially have no idea how it might manifest! Listen to two former scientists wail about science. Happy 2019!

Serena Chen

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Things of Interest. I’m Serena Chen

Sophia Frentz

And I’m Sophia Frentz.

Serena Chen

And today we’re going to be talking about science and the media and how the media portrays popular science. Recently there was a …. was it today or yesterday?

Sophia Frentz

It’s happened this week, like,

Serena Chen

Yeah, there’s been reports of a scientist using CRISPR to edit genes in the germline, which is a big deal, because once you edit genes in the germline, then that means those gene edits can get passed down to the next generation. I’m not sure what to make of this, because this is not my area of expertise. But Sophia, can you tell us what to make of this?

Sophia Frentz

Look, it’s been a good ass week for my PhD knowledge actually getting play in the media because we’ve had this CRISPR outcome. But we’ve also had like news that, turns out, mitochondrial DNA is passed down paternally.

Serena Chen

Yeah, that’s right,

Sophia Frentz

Like more often than we previously suspected. And I mean, look, we’ll get onto that I’m also mad about how that’s been reported. With the CRISPR thing, essentially, there’s a scientist who is claiming, and it’s now thought that it’s quite likely that what he claims is true, that he genetically engineered twins, to result in changes to a particular gene that should give them resistance to HIV.

So they recruited I think something like 30 couples, where the father was HIV positive and the mother was HIV negative. So these couples generally go through IVF in order to minimize the risk of HIV transmission to the mother and to the kids. And so they were, they were couples that were going to go through IVF anyway. And so this just extra step was added on.

The problems are many, from a scientific perspective, like the major issue is that the mutations that have been sort of published and released for the two kids who are being called Lulu and Nana, but those aren’t their actual names they’re, they’ve been entirely anonymized. And this is one of the issues that many scientists are having, because like, while we sort of go like, yeah, obviously, these families should be anonymized. If we have no way to track their progress. We don’t know if these kids are going to like die real fast. And the mutations that we’re seeing in these two kids genomes, like they’re not, they haven’t been previously observed in the world. And so we don’t know what they’re going to do. We don’t know what this means

Serena Chen

Right.

Sophia Frentz

So that’s not, that’s not great. So we don’t know if the change is actually a bad change. We don’t know if the change results in HIV resistance. And we don’t know if the kids are actually okay. So that’s all not wonderful. You then get onto the fact that like, so the lead scientist, is He, He Jiankui, and I apologize if I pronounced that badly. And like I - China was the first place that did CRISPR gene editing on non viable embryos. And there was a huge outrage and pushback from the West about this. And I’ve always been incredibly defensive of this, because essentially, the paper that was published ticked every box that a Western study would have had to check to be published in Science and Nature. And their reason for rejecting it was it didn’t make the ethical standards. And like American studies sew mice together to see if young blood refreshes old mice like

I don’t necessarily think that - I don’t necessarily see that like gene editing on known non viable embryos so these embryos were two sperm that fertilized an egg, and they were being discarded from IVF. And so this happened back in 2015. And, you know, like, I have always very publicly like I’ve written on this like taking the stance that like, it was fine. And the West were just being like kind of racist and kind of xenophobic about China.

And then this fucking happens. So it’s just, I can’t, there is no way I can defend this, like, come on guys. To a large extent, the West is shitty about Chinese science a lot of the time. And this is just this idea that like, you know, ethics isn’t as stringent they kind of do whatever they want. There are so many instances where this has happened in the US and like there was one a couple of years ago, where so - in a similar way of like editing whole babies. There is really no better way to say that. In taking the genetic makeup of an entire human child that results.

Mitochondrial transfer was something that happened for the first time a few years ago. It didn’t happen because of like, you know, the good ethical oversight that was happening in the UK where there was like, a lab full of people who are experts on it, where they would do they’d done like a lot of experiments on monkeys to ensure that it was like safe and viable.

It was done by a guy in the US who refused to publish his entire work, who took families to Mexico to do the IVF. Because the ethics in the States wouldn’t allow him. And he sort of said, like, Oh, yeah, it’s fine. Like I would do this again, it’s so important to do this kind of stuff. So in most instances, we’re like mitochondrial transfer is an option, right? Like, the reason it is offered as an option is because it is more efficient than you know, embryo selection. So you have a lot of mitochondria in every single one of your cells. Some of them have bad genes on them, some of them don’t. And the instance of mitochondrial disease, the amount of ones with bad genes on them outnumbers the ones that don’t. And that’s generally like 90%.

