Science Friday - The Leap: Everything Else Is Boring

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

In both her life and her work, researcher Karmella Haynes has never followed the pack. Karmella explains why she created her own area of research at the intersection of synthetic biology and epigenetics. Emory colleague David Katz weighs in on the challenges Karmella faces in pioneering a new research field. Plus Karmella’s sister Sherrone Wallace fills us in on their family life, and how their father raised them to inhabit spaces that weren’t always welcoming. Karmella has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a Scout for her bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. “The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript is available on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Scientific Poster Session. This is a standard feature of scientific conferences. Picture a big hotel ballroom with rows and rows of bulletin boards. Tack to them are shiny white printed posters. There's a little bit of a fifth grade science fair vibe to the whole thing, except the posters are generally less engaging and harder to make sense of. And they always kind of look the same. They're crammed with text and technical images.

Which is why, when biologists' carpenters, Carmela Haynes decided to do something different with her poster. It was a bold choice. You painted your scientific poster. Yeah. Yeah, okay, well, that was one moment where I was just, you know, I was like, okay, I'm going to do this just to see what people say. Here's the setup.

Carmela was wrapping up her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. She had a job offer at Arizona State. She had just submitted a paper and it was accepted. She was riding high. So she decided to submit to present at this International Synthetic Biology Conference, which is her field. And I submitted an abstract and I really, really, really, really wanted to be selected for a talk. But instead, the selection committee was like, no talk, you can do a poster. And so now I got to admit, my ego, I was like, a poster.

Okay. Okay, a poster. All right. So then I said, well, you know what? Hmm. Let me do something different with this. So. So Carmela, who's not only a biologist, but an accomplished painter, decided instead of going to Kinko's, she was going to bring a three by four stretched canvas. And then bring it with me to the conference, hang it up. And I actually had paints with me because I was working on it while I was there. And she proceeded to live paint her scientific poster complete with. with intricate, accurate graphs and figures during the conference. I just felt like I had the freedom to just, you know, do something.

Little cheeky, but also in good spirit. Here's the thing that I noticed when I heard this story. It's like, yeah, okay, fine. You had freedom. You could try something. It was low stakes. But Carmela, like, it feels to me like you're doing this all the time. Yeah.

Like whether the stakes are high or low. Not to be provocative. Yeah. But because you want to do what you want to do. Yes. That sounds right. And, you know, how else is there to live? This is The Leap.

A new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough. Carmela Haynes works at the cutting edge of the cutting edge. She is pioneering a new field of science at the intersection of two other new and complex fields. epigenetics and synthetic biology. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get turned on and off, and synthetic biology is building molecules to do work inside of organisms and cells and biological systems. So Carmela is engineering molecular machines that turn genes on or off, or change their level of expression. There are about a million possible applications for this kind of research, but Carmel has done a lot of work.

around designing her machines to thwart cancer cell growth. And she is really out there kind of inventing a new field of science. The number of people who are really doing this, I mean, it's tiny. This is David Katz, an epigenetics professor who knows Carmela and her work. It's a small field. There's a handful of people who are even trying this. And, you know, when you're pioneering something, it's never easy. you know, it's scary to go out there in front.

I kind of imagine, I'm a very visual thinker, and I kind of see the whole body of science as being like a plant. So that stem growing taller and taller is sort of that stepwise approach to sort of building up knowledge. But then you've got those leaves, right? These little shoots that come off of the main stem. Are you trying to be the shoot? Yeah, I'm trying to be the shoot.

But that's not an easy place to be. And so this is what I wanted to know. What propels Carmela to the front? What makes her that kind of person who wants to be the leaf? To hang up a giant canvas and live paint her research while her peers are tacking up posters that basically all look the same. If you ask Carmela's big sister, Sharon Wallace, where that came from, that tendency, she'll tell you it started when Carmela was a little bit of.

kid. She, you know, just walked to her own beat, basically. Sharon is the oldest. Carmelah is next, and then they have a younger brother and a younger sister. They grew up in St. Louis. And from a young age, Carmela stood out. She excelled in everything. So we knew, oh, this kid is different. Early on, Carmela started painting portraits. Like in elementary school, she painted her baby cousin. It was just, it was so detailed. It was. It was. was everything from the little baby wrinkles to the little lace on her socks. And that was like, wow, that was amazing.

