Podcast appearances and mentions of Michael Eisen

It's so great to welcome back Jeffrey Eisen, a Toronto based visionary who shifted from a very practical life as a CEO of a multimillion dollar steel company, to a much more spiritually based one as a Spirtitual Life Coach, channeler or Shaltazar, Energy Intuitive and more!    In our conversation we chat all about manifesting what you want in life, and more. Jeffrey's mission is to elevate global consciousness.    Through the profound wisdom of Shaltazar, Jeffrey inspires peace, harmony, and contentment, guiding individuals to explore their inner selves and harness their potential for radical change. His dedication to awakening, empowering, and inspiring others is reflected in his co-authored book, 'Empowered YOUth - A Father & Son's Journey to Conscious Living', written with his son, Michael Eisen.  Jeffrey's journey exemplifies the human spirit's capacity for reinvention and serves as a reminder that true purpose lies within our humanity. Join him on a transformative journey to shift the planet's consciousness, one heart and soul at a time.   You can connect with with him here:   https://jeffreyeisen.com/ https://www.facebook.com/jeffreyeisen/ https://www.instagram.com/jeffreyeisen/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffeisen/   Of course, please feel free to send me YOUR questions anytime, or connect with me for an actual conversation to get them answered.    I definitely look forward to connecting with you anytime! If you'd like to have a FREE life mapping chat with me, you can grab a time right here to do that: 20 Minute FREE Life Mapping Session   You can also find me on the CATCH website. It has a great video and some free recordings right there to explain more. CATCH - Laura Ordile   Please come join me in The Change Gang Group! Change Gang Group     Grab yourself a freebie made just for YOU here: Fun FREEBIES!   And I have a brand new one that's not even on the website yet. If you'd like to boost your happiness and increase your sleep, this one's for you!  Sleep Better and Live Happier!   And I'm also always happy to connect on Instagram: Laura Ordile   Thank you so much for joining me in the fun. I'd be very grateful if you would be willing to take a moment and rate and review the show for me. And I hope you have a great week!   Happy day to you,   Laura 

Today we have the pleasure of meeting Jeffrey Eisen, a Toronto based visionary who shifted from a very practical life as a CEO of a multimillion dollar steel company, to a much more spiritually based one as a Spirtitual Life Coach, channeler or Shaltazar, Energy Intuitive and more!    In our conversation, he shares about his spirtitual awakening at 50 and shifting his focus from profits to people, embarking on a journey of self-discovery and spiritual exploration. Jeffrey's mission is to elevate global consciousness.    Through the profound wisdom of Shaltazar, Jeffrey inspires peace, harmony, and contentment, guiding individuals to explore their inner selves and harness their potential for radical change. His dedication to awakening, empowering, and inspiring others is reflected in his co-authored book, 'Empowered YOUth - A Father & Son's Journey to Conscious Living', written with his son, Michael Eisen.  Jeffrey's journey exemplifies the human spirit's capacity for reinvention and serves as a reminder that true purpose lies within our humanity. Join him on a transformative journey to shift the planet's consciousness, one heart and soul at a time.   You can connect with with him here:   https://jeffreyeisen.com/ https://www.facebook.com/jeffreyeisen/ https://www.instagram.com/jeffreyeisen/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffeisen/   Of course, please feel free to send me YOUR questions anytime, or connect with me for an actual conversation to get them answered.    I definitely look forward to connecting with you anytime! If you'd like to have a FREE life mapping chat with me, you can grab a time right here to do that: 20 Minute FREE Life Mapping Session   You can also find me on the CATCH website. It has a great video and some free recordings right there to explain more. CATCH - Laura Ordile   Please come join me in The Change Gang Group! Change Gang Group   Grab yourself a freebie made just for YOU here: Fun FREEBIES!   And I have a brand new one that's not even on the website yet. If you'd like to boost your happiness and increase your sleep, this one's for you!  Sleep Better and Live Happier!   And I'm also always happy to connect on Instagram: Laura Ordile   Thank you so much for joining me in the fun. I'd be very grateful if you would be willing to take a moment and rate and review the show for me. And I hope you have a great week!   Happy day to you,   Laura 

In this episode, we talk to Ravinder Sehgal, Board Member of the San Francisco Veg Society and biology professor at San Francisco State University. We learn about why and how eating more plant-based food can decrease our negative impact on the climate. We discuss deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, misuse of energy, land and water, and more.  Ravinder also shares easy, everyday tips and recommendations for how to adopt a more Earth-friendly diet. Great Guest Quote: “If people reduce the amount of animals they eat, I believe slowly we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, and improve the climate.” Keywords:  #vegandiet #plantbased #veganfood  #plantbaseddiet #plants #climate#climatechange #climatecrisis #vegan #vegansofinstagram #endfactoryfarming#endanimalagriculture #livevegan #veganliving Host: Ellisa Feinstein Transcript HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j_Al_EQOUkqPYtnfmxY_0eiJZydEHtHDN8y8RGv2HNo/edit?usp=sharing We LOVE listener feedback! Share your thoughts and insights by taking this brief survey: ⁠⁠  https://forms.gle/MqoL7F8K6uc3FAD99 Related Websites: Could going vegan help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?: Article outlining the findings from a study by Patrick Brown, professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University and Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics and development at UC Berkeley Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions:  Well-researched article about main contributors to food's emissions New estimates of the environmental cost of food: University of Oxford article highlighting environmental impacts of food producers and their products SF Veg Society: non-profit organization that promotes a plant-based diet and a vegan lifestyle for healthy, ethical and sustainable living About Ravind Sehgal: Learn more about Ravinder Sehgal and his work Rainbow Grocery: San Francisco-based worker-owned grocery store that only carries vegan and vegetarian food items, beauty/personal products, and home goods Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicin - Non-profit organization dedicated to saving and improving human and animal lives through plant-based diets and ethical and effective scientific research Please share this podcast with a few friends, family, or colleagues.  Remember to follow this podcast to find out when new episodes get released! Contact Us: Do you know a Bay Area-based Everyday Climate Champion? We'd love to interview them!  Get in touch: crba.eccpodcast@gmail.com  Website: www.climaterealitybayarea.org/eccpodcast  The Climate Reality Project Bay Area Chapter catalyzes local solutions to the climate crisis in every corner of the San Francisco Bay Area. We work together to spark urgent action and rapid adoption of solutions to the climate crisis. As Climate Reality founder and Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore says, “Solving the climate crisis is within our grasp, but we need people like you to stand up and act.”   To learn more, visit: www.ClimateRealityBayArea.org Podcast Production Team: Executive Producer/Editor: Dalya Massachi; Audio Engineer: Trevor Skerbe; Co-Hosts/Researchers: George Dy, Ellisa Feinstein, Isabella Genereaux, Sean Mendelson, Hasini Parepalli; Logo Designer: Gabriela Vargas

