On with Kara Swisher - A Nobel Prize Winner on the “Dark Matter of Biology”

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Kara interviews Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford University scientist who, along with Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry earlier this year for developing bioorthogonal chemistry and click chemistry. Bertozzi explains what bioorthogonal chemistry actually is before breaking down how identifying different sugars in the body — which she calls “the dark matter of biology’’ — could lead to breakthroughs in treating diseases ranging from the flu to cancer. She also weighs in on the state of funding in biology, Twitter, being lesbian in STEM, and the never-ending feud between chemists and biologists. Before the interview, Kara and Nayeema briefly discuss former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's protest march (which was called off after this episode was recorded) and Trump's dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes. You can find Kara and Nayeema on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? you need Indeed. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, now with 100% more pie. Actually, 200%. And I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. Pie? Yeah.

We don't have pie where I am right now. Explain where you are for the people. I'm in Pakistan. I'm in Islamabad right now. And why? We just finished celebrating my sister's wedding to a great guy. She's a great girl. And it was a multi-day celebration.

You saw the photos. Yeah. What do you think? It's one color after the Knicks and the backdrops and it's almost like a theatrical presentation. I mean, I think weddings are that, they're very performative, but this is like beautiful and gorgeous

with all the colors. Yeah, it's a wedding industrial complex. I mean, we talk about that in the West, but here it's something else. Everyone gets married in halls and lots of colors and beautiful outfits and partying. Yeah. It's exhausting.

Weddings are exhausting. Yeah. You kept saying day three. I was like, what? Like, huh? And I've been to an Italian wedding. Day four. Day four. Oh, you're on day four now. Is it done? Are they married finally? It's done. They're married. They've been married. Are they freaking married? You have to be real married after one of those things. Anyway, your sister looks beautiful. You look beautiful. Your mother looks beautiful. It's really quite something.

Thank you. You seem a little weary. I know you have to fly back for 20 hours. Well, you know what's happening right now in Islamabad, other than my sister's wedding, which is obviously huge news. That's the most important thing. Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, is actually doing kind of a long march across the country.

And he's come to Rawalpindi, which is a twin city of Islamabad. And he's out there right now. This is his first kind of public appearance since being shot weeks ago. And so the feelings in the country are very tense and all the roads were closed. So logistically, it was extremely complex, just like getting people in and out of Islamabad because not everyone lives here. And it's like you can leave the city, but it's hard to come back in. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's a very strange mood right now. So what is he protesting? Well, yeah, he had served in power until spring of 2022. So he'd served for about four years. And then there was a vote of no confidence in him. And he's part of the PTI party. And, you know, he's been accused of corruption and whatnot. And there have been kind of acts of trying to get him not to run again and not to participate in elections again.

And he is protesting the current government's stance on him and his party, on PTI, the party. And also, we're a parliamentary system, so everybody has to form these really weak coalitions to serve in government. And when the party in power has power, they tend not to relinquish it very well. And then, you know, he was shot weeks ago, which is very scary. And Pakistan has a long history of kind of violent attacks against leaders, including Benazir Bhutto's assassination. I remember. And so, yeah, he's protesting that. I mean, there have been back and forth where he had claimed that the Pakistani government was responsible for the attack on him. They said they were not.

There's no evidence that they were. But all of this is, you know, there's high politicking. A larger-than-life figure doing something controversial, not unlike Trump having dinner with white supremacists. We're not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about that. That was Thanksgiving here in this country. I don't know what's going on there.

I wouldn't even compare them, by the way. I remember when Imran Khan came. He came to speak to the editorial board at the Times in 2019. And I remember sitting there thinking like, you know, Donald Trump is the president of the United States and Imran Khan is just a lot more civil, more open to media, not at all that open to media, by the way, but more open to media than the American incumbent at the time was. So it was just shocking to think that. Yeah. What's going on in the States, Cara? Loudmouth narcissists are screaming from Elon Musk to Donald Trump. And that's what's happening here as usual. And everyone's having a really nice Thanksgiving, I think. Should I just stay here? I think you should stay in Pakistan. I mean,

very briefly, Donald Trump had dinner with Kanye West and he brought Nick Fuentes, who is a white supremacist. And finally, the New York Times named him who he was. So Trump released a thing saying he didn't know who he was. And it's the same old, same old. It's the same old as where we are. But it was a very nice Thanksgiving and very uneventful. Yeah, maybe I'll stay here. Let's talk about people who are doing great things. And this is what we talk about today. Our guest today is Carolyn Bertozzi. She's a multi-award winning scientist, and she just won the 2022 Nobel Prize for chemistry. She shared it with two other scientists. Yeah.

