Podcast appearances and mentions of amy standen

Yuyi Morales is on the DT podcast!!Hellloooo! This week on the DT pod we celebrate Día de los Muertos with special guest children's book author and illustrator Yuyi Morales! Her might recognize her Caldecott-nominated Viva Frida, or her other award-winning books, including Niño Wrestles the World, Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, and Dreamers. We spent some time talking about one of my favorite of Yuyi's characters, Señor Calavera. He's the trickster skeleton star of two of Yuyi's books: Just a Minute and Just in Case. He even made an appearance during our interview!On this special DrawTogether Podcast, Yuyi joins us from her art studio in Veracruz, Mexico for some Day of the Dead drawing, including a fun sugar skull warm-up and alter-drawing to celebrate someone we love who has passed. Yuyi also plays us some original drawing music on her jarana. Grab some paper, pens, colors and press play above. Enjoying the DT Pod? Can you think of someone else who would love it, too? Please share with a friend!AND! Does your kid want to be featured on the DrawTogether podcast? Call the DT Hotline and ask your kid to tell us about their FAVORITE FAMILY FOOD. Call 1-866-4-DRAWTOGETHER with your young person, leave a message after the beep and they just might end up on a future episode. The GUT's First Visiting Artist: Maira Kalman!Ask and ye shall receive! This Sunday, Maira Kalman joins us at the Grown-Ups Table where she answers some of my most pressing drawing/life questions, shares a little about her new book “Women Holding Things”, and gives us an inspiring drawing assignment. We'll be taking questions from the table, so start thinking what you'd like to ask her, too! If you haven't joined the Grown-Ups table, subscribe for weekly creative wanderings, explorations and lessons, visiting artists, and drawing assignments - and most of all, a joyful, creative, supportive community of fellow drawers. Thank you Yuyi for joining us on the pod this week, and producers Liz Scheltens and Arjuna Saeed, and editor Amy Standen for all your hard work to make this podcast so great. And thank YOU, DrawTogether Supporters and GUT members, for making this all possible. See you next week! xoxow Get full access to DrawTogether with WendyMac at club.drawtogether.studio/subscribe

Helloooooo DT fam. As the school year is wrapping up, so is Season One of the DrawTogether Podcast! (Can you believe it?? 26 episodes!) As our Season One finale, we do a big-hearted DrawTogether classic: the blind contour portrait. This is a partner exercise, so grab a family member, friend or stranger, hit play above, and get ready to learn to LOOK in under a few minutes. Because in addition to helping us imagine a world we want to see, drawing teaches us to LOOK at one another. To slow down and pay attention. I deeply believe drawing is one of the most accessible and immediate ways to create connection between people and open doors for deeper relationships. My TED talk features this drawing exercise, and goes deeper on how Drawing helps us slow down, look closely and connect with the world around us - and each other. That drawing is looking, and looking is loving. And that DrawTogether isn’t really about drawing. ;) I hope you enjoy this episode, and continue to do this exercise anytime, anywhere, with anyone. I’ve done it in classrooms, workplaces, in hospitals - I even got a bar full of strangers to draw each other all at once. It’s the ultimate humanity ice-breaker/connection maker. I can’t wait to hear what you think (and see what you see.) Do let me know how it goes. Looking back on the DT Pod for a minute: When we started this podcast 26 episodes ago, we never thought we would come so far. With the help of phenomenal editor Amy Standen, we learned about artists Alma Thomas, Agnes Martin and Ruth Asawa. We talked about the war in Ukraine and drew sunflowers to process our feelings and show our support. We drew the shape of sound with musician Colin Meloy, and visited with children’s book author/illustrator Carson Ellis. We moved our feelings through our bodies and onto the page with five finger drawings and silly emotional fruit, and made a bunch of fun imaginary animals - because why not. We drew SO. MUCH. All these DT podcasts and more are here on Substack and on Apple Podcasts. If you or your kids missed any, they are here for you over the summer. Speaking of Summer: next week I’ll share deets on what’s coming next, what subscribers will be receiving in their inboxes, all that fun stuff. Plus a recap on everything DrawTogether has done in our classrooms program (SO MUCH STUFF) and some pretty awesome partnerships we’ll finally be able to share. For now, a huge thank you so much for being part of DrawTogether. There is no DT without YOU. And as we say at the end of every class, show, podcast episode, and first podcast season (!): Drawing is Looking and Looking is Loving. Also, Everything is better when we DrawTogether. See you soon!xoxow Get full access to DrawTogether with WendyMac at club.drawtogether.studio/subscribe

Hey there!This is our third and final episode in our series “Emotional Doodles” - drawing to alleviate anxiety. Reminder: UCSF Pediatrician and friend of DrawTogether, Dr. Lee Atkinson-McEvoy, shared that she’s seeing unprecedented levels of anxiety in kids and asked if DrawTogether could help. So we’re doing a few short, simple, fun drawing podcast exercises here on the podcast that can help reduce anxiety in a big way. You can do them on your own, with family members or friends, or with an entire classroom. The first episode explored how drawing varying types of abstract marks can help us identify feelings, and scribble them out of our bodies and onto the page. The second episode used drawing to focus our attention on things we’re grateful for, which studies show helps reduce anxiety and depression. And TODAY, we do a simple and powerful doodling exercise that I do all the time. Let’s call it LINES. It’s simple, powerful meditative drawing exercise. After a few minutes you feel more calm, less anxious, and you end up with a pretty cool drawing. So grab a pen and a piece of paper and press play. It’s less than 10 minutes. :) And COMMENTS! Friends! I heart feedback! Your input helps me know what is and isn’t working. Are these too long? Too short? Too literal? Too abstract? Easy to follow? This is one big experiment, so please take a moment and leave a comment or shoot me a message. I so, so appreciate it. Thank you! And thanks Chris Colin for the DT Podcast drawing music, Amy Standen for the edit, and Thao Nguyen for the DT theme song. See you next week with a very different kind of drawing direction. xoxo,w Get full access to DrawTogether with WendyMac at club.drawtogether.studio/subscribe

Hi, it’s me, WendyMac. It’s episode 3 of the DrawTogether Podcast! It’s also my birthday week. To celebrate, I wanted to do one of my favorite drawing exercises with you, which also happens to be a DrawTogether classic: the world famous Heart Spiral. But let’s do it with a twist… If you’ve watched DrawTogether, you probably know the Heart Spiral was inspired by cartoonist, writer and educator (and DT patron saint) Lynda Barry. Lynda believes drawing spirals helps people get out of their head and into their bodies. (We strongly agree!) In this episode, we meet another artist with a spiral drawing practice: Louise Bourgeois. Louise made drawings constantly from her home in New York (and before that France) until she passed away at 98. Best known for her large scale installation and sculptures, she also drew, carved, printed and painted spirals using all sorts of materials She even created spirals using text. She said, “I love the spiral. It represents control and freedom.” Louise believed the direction in which you draw a spiral changes how you feel: when you draw outside in, you feel in control. Draw inside out, you feel a sense of freedom. In today’s DrawTogether podcast, we explore Louise’s hypothesis. I’d love to know - did drawing a heart spiral change the way you feel? Did you notice a difference between the two? Let me know in the comments below. And I’d also love to see your finished drawings. Post them on instagram and tag @drawtogether.studio to share them with the DT community.Happy Diwali!Later this weekend, subscribers will receive a special post celebrating Diwali by illustrator Ishita Jain. Become a subscriber-supporter to get more cool stuff like this, and help DrawTogether keep going and growing. Thanks to Chris Colin for the music, Thao Nguyen for the DrawTogether theme song, and Amy Standen for the mix. Everything is better when we Draw (all sorts of spirals) Together! Get full access to DrawTogether with WendyMac at club.drawtogether.studio/subscribe

For seven months, Arlan Hamilton agreed to let StartUp reporter Amy Standen follow her around with a microphone and ask her all kinds of questions — from how much money she had raised for her venture capital firm, Backstage Capital, to where she slept when she couldn’t afford a place to live. Like many reporter-interviewee relationships, Arlan and Amy’s was complicated. At GimletFest, the two of them sat down to talk it out. Shereen Marisol Meraji, from NPR’s Code Switch podcast on race and identity, moderated the conversation. 

