News & Events Alumni Panel: Science Center Celebration

- And now it's my great pleasure to introduce our trustee, our friend and an eminent biologist who used to be President of Princeton University, Shirley Tilghman.

- Welcome to this extraordinarily exciting moment for Amherst College, the dedication of this absolutely beautiful building. I'm delighted to be here with four distinguished scientists who are Amherst graduates and we're gonna have a conversation about science today, a little bit about their experiences at Amherst but we're going to really focus on some of the issues that colleges and universities and students and faculty are going to face going forward. So I'm going to introduce them. Let's see, if I'm going to introduce you in order right to my left is Julie Segre who is a member of the class of 1987, graduated in mathematics, a trustee emeritus of the University at the college and is a chief and senior investigator in the Translational and Functional Genomics branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute where she also heads the microbial genomics section and you can tell that from her skirt. Julie published the first topographical maps of human skin bacterial and fungal diversity. Her lab also develops genomic tools to track hospital-acquired infections of multi drug-resistant organisms. After graduating from Amherst, Julie received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Next is Kim Leary, class of 82 at Amherst with a degree in psychology. Kim is currently a trustee of the college and is an associate professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School and an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. There, she directs the enabling change program teaching leadership skills to prepare public health professionals for synergistic engagements with complex problems. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and a master's of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. Next is Brad Hager class of 72 here at Amherst. He is the Cecil and Ida Green professor of her sciences at MIT where he also serves as co-director of MIT Center for carbon capture, utilization and storage and associate director of the Earth Resources Laboratory. He has a expertise on tectonic earthquakes in regional fault systems as well as deformation and earthquakes induced by reservoir production. He received his PhD from Harvard University and last but far from least is Harold Varmus, a member of Amherst class of 1961. He is a cancer geneticist and Nobel prize-winning scientist. He was the 14th director of the National Institutes of Health and subsequently, the 14th director of the National Cancer Institute. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University professor of medicine at the wild Cornell Medical College and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. After Amherst where he received his degree in English, he earned an MA in English from Harvard University and an MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. So please join me in welcoming. So the five of us have already had a conversation together around the phone prior to this discussion and what became very clear at the end of the discussion is how much the dedication of this building has elicited in them thoughts about their times at Amherst. So I'm gonna start with my friend Harold and ask him how did your Amherst degree in English literature lead directly to a Nobel Prize in medicine?

- Well needles to say Shirley, is this working? There's no direct line from an Amherst education to Stockholm but so there'd be a lot more Nobel laureates from Amherst College if that were true but the notion that somebody from Amherst would win a Nobel Prize or become widely known in science does run counter to the received narrative that most people carry in their heads that people who do very well in the advanced sciences have been trained at Caltech or MIT or research intensive universities and indeed, my own anecdotal experience is consistent with the counter narrative. My partner in science, Mike Bishop graduated from Gettysburg College. The Nobel Prize winners I've known best, people like Howard Temin and David Baltimore went to Swathmore, others went to other small colleges but this has also been subjected to a bit of study by our friend Tom Cech, the former head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a graduate of Grinnell who's done a study published in Daedalus Magazine in 1999 showing that actually if you look achievements in science that you find among PhD winners, members of the National Academy and so forth, a proportion equal to that of research universities having graduated from the leading liberal arts colleges. So there's documentation one has to then ask but why is it? Now I know during our conversation we're gonna talk a lot about the virtues of studying the arts and humanities for being articulate and good writers and wise judges of evidence but I think there were a few other things I'd like to point out very briefly. I know you don't want people to speechify and I won't but just briefly a couple of things that are important. One is the size of the place. Because this place was small, I knew a lot of people in lots of different disciplines. I knew faculty who taught courses in departments I never took courses in like classics and others. One simple example of how that influenced me after I graduated in English, was on my way to graduate school, I traveled in Europe with a man named Arthur Landy who became later a distinguished professor at Brown, and member the National Academy of Sciences and because I was traveling with him, I went to the first biochemistry meeting to be held in Russia and a very long time, this is 1961 and was exposed to his excitement at hearing the news of the solving of the genetic code. Later when I was much less excited by my graduate work in English, I remembered that that thrill of that art was experiencing and that was a connection that mattered. The second thing that I found in my experience at Amherst that I think is relevant is the feeling of fluidity, the ability to move from field to field and indeed that sense accounted for my own prolonged adolescence having extended my college career by going to graduate school and going to medical school, getting clinical training and then at the age of 28 actually being a laboratory scientist and I think encouraging that is important. The third thing has to do with the symbolism of what colleges do and that's indeed what this event is about today. The symbolism of having a building like this that shows the commitment of a small liberal arts college to the Natural Sciences. Now I'm not going to be speechifying but I can't resist pointing out and quoting from one short story by an esteemed writer of science related fiction named Andrea Barrett who teaches at a rival institution called Williams College and who's written a moving story about the graduates of a small upstate New York College who happened to be on a boat that is destroyed as they're returning them from a genetics meeting in Edinburgh just after the outbreak of World War II and in the course of recounting the history of one of the protagonists of this story, his college experience is briefly recounted and he's described as having arrived at his college room, found a roommate who didn't want to sleep next to the window giving him a view out the window and the view out over the quad past the beaches and the benches and the flower beds to the long brick building with lime stone lintels, the Hall of Science, the reason he'd come, this was his place, this and no other. I recommend the story to you.

