Coronavirus Crystals Transcript (031)
EDWARD SNELL: Hello! I’m Dr. Edward Snell, President and CEO of Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Dr. Peter Horn. For over 60 years, the Hauptman-Woodward Institute has worked to find cures for diseases like COVID-19, cancer, and others that impact us today. Our renowned researchers study proteins in normal and diseased states, and what they learn provides a foundation for developing medicines, therapies, and cures. One of our scientists, Dr. Sarah Bowman, has devoted much of the past year to studying the structures of proteins within SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Today she’ll be talking with Pete, who has helped support our education programs here at HWI. I look forward to their conversation, and I hope you enjoy the show!
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show …
SARAH BOWMAN: I will say it’s an incredible time to be a scientist.
[VO]: Dr. Sarah Bowman on the critical importance of basic science, now and for the future ...
SARAH: All you have to do is look at what’s been happening over the past few decades, right? Where we have things like SARS, MERS, Zika, Ebola—and those last two are not coronaviruses, but they are infectious agents that cause severe disease, and now of course, with SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. These are things that are going to continue to happen. And so anything we can do to gather information to help us understand the basic biology, the basic structures, how these things work, how we can stop them is absolutely important.
SARAH: I hope that in some ways that our experience in the pandemic culturally, worldwide, helps us to really recognize the role of science and the role of structural biology in helping deal with these types of things.
SARAH: You know, frankly, and I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we can anticipate other kinds of things happening. And so that is something that I think we should all, you know, be thinking about. “Okay. So what have we learned from this? And how do we move forward with that information?”
[VO]: All that and much more coming right up on this episode of Point of Learning. Stick around!
[3:02]
[VO]: Dr. Sarah EJ Bowman earned her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Rochester, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory. For the last year, she has focused on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Dr. Bowman is Director of the High-Throughput Crystallization Screening Center and Associate Research Scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Institute (a.k.a. HWI) here in Buffalo, where I was fortunate enough to get to know her a little bit in recent years as I helped to support the Institute’s education programs. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S., Sarah’s lab has been studying key components that make up the novel coronavirus. At the Crystallization Center, a facility that over the past 21 years has supported over one thousand labs around the world, crucial non-infectious elements of the virus are coaxed into crystals that can help researchers see the otherwise invisible structure of the virus. Knowing what these extremely small viral parts look like helps researchers understand how new or existing existing drugs might be effective in fighting the virus.
PETER: Sarah, thanks so much for sitting down today. I do have some idea about how busy you are!
SARAH: Thanks for having me.
PETER: Before we get into what you’ve been up to lately, and because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I wanted to begin by noting that you did not wander around as a seven-year-old with pipettes and beakers, rocking a lab coat, dreaming that one day you’d be helping to cure disease. In fact, you have said that you didn’t like science as a kid, or at least in high school. What changed for you, and how?
SARAH: Well that’s a great question. I actually got my first undergraduate degree in English Literature and Women’s Studies. I didn’t take any science or math classes at all in my first round of college. And I was working at a bookstore, a small independent bookstore in Denver, Colorado, the Tattered Cover. And I had a number of people who I was training—I was in personnel, in the human resources department—who were in college, taking science classes. I was like, “These people seem a lot more interested in science—it seems a lot more interesting than anything I encountered when I was, you know, trying to memorize things,” which I’m horrible at. And so I think one of the things that happens is that—and maybe it’s not as bad anymore—but the high school educational system in science really becomes about memorizing a bunch of facts, and you really lose a lot of the wonder and amazingness of science, where you get to try to discover things and learn new things. It’s a constant joy to just do science. And I think that does a big disservice to a lot of students who maybe, like me, aren’t good at memorizing things, and instead just would love to learn things that are really interesting. And so I went back to school and I got a second undergraduate degree in chemistry.
PETER: So it was your friends’ enthusiasm for what they were thinking about, but really—but you went for chemistry?