She won it for bio-orthogonal chemistry. What does it mean, Kara? You're asking me. You're going to wait a long time, but she explains it beautifully. That'll be our first question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so impressed by her. I mean, I think, you know, she's sort of an easy-to-talk-to person, and, you know, there's this whole idea of scientists being sort of larger than life, but they aren't. They spend a lot of time in these labs and are doing amazing things,

and she, in particular, has a very interesting backstory and has moved chemistry forward by—I'm not a scientist, and I don't even play one on TV. Nor I. I think she explained very well what she was doing, how important it is to future discovery. And one of the things that we have to, in this crazy political world,

advances in science and health are just astonishing. And she is one perfect example of that. The advances are just astonishing, but also so is the scrutiny and skepticism and misinformation. And I think the reason why you and I want to talk to all these scientists is because we think it's important to hear directly from the people who are pursuing these great initiatives and understand what they're trying to do and let people see that as opposed to having it play out in social media or on, you know, in some kind of politicized environment. Yeah, we have to hear what they're doing. And it's important to hear from scientists directly. When we're back, we'll have Carolyn

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Their mom is not. So as speaks to me like I'm not very good at chemistry, and I know I'm sure you've heard this a million times before, but let's start. You just won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Congratulations. There's a tweet that includes a video of you opening a bottle of champagne and drinking out of the bottle, which got featured all over the place. Many people called you a badass. Are you going to the award ceremony?

Of course I am. Yeah. So that's in December. Good. Well, you should. It's a great moment. Jennifer, I interviewed Jennifer Doudna when she won and it was a pandemic year and she didn't get to go. And so she was bumming out because she never got to be in Sweden.

Well, she's coming now. Oh, good. Yes. Her entire class of laureates and then last year's class, they're all coming in December. So there'll be three generations of us. So we're going to have a lot of fun. You won the Nobel for your work. And I'm sure I'm pronouncing this correct, bio-orthogonal chemistry, a field that you essentially invented. Now I'm going to read a quote from you, which I thought I did understand. What that means in practice is that we basically develop pairs of chemical groups, and those pairs of groups are perfectly suited to each other. And when they encounter each other,

they want to react and form a bond. And they love each other so much, which I love, that you can surround those chemical groups with thousands of other chemicals. But these two chemicals that are bio-orthogonal will ignore all that. They'll find each other and form a bond with each other, do chemistry with eachonal will ignore all that. They'll find each other and form a bond with each other, do chemistry with each other. I love that. But talk about what that means for people who may not be as a scientist. So the way that we pronounce that awkward word is bio-orthogonal. Orthogonal. Orthogonal. Like orthogonal thinking, like when people think outside.

Exactly. I have a son who's, I call him an orthogonal thinker. Oh, one of mine is also very orthogonal. And like you said, when two things have no interaction, they're orthogonal. Or when your son is thinking in a completely different way from mainstream, he's orthogonal. And to be bio-orthogonal means you're in a completely different plane from biology. So we invented this type of chemistry. And because it's bio-orthogonal, it's chemistry that takes place regardless of all the biology surrounding it. Totally ignores the biology and has a life of its own. And the reason we were

kind of motivated to invent this type of chemistry is because we wanted to study biological molecules in their native habitat. So molecules that are in a cell doing their thing or molecules that are in your body doing their thing, and we want to study them. And one way to do that is to mark them with probes or tags so we can kind of visualize them. But to do the marking, we have to have a chemistry that we can do on them in that living system. You're basically coloring them in some fashion, correct? Yeah. So you can see them at work. Exactly. That's the original goal was to basically put a light bulb on molecules that we were interested in and kind of watch them do their thing. And since then, it's kind of taken on a life of its own and it's turned out to be really useful for a lot of other applications in biology and also as a way to do medicine in a different way.