- Great, so the other three of you of course did study science here at Amherst. So as you think about what Harold just said, how did studying science at Amherst affect how you thought about where you were gonna go next? Who wants to start?

- Heading down the road I'll take that on. So the courses I took here were just seminal in my development as a scientist, in particular the courses that I took in philosophy, the philosophy of science in particular was a fantastic course that made me go every time I encountered something, question what's the link between observation and reality and so I've made a career out of questioning other people's assumptions about the link between observations and reality. The other thing I want to say is picking up on your point about the symbolism of this place. It's a little disturbing for me today. I missed the comparable dedication to the Mural Science Center but I was here when the first group of students including me moved in and everything that's been said about this place we said about that place. I assume it was said about this place because I wasn't in the equivalent meeting and I'm glad to have a chance to be here. And picking up on what Biddy said, I'm pretty sure that some of you are are in my bedroom from my junior year because that structure is no longer here but anyway, having an office in the Mural Science Center overlooking the Holyoke range, part of the life of the mind with this elite group of physics professors and elite group of students made me feel appreciated in this college full of English majors and AM study majors that indeed I was doing something worthwhile. So its symbolism is important.

- So I guess to sharpen my question for both Kim and Julie is did it matter to you that you were at a liberal arts college as opposed to at a place where everybody was studying science?

- Well I would say that my experience as a psychologist and as a psychology major at Amherst was extraordinary for a couple of reasons. One, when you think about a discipline like psychology, it's pretty broad. It can include clinical psychology, social psychology, people who are specializing in particular constituencies like adolescents but also neuroscientists, biologists and if you just walked down the road a little to the English department or Black Studies, you would also see representations of psychological research, psychological frameworks in the way we approached literature and in the way we tried to understand the human condition. So for me, the experience of being at Amherst and studying psychology but also just generally, being interested in human development and human potential and also human tragedy quite frankly as a clinician, there was just a natural movement across boundaries and because Amherst was a small and intimate college, the opportunity to get to know faculty across the different sub disciplines of psychology and across different departments was really extraordinary and just yesterday I ran into Buffy Aries in this very building and it was one of those wonderful moments of the both the past the present and the future of this building coming together and that's really what my experience of Amherst was like.

- For me, it was tremendously important to be in a school with the excellence of the faculty here and in particular, I think we'll get to this later but I would say my senior advisor under whom I wrote my senior thesis taught me how to write and that and I of course was taking English classes and political science but to write scientifically and not have it be technical is something that has really served me and I think enabled me to be not just a scientist but a leader in science because I understand why am I phrasing this question and we really worked on it and it was required to be embedded where everyone else was posing those questions so crystal clear but you had to integrate that into your scientific approach that it was not separated from the rest of a liberal arts education. The way in which I thought of myself as a scientist was as a person who was a liberal arts first and foremost within that then I was a math major. But I had to state my hypothesis and formulate it and write these 50-page math thesis which I then compiled on the VAX of Seeley Mudd but I learned how to write in tech which has also served me well but it was about really this full integration and that was particularly important to me. My father's a high energy theoretical physicist and I would see people kind of saying, oh you're a physicist and then this sort of glaze over of like you must be smart. I think it really compelled me to want to be a scientist where people would then say oh and what do you work on and you know and actually try to engage and have science be part of how we talk about our lives.

- That wonderful answer leads me to point out that when I think maybe all but Julie attended Amherst. Every student was required to take at least one science course and as we now know, there is an open curriculum now at Amherst and so it is possible luckily not many of the students actually take advantage of this but it is possible to graduate having not taken a course in science. Is that a mistake? Are students sort of missing an opportunity to learn a new way of thinking that perhaps is not being represented in the rest of the curriculum? Brad you come from a University where that would be impossible to accomplish. MIT is not gonna let that happen.