That was amazing. But Carmela wasn't just unusual in the art department. I would actually work on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. And it was just that satisfaction. As a child? Yes. I was a weird little. I can't do the Monday.

As an adult. I mean, I didn't do them well then. But even if I could fill in a row or a column that rush, right? Carmelah loved solving puzzles. It wasn't just crosswords. I mean, Carmela was searching for thrills in her algebra class, too. Her teacher would give them bonus credit for solving extra hard proofs. And when I was done with the boring homework that everybody else had to do,

it was like, okay, proof time. And it just like when you, everything clicked and you could find the pattern you were confident that all of the information that you had sort of led you down this path to a solution. Oh, man, when you got to that solution, it was just the most, it was so satisfying. This is how Carmela likes spending her time, thinking through problems, which when she was a kid, sometimes worried her mom and her sister. When I went outside, you know, instead of, I don't know, being more interested in, you know, chasing some kid or whatever. I was stopping out of see a flower or a leaf like, huh, all these flowers have exactly the same number of petals. How does that work?

And I would just sit and kind of just look at things and just wonder about how they worked. Yeah. So, you know, to my mom, it was, oh my gosh, should I worry about my child? She's just sitting there staring over the space. But while I was kind of just like still and silent on the outside, there was a lot going on inside my head. and I was plenty entertained by just sitting and thinking about things. You're like the platonic form of a scientist. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.

Looking back, it seems obvious that Carmela was born to be a scientist. But she didn't always feel like she belonged. I mean, study after study shows that still people generally picture scientists as white guys. Carmela didn't fit the profile. Growing up, right, being a young black girl in science, you know, my identity, everything about who is seen as a scientist and, you know, who belongs in that space was completely opposite of what I was. Carmel's dad worked hard to combat that notion. He had his own experience being gate-kept out of science. Carmela says he was a gifted student in high school, and he loved engineering. No one in his family had gone to college. but he had his site set on MIT.

So he asked his school counselor for help. But instead, the counselor talked him out of applying, told him to skip college and get a job instead. That's what he did. But he tried to make sure his kids weren't held back by other people's biases. He very deliberately, you know, as part of, you know, doing his dad duties

was to take us kids right out to some five-star restaurant. Both sisters remember this. Yes. Yes, yes. It was called the coal hole. The coal hole. That's right. Yes.

So I remember the entrance being, like going into a cave. And it was, you know, dimly lit. There'd be valet parking. You're like, oh, what's this? And there would be a matri-D. You know, five-star all the way. So we'd all sit down. And I remember specifically the first time when the waiter came

the table and, you know, started asking, you know, what we wanted. And so I remember looking to my dad, like, okay, can you tell him, you know, tell him what I want to eat. And he looks at me, he says, tell the gentleman what you would like to have for dinner. I said, oh, I actually get to talk to them later. Yeah. And I just really specifically remember that moment. Without really being aware of it at the time, just sort of like in retrospect, that was my dad teaching us that we belonged. Whatever space we walked into, we belonged there. Carmela, she has grasped that.

Out of the four of us, she took it and ran with it. I mean, she ran with it. Carmela ran at biology. In high school, she remembers learning about DNA and wondering how you go from blueprints to action. Like every cell is the same DNA, how do you get a brain cell or a liver cell? The answer is epigenetics, the system that controls which genes are expressed. Carmela followed that interest all the way through her PhD,

where she studied a key epigenetics player, chromatin. Okay, so chromatin is this stuff that packages your DNA and then unpackages it, exposing the right piece at the right time so that genes can be expressed. Then, during her postdoc, Carmela learned about synthetic biology, and she had this idea. How about, gosh, wouldn't it be cool

to, like, just sort of do a mash-up between synthetic biology and chromatin? And I said, okay, I want to engineer chromatin. I mean, I just had this general idea. I want to engineer chromatin, right? These switches that turn things on and off. I've always wondered how that worked ever since, you know, grade school.

