Instant Genius - Camilla Pang: How can science guide my life?

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Dr Camilla Pang is a bioinformatician, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when she was eight years old. Her first book, Explaining Humans (£14.99, Viking), is a guide to navigating life, love and relationships using the lessons she’s learned in her scientific career so far. In it she draws on examples from how the different proteins in the human body can reflect the different roles in a social group, to the way how light refracts through a prism helping her to break down fear into something manageable. In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, she discusses her current work using disease and cancer data, along with machine learning methods, to find patterns that can be used in healthcare and lead to the development of therapies. She also explains how her neurodiversity has affected the way she works. If you have a burning science question you want an expert to answer, send them to us on twitter at @sciencefocus, and we may answer them in a future episode. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Why AI is not the enemy – Jim Al-Khalili What we got wrong about pandas and teenagers Jim Davies: How do you use your imagination? Dean Burnett: What’s going on in the teenage brain? Dr Guy Leschziner: What is your brain doing while you sleep? Everything that's wrong with the human body – Nathan Lents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit Name Audio, So neurodiversity is something we're all faced with. Some of us just know how to hide it better because they either feel it less or they're more scared. So to be neurodiverse is actually, and to show that, is very brave. And it takes a lot of guts. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats,

throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara and like many of us, I'm keeping myself socially distant, so apologies to things seem a little bit different for the time being. But we've got a load of new podcasts ready to keep you entertained over these difficult times, so be sure to listen out for our latest episode every Monday. And with over 100 episodes for you to catch up on, hopefully we should be able to help take your mind of the things. Back to this week's episode, Dr Camilla Pang is a bioinformatician who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder

when she was eight years old. Her book, Explaining Humans, is a guide to navigating life, love and relationships using the lessons she's learned in her scientific career so far. In it, she draws an example from how the different proteins in the human body can reflect the different roles in the social group

to the way how light refracts through a prism helping her to break down fear into something more manageable. She set down with our editorial assistant Amy Barrett and discusses her current work using disease and cancer data, along with machine learning methods to find patterns that can be used in healthcare and lead to the development of therapies. She also explains how her neurodiversities have affected the way she works. Okay, so explaining humans is out 12 March published by Viking.

And if you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, what do our listeners need to know about Dr Camilla Pine? The first one is open-ended questions aren't her forte. but I do think that's quite important to note because this whole book highlights why open-ended questions are hard because I am on the autistic spectrum. I also have ADHD, but those don't define me. I don't fall victim to my neurodiversities. They empower me, and I wouldn't have been able to do my PhD

and written this book, explaining humans without them. So that's kind of me in summary. Can you give us a brief description of what your book explaining humans is about? So it's my attempt to write a manual for myself from the pieces of information I have assembled together as a child. I didn't know I was writing it. It was more of a notes I collected, a bit like bubbles on a jumper.

You're a little bit embarrassed by them. But one of the main reasons why I wrote it because I couldn't not write it. I had to write to survive. And I like assembling notes together and piecing information together that for me enabled me to decode and connect with humans.

It's also an attempt to make science visible for people as it actually made people visible to me. So, yeah, I can be myself with science. It's my language and something that I want to share with people because it's how I understand them. And so who is it for as a reader? Who do you see this book for? Originally, when I gathered my notes and I wrote it,

which I didn't realize I wrote the book about a month ago because it's one of those processes, I wrote it for myself, but to be honest, I think, thinking about it, I've had visions of me wanting to give it to my mother when I was little. I wanted to write it so that I can one day be like, here, Mum, this is what's happened. This is why, this is what's been happening when I couldn't communicate, and now I can, I want to write it for her. And so you've sort of said just then why you sort of wanted to write it, but why now?