Brittany and Eric talk to Startup podcast host Amy Standen about Arlan Hamilton--a gay Black woman who started a venture capital fund unlike any other in Silicon Valley.

In part 2, Michael Eisen discusses the Public Library of Science, his position on GMOs and a labeling strategy. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program [00:00:30] bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of spectrum. Today we are presenting part two of our two part interview with Michael Isen and associate professor of genetics genomics in development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. In part one Michael talked about his research of gene regulation this week. Michael explains [00:01:00] the Public Library of science, his feelings on labeling of GMOs in food as well as intellectual property science outreach and science funding. Enjoy the interview. I wanted to talk about the Public Library of science if you were a cofounder of. Yeah, and are you still involved with that? Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm on the board. I've still very actively involved in trying to shape its future and in general in the future of science publishing. Speaker 3: And so can you talk about its business model and how it's changing publishing? Speaker 4: [00:01:30] Sure. The basic idea is that science publishing, it's been around for as long as science has been an endeavor from the 17th century. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, all these guys were sort of inventing science as we currently know it. And Science as a enterprise obviously requires that scientists communicate with each other and since time immemorial in science, we've had journaled, Francis Bacon, other scientists that 17th century started at seedings of the Royal Society. Right? And for 330 [00:02:00] years or so after they started these journals, they were using the only technology available to them at the time, which was print publishing and a lot of things that follow from the way scientific publishing was structured follow intrinsically from the limitations and features of that printed journal. And as an economic model, the only model that makes sense is for the end users to pay for the first subscription. And you know, there's problems with that. Speaker 4: Only people who [00:02:30] can afford the subscriptions can get access to the scientific literature and so forth. They follow from an intrinsic limitation of a medium. Now in the nineties 1990s that all changed, right? The Internet came along and science was amongst the first groups of people to embrace the Internet, and by the sort of mid to late 1990s basically every scientific journal that existed was online and publishing and electronic edition and increasingly going into their archives and digitizing their, their archives, so forth, so that [00:03:00] by 2000 you now could have had access to a large fraction of the tire published record of scientists. Such an amazing thing to be able to do that, but insanely the business model behind scientific publishing didn't change at all. So publishers who had all these subscriptions, now we're no longer selling print journals or decreasingly selling printed journals. They were just selling access to published material in a database and yet they didn't know innovation and the business [00:03:30] model at all. Speaker 4: They just simply charged people for accessing their database just like they'd been charging people to mail them copies. There was no longer any technical or economic reason why the whole universe couldn't have had immediate free access to the published scientific literature. The only reason that you or anybody else in the world didn't have immediate access to anything published in medicine or science or whatever was that the publishers then let them, so plus and the whole industry of open access publishing around [00:04:00] it. The basic idea is publishers do and have provided an important service and they should be paid for the service they provide, but that as soon as they're done, as soon as the publisher's hands are off the paper, it's freely available to everybody, not just to read, but to use and do with whatever to basically place the scientific literature into the public domain. Speaker 4: Where it belong. Science is a public venture, not exclusively, but for the most part funded by either the federal government, state governments or by public minded foundations. And the idea that [00:04:30] the end product of that investment is the property of publishers is insane and it's a huge impediment to the way science works and to the ability of the public to benefit from scientific information. And so plus has been trying to pull the rug out from underneath this subscription based business model by creating journals that use this alternative business model that are now quite successful plus as a journal plus one which is now the biggest biomedical research journal on the planet. Still only publishes a couple percent [00:05:00] of the total because there's a ton of journals out there, but it's big, it's successful, it's growing. Lots of other publishers are starting to switch not just because of it's a successful business, but because of the pressure from the public pressure from the government. Speaker 4: The NIH now requires that people make papers that are funded by NIH research freely available within a year after publication. Things are moving in the right direction and I think the insanity of a world in which the output of publicly funded publicly minded science is privately owned by people who had nothing to do with [00:05:30] a generation of the science in the first place is, it's not quite over, but it is. The writing's on the wall today. Let's go ahead and there was a bit of pushback on that in the, in the congress. What's the state of that? Is that so it's all a lot of pushback because the publishers, it's an incredibly lucrative business that profit margins for Elsevier and other big commercial publishers exceed those of apple and other sort of paragons of highly profitable businesses. When you have a company that's making $1 billion profit off of the public back [00:06:00] and they see a simple legislative solution to avoiding the problem, I think it's a natural instinct on their part to just try to write a law and you know, basically what happened was someone from their district who has a company in their district who gives them lots of money, writes a bill, gives it to them and says, Hey, could you introduce this?Speaker 4: We have a huge problem. These, you know, radical crazies from Berkeley are trying to undermine our entire business model and to lose jobs, blah, blah, blah. They get this bill introduced and there's non-trivial risk that this kind of things would pass [00:06:30] because they've managed to align themselves with a stronger force in Congress. The pro copyright lobby, they've managed to basically convinced them that this issue with scientific publishing is scientists want to steal publishers content. Just like college kids want to steal music from, you know, musicians the, and so there was a nontrivial risk that this was gonna pass and this is the second time it's been introduced. So fortunately it's very easy to say, look, the taxpayers paid for this stuff. You really think it's right for, you know, somebody who just got diagnosed [00:07:00] with some terrible disease to not have access to information that they paid for. Speaker 4: The publishers lose this every time this becomes a public fight, they're not in a winning path. And so I expect it to happen again, but just like this last time, I don't think they're gonna win. More people in Congress are on our side and paying attention than there are on Elsevier side or those publishers mostly private? Or are they publicly, I mean, they're corporations. I mean, yeah, they're mostly public corporations. So Elsevier is a big publicly traded corporation, but they're mostly from the Netherlands and [00:07:30] London. There's a bunch of big companies, but interestingly we've had as much problem historically with nonprofits, scientific societies, the societies themselves and make a lot of money on their journals. A lot of them do and it's put them in a kind of compromise position where their revenues from their journals are so important to their overall financial stability that they behave like commercial publishers. Speaker 4: It's not just big companies, any established publisher who makes a lot of money on publishing. This is sort of intrinsically compromised I think in this endeavor. [00:08:00] So the next sorta thing Blas is trying to do is to switch to a world in which publishing becomes almost instantaneous, still takes nine months or so on average for most works to go from when an author's ready to share it with the public to when it's actually publicly available, even if the journal is freely accessible. And so there's still a lot wrong with the waste. Scientists communicate with each other and with the public that this is not a close up shop. Once we win this open access battle, it's just the beginning. And this doesn't really conflict with intellectual property rights