That means that like, someone who’s perfectly healthy can donate mitochondria to a kid that is not healthy, who has mitochondrial disease. And that’s just simply because like, all of our cells in our body have different kind of mixes of mitochondria. That just, it just happens. Everyone’s a chimera probably. That sounds really flippant, but it’s true, my PhDs in mitochondria.

And so like, in that context, when like really recently in scientific memory that this guy’s just been like a fucking cowboy, pissed off to Mexico, probably not given the parents like sufficient information about their alternatives for them to meaningfully consent to this procedure. Like potentially result in a really high number of miscarriages associated with this procedure and no experience and it previously that happened something like two fucking years ago, and now this guy He Jiankui is like, yeah, sure just CRISPR edit the babies.

It’s just like man, in the scientific context of like baby genome editing, right, like, baby genetic manipulation. It’s not fucking great. Right? And then

I have a lot to say about this. I’m sorry. I’m just like going off, right?

Serena Chen

That’s so good. I’m learning so much, because I really didn’t know what to think of it. Like I didn’t know if it was real if someone was just, yeah, I had no idea.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, so He Jiankui spoke at a couple of events over the last few days. So like this was announced earlier this week.

Sorry, if you’re listening to this, we’re in the past. So you might know more about this than us by now it might have all been said like turns out, lying. And there have been examples about people just like telling straight up fibs about like cloning humans previously. And like that’s been happening since you know, 2000, beforehand. Probably pretty much since Dolly was cloned, right? Like we’re humans, we lie.

The general consensus of people who’ve attended the events that have been spoken at, and that’s really all I can go off because there’s no published papers yet. This is the stuff that makes me really suspicious, right is when you create a media kind of furore without really having published.

Serena Chen

Yeah.

You get this a lot with the Clay Institute Millennium problems in mathematics, get a lot of people making a lot of media hoopla about how they’ve sold the Riemann hypothesis. And then turns out and then they like host a symposium and then everyone leaves it being like, Oh, well, that was a crock of bullshit.

Sophia Frentz

So there are a lot of lot of images and a lot of information about this available online. Gaetan Burgio has done some very good Twitter threads about it. And that’s taken slides from presentations that have occurred, which makes them look very scientific and like fully considered, but doesn’t come with the rigor of peer review.

And arguably, the rigor of peer review is trying to tear this shit apart, because it shouldn’t have fucking happened. Which, like, to an extent, I understand that, but I think it is exacerbated by the fact that this is a team in China. And like, I think there’s something we need to be really careful about is like, it’s really easy to go like, oh, fucking China have no ethics, fundamentally like that colours our view of this.

Having said all of that, I still think it’s real bad.

Serena Chen

Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

Like I would be pissy if a Western University did this. Yeah. Arguably they could have in the US just. Yeah, so the big issues is the testing for so CRISPR is a little bit of DNA scissors. That is not as exact as everyone who uses CRISPR would like you to think it is. It’s not as exact and it’s not as efficient. And there are a lot of a lot of problems with CRISPR , many of which I personally experienced. But basically, the big one is like, while you can screen for off target effects, which this team ostensibly did, and they did whole genome sequencing, that doesn’t pick up on like really broad scale rearrangement.

So like, your genes are kind of meant to be in a particular order. And when that fucks up sometimes cancer happens is basically the short story of that. Sometimes really, other bad things happen. But like a lot of the really clear examples, we have are like, oh, there’s this rearrangement that’s really highly associated with cancer, there’s one called the Philadelphia translocation. And yeah, so like there’s damage associated with the potential for large scale rearrangements, which weren’t tested for by by any accounts so far. So

I really want to be careful with my language here because like, you know what this might be published and the ethics might be perfect, and they might have done everything good. My concern is that in all of the presentations that have happened so far, is that they’ve been - the answers to the questions surrounding informed consent of the parents have by all accounts were very vague and really not specific. And don’t make people feel good about the, like the fact that these parents provided informed consent.