SARAH: That’s good question! So I went back to school and I took a couple of classes. I took a general biology class, and a basic math—it might’ve been like trigonometry. I can’t even remember it, maybe algebra, and then chemistry. And it turned out that I had this absolutely fantastic chemistry instructor, who I’m still in touch with. And instead of being a bunch of memorization, which biology still was (in that class), it was just amazing, and I completely fell in love with it. And I said, “Wow, well, what else can you do with chemistry?” And I found myself on the path to finding myself with a second bachelor’s degree.
PETER: So it sounds like you certainly had an instructor that you connected with, and that’s huge. But do you remember—was there, I mean, was there a moment—I’m just thinking about this because to me, you know, I found a lot of chemistry more abstract, say, than biology or physics. I mean, was it an experiment, was it a property of something? Was it, you know, was there a flash at any point—literal or metaphorical?
SARAH: I think that it was a series of recognizing—like an understanding of how molecules are actually made, and what different things are made up of, and understanding the periodic table and how electrons are organized. And then from there, kind of going into biochemistry and physical chemistry, and really delving into all of these just amazing things. You know, experiments?—probably not. Just really a kind of a gathering of information that just fit in my head in terms of how the world works. And I had a lot of really great instructors. I was actually at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which is a university in the middle of Denver, and they do a lot of teaching. They have some tremendous professors there.
PETER: Well, it sounds like you answered a question that I was going to ask, which was—you know, because it sounds like you didn’t click with science so much in high school, or even in college the first time through—is there something that you’d recommend about changing or making sure is included in the teaching of science that wasn’t included in your experience of science? But it sounds like, as opposed to leaning heavy on memorization, which sometimes happens, to lean more into the wonder and the marvel of the natural world, and allow kids to experience that in some way.
SARAH: Right, and you know, it can be broken down into different areas for different age groups and things like that, where instead of memorizing a whole list of different things, you ask a question like, you know, simple things: Why is the sky blue? Why—you know, why, why … I can’t think of anything!
PETER: Well, I mean, Friend of HWI Alan Alda, from the Center for Communicating Science [at Stony Brook University], he has this famous Flame Challenge that began with this story of asking, “Well, how does fire work?” or “How does a flame work?” Like what’s the science behind that?—which of course is not actually, you know, an easy matter.
SARAH: It’s not an easy matter, but when you start talking to kids about that stuff—kids, adults—that actually doesn’t matter. I think that a lot of people get scared about science and go, “Oh gosh, that’s way too tough! Wow, you do some really hard things!” And it’s like, actually, I think there’s ways you can talk about the different things that are happening to help people. And I can say that often as scientists, that’s not something we’re trained to do, right? It’s not part of the natural training to learn how to talk to non-scientists about what we do—
PETER: What you need is more podcasts, and then you can practice!
SARAH: And then there’s practicing. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so we’ll do like one a month!
PETER: Don’t threaten me with a good time, Dr. Bowman! I’m right here. I don’t know that this is the definition of thinking like a scientist, but I remember this, reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark [Penguin Random House, 1995] which I think was mid-1990s, but it seems kind of prescient, talking about the danger of pseudo-science and things that pass themselves off [as science]. But at one point he talks about the disposition of scientists, or of great scientists, as having these things in common: one is a real sense of wonder, you know, this appreciation for the marvels and the mysteries of the natural world, but then also that’s tempered with—or in dialogue with—a real skepticism, asking questions about how that works and why that works. So I wanted to put this question to you before we get into some of your own work. You mentioned that you have this background in English—brava!—and Women’s Studies, so you were immersed in some disciplines that were, you know, pretty different in terms of the approach to subject matter, usually, the way that they’re engaged and taught, before you had this very increasingly extensive and intensive science training, and then experience as a practicing scientist. Is there anything to the idea of “thinking as a scientist,” as opposed to—because you’ve done it in different ways. You went through a certain part of your life as a pretty avowed non-scientist. Do you think there’s a way that you approach scientific problems differently? Is there a kind of discipline to it? Is there a rigor to it that’s different? Not that we don’t think rigorously over in English or, you know, in social sciences or other cross-disciplinary areas—but is there anything to that, or is that just one of those things people say?