Right. So talk about the real-life applications where people understand it. Now, because you can identify something and see it, why do you want to see it? Well, sometimes when you see things and you watch them change, that can give you a hint as to how biology is working. how biology is working. One of the things we did with bio-orthogonal chemistry was to look at how the structures of cell surface molecules change in cancer. And so what we found is that in normal cells of your body, there's a certain pattern of molecules. And the particular molecules were complex carbohydrates, by the way. And in cancers, they change. And you can actually see these changes if you have this bio-orthogonal chemistry tool. And so by seeing the changes, that gives you a way to actually detect the cancer. And it turns out some of those changes actually contribute to the

disease. And you can design new medicines that target those changes. Meaning return them to normal behavior or just see them? Detecting is one thing, solving is another, of course. Exactly. So detecting is the first step, right? But once you see the problem, then we went on and we made some medicines that basically go after those changes and try to restore them to normal. And the metaphor, you know, I love metaphors. These particular types of sugars, I like to think of them like a forest coating the surface of a cell, like trees and grass. And when the trees get too tall, this can promote cancer. And so we've developed medicines that kind of cut the trees back down to size. But before even making those medicines, we first had to understand the changes,

and that's what we use the bio-orthogonal chemistry for. Meaning the tree's too tall is the reason the problems the shrubs have. That's why. Yeah. The trees are too tall and their leaves have changed. Right. And the leaves are actually doing something that helps the cancer spread. So in the first maybe 10 years of my independent career, we developed the chemistry.

And then more recently, we used the chemistry to actually see these changes happening. And then most recently, we've developed a new medicine that can target those changes. Essentially, if you can see it, you can solve it. That's the hope. You've used M&Ms also? Well, so M&Ms, I like to think of as like, kind of like a simple rendition of what your cells look like. And so M&Ms have a sugar coating, and so do your cells. But the sugars are way more complicated on your cells than on that M&M. Not as delicious, but go ahead. Not as yummy. And sometimes they're bad guys. You want to get rid of it. So the reason we made these medicines was to take the sugar off of cancer cells. And when you strip them of their sugar coating, it turns out your immune system is able

to see the cancer cells as bad guys and kill those cells. I see. So the sugars were protecting them. That's right. They were using the sugars to confuse your immune system is what we learned, right? But that's more recent work. The Nobel Prize is actually recognizing just the chemistry that we use to kind of get to the bottom of this. Of detection. Yeah, right. The detection method. So why sugars? What was it in chemistry? Why is that so interesting to you? You know, because sugars are, they were like the dark matter of biology in a way.

So you're doing a little physics reference there. Yeah. So, you know, you interviewed Jennifer Doudna, you interviewed the scientists at BioNTech and so on. And so they talked about DNA and they talked about RNA and you've maybe had people talk about proteins. So there's a fourth important biological molecule. Those are the sugars. But nobody was talking about them.

Why not? And so, because it was the dark matter. No one really knew much about them, and they were difficult to study because you couldn't see them. And so, since everybody else was working on those other molecules, when I was trying to figure out what would I do in my lab, I thought sugars would be the place to go because nobody was studying them. And it was a big mystery. They're all over every single cell. And they're involved in a lot of really important biology for human health and human disease. But no one could study them.

And people didn't even know they were there for the longest time. Turns out we've learned they're really important in the immune system and in the process of cancer. When you talk about that idea of looking at them and understanding them, one of the things I did talk about with both Jennifer and the couple from BioNTech was the idea of the worst things that it can unleash. Obviously, any science, whether it's vaccines or whatever, has implications. How do you look at that when you're shedding a light on this important biology? What's the things you think about?

You know, the kind of work we do is a little less fraught with ethical conundrums. And the reason is that the molecules we study, they're not programming the cell for all eternity. They're players in a more transient way in biology. They don't have the same permanence that the DNA has. So we don't have the same ethical issues. But we do have problems that we think about that go beyond the science. For example, when we discover that these sugars are contributing to diseases and we want to make medicines to treat those diseases. Based on that learning, we have to convince people that even though they've never heard of sugars before, that sugars are really important in biology, and they should invest in making new medicines that target them.