Eric Topol (00:00):Hello, this is Eric Topol, and I'm thrilled to have a chance to have a conversation with Magdalena Skipper, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Nature. And a historic note. Back in 2018, she became the first woman editor of Nature in its 149 years, and only the eighth editor of all times. Having taken over for Philip Campbell, who had been previously the editor for 22 years, we're going to ask her if she's going to do 22 or more years, but we're going to have a fun conversation because there's so much going on in medical publishing, and I think, you know, that Nature is the number one cited science journal in the world. So, welcome, Magdalena.Magdalena Skipper (00:41):Thank you very much. Real pleasure to be here and chatting with you today, Eric. Thank you.How COVID-19 Affected NatureEric Topol (00:47):Well, you know, we're still, of course, in the pandemic world. It's obviously not as bad as it had been, but there's still things going on with new variants and Long Covid, and it's not, the virus isn't going away. But first thing I wanted to get into was how did Nature handle this frenetic craziness? I mean, it was putting out accelerated publications on almost a daily or weekly basis and putting out like a speed, velocity of the likes that we've not seen. This must have been really trying for the whole crew. What, what do you think?Magdalena Skipper (01:29):It was! And, you know, the first thing I, I think I will recognize two things at the same time. So the first one, as you say, at a time, such as the pandemic, but actually at any point when there is a, a new health emergency that is spreading, especially something as unknown, as new as, as it was the case with SARS-CoV-2. And of course, in the beginning, we really knew nothing about what we were facing if speed is of the essence, but equally what's truly important is of course, the rigor itself. So that combination of needing to publish as quickly as possible, but at the same time as rigorously evaluating the papers as possible, that was actually quite a challenge. And of course, you know, what we sometimes forget when we talk about, well, researchers themselves, but also editors and publishers is of course, as individuals, as human beings.(02:33):They are going through all the trauma, all the constraints associated with various lockdowns concerns about the loved ones, perhaps those ones who are in the care. You know, in many cases of course there would've been the elderly who are individuals would've been concerned by or indeed children, because of course, schools in so many places were. And all the while, while we were dealing with these very human, very ordinary daily preoccupations, we were very focused on the fact that we had a responsibility and a duty to publish papers and evaluate them as quickly as possible. It really was an extraordinary time. And, and you know, one other thing I should emphasize is, of course, it's not just the manuscript editors who evaluate the research, it's the reporters on my team as well who are going out of their the way to find out as much information to report as robustly, find as many sources to, to interview as possible.(03:44):And, and, you know, I also have to mention colleagues who work on production side of nature actually make Naturehappen, be published online on a daily and then of course weekly basis. And literally from one week to the next all our operations had to be performed from home. And it's really remarkable that the issue was not late. We published the issue, just as you know, from as lockdowns came in. And as it happens, the production side of Nature is mainly based in, in London. So most of that team effectively found themselves not being able to go to the office effectively from one day to the next. So it really was an extraordinary time and, and a time that as I said was, was a time of great responsibility. But looking back on it, I'm actually incredibly proud of, of my team, what, what they achievedEric Topol (04:47):Did they hold up? I mean, they hadn't, they didn't get burnout from lack of sleep and lack of everything. Are they still hanging in there?Magdalena Skipper (04:55):So they are hanging in there. You'll be glad to hear. But I think, very importantly, we were there for one another insofar that we could be, of course, we were all at home remotely. We were not meeting, but we had virtual meetings, which were regular of course in as a whole team, but also in, in subgroups as we sub-teams, as we worked together, that human contact in addition to of course, loved ones and families and friends, that human contact in a professional setting was, was really, really necessary. And clearly what I'm describing was affected all of us one way or another. Sometimes there is a tendency not to remember. That also applies to editors, publishers, and of course researchers themselves. I mean, very clearly they were at the forefront of the issue facing the same problems.Nature and Challenge of Generative A.I.Eric Topol (05:57):Well, a new challenge has arisen, not that the pandemic of course has gone away, but now we have this large language models of AI, Generative AI, which you've written editorials at Nature, which, of course, is it human or is it the machine? What do you think about that challenge?Magdalena Skipper (06:19):Well of course, you know, the way I like to think about it is AI, of course, broadly is, has been around for a very long time, a number of decades, right? And steadily over the last several years, we have seen AI emerge as a really powerful and important tool in research right across a number of disciplines. The reason why we are all talking about AI right now, and I really think all of us are talking about AI all the time, is, of course, specifically the emergence of generative AI, the large language models that, that you just mentioned. And they sort of burst onto the scene for all of us really last year in the autumn with chat GPT and GPT-4 and so on. But it's important to remember that, of course, when we talk about AI, there are other models, other approaches, and machine learning in general has been creating quite some revolution in research already.(07:36): You know, probably the best example that will be familiar to many of the  listeners was of course Alpha Fold which, you know, Nature published a couple of years ago and, and has been really revolutionized structural biology. But, of course, there are many other examples which are now becoming developing much more rapidly, becoming much more, I would say, commonplace in, in research practice. You know, not just predicting structure from sequencing from sequence. And I say just so flippantly now, of course, it was such and it continues to be such an incredible tool. But of course now we have AI approaches, which actually suggest new protein design, new, new small molecule design. We've had in the last couple of years, we've had identification of new potential antibiotics that are effective against bacterial strains that have otherwise been resistant to any known antibiotics.(08:48):And, and of course, it's not just in biomedicine. Material science--I think it's very helpful, hopeful when it comes to, to AI tools as well. And then, and of course, generative AI indeed helps us in some of these contexts already. But I think your question perhaps was more focused on the publishing, the communication, the sort of output of, of research, which of course is also very important. In some way. The reason why I answered, I began to answer the question the way I did, is because I'm actually very excited about harnessing the power of AI in augmenting research itself. Helping navigate enormous data sets generate hypotheses to be tested finding new ways to advance projects. I think that's a very exciting opportunity. And we're just beginning to see the first applications of it.(10:04):Now, in terms of publishing you referred to some editorials that we wrote about this. And right at the beginning of the year, there was a flurry of excitement associated with the ability of generative AI to indeed generate text. There were some manuscripts which were published in journals that were co-authored by Chat GPT. I I even believe there was an editorial which was co-authored by Chat GPT. So in response to that, we felt very strongly that, that clearly there was a need to, to come out with a, a clear position, just as in doing research, we see AI tools as tools to support writing, but clearly they don't have the ability to fulfill authorship criteria. Clearly, they cannot be authors. Clearly, they must only remain as tools supporting researchers and individuals writing and communicating their research.(11:23):And so we, we wrote a very clear editorial about this, essentially summarizing what I just explained and asking the community to be transparent about how AI tool has been used, just as you would be transparent about your methodology, how you have arrived at the results that you're reporting and, and results that support your conclusions. So for us, it's a relatively simple set of recommendations. As I say, we ask for transparency. We understand it can be a tool that can be used to help write a paper. What we also ask at this stage that generative AI tools are not used to generate figures or images in papers, simply because there are a number of outstanding copyright issues, a number of outstanding privacy issues, they remain unresolved. And for as long as they remain unresolved, we feel it's not an appropriate application of these tools. So that's our editorial position.Eric Topol (12:42):Yeah, no, that's very helpful. I mean, where do you think, if you write a manuscript and then you put it into let's say GPT-4 and say, please edit this, is that okay? Or is that something that, and it's acknowledged that the paper was written by us researchers, but then we had it tweaked by chatbot or is that something that it wouldn't go over too well?Magdalena Skipper (13:10):Well, my preference, and actually what I would hope is that if you were writing this paper and then you felt the need to put it through a chatbot as you just put it, although I find it hard to imagine that you would find no need for that,Eric Topol (13:29):I wouldn't do it. But I know there's people out there that are working on it.Magdalena Skipper (13:32):Yeah, absolutely. But then I would hope that the last pass, the final word, would rest with you as the author. Because, of course, if you are using a tool for whatever it is that you do, you want, at the end of the day to make sure that what that tool has returned is aligned with what you intended that you perform some kind of a sense check. We, of course, all know that although GPT-4 has less of a tendency to hallucinate, so to essentially come up with fabricated sort of statements and, and reality, if you like, it remains an issue. It can remain an issue. And very clearly any, any scientific communication has to be rooted in facts. So, in the scenario that you propose, I would hope that if a researcher felt compelled to run the manuscript through a chatbot, and for example, one consideration may for an individual whose English is not their first language, who feel may feel more comfortable with a sort of support of this kind. But in the end, the final check, the final sign off, if you like, on that manuscript before submission would need to come from the researcher, from the corresponding author, from the writing group. and indeed assistance from a chatbot would need to be disclosed.Eric Topol (15:14):For us. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because you can almost foresee the shortcut of having to go get all the references and all the links, you could say, you know, please insert these, but you better check them because they may be fabricated Absolutely. It's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out and the difficulty of detecting what is written by a large language model versus a person.Nature and PreprintsNow another topic that I think is really in play is the preprint world and publishing via preprints. And as you know there's been Michael Eisen and the whole idea of how things would move with his journal eLife. And you will remember when you and I were together at a conference. I organized Future of Genomic Medicine many years ago at the kind of dawn of life science preprints. And some people in the audience sai, “what's a preprint?” Right? Nobody else asks about that now. It's come a long way over this decade. And where do we go with this? Should journals like the top journals in the world like Nature require a paper to be vetted through the pre-print mechanism? Where is this headed, do you think?Magdalena Skipper (16:40):Yeah, it's an excellent question. And, and you know, by the way, I have such wonderful memories from, of that conference. I think this must have been like 11 years ago or something like that. It was a long time ago. And I actually remember presenting this, this vision of a rather radical vision of, of the future of publishing. And here we are in the future as compared to then, and we have moved relatively little by comparison to where we were then. But back to your question. So, you know, the first thing to say is that, of course, just as a reminder, preprints have been around for more than two decades now. And, and of course they initially were really spearheaded and advanced by the physical sciences community. archive itself is, as I say, more than two decades old. So, you know, for us at Nature as a multidisciplinary journal where of course, we've been publishing in the physical sciences since the very beginning of our existence as soon as preprints first emerged in those communities, we realized that we could coexist very harmoniously as a journal peer-review based journal with preprints.(17:59):So when initially biological sciences community embraced them and bioRxiv was established, and then of course, many other archives and then subsequently actually really spearheaded by Covid, the medical and clinical community began to embrace preprints. in many ways, for us, that was nothing new. It was just an extension of something that we worked with before. Although our own our own policies have evolved. So, for example, during the pandemic we actually mandated deposition of papers that were submitted to us that were Covid related. We mandated the deposition in a preprint server. The authors had the choice which server they deposited, but we wanted those manuscripts to be available to the community for the scrutiny as soon as they were finalized, as soon as they were actually written. So while we were reviewing them again as quickly as rigorously, but as quickly as possible, the preprint was already available for the community just before the pandemic.(19:17):As it happens, we also took a step forward with our policy. So previously, let's just say we were completely fine with preprints. We saw preprints as compatible with submission to, to Nature, and for that matter to the other journals in the Nature Portfolio. But actually just in the year before COVID started, we decided to actively encourage our authors to deposit preprints. We could see that preprint sharing had great advantage. You know, the, the usuals of advantages, which are often listed first are of course ability to make that primacy claim, make a stake that, that you have been working on something and, and this is your project. You have a set of results that you are ready to communicate to, to the community at large. And of course, another very important one is that sort of community and, and almost public form of peer review and, and ability to comment.(20:30):And incidentally, I remember as you know, my, my history as an editor very well. We've known each other for a long time. I remember when the genomics community, which is sort of my, my background is sort of my old hat, if you like, that, that I used to wear when the genomics community began to embrace preprints especially the population and evolutionary genomicists really embraced this idea that this was like a group peer review. And the authors of those preprints were very grateful to the community for improving the papers before they were submitted to journals, or sometimes that sort of community review was going on while a paper was being considered at a journal. And we, as editors actually encouraged sort of formal submission of these reviews, if you like, I mean, formal maybe is the wrong word, but we were saying that we would take those comments into account when evaluating papers.(21:38):So there has been an interesting evolution that more and more disciplines, more and more fields have embraced preprints as a way of disseminating information. Preprints service themselves have also grown and matured in the sense that there is now realization that, for example, clinical preprints need a higher degree of scrutiny they're posted on a preprint server than maybe let's say theoretical physics or theoretical biology preprints. So overall all communities collectively have grown and matured. Where are we going with this? I mean, who knows? I was predicting 12 years ago you know, a bit of a different, more advanced future today. It's very difficult to predict the future. I do think, however, that what we are seeing today, that sort of hand in glove coexistence of preprints with journals, with peer reviewed papers is going to continue into the future. And I think actually that's a really valuable and interesting combination. So it's a great development to see and great to see that communities right across disciplines have really embraced this.Eric Topol (23:11):Yeah, I think it does complement, obviously the traditional peer review of a few expert reviewers with, you know, could be hundreds if not thousands of people that weigh in on, on a pre-print. So yeah, it's fascinating to see. And it's, I still remember the vision that you portrayed for it, and how we we're not quite there yet, but I'm sure there'll be further evolution.Women in Science: Where Do We Stand?Now, another area that I think is particularly good to get your input, because you're a woman in science, as you mentioned, you know, grounded obviously in genetics and genomics, and here you are, one of the most influential women in science at a time when there's been a reckoning that women in science have been shortchanged historically, I mean, for hundreds of years. Do you see that this is starting to get better? Are there palpable signs that we're finally getting kind of equal rights here? Or are we, is it, is it just still a long fight ahead?Magdalena Skipper (24:20):So the, the optimist in me and, and I should say, you know, my, my glass, my glass is always half full. The optimist in me says that it is getting better, but the realist in me has to add immediately that the changes too slow. It really is too slow. We do see many more women prominently able to make the contributions that they should, they can, and they should make to whatever discipline whatever aspect of the research community and beyond they wish to, to make. I still think it costs them too much. I still think we don't appreciate and support women sufficiently.(25:23):Maybe we have moved on the bottleneck in the, in the pipeline a little bit further, towards more seniority. But we still, we still don't sufficiently support women. As I say, we, I think we still default to an expectation that successful women in science in research more broadly will somehow emulate how success has looked in the past. And that's a shame, that's a shame not just for those women who are trying to come in and make a difference, but it's a shame for all of us because it means that we are denying diversity in that picture of success. Yes. So yes, I think, I think that we have seen many changes, but I think the change is not happening fast enough.Eric Topol (26:23):Yeah. One of the things that I've noticed since of particular interest in AI is that the very profound imbalance of researchers, the gender imbalance there is just, you know, I'm not even sure if it's 10% women researchers in AI, so that has to be changed. And so this, there's so many things that are holding us back, but, but that's certainly one of, of many.Magdalena Skipper (26:49):Absolutely. And, and, and if I can just add, there are some outstandingly influential female researchers in the AI field, as you say, they are just outnumbered. Yes. , I think not given the opportunity to, to fully blossom, if you like, considering their capabilities and, and their contributions already.Eric Topol (27:11):You know, it's so true. I just interviewed Melanie Mitchell from the Santa Fe Institute, and I work with Fei- Fei Li. And when I, when Fei-Fei Li and I spoke some months ago about a book (Genius Makers) that Cade Metz, the New York Times journalist had written, and I say, why didn't he bring up or emphasize the role of any women in the whole book . Yes--who work in A--I mean, she, she obviously was, was did not take that particularly well, and as did I.Too Many Nature Portfolio Journals?So one of the other areas that I think you already touched on, which is separating Nature, the flagship journal from the Nature Portfolio of, I don't know what it's up to now, 200, 300, I'm not sure how many journals are. So do you, do you have to over oversee that? Do you have input on that? Because what I worry about is, you know, people quote a Nature journal and it may not be, you know, at that level that you would be proud of. What, what are your thoughts about this endless proliferation of the nature portfolio?Magdalena Skipper (28:17):Well, I, I'm, first of all, I'm not sure if it's endless, butEric Topol (28:20):Oh, that's good. .Magdalena Skipper (28:22):So, so  let me, I think in your question, you touched on a number of things. So first of all, a clarification. So my role is as Editor-in-Chief of Nature, and of course, that is my main focus. there is another aspect to my role, which is Chief Editorial Advisor for the Nature Portfolio. So in that sense each of the journals within the Nature portfolio has its own chief editor. but by virtue, I guess, of my seniority, and also by virtue of multi-disciplinarity of Nature I have this advisory role to my colleagues in the other journals. I like to think about the Nature Portfolio as an ecosystem, actually. And it's an ecosystem, like any ecosystem. It has different niches, each of which fulfills a different role. Some of them are bigger, some of them are smaller, some of them are very specialized, others are more general.(29:22):And I think you know, working with researchers for many years as an editor now, I can see benefits to having that sort of almost an ecosystem type approach to publishing. You know, for example, we mentioned already earlier that in my previous sort of incarnation as an editor, my focus was on genomics especially in the context of human genomics. of course starting from the Human Genome Project, these were very large or have, where, why, why am I using past tense? They are, to this day, very large collaborative projects involving many different labs, many different approaches these days that they're not just focused on genomics, but of course other omics go hand in hand with them. So when a project comes to fruition, when, when it comes to be published, there are many different pieces that need to be communicated, many different papers of different sizes of different value.(30:32):And for example what value maybe is the wrong word of different utility? So, for example, there may be a flagship paper that is published in the pages of my journal of Nature, but there may be papers that specifically described development of methodology that was part of the same stage of the project. And those papers may be published in Nature Methods, which is part of the Nature Portfolio. There are other journals that are part of Nature Portfolio, which have different editorial bar. And so, you know, one example is Scientific Reports, which is a journal which does not require conceptual novelty in the papers that it publishes. Of course, it requires rigor and, and robustness in the papers that it publishes, like every journal should. But there is utility in publishing papers in a journal like this.(31:36):There may be replications that are published there that further add further evidence to support conclusions that are already well known, but nevertheless, they're useful. I should however, add that in Nature itself, we also publish replications, right? There are different degrees of influence and impact that, of course, different studies be there, replications or not that can carry. So, that will be my way of conceptualizing the Nature Portfolio. and, you know, coming back to your, to your comment that it seems like it's endless. I think well, nothing, nothing is endless. Of course. Nothing, nothing, right, grows forever. I do think that we have in the launches within the portfolio, we have been able to capture and at the same time serve an interesting evolution in the research ecosystem itself. So the final comment I will make on this is, if you look at some of the more recent launches in the portfolio, they've been what we like to call thematic journals, such as, for example, Nature Food or Nature Water.Eric Topol (33:10):Right?Magdalena Skipper (33:10):And here we are really capitalizing on that multi-disciplinarity of these emerging themes that, especially in the context of sustainable development goals, have acquired their own identity. They don't belong to one discipline or another discipline. And, and so these journals, they're new journals, relatively new journals, some of them very new Nature Waters is, is quite new, but they provide a focal point for researchers who come together to solve a particular set of problems from different disciplines. And I think that's an interesting function in, as I say, for the community.What About the Paywalls?Eric Topol (33:53):Yeah, there's no question some of the newer journals and their transdisciplinary mission --they're needed and they become extremely popular and well -cited very quickly to prove that. So along that line obviously the public is all fired up about paywalls and you know, and obviously for Covid, there was no paywalls, which is pretty extraordinary. Do you see someday that journals will have a hard time of maintaining this? I mean, you have what I consider an extraordinary solution, which is the ReadCube postings anyone can access, you just can't download the PDF, and I wish authors would always routinely put that out there because that would solve part of the problem. But do you think we're going to go to a free access that's much more wide, perhaps even routine, in the years ahead?Magdalena Skipper (34:52):So certainly open access as in ability to access a manuscript, published manuscript without any payment or barrier associated with a Creative Commons license is something that is advanced as a, as a preferred future by many researchers, by many funders. and for that matter, actually many publishers as well. You know, let me make one thing very clear. As an editor, I would love as many people as possible to read the papers that I publish in my journal.Magdalena Skipper (35:30):That should go without saying. Sure. at the same time, publishing papers, of course, is associated with a cost, and, and that cost has to be somehow covered. In the old days it was exclusively covered by library subscriptions or site licenses or personal subscriptions. Now the focus is shifting. And of course, Nature itself as well as the other research journals such as, for example, Nature Medicine or indeed Nature Water, as I mentioned before are what we call transformative journals. So effectively we are hybrid journals that advocate for open access. So today, when you submit a paper to Nature, you can publish under the traditional publishing model, or you can choose to publish open access, which is associated with an article processing charge. That should, in my view, be part of your costs of doing research, because after all, I'm a firm believer in the fact that publishing your research should be seen as part of doing research, not sort of an add-on.(36:47):Now, I'm glad you mentioned read Read Cube and this functionality that we call shared it. We developed it actually quite some years ago. I would say at least a decade ago. it remains curiously underappreciated. Yeah. I just don't understand it. Yeah, exactly. And, and we, we inform the authors that they are free to use that link. And, and just to clarify, it's a linked as you exactly as you explained to an online version of the paper. It's the final version, the record version of the paper. You can't download it, but you can share that link. Anyone can share that link once they have it Infinite number of times. So it's not like the link expires, or it's a, a finite number of, of that it has a number of finite number of uses in addition to that nature.(37:49):And for that matter, the whole of Springer Nature is part of Research4Life. Now, that's an organization that provides free access to all content from publishers. And Springer Nature is not the only publisher that's part of Research for Life that provides full access to all of our content in the countries which are designated as low and middle income countries by the World Bank. So that we've been part of that. And, and previously for many, many years, in fact, decades, again, that is curiously underappreciated, including in the low and middle income countries. So, you know, recently had an opportunity to do some visits in Africa. And my, my take home message there was, if there is one thing that you remember from our conversation or from my presentation, please remember about Research4Life.Magdalena Skipper (38:52):Because that content is freely available if you follow, if you go to our content through Research4Life. And incidentally, there's also training, which is available there. So part of Nature portfolio in addition to journals, we have Nature Master classes, which is training for researchers. And that is also completely freely available in those countries. So there are a number of approaches to, to getting content open access is definitely growing, but there are those other ways to gain access to content which is not open access at the moment.Eric Topol (39:33):I'm really glad you reviewed that because a lot of people who are going to be listening are going to really cue into that. Now the last question for you is, you know, it's not just every Wednesday, 51 or whatever, 50 weeks a year, that you're getting the journal ready, but it's every day now that you're putting out stuff and on the Nature website. Features that are by the way, free or full access and many other things to keep Nature out there on a daily, if not minute to minute basis. So this is really a big charge to, you know, do this all so well. So what keeps you up at night about Nature is this, this must be a very tough position.Magdalena Skipper (40:28):So the first thing I would say that is that of course it's, it's not me. I'm just the person here talking to you representing Nature. I have an outstanding team.Eric Topol (40:44):I've met them, and they're amazing.Magdalena Skipper (40:46):And it's really them who are making it possible on a minute by minute, certainly day by day basis. And so the reason why I sleep relatively well is thanks to them actually, okay,Eric Topol (41:00):. Okay.What Keeps You Up At Night?Magdalena Skipper (41:01):But more, but more broadly. and this is a thought which is bigger than Nature itself. What actually keeps me up at night these days is the rather difficult light in which science and research is portrayed these days increasingly.Magdalena Skipper (41:27):And I think it's very unfortunately being to support other goals and other ends forgetting about the fact that science is an ongoing process that science takes steps back when it needs to revise its position, that it still continues to be true, that s science progresses through self-correction. Even if that self-correction doesn't happen overnight, it takes time to realize that a correction is required, takes time to evaluate judiciously that correction is required and what kind of correction is required, right? These are the things that of course, you and I know very well. But the, sometimes if for individuals who are not close to the process of how science research fact-based discovery is conducted, if you just look at information on social media or in general media, you may walk away with an impression that science is not worth paying attention to that science is in some deep crisis.Magdalena Skipper (43:04):And I think that's, that's a shame that that's a picture that we have other things that need other things in science, in research that need correcting, that need sorting out. Of course, we mustn't forget that research is done by humans and, and after all it is human to air. But overall, that's actually something that keeps me up at night. That overall, I really hope that those of us who are engaged in one way or another within the research enterprise, we can continue to advance the right kind of image that it's not perfect in some artificial way, but actually, at the same time, it's the only way that we can move forward. We can understand the world around us, and we can wake, make the world around us better, actually.Eric Topol (44:11):Yeah. I'm so glad you've emphasized this because just like we talked earlier about distinguishing between human and AI content generated here, we have science and anti-science blurring facts, blurring truths, and basically taking down science as a search for truth and making it trying to, you know, obscure its mission and, in many ways, we, we saw it with not just anti-vax, but it's much bigger. The political motives are obvious extraordinary, particularly as we see here in the U.S. but other countries as well. So I almost didn't hit you for that question, just because it's so profound. We don't have the answers, but the fact that you're thinking about it tells, tells us all a lot. So Magdalena, this has been a joy. I really appreciate all your candid and very thoughtful responses to some of these questions.(45:09):Some of them pretty tough questions I have to say. And I look forward to our conversations and chances to visit with you again in the future. And congratulations again on taking on the leadership of Nature for five years now-- I believe just past your five-year anniversary now. You could say that's small out of 155 years, but I think it's a lot. particularly since the last few years have been, you really challenging. But to you and your team ultimately –-major kudos. I'm on the Nature website every single day. I mean, even, I when I'm on vacation, I'll be checking out the Nature site. So you can tell that I think so highly of the its content and we'll look forward to future conversations going forward.Magdalena Skipper (45:52):Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Eric. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Edwin Díaz's season-ending injury at the WBC and the anti-WBC sentiment it engendered, then (20:39) bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Michael Eisen to discuss his history with Effectively Wild and baseball and how his scientific research is analogous to baseball research, before answering listener emails (31:29) about the […]