SARAH: Again, it’s a really good question. I have to agree with the characterization of, you know, you have a sense of wonder and a sense of skepticism combined when you’re doing science, and in part that’s because you have ideas about how something should be working or how it might work. And so you come up with experiments to test that, and then you run the experiment. And many, many times what you discover is that it’s nothing like what you thought. And so you have to go back to the drawing board and go, “Okay, I have to reevaluate with this new information that I’ve gained from my experiment.” That’s kind of just a basic science approach to things. And I think it’s one of the things that is hard for people to think about in terms of scientists, because we’re supposed to be expert, to know what we’re talking about all the time, and a huge part of our discipline is that, okay, well, we know what we’re talking about, and then we’re going to test it. And then we’re going to figure out where we were wrong about those things. In terms of “Are the disciplines themselves very different?” … so, I’ll tell you a small story. When I was finishing my English literature degree, I had an opportunity to go to graduate school for English literature to continue studying this 18th-century novelist that I had been studying in college. So my first presentation at a conference was actually in English literature when I was an undergrad.
PETER: All right!
SARAH: So I thought about it and I was like, you know, the thing that would be really horrible about that for me is that—I read a lot and it’s very important to me—is that I didn’t want to have to just keep reading and essentially being very analytical and tearing apart the language and the reading, and so on and so forth. And so that’s where I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go work at a bookstore and figure out my life for a little bit,” which I did. And in reality, in science, it’s very similar. You are very analytical, you tear things apart—
PETER: You end up tearing up viruses!
SARAH: And in that case, for me it’s great because that’s getting at the details of how things work and how things are put together and how biology works and how the virus works with regards to the human host and things like that. So I found myself not wanting to do that in English literature and thrilled to be doing that in science. And so I’m not sure how different it really is once you’re at a research level. It’s just about would you find that fulfilling work to be engaged in, and you know, for science, for me, it is. For English, it would not have been, you know?
PETER: Yeah, I just found myself thinking as you were speaking about the number of musicians who are very fine musicians who have decided not to go into music professionally, because they love it so much and they don’t want to depend on it, you know, for their bread and butter.
SARAH: Right, and you don’t want to, you know, I guess, ruin it in some way.
PETER: Yeah, I understand. I think that’s a nice comparison. Because of course it’s dangerous—I think it’s just downright fallacious to think that there’s a different kind of, or you know, a higher level— There’s just maybe a slightly different critical capacity that somebody who’s a scholar of literature takes to texts and words and language, you know, because there is some analysis that goes along with that.
SARAH: Right.
[18:35]
PETER: To shift back to what you’ve been working on lately, which is SARS-CoV-2, I’ll first clarify, as you’ve clarified to me, that you’re not a medical doctor; you’re not a virologist per se. Rather you study—and help others to study—the underlying structures of proteins and other molecules that compose cells and viruses in this case, as well as the pharmaceutical drugs that interact with them. That’s fair to say?
SARAH: Yeah, I would say so.
PETER: I’m going to link in the show page for this episode to the recent feature in the Buffalo News about the work that you and your lab are doing. It’s attracted a great deal of well-deserved attention—but you should know this, including prompting some people who know I have done some work with Hauptman-Woodward to ask me what exactly your process is. So I have been proud to say that I’d be able to double check my story with you soon, but I wonder if I can make the unconventional interview move of telling you how I understand your process, based on conversations with you and tours of your lab from the “Before Times” [i.e., pre-pandemic] and asking you to stop me and gently disabuse me of my misunderstandings. I hope this won’t be come off as mansplaining so much as “laymansplaining,” which I don’t know is any better! You game?
SARAH: We can try that.
PETER: All right, professor, self-induced pop quiz for me! First, the virus itself that causes COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2—
SARAH: That’s correct!
PETER: And that’s named because it’s very similar to the virus that causes SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that had a global outbreak in 2003, as many of us remember.
SARAH: Yes.
