Science Friday - The Leap: This Is Going To Kill Your Career

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Betül Kaçar started her scientific career as a biochemist, working on an enzyme found in zebrafish. But then she found her calling: investigating some of the hardest questions in evolutionary biology by resurrecting ancient life forms. NASA administrator Melissa Kirven-Brooks recalls the fellowship application that put Betül on her radar. And evolutionary biologist and geneticist Harmit Malik weighs in on what makes Betül's project so hard, and why he’s kind of jealous he didn’t think of it first. Betül previously received a Hypothesis Fund Award for her research.Guest:Dr. Betül Kaçar, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leader of a NASA-funded multi-institutional research center focusing on life’s early evolution“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 will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, I'm Flor Lickman and you're listening to Science Friday. On the podcast today, the next episode in the leap and audio series I made with the Hypothesis Fund, today what it takes to follow your heart in science. Do you remember people saying, like, that's a bad idea? Yeah, absolutely. Like, what did they say? Like, give me a flavor of that. That's a bad idea. It was not sugar-coded.

This is a bad idea. You're not going to get a job. But no department will hire you. There's no funding. It's not a thing. But it just didn't stop me. I thought, well, I'm sorry you think that way. And you're wrong.

Because I believed that if you actually put your heart into something, something that you create out of love and beauty and that you give yourself into it, that it can be ugly. I thought, how is that possible? This is The Leap. A new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, to make a breakthrough. My name is Betul Kachar, and I study the origins and early evolution of life on Earth.

Small questions. As small as it can get. Where did we come from? How did we get here? Why do we exist? These questions have lit up human brains for, I don't know, probably all a time. They're so big and so. fundamental, they almost seem like they couldn't have concrete answers. And so they're usually

probed with religion and philosophy, not with data and experiments. Batul Khachar, somewhat audaciously, is trying to change that. Batul grew up in Istanbul, and she came to America to get her PhD at Emory University in Atlanta. At age 20, knowing nobody. It's your classic American immigrant story. Hey, it's a classic for a reason. At the time, people told Batul how brave she was for leaving home, for going so far away. But she didn't see it that way. She was just excited. It was, oh my God, all the things I'm going to learn. I can't wait. And they have books and all kinds of books and libraries are so great. And they have these couches and giant windows and you can sit and read. Like that was the thought I had flying.

Batul was studying biomolecular chemistry, nothing to do with the origin of life. She was researching an enzyme in zebrafish that in people can misbehave and lead to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Her dissertation was about how to get it to stop misbehaving. But as she dug in, her instinct was to zoom out. I was interested in this context that gave rise to the enzyme. So the question became more about how the enzyme happened to be the way it is rather than what it does to a cell. Butul thought to understand what it does today, she had to know its past. Why do we have this enzyme?

Where in our giant family tree did it develop? And why? Her interests were drifting away from molecular biochemistry and toward evolutionary biology. At the same time, she had this fellowship that had her teaching evolution in high school classrooms. And she found herself in a cultural crossfire. If you want to teach our kids about creationism, let's teach them about intelligent design. Alabama has approved inserting a disclaimery in biology books that calls evolution a controversial theory. So when you realize that a certain topic or a certain area is told to be dangerous to learn,

I wanted to study that more. Batul immersed herself in the evolutionary biology world. She was an outsider. So she was reading everything she could. She started attending biology seminars. It's almost like, you know, you open a curtain or something. and then there's this most amazing view. And then you basically want to tear that curtain down, right?

Like it's just like you want to see the whole thing. And to me, evolution and asking these questions was that moment where the curtain was lifted a little bit. And I had to open it all the way. So as Patul is finishing up her PhD, she started seriously thinking about switching fields. Bye-bye zebrafish. Hello, Origin of Life on this planet. She was interested in the evolutionary history of enzymes. How'd they evolve?