and things like that. [00:08:30] The idea of open science is really just sharing the information. The intellectual property is independent of how openly accessible the publication is. Speaker 4: On the other hand, I also think that the intellectual property stuff is bad. I've always believed that if you're getting money from the federal government, that the intellectual property you develop should not belong to you. It should be in the public domain, and I think that there's a lot of corruption of the way people behave in science that stems from the personal pressure as well as the pressure from the institutions to turn every idea, every little thing [00:09:00] they generate in the lab into a commodity, and I think it's makes science work poorly, but this is happening and so it doesn't benefit society to have academic, publicly funded research turn into privately held intellectual property. It inhibits the commercialization of those ideas that inhibits the broader use of ideas. Plenty of studies have shown this is generally cost more money to manage this whole intellectual property thing than the system benefits. Speaker 4: At the end of the day, very few universities profit from their intellectual property effort. [00:09:30] Mostly they spend a lot of money on lawyers and systems and they don't have the, you know, cloning patent or whatever it is. But if your interest is in the broader functioning of science and in the broader exposure to the public to the benefits of scientific research, you have to think that this stuff should just go right into the public domain where people want to commercialize it. They can, they just don't own any exclusive right to use it. And I think making it all pre competitive is by far the best thing to do. So while publishing itself to answer the question directly is not a [00:10:00] threatened virtual property. If I could figure out a way to make it so I would do stuff cause I think it's a very, very bad thing that publicly funded scientists, people at University of California that their stuff doesn't just belong to the public. Speaker 5: This is spectrum on KALX Berkeley today. Michael Isen, an associate professor at UC Berkeley reflects on the prop 37 campaign and GMO labeling on food. Speaker 3: Another issue [00:10:30] that involves the public a lot is the interest in GMOs in food. How would you like to see that debate transformed? Having just been through the the election cycle here in California where we had that propositionSpeaker 4: right. As you know, I was very, very much opposed to prop 37 and I think mostly because the campaign against genetically modified organisms was predicated on an ignorance of how the technology works and I felt a fear sort [00:11:00] of of science that the problem for most people was that science was involved in food and there's so many problems with that point of view that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, the reasons why I was particularly opposed to this initiative was that the backers were willfully distorting the science spreading the idea that GMOs were intrinsically dangerous, basically, that the public would benefit from having the wrong knowledge about GMOs, which is what I really felt like they were pushing some. Most scientists look at this and think what GMOs are doing [00:11:30] is so different than what we've done for thousands of years and selective breeding of crop. Speaker 4: The idea that the food we eat is in some natural state is a fallacy. Compare corn to its ancestor teosinte. You compare the tomato you buy in the supermarket to the wild slant islands, the person come. None of these things we eat. Look anything remotely like what you found in the wild. They were transformed by centuries of selective breeding and crossing and all sorts of other genetic techniques. Those are the tools of genetics that genetics has just gotten [00:12:00] better and we can do these things in a different way and yes, genetic modification is not identical, but there's nothing intrinsically weird or intrinsically dangerous about moving genes from one species to another. Putting synthetic genes into a plan. It could be, it's not intrinsically safe either, but the attitude that people seem to take is one of the food we have now is in a natural, untainted state and that the second scientist put their hands on it. Speaker 4: All of a sudden it becomes a dangerous threat, but I also think the industry has been stupid in my [00:12:30] mind and has caused a lot of this problem by basically being secret about it. For me it was sort of a lose lose situation in that neither side of that fight was actually interested in the public understanding the science. So you had a ballot measure from my mind in which more or less everybody involved was trying to promote public ignorance about an issue and it's a struggle. I don't know what the right exact solution is to achieve what I think we really need to do, which is to have the public have a, an understanding of the technology, not a detailed understanding [00:13:00] about what enzymes are used to move plans to do you know, why it exists, how it exists, how it works, what people are doing, why it will benefit them or why could benefit them in the long run and so that they understand it and can weigh the benefits and costs in a rational way. Speaker 4: Not in a rational way. I would love to see the food producers label their food, not with a huge thing on the front that says caution contain genetically modified ingredients, but with a label on back that says, here's where the seeds, the crops that went into this food come [00:13:30] from. Maybe there's not enough room on the label of every plant to give a comprehensive thing, but we know everybody's got a cell phone and a QR reader. Now. It's not impossible to imagine that every food had a little QR code on the back that you could scan and would say, here are the varieties that were used in the food. Some of them are genetically modified and here's why they were genetically modified and here's what benefit accrues from that genetic modification. Here's why you shouldn't be worried about it. I just think somehow we need to get the public more engaged in the, an understanding [00:14:00] of where food comes from, how it's grown, and what the rationale behind this process is so that they're rational actors in the process. Speaker 4: I mean, that's all. I mean, most scientists really want out of this. It's not so much to dictate that the public make particular decisions about science so that we all have our own biases about these things, but that that lack of understanding of the public about these issues and even very simple things like the simple fact that the food we eat has been subjected to genetics and that better education about simple [00:14:30] scientific things like that would make these debates focus on things that actually should be in the public debate, like part of the companies that are using genetically modified crops, exploiting intellectual property in ways that's bad for the public. It certainly seems like in many cases they do. Should we be developing genetically modified crop who basically resulted in increased herbicide use. Those are issues that are worth discussing, but they have to be discussed in a context where people understand what you're talking about and they don't think, oh my God, there's an insecticide [00:15:00] in my corn and everybody's going to die. Speaker 4: And so if I had an easy solution to that problem, we would implement it, but I can recognize when something is not going to achieve it. And I think scaring everybody into thinking that genetic modification is a horrible, dangerous technology that needs to be regulated by the government and some kind of special way was not going to achieve that. Isn't that sort of a difficulty with science in general that oftentimes it gets out in front of the population and presents it with quandaries that it can't grasp and it boils down to fear? [00:15:30] Yeah, I think this is true. This is a lot of this happening with human genetics and things like that. There's plenty of examples of where the way people are used to thinking about things is threatened in some ways or challenged by new science, and I think it's a constant challenge to the scientific community to try to make sure that it doesn't, not so much to make sure that it doesn't get ahead of the public. Speaker 4: That's fine. That's what we're paid to do. Right. But that in doing so, we grapple with the challenge of educating the public [00:16:00] about what we're doing and why and how it's going to benefit them, and it's never going to be completely successful. But I do think that the scientific community is as much to blame as anybody for not having engaged in these issues repeatedly and not having spent it's capital to some extent earning the trust of the public and things like this. You see it with human genetics and probably more acutely than anything with global warming where at some deep level the problem is would an insufficient number of people in the public trust scientists to convey. So what's important [00:16:30] about their understanding of the universe