PETER: CoV is short for coronavirus, which refers to the shape now very familiar to many of us, a scary little sphere covered in spikes. When I say “little,” I mean that if you could get these microscopic Death Stars to line up, it would take about 600 of them to match the width of a human hair.
SARAH: That’s right.
PETER: Not the length, which of course varies (especially with lockdown hairstyles)—but the width of one hair. Okay, and it’s those spikes on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that attach to a specific protein in our lungs, heart, and other organs, which allows the virus to hijack our body’s own biochemistry and begin replicating, spreading disease within us.
SARAH: So what happens is that the spike is able to interact with receptors in the human cells. And so you’re correct there. And that then enables—
PETER: You don’t say “hijack”?
SARAH: Oh no, you can say “hijack.” “Hijack” is fine. It hijacks. But the way it hijacks is by inserting itself then into the human cell. And so it inserts into the human cell and essentially starts opening up, releasing its RNA into the human cell. This might be too detailed, sorry!
PETER: This is ribonucleic acid.
SARAH: And then and then it’s essentially—
PETER: —like genetic material.
SARAH: It’s the genetic material, but it’s really primed— So the human host machinery, then—our cells—as soon as the thing is in us, will just start pumping out all the proteins that it needs to make copies of itself and send it out to more of your cells. And so it’s not that it’s not hijacking. It grabs onto that receptor that helps it pull itself into the cell and then it really hijacks the cellular machinery inside the human cell.
PETER: So you’ve been working on some non-infectious parts, right?
SARAH: Right.
PETER: So as small as the virus is, you’ve been working on some of the even smaller proteins that compose the virus.
SARAH: Right.
PETER: Again, this isn’t the infectious part—that’s happy. But these are critical to understanding how that virus works and the damage that it does.
SARAH: Right.
PETER: And so this is the part that you and your team do is to figure out how to get those proteins that make up the virus to form crystals.
SARAH: Right.
PETER: Which are a little like salt crystals, but much smaller. Right? They’re like the repeated structure of that same protein, but in this stable, regular form.
SARAH: Right.
PETER: And they’re regular enough that if you shoot an x-ray through them (or get some friends in Chicago who can do that for you), I guess—
SARAH: Right.
PETER: —then you get what are called diffraction patterns.
[23:38]
[VO]: SIDEBAR. Let’s break this concept down. Diffraction, etymologically a “breaking apart,” is a phenomenon involving a change in direction that can happen with any kind of wave—sound waves, water waves, light waves—that pass through an opening or around a barrier in their path. If you’ve watched river water flowing around big rock, or if you’ve been able to hear someone calling to you from behind a tree, you’ve experienced diffraction. Diffraction patterns are probably easiest to understand with visible light like certain lasers, because they’re, you know, visible. Also, lasers are a single-point light source, similar to a single sunbeam, if you can imagine that. Linked to the show page for this episode is a short YouTube video for physics teachers that demonstrates a diffraction pattern nicely. In the video, there’s a green laser pointer fixed onto an apparatus that holds the laser pointer in place. A foot or so away is a thin wire, also fixed onto an apparatus, vertically—the wire is straight up and down. Behind that is a large white screen of paper. When the laser is focused on the wire, what shows up on the paper screen is not what most of us would intuitively expect. For instance, I’d expect to see a vertical shadow from the wire. Instead, what shows up is evidence of interference patterns from light waves bending around the wire. What shows up on the screen is not a vertical shadow, but a dotted horizontal line: a diffraction pattern mapping where the shape of the waves coming around one side of the wire match the shape of the waves coming around the other side of the wire. This is called constructive interference, and results in the projected dots. Where the light waves don't match up, it’s called destructive interference, and the resulting image—or non-image—is the breaks in the dotted line. If you know the math, you can move backwards from this pattern to calculate the width of the wire.
PETER: And making the crystals is important, so—again, it took me a little bit to grasp this. So making the crystals is important because it repeats that protein many times over, because you wouldn’t get enough information, or it would be just too small, I guess, if you tried to shoot an x-ray at just one protein, if you could even find it, right? But if you have lots of them, then you get a big enough diffraction pattern or enough data to be able to do this next step.