Tune in TOMORROW, February 27th at 10 am ET/9 am CT for the first ever In Plain English Live Stream! We will be hosting a round table discussion on Open Science and scientific publishing with the Editor-in-Chief of eLife, Michael Eisen; the founder of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan; and WashU neuroscientist Bryan Copits. You can find the live stream at this link: https://youtube.com/live/4oiTDnGmWXs An edited version of the round table will be released on Tuesday, March 7th.

Open Access is one of the pillars of Open Science. In this episode I am talking to Jean-Claude Guedon from the University of Montreal (Canada). Jean-Claude is one of the authors of the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative from 2002. He is also an expert on scientific communication and its history. Who better to take us through the road that led to the Open Access declaration, what has become of it and where (we hope) it will go. Here a few links you might look up:https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org The site of the Budapest Open Access Initiative - which includes the declarationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Guédon Jean-Claude's bio on Wikipediahttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00008/full a history on the Garfield scientific indexinghttps://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1580 Michael Eisen another co-author of the Budapest declaration. This article is from 2014 where he talks about why he forsake open accesshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevan_Hanard Stevan Hanard is another signatory of the Budapest declaration A History of Scientific Journals: publishing at the Royal Society 1665 - 2015, UCL Press A Fyfe, N Moxham, J McDougall-Waters, C Moerk Roestvik, 2022Support the Show.Thank you for listening and your ongoing support. It means the world to us! Support the show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/codeforthought Get in touch: Email mailto:code4thought@proton.me UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt Mastadon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This week we discuss the big changes occurring over at eLife with Editor in Chief Mike Eisen & original ECAG member Devang Mehta. From Jan 2023, eLife is focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprints and eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review. Read more about this new model here: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/54d63486/elife-s-new-model-changing-the-way-you-share-your-research Mike Eisen: http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/GEN/eisenm.html Devang Mehta: https://mehta-lab.com/ eLife: https://elifesciences.org/ This episode was produced by Jonny Coates and edited by Camilla Valenzuela. If you enjoyed this show then hit that subscribe button and leave a review (on Apple Podcasts or Spotify). If you love what we are trying to do then buy us a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/preprints! Any contribution is greatly appreciated. For the latest podcast news and updates follow us on Twitter @MotionPod, Instagram @Motion_Pod or visit our website; www.preprintsinmotion.com. Find us on Twitter: Jonny @JACoates, Emma @ELWilson92, John @JohnDHoward8) & Camila (@Kamo_Valenzuela). Generously supported by ASAPbio (https://asapbio.org | @asapbio_). --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/preprints-in-motion/message

Dan and James discuss eLife's new peer review model, in which they no longer make accept/reject decisions at the end of the peer-review process. Instead, papers invited for peer review will receive an assessment from eLife and the peer reviews will be shared on eLife's website. It's up to author if they would like revise their manuscript or publish their paper as the version of record. eLife's announment (https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/54d63486/elife-s-new-model-changing-the-way-you-share-your-research) A editorial (https://elifesciences.org/articles/83889) from Michael Eisen and team Episode 122 (https://everythinghertz.com/122): Reoptimizing scientific publishing for the internet age (with Michael Eisen) Episode 123 (https://everythinghertz.com/123): Authenticated anonymity (with Michael Eisen) A paper (http://www.ejwagenmakers.com/2009/IversonEtAl2009Agony.pdf) describing p-rep Other links Everything Hertz on social media - Dan on twitter (https://www.twitter.com/dsquintana) - James on twitter (https://www.twitter.com/jamesheathers) - Everything Hertz on twitter (https://www.twitter.com/hertzpodcast) - Everything Hertz on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/everythinghertzpodcast/) Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/hertzpodcast) and get bonus stuff! $1 per month: A 20% discount on Everything Hertz merchandise, access to the occasional bonus episode, and the the warm feeling you're supporting the show $5 per month or more: All the stuff you get in the one dollar tier PLUS a bonus episode every month Citation Quintana, D.S., Heathers, J.A.J. (Hosts). (2022, November 7) "163: eLife's new peer review model", Everything Hertz [Audio podcast], DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/XYBU5