And secondly, the fact that there isn’t any clear future care or follow up plans for these kids. And like, there is no requirement for anyone outside this research team and any medical treating teams of these kids to know their identities or to know even the fact that they were, like genome edited to be born basically right, like, the kids’ doctor doesn’t need to know that. But there needs to be an ongoing plan a treatment team like okay, just scans for cancer, like, you know, age 5, get on that like have an ongoing oversight of the fact that like, making sure that you haven’t done something that’s resulted in genomic instability,

Serena Chen

It seems really important to the validity of the research as well. Like if you don’t have data about what happens afterwards and

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, so it’s, it’s a balance between like the privacy of, you know, the families involved in the individuals involved, and doing your medical due diligence, right. Like, I think to a large extent, like you have a limited ability to have ongoing publications and follow ups of these kids. Because to do so could impact their privacy and their ability to essentially like, live their own lives, like self actualize, right? Like if they constantly being poked, prodded and tested, like that’s not really a good way to grow up as a child, right.

So to a large extent, I respect the fact that these people aren’t going to be doing like one year publications, but equally like you need to be able to say with confidence, what you’re doing and why you are or are not doing it. Like if you’re not going to be following these kids up for cancer, you need to explain why you are that confident that you haven’t caused genome instability and large scale rearrangements.

Like, particularly when you’re doing something that’s groundbreaking, like, yeah, it’s like what you said about the Millenium problems: When you do something groundbreaking, there’s a higher burden of evidence and whether that’s fair or not, is like a totally different question. But like, this has the double pronged instance where it’s groundbreaking and is fundamentally changing humanity, right. Like you said, germline. And like I sort of, you know, went back and went like, it’s the whole fucking baby. But that includes the germline, right, like these two young girls. Every other child that is born from this study because they recruited a number of couples, they are going to pass on these change to the children.

Serena Chen

And that’s the really freaky thing.

Sophia Frentz

Yes. It’s, um, yeah. So like, again, there are two things that bother me about it right like, firstly, that these kids did not have the ability to consent to this

Serena Chen

No,

Sophia Frentz

like, and that’s my issue with germline editing. Like, I’m fine with people that like, you know, the - with trans kids when they’re like eight or 10 just being like you know what, I want hormone therapy, I want this because they have chosen that and made that decision like to go on puberty blockers to do whatever they want. That is great.

When you decide for your child, that something is happening, like, fundamentally to their body, to the genome, to their kids, to their ability to live their lives, like that’s not good. That’s like that’s why the medical community is sort of starting to pull back on like, enforced surgery for intersex kids.

And like that comes off the basis of like this evidence that’s really fucking bad for the physical and mental health. It’s also a recognition That like, children, are little people, and because of that they have some human rights.

Serena Chen

Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

Deep breath

Serena Chen

Sorry I’m not asking anything.

Sophia Frentz

It’s all right, just like interrupt me whenever.

Serena Chen

Mm, I feel like I have so many questions, but I don’t know how to put them all into words.

Sophia Frentz

I think the consent thing really bothers me, because it’s both about like, consent of the family involved. And this similarly, as the issue we saw was like the mitochondrial transfer therapy by the researcher in the States. I think it is difficult to judge informed consent, particularly like of the people who are going to be parents, particularly if they’ve had kids die from diseases, and particularly if they don’t come from a scientific background, like broadly, I’m of the belief that no one can provide informed consent to whole genome sequencing. And that’s because to provide informed consent you need to understand the possible outcomes of what you’re consenting to, right. And like scientists don’t fucking know what the potential outcomes if you’re getting whole genome sequencing are, and I think it’s very difficult like, even for me as a geneticist, to sit down and be like, I understand all the possible outcomes of getting my genome sequenced.

From my perspective, like I understand a possible outcome, and I don’t want it so I don’t get my whole genome sequence, right. Like I, there are particular genetic variants that predispose people to depression. And I just don’t want to know if I have it. And so I’m never going to get my genome sequenced like, that is a choice I’ve made. And that’s, I think, is a very, it’s very easy to understand when you want to withdraw consent, but I think it is very difficult in the context of genomics and like, and genomics particularly.

So, genetics is like when you’re sequencing one gene and genomics is when you’re like looking at the whole genome. There is so many potential outcomes from that, some of which like we haven’t even discovered because a lot of the time when you get your genome sequenced you get updates on like, you know, oh, this thing has just been discovered in research. Oh, this thing has just been turned out. And I think there’s also like, it is near impossible in my opinion to understand the full, like the entirety of the gene-environment and gene-gene interactions that you may have experienced throughout your life.

Serena Chen

Yeah, it’s such a huge space. Yeah,

Sophia Frentz

yeah. Well, like I say that being like, you know, like, my expertise rests in like a limited number of genes and even then I’m like, I don’t fucking how these interact with the environment? Like probably not well, they’re all disease genes like, eugh.