and say they trust them when you do surveys, but it's clear that that trust can be easily undermined with the right kind of PR, right? Speaker 4: It was easy to undermine it from the yes on 37 crowd was easy to undermine scientists as all being self interested somehow all we're all involved in making GMOs and therefore were just shells from Monsanto at some deep level. And though it's absurd and it's easy from the right to say, well scientists, you know, there are a bunch of crazy lefties who just [00:17:00] want us all to be environmentalist's and don't have any care about business. Say these, the public support science. But it's a thin support and it's a thin support because the scientific community hasn't really engaged the public in trying to understand what we're doing and you know, sure, there's plenty of good scientists who are trying to do that, but it certainly have to look at it as a general failure. You know, in terms of scientific literacy in this country. And it bites us all the times in small ways like prop 37 and in big ways like global warming Speaker 5: spectrum is on k a l x Berkeley alternating Fridays. [00:17:30] Michael Eisen is our guest and in this next section Michael Talks about sciences, failure in public outreach and new trends in science funding. Speaker 4: Scientific outreach is a difficult endeavor for a lot of scientists. It doesn't really have a lot of cachet or status within the, and it's tough to fund. Yeah. All that's true. I think it's not without its rewards if fun. I mean, I like talking to the public about science, not because I get anything particular from [00:18:00] it, but just because I like what I do. I like talking about what excites me about the world. I mean, it's fun. A lot of scientists don't feel that way. They don't know they'd rather be in the lab than talking in public. But it's like a lot of things. I think that partly it's just our expectation. We don't expect as a university, as a federal government funding science, it's not considered to be part of what we expect people to do to try to get engaged in communicating. The scientists sort of viewed that there's a another layer of people who are going to be involved in communicating science who are gonna know how to talk to the scientists [00:18:30] and know how to talk to the public. Speaker 4: And there's certainly are fantastic people who do that. But I think ultimately it has to come back to scientists recognizing that it's important. Like if we can't convince the public that what we're doing is important, they're not going to keep giving us money to do it. And so it's a threat to science in every way, not just in its application, but in some practical day to day existence that the public doesn't, when they don't understand us, the scientific community should expect [00:19:00] the people who are doing research or benefiting from the system to do a better job and to take seriously the challenge of communicating it to the public. That's not to say I'm in. Lots of people do it. It's just because it's not organized because it's not expected of people because there's no systematic method for doing it. It peaks me on and he's not as effective I think as it could be if this were a big part of what scientists did and just to tie all these things together. Speaker 4: I'll point out that one of the things I would hope in the long run would happen [00:19:30] as a consequence of the public having hacks as to the scientific literature is that people would start writing papers with the public at least partially in mind when they wrote them. The stuff we do isn't that complicated. I can explain what I do. I could write papers that explained sort of what I'm doing and why and it would be a huge benefit. One of the things we've really, really failed to do is we're good at explaining facts. Here's what we know, here's what we've learned, here's the truth of the system. We're really bad at explaining the scientific method to people and I think people [00:20:00] don't know why. We know things. We know why we believe them. And I think if we were better at writing our papers, I don't expect tons of people to break down the doors and read my papers. Speaker 4: But you know, I think they're interesting and well-written and certainly there are papers that plots publishes that get a lot of public attention to anything involving dinosaurs or anything involving weird sexual practices of animals, right? So when those things are good, really good, strong science, people are looking and paying attention. And if the papers were written in a way [00:20:30] that actually engages the public and thought, well, I'm going to try to explain what I did here to the public that this would probably be the most effective thing we could do, would be to educate the public, educate our students, educate everybody about what scientists do and how we do it. Not just what we discovered, which is I think one of the major problems is focus on facts and discoveries to problem in our public communication. It's a problem in education as a problem just in general for science that we don't talk very much about how we know things, what we're doing [00:21:00] and why. Speaker 4: We just talk about what we've learned. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to hold forth on? Um, you asking some questions about science funding and about amount of money available for sciences getting tighter and tighter arts, more and more scientists. And I think we're facing a kind of big question about like what does the public want to fund in science? Part of the downside of this big data move in science has been a sort of loss [00:21:30] of appreciation for the importance of individual scientists. And I think that there's all this big science and it's true in biology. People think, well, let's just get a hundred scientists from across the country and we'll all get together and we'll do the most important experiments to do. And these are increasing tendencies for the sort of science by committee kind of way of doing things. Speaker 4: And sometimes that worked, it worked for the human genome project and so forth. But probably one of the things I worry about most in sciences with that, that we're moving away from [00:22:00] a world in which individual scientists get to pursue their own ideas. And you know, which is ultimately where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. You know, genome projects don't win Nobel prizes because their infrastructure, they're not ultimately about discoveries. And so I do worry that seduction of big science is such that funding agencies and other people think that this is a great way for them to control what happens. They're going to put tons of money into these big projects and get everybody to sign on to whatever agenda is coming from the NIH rather than from individual scientists. [00:22:30] And I think it's a struggle we're about to see reach a real head in science as less and less money is available. It's harder and harder to get individual research grants and I think we're just starting to see push back against that in the scientific community. But I don't know who will prevail. I would not like being a scientist if what I did with my days was go to committee meetings with 30 other scientists where we discussed what one experiment we were going to do, which is pieces where things are headed at least at the moment. But Michael lies and thanks very much for coming on [00:23:00] spectrum. Absolute pleasure. Speaker 5: [inaudible] now our calendar of science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski and Renee arou present the calendar. Speaker 4: Charles Darwin may have been born on February 12th but the fellowship of humanity is celebrating his birthday with the Darwin Day on Sunday, February 24th at 1:30 PM David Seaborg of the world [00:23:30] rainforest fund and a leading expert on evolutionary theory presents the keynote evolution today. Current state of knowledge and controversies, Nobel prize physicist George Smoot and leading expert on Darwin, Peter Hess of the national for science Speaker 6: education. We'll also talk afterwards, enjoy a potluck dinner party with the Speakers. I anticipate primordial soup. The event is at Humanist Hall Three Nine Zero 27th Street in Oakland. Visit Humanist [00:24:00] hall.net for more Info every month. Speaker 7: Nerd night holds an event that can only be described as a gratifying mixture of the discovery channel and beer. This Monday, East Bay's own February nerd night will be held at the new parkway theater. Jessica Richmond will speak about the plethora of microbial cells we play host to within our bodies and what they do there. She will explore the latest research on how our microbes correlate with obesity, anxiety, heart disease, and tooth [00:24:30] decay. We'll Fischer. We'll discuss the history, physics and some modern advances of the processes of creating machines. Finally, Guy Pyre. Zack will speak about his experience as a science planner for the curiosity rover. Nerd night will begin at 7:00 PM on February 25th as the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. The HR tickets can be purchased online at