- No MIT does not let that happen despite being a school in electrical engineering we insist that all of our students take physics and math and chemistry, biology and humanities and social sciences and for the obvious reasons, these students are going to enter into society and should be well educated. So I think it's very important for Amherst students to understand in a very fundamental way science and math. I kind of look at kind of three levels of this problem. Everybody should understand the scientific method. It's an iterative approach to truth. We make hypotheses, we make predictions from these hypotheses, we test them against observations and in this case we end up with absolute truth. Either the hypothesis fails usually or it works and so we have an objective standard of reality and facts matter but there's a second level which is a kind of a community effort and that is that we all go through the peer-review process. We can't say anything we want, we have to run these things by our colleagues, they go out for peer review and they are either accepted or rejected as being reasonable hypotheses. And then taking that up on a third level, I'm sitting here with a number of people from biology and I am biologically challenged. I didn't take a biology course while I was here. They are all highly esteemed and highly honored but I can't evaluate them. How should I trust anything that they say? How should you trust anything that we say? Well because we're all members of this enterprise where we're not just speaking here as individuals with our individual truths. We're part of groups that have gone through peer review and so I trust these people because they have gone through the kind of cultural experience that I have in terms of being vetted. So I think it's very important for Amherst students not to just learn at the low level of a scientific method but also to understand how scientists as a whole function and how we arrive at scientific truths if 98% of the scientists have a point of view on one side of a question, two percent have a point of view on the other side of the question, they should have the maturity to know that no matter what question you ask, you're gonna find at least two percent who give the wrong answer.

- Kim it looked like you wanted to respond as well.

- Sure I currently teach in a doctoral program right now that's aimed at developing the next generation of public health leaders. So our doctoral students take a curriculum in public health, the science of public health as well as a parallel curriculum in leadership management, communication and strategy and increasingly what we're finding is that the kind of problems our students are interested in solving and I think this is the case with Amherst students as well, there is no one single discipline that can provide the answer or the pathway. One needs to have expertise as well as conversational capacity across different disciplines and to know what you can trust, what are the reasonable sources of information but also how to build those bridges and increasingly in the world we're in right now, I think it's incumbent upon scientists to also develop the capacity to speak to the public and to think about novel ways and accessible ways for very complex ideas to enter into everyday dialogue. One reason that health policy is often something that people do have strong opinions about it's because it's a kind of kitchen table issue. People talk about it over the kitchen table and I think there are many critical scientific issues that could have that same status if there was a greater pathway for people to be able to participate in the conversation and feel that their ideas might also receive uptake by scientists who were actually conducting research.

- Harold.

- Yeah I resonate with the comments of my colleagues here. I'd like to just add a couple of simple points. One is that I know it's fashionable to say that in all areas of the Academy, we should be doing the same thing that is compiling the evidence, evaluating it, making legitimate decisions whether we're trying to understand what a poet means or whether we're trying to understand the political process but I do think there's something different about science. The Natural Sciences, Natural Philosophy that is trying to understand the nature of things or the things of this world whether we're talking about Lucretius or Richard Wilbur that we're trying to cope with what we receive when we end up on this earth, the material things that are subject to a process that is similar in principle to the way we approach other kinds of learning but different because we're looking at things. The second thing that concerns me is the notion of demystifying science, making science understandable is the kind of process that everybody's engaged in. I give a course these days at Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, the City University of New York in which a mixture of undergraduates are there to talk with me on a weekly basis about the scientific enterprise. Why the government pays for it, why it's important to people, what it contributes to society, what problems it has within it that are similar to problems and other disciplines. I think being able to understand the nature of the scientific enterprise is a fundamental thing which you don't get unless you actually engage in it by taking courses as an undergraduate.

- Just coming back to who was I as a student when I started here and what is the scientific process. For me in high school science was rote memorization and it was memorizing genus species and I really am glad when I came to Amherst, I took science classes and found out that science was a process of discovery and that we were trying to understand a process and that there was knowledge that still needed to be gained and we needed people to go into science and try to understand these natural processes and that's what hooked me as a scientist was this participatory nature that we need to discover. We need these breakthrough discoveries and can be a part of this and that again, comes to where the honors thesis is really important because you have to design your own experiments and you really actively engage in that process and that's what really hooked me as a scientist and it was quite different than what I had learned in high school. So I think it is great if you say to kids, even if you didn't love this in high school, come try this again because here, it is going to be potentially a very different experience

- And I want to come back to the role that the senior thesis plays in just a minute but I want to just follow up this line of discussion for a minute and sort of flip the coin a little bit and that is to say that we are living right now in a country where it appears that the level of science literacy is shockingly low. I think surveys routinely show that 40% of people who respond to surveys claim that they do not believe in Darwin's theory of natural selection and in evolution. We have a growing population of people in this country who will not vaccinate their children because of a fear that the vaccines cause autism, despite the fact that there have been many scientific studies that show that that is not the case and I think Brad has already alluded to one of the most shocking failures of scientific literacy which is the fraction of people who despite scientific consensus, do not believe that climate change and global warming is happening. So the question I want to pose to the four of you is the question of whether we as scientists are doing enough to broadly educate the public about these scientific issues, about the nature of discovery about what it means... The difference between a theory, a hypothesis and a proof for example. Are we doing enough or is it even our responsibility? Harold you spend a lot of time thinking about this.