Serena Chen

Well, that’s the thing that really baffles me about biology and why I think biology is so amazing, is because the, just the utter like search space of all of the different combinations of things that could happen is so mind blowingly huge that like, I am amazed that we even can make sense of a fraction of it. And I’m amazed that like that in popular culture, the assumption is that we know a lot about medicine and we know a lot about biology, whereas the reality is that we know so, so very little. And we’re guessing most of the time.

Sophia Frentz

I think part of the assumption that we know a lot about medicine and biology is like a lot of power is being passed on to the individual in these instances. So the individual is like upping their understanding of medicine and biology, whether you look at things like patient rights, or the fact that like personal genomics exists. Those are two things where a huge amount of power has been passed away from doctors or away from the ivory tower of academia into the hands of an individual. And that means the individual is, you know, when they engage in these they have to lift their game, but it means that that assumption of the knowledge that, you know, academics and professors have is similarly raised. And I don’t think that’s accurate.

There’s that Douglas Adams line, which is like: the universe is very big. So most people move to a smaller place of their own choosing. I think that’s often the way that geneticists approach their research. So whether you’re like me and you focus on a couple of genes that you’re like, these guys are my favorites. I understand some of their friends. But… the rest of it who fucking knows, oh, you’re a mucosal receptor gene. Have fun with that, I guess.

Serena Chen

Yeah, I guess this is the thing that frustrates me similarily with things like machine learning, and what frustrates me is that the public perception and the general perception of what it can do and how powerful it is and how much control we have and understanding we have over it, is complete is a complete oneeighty to the reality. And I come across this frustration a lot with machine learning and tech because marketers, people with startup businesses they’re throwing around machine learning as the solution to every single problem ever. Whereas, like, experts will know that no one actually knows what goes on inside a machine learning algorithm like we’ve gone. We’ve talked about this in previous episodes, and similarily, when you change, when you edit a gene to be something else, no one knows what’s going to happen. And I think, in general, the public has an idea that scientists have an idea of what will happen.

Sophia Frentz

I mean, we can we can predict things certainly.

Serena Chen

Yeah

Sophia Frentz

It’s generally pretty easy if something’s gonna be real bad to look at and be like, Oh, no, that’s gonna be real bad. It’s that midline.

Serena Chen

Yeah

Sophia Frentz

Where it’s really difficult to predict what it means.

Serena Chen

High uncertainty.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, so this is why, so a lot of genomics is surrounding disease gene discovery in that, like, there’s a family who has sick kids and no one knows why. And like I am often referring to children because as I think we’ve mentioned in a previous episode, my PhD was through the Department of Pediatrics, so that’s what I know about. And, you know, a family will have sick kids and you’ll generally get like the parents to provide samples to have their genomes or their exomes, which is the coding part of the genome, sequenced. You’ll get something from the kid. If they have a healthy sibling, you’ll generally try and get that as well.

And often, the next step is to say, Okay, what aren’t we looking at? And that’s generally, there’s like a list of mutations which like, you know, the scientific community, I use are quotes there. I mean, like Nature, right? Like the journal Nature has said, There’s a list of genes that you should notify someone if you find a mutation. And those genes, they have a very high relationship to, you know, quite damaging diseases. So things like the BRCA1 gene, if there are deleterious mutations in it, you have to tell the family because there’s a really high likelihood that people within that family will develop breast or ovarian cancer if there is BRCA1 mutations.

So, usually, the way that scientists deal with that is we just don’t look at that gene. Like, don’t want to deal with that ethical minefield, just not gonna, not gonna look at it, just gonna take it out, not align it, it’s fine.

And then often we’ll have a like list of genes that we’re particularly interested in, we can take out all the HLA genes. So there are a couple of genes and humans that are very, very variable. The genes we use to make antibodies are some of those, which is why when there is plagues not all of us die, that’s pretty good, very annoying in genomics. So we ignore all of those.

And then so in mitochondrial disease is a list of about 200 genes that are associated with mitochondrial disease and often we’ll only look at those. If you’re just kind of having a broad kind of “look” for disease gene, you’ll get a number of differences to the standard code you have.

And so like, standards are often either you as a group or you as an institution will have samples for Healthy People, which are, you know, age-matched race-matched as closely background-matched as you can. Or you will compare to a healthy sibling. And that’s also really good and powerful.