And now I'm going to, yeah, I'm in a position where I can actually engineer this stuff to understand how it works. Okay. So Carmela looked around for candidates for what to engineer, and she landed on something she'd learned about in grad school. Polycomb group proteins. I noticed there was a whole set of papers where these polycombe proteins, there was a weird, you know, abundance of them in cancer cells, all kinds of cancer. Prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, right?

So very diverse cancer types. These polycombs were messing stuff up. So in normal cells, we have genes that stop tumors from growing. They're called tumor suppressor genes. They, like, put the brakes on tumors. So these bad polycombs were interfering with those genes, with the breaks, allowing tumors to grow. So a bunch of people were trying to find ways of attacking the bad polycombs or stopping them from being produced altogether. But Carmela had a different idea.

I says, okay, so how about instead of doing that, we send in this sort of, um, alternative synthetic weirdo protein that I build. That would outcompete the bad polycoms. Like a synthetic replica that would muscle out the bad guys and that was engineered to help the tumor suppressor genes do their job. Right. To get the brakes reactivated. Yes. Yeah. And it worked. Yes. Right. In a feature dish.

We've shown that we can slow down breast cancer cell growth, when we put these things into like a little mini fake tumor, it's a little ball of cells, grows really fast, and then the cells around the edge kind of like stretch out and creep into the extracellular matrix. And so that represents early events and an actual tumor that lead to spread of cancer. Our engineer protein stops that cold, right?

And then the ball of cells actually shrinks a little bit. So we've gotten that far, and that's really exciting. It's like, wow, what would happen if we could actually get this into a tumor? We could potentially stop metastasis from happening. It was in a petri dish as Carmela stresses, but it was a cool finding. So in 2019, Carmela lands a job at Emory, where she is now. So she has her own lab.

She's got a startup package. And she is all in on this idea, this mashup between synthetic biology and epigenetics. Did you have a sense when you started this project when you were like, yeah, cool, I'm going to try to do this. Did you have a sense that it was risky or might be a hard road? Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.

As I'm sure anybody in any profession, anyone who has been in a meeting can relate, being out front with a new idea is perilous. But in science, there are particular challenges. One is that you have to raise money to do your work. And it's hard to do. that when the field doesn't exist yet. Once you have a built-up field, it self-reinforces. Here's Carmela's colleague David Katz again.

Because you have people advocating for it, you know. People love the science that they're doing, and they want other people who are like-minded. When you're small and out there, then there's nobody, you know, pushing for you. What about even having enough people to, like, vet the proposals? Like, do you have enough people who are expert enough to even, understand what's being proposed and vetted appropriately? No. Definitely not.

Our system is designed to reward people in basically categories. And so when you don't fit into a category, you can run up against different challenges. For one, people are sometimes skeptical about your expertise. Like in one grand application, Carmela got this critique. While they were convinced that I was an expert in synthetic biopies, I wasn't really a cancer epigeneticist. She's also been told the exact opposite thing. On the flip side, this person raised concern that, while I seem to be an expert in cancer epigenetics,

they didn't consider what I was doing to be real synthetic biology. This gatekeeping around who gets to be an expert is just one challenge. On top of that, when you're doing a science mashup like Carmela, reviewers who are from one particular field might be scared off by the inclusion of another field. If you're an engineering person and you're sitting with Carmela's grant and it's got this chromatin aspect and you don't understand it, you're not going to advocate. It's scary to advocate for it because you don't know it. Yeah. And that's a big problem that we have. And it happens over and over. Once you show something can work, do people change their mind? The answer is no.

I mean, eventually, maybe, the numbers of examples of the length that people had to go to get anybody to listen. You know, Barbara McClintock and, you know, jumping genes transposeons, right? People literally turned around behind her back and said she's crazy. And she was 100% right. This is the thing I've heard again and again from scientists, that although the job of a scientist is to follow the data, wherever it takes you. you. Scientists are also just like everybody else on this planet. And so when you are challenging the status quo, when you are trying to be the leaf, even when you have evidence, it can be hard to change people's minds. Yeah, I think that's a real thing. You know, this is going on in society as a