It's not the whole answer to where did we come from. Why are we here? But it's a bite out of the apple. So she started talking to colleagues and mentors. And they were like, wait, what? No one the questions, why are you studying a disease? But when you say, I want to understand how the enzyme that gives rise to a disease happened to be on this planet

at the first place, then you get eyebrows. It was more than eyebrows. I was warned that these sort of problems are not going to be solved in your lifetime, so don't pursue. And you will kill your

career if you change fields post PhD. Just go to a Parkinson's lab or study proteins and purifier proteins until the end of time. This feedback felt hard to parse. So I asked Hermit Malik, a champion of Bittal's work and a leading evolutionary biologist himself, what he made of it.

It's probably a mix of this is not something I can do, so you shouldn't do it. And it's a mix of, you know, you're early in your career. You really need to make sure that you get some successes. And this, even if it works, it's going to take so long. It's going to be, you don't want to stake the success of your entire career on that. Unfortunately, the second thing, even though it's a very benign and even like a somewhat positive sentiment, we hear about that a lot in science, right? This is where science's lofty ambitions bump up against the reality of how the career works in practice.

In practice, there's a tenure clock. You're measured on how many papers you publish, how much funding you pull in, and there is just very little incentive for someone, especially early in their career, to take a big bet and change course, because if it doesn't pay off, their whole career could be screwed, which is why people counsel caution. And honestly, that is the advice

that many of us would give to our trainees as well, just to make sure that, you know, your bread and butter, your foundation is, like, really strong before you kind of take these huge leaps of science. So some people might hear this feedback and tone down their ambitions. You know, decide on a more conservative path. that is not what Betoile did.

It's my life, it's my career, and I'll do whatever I want. The more pushback I received, the more I knew, I need to do it. Like, this is worth doing. Because this is how humans are, right? Like, if something is interesting, we don't welcome it. We don't, we want to believe that. We want to believe that you show someone or so, show the field, to show the world some amazing data and everyone gets behind the work that you do.

That's not how it works. The thing that I love about this, though, is, like, what I'm hearing you say is, like, Evolution was a hot-button mess, and people in your field were telling you the questions you're asking cannot be answered. And I think a lot of people would say, oh, I'm going to turn in the other direction. But there are some people who say, oh, a big huge mess where you're telling me I can't do something, I'm going to run right at it. Is that you? Like, is that who you are?

Looking back, yeah. I mean, and looking forward also, yeah. Like I'm looking at today also, yes. I think so. I didn't even think about it. Did you have moments of doubt? Doubt about what? Just about what you were pursuing.

That it was, that it is too hard, that they were right. No. No. Did you have doubts about other things that we can probe? I never doubted that. It was just something that I had to do. Like, it wasn't, there was not much thinking to it. It was more like a feeling, right?

You are in love. Betuel followed her heart and tuned out the noise. You need to, like, have this bubble that you surround yourself with your own atmosphere. Like, I'm not going to let this take me down. I think that some of us are so used to this sort of pushback from such early age that we have that resilience. To understand why Betoahue is, seems impervious to all these people warning her off of the research she wanted to do. We have to go back to how Batole grew up.

I was the first woman in my family to attend the school. And I'm not talking higher education. I'm not talking going to an IV school or, no, education, periods. Learning how to hold a pet. Batul grew up around a lot of extended family. And some uncles, cousins, the women were the caregivers. They hadn't gotten the chance to get a formal education. But Patul, even as a teeny tiny kid, had a different vision for herself.

I went to school. I was five years old when I started elementary. I really insisted, I was told. In fact, the first grade teacher did not want me in the class because I was too young, like two years almost younger than the rest and did not want my parents to enroll me. But I'm told that I basically pulled her skirt and said, Excuse me, but can you show me my seat? And that she burst out and laughed and then says, well, maybe she's ready for it. I don't know what it is.

It's just... Like where that came from? No. No. I really don't. It's something that I felt very strongly, I can say. It's just a very strong force in me. When kids have a strong force in them, sometimes their parents bristle,

especially when that force butts up against how things are usually. done. But Patul's family supported her getting an education. And her dad especially found other ways to add oxygen to Patul's personal atmosphere. Like he would take these moments of like acknowledging my mind. Like what? Give me an example. This will sound very funny, but I asked, uh, we were having dinner and, you know, this is Turkey in 90s, people are smoking. So he asked me to bring his cigarette. So can you can you grab my cigarettes? So I grabbed a cigarette. I remember Parliament, light.