And then you’ll sort of go through and be like, okay, where does this differ? And if it differs you then go all right, how bad is this likely to be? So if the genome sequence differs that might not change proteins. Might do shit-all and they’re generally some stuff you can exclude at this point where you’re like doesn’t change the protein, who gives a shit.

And then you go to the stage where you have some things that do change the protein. And then generally what we do, and this the point of this very long story, is we’ll look at the- how well that gene is conserved across other species.

Serena Chen

Okay.

Sophia Frentz

So if that particular part of that particular gene is exactly the same in like, mice and frogs and lampreys, then it’s likely that it’s important. And if you get something different there, than that’s real bad.

Serena Chen

Right…

Sophia Frentz

Yeah. It was a really long story to get to that point, which is like, that’s kind of how we predict things. We use the fact that like, for the same gene in mice, and like often my work had the same genes and mice because mice have mitochondria. Mice-ochondria.

Serena Chen

Love it.

Sophia Frentz

So good. And so like, you know, if it’s the same in mice and frogs and lampreys, like probably a pretty important part of a protein. So if it changes it’s probably kind of bad.

Then we see by how much it changed. So your proteins are made out of things called amino acids. And some are real little and jiggly and act like little hinges on the protein, and some chunky boys that have sulphur in them. And if like, you know, a chunky boy with sulphur in it turns into a little hinge that’s probably pretty bad. Whereas like if one that’s facing one way turns into one that’s facing the other it’s like, Who cares? It’s a protein, it does this thing

Serena Chen

This is incredible to me, by the way. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it is incredible to me that… just the functioning of like molecule level proteins and- I can’t believe we’re all alive basically is

Sophia Frentz

Oh god i mean look like all life is kind of held together by duct tape and string.

Serena Chen

Yeah

Sophia Frentz

But also we can do things like look at proteins with an electron microscope, it’s just so fucking wild.

Serena Chen

It’s just wild and it’s wild like how resilient life is as well.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah. Yeah, it’s really surprisingly unkillable.

Serena Chen

Even though we’ve got like, like I’m just imagining a huge machine with tiny, tiny intricate cogs and levers and like little Rube Goldberg machines everywhere but like all in one machine, and everything has to work for something to work but also surprisingly indestructible. Like, just

Sophia Frentz

well it’s like, if you laid out your genome sequence like your DNA in its current size, if you stretch all of your DNA out, it’ll be two meters long.

Serena Chen

Yeah

Sophia Frentz

You’ve got that in every single one of your cells and half of that in like your egg cells or your sperm cells, but what the fuck, just

Serena Chen

Have you seen a YouTube video where a guy dissolves all the other stuff in some organic matter and is just left with DNA.

Sophia Frentz

I mean, I’ve done that.

Serena Chen

Oh, You don’t need to see the video.

Sophia Frentz

You can like, you can do it with stuff in your kitchen. I think it’s pretty easy to get DNA particularly out of like kiwifruit.

Serena Chen

Hmm, I think that’s what they used.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, no, it’s um, it’s a really common experiment for like high school is to do

Serena Chen

It looks gross.

Sophia Frentz

Well the thing is right, like if you can see the DNA it’s not very pure.

Serena Chen

Hmm.

Sophia Frentz

So when it’s like white and like goopy, huh, that is like it’s still got lots of proteins on it and it might have some fats on it as well. The trick with DNA is you want to have basically like a clear blob at the bottom of your little test tube, which is super annoying when you’re trying to dry it out. And you need to get all the liquid off. But you don’t want to suck the DNA up and it’s- you’ve got really pure DNA because you’re quite good at experiments by now and it’s all clear you just fuck it up and loose your DNA. Like that’s really annoying.

But yeah, like the best DNA is stuff you can’t really see.

Yeah, so like a lot about predictive things are based on the fact that like, we know a bit about disease genes. And so like if it matches a previously known disease gene or looks really similar to it, we can be like “seems bad”. If it’s a highly conserved region, and it changes dramatically, we’re like oh, seems bad,

and just generally like we’ve sequence a buttload of genomes, like a lot. When you consider the Human Genome Project tied up in, what, 2001 like we’ve sequenced so many fucking genomes since then, like the problem with genomics, I think like to a large extent the problem that we’re facing in biology as a whole isn’t information. It’s how to deal with the influx of information we’re experiencing with the improvements in computing powers and techniques.

Serena Chen

That’s the that’s the big question for our age isn’t it. Too much information, and not enough comprehension.