SARAH: I’d say that’s correct. That’s accurate.
PETER: So, and this—I don’t think you do this part, right? [HWI colleagues in Chicago] study the diffraction patterns that are produced and they use math based on the understanding of like, how x-rays would interact with various materials.
SARAH: Right.
PETER: And then they kind of back-map from those patterns; using the math, they back-map it and say, “Okay, well, this is what this would look like, or probably looks like in 3D.”
SARAH: Right. So you can think about it like this. You get a diffraction pattern, and then you can use the mathematics, for instance, some of the equations that Herb Hauptman actually developed—
[VO]: Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman was the mathematician who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work applying mathematical methods to determine the molecular structure of complicated crystals, as Dr. Bowman is relating. Hauptman began working at Hauptman-Woodward in 1970, well before the Institute was renamed in his honor, and remained for 41 years, until his death at age 94. A decade later, he is still as much loved for his humanity as revered for his mind.
SARAH: —some of those equations, and then some others, because proteins are a little bit bigger and so have to have to be handled a little differently, and what you get out of kind of working with the data and the math is an electron density map. And then when you have this electron density map, you can build a model into that map, okay? And so that’s a little bit more of a scientific spin on it. And so what we do at the Crystallization Center, you’re right, is mostly the crystallization step. But in my work, I also send the crystals to a synchrotron, which is a big x-ray source, and then I take the data and actually work with it as well.
PETER: Oh you do. Okay. So you do some of that back-mapping that I was talking about, right?
SARAH: Yeah, exactly. Not for everything that comes into the Crystallization Center, but for my science projects.
PETER: Yeah, you’ve got lots and lots samples you’ve been working with. Now the samples of CoV-2 that you’ve been working with, they’ve been national—all across the country. Any international samples?
SARAH: For the SARS-CoV-2, we pretty much been working with samples from the U.S. We do more than just SARS-CoV-2 proteins, and we do have other international people sending samples for those as well.
PETER: My understanding is that there are about 500 coronaviruses that have been identified already, out of potentially 5000 that scientists believe likely exist. Is it reasonable to believe that the underlying structures of all coronaviruses are similar enough that the work that’s already been done will be a step forward in the unhappy circumstance of a future epidemic or pandemic caused by one of these more-novel coronaviruses?
SARAH: I think that any time we can do continued science work on these types of things, it’s really important and critical. So one of the reasons that we have been able to move so quickly—I know it doesn’t feel “quickly” for anybody who’s still in lockdown and not going out to eat and stuff like that, right?—but it’s been an incredibly quick process to get vaccines and therapeutics moved forward. And part of that is because of the research, some of the basic research on some of the basic structures that were done on the original SARS, as well as the MERS coronavirus. And those are two of the (now) three coronaviruses that are highly infectious and transmissible and deadly for humans. So there’s another four known coronaviruses that infect humans, but they just kind of cause common cold symptoms. And so the basic research is incredibly important. And I think one of the key things to come out of what’s happening right now is that we really do need to have funding and support for doing this type of work, even when we’re not in a pandemic, because it’s—I mean, all you have to do is look at what’s been happening over the past few decades, right? Where we have things like SARS, MERS, Zika, Ebola—and those last two are not coronaviruses, but they are infectious agents that cause severe disease, and now of course, with SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. These are things that are going to continue happen. And so anything we can do to gather information to help us understand the basic biology, the basic structures, how these things work, how we can stop them is absolutely important. You know, they are none of them so similar to each other that we can go, “Oh, great. We know exactly how to treat this once something arises.” And that’s coming out, even just with the SARS-CoV-2, we know a tremendous amount about this virus now: we know how it transfers. We know what a lot of the proteins look like. We know some drugs that might actually stop it from replicating once it infects a cell, once it infects a human. But you know, we’ve now got a couple of mutations that are coming up that may impact the ability of the various vaccines to actually stop it from causing an infection. So, you know, I think the basic science is absolutely critical and I hope that in some ways that our experience in the pandemic culturally, worldwide, helps us to really recognize the role of science and the role of structural biology in helping deal with these types of things. So yeah, that’s my soapbox!