So I think just educating people about this new area of biology, that's our rock that we have to push up the hill. So the most important thing here will be these medications to let the immune system do its work. Definitely the people are talking about cancer vaccines, but these are for cancer treatments. Well, it's one that we work on. There's many other sugar-related diseases as well. And in fact, I-

Such as? Oh gosh, everything. I mean, sugars are involved in bacterial infections, even COVID-19. There's some sugar biology going on with that virus. In fact, sugars first kind of hit the mainstream in the pharmaceutical industry around the influenza virus. So there's flu drugs, and those drugs are sugars, basically. And they were designed based on the sugar biology that we know about influenza. The reason we work on cancer and

these immune therapies is because the discoveries we happen to make relate to that area. You're therapizing it, really. You're trying to just get it until they figure out a way to completely get rid of it, correct? Well, you know, that's what's so exciting to me about immune therapies as opposed to other types of cancer medicines like chemotherapies, right? So chemo, we've all

heard of it. We know people who've taken it, kills it. It kills the cancer and you at the same time, and it's toxic and horrible. And very often the cancer comes back and it becomes resistant to those drugs. And then the person has to try a new drug and a new drug and a new drug, and this can go on and on and on. Immune therapies have the promise of, if you get your immune system to do the bad work, to do the killing, not only can you kill the cancer, but then your immune system has memory. So if the cancer tries to sneak back, your immune system's ready to go to kill it again,

just the way that we respond against, we get vaccinated against something and our immune system remembers that for a long time. So if you can do that for cancer, you could potentially cure the disease with your immune system. Meaning your immune system understands it, sees it and kills it rather than externalized ways to treat it. Exactly. Yeah. You live in Silicon Valley. You're at Stanford. You've founded multiple startups and I've met lots of different startup people. And of course, Genentech is from there and other things you've've started, is it Theos Pharmaceuticals?

That was my very first co-founded company way back. Way back. But Redwood Bioscience, Enable Biosciences, Paleon Pharma, which develops drugs to treat cancer diseases, just to name a few. Talk about that, the link between business and creation and scientists like yourself. Yeah, well, since I'm a person who does biomedical research,

when we discover something where we feel like there could be a medicine that you make or a diagnostic test or something, we want to kind of bring that value out of our lab and into the public at large if we can. And the best way to do that, I've found, is to spin the technology out of the university, start a company,

and do what we call the clinical translation of the idea. So my grad students in my lab, in my postdocs, they can only take things so far. We have a limited budget, and they're transient people who are training in my lab and want to go out and have their own jobs eventually. So we can do the early stage research. We publish papers, but to actually make a medicine or make a diagnostic test, you really need a lot more resources and a lot more people and you have to scale it. So I've been starting companies as a way to do that translation. So when you do these, obviously pharma gets a lot of heat in this country. What do you think works about the business model, basically R&D with long run patents? And what do you think is broken?

That's a great question, a really loaded question. I load them all. Well, of course, right now there's been a change in patent exclusivity for certain types of drugs because of this Inflation Reduction Act. And I'm not going to jump into that because everyone has their thoughts on that. But I will say that there's a lot of friction in the system that has to do with the type of diseases that you want to make a medicine for. So if you want to make a new cancer medicine, you're in reasonably good shape because that's a very profitable area. There's a lot of investment dollars you can tap into from the venture capital community. There's partnerships with big pharma companies you could potentially engage in.

There's partnerships with big pharma companies you could potentially engage in. By contrast, if you want to make a medicine for a rare disease where there aren't that many patients and it's not as profitable, there's a difficult tightrope you have to walk there. And it's hard to pursue those types of medicines because the business model doesn't work often. And if you want to make medicines to treat diseases that are not prevalent in wealthy nations, but are prevalent in less wealthy environments. Give me an example. Tuberculosis. That's an area where, you know, if you want to start a company and get investment dollars from Silicon Valley, I mean, good luck. That's not an area people would invest in. Right, because they can't get paid for it.

What is that like when you know you can possibly do something rather see? I mean, I know Bill Gates worked on malaria, which was not a very popular thing. It can be very frustrating, especially when you see in your own lab side by side, the investment you can get for an oncology product versus a tuberculosis product. So the Gates Foundation has been wonderful and they've supported research in my lab. But we developed a diagnostic test that we thought could really be useful in low-resource environments. But we had an awful time trying to get money for that company. Even Gates really, you know, couldn't take you down that path.