whole, and science is not immune to this at all. People are people. And it's even harder to change people's minds when you don't fit the mold, when you don't look like the cookie cutter scientist, when you were the only black woman in the room. I feel like the types of things that I do, right, sort of doing things that may be perceived as provocative and, you know, challenging. I kind of look at, you know, folks, my peers and folks who are more senior than me, and it seems like, you know, if you come from a certain, you have a certain identity, you do similar things and you are a thought leader, you're a trailblazer, you are bold. And, you know, the difference between Maverick and Genius and Oddball and Loner, you know,

is just perception. And the scientific community, I think, has more room for those geniuses to play around if you're, you know, white male. David has seen this firsthand at conferences with Carmelah, how people respond differently to her when she expresses an opinion that goes against the grain. Yeah. Yeah, there's a few people who go, you know, that kind of reaction. And science people often express strong opinions. It's just that certain people are penalized for it. Not everyone can get away with standing in the back of the room and challenging the status quo. She would be seen as, wait a second, you know. she's being difficult, right, as opposed to just scientifically trying to push us all.

It is a real difference. There is a difference in response. Now, I had to be fair, you know, I've also seen, you know, white guys who have these, you know, certain provocative ideas and they get pushed back. So that's not to say that it works for them all the time, but I will say that it seems to work for them more often than someone like me. Yeah. I'm sure that adds a layer for you of having to wonder.

Like, is this feedback because I need to change something about my science or my approach, or is it coming from somewhere else? Yes, right. So it's really tough that uncertainty because I don't want there to be the racism and the misogyny. I don't want that. So I would prefer that, oh, maybe there's, you know, some kind of fundamental flaw. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe I need to fix, you know, this technical aspect to really make this work.

But then the problem is that there's a lot of examples of feedback that I'll get that sort of are very ambiguous. And I'm left wondering. I have this moment a lot, unfortunately, where it's, okay, what is it this? time. Is it the racism, the misogyny, or both, or is there, is this really fundamentally flawed? The challenges are layered. So it makes me wonder, you know, what keeps Carmela out on this limb? I started witnessing and experiencing things that intensified my commitment to doing that research. She told me the story about visiting a cancer treatment center at Emory. And I get kind of tear even thinking about this moment.

So as soon as I walked through the door, I saw a family. And it was, you know, black family, right? There was an older woman who, you know, her family was sort of escorting her out of the elevator in a wheelchair. And she was, it was clear that she was a patient. And I just, I don't know, I had a moment considering the disproportionate impact that can't has on black folks and folks who are traditionally underserved. I just, I saw me. I saw my family.

And I just, it just hit me that, oh, this is, this is why I'm doing this. This is why I'm doing this. Now, there are a lot of ways to do cancer research. And there are a lot of ways to use science to help underserved communities. But Carmela has chosen this very specific and challenging. path. She's choosing to carve out a new field to take this new approach. She's adding like 10 layers of hard on top of something that's already hard. Why? Because I mean, to be honest, everything else is boring. It's fun to be the leave. And more than that, plants need leaves to grow. The norm is not necessarily good, right, or healthy for people. And I think that's particularly relevant in science because some of the problems that, you know, we have to deal with really need creative solutions. If you keep doing things the same old way, how do you expect to really solve any problems?

So I would say that, yeah, you know, me marching to the beat of my own drum and doing what I want, I just, I like inventing and creating. and making things that are going to help a lot of people, I'm drawn to it. That's just how I am. 15 or so years after Carmelah was painting that poster, she's now invited to give talks all over the world. She's shaping the future of the field. She founded a conference called Afrobiotech

that brings together black scientists across biotechnology. Carmelah is clearing the way for other people with creative ideas. making room on the stock for new leaves to emerge. The LEAP is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. Carmela has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a scout for her bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. You can learn more about this recognition and volunteer role on the website. The show is hosted by me, Flor Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist,

editing by Devin Taylor, Pigeau Van Gay, and David Sanford. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. by Joshua Budo Karp. Backchecking by Nicole Pesulka. Thanks to Malcolm Campbell and Pam Silver. And thank you to you for listening. We're back tomorrow with a conversation with former FDA commissioner David Kessler about those GLP-1 drugs you have heard about, like Zembek and Rogovi.

The drugs work primarily. I'm not saying this is the only way they work. They work essentially through their adverse effects. We're going to talk about the science of how they actually work. You don't want to miss it.