Eastbourne or night, spelled n I t e.com this February 26th the life [00:25:00] sciences divisions at the Lawrence lab in Berkeley will hold a seminar on the subject of life and death at the cellular level. Speaker 7: Denise Montell, a professor of molecular and developmental biology at UC Santa Barbara. We'll discuss her research in the area. Her lab has recently discovered a surprising reversibility of the cell suicide process known as a pop ptosis. She is now testing the hypothesis that the ability of cells to return from the brink of death, so it's to salvage cells that are difficult [00:25:30] to replace such as heart muscles or neurons in the adult brain. The seminars open to the public, although non UC Berkeley students are asked to RSVP by phone or through the lab website. The event will be held in room one for one of the Lawrence Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in West Berkeley. It will begin at 4:00 PM on February 26th this Wednesday at the herps leader in San Francisco. You can learn more about your nightly slumbers. [00:26:00] Professor Matt Walker in the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at UC Berkeley has found compelling evidence that our light dreamless stage of sleep can solidify short term memories by rewiring the architecture of the brain, burst of electrical impulses known as sleep spindles, maybe networking between the brain's hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex is storage area. His team has also found evidence that sleep can associate and integrate new memories together. Dr. Walker will be in conversation with k a [00:26:30] l w reporter Amy Standen. Tickets for the February 27th event can be found online@calacademy.org Speaker 6: Berkeley Professor Alex Philip Pinko is speaking at the Commonwealth about dark energy and the runaway universe. We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the university is expanding, but observations of very distant exploding stars known as Supernova show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up the universe seems [00:27:00] to be dominated by a repulsive dark energy. An Idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 the renounced in 1929 as his biggest blender. The physical origin and nature of dark energy is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics. This event will be Thursday, February 28th at five 30 there will be a networking reception followed by the program at six the cost is $20 $8 for Commonwealth members [00:27:30] or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info now to news stories presented by Renee and Rick, Speaker 7: a UC Berkeley student team has made it into the final rounds of the Disney sponsored design competition known as imaginations. The competition challenges students to design a Disney experience for the residents of their chosen city. The student team, Tiffany, you on, Catherine Moore and Andrew Linn designed a green robot [00:28:00] food truck called Sammy the students do on Berkeley's reputation as an environmentally friendly city to create Sammy who comes equipped with solar panels and a self cultivating garden. Disney has praised the projects collaborative nature, which incorporates design aspects from each student's major. The students are now presenting their project at Disney headquarters along with five other teams from across the country. Speaker 6: Last Friday, February 16th you may have seen a large fireball in the night sky [00:28:30] over the bay area. Jonathan Bregman of the Chabot Space and science center in Oakland told The Washington Post that meteors that streak through the sky are a very common occurrence. What is uncommon is that it's so close to where people are living. Bregman also noted that 15,000 tons of debris from asteroids enter the earth's atmosphere every year. Usually these things break up into small pieces and are difficult to find. This event was ours. After the 200 foot asteroid named 2012 [00:29:00] d a 14 came within 18,000 miles of earth and after the Valentine's Day, media exploded over Russia and drain more than a thousand people. That media was the largest to hit the earth in more than a century streaking through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it created a loud shockwave that broke glass. Scientists estimate that it was about 15 meters across and 7,000 metric tons. Despite this massive size it was undetected until it hit the atmosphere. [00:29:30] Music heard during the show is by Scott and David from his album folk and acoustic released under a creative Commons license 3.0 attributional. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In part 2, Michael Eisen discusses the Public Library of Science, his position on GMOs and a labeling strategy. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program [00:00:30] bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of spectrum. Today we are presenting part two of our two part interview with Michael Isen and associate professor of genetics genomics in development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. In part one Michael talked about his research of gene regulation this week. Michael explains [00:01:00] the Public Library of science, his feelings on labeling of GMOs in food as well as intellectual property science outreach and science funding. Enjoy the interview. I wanted to talk about the Public Library of science if you were a cofounder of. Yeah, and are you still involved with that? Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm on the board. I've still very actively involved in trying to shape its future and in general in the future of science publishing. Speaker 3: And so can you talk about its business model and how it's changing publishing? Speaker 4: [00:01:30] Sure. The basic idea is that science publishing, it's been around for as long as science has been an endeavor from the 17th century. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, all these guys were sort of inventing science as we currently know it. And Science as a enterprise obviously requires that scientists communicate with each other and since time immemorial in science, we've had journaled, Francis Bacon, other scientists that 17th century started at seedings of the Royal Society. Right? And for 330 [00:02:00] years or so after they started these journals, they were using the only technology available to them at the time, which was print publishing and a lot of things that follow from the way scientific publishing was structured follow intrinsically from the limitations and features of that printed journal. And as an economic model, the only model that makes sense is for the end users to pay for the first subscription. And you know, there's problems with that. Speaker 4: Only people who [00:02:30] can afford the subscriptions can get access to the scientific literature and so forth. They follow from an intrinsic limitation of a medium. Now in the nineties 1990s that all changed, right? The Internet came along and science was amongst the first groups of people to embrace the Internet, and by the sort of mid to late 1990s basically every scientific journal that existed was online and publishing and electronic edition and increasingly going into their archives and digitizing their, their archives, so forth, so that [00:03:00] by 2000 you now could have had access to a large fraction of the tire published record of scientists. Such an amazing thing to be able to do that, but insanely the business model behind scientific publishing didn't change at all. So publishers who had all these subscriptions, now we're no longer selling print journals or decreasingly selling printed journals. They were just selling access to published material in a database and yet they didn't know innovation and the business [00:03:30] model at all. Speaker 4: They just simply charged people for accessing their database just like they'd been charging people to mail them copies. There was no longer any technical or economic reason why the whole universe couldn't have had immediate free access to the published scientific literature. The only reason that you or anybody else in the world didn't have immediate access to anything published in medicine or science or whatever was that the publishers then let them, so plus and the whole industry of open access publishing around [00:04:00] it. The basic idea is publishers do and have provided an important service and they should be paid for the service they provide, but that as soon as they're done, as soon as the publisher's hands are off the paper, it's freely available to everybody, not just to read, but to use and do with whatever to basically place the scientific literature into the public domain. Speaker 4: Where it belong. Science is a public venture, not exclusively, but for the most part funded by either the federal government, state governments or by public minded foundations. And the idea that [00:04:30] the end product of that investment is the property of publishers is insane and it's a huge impediment to the way science works and to the ability of the public to benefit from scientific information. And so plus has been trying to pull