Why did you decide to write this book? Is there anything that happened to make you want to write? It was quite an impulsive thing, as best things in life are. and it wasn't as constructive, it was more reflective, and something that I realized, because I wrote this book all before the age of 20, and I didn't notice that my notes were very much different to the ones before I was 20, until I was 25, and I thought, hmm, it's been five years,

and they're a little bit different, they're a bit more nuanced, they use lots of different types of science and some art, and then I realized that in order to move on and from the notes I'm writing today, I need to somehow gather the ones I've written as a teenager and put them somewhere. And I didn't realize they were useful until other people had the same struggles as me. And I thought, maybe this can help people.

Yeah. And out of all of the things, what do you think is the biggest lesson that science has taught you? Science is still teaching me. It's not some... This is one of the reasons why I'm in love with it, because it's not just a concrete thing. It's something that is ever evolving.

And so are people. And to be honest, it's a vehicle for my understanding and help me make connections. It was my crutch and how I decoded and communicated with my species. That's always nice, isn't it? So, yeah, it's very fluid science. And that's one of the lessons it has taught me.

because, like I said, it's evolving. There are some things that are, you know, very much established, but I like to be on the cutting edge of it. And I think that inadvertently makes me more fluid as a person and less rigid, which I crave. I crave to be able to know my place and to be able to have science hold my hand while I navigate people is great.

So is there really any science behind my failed relationships? I don't like the word failed. I think it's a very binary way of thinking, because I even mentioned this in chapter one, where it's, you know, it's box thinking. It's either one or the other. You fail or you, you know, succeed. But evolution's a bit more flexible than that.

So a failure in one context is often a treasure in the next. And that's actually kind of nice because it gives us that wiggle room we need and that open-mindedness to be like, you know what? Let's cut ourselves some slack. If it's not working, it's not working. And we are all evolving.

And to be able to evolve together is great, but to evolve separately and through different means is also great. It's what we, it's our energetic potentials as people. And that's so the science behind a relationship is merely a matter of divergent evolution. Divergent evolution? So in science, so you've got either of evolution and you evolve together from different places and you kind of like come together holding hands and that's called convergent evolution. And where divergent evolution is, you know, just as me and my sister.

We've come from the same place but we've come, we evolve in different paths. So this is something that I use. I think I mention it. I think I might have mentioned it in chapter 8. But yeah, it's how I see things. help the inevitable, you just have to just be yourself and, you know, hope for the best. Thank you. And, you know, personally, but I think for everyone, the human connection is something that we all struggle with. What can science teach us in that respect? It's all going to be

okay. Basically, just, it's all going to be okay because you are you and as long as you make yourself whole, then you are an evolutionary module that is capable of interacting with lots of different partners, lots of different people and situations. And I think that's one of the parallels I make in the second chapter about how to embrace your weird that not only is weird, wonderful, it's also subjective. And it's about being able to make yourself whole and, I guess, protein, you know, soluble, to move about. Life is an independent unit. And my memory was referred to that unit as being cooked. cooked, like you're cooked, you know, you're ready to go.

Ready to be served. Ready to be served. So is there a time when we can use science to help us make decisions? You mentioned machine learning principles in the book. Yes, so the whole book is about being able to make decisions and elucidating some kind of psychology. Each chapter offers information on that. But specifically, so the first chapter mentions about different ways of kind of,

kind of visualising what your situation is, such as clustering and, you know, and a classification. But the ones which resonate with me most today is in, I think it's Chapter 7. I can't sure remember. Anyway, we'll see. It's called how not, it's called how to find your goals. And I talk about a gradient discern algorithm. And what that basically means is to acknowledge a situation and future projections of it are a landscape.

And the ability to kind of simulate which solutions are most best for that, you know, and which ones seem the best for that, short-term or long-term, can differ. And there's lots of different machine learning algorithms that kind of, you know, iterate, you know, they kind of walk along the landscape to find solutions. So I do explain that in the book,

and it will become clearer because I don't want to end up reading out the whole chapter to you. But in essence, yes, machine learning inherently is based on psychology. It's what we're trying to do. It's the point of it. It's trying to mimic the human brain and then scale it up to lots of data so that we can gather some kind of insight and intuition, much like a human. Because humans are great at these complex, convoluted algorithms that enable us to have a 4D experience of the world. machines are a little bit they're a little bit thick