Sophia Frentz

And just like not enough people, really,

Serena Chen

yeah

Sophia Frentz

I’m thinking about like places I’ve worked in like, honestly, they could do with like, 50% more genomics specialists, and a lot ofthe time they don’t have funding for it. But like realistically, that’s how they should be dealing with the data they have.

Serena Chen

Hmm.

Well, this is the thing that I always end up thinking about when I think about science, and how fucked up it is, is the economics behind it, not necessarily the economic well I don’t know, when people talk about economics of science, they talk about- what they mean is the economic activity, the positive economic growth that comes from scientific study.

But there’s not much talk about the economics of science itself, like how scientists are paid and funded, how research is funded. Whether all the incentives are in the right place. And I don’t know, whenever I think about science now and I think about the problems in it, it all comes down to it not having enough incentives, not having the right incentives in the right place. And just not flourishing because we as a worl, as a society place so much value on money and profitability.

Sophia Frentz

Well, to a large extent that’s why like human genomics has done quite well right, in the sense that like this private genomics organizations out there there’s, you know, ostensibly private ones that have open access and seem to do quite well that way. And it’s medical. And it’s pretty easy anywhere except for the States. Sorry, I’m really bagging on the US today.

Serena Chen

That’s all right.

Sophia Frentz

But like realistically they let an experiment happened where a guy just sewed two mice together and was like “wonder what will fucking happen”. Like, so I just don’t really have time for it. That’s a real poor ethics overside homies,

Serena Chen

and just some real villain shit.

Sophia Frentz

Oh, yeah. So those are the O.G experiments that mean that like old rich people in the US, like inject themselves with younger people’s blood.

Serena Chen

This is totally off topic, but are there studies that look into why rich people are so weird.

Sophia Frentz

I mean, probably. They probably don’t phrase it like that.

Serena Chen

Rich people are really weird though.

Sophia Frentz

Probably like class and eccentricity

Serena Chen

Yeah. Anyway,

Sophia Frentz

yeah, so like basically anywhere except the States there’s bunch of money put aside for medical research funding and like full disclaimer, I’m someone who’s benefited directly from that. But also, I think it’s a misunderstanding of what like the fundamentals of science should be like, obviously, they should be medical research funding, that’s really important. If fewer people die from cancer, that’s pretty good. Let’s defeat cancer, the way the meteor defeated the dinosaurs,

Serena Chen

inspirational.

Sophia Frentz

But like that fundamental biology, that fundamental chemistry that fundamental physics research, like is all really important not simply to like, you know, increase the profitability or whatever but like to increase the base of human knowledge and to like get us closer to that post scarcity society we see in fucking Star Trek, right?

Serena Chen

Well, that’s the thing is like when I think about the economics of science, I inevitably arrive at a place where it’s like, well, how do we remove the need for money in science?

Sophia Frentz

Just use less shit that has fucking gold on it, man.

Serena Chen

The what?

Sophia Frentz

So many of my experiments require things that were like plated with gold? So that’s probably the first step is like cut out the gold.

Serena Chen

But like, do you need it? Cause gold is like… very good.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, you really need it

Serena Chen

Yeah, it has really handy properties. I’m just reminded of this tweet by @SwiftonSecurity that’s like, Can people please stop putting gold in their food? We need it for HDMI cables. So maybe we just need to stop eating gold.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, true

Serena Chen

@ rich people.

Sophia Frentz

You can have gold coloured fondant it’s basically the same. Yeah, I mean like humans are weird I don’t think we can specifically @ rich people about that I think they just have the money to like actualize their weirdness. I think if you gave anyone a lot of money and were like, do whatever with it, they’d just do some bizarre shit.

Serena Chen

I think you’re absolutely right. Like I’m bagging on rich people now, but if I had that much money, I’d be doing some fucked up shit. I’m sure

Sophia Frentz

you’d be, you’d be eating gold.

Serena Chen

Sure, why not, poop it out.

I mean, as an aside, I would love to know how you are so mentally lucid while being sick.

Sophia Frentz

I like slammed a lemsip at 8am and then went for a walk and then had breakfast and then did this call.

Serena Chen

You’re amazing inspirational.

Sophia Frentz

Also like I’m always angry about science in some way, right

Serena Chen

I’m sad about it. I’m really sad about it.

Because I really like science?

Well, that’s an understatement. I think science is fundamental to our progress as a society, to our entire species, it’s so important, not only to progress us like technologically, to make our lives better, but also, it’s kind of like, this sounds silly, but it’s kind of a way for humanity to pay tribute back to the nature that surrounds us by learning all about the intricacies and by understanding the world that we live in.