Lance Medow and Paul Dottino chat with Michael Eisen about the NFL Owners Meetings, and talk to Jason Strayhorn and Darrell Thompson about Michigan State and Minnesota prospects. SUBSCRIBE NOW: AppleSpotifyGoogleStitcheriHeart Radio :52 - Michael Eisen on NFL Owners Meetings 15:24 - Jason Strayhorn on Michigan State prospects 29:04 - Darrell Thompson on Minnesota prospects 42:19 - Calls 50:15 - League news See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lance Medow and Paul Dottino chat with Michael Eisen about the NFL Owners Meetings, and talk to Jason Strayhorn and Darrell Thompson about Michigan State and Minnesota prospects. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Stitcher iHeart Radio :52 - Michael Eisen on NFL Owners Meetings 15:24 - Jason Strayhorn on Michigan State prospects 29:04 - Darrell Thompson on Minnesota prospects 42:19 - Calls 50:15 - League news

Are you overwhelmed by the current state of the world? After the global pandemic began and the countless major world events that have since followed, it's understandable to feel as though we've all been on an emotional rollercoaster. In this episode, I am joined by Michael Eisen. As someone who has always questioned the system we live in, Michael founded the Youth Wellness Network. Through this network, Michael set out to change the way we educate our youth by incorporating mindfulness, self-esteem, and emotional intelligence training and programming in schools. He has worked in over 100 schools and spoke to over 70,000 youth, parents, and teachers. This journey has led Michael to discover a new passion - running and growing his own wellness business and applying it to help other wellness entrepreneurs launch and grow theirs. Michael has since helped hundreds of clients and students create successful online platforms and a more sustainable financial livelihood. He also runs a powerful group program called Ground and Grow Your Sacred Platform with his wife, and works with a select number of clients 1 on 1. Michael has always known that the system is broken, but he really started paying attention when the global pandemic began at the beginning of 2020. He believes that we are in the midst of a global awakening and are headed towards a united future as we rise above the division. Throughout this episode, Michael and I cover so many topics that are impacting all of our lives currently. We discuss mass programming, the destructive food system, what we believe the future holds for humanity, and so much more. If you or someone you know has opposing views to Michael and I, we'd love to have you on the show to respectfully learn from each other's perspectives. Tune in and listen to episode 20 of Ignite the Spark Within, to learn more about the awakening that's happening all around the world, and what the future holds. In This Episode, You Will Learn:What Michael believes is the current awakening in the world (22:49)Michael's breakdown of the systems influencing our lives (45:19)To take your health into your own hands (58:58)Our opinions on how to move through separation from ourselves and others (1:16:41)The hope Michael and I have for the future (1:31:05)Sign up for the FREE masterclassConnect with Michael Youth Wellness NetworkGround & Grow Your Sacred PlatformLet's connect!Email: sarah@sparkflc.com InstagramFacebook Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/ignite-the-spark-within. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I share a conversation with my friend and awakened warrior Michael Eisen on Liberated Living. If you are on the awakening journey, be sure to press play because this is for you.Michael is the founder of the Youth Wellness Network, an organization dedicated to empowering youth across the globe to live happier and more positive lives. After transforming his own life at the age of 19, he is now on a life-long crusade to share the principles, strategies, and practices that have given him the strength to start living a more joyful, healthier, and liberated life from the mainstream narrative.Michael shares what it's like to lead from the gut and a deeply informed perspective in the polarized space humanity is facing right now. As entrepreneurs and business professionals, it can be scary to speak your truth when you fear it might affect your business, but Michael shares how it's actually beneficial once you learn how to open up the door with the keys to conscious communication.You'll hear how we've both succeeded in building and growing our community by standing firm in our truth, and how to accept and transcend the divisive opinions of others as you walk this brazen path.You'll also learn what you can expect from our upcoming free masterclass, Break the Spell: A Masterclass in Liberated Living. This experience will support you with the tools, resources, and activations from the leading edge portal of LIBERATION alongside a like-minded power tribe.Tune In To Learn:Unapologetically bringing truth into your life and business model (6:46)Finding and building sacred community in our polarized times (13:45)The three camps of mass formation that humanity is facing in our current situation (18:10)Advice for getting through these times if you're questioning the narrative (26:46)What you'll walk away with from attending our free masterclass on January 17, 2022 (35:21)Resources:Join our free masterclass, Break the Spell: A Masterclass in Liberated LivingHow to understand the phenomenon of Mass Formation by professor of clinical psychology Mattias Desmet on the Aubrey Marcus podcastConnect with Michael Eisen on Facebook See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tune-in as Rob 'Hardy' Poole, Paul Perillo and Mike Dussault get you ready for the Patriots preseason game against the New York Giants. Michael Eisen from Giants.com is our call-in guest. The Patriots Pre-Game Social is fueled by Dunkin'.

Nick talks to Dr. Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC-Berkeley and editor-in-chief for eLife, a non-profit open access science journal. Throughout his career, Dr. Eisen has been an advocate of open science, the free release of the results of scientific research, and has been critical of traditional forms of scientific publishing, which often place scientific results behind a paywall.They discuss a variety of topics related to how academic science is conducted, including how it gets funded and what is involved in running a research lab. Much of the discussion centers on the business of scientific publishing, including what scientific journals are and their history, as well as the business models of for-profit journals and how they work. They also talk about open access journals and new ways that people are using technology to get around paywalls. Scientific publishing is an industry that most people have little awareness of (including many scientists), and the size and profitability of large scientific publishing groups may surprise you.  USEFUL LINKS:Download the podcast & follow Nick at his website[www.nickjikomes.com]Support the show on Patreon & get early access to episodes[https://www.patreon.com/nickjikomes]Sign up for the weekly Mind & Matter newsletter[http://eepurl.com/hFlc7H]Try MUD/WTR, a mushroom-based coffee alternative[https://www.mudwtr.com/mindmatter]Discount Code ($5 off) = MINDMATTEROrganize your digital highlights & notes w/ Readwise (2 months free w/ subscription)[https://readwise.io/nickjikomes/]Start your own podcast (get $20 Amazon gift card after signup)[https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1507198]Buy Mind & Matter T-Shirts[https://www.etsy.com/shop/OURMIND?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1036758072§ion_id=34648633]Connect with Nick Jikomes on Twitter[https://twitter.com/trikomes]​​​Learn more about our podcast sponsor, Dosist[https://dosist.com/]ABOUT Nick Jikomes:Nick is a neuroscientist and podcast host. He is currently Director of Science & Innovation at Leafly, a technology startup in the legal cannabis industry. He received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University and a B.S. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/nickjikomes)

Giants.com Senior Writer Michael Eisen joins John Schmeelk and Lance Medow to discuss the Giants connections to Super Bowl XLII before the guys take fan calls. 2:40 Osi Umenyiora zoom call bombs 5:22 Spags in SB XLII vs SB LV 7:35 JPP 10:43 Justin Tuck interview 13:18 Tom Brady 16:46 Interesting stats about SB LV 23:56 Calls – Potential impact of a rookie on the offense 30:47 Deshaun Watson and the important of putting a strong team around a quarterback 38:58 Dalvin Tomlinson and Leonard Williams 43:27 Improvement from current players on the roster SUBSCRIBE NOW: AppleSpotifyGoogle PlayStitcher See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Giants.com Senior Writer Michael Eisen joins John Schmeelk and Lance Medow to discuss the Giants connections to Super Bowl XLII before the guys take fan calls. 2:40 Osi Umenyiora zoom call bombs 5:22 Spags in SB XLII vs SB LV 7:35 JPP 10:43 Justin Tuck interview 13:18 Tom Brady 16:46 Interesting stats about SB LV 23:56 Calls – Potential impact of a rookie on the offense 30:47 Deshaun Watson and the important of putting a strong team around a quarterback 38:58 Dalvin Tomlinson and Leonard Williams 43:27 Improvement from current players on the roster SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Play Stitcher

In this episode, cohosts Sicco and Sanli share their personal takes on the essence of open science and how it benefits the academic community and the society at large taking examples from the hot debates around handling of the Covid19 pandemic by national health agencies. They review the recent announcements and news. They talk to Melanie Imming about her 6 years of advocating for Open Science in the Netherlands and the upcoming open science festival. Mentioned in this episode: Covid vaccination data - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations NWO open science fund - https://www.nwo.nl/calls/open-science-fund-2020/2021 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)- https://sfdora.org/read/ Open Science Festival - https://www.openscience.nl/the-netherlands-national-open-science-festival Everything Hertz podcast with Michael Eisen - https://everythinghertz.com/122 SciPost’s peer-witnessed refereeing - https://scipost.org/FAQ#pwr

Part two of our chat with Michael Eisen (eLife Editor-in-Cheif), in which we discuss the pros and cons of collaborative peer review, journal submission interfaces, Michael's take on James' proposal that peer reviewers should be paid $450 dollars, why negative comments on peer reviews need to be normalised, plus much more. Some more details: - The pros and cons of collaborative peer review (in which all peer reviewers discuss the paper after all individual peer reviews have been submitted - How technology can constrain journal operations - The strange engineered delay in paper reviews (I doesn't take 2-3 weeks to review a paper) - Michael's proposal for a system in which people can nominate they have time in the near future to review a paper and then papers can be sent to them so they're rapidly reviewed - Journal submission interfaces - Michael's take on paying peer reviewers - Who owns peer reviews? - Would negative (anonomous or not) comments on an open peer review report penalise authors in the future? - Every paper gets negative peer-review comments, this doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad paper - Michael proposes an explicit "speculation" section for papers, where authors get free reign to basically say whatever they want Other links - Dan on twitter (www.twitter.com/dsquintana) - James on twitter (www.twitter.com/jamesheathers) - Everything Hertz on twitter (www.twitter.com/hertzpodcast) - Everything Hertz on Facebook (www.facebook.com/everythinghertzpodcast/) Music credits: Lee Rosevere (freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/) Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/hertzpodcast) and get bonus stuff! $1 a month: 20% discount on Everything Hertz merchandise, a monthly newsletter, access to the occasional bonus episode, and the the warm feeling you're supporting the show - $5 a month or more: All the stuff you get in the one dollar tier PLUS a bonus episode every month Episode citation Special Guest: Michael Eisen.

The internet should have transformed science publishing, but it didn't. We chat with Michael Eisen (Editor-in-Chief of eLife (https://elifesciences.org/)) about reoptimizing scientific publishing and peer review for the internet age. Here what we cover and some links: How Michael co-founded PLOS (https://plos.org/) The book Dan mentioned on the history of the scientific journal (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo28179042.html) Why did eLife launch? What did it offer that other journals didn't? Nature's recently proposed $11k article processing fee proposal eLife's new "author-driven publishing" approach (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64910), in which all submitted papers have to be posted as preprints Part two of our conversation will be released on January 4, 2021 Other links - Dan on twitter (www.twitter.com/dsquintana) - James on twitter (www.twitter.com/jamesheathers) - Everything Hertz on twitter (www.twitter.com/hertzpodcast) - Everything Hertz on Facebook (www.facebook.com/everythinghertzpodcast/) - Our merch store (https://everything-hertz-podcast.myteespring.co/), with mugs, shirts, hoodies + more Music credits: Lee Rosevere (freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/) Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/hertzpodcast) and get bonus stuff! One dollar a month: a twenty percent discount on Everything Hertz merchandise, a monthly newsletter, access to the occasional bonus episode, and the the warm feeling you're supporting the show - Five dollars a month or more: All the stuff you get in the one dollar tier PLUS a bonus episode every month Episode citation Quintana, D.S., Heathers, J.A.J. (Hosts). (2020, December 21) "122: Reoptimizing scientific publishing for the internet age (with Michael Eisen)", Everything Hertz [Audio podcast], DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/USYFC Special Guest: Michael Eisen.

This week on The Rundown, team insiders Kyle Stackpole and Zach Selby interview New York Giants senior writer and editor Michael Eisen about the Washington Football Team's Week 6 matchup.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Michael Eisen talks to running back Dion Lewis about Joe Judge, his time with the Patriots, and growing up a Giants fan in Albany. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Play Stitcher TuneIn

John Schmeelk and Michael Eisen talk to offensive tackle Cameron Fleming about coming to the Giants, his role, Jason Garrett and Marc Colombo. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Play Stitcher TuneIn

Michael Eisen interviews two of the newest Giants, quarterback Colt McCoy and tight end Levine Toilolo, about why they chose to come to Big Blue SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Play Stitcher TuneIn

John Schmeelk and Michael Eisen talk to safety and special teams ace Nate Ebner about why he joined the Giants, Joe Judge, and his rugby background. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Apple Spotify Google Play Stitcher TuneIn

Giants president John Mara speaks with Giants.com's Michael Eisen to discuss the progress of the 2019 roster

Writer for Giants.com Michael Eisen joins the show to talk about the Titans v Giants match up and the state of the G-Men.