and that's why they frustrated so much but they're fast and they can deal with lots of different data they're so effective because they can learn fast with humans take a little bit longer but we're more accurate in how

we come up with decisions but yes I do mention that extensively in different chapters and you've You've mentioned the word, or sort of the term box thinking. What does that mean? Box thinking is just binary thinking,

either that or this. You, I call them isms thinking, oh yeah, you're this. It's very much, it's very categorical. And you classify people according to these box categories. And you're like, how do they link up to each other, but they don't. And I think to have a bit more of an open mind

and be open to the different, you know, be open to the different ways in which things can be related is more of a tree-based approach where you know that everything's at some point interconnected. You've just got to find your way through. So box thinking is great in making a decision there and then, brilliant, because you don't want to end up going, oh, yeah, it could be this, yeah, you could do that all day, every day. But you do need box thinking, which are basically the fruit of your intellectual labour. that's what I like to think. In the book there's a couple of times

where you sort of get us to think about ourselves in different, almost categories. So we've got the different proteins that we find in the body the different roles proteins have, but also the different, for example, bonds that you find. There's kind of categories

that are defined in the book. But psychology has a lot of models for putting these people in boxes and categories thinking of things like Myers-Briggs. Do you have one that you subscribe to? Are they useful? To be honest, I think the inherent adaptability we have as people, to describe a single person within like a four-letter metric is reductionists to say the least. And I think to know the limitations of each psychological model and the uses and limitations but, you know, for different environments is very, it is good.

But I wouldn't try and encompass my personality into that kind of singularity because that only, you know, would be limiting me as a person, but it's also affected my native behaviour. So Myers-Briggs is all right, but it's very general. It doesn't take into account context. And I mentioned that in the book, and I think it's very widely used. And it's something that is, you know, it's easily, it's easy to be online, it's free. But it describes the general tendencies. I'm not a psychologist. There are probably loads of different ones. You know, there's a human brain model. You know, you can ask, you know, just Google it. But at the end of the day, what they all have in common is you've got, you know, they describe different sides of people and it's just knowing how you

are. And they don't account for evolvability. You have to keep taking them. But then again, would your answers to the next round of questions be affected by what you did before? So this is why I think this is good if you want to know how you will respond in a specific situation and not encompass you as a person. And you refer in the book to neurotypical and neurodiverse. Can you just explain what those terms mean? So everyone is neurodiverse. There's no, honestly, even though you try to be square, you're not square. I'm very sorry to tell you. It doesn't exist because you are literally a species on this planet and subject to evolution. And you're going to to evolve and to admit to that and to behave as your natural self is sometimes quite hard in

these kind of social constraints. So everyone is neurodiverse. In terms of neurotypical, I think what people were more commonly refer it to is something that is you're not yet diagnosed with a mental health variance. I don't call disorder because I don't believe in this whole mental disorder when it's something that is clearly imposed by an environment. So neurodiversity is something we're all faced with. Some of us just know how to hide it better because they either feel it less or they're more scared. So to be neurodiverse is actually, and to show that, is very brave.

And it takes a lot of guts. And it's a term that's quite closely related to, like, autism and asperages, right? Yes, it is ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, all that's of different types of psychological impositions that can affect you. And what you'd find with these mental health disorders or variances, sorry, is that a lot of the struggles that they have are mainly due to the intolerances of their environment. If left alone, I'm normal. I'm fine. Happy as Larry. But if I have to sit at my desk, you know, in a certain, you know, way all day, I'll be

absolutely nuts. I actually sit under my desk and I've got a standing desk and I read under there. But the people at my work are very accepted of that. So what I'd want neuro-tribicles to learn about neurodiversity is just to accept and embrace it. they're probably jealous. They probably want to send her to my desk. And that's one way you've said about being neurodiverse, changing the way that you work. Is there any other ways that it actually impacts your career, your life? Right. I'm speaking for my personal experience. And everyone who has, well, everyone,

basically, or those that have a diagnosed mental health variance or have their own experience. but personally I find logistics really hard I get really bad anxiety but I've got that under control I mean all these things I have I've made into something positive

because it's a force to be reckoned with it's an untapped resource you just have to know how to train it and to use it and not be hindered by you being an odd shape because it's easily to feel squeezed and trapped But it can affect my focus.