So to me, science is not just something that’s very practical and good for progress. But there’s something that feels incredibly important about understanding the world that we live in. And it’s something that’s quite satisfying on an emotional level, to be able to marvel at the world that we live in, and all its strange intricacies and processes and just how it all works. And the fact that right now science is so held back, stifled by the fact that people need money to live. And things require money and profitability to survive. That’s just extremely sad to me.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, something that’s happened in Australia this year is that the Australian Research Council has had what some would call ministerial interference where after the grants were submitted, the Minister in charge was like, they have to be like useful for the economy. And it made people heard about grants over a month after they were meant to which is substantive of when the month you’re meant to hear it is October and you hear in November and your grant runs out in December.

But also it means like people didn’t pitch for that. Like a lot of a lot of scienc is, the pitching a lot of science becomes the grant writing and getting fellowships

Serena Chen

Oh my gosh, yeah

Sophia Frentz

And I mean, like, fundamentally, there’s a lot of reasons I fundamentally left academia. But like the first time that I thought about it, I was just like, what I love about this is the actual science.

Serena Chen

Yes, same.

Sophia Frentz

So why would I have a career where the further I get the more like writing, grant writing I do? Yeah, like, yeah. I don’t want to write grants.

Serena Chen

You don’t want to spend your time being a salesman, like we’re not here to.

Sophia Frentz

If I wanted to do that I would have been a pharma rep right? Like

Serena Chen

That’s exactly what, what really put me off academia as well, like in honours year, I think I told you about this already. My supervisor spent so much of his time writing grants. And that was bizarre to me. It’s like, aren’t we supposed to be here doing science? And then I had to understand that to do the science, you have to write the grants. So that someone will pay you to do the science. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

And like I would accept an element of responsibility to the broader population, when you consider the most science is funded by taxpayer money, like I think as part of your science, if it is funded by taxpayer money, some of that should be general science communication about what you’re doing, like-

Serena Chen

Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Sophia Frentz

I think, I think there’s an element of that responsibility, but I don’t think it is as much as it is right now. You know, like, I don’t think you should be having to spend most if not all of your time writing grants and constantly and constantly on one year contracts not knowing if you have a job the next year.

Like I have a friend who currently works for the government and her big, like shock. She’d spent the last 13 years on one year contracts in one place. So in one institution in one job, every year, she had to get a contract renewed just for another year. At the point where they were like, Okay, so we’re going to renew it for six months. That was the point which was like, No, I quit. Yeah, like, that’s, that’s not like, she moved to government and got like, a permanent position. And she was just kind of like, What do you mean? I don’t have a contract and they were like, well, you you’re staff, like, you’re not a contractor, you’re staff.

Serena Chen

Something that I would really love to see is either the decoupling of economic incentives and Money in general, from social good investments such as science, or even like things to mitigate climate change, like either the removal of the need for money or for the opposite end, which is like really heavily coupling it and saying, this is an investment we’re going to make and kind of go all in on that.

Sophia Frentz

Look, I think I think there’s space for both, it’s like when you look at like medical research, arguably what we’re pitching is like fewer people die and people are healthier, like there’s never any question that we have to be like, and this will help the economy. But fundamentally they do right because like when people are less sick, they’re in hospital less. They work more they make more money.

Serena Chen

I guess what I would just love to say is like the de-throning of economic health as the number one priority in every sense of life, that we that is what I would like to see.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, I think like the needs to be more space for like blue sky kind of research.

Serena Chen

Yes, yes. Just like having research that might like that will probably not work out. We need more of that we need more like throwing spaghetti at a wall kind of research

Sophia Frentz

And it needs to be done by people who aren’t Craig Venter. Right.

Serena Chen

Yes. That’s a whole other can of worms. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

It’s like when we have that kind of blue sky research done by individuals, like it’s much less likely that any good outcome of that will benefit you know, people, right, like the example that always gets trotted out in Australia is like, you know, Wi Fi was invented by like some of this blue sky research that was done at CSIRO. But the reason that benefited everyone is because that’s a government funded agency, right, like that’s in the public domain. If fucking Elon Musk had discovered Wi Fi, you can guarantee yourself that we’d be paying like through the nose to use Wi Fi and not wired internet.