In this week's episode, we will be highlighting wellness at HTS. Throughout the course of the year, HTS engages in wellness activities during PLUS period in the Lower School, FLEX in the Middle School and TAG in the Senior School. During the month of January we highlight wellness and mental health. This week's Podcast will feature our HTS Wellness Leaders who have been working with Michael Eisen from the Youth Wellness Network.

Michael Eisen is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley. We talk about fruit flies, Open Access, and running for political office. For more information: it is NOT junk, Michael Eisen's blog Eisen Lab at UC Berkeley PLOS: Public Library of Science, Open Access publisher and advocacy organization Publisher for the People by Will Harper Q&A: Michael Eisen bids to be first fly biologist in the U.S. Senate by Jon Cohen The Largest Number Of Scientists In Modern U.S. History Are Running For Office In 2018 by Alexander C. Kaufman Here’s How The Scientists Running for Office Are Doing by Ed Yong How The Word 'Scientist' Came To Be, Science Friday

We return to the Talkin' Immunology Podcast with guest Lenny Teytelman to discuss his website, protocols.io, and the challenges of protocol reproducibility, journal paywalls, and more. Topics Protocols.io BioLegend supports The Reproducibility Initiative BioLegend protocols Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs publication Keywords: Lenny Teytelman, protocols, reproducibility initiative, journals, paywalls, troubleshooting, reagents, antibodies, protocols.io, PLOS, Michael Eisen  

This episode we chatted to Michael Eisen (@mbeisen), a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael is a core advocate of the Open Science movement Co-Founding the Public Library of Science (PLOS). He is also, as of this April, an aspiring Senator (you can follow his alter-ego at @SenatorPhD). We spoke about bringing science down from its ivory tower, the merits of being a politically engaged scientist, and how the issue of diversity in science (..and politics) is far from solved. 

488-10.28.2015New Orleans Pelicans & SaintsOnline radio show focused on Pelicans and Saints news.Today's report includes David Wesley (Pelicans TV color analyst), Pelicans postgame sound from head coach Alvin Gentry and guard Ish Smith and Michael Eisen (senior writer, Giants.com). 30:

195-04.16.2014New Orleans Pelicans & SaintsOnline radio show focused on Pelicans and Saints news.Today's guests include Pelicans TV analyst David Wesley and Giants.com's Michael Eisen.34:0

Most scientific articles are not published in open access journals. On this program, Dr. Patrick Brown and Dr. Michael Eisen discussed the state of the publishing system, the shift towards open access, and the story of PLoS.

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.