I know at the times of day that I focus best. You just need to know your shape and make the most of it. And I might not fit at a 9 to 5 desk. I might be focused really well at 6am until 12. And then all afternoon I won't. It depends. It's about being adaptable to your own needs. And I think that can be said for everyone,

not just being universe, but everyone. So, yeah, but also in terms of my Aspergis, I guess I'll tell a bit more about that later on. I wonder thinking about how autism appears in pop culture, how do you feel when you see it portrayed in the media? I think that the, okay, one-line summary. It's very male-orientated, very white culture, and there's lots of head banging on walls. And I think that's because, for both supporters and people with autism,

I think it's due to the fact that we don't know what it looks like in any other form because it's very hard to diagnose. It's symptomatic, it's very varied, and those that have it, particularly females, they're known to mask their symptoms. And so trying to get it out of them is really, really hard. Lucky for me I was diagnosed at age eight, or eight or nine. But for example, but then someone says to me, oh, you don't look autistic, as if, like, I'm tired that day. And it's actually, I know that they mean well. So I don't make a first, I just be like, oh, yeah, okay. You know,

I just have a given an indifferent answer. I've rehearsed, obviously. But it's a great, to say I don't look autistic because it's not something that I have, it's something that I am. This is my human shape. I am autistic and I have a different shape such that I experience life differently to the point where it can hinder but also enhance your experience. So in terms of its betrayal in the media, I think it's not quite accurately represented in terms of how how varied it can be. And I'm really hoping that this book sheds a light on how varied it can be, but also anchor it down to a common psychological route

that explains why you are feeling, A, that little bit weird, or B, out of place, or C, to explain the humor that you are. And there's a fair amount of self-diagnosis when it comes to autism. Do you have any views on that? Does it have consequences? Self-diagnosis. What, just by reading or by the internet? It depends how it's done, to be honest.

Self-diagnosis, you have to be careful because you don't want to end up reading the wrong thing and thinking that you're one thing going, oh, no, you know, it's good to have an expert opinion. But having said that, it is very hard to get a diagnosis, not because it's hard to diagnose in the first place, but it's also very hard to even get therapy on the NHS because it's such a high demand.

It's just, you know, the system is not as efficient as it could be. And I think because of that, it's made people be overlooked and suffering in silence, and I don't like that. But I am hoping that this book will bring them into light. That's the most important thing. I want people to, want people who feel hidden away and like I was not made for this world. I was not made for these times to read it and go,

oh yeah, maybe I am. And for them to step out at the corner and, you know, go into the light. And self-diagnosis can be limited at times, but you don't have to self-diagnose to feel like you belong. Why is it that autism is often closely linked with ADHD? They are a marriage made in heaven, but they live in hell. They are counterparts, to be honest, because ADHD is a kind of chaotic, unpredictable, sporadic wildfire that spins outwards.

And it's everything that makes you feel alive and it's messy and it's not routine. It's fluid. and AD and ASD is very is more rigid, more focused, more, it likes routine. It's quite inwards, which is very introspective. And this is from my experience, that is. I'm just trying to stratify why they're both so different from each other. And they save each other a lot of the time because they're a ying and yang. Most of the time I feel like I'm a third wheeler.

I really do. I'm mediating both of these psychology simultaneously, and I'm like, I just want to make a cup of tea. But the good thing is that they do complement each other. When I go into hyperfocus mode, I've also got my Asperger's to push that through further, and I can get stuff done fast. But the question is, what do I need to do by when?

If I know what and how and why, I'm there, ADHD can make you feel lost, and so can autism. But together somehow you find your way through. It's almost like magic. But they are closely linked. I think it's very important to highlight the intersection of anxiety. So one can save another,

but also they can act together to really provide a, you know, horsepower of anxiety. And that could be hard to deal with. You don't know what you're going to be anxious about that day. but you know that your mind is spinning in both directions. But you have to just learn to train it. It's literally what you've got to do. It's energy at the end of the day.