Serena Chen

Well, you could guarantee also that it won’t be as prevalent and we might not even be using it at all because it’s expensive. So, the whole reason why these technologies are so ubiquitous, much like why internet is so ubiquitous, is because it’s free and open and the protocols are not patented, not privatized. And so it spreads.

Sophia Frentz

The polio vaccine is one of those very good examples where like the guy who invented it had the opportunity to patent it. And he was like, no, yeah, it’s a it’s a vaccine for polio. Like why would I patent that

Serena Chen

Good on you, guy

Sophia Frentz

Yeah, I mean look having having said that I’m also I’m I’m okay with like patents existing, like, even even in the medical space, like I think a lot of the time that can be a good thing. And that can support innovation. But I think that does need to be coupled with like a public healthcare system essentially like a government who says like, yeah, okay, like we’ll pay for this and if you charge too much for it, we’ll just take it because we can

There’s like a thing in medical health law where if a company is like charging heaps for something that the government sees as being like a necessary public good, they can just like break the patent and be like whatever. Yeah, but like essentially that only works when you have a public health care system whereas if you healthcare system is entirely privatized like, people die because they can’t pay for heart transplants

Serena Chen

we’re looking at you America

Sophia Frentz

It’s a really bad episode for ragging on the US

Serena Chen

Well, they’re not done so I mean, they need to step up their game and also they’ll be fine.

We can we can rag on them every episode and they will, their privatized medical system will keep going. So you know,

Sophia Frentz

yeah, I feel like the states has bigger problems than us like, ragging on them.

Serena Chen

Yeah, I really I really wouldn’t know. Because have we talked in a previous episode about how ridiculous it is that scientists, they don’t get paid? Sorry, is what I’m trying to say they don’t get paid by journals for their work. Have we covered that in an episode?

Sophia Frentz

I don’t think so. It’s fucked though.

Serena Chen

Yeah, yeah. So that’s like another just weird economics of science thing that happens is that in any normal publication, the publication will pay the authors for their content for their work, but not in science and in science the journals do not pay for the work they publish. And in fact, in some cases, in some dodgy journals, the scientists will have to pay the journal to get their work published. So it’s like

Sophia Frentz

yeah, there are a couple of open access journals that will charge scientists who come from, like wealthy universities so that they can pay scientists from like, you know, African or South American institutions. I’m a big fan of that. But it’s so just like, it’s fucked, like,

Serena Chen

it’s still really weird because most science is publicly funded. So what’s happening is that there’s public money going into the funding of the research. And then the research that comes out of that is published in a private journal that has subscribers, paying subscribers, and what are these journals doing? They’re turning public money into private money with little work in between and like that just baffles me having also worked in normal publications where it’s completely the other way around like you pay your authors for their work.

Sophia Frentz

Yeah. It has resulted in, you know, sci-hub, which is fantastic. And things like for most journal articles, if you’ve reached out to the corresponding author, they will just send the articles.

Serena Chen

Yes. Yeah.

Sophia Frentz

Because they’re just like we don’t like the fact that there’s paywalls, it’s not like we’re getting paid. And when you think like, you know how much a Nature a full Nature subscription is when you think like, there’s like a single paper in a lot of these close access journals is $32. They are making so much bank.

And that’s not really going back into the community.

Serena Chen

It is not that is just going straight into people’s pockets.


Serena Chen

So you have been listening to Things of Interest. In this episode, we have talked a lot about how science is broken, single tear, and all the different ways that it’s broken. We’ve talked about the recent event of a scientist editing the germline of some babies. I have been, again, amazed by the entire field of biology and how mind blowingly complex and mysterious it is and just how little we know. Science is awesome. Science is cool. It’s very broken. And if you’re listening to this and you’re a scientist, kudos to you, positive vibes to you.

Sophia Frentz

As always, we’re on social media. You can get us on Twitter. We’re @castinginterest. On Facebook we’re Things of Interest. And you can email us: castinginterest@gmail.com. Please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or your podcast listening device and tell a friend like that’s how people find out about us. We’re not always a science podcast. If that’s not your jam, we just like talking about stuff. But we are both scientists. So it comes up sometimes.

Serena Chen

And if you want us to cover something that you’re interested in, if you want us to chat about something that you’re interested in, please send us a message like, let us know. Tell us about really interesting things that you found and that you want to hear about.

Sophia Frentz

I’ve been Sophia Frentz

Serena Chen

And I’m Serena Chen

Sophia Frentz

and as always, stay interesting

Transcribed by https://otter.ai