the rug out from underneath this subscription based business model by creating journals that use this alternative business model that are now quite successful plus as a journal plus one which is now the biggest biomedical research journal on the planet. Still only publishes a couple percent [00:05:00] of the total because there's a ton of journals out there, but it's big, it's successful, it's growing. Lots of other publishers are starting to switch not just because of it's a successful business, but because of the pressure from the public pressure from the government. Speaker 4: The NIH now requires that people make papers that are funded by NIH research freely available within a year after publication. Things are moving in the right direction and I think the insanity of a world in which the output of publicly funded publicly minded science is privately owned by people who had nothing to do with [00:05:30] a generation of the science in the first place is, it's not quite over, but it is. The writing's on the wall today. Let's go ahead and there was a bit of pushback on that in the, in the congress. What's the state of that? Is that so it's all a lot of pushback because the publishers, it's an incredibly lucrative business that profit margins for Elsevier and other big commercial publishers exceed those of apple and other sort of paragons of highly profitable businesses. When you have a company that's making $1 billion profit off of the public back [00:06:00] and they see a simple legislative solution to avoiding the problem, I think it's a natural instinct on their part to just try to write a law and you know, basically what happened was someone from their district who has a company in their district who gives them lots of money, writes a bill, gives it to them and says, Hey, could you introduce this?Speaker 4: We have a huge problem. These, you know, radical crazies from Berkeley are trying to undermine our entire business model and to lose jobs, blah, blah, blah. They get this bill introduced and there's non-trivial risk that this kind of things would pass [00:06:30] because they've managed to align themselves with a stronger force in Congress. The pro copyright lobby, they've managed to basically convinced them that this issue with scientific publishing is scientists want to steal publishers content. Just like college kids want to steal music from, you know, musicians the, and so there was a nontrivial risk that this was gonna pass and this is the second time it's been introduced. So fortunately it's very easy to say, look, the taxpayers paid for this stuff. You really think it's right for, you know, somebody who just got diagnosed [00:07:00] with some terrible disease to not have access to information that they paid for. Speaker 4: The publishers lose this every time this becomes a public fight, they're not in a winning path. And so I expect it to happen again, but just like this last time, I don't think they're gonna win. More people in Congress are on our side and paying attention than there are on Elsevier side or those publishers mostly private? Or are they publicly, I mean, they're corporations. I mean, yeah, they're mostly public corporations. So Elsevier is a big publicly traded corporation, but they're mostly from the Netherlands and [00:07:30] London. There's a bunch of big companies, but interestingly we've had as much problem historically with nonprofits, scientific societies, the societies themselves and make a lot of money on their journals. A lot of them do and it's put them in a kind of compromise position where their revenues from their journals are so important to their overall financial stability that they behave like commercial publishers. Speaker 4: It's not just big companies, any established publisher who makes a lot of money on publishing. This is sort of intrinsically compromised I think in this endeavor. [00:08:00] So the next sorta thing Blas is trying to do is to switch to a world in which publishing becomes almost instantaneous, still takes nine months or so on average for most works to go from when an author's ready to share it with the public to when it's actually publicly available, even if the journal is freely accessible. And so there's still a lot wrong with the waste. Scientists communicate with each other and with the public that this is not a close up shop. Once we win this open access battle, it's just the beginning. And this doesn't really conflict with intellectual property rights and things like that. [00:08:30] The idea of open science is really just sharing the information. The intellectual property is independent of how openly accessible the publication is. Speaker 4: On the other hand, I also think that the intellectual property stuff is bad. I've always believed that if you're getting money from the federal government, that the intellectual property you develop should not belong to you. It should be in the public domain, and I think that there's a lot of corruption of the way people behave in science that stems from the personal pressure as well as the pressure from the institutions to turn every idea, every little thing [00:09:00] they generate in the lab into a commodity, and I think it's makes science work poorly, but this is happening and so it doesn't benefit society to have academic, publicly funded research turn into privately held intellectual property. It inhibits the commercialization of those ideas that inhibits the broader use of ideas. Plenty of studies have shown this is generally cost more money to manage this whole intellectual property thing than the system benefits. Speaker 4: At the end of the day, very few universities profit from their intellectual property effort. [00:09:30] Mostly they spend a lot of money on lawyers and systems and they don't have the, you know, cloning patent or whatever it is. But if your interest is in the broader functioning of science and in the broader exposure to the public to the benefits of scientific research, you have to think that this stuff should just go right into the public domain where people want to commercialize it. They can, they just don't own any exclusive right to use it. And I think making it all pre competitive is by far the best thing to do. So while publishing itself to answer the question directly is not a [00:10:00] threatened virtual property. If I could figure out a way to make it so I would do stuff cause I think it's a very, very bad thing that publicly funded scientists, people at University of California that their stuff doesn't just belong to the public. Speaker 5: This is spectrum on KALX Berkeley today. Michael Isen, an associate professor at UC Berkeley reflects on the prop 37 campaign and GMO labeling on food. Speaker 3: Another issue [00:10:30] that involves the public a lot is the interest in GMOs in food. How would you like to see that debate transformed? Having just been through the the election cycle here in California where we had that propositionSpeaker 4: right. As you know, I was very, very much opposed to prop 37 and I think mostly because the campaign against genetically modified organisms was predicated on an ignorance of how the technology works and I felt a fear sort [00:11:00] of of science that the problem for most people was that science was involved in food and there's so many problems with that point of view that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, the reasons why I was particularly opposed to this initiative was that the backers were willfully distorting the science spreading the idea that GMOs were intrinsically dangerous, basically, that the public would benefit from having the wrong knowledge about GMOs, which is what I really felt like they were pushing some. Most scientists look at this and think what GMOs are doing [00:11:30] is so different than what we've done for thousands of years and selective breeding of crop. Speaker 4: The idea that the food we eat is in some natural state is a fallacy. Compare corn to its ancestor teosinte. You compare the tomato you buy in the supermarket to the wild slant islands, the person come. None of these things we eat. Look anything remotely like what you found in the wild. They were transformed by centuries of selective breeding and crossing and all sorts of other genetic techniques. Those are the tools of genetics that genetics has just gotten [00:12:00] better and we can do these things in a different way and yes, genetic modification is not identical, but there's nothing intrinsically weird or intrinsically dangerous about moving genes from one species to another. Putting synthetic genes into a plan. It could be, it's not intrinsically safe either, but the attitude that people seem to take is one of the food we have now is in a natural, untainted state and that the second scientist put their hands on it. Speaker 4: All of a sudden it becomes a dangerous threat, but I also think the industry has been stupid in my [00:12:30] mind and has caused a lot of this problem by basically being secret about it. For me it was sort of a lose lose situation in that neither side of that fight was actually interested in the public understanding the science. So you had a