It's a bit of a privilege. And do you remember your own diagnosis? What did it mean for you? To be honest, it didn't really mean anything to me. I was pretty happy just do my own thing and carried on doing my own thing. It was mainly for my mother and my family and my mentors to help support me.

So they could Google. and research, what was going on and how best they could help. And that was absolutely instrumental in me functioning and learning like a normal teenager and then me kind of replicating these strategies put in place in my adult life. So actually it didn't mean anything to me because I didn't understand it. It was not something that's another label. I don't, it's another ism or a label for neurotypicals to have to support people with neurodiversity. And was there anything that was so different about getting, obviously, your autism diagnosis so young, eight or nine,

and then your ADHD diagnosis so recently? To be honest, I think, because their symptoms do overlap and, you know, I'm hyperactive generally as it is, as a person, you know, that might not do to my autism, but that's just me generally. I think the ADHD kind of got overlooked and a lot of support was based on me having autism, which was fine. I mean, great. I only noticed I had ADHD when I went into a job where I had to be a shape, a certain shape. And I was like, oh, I don't know if I fit in this shape.

I thought, why, why, why? And it was almost a self-diagnosis based on me running to occupational health at lunchtime, crying, knocking on the door, I'm going to be really frank here. And then I talked to them and they were like, you've basically got ADHD. And I'm like, yeah, I thought so. Because the panic attacks were different. When you have autism, your panic attacks makes you spiral inwards and you want to hide in a corner or put something over your head covering all senses. but it's from over-stimulation. But an ADHD panic attack is actually from under-stimulation,

and you spin outwards because you want to move, and you're restless, your mind is restless. And when I had to be in that certain shape, every fibre of my body was trying to push out. And there's only so many lunchtime walks that can kind of quench that cognitive thirst to just burst out energy. So, yeah, so I...

It's interesting because I didn't realize I had ADHD until I realized I didn't no longer fit anymore. And that wasn't because of my autism. It was because of something else. Good job. Yeah. So that's probably why I was so late. But that being said, I've not actually been formally diagnosed with ADHD. And I've tried to get one, but it's really hard work.

Really hard work. And even I even thought about getting it done privately, but it's... very expensive, so I haven't done it. And also, I've got the support I need, but it is important to note that people who are suffering and need that diagnosis, they are probably going to be struggling with getting that diagnosis because it's really hard to get that on the NHS, not only, obviously, availability, but diagnosing it. So my advice is if you know you've got something wrong, live it up and don't hide it because people need to know. Thank you. You mentioned your job that you specialize in translational bioinformatics. That term means absolutely nothing to me. What is that?

Biomaphematics is quite a new field because it's been such a big influx of data. And so specifically biomantics deals with biological data from the labs. Someone actually said to me, what's the point of bioinformatics if you can just do it by hand? And I'm like, nothing. because we have so much data and so many patterns within that, both obvious and not so obvious, we need a way of processing that data, putting it somewhere, and making sense of it. So this is what Pythormatics specifically, you know, I deal with clinical data and cancer data

and lots of different disease data that we have in order to find patterns so that we can find therapies. And these might be, you know, there's lots of different types of data that you can do this with. Translational in this context specifically means regarding, you know, clinical outcome and how can it affect, you know, healthcare. So that's why I like it. It gives me that. I'm a biochemist.

And it's basically biochemistry on the computer for medicine. That's great. It's good enough for me. And so bioinformatics, can you put that into context? How does that affect the wider world? Science, I think generally, especially those that code, is very hidden. It kind of goes on without you noticing it. But without it, we wouldn't be able to elucidate the results and the discoveries that we've made from all this data that we've harnessed.