In part 1, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Michael Eisen talks about his research, the field, and both experimental and computational biology. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to [inaudible] Speaker 1: section, the Science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. Thanks for tuning in. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michael Eisen and associate professor of genetics, genomics and development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. Iceland employs a combination of experimental and computational methods to the study of gene regulation [00:01:00] using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Isen and his colleagues have pioneered genomic approaches in modern molecular biology and our leaders in the emerging field of computational biology. In part one, Michael talks about how he got started in biology and how his research has evolved onto the interview. Michael Isen, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. My pleasure. Would you give us a narrative of how you initiated your research and how your research has [00:01:30] changed to what it is currently? Speaker 4: Okay. Actually, I grew up in a family of scientists. My parents were both biologists, so I always had an interest in biology. But as a kid, my talents were primarily in math and I was a heavy duty math geek and went to college expecting to be a mathematician and took this freshman calculus class and all the hardcore math geeks tuck. And I did fine. I did well in the class, but [00:02:00] there were several people in the class who were clearly a notch better than me in a way that I think you only can realize and you know, basketball and mathematics at the age of 18 that you're not destined to be the best. And I think math is a field where if you're not the best, it's just kind of boring. And so I stayed as a mathematician and math major in college, but I started increasingly taking a lot of biology classes and had more or less, you know, realized that biology was what really captured my, my attention and [00:02:30] my heart. Speaker 4: And so I went to graduate school but had the idea that I'm interested in biology, but I'm really good at math. So there must be some way of combining these two things. And so I entered a graduate program in biophysics, which is sort of a place where people who are interested in biology maybe haven't taken all the prereqs for a normal biology department but also have a quantitative background go cause. And so, you know, in the way that people sort of drifted into things, I drifted into working on protein structure and [00:03:00] did my phd studying the evolution of the proteins on the surface of flu viruses and using a combination of experimental work and I would hesitate to call it mathematics. It was really just sort of kind of physics and it's, it's a lot of data. You generate a lot of raw data, you generate a lot of data on the coordinates of individual protein molecules and things that they might bind to. Speaker 4: And so it was very natural to start using computers in that work. You know, my background was not in computer science. I programmed as a kid [00:03:30] because my grandfather bought me a computer and I taught myself how to program and I wrote programs to, you know, keep track of baseball statistics and other things like that. In College, I basically never programmed anything in the math department I was in. It was considered not math that you were touching a computer. And so I didn't really do anything with computers until I got to graduate school when you started seeing all this data coming down the pipe. But I wasn't particularly interested in structural biology and I discovered that through six years from graduate school that [00:04:00] although I liked doing it, it wasn't intellectually satisfying, was too small. You're working on one sugar bound to one protein in one virus and I was having trouble seeing how that would expand into something grand and whatever. Speaker 4: You know, the ambitions of, uh, of a graduate student wanting to do something big. And I got lucky in the way that often happens in that my advisor had a colleague he knew from an advisory board. He sat on and he was coming into town because his brother was getting some honorary degree [00:04:30] and I met him in his hotel room, Austin. And he had with him, uh, glass microscope slide onto which had been spotted down little pieces of DNA, each of which corresponded to one gene in the yeast genome. So it's about 6,000 genes in the yeast genome. And you could see them because there was still salt in the spots, but it was a very evocative little device. You could sort of hold it up in front of the sun and you could see the sun sort of glittering on all these little spots. Speaker 4: You could just see the grandness of [00:05:00] the device. Didn't know how people were using them. I didn't know what they would be used for. I didn't know what I would do with them, but I was sort of drawn in by the scale of it all. The idea that you could work on everything at once and you didn't have to choose to work on just one little thing and disappear into a little corner and study. Just that. And so my advisor said, oh, you really should go do this. They need someone who's, you know, understands biology, but can deal with the computational side of things. It's clear that this was going to generate a lot of data [00:05:30] and that, you know, he was right. I mean this was a field that really was in great need of people who understood the biology but could work well in the quantitative computational side of things. Speaker 4: So I packed up and moved to Stanford with a short stint as a minor league baseball announcer in between. Really it was just a very fortuitous time to have gotten into this new field. I mean, the field was really just beginning. So this was in 1996 the first genomes been sequenced, they were microbes, there's bacteria and yeast [00:06:00] and so forth. And we were just getting our first glimpse of the scale of the kind of problems that we were going to be facing in genomics. But what I loved about this device, which is a DNA microarray, it's the sort of became a very hot tool in biology for a number of years was that it wasn't just a computer, it wasn't just data in a computer. It actually you were doing to do experiments with this. I'm interested in biology cause I liked living things. I like doing experiments, I like seeing things and I didn't want to just disappear with someone else's data and [00:06:30] analyze it. Speaker 4: So I went to Stanford to work on these and it really was just this awesome time and we were generating huge amounts of data in the lab and not just me. There were, you know, dozens of people generating tons of different types of experiments and so forth. And we lacked any kind of framework for looking at that data constructively. You couldn't look at those experiments and figure out by looking line by line in an excel spreadsheet at what gene was expressed, at what level and what condition. It just wasn't [00:07:00] the way to do it. And so my main contribution to the field at the time was in bringing tools for organizing the information and presenting it visually and being able to interact with that kind of incredibly complicated data in a way that was intuitive for people who understood the biology and allowed them to go back and forth between the experiment in the computer and the data and really try to make sense of what was a huge amounts of data with huge amounts of information, but something nobody had really been trained to [00:07:30] look at. And so it was there that I really realized kind of the way I like to do science, which is this constant back and forth between experiments on the computer. In my mind and in what I try to teach people in my lab. There's no distinction between doing experiments on the bench or in the field or in a computer that they're just different ways of looking at biology. Speaker 3: This is spectrum line KALX Berkeley. Today, Michael [00:08:00] I's associate professor at UC Berkeley explains his research in developmental biology. Speaker 4: On the basis of that time at Stanford, I got a job at Berkeley and what I did when I started my lab at Berkeley was really tried to focus on one problem. I mean I had been working on a million different problems at Stanford where we had a huge group and a million different people working on, and I was sort of moving around from problem the problem and helping out people with their data or thinking of different experiments. And when I came to Berkeley, I really [00:08:30] wanted to focus on one problem. And the problem that had intrigued me from the beginning of working on the microarray stuff was figuring out how it is that an animal's genome, which is the same essentially in every cell in the body, how it instructs different cells to behave differently, to turn on different genes and to acquire different properties. And so partly because of the influence of people here at Berkeley who were working on fruit flies, I switched my research program to work on [inaudible] when I started my lab at Berkeley, the genome of that [00:09:00] had just been sequenced and I liked working with animals. Speaker 4: I like having something that moves around and you know, had some behaviors and so the lab started to work on flies and pretty much since then that's what we've worked on. That's sort of the story of how I got to where I am. So your research then is you're looking at flies over time? Yeah, I mean, I mean I see how the genes are expressed. I'd say we're looking at classified more as developmental biology in the sense that we're looking at how genes are expressed over time during the lifespan of a lie. To this day, [00:09:30] we can't look at a newly sequenced genome and say, oh well this is what the animal's going to look like. That is, I couldn't tell you except sort of by cheating and knowing, comparing it to other genomes. If I, you gave me a fly genome, I look at it, I wouldn't know it was a fly or a worm or a tree or it's just the way in which the organism acquires it. Speaker 4: Things that make them interesting, their form, their appearance, their function. We have just the tiniest scratch of understanding of how that works. And so it's, for me, the most [00:10:00] interesting problem in biology is how do you get in a complicated structure like an animal out of a single cell. And how is that encoded in a genome sequence? I mean it's a fascinating mystery that I thought, you know, when I first started doing this I thought we'd have solved that problem by now. Not Easily. You know, because we had all this new data, we had the genome sequences we could measure. And a lot of what my lab does is actually measure which genes come on when, during development and try to understand for individual genes where that's been encoded in the genome [00:10:30] and how that happens. And I just sort of figured, well, you know, the problem for all these years was not that the problem was that hard. Speaker 4: We just didn't have the right data to look at this problem. And now we can do these experiments. I can sequence the genome of a fly and in a day I can characterize which genes are turned on when during development. And I sort of naively thought, well, we'll just sort of put it into a computer and shake things up and be clever and we'll figure out how these things are related to each other. And I mean now it's laughable that I would've ever thought that, but it was a very, very complicated thing. It's a process that's [00:11:00] executed by very complicated molecular machines operating in a very complicated environment or the nucleus and it, you know, we really don't understand it very well. We've learned a lot, but it's not a problem. We really understand. And so what is it that you've accumulated in terms of knowledge in that regard? Speaker 4: What do you think you've learned? A small amount of this is coming from my lab, but this is a whole field of people looking at this. But that we know the basic way in which that information is encoded in the genome. [00:11:30] We know that there are tuneable switches that can turn genes on and off in different conditions. And we know basically what molecular processes are involved in doing that in the sense that we know that there are proteins that can bind DNA in a sequence specific manner. So they will stick only to pieces of DNA that contain a motif or a particular code that distinct for each of these factors. In flies, there's several hundred of these factors and for humans that are several thousand of these factors that bind DNA in a [00:12:00] sequence specific manner, and they basically translate the nucleotide sequence of the genome into a different kind of code, which is the code of proteins bound to DNA. Speaker 4: And we know from a million different experiments that it's the action of those proteins binding to DNA that triggers the differential expression of genes in different conditions. So if you have a particular proteins, these are called transcription factors. If you have one in a cell at high levels than the genes [00:12:30] that are responding to that factor will be turned on in that cell. And if there's another cell where that protein isn't present, the set of genes that responds to it won't be turned on. So we know that as a general statement, but working out exactly how those proteins function, what it is that they actually do to turn a gene on and off, how they interact with each other, what conditions are necessary for them to function. All of those things are, I wouldn't say we know nothing about it, but they're very, [00:13:00] very poorly understood. Speaker 4: A lot of this sort of simple ideas that people had of there being a kind of regulatory code that looked something like the protein code that we're, you know, amino acid code that people are familiar with, right, that there'll be a genetic code for gene regulation. The idea that that's true is long disappeared from our thinking in the sense that it's much more like a very, very complicated problem with hundreds of different proteins that all interact with each other in a dynamic way. Something bind recruits, something else. [00:13:30] The thing it recruits changes the coding on the DNA and essence to a different state and then that allows other proteins to come in and that somehow or another that we still really don't understand. You eventually reach a state where the gene is turned on or turned off depending on what these factors are doing and you know, while there's lots of models for how that might function, they're all still tentative and we're getting better. The techniques for doing these kinds of experiments get better all the time. We can take individual pieces of or Sophala embryo [00:14:00] and sequence all the RNA contains and get a really complete picture of what's turned on when the technology is improving to the point where we can do a lot of this by imaging cells as amazing things we can do, but still the next level of understanding the singularity in our understanding of transcriptional regulation is still before us. Speaker 3: Spectrum is on KALX, Berkley alternating Fridays today. Michael [inaudible], associate professor at UC Berkeley [00:14:30] is our guest. In the next section, Michael describes the challenges his research poses Speaker 4: and is the task then the hard work of science and documenting everything's, yeah. Mapping a little bit about just observing. I mean, I'm a big believer in observational science that what's limited us to this has been just our poor tools for looking at what's going on. I mean we still hard to visualize the activity of individual molecules within cells, although we're on the precipice [00:15:00] of being able to do that better. So yeah, it's looking and realizing when the paradigms we have for thinking about this thing are clearly just not sufficient. And I think the fields get trapped sometimes in a way of thinking about how their system works and they do experiments that are predicated on some particular idea. But you know, usually when you have an idea and you pursue it for quite a long time and it doesn't pan out, it's because the idea is wrong. Speaker 4: And not always, but I think the transcriptional regulation field has been slow to adapt [00:15:30] to new sort of models for thinking. Although that is changing, I think that there's a lot of activity now and thinking about the dynamics of DNA and proteins within the nucleus. You know, we tend to think about DNA as kind of a static thing that sits in the nucleus and it's a, it's sort of read out by proteins, but really much more accurate as to think of it as a living kind of warned me like thing in the nucleus that gets pulled around to different parts of the nucleus and where it is in the nucleus is one way in which you control what's turned on and off. And I think people are really [00:16:00] appreciating the importance of this sort of three-dimensional architecture of the nucleus as a key facet and controlling the activity that there's, the nucleus itself is not a homogeneous place. Speaker 4: There is active and inactive regions of the nucleus and it's really largely from imaging that we're learning how that's functioning and you know, we as the whole field and are there lots of collaborators and people who are doing work? Yeah, I mean I'd say oh yeah. I mean it's a, it's an active feeling. Pay Attention to [00:16:30] oh yeah. So it's an active, if not huge field and not just in flies. I mean, I think it's transcriptional regulations of big field and in particular in developmental biology where amongst scientists we're interested in how animals develop. It's long been clear that gene regulation is sort of sits at the center of understanding development and so people interested in developmental biology and have long been interested in transcriptional regulation and I think everybody's got their own take on it here. But yeah, it's a very active field with lots of people, including several other people at Berkeley who are doing really [00:17:00] fascinating stuff. Speaker 4: So it's not out in the wilderness. This is not the hinterlands of science, but it's um, it's a nice field to work in about appropriate size. Our annual meetings only have a thousand, a few thousand people. It's not like some of these fields with 25,000 people. I can realistically know all the people who are working on problems related to ours and I literally know them and I know what they're doing and we sort of exchange ideas. So I like it. It's, it's nice community of people. [00:17:30] Is the field driving a lot of tool development? Absolutely. I say, this is something I really try to encourage people in my lab and people I trained to think, which is when you have a problem, you should be thinking not what am I good at? What can I apply to this problem? What technique has out there that would work here? Speaker 4: But what do I need to do? What is the right way to solve this problem? And if someone else has figured out how to do it, great, do it. But if they haven't, then do it yourself. And I think that this applies sort of very specifically [00:18:00] to doing individual experiments, but also to this broader issue we were talking about before with this interplay between computation and experiment. I think too many people come into science graduate school or wherever, thinking, well, I'm an experimentalist or I'm a computational biologist or whatever. And then they ask a question and then the inevitably hit the point where the logical path and pursuing their question would take them across this self-imposed boundary. Either you're an experimentalist who generated data and you're not [00:18:30] able to get at it in the right way and therefore, you know what you really need to be doing is sitting at a computer and playing around with the data. Speaker 4: But if you view that as a boundary that you're not allowed to cross or you're incapable of crossing, you'll never solve it because it almost never works. You almost never can find somebody else no matter how talented they are. Who's as interested in the problem that you're working on as you are. And I think that's a general rule. Scientists should feel as uninhibited about pursuing new things even if they're bad at it. It's certainly been a mantra [00:19:00] I've always tried to convey to the people in my lab, which is, yeah, sure, you come in with a computer science background and you know you're a coder and you've never picked up a pipette or grown a fly. But that's why the first thing you should do in the lab is go grow flies and vice versa. For the people who come in perfectly good in the lab but unable to do stuff in the computer, the first thing you should do is start playing around with data on the computer and it doesn't always work and not everybody sort of successfully bridges that gap, but the best scientists in my mind are ones who don't [00:19:30] circumscribe what they're good at. Speaker 4: They have problems and they pursue them. When something like visualization, is that a bridge too far to try to embrace that kind of technology? I've always done that. I mean I almost every time I do an analysis in the computer, I reduce it to picture some way or another. You know, because of the human brain, no matter how fancy your analysis is, the human brain is just not good at assimilating information