It's like, I don't know if 90s kids can resonate with the cigarette packages of their parents, but I do. And I brought, and I grabbed the lighter. And then he was a businessman himself. So he had a lot of people working with him. And when I brought the cigarette and then handed him the lighter, and then I left the room. But he stopped me.

And then he turned the room and he said, she's only 11 years old and she knew that I will need a lighter not just a cigarette and she thought about it herself and she put it together it sounds funny you may think

is this your biggest achievement in life that you did not forget a lighter but at that time you have to understand this was a room of pact with men and for him to stop the conversation to acknowledge something so tiny that I did

to over all this man around him to acknowledge my mind I was like, that's right. I am smart. As Bittal grew up, it became clear and clearer to her that if she wanted a life that looked different from the women who raised her, education was the key. Because I have never seen any uneducated woman who was also independent.

The education is the only way for me to make a life for myself. And so that was really... clear in my mind that all the diplomas will be mine. Like, I will get everything. Did you? I think I did, yes. But for me to decide that I'm going to actually get a PhD, I don't know who I thought I was.

Like it's kind of, I like that I had that. I dared and I didn't think that I, that's not my place. So now when people tell the tool something is impossible, she's skeptical. Reasonably so. because she has done impossible things in the past. It's also given her clarity on how best to use her time. When you realize that education is a privilege,

at least for me, it wired me up. There's no experience that will ever erase that drive from me. I will never forget that I can hold a pen and I can write. So now what do you do with it? What is the biggest question you can ask? What is the most important thing you can do with your life? Which brings us back to Betul's science. The project she landed on after she wrapped up her PhD

sounds a little like science fiction, like an echo of a story we've all heard. It's a dinosaur. Batul isn't trying to make Jurassic Park. What she's doing is harder in a way. She's going for Pre-Cambrian Park, something much, much older. Yes, dinosaurs are babies. Like, they're born and dead, I guess, yesterday.

But it's weird, yeah, we're talking really old things. T-Rex lived 80 million years ago. Butul wants to resurrect life forms from 3 billion years ago, when Earth was super different than it is today. So we want to understand the limits of life and how it can express itself and how differently it can express itself. It's sort of a re-extinction process that we bring the debt back to life. And then the fun begins.

Understanding how this works gets technical fast. So let me just give you the Mr. DNA version. But Tool's idea is to resurrect bits of the oldest life forms, specifically the proteins in ancient microbes, the proteins that were essential for life survival. So the first step is analyzing the sequences that code for today's proteins and using them to extrapolate the sequences of their ancestors. Step two is using those ancestral sequences to resurrect extinct proteins in the lab.

And step three is putting those ancient proteins in living microbes to see how they operate with the hope that they can give us insights into early life on this planet and how life persevered through huge changes in Earth's climate and atmospheric history. And if you're like, whoa, that is a lot, you're right. It's super ambitious. And that can make it hard for a young investigator. Because science isn't just about coming up with a cool idea and then executing it. You also have to sell people on it to get funding, to get collaborators, a job, get papers accepted.

And so when Batole was a postdoc, trying to get an early version of this project off the ground, when she was still trying to talk people into the idea that this wasn't some crazy Michael Crayton fantasy, she was invited to give a talk at a conference. And she got some pretty serious pushback. Some senior person took the microphone and just grilled me. Like how? Look, why are you doing this? This is, you know, what is this?

It was not easy. My knees were shaking. So in the moment, I was extremely terrified. And I thought that was a bad idea that I'm, but you know, I'm in the moment. So what can I? I cannot say. I'm really sorry, everybody. This was a huge mistake, and you're right.

So I'm like, this is not the time. So I parvered through it. And instead of slinking away embarrassed, Batul did the opposite. She saw this as an opportunity to learn and to enlist people in her quest. I received a lot of help. People shared so many papers with me that I missed. I didn't think it was a humiliating experience. I thought it was the best thing ever because I would not be able to get that feedback.

nowhere. This wasn't the only bump Batul hit, and it wasn't the only time she found a creative way around it. Batul applied for a postdoctoral fellowship, and she got rejected. But instead of giving up, she went back and asked them to tell her in excruciating detail what was wrong with the proposal. I asked them to be as brutally honest as possible with me, and I told them, please help me so that you don't have to review my application for the next five years, because I will keep trying. I remember telling numbeduts. Do you remember that application? Oh, yes.