So it's a bit of a process that a lot of people depend upon, but they don't really know that it's there. I think that's a bit of the shame because people work so hard and their minds are incredible. Like some of the people at work, I'm like, your mind is awesome. And to be able to shed light on that, I'm really hoping that bioinformatics and science and biochemistry have more of an awareness about how instrumental they are, not just making you alive, but also healthcare and, you know, renewable. energies, there's such a big outreach of how bianformatics and biochemistry can affect your life. So I'm hoping that people, when they read the book, they can Google all the bits of stuff. They're like, oh, what's that? What's game theory?

Or what's hemoglobin? My favorite protein, sorry. Yeah, I'm hoping that it will stir curiosities that people can find a bit more about science. And this subject that is a little bit hidden. It's quite new, though. And you talked about outreach. You work both in the lab and you do a lot of outreach. Which do you prefer and why?

I love both and I wouldn't have it any other way. I designed it such that, much like the different sides of science, I like to assemble together. I like the different types of way of interacting with different sides of science in order to reach my arms out and gather them all. I like to say to my friends that I'm spider-shaped. It's actually an analogy I got from my mum because we were talking about artists

and Louise Bourgeois and she did this art installation piece called Bon Maman. It's probably just called My Man. Bono Man's a jam, sorry. So it's actually called My Man. And it's about this massive spider installation that when you look at it,

you kind of feel a little bit haunted. But when she gave me this book is about being able to tie lots of different pieces together via a web and be in control of them. And I like to think that I've got my main job that really feeds me and I, you know, I feel really happy there. But I also have side projects that I do on my evenings and my weekends. And I love that because not only is it a source of creativity, inspiration, it also enables

me to practice lots of different things without that pressure of having to perform. And also it's having lots of different eggs and lots of different. baskets that they can feed into one another when need be. So this is one of the reasons why I like have a main job and different side projects because outreach is just sharing the love, isn't it? And you mentioned the book that you have synesthesia. Can you explain what that is and how it presents itself for you? Yeah. So synesthesia, it's a, it's not a mental health disorder or variance or whatever have you. It's just aware that you perceive the world. And specifically, my senses are very, very heightened. And that's due to my autism. That's one of the things that

a lot of people that autism have is a sensory overload. But it's a bit different to that because you associate colours with words and smells and everything's cross-linked. And so you're like, yeah, but that doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't. You're completely right. So whenever I see a picture or I see like words, all them have their personalities, colors, smells. And they can get really confusing. But it's okay because I've got my ways of dissecting what means what, which is one of the reasons why reading fiction is actually quite hard for me, but also getting on the tube because you can, it's not like a form of delusion,

it's just more of an extra thing that you sense. And I mentioned it in the book in the fears chapter, the chapter where I look at how to, refract or spread out different emotions so that you can process them because when they when they hit you like a white light you just don't know what to do with them and the one one of the main reasons of me using that parallel was because I saw emotions very vividly with colour and with their own personality situations have their own personality and their colour and from that it really helped me, I want to say label, but kind of cluster what was what.

But how it manifests as me is colour and sounds and tastes and smells. It just heightens that. It makes the experience more 4D basically. I think that leads into my next question, my final question, which is can art influence science? Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Funny you should say that because one of my, well, a couple of my side projects I'm doing is communicating the parallels between art and science.

I'm not going to go into it too much. I'm going to leave you with a cliffhanger there. But yes, they are both in, it's both in art, complementing science, with it communicating what science is trying to do, but also on like an algorithmic level and how using the different strategies used in the creative industry and those used dealing with things on a micromelecular level are very much paralleled.

So yes, yes, art can influence science because both of them root from creativity, both have an innate chaos, that they're trying to find patterns they're in, and they're very much complementary. So art is top down and science is bottom up. that's all I'm going to tell you for now. Well, thank you.

Everybody so much, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. That was Camilla Pang, whose book Explaining Humans is out now. Just to reassure you that the team here at BBC Science Focus are still working hard to bring you the magazine, and we're offering a half-priced subscription so you can get it delivered to your door and save any unnecessary trips to the shops.

Head over to buy subscriptions.com forward slash 2020 to take up this great offer. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

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