PETER: I think it’s an important one to stand up on. And I just wanted to reiterate that when you say “basic science,” you’re talking about like the structural biology, in this case.
SARAH: Yeah. I collaborate now, in part because of the pandemic, I’m collaborating with a virologist who studies—she studies coronaviruses. And so you know, when people aren’t interested in it, then funding goes down and it becomes very hard to study these things. And so when I say basic science, I’m talking about definitely the structural biology, because that’s the basic science that I’m engaged in, but also how do viruses get transmitted? … the basic biology behind how do the aerosol droplets actually contain the virus? What’s the humidity required to actually let the viruses live? Because these are all things that would help in a future pandemic, which— You know, frankly, and I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we can anticipate other kinds of things happening. And so that is something that I think we should all, you know, be thinking about. “Okay. So what have we learned from this? And how do we move forward with that information?”
[35:27]
PETER: A couple questions about the culture of science. There has been unprecedented international focus and cooperation on COVID-19. What’s it like to be working in science at this time, by which I mean, how do you think about the pros and possible cons of redirecting so much energy toward one problem?
SARAH: Well, you know, I will say it’s an incredible time to be a scientist! You know, we are confronting something that is a major threat that everybody recognizes as a major threat—that maybe most everybody recognizes as a major threat. And so I think that there’s a real value placement culturally worldwide on scientists and what scientists are doing. To be in the community of scientists who are working together and collaborating and putting their work out, sometimes without everything being published yet and making sure that structures are available and results are available, is just incredible. So it’s really enabled, I think, an increase in open access and open science, which I think ultimately benefits science—because, you know, science can be a little competitive! And so, we’re in a period where instead of the competitiveness, there’s a lot of collegiality and helpfulness and working together. You know, obviously a lot of funding has been shifted and a lot of people’s projects— You know, I didn’t work on anything, I think, anything viral-related until around this time last year. And so it does shift things and it has shifted things, I think, for a lot of people. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. You sometimes start working on things because you have discovered it and you find it very interesting and you want to continue to work on it.
PETER: But that might be a nice example, which is to say, like the stuff you were working on before. It wasn’t viruses, but it wasn’t unimportant, right?
SARAH: Right.
PETER: You weren’t just doing it for fun. And so you’ve had to kind of table that for a year. You know, I don’t know. I’m just interested in thinking about like the possible downside of things that may have been neglected.
SARAH: No, I think it’s gonna, so—
PETER: We don’t know yet.
SARAH: We don’t know yet. Well, here are some things that we do know. I can say that there was a period where the only samples we were running were samples for SARS-CoV-2, and that was fine because pretty much everybody was kind of closed down. So graduate students and postdocs and scientists weren’t in their labs generating samples. So there was a tremendous stopping of a lot of stuff. And I think that people are getting back into their labs and have staggered schedules [for safety, to minimize personnel on site] and things like that. But when I talked to my colleagues who have graduate students and they packed up computers and sent them home to, you know, have their lockdown. And at that point, your science is completely interrupted. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the scientific community and to early-stage investigators who are really, you know—you only have a few years to get results and get funding and things like that before you have to move on, typically. And so it’s a stressful time, I think, for a lot of scientists.
PETER: Finally—thank you. I mean, I just wanted to say on behalf of somebody who’s part of a larger community benefiting from the work that you all are doing. You know I have some sense of how hard you in particular and your colleagues at HWI are working. It is not unappreciated. Finally, I wanted to ask about women in science. I know that have highlighted several of the outstanding female scientists, such as Professor Kara Bren at the University of Rochester and Professor Catherine Drennan at MIT, in whose labs you’ve worked, and who mentored you, to some extent.
SARAH: No, they definitely mentored me!