ballot measure from my mind in which more or less everybody involved was trying to promote public ignorance about an issue and it's a struggle. I don't know what the right exact solution is to achieve what I think we really need to do, which is to have the public have a, an understanding of the technology, not a detailed understanding [00:13:00] about what enzymes are used to move plans to do you know, why it exists, how it exists, how it works, what people are doing, why it will benefit them or why could benefit them in the long run and so that they understand it and can weigh the benefits and costs in a rational way. Speaker 4: Not in a rational way. I would love to see the food producers label their food, not with a huge thing on the front that says caution contain genetically modified ingredients, but with a label on back that says, here's where the seeds, the crops that went into this food come [00:13:30] from. Maybe there's not enough room on the label of every plant to give a comprehensive thing, but we know everybody's got a cell phone and a QR reader. Now. It's not impossible to imagine that every food had a little QR code on the back that you could scan and would say, here are the varieties that were used in the food. Some of them are genetically modified and here's why they were genetically modified and here's what benefit accrues from that genetic modification. Here's why you shouldn't be worried about it. I just think somehow we need to get the public more engaged in the, an understanding [00:14:00] of where food comes from, how it's grown, and what the rationale behind this process is so that they're rational actors in the process. Speaker 4: I mean, that's all. I mean, most scientists really want out of this. It's not so much to dictate that the public make particular decisions about science so that we all have our own biases about these things, but that that lack of understanding of the public about these issues and even very simple things like the simple fact that the food we eat has been subjected to genetics and that better education about simple [00:14:30] scientific things like that would make these debates focus on things that actually should be in the public debate, like part of the companies that are using genetically modified crops, exploiting intellectual property in ways that's bad for the public. It certainly seems like in many cases they do. Should we be developing genetically modified crop who basically resulted in increased herbicide use. Those are issues that are worth discussing, but they have to be discussed in a context where people understand what you're talking about and they don't think, oh my God, there's an insecticide [00:15:00] in my corn and everybody's going to die. Speaker 4: And so if I had an easy solution to that problem, we would implement it, but I can recognize when something is not going to achieve it. And I think scaring everybody into thinking that genetic modification is a horrible, dangerous technology that needs to be regulated by the government and some kind of special way was not going to achieve that. Isn't that sort of a difficulty with science in general that oftentimes it gets out in front of the population and presents it with quandaries that it can't grasp and it boils down to fear? [00:15:30] Yeah, I think this is true. This is a lot of this happening with human genetics and things like that. There's plenty of examples of where the way people are used to thinking about things is threatened in some ways or challenged by new science, and I think it's a constant challenge to the scientific community to try to make sure that it doesn't, not so much to make sure that it doesn't get ahead of the public. Speaker 4: That's fine. That's what we're paid to do. Right. But that in doing so, we grapple with the challenge of educating the public [00:16:00] about what we're doing and why and how it's going to benefit them, and it's never going to be completely successful. But I do think that the scientific community is as much to blame as anybody for not having engaged in these issues repeatedly and not having spent it's capital to some extent earning the trust of the public and things like this. You see it with human genetics and probably more acutely than anything with global warming where at some deep level the problem is would an insufficient number of people in the public trust scientists to convey. So what's important [00:16:30] about their understanding of the universe and say they trust them when you do surveys, but it's clear that that trust can be easily undermined with the right kind of PR, right? Speaker 4: It was easy to undermine it from the yes on 37 crowd was easy to undermine scientists as all being self interested somehow all we're all involved in making GMOs and therefore were just shells from Monsanto at some deep level. And though it's absurd and it's easy from the right to say, well scientists, you know, there are a bunch of crazy lefties who just [00:17:00] want us all to be environmentalist's and don't have any care about business. Say these, the public support science. But it's a thin support and it's a thin support because the scientific community hasn't really engaged the public in trying to understand what we're doing and you know, sure, there's plenty of good scientists who are trying to do that, but it certainly have to look at it as a general failure. You know, in terms of scientific literacy in this country. And it bites us all the times in small ways like prop 37 and in big ways like global warming Speaker 5: spectrum is on k a l x Berkeley alternating Fridays. [00:17:30] Michael Eisen is our guest and in this next section Michael Talks about sciences, failure in public outreach and new trends in science funding. Speaker 4: Scientific outreach is a difficult endeavor for a lot of scientists. It doesn't really have a lot of cachet or status within the, and it's tough to fund. Yeah. All that's true. I think it's not without its rewards if fun. I mean, I like talking to the public about science, not because I get anything particular from [00:18:00] it, but just because I like what I do. I like talking about what excites me about the world. I mean, it's fun. A lot of scientists don't feel that way. They don't know they'd rather be in the lab than talking in public. But it's like a lot of things. I think that partly it's just our expectation. We don't expect as a university, as a federal government funding science, it's not considered to be part of what we expect people to do to try to get engaged in communicating. The scientists sort of viewed that there's a another layer of people who are going to be involved in communicating science who are gonna know how to talk to the scientists [00:18:30] and know how to talk to the public. Speaker 4: And there's certainly are fantastic people who do that. But I think ultimately it has to come back to scientists recognizing that it's important. Like if we can't convince the public that what we're doing is important, they're not going to keep giving us money to do it. And so it's a threat to science in every way, not just in its application, but in some practical day to day existence that the public doesn't, when they don't understand us, the scientific community should expect [00:19:00] the people who are doing research or benefiting from the system to do a better job and to take seriously the challenge of communicating it to the public. That's not to say I'm in. Lots of people do it. It's just because it's not organized because it's not expected of people because there's no systematic method for doing it. It peaks me on and he's not as effective I think as it could be if this were a big part of what scientists did and just to tie all these things together. Speaker 4: I'll point out that one of the things I would hope in the long run would happen [00:19:30] as a consequence of the public having hacks as to the scientific literature is that people would start writing papers with the public at least partially in mind when they wrote them. The stuff we do isn't that complicated. I can explain what I do. I could write papers that explained sort of what I'm doing and why and it would be a huge benefit. One of the things we've really, really failed to do is we're good at explaining facts. Here's what we know, here's what we've learned, here's the truth of the system. We're really bad at explaining the scientific method to people and I think people [00:20:00] don't know why. We know things. We know why we believe them. And I think if we were better at writing our papers, I don't expect tons of people to break down the doors and read my papers. Speaker 4: But you know, I think they're interesting and well-written and certainly there are papers that plots publishes that get a lot of public attention to anything involving dinosaurs or anything involving weird sexual practices of animals, right? So when those things are good, really good, strong science, people are looking and paying attention. And if the papers were written in a way [00:20:30] that actually engages the public and thought, well, I'm going to try to explain what I did here to the public that this would probably be the most effective thing we could do, would be to educate the public, educate our students, educate everybody about what scientists do and how we do it. Not just what we discovered, which is I think one of the major problems is focus on facts and discoveries to problem in our public communication. It's a problem in education as a problem just in general for science that we don't talk very much about how we know things, what we're doing [00:21:00] and why. Speaker 4: We just talk about what we've learned. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to hold forth on? Um, you asking some questions about science funding and about amount of money available for sciences getting tighter and tighter arts, more and more scientists. And I think we're facing a kind of big question about like what does the public want to fund in science? Part of the downside of this big data move in science has been a sort of loss [00:21:30] of appreciation for the importance of individual scientists. And I think that there's all this big science and it's true in biology. People think, well, let's just get a hundred scientists from across the country and we'll all get together and we'll do the most important experiments to do. And these are increasing tendencies for the sort of science by committee kind of way of doing things. Speaker 4: And sometimes that worked, it worked for the human genome project and so forth. But probably one of the things I worry about most in sciences with that, that we're moving away from [00:22:00] a world in which individual scientists get to pursue their own ideas. And you know, which is ultimately where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. You know, genome projects don't win Nobel prizes because their infrastructure, they're not ultimately about discoveries. And so I do worry that seduction of big science is such that funding agencies and other people think that this is a great way for them to control what happens. They're going to put tons of money into these big projects and get everybody to sign on to whatever agenda is coming from the NIH rather than from individual scientists. [00:22:30] And I think it's a struggle we're about to see reach a real head in science as less and less money is available. It's harder and harder to get individual research grants and I think we're just starting to see push back against that in the scientific community. But I don't know who will prevail. I would not like being a scientist if what I did with my days was go to committee meetings with 30 other scientists where we discussed what one experiment we were going to do, which is pieces where things are headed at least at the moment. But Michael lies and thanks very much for coming on [00:23:00] spectrum. Absolute pleasure. Speaker 5: [inaudible] now our calendar of science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski and Renee arou present the calendar. Speaker 4: Charles Darwin may have been born on February 12th but the fellowship of humanity is celebrating his birthday with the Darwin Day on Sunday, February 24th at 1:30 PM David Seaborg of the world [00:23:30] rainforest fund and a leading expert on evolutionary theory presents the keynote evolution today. Current state of knowledge and controversies, Nobel prize physicist George Smoot and leading expert on Darwin, Peter Hess of the national for science Speaker 6: education. We'll also talk afterwards, enjoy a potluck dinner party with the Speakers. I anticipate primordial soup. The event is at Humanist Hall Three Nine Zero 27th Street in Oakland. Visit Humanist [00:24:00] hall.net for more Info every month. Speaker 7: Nerd night holds an event that can only be described as a gratifying mixture of the discovery channel and beer. This Monday, East Bay's own February nerd night will be held at the new parkway theater. Jessica Richmond will speak about the plethora of microbial cells we play host to within our bodies and what they do there. She will explore the latest research on how our microbes correlate with obesity, anxiety, heart disease, and tooth [00:24:30] decay. We'll Fischer. We'll discuss the history, physics and some modern advances of the processes of creating machines. Finally, Guy Pyre. Zack will speak about his experience as a science planner for the curiosity rover. Nerd night will begin at 7:00 PM on February 25th as the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. The HR tickets can be purchased online at Eastbourne or night, spelled n I t e.com this February 26th the life [00:25:00] sciences divisions at the Lawrence lab in Berkeley will hold a seminar on the subject of life and death at the cellular level. Speaker 7: Denise Montell, a professor of molecular and developmental biology at UC Santa Barbara. We'll discuss her research in the area. Her lab has recently discovered a surprising reversibility of the cell suicide process known as a pop ptosis. She is now testing the hypothesis that the ability of cells to return from the brink of death, so it's to salvage cells that are difficult [00:25:30] to replace such as heart muscles or neurons in the adult brain. The seminars open to the public, although non UC Berkeley students are asked to RSVP by phone or through the lab website. The event will be held in room one for one of the Lawrence Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in West Berkeley. It will begin at 4:00 PM on February 26th this Wednesday at the herps leader in San Francisco. You can learn more about your nightly slumbers. [00:26:00] Professor Matt Walker in the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at UC Berkeley has found compelling evidence that our light dreamless stage of sleep can solidify short term memories by rewiring the architecture of the brain, burst of electrical impulses known as sleep spindles, maybe networking between the brain's hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex is storage area. His team has also found evidence that sleep can associate and integrate new memories together. Dr. Walker will be in conversation with k a [00:26:30] l w reporter Amy Standen. Tickets for the February 27th event can be found online@calacademy.org Speaker 6: Berkeley Professor Alex Philip Pinko is speaking at the Commonwealth about dark energy and the runaway universe. We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the university is expanding, but observations of very distant exploding stars known as Supernova show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up the universe seems [00:27:00] to be dominated by a repulsive dark energy. An Idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 the renounced in 1929 as his biggest blender. The physical origin and nature of dark energy is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics. This event will be Thursday, February 28th at five 30 there will be a networking reception followed by the program at six the cost is $20 $8 for Commonwealth members [00:27:30] or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info now to news stories presented by Renee and Rick, Speaker 7: a UC Berkeley student team has made it into the final rounds of the Disney sponsored design competition known as imaginations. The competition challenges students to design a Disney experience for the residents of their chosen city. The student team, Tiffany, you on, Catherine Moore and Andrew Linn designed a green robot [00:28:00] food truck called Sammy the students do on Berkeley's reputation as an environmentally friendly city to create Sammy who comes equipped with solar panels and a self cultivating garden. Disney has praised the projects collaborative nature, which incorporates design aspects from each student's major. The students are now presenting their project at Disney headquarters along with five other teams from across the country. Speaker 6: Last Friday, February 16th you may have seen a large fireball in the night sky [00:28:30] over the bay area. Jonathan Bregman of the Chabot Space and science center in Oakland told The Washington Post that meteors that streak through the sky are a very common occurrence. What is uncommon is that it's so close to where people are living. Bregman also noted that 15,000 tons of debris from asteroids enter the earth's atmosphere every year. Usually these things break up into small pieces and are difficult to find. This event was ours. After the 200 foot asteroid named 2012 [00:29:00] d a 14 came within 18,000 miles of earth and after the Valentine's Day, media exploded over Russia and drain more than a thousand people. That media was the largest to hit the earth in more than a century streaking through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it created a loud shockwave that broke glass. Scientists estimate that it was about 15 meters across and 7,000 metric tons. Despite this massive size it was undetected until it hit the atmosphere. [00:29:30] Music heard during the show is by Scott and David from his album folk and acoustic released under a creative Commons license 3.0 attributional. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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