So, you know, we ended up launching that company outside of the U.S., where it's less expensive to operate. But that's not ideal for me. Right. Is that one that you would like to get more attention just for the good of it? Because it does. I mean, malaria and tuberculosis and all kinds of diseases like that. Right. But when we were raising money at Stanford to support COVID, we had no problem, right? Getting donors excited about trying to contribute to the pandemic crisis. But you could work for years trying to get that that money for tuberculosis and you're not going to find it. Right. That is frustrating. Yeah, it must be. So I was talking, we were talking to

Laura Kiesling, a professor of, she's a friend of yours. Of course, yeah. She told the Boston Globe your work did change, two things she said I think were interesting, changed the way people think about doing science. There have been further advances. They all build on your work, such as cancer research. She also said you democratized, which I thought was really interesting, chemistry and said your work is powerful. She texted me this just a little while ago, is powerful in its simplicity. Can you expand on that? Oh, that's about the best compliment you could give a scientist, actually. You know, so the whole point of developing bio-orthogonal chemistry was so that you could have a chemical reactions, like a toolbox of these chemical reactions, where they would react with each other so reliably that you could literally spit in the reaction and you wouldn't kill it.

You could do it in your own body with all of this stuff, right, that's in you. And the way I put it is even a biologist could do it. You don't have to be a chemist. Are you dissing biologists? Well, and Jennifer Doudna would say that the power of CRISPR is such, it's so simple and so reliable as a way to do genome engineering, even a chemist could do it. And she's right. Yeah. A little science insult. Yeah, we have a little frenemy situation between chemistry and biology. Oh, I had no idea.

Yes. And Laura is right. The chemistry is so easy to do and so robust and you can't kill it as hard as you might try. That makes it useful for lots of people who are not experts in chemistry. And then, of course, your impact is much greater if your technology is useful and accessible to a broad group of people. This is like an iPhone. Anybody could use it. My two-year-olds were doing iPad games, right? That is, for me, the best kind of research is where it's low-tech and therefore high-impact. So easy to use. And no wonder it's number one kind of thing. That was AOL's former motto.

Anyway, one of those areas, as you talked about, is cancer research. Death rates from cancer are falling, but the cost of care is not. Could the advancement of cancer science change it? You talked about identifying it before it happens and letting your immune system fix it, which means less intervention, less medicines, less etc. Well, that, et cetera. Well, that's the hope. I mean, the promise of immune therapy is that treatment over a limited time period gives you a lifetime of protection against the disease. Now, you know, a pharmaceutical company will charge for a medicine as much as, you know, payers will reimburse for it, right?

And if it's a short-term treatment versus a long-term treatment, it will be priced higher, right? Because you have fewer doses that you're selling. One would like to think that something as elegant and useful and potentially powerful as an immune therapy could lead to a more affordable cancer treatment. But the truth is, I think affordability is really a different issue from performance. You know, the higher the value of a medicine, the more a company can charge for it, generally speaking. How do you feel about that? You know, there's open source people in tech, and then there's ones who want to charge $900 for an iPhone. It's very expensive to have access, and then it opens your whole world up when you have it. Yes. And I absolutely do think that the system is broken. I mean,

healthcare economics in the US is a broken system and it needs to be fixed and drugs need to be made more affordable here and also in other geographies. People often blame the pharma companies for this and kind of they're the foil for all things that are broken in the healthcare system. I've seen enough on the inside to know that that is a huge oversimplification. And there's a lot of value that never makes its way to the pharmaceutical companies. There's a huge intermediate bureaucracy of payers and pharmacy benefit managers.

They're the new bad guys. PBMs, right? PBMs, yeah. And everyone has a role here in mismatched incentives where the payer ends up with an... Is there a solution to that? There is always a solution to every problem. What am I asking a scientist? There's a solution.

The problem is, the question is, do politicians, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical companies, innovators, can everyone get aligned in an incentive that allows this to work better for the ultimate customer who's the patient? And do we have enough leaders with enough courage to take on these problems, even though it might interfere with their election cycles and it might interfere with the way Wall Street treats them on a quarterly basis and so on? They sure yell a lot about it. I know I've talked to Amy Klobuchar a lot about this. A lot of senators do. There's nothing more heartbreaking to a scientist than watching economics. So non-scientific forces interfere with bringing their discoveries to the benefit of humanity. If you have a discovery and you want people to benefit from it, and all this other stuff gets in the way, that's incredibly frustrating. Support for this podcast comes from Aura.