PETER: They definitely mentored you. I also know that one of my favorite facts about the high school program in bioinformatics at HWI led by Dr. William Duax is that the participants are usually 50/50, kids who identify as male and female. This reflects HWI itself, where women are well represented on the science staff—pretty much 50%— but still I believe worldwide, only about 30% of science researchers are women. Do you see the balance of this traditionally male-dominated field improving quickly enough, or is there something in particular you think would be helpful to see change?
SARAH: Is it changing fast enough? Of course not. You know, there’s definitely a leaky pipeline. This is for women. This is for underrepresented minorities. This is for people who identify in different ways. It’s a hard path to choose to be on. And it is, I think can be made harder by not having people around you who, you know, have had your similar experiences, right? And so what can be done? A lot. And some things are being d one by a lot of people. So here are some examples. We’ve had a somewhat lively discussion and I felt—this was before the pandemic actually happened—about, you know, well, what happens when you have a conference and you have a session and it’s all, you know, white men who are speaking? Okay. So what, how, wait, how does that even happen? And you know, there’s people who can be kind of—how do we say?—maybe defensive about that and who say, “Well, these are the top people in the field, and these are the people who are really well known.” And so I think, you know, one of the things that many people are trying to do is say, “Okay, great. We’re gonna make sure that we have as diverse a group of people speaking as we possibly can.” And, you know, I run a workshop—I’ve run it for the past three years—at Stanford Synchrotron Light Source. And every year we essentially bring in speakers, and last year it was virtual, which actually enabled a larger international participation. So that was great, but we always try to have obviously various gender parity, as well as early-stage investigators, people who work at government labs, people who work in industry, people who are at major research institutes, people are primarily undergraduate institutes, at various career stages doing a variety of different types of experiments. And what it’s actually done is generate this really engaged and interactive group that I think maybe otherwise wouldn’t have come together and started talking in the ways that it has over the past few years. And so there are things that can be done that don’t take tremendous effort, but they do take some effort.
PETER: Some thoughtfulness.
SARAH: Some thoughtfulness about how to do it. So I think that the pandemic, by all kinds of reports, is potentially going to be difficult for, you know, women with children, who typically take more of the childcare burden. And so, you know, if you are on a tenure clock and having to produce a certain amount of stuff and your lab’s shut down, you can’t do any work. And you have to care for your kids instead of sending them to school. It can be a tough thing.
PETER: There are staggering stats about the disparity and people who have needed to come out of the workforce in order to take care of kids—almost entirely women.
SARAH: Right. So like I said, it’s a really great time to be a scientist, but it’s also—you know, really, we’re not going to know what the ultimate impact of things is in terms of the pandemic for some time, and I think in some ways that will depend on what kind of various institutional responses are toward the different kind of disparities that occur.
[45:17]
[VO]: That’s a wrap for today’s show! Thanks so much to Dr. Sarah EJ Bowman for taking time to talk about her lifesaving work. Point of Learning has recently joined the Patreon family, where you can show your support for this show about what and how and why we learn—from theatre to leadership, psychology to poetry to structural biology—for as little as a dime a day. Check out the various membership tiers at patreon.com/pointoflearningpodcast. For this episode, Patreon members will be able to view a few more-technical segments that may be of interest on the Patreon Point of Learning page. This episode has its own YouTube companion, replete with supplementary visuals, so be sure to visit and subscribe to the Point of Learning YouTube channel. You can also find links to the transcript and other related materials on the show page for this episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks too to DJ Sluggy for special music featured throughout this episode. Sluggy is a versatile creator based in the Denver area who was pleased to contribute to this episode showcasing another remarkable woman who discerned her mission in Denver. I am proud to share that once upon a time, Sluggy was my student for 11th- and 12th-grade English. Finally, thanks to you for listening and subscribing, rating and reviewing this show. If you can think of just one person who’ll enjoy this episode as much as you did, please share! It will mean most coming from you. A member of the Lyceum consortium for education podcasts, Point of Learning is written, edited, mixed, and produced in Sunny Buffalo, New York by me. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn!