This is Melissa Kerven Brooks, one of the reviewers on that fellowship application. Melissa is the future workforce lead of the NASA Astrobiology Program. And she says, even though this was over a decade ago and she's reviewed thousands of applications, Betul is stuck with her. I remember so much. There are a handful of people that I remember so much about, and Batulah's very much. certainly one of them. Part of it was that she was very brave. For somebody to be willing to try something that hadn't been done before,

it takes a certain type of person. And she was also super modest. She would say, this is not my strength, but I know that I can use my skills and adapt them. She was willing to learn. Betour revised the application and got the fellowship. We knew she was going to become a leader in the field. A field she had to carve out.

That was another thing Batole ran up against. The silos of science. Her work is so interdisciplinary, it didn't fit neatly in one discipline. Where should I ground it? Should I base it on biophysics or cell biology? She landed her first professor job in the astronomy department at the University of Arizona. I was very proud of it because I thought, wow, I'm the first biologist in this country who's hired in an astronomy department. Because Earth was a very different planet when these life forms evolved, they're aliens in a way,

and they might give us clues about the existence of life on other worlds. Being in this department, it allowed Boutoult to zoom out even further. That experience definitely helped me conceptualize biology in the context of planets and stars. From Arizona, Boutel went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ultimately, I realized microbiology is where it is very disparate. belongs. So as you see, I've been through many different disciplines. It was far from a straight path. Research isn't a straight path either, as almost all scientists will tell you. And what Batole is trying to pull off scientifically is really hard. But she's making progress. Those questions

that raised eyebrows 15 years ago, she's starting to get some answers. She's successfully resurrected a couple of extinct proteins in the lab. Even more amazing, They function when she puts them into living organisms. And she's using them to start to glean insights into the evolution of early life. Other people are doing bits and pieces of this kind of work. But Betel might be one of maybe two or three people in the world who do all of those things. Now, each of these things has like some question marks. And I can easily see us having debates about them.

But, you know, that is like almost paralyzing. And it was really wonderful to have somebody like Betul who's got this. I'm going to take no prisoners, and I'm just going to do it. You know, you always have that thing in the back of your head is that if I had to start from scratch, what would you rather be doing? And I was like, oh my God, I wish I had thought of this experiment. Harmeet was so impressed with the work. He recommended Betool for a seed grant from the Hypothesis Fund,

which enables scientists to nominate other scientists for funding to pursue their most ambitious ideas, ideas that might otherwise not get funded. The Hypothesis Fund also makes this podcast. And already, Harmeet says, Batul is creating a path that others are following. Her successes have not just motivated her and her lab, but they kind of motivated other people who would be maybe on the fence about whether we should do this.

She started a whole sort of new branch of research. She's a rock star. It's remarkable how important persisting is in this business, and probably in many things where you are trying to break a new ground. You need to survive. You know, just like that protein that survive, I need to persist. I need to exist to tell this story. I asked Patul if she thought her own story helped explain her science or what draws her to it.

Yes, because I'm a biological system trying to understand itself ultimately, right? When you're trying to understand life and its origins and how it all happened, you are really exploring you. It is an exploration. of ourselves. So our backgrounds and our stories inevitably shape the way we do science. So me being this alien visitor in an alien place, right, and I moved to United States, knowing nobody, I found it poetic that I ended up asking the history of the systems that I study.

I was interested in their journey. To me, they were the alien. Where did you come from? What have you been through? Tell me a little bit more about yourself. You seem really old. I mean, four billion years is a lot of living. I want to hear about it.

The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Florida Lichten, and produced by Annette Heist. Editing by Devin Taylor, Pajau-Vangay, and David Sanford. Backchecking by Nicole Pesulka. Mixing and scoring by Emma Mung. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks for listening.