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female founders after that. Do you see that? There's so few of them. So do you see any impact or not? Well, it's hard to know because you never have the statistical power to do an experiment to compare before and after Theranos in terms of investment in female-led companies. But it is absolutely true that people who are minoritized, like women CEOs, right, this is a very tiny minority, are often looked at not as individuals, but as representatives of their classification, however that is defined. And I know this as a scientist, I mean, just as a chemist who's, you know, a minority woman and a minority as a lesbian, that people look to me as not just me, but as a representative of a theme, right? So, if I make a mistake, that's an indictment of all women scientists, right? Hopefully, it also works the other way, that if you're recognized for

doing something good, maybe that will trickle down as a reflection on all other members of your group. But there's plenty of men who have behaved in unethical ways, tanked their companies, and nobody knows their name, but we all know Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, that's correct. Or they get more funding. Hello, Adam Newman.ann. Nice to meet you, Adam Neumann. Anyway, that's my- You said it. I did say it. Right. So Elizabeth Holmes becomes, unfortunately, a stain on all women CEOs and all women scientists, and it's not justified. So do you think there needs to be more scrutiny? You just mentioned it, they get away and then get to go away. How should funders be looking differently in investments?

Well, I think that was a cautionary tale to investors not to get seduced by the hype of some pitch, you know, and not to end up as a lemming following a flock of people towards something that you don't understand. So I think investors need to get smart and they need to make sure that if they don't have the expertise themselves, that they have a circle of experts who they trust, who can critically evaluate the technology that they're considering. It's ridiculous to put that much money into a company whose technology you have no understanding of. When you think about the impact of the pandemic, we've seen major advances in mRNA technology with code vaccines. Is there going to be a next wave golden age of new drugs? Because at the same time, we're headed towards a recession. You think funding is going to

pull back. How do you look at that? Are we right on the cusp of something bigger or is lack of funding going to diminish and cause problems in that? We are in the beginning of an enormous wave of innovation in biotechnology and biopharma. Even five years ago, I was skeptical about medicines that are now making a huge impact. They're completely new brands of medicine, like mRNA vaccines. There's live medicines like cell therapies. There's gene therapies. There's CRISPR engineering therapies, right? And even five years ago, you couldn't believe it, you know, and here we are. So if ever there was a time to double down on the investment in biopharma, now is the time. Now the venture capital community is a cyclical thing, right? So they have booms

and busts and right now it's slow. A year ago it was hot, right? And they're going to come back, and it's already starting to come back. But I'm hoping that our public investment can keep pace. Right, government investment. Right, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation. I'm hoping that these agencies can get the resources from the government, right, and with the support from the politicians and the taxpayers, to double down at a time when that investment would have a huge impact. Throughout the pandemic, there's been erosion of trust in science and our institutions.

Does that worry you? Yes, it does worry me. Because science has so much to offer humanity, right? Science has always been, you know, an amazing human creation, and it's benefited people in so many ways. And I'm sure we could point to the bad things too, but there's so many more good things than bad things. And so, if people lose their trust in science, they're leaving a lot of potential quality of life on the table. And you want people to benefit from science. So, you want them to appreciate it. You want them to understand it. You want them to understand the basics of the scientific method and what scientists are trying to do for humanity. I mean, that's the ideal world.

That's not happening. I mean, you know, the Republicans are talking about doing something to Fauci, jail him or whatever. I mean, and it's been utterly politicized, the whole COVID. It's nonsense. Yeah. Politicizing science is a big mistake. Politicizing science is a big mistake. People like Tony Fauci, scientists who are trying to, as quickly as possible, facilitate the development of vaccines to save lives and make people's future better than their present. I mean, those people are, there's not much in it for themselves.

They're not going to make a lot of money from it. You know, Fauci is a human being like the rest of us, and everyone has their breaking point. And, you know, when I see him up there being grilled by Rand Paul and kind of losing his temper, I understand it. You know, I mean, he's just a human being. I don't know. I could never do what Fauci does. I don't have the temperament for that. Sugars, I don't think, are quite as controversial. Yeah, I'm not good at controversy. Yeah. So in August, President Biden signed in the CHIPS Act and Science Act to stimulate scientific innovation. Recent reports suggest that the U.S. is falling behind China in academic research and quantity. Same thing in tech.