as numbers. What we're good at as thinkers is looking at patterns, [00:20:00] finding patterns and things, looking at looking at images, recognizing when patterns are interesting and important, and there's a crucial role for turning data into something the human brain can pull in. And that's always, for me, one of the most fun things is taking data that is just a string of numbers and figuring out how to present it to your brain in a way that makes some sense for it and the refinement of it so that it's believable. Speaker 4: Yeah, and so then you can do it over and over and over and get the same result. Yeah, and all, I mean it is one of the dangers [00:20:30] you deal with when you're working with, when you're relying on human pattern recognition is we're so good at it that we recognize patterns even when they don't exist. There's a lot of statistics that gets used in modern biology, but often people I think use it incorrectly and people think that statistics is going to tell them what things are important, what things they should be paying attention to. For me, we almost entirely used statistical thinking to tell us when we've fooled ourselves into thinking something's interesting, you know, with enough data and enough things going on, you're going [00:21:00] to find something that looks interesting there and having a check on that part of your brain that likes to find patterns and interesting things is also crucial. Speaker 4: You know, I think people understand that if you flip a coin three times, it's not that we are trying to land on heads, but they have much, much harder time thinking about what happens if you flip a coin a billion times. We're struggling with this in biology, this transformation from small data to big data, it taxes people's ability to think clearly about what kinds of phenomena are interesting and aren't interesting. [00:21:30] Big Data is sort of the promise land now for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm a big believer in data intrinsically. If you're interested in observing things and interested in understanding how they work, the more you can measure about them better. It's just that's not the end of the game. Right? Just simply measuring things that doesn't lead to insight. Going from observing something to understanding it. That's where the challenges and that's true. Whether you're looking at the movement of DNA in a nucleus or you're [00:22:00] looking at people by a target, right? Like the same. It's the same problem. Speaker 3: This concludes part one of our interview with Michael [inaudible]. On the next spectrum, Michael Eisen will explain the Public Library of science, which he [inaudible]. He will give his thoughts on genetically modified organisms and a strategy for labeling food. He discusses scientific outreach and research funding. Don't miss him now. Our calendar of science and technology [00:22:30] events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rao present the calendar Speaker 5: tomorrow, February 9th from noon to one wild Oakland presents nature photography basics at lake merit. Meet in front of the Rotary Nature Center at 600 Bellevue Avenue at Perkins in Oakland. For this free event, learn to get more out of the camera you currently have and use it to capture beautiful photos of Oakland's jewel lake merit. [00:23:00] Bring your camera and you'll learn the basics of composition, camera settings, but photography and wildlife photography. Okay. Your instructor will be Dan. Tigger, a freelance photographer that publishes regularly in Bay Nature and other magazines. RSVP at Wild Oakland dot o r G. UC Berkeley Speaker 6: is holding its monthly blood drive. This February 12th you are eligible to no-name blood if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. You can [00:23:30] also check out the eligibility guidelines online for an initial self screening if you're not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. You can make an appointment online, but walk ins are also welcome. The blood drive will be on February 12th and the alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus will last from 12 to 6:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. [00:24:00] Red Cross blood.org using the sponsor code you see be February 13th Dr. Bruce Ames, senior scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute will speak at a colloquium on the effects that an inadequate supply of vitamins and minerals has on aging. Speaker 6: Dr Ames posits that the metabolism responds to a moderate deficiency of an essential vitamin or mineral by concentrating on collecting the scarce proteins [00:24:30] to help short term survival and reproductive fitness, usually at the expense of proteins important for longterm health. This is known as triaged theory. Dr Ian Discuss ways in which the human metabolism has evolved to favor short term survival over longterm health. He will also present evidence that this metabolic trade-off accelerates aging associated diseases such as cancer, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease. The colloquium will be on February 13th from 12 [00:25:00] to 1:15 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in five one oh one Tolman hall February 16th the Monthly Science at Cau Lecture series will hold a talk focusing on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology to build sales with new capabilities. The Speaker, John Dabber is a mentor in the international genetically engineered machines competition or ai-jen and a UC Berkeley professor, [00:25:30] Dr Debra. We'll discuss the new technique created in J key's link's lab to make low cost drugs to treat malaria. He will also introduce student members of the UC Berkeley Igm team who will discuss their prize winning project. The free public event will be on February 16th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM will be held on the UC Berkeley campus in room one oh five of Stanley hall Speaker 5: on Tuesday the 19th how long now and Yearbook Buenos Center for the Arts Presents. Chris Anderson's talk [00:26:00] on the makers revolution. He describes the democratization of manufacturing and the implications that that has. Anderson himself left his job as editor of wired magazine to join a 22 year old from Tijuana and running a typical makers firm. Three d robotics, which builds is do it yourself. Drones, what based collaboration tools and small batch technology such as cheap 3d printers, three d scanners, laser cutters and assembly. Robots are transforming manufacturing. [00:26:30] Suddenly large scale manufacturers are competing, not just with each other on multi-year cycles are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance. In a weeks today, Anderson notes there are nearly a thousand maker spaces shared production facilities around the world and they're growing at an astounding rate. The talk is seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Lam Research Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts at 700 Howard Street in San Francisco. Speaker 5: [00:27:00] Tickets are $15 for more information, visit long now.org now to new stories presented by Renee and Rick. The Federal Communication Commission has released a proposal to create super wifi networks across the nation. This proposal created by FCC Chairman Julius Jenna Koski, is it global first, and if approved, could provide free access to the web in every metropolitan area and many rural areas. The powerful new service could even allow people [00:27:30] to make calls for mobile phones using only the Internet. A robust public policy debate has already sprung up around the proposal, which has drawn aggressive lobbying on both sides. Verizon wireless and at t, and t along with other telecommunications companies have launched a campaign to persuade lawmakers. The proposal is technically and financially unfeasible. Meanwhile, tech companies like Google and Microsoft have championed the ideas sparking innovation and widening access to an [00:28:00] increasingly important resource. We can add this to the growing list of public policy debate over our changing and complex relationship with the Internet. Speaker 5: A team at McMaster university as reported in the February 3rd issue of nature chemical biology that they have found the first demonstration of a secreted metabolite that can protect against toxic gold and cause gold. Biomineralization. That's right. Bacterium Delphia, [00:28:30] a seat of [inaudible] take solutions continuing dissolve the gold and creates gold particles. This helps protect the bacteria from absorbing harmful gold ions, but it also might be used to harvest gold. The researchers found genes that cause gold, precipitation, engineered bacteria that lack these jeans and observed that these bacteria had stunted growth and that there was no gold precipitation. They also extracted the chemical responsible [00:29:00] for the gold mineralization naming it delftibactin a, the molecule creates metallic gold within seconds in Ph neutral conditions at room temperature. Gold exists in extremely dilute quantities in many water sources and the bacteria or the metabolite might be used to extract gold from mine. Waste in the future. Speaker 3: [inaudible] the music her during the show is by Luciana, David [00:29:30] from his album foam and acoustic, released under a creative Commons license, 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about show, please send Speaker 1: them to us. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In part 1, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Michael Eisen talks about his research, the field, and both experimental and computational biology. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to [inaudible] Speaker 1: section, the Science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. Thanks for tuning in. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michael Eisen and associate professor of genetics, genomics and development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. Iceland employs a combination of experimental and computational methods to the study of gene regulation [00:01:00] using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Isen and his colleagues have pioneered genomic approaches in modern molecular biology and our leaders in the emerging field of computational biology. In part one, Michael talks about how he got started in biology and how his research has evolved onto the interview. Michael Isen, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. My pleasure. Would you give us a narrative of how you initiated your research and how your research has [00:01:30] changed to what it is currently? Speaker 4: Okay. Actually, I grew up in a family of scientists. My parents were both biologists, so I always had an interest in biology. But as a kid, my talents were primarily in math and I was a heavy duty math geek and went to college expecting to be a mathematician and took this freshman calculus class and all the hardcore math geeks tuck. And I did fine. I did well in the class, but [00:02:00] there were several people in the class who were clearly a notch better than me in a way that I think you only can realize and you know, basketball and mathematics at the age of 18 that you're not destined to be the best. And I think math is a field where if you're not the best, it's just kind of boring. And so I stayed as a mathematician and math major in college, but I started increasingly taking a lot of biology classes and had more or less, you know, realized that biology was what really captured my, my attention and [00:02:30] my heart. Speaker 4: And so I went to graduate school but had the idea that I'm interested in biology, but I'm really good at math. So there must be some way of combining these two things. And so I entered a graduate program in biophysics, which is sort of a place where people who are interested in biology maybe haven't taken all the prereqs for a normal biology department but also have a quantitative background go cause. And so, you know, in the way that people sort of drifted into things, I drifted into working on protein structure and [00:03:00] did my phd studying the evolution of the proteins on the surface of flu viruses and using a combination of experimental work and I would hesitate to call it mathematics. It was really just sort of kind of physics and it's, it's a lot of data. You generate a lot of raw data, you generate a lot of data on the coordinates of individual protein molecules and things that they might bind to. Speaker 4: And so it was very natural to start using computers in that work. You know, my background was not in computer science. I programmed as a kid [00:03:30] because my grandfather bought me a computer and I taught myself how to program and I wrote programs to, you know, keep track of baseball statistics and other things like that. In College, I basically never programmed anything in the math department I was in. It was considered not math that you were touching a computer. And so I didn't really do anything with computers until I got to graduate school when you started seeing all this data coming down the pipe. But I wasn't particularly interested in structural biology and I discovered that through six years from graduate school that [00:04:00] although I liked doing it, it wasn't intellectually satisfying, was too small. You're working on one sugar bound to one protein in one virus and I was having trouble seeing how that would expand into something grand and whatever. Speaker 4: You know, the ambitions of, uh, of a graduate student wanting to do something big. And I got lucky in the way that often happens in that my advisor had a colleague he knew from an advisory board. He sat on and he was coming into town because his brother was getting some honorary degree [00:04:30] and I met him in his hotel room, Austin. And he had with him, uh, glass microscope slide onto which had been spotted down little pieces of DNA, each of which corresponded to one gene in the yeast genome. So it's about 6,000 genes in the yeast genome. And you could see them because there was still salt in the spots, but it was a very evocative little device. You could sort of hold it up in front of the sun and you could see the sun sort of glittering on all these little spots. Speaker 4: You could just see the grandness of [00:05:00] the device. Didn't know how people were using them. I didn't know what they would be used for. I didn't know what I would do with them, but I was sort of drawn in by the scale of it all. The idea that you could work on everything at once and you didn't have to choose to work on just one little thing and disappear into a little corner and study. Just that. And so my advisor said, oh, you really should go do this. They need someone who's, you know, understands biology, but can deal with the computational side of things. It's clear that this was going to generate a lot of data [00:05:30] and that, you know, he was right. I mean this was a field that really was in great need of people who understood the biology but could work well in the quantitative computational side of things. Speaker 4: So I packed up and moved to Stanford with a short stint as a minor league baseball announcer in between. Really it was just a very fortuitous time to have gotten into this new field. I mean, the field was really just beginning. So this was in 1996 the first genomes been sequenced, they were microbes, there's bacteria and yeast [00:06:00] and so forth. And we were just getting our first glimpse of the scale of the kind of problems that we were going to be facing in genomics. But what I loved about this device, which is a DNA microarray, it's the sort of became a very hot tool in biology for a number of years was that it wasn't just a computer, it wasn't just data in a computer. It actually you were doing to do experiments with this. I'm interested in biology cause I liked living things. I like doing experiments, I like seeing things and I didn't want to just disappear with someone else's data and [00:06:30] analyze it. Speaker 4: So I went to Stanford to work on these and it really was just this awesome time and we were generating huge amounts of data in the lab and not just me. There were, you know, dozens of people generating tons of different types of experiments and so forth. And we lacked any kind of framework for looking at that data constructively. You couldn't look at those experiments and figure out by looking line by line in an excel spreadsheet at what gene was expressed, at what level and what condition. It just wasn't [00:07:00] the way to do it. And so my main contribution to the field at the time was in bringing tools for organizing the information and presenting it visually and being able to interact with that kind of incredibly complicated data in a way that was intuitive for people who understood the biology and allowed them to go back and forth between the experiment in the computer and the data and really try to make sense of what was a huge amounts of data with huge amounts of information, but something nobody had really been trained to [00:07:30] look at. And so it was there that I really realized kind of the way I like to do science, which is this constant back and forth between experiments on the computer. In my mind and in what I try to teach people in my lab. There's no distinction between doing experiments on the bench or in the field or in a computer that they're just different ways of looking at biology. Speaker 3: This is spectrum line KALX Berkeley. Today, Michael [00:08:00] I's associate professor at UC Berkeley explains his research in developmental biology. Speaker 4: On the basis of that time at Stanford, I got a job at Berkeley and what I did when I started my lab at Berkeley was really tried to focus on one problem. I mean I had been working on a million different problems at Stanford where we had a huge group and a million different people working on, and I was sort of moving around from problem the problem and helping out people with their data or thinking of different experiments. And when I came to Berkeley, I really [00:08:30] wanted to focus on one problem. And the problem that had intrigued me from the beginning of working on the microarray stuff was figuring out how it is that an animal's genome, which is the same essentially in every cell in the body, how it instructs different cells to behave differently, to turn on different genes and to acquire different properties. And so partly because of the influence of people here at Berkeley who were working on fruit flies, I switched my research program to work on [inaudible] when I started my lab at Berkeley, the genome of that [00:09:00] had just been sequenced and I liked working with animals. Speaker 4: I like having something that moves around and you know, had some behaviors and so the lab started to work on flies and pretty much since then that's what we've worked on. That's sort of the story of how I got to where I am. So your research then is you're looking at flies over time? Yeah, I mean, I mean I see how the genes are expressed. I'd say we're looking at classified more as developmental biology in the sense that we're looking at how genes are expressed over time during the lifespan of a lie. To this day, [00:09:30] we can't look at a newly sequenced genome and say, oh well this is what the animal's going to look like. That is, I couldn't tell you except sort of by cheating and knowing, comparing it to other genomes. If I, you gave me a fly genome, I look at it, I wouldn't know it was a fly or a worm or a tree or it's just the way in which the organism acquires it. Speaker 4: Things that make them interesting, their form, their appearance, their function. We have just the tiniest scratch of understanding of how that works. And so it's, for me, the most [00:10:00] interesting problem in biology is how do you get in a complicated structure like an animal out of a single cell. And how is that encoded in a genome sequence? I mean it's a fascinating mystery that I thought, you know, when I first started doing this I thought we'd have solved that problem by now. Not Easily. You know, because we had all this new data, we had the genome sequences we could measure. And a lot of what my lab does is actually measure which genes come on when, during development and try to understand for individual genes where that's been encoded in the genome [00:10:30] and how that happens. And I just sort of figured, well, you know, the problem for all these years was not that the problem was that hard. Speaker 4: We just didn't have the right data to look at this problem. And now we can do these experiments. I can sequence the genome of a fly and in a day I can characterize which genes are turned on when during development. And I sort of naively thought, well, we'll just sort of put it into a computer and shake things up and be clever and we'll figure out how these things are related to each other. And I mean now it's laughable that I would've ever thought that, but it was a very, very complicated thing. It's a process that's [00:11:00] executed by very complicated molecular machines operating in a very complicated environment or the nucleus and it, you know, we really don't understand it very well. We've learned a lot, but it's not a problem. We really understand. And so what is it that you've accumulated in terms of knowledge in that regard? Speaker 4: What do you think you've learned? A small amount of this is coming from my lab, but this is a whole field of people looking at this. But that we know the basic way in which that information is encoded in the genome. [00:11:30] We know that there are tuneable switches that can turn genes on and off in different conditions. And we know basically what molecular processes are involved in doing that in the sense that we know that there are proteins that can bind DNA in a sequence specific manner. So they will stick only to pieces of DNA that contain a motif or a particular code that distinct for each of these factors. In flies, there's several hundred of these factors and for humans that are several thousand of these factors that bind DNA in a [00:12:00] sequence specific manner, and they basically translate the nucleotide sequence of the genome into a different kind of code, which is the code of proteins bound to DNA. Speaker 4: And we know from a million different experiments that it's the action of those proteins binding to DNA that triggers the differential expression of genes in different conditions. So if you have a particular proteins, these are called transcription factors. If you have one in a cell at high levels than the genes [00:12:30] that are responding to that factor will be turned on in that cell. And if there's another cell where that protein isn't present, the set of genes that responds to it won't be turned on. So we know that as a general statement, but working out exactly how those proteins function, what it is that they actually do to turn a gene on and off, how they interact with each other, what conditions are necessary for them to function. All of those things are, I wouldn't say we know nothing about it, but they're very, [00:13:00] very poorly understood. Speaker 4: A lot of this sort of simple ideas that people had of there being a kind of regulatory code that looked something like the protein code that we're, you know, amino acid code that people are familiar with, right, that there'll be a genetic code for gene regulation. The idea that that's true is long disappeared from our thinking in the sense that it's much more like a very, very complicated problem with hundreds of different proteins that all interact with each other in a dynamic way. Something bind recruits, something else. [00:13:30] The thing it recruits changes the coding on the DNA and essence to a different state and then that allows other proteins to come in and that somehow or another that we still really don't understand. You eventually reach a state where the gene is turned on or turned off depending on what these factors are doing and you know, while there's lots of models for how that might function, they're all still tentative and we're getting better. The techniques for doing these kinds of experiments get better all the time. We can take individual pieces of or Sophala embryo [00:14:00] and sequence all the RNA contains and get a really complete picture of what's turned on when the technology is improving to the point where we can do a lot of this by imaging cells as amazing things we can do, but still the next level of understanding the singularity in our understanding of transcriptional regulation is still before us. Speaker 3: Spectrum is on KALX, Berkley alternating Fridays today. Michael [inaudible], associate professor at UC Berkeley [00:14:30] is our guest. In the next section, Michael describes the challenges his research poses Speaker 4: and is the task then the hard work of science and documenting everything's, yeah. Mapping a little bit about just observing. I mean, I'm a big believer in observational science that what's limited us to this has been just our poor tools for looking at what's going on. I mean we still hard to visualize the activity of individual molecules within cells, although we're on the precipice [00:15:00] of being able to do that better. So yeah, it's looking and realizing when the paradigms we have for thinking about this thing are clearly just not sufficient. And I think the fields get trapped sometimes in a way of thinking about how their system works and they do experiments that are predicated on some particular idea. But you know, usually when you have an idea and you pursue it for quite a long time and it doesn't pan out, it's because the idea is wrong. Speaker 4: And not always, but I think the transcriptional regulation field has been slow to adapt [00:15:30] to new sort of models for thinking. Although that is changing, I think that there's a lot of activity now and thinking about the dynamics of DNA and proteins within the nucleus. You know, we tend to think about DNA as kind of a static thing that sits in the nucleus and it's a, it's sort of read out by proteins, but really much more accurate as to think of it as a living kind of warned me like thing in the nucleus that gets pulled around to different parts of the nucleus and where it is in the nucleus is one way in which you control what's turned on and off. And I think people are really [00:16:00] appreciating the importance of this sort of three-dimensional architecture of the nucleus as a key facet and controlling the activity that there's, the nucleus itself is not a homogeneous place. Speaker 4: There is active and inactive regions of the nucleus and it's really largely from imaging that we're learning how that's functioning and you know, we as the whole field and are there lots of collaborators and people who are doing work? Yeah, I mean I'd say oh yeah. I mean it's a, it's an active feeling. Pay Attention to [00:16:30] oh yeah. So it's an active, if not huge field and not just in flies. I mean, I think it's transcriptional regulations of big field and in particular in developmental biology where amongst scientists we're interested in how animals develop. It's long been clear that gene regulation is sort of sits at the center of understanding development and so people interested in developmental biology and have long been interested in transcriptional regulation and I think everybody's got their own take on it here. But yeah, it's a very active field with lots of people, including several other people at Berkeley who are doing really [00:17:00] fascinating stuff. Speaker 4: So it's not out in the wilderness. This is not the hinterlands of science, but it's um, it's a nice field to work in about appropriate size. Our annual meetings only have a thousand, a few thousand people. It's not like some of these fields with 25,000 people. I can realistically know all the people who are working on problems related to ours and I literally know them and I know what they're doing and we sort of exchange ideas. So I like it. It's, it's nice community of people. [00:17:30] Is the field driving a lot of tool development? Absolutely. I say, this is something I really try to encourage people in my lab and people I trained to think, which is when you have a problem, you should be thinking not what am I good at? What can I apply to this problem? What technique has out there that would work here? Speaker 4: But what do I need to do? What is the right way to solve this problem? And if someone else has figured out how to do it, great, do it. But if they haven't, then do it yourself. And I think that this applies sort of very specifically [00:18:00] to doing individual experiments, but also to this broader issue we were talking about before with this interplay between computation and experiment. I think too many people come into science graduate school or wherever, thinking, well, I'm an experimentalist or I'm a computational biologist or whatever. And then they ask a question and then the inevitably hit the point where the logical path and pursuing their question would take them across this self-imposed boundary. Either you're an experimentalist who generated data and you're not [00:18:30] able to get at it in the right way and therefore, you know what you really need to be doing is sitting at a computer and playing around with the data. Speaker 4: But if you view that as a boundary that you're not allowed to cross or you're incapable of crossing, you'll never solve it because it almost never works. You almost never can find somebody else no matter how talented they are. Who's as interested in the problem that you're working on as you are. And I think that's a general rule. Scientists should feel as uninhibited about pursuing new things even if they're bad at it. It's certainly been a mantra [00:19:00] I've always tried to convey to the people in my lab, which is, yeah, sure, you come in with a computer science background and you know you're a coder and you've never picked up a pipette or grown a fly. But that's why the first thing you should do in the lab is go grow flies and vice versa. For the people who come in perfectly good in the lab but unable to do stuff in the computer, the first thing you should do is start playing around with data on the computer and it doesn't always work and not everybody sort of successfully bridges that gap, but the best scientists in my mind are ones who don't [00:19:30] circumscribe what they're good at. Speaker 4: They have problems and they pursue them. When something like visualization, is that a bridge too far to try to embrace that kind of technology? I've always done that. I mean I almost every time I do an analysis in the computer, I reduce it to picture some way or another. You know, because of the human brain, no matter how fancy your analysis is, the human brain is just not good at assimilating information as numbers. What we're good at as thinkers is looking at patterns, [00:20:00] finding patterns and things, looking at looking at images, recognizing when patterns are interesting and important, and there's a crucial role for turning data into something the human brain can pull in. And that's always, for me, one of the most fun things is taking data that is just a string of numbers and figuring out how to present it to your brain in a way that makes some sense for it and the refinement of it so that it's believable. Speaker 4: Yeah, and so then you can do it over and over and over and get the same result. Yeah, and all, I mean it is one of the dangers [00:20:30] you deal with when you're working with, when you're relying on human pattern recognition is we're so good at it that we recognize patterns even when they don't exist. There's a lot of statistics that gets used in modern biology, but often people I think use it incorrectly and people think that statistics is going to tell them what things are important, what things they should be paying attention to. For me, we almost entirely used statistical thinking to tell us when we've fooled ourselves into thinking something's interesting, you know, with enough data and enough things going on, you're going [00:21:00] to find something that looks interesting there and having a check on that part of your brain that likes to find patterns and interesting things is also crucial. Speaker 4: You know, I think people understand that if you flip a coin three times, it's not that we are trying to land on heads, but they have much, much harder time thinking about what happens if you flip a coin a billion times. We're struggling with this in biology, this transformation from small data to big data, it taxes people's ability to think clearly about what kinds of phenomena are interesting and aren't interesting. [00:21:30] Big Data is sort of the promise land now for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm a big believer in data intrinsically. If you're interested in observing things and interested in understanding how they work, the more you can measure about them better. It's just that's not the end of the game. Right? Just simply measuring things that doesn't lead to insight. Going from observing something to understanding it. That's where the challenges and that's true. Whether you're looking at the movement of DNA in a nucleus or you're [00:22:00] looking at people by a target, right? Like the same. It's the same problem. Speaker 3: This concludes part one of our interview with Michael [inaudible]. On the next spectrum, Michael Eisen will explain the Public Library of science, which he [inaudible]. He will give his thoughts on genetically modified organisms and a strategy for labeling food. He discusses scientific outreach and research funding. Don't miss him now. Our calendar of science and technology [00:22:30] events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rao present the calendar Speaker 5: tomorrow, February 9th from noon to one wild Oakland presents nature photography basics at lake merit. Meet in front of the Rotary Nature Center at 600 Bellevue Avenue at Perkins in Oakland. For this free event, learn to get more out of the camera you currently have and use it to capture beautiful photos of Oakland's jewel lake merit. [00:23:00] Bring your camera and you'll learn the basics of composition, camera settings, but photography and wildlife photography. Okay. Your instructor will be Dan. Tigger, a freelance photographer that publishes regularly in Bay Nature and other magazines. RSVP at Wild Oakland dot o r G. UC Berkeley Speaker 6: is holding its monthly blood drive. This February 12th you are eligible to no-name blood if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. You can [00:23:30] also check out the eligibility guidelines online for an initial self screening if you're not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. You can make an appointment online, but walk ins are also welcome. The blood drive will be on February 12th and the alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus will last from 12 to 6:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. [00:24:00] Red Cross blood.org using the sponsor code you see be February 13th Dr. Bruce Ames, senior scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute will speak at a colloquium on the effects that an inadequate supply of vitamins and minerals has on aging. Speaker 6: Dr Ames posits that the metabolism responds to a moderate deficiency of an essential vitamin or mineral by concentrating on collecting the scarce proteins [00:24:30] to help short term survival and reproductive fitness, usually at the expense of proteins important for longterm health. This is known as triaged theory. Dr Ian Discuss ways in which the human metabolism has evolved to favor short term survival over longterm health. He will also present evidence that this metabolic trade-off accelerates aging associated diseases such as cancer, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease. The colloquium will be on February 13th from 12 [00:25:00] to 1:15 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in five one oh one Tolman hall February 16th the Monthly Science at Cau Lecture series will hold a talk focusing on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology to build sales with new capabilities. The Speaker, John Dabber is a mentor in the international genetically engineered machines competition or ai-jen and a UC Berkeley professor, [00:25:30] Dr Debra. We'll discuss the new technique created in J key's link's lab to make low cost drugs to treat malaria. He will also introduce student members of the UC Berkeley Igm team who will discuss their prize winning project. The free public event will be on February 16th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM will be held on the UC Berkeley campus in room one oh five of Stanley hall Speaker 5: on Tuesday the 19th how long now and Yearbook Buenos Center for the Arts Presents. Chris Anderson's talk [00:26:00] on the makers revolution. He describes the democratization of manufacturing and the implications that that has. Anderson himself left his job as editor of wired magazine to join a 22 year old from Tijuana and running a typical makers firm. Three d robotics, which builds is do it yourself. Drones, what based collaboration tools and small batch technology such as cheap 3d printers, three d scanners, laser cutters and assembly. Robots are transforming manufacturing. [00:26:30] Suddenly large scale manufacturers are competing, not just with each other on multi-year cycles are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance. In a weeks today, Anderson notes there are nearly a thousand maker spaces shared production facilities around the world and they're growing at an astounding rate. The talk is seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Lam Research Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts at 700 Howard Street in San Francisco. Speaker 5: [00:27:00] Tickets are $15 for more information, visit long now.org now to new stories presented by Renee and Rick. The Federal Communication Commission has released a proposal to create super wifi networks across the nation. This proposal created by FCC Chairman Julius Jenna Koski, is it global first, and if approved, could provide free access to the web in every metropolitan area and many rural areas. The powerful new service could even allow people [00:27:30] to make calls for mobile phones using only the Internet. A robust public policy debate has already sprung up around the proposal, which has drawn aggressive lobbying on both sides. Verizon wireless and at t, and t along with other telecommunications companies have launched a campaign to persuade lawmakers. The proposal is technically and financially unfeasible. Meanwhile, tech companies like Google and Microsoft have championed the ideas sparking innovation and widening access to an [00:28:00] increasingly important resource. We can add this to the growing list of public policy debate over our changing and complex relationship with the Internet. Speaker 5: A team at McMaster university as reported in the February 3rd issue of nature chemical biology that they have found the first demonstration of a secreted metabolite that can protect against toxic gold and cause gold. Biomineralization. That's right. Bacterium Delphia, [00:28:30] a seat of [inaudible] take solutions continuing dissolve the gold and creates gold particles. This helps protect the bacteria from absorbing harmful gold ions, but it also might be used to harvest gold. The researchers found genes that cause gold, precipitation, engineered bacteria that lack these jeans and observed that these bacteria had stunted growth and that there was no gold precipitation. They also extracted the chemical responsible [00:29:00] for the gold mineralization naming it delftibactin a, the molecule creates metallic gold within seconds in Ph neutral conditions at room temperature. Gold exists in extremely dilute quantities in many water sources and the bacteria or the metabolite might be used to extract gold from mine. Waste in the future. Speaker 3: [inaudible] the music her during the show is by Luciana, David [00:29:30] from his album foam and acoustic, released under a creative Commons license, 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about show, please send Speaker 1: them to us. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guests tonight are Jeffery and Michael Eisen, father and son and co-authors of Empowered YOUth: A Father and Son’s Journey to Conscious Living This is the heartfelt story of Michael and Jeffrey Eisen who rose up from a tumultuous, emotional past to come together in a loving, respectful relationship as father and son; coach and student. Through this engaging narrative they help deconstruct the paradigms and beliefs that contribute to anxiety, stress and unrest within the family unit. They provide a refreshing perspective on how parents and kids can work together to empower and support one another by opening the channels of communication, dissolving fear and surrendering the need for control. Through this story of a relationship broken apart and put back together, Jeffrey and Michael provide inspiration for those looking to empower the next generation in a more loving, open and intuitive way. Empowered YOUth will leave readers feeling hopeful, passionate and optimistic. Visit Jeffrey online at www.awakeningtheself.com To learn more about Michael and the YWN, visit www.youthwellnessnetwork.ca

  Michael Eisen is the Founder of the Youth Wellness Network (YWN), an organization dedicated to inspiring and empowering youth across the globe to live happier and more positive lives.  Michael created YWN at the age of 25, in order to provide more extensive support programs and resources for youth struggling with similar challenges. Michael provides a fresh, young and authentic voice to the field of wellness and is rapidly becoming a youth wellness expert. His first book titled Empowered YOUth: A Father and Son's Guide to Conscious Living, has been co-authored with his father Jeffrey and published by Hay House. Learn more about this book, Michael, his father, Jeffrey and the tremendous journey of self-discovery!

Michael Eisen is the founder of the YouthWellness Network (YWN), an organization dedicated to inspiring and empoweringyouth across the globe to live happier and more positive lives. YWN specializesin creating and implementing wellness programs in schools and organizations,while offering additional assistance through online resources. Michael is apassionate, authentic, and charismatic speaker, author, and socialentrepreneur. Michael's book, EmpoweredYOUth: A Father and Son's Guide to Conscious Living, co-authored with his father Jeffrey Eisen, will be released fall of 2012 with Hay House. Read More