Are we losing the race of innovation to China and other countries? You know, I think we're not on a good trajectory. We still have an advantage in part because we have such a big investment community, right? We have dollars through investors, venture capital groups that will pump money into science. And China is still growing in that area. But in terms of government investment, as a percentage of GDP, China's way ahead of us. And the pace at which Chinese science is advancing is faster than our pace, right? So we're ahead, but our

trajectory is a steeper incline. So they'll overtake us at the rate we're going. They will overtake us. But Biden administration recently spent $1.5 billion investing in national labs. Is that enough? It's not enough. It's a good start. Any increase, of course, makes an impact. I think the government labs are a great place to put money down, especially since energy science is so important for the future of our planet. We need cleaner sources of energy that are more sustainable. And the Department of Energy labs are big players in this. Also, the Department of Energy labs, they make their resources, their technologies available to the entire research community. So that's a great place to put money if you want it to impact beyond just those scientists.

So I think that's a really good choice. Right, but more money for everything, like a significant... Yeah, I mean, there are so many more great ideas in the heads of those people than we can afford to pursue. So the investment is still, it's a limited resource setting. So also what's limited is identities and mentorship in STEM. When I was talking to Dr. Kiesling about you, she said, I should ask you about being a role model, whether it's a burden or a joy. Very similar to tech. I've been on this train for many years now. And when people ask me, has it improved? I'm always like, no, it has not. So, and they're expecting me to go, oh yeah, it's gotten better. I'm like, it's gotten worse.

So talk about this idea of how you look at yourself as a role model. You know, Laura and I are of a similar generation where we started our academic careers in the, for me, it was mid-1990s. And at that time, there were very few women on the faculties of chemistry departments, like it's Berkeley, and she's now at MIT, right? So, you know, we were typically like 10% of our faculty would be women at that time, very few of us. And so, our female trainees would look to the few of us as role models, and they recognized that our lives were not simple, right? We were in minoritized situations. There were men that were actively hostile to our presence in these departments. That's not the case now, but, you know, this was 25 years ago or so.

And we were working really hard to try to establish ourselves in a career that wasn't often welcoming of us. And so it's true. Some of my young women students would look at me and my hundred-hour work weeks and, you know, my loneliness and having to deal with men who were telling students not to join my lab because they didn't think I would be successful. I mean, literally, that's what happened to me early in my career. And they said, you know, I don't know what I want to be after I finish my PhD, but I just don't want to end up like you. Oh, wow. And people would say this to me, and I would think like, oh, my God.

I admire you, but you suck. You're like that. I admire you, but you look miserable. Yeah, yeah. I had to look in the mirror and say, what message am I inadvertently delivering to my young trainees? So I had to make a concerted effort to figure out how could I be happy? What did you do? I had to adjust my mindset. I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to be fulfilled personally

just from my work environment. I needed to have things outside of work. And I was lucky, actually. I think being queer was, for me, a benefit. I would agree. I mean, I think I have advantages at work for being, because they, because especially men, they kind of want to get along, where there were so few women, and I was the only woman in my lab, and that was true for all women. They were the only ones in their labs. And the men looked at these women as dating prospects. Right. And, of course, they didn't look at me that way. And so, they couldn't figure out how to talk to me at first. And really, the only thing left was to talk chemistry with me. Yes, right. So, therefore therefore they talked about the thing. Yeah, we talked chemistry because there was nothing else to talk about, I guess, with me. So that was great. And even now, I think it puts me outside of this stereotype that men might have about women. They don't know how to think about me. And so there's just nothing other than to

think about me as a scientist. As a scientist. That's really interesting. I have the same issue around tech, which is interesting. Although one of the things is that when I'm ever in a group of venture capitalists, and you'll know this, I was in a group and they started talking about women. They're like, oh, she's good looking. She's good. You know, just really sexist stuff.

And I said, don't you think so, Karen? I go, hey, still a feminist. Still a feminist. And they're like, oh, I think so, Karen? I go, hey, still a feminist, still a feminist. And they're like, oh, I was like, totally offensive, totally offensive. Oh my God. I think tech has got to be the worst. Oh, the worst, the worst. So I have two last, very last questions. One, you're very active on Twitter and you have a blue check mark. It appears you did not pay for it. Not yet. Like the good chemist you are and don't, don't. You're applying scientific method to social media, specifically trying out Mastodon. How do you like it?

Oh, I only got on Mastodon about a week ago. Yeah. And? So it's new so far, but I'm getting used to it, but I haven't quite figured out how it works exactly because. Yeah. That's because it's designed by technology. Yes. It's complicated and the lingo is foreign to me and I have to be on a server and I don't really know what that means. But the community is very rapidly growing. So, you know, a week ago I got on there and there was just a few people I found that I know from Twitter. And now there's over a thousand people who are following me there. So it's growing. So I think it's, for me, I'm just, you know, kind of tiptoeing into the shallow end of Mastodon.

Right. There's more choices coming. Technology always finds you. Twitter, I have to say, Twitter has been really great for me. Why is that? Tell me why. It changed my life. In that? You know, I first got on Twitter back around 2014.

And the reason was simply because I became the editor-in-chief of a chemistry journal. And the publishing house said, oh, you have to get on social media. You have to promote the journal on social media. And I had never been on anything. I had no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing, right? And I thought Twitter was like for Taylor Swift and people like that. Right, yeah. It is for Taylor Swift. That's what I thought. I love your shirt. People like me who are scientists. I'm glad you're a Swifty also. I love Taylor Swift. She's phenomenal. Yeah, okay. Me too. So anyways, I didn't know anything about it. So they put me on Twitter and they said,

listen, just start by following other journals and science publications. And I quickly realized I kept up with the literature so much more effectively by just following the feeds of these journals. And then I started following Associated Press and NPR and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. And I felt like I just was collecting information so much more efficiently and making use of it. And then I started posting job advertisements and I got better applicants and everything about it was enriching at its best. It was at its best. If Twitter becomes a tool for evil, more so than it has been, then I don't really want to support it anymore. But it would be a huge loss for me to go off Twitter. Well, one good thing is there's lots of entrepreneurs in

Silicon Valley working on the solution. So you'll have an easier one. All right. Last, very last question. You shared the Nobel Prize with two other scientists, Morten Mendahl from the University of Copenhagen and Kay Berry Sharpless from Scripps Research. Science isn't done alone. What other groundbreaking work are you paying attention to right now? Oh, there's so much going on to be excited about. In my field, there's a ton. You know, my lab is working on new things. But I have to say, outside of my lab, the kinds of work that I've been sort of trying to learn about from a distance has to do with this concept of what we call upcycling plastics. So plastic debris, plastic waste is a crisis, right? I mean, we've all seen the images of things, giant landfills of plastic floating around in the oceans and stuff. manfills of plastic floating around in the oceans and stuff. And there's been some breakthroughs in chemistry recently about ways that you can break down that plastic and convert it to useful,

small things that you can then build new molecules with, right? And if we can get a scalable, energy-efficient, environmentally benign, upcycling chemistry online, this would really change the planet for the better. And I would encourage people outside of science, if there's any way you want to learn new chemistry, this would be a great way to learn it. Yeah. At my recent conference, I had a full day on climate change tech. I think it's critically important. That's great. Yeah. Anyway, I really appreciate this. I think you deserve every success you've gotten. Oh, thank you. And you've done a really great job explaining it, a very complex thing to people, and I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me you. And you've done a really great job explaining it. A very complex thing to people, and I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on.

And go to the Taylor Swift concert. I will. I can't wait. She's worried about the end of Twitter too, Cara. Yeah, she is. She likes the Twitter. And it was very funny that she found Mastodon too hard to use, and she's a Nobel Prize winner. Mastodon, more difficult than click chemistry. Yeah, I guess. More difficult than bio-orthogonal chemistry. Bio-orthogonal chemistry. I thought it was

really interesting. And some of the issues around giving science enough funding by the government is critically important. I think the idea of respecting science is important. And, you know, important. I think the idea of respecting science is important. And, you know, mRNA technology has opened an enormous field just from the pandemic. It's a game changer. And so it's a really golden age, I think, for science going forward. All right. You want to read us out, Cara? Yes, I will. Today's show is produced by Naeem Araza, Blake Nishik, Christian Castro-Rossell, Raffaella Seward, and Claire Tai. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan our theme music is by Trackademics if you're already following this show

you get a Nobel Prize if not why not because you're not good at science go wherever you listen to podcasts search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher

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