- I do and I think there's no doubt that we are not doing enough and hence the results we're seeing and that's we're not doing the right thing because we haven't been very clever about defining what we mean by scientific literacy. It clearly does not mean knowing a lot about all fields. I know a little bit about Brad's field but not a whole lot and he's reciprocated saying he doesn't know a lot about ours but I think the point that you're getting at is the critical and that is the nature of the scientific process, the way in which you go about getting information that approximates the best we know about natural phenomena, the ability to learn how to how to approach evidence and to know what the limits of scientific understanding are. These are the things we need to teach. It's often difficult to do that. When I go out on the hustings to try to tell people about the science that I do, my colleagues do. They say well how when are we going to cure cancer and that's not teaching scientific literacy and so I think it's time for us to reevaluate what it means to try to inculcate a sense that the public understands what scientists do. We don't really transmit that in effective ways. It's not enough to send your graduate students out to tell their neighbors what's going on at their medical center. It's a bigger problem than that.

- So say that one of the challenges is the incentive system within universities as well. Certain kinds of academic work is valued in a very different way and public education is not really at the top of that list. So at Harvard over the last couple of years, there's been a real effort to think about what it means to engage scientists at an early stage of their careers during graduate training in thinking about civic engagement and to build that into the process of communicating their research passions and their research findings. But again, until some of the incentives in the academic world are aligned with that, it's going to be difficult for that to be other than a side project or an incidental part of the work that people do.

- One other point here and that is it's hard to avoid preaching to the converted. So if Julie is advertised as being on the podium in Bethesda, her colleagues will turn up, other people who are already scientifically inclined will turn out. The real problem resides in elementary and junior high schools and even high schools because the teaching of science is not at the quality level it should be in those schools in fact we don't pay teachers enough to get people who know science to work in the public education system and that's where the solution is not going to be achieved by having us go out and give occasional talks to the public. We have to do more and pay more attention to the question of how we educate our young people.

- There was a very well-known and effective study that was conducted about now I guess 10-15 years ago called Rising Above the Gathering Storm which was a report from the National Research Council about the future of science and the role it plays in our national well-being and one of those shocking statistics in that was that 67% of physics teachers in high schools across America do not have degrees in physics and the substantial number had never taken physics in college. So if you wonder about why the level of science literacy is problematic, there's one place where you can begin. Brad you were gonna add something.

- Yeah I want to take a slightly different point of view. We're talking as the elders of the tribe here about what we can do to get more converts but there's another place where Amherst can make a real difference and I think does make a real difference and I'll speak from personal experience. I have a daughter who was a science major here. She was a joint major in geology and in English. She is now teaching English in a high school in North Woods, Maine, an area which is in the Rust Belt, the paper industry has been destroyed and what she told me is that the critical thinking that she learned as a scientist, she is passing on to her English class. So things like how do you evaluate a source of information. And so this is the way that you know we as scientists can leverage our scientific capabilities by having students which Amherst is pretty good at and maybe we can encourage these students to go and influence the next generation. So in education we can make a real difference that maybe as scientists per say, we can do.

- Yeah so I want to come back to the senior thesis. When we had our conversation on the phone, I was not at all surprised when all four of my colleagues here, told me that they had done a senior thesis here at Amherst and it had been a really transformative experience. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that experience but I'd also like you to reflect on whether if it's such an important experience, why don't we require all students to do a senior thesis? Julie do you want to start? So you can start with the first part.

- Yeah I mean... The faculty are really special here. I remember coming back and having lunch with a bunch of faculty. I think I had come back to give some talk in some someone's class I'm just hearing them talk about the students and they all knew the students by first names and so and they cared about these students and they knew what classes they had taken and what they were gonna recommend for the next semesters. So I don't think it's absolutely required to write a senior thesis because the level of caring here of the faculty it's not that you have to commit to being in this person's lab and only then will they know your name and who you are. It happens. It's inculcated into the entire process but I guess from that, I was obviously slightly terrified of writing a senior thesis in math but I really wanted to do it. I was fortunate actually to write with David Cox. I would have been very happy to write with Dan Vallerman too and loved Norton Starr who was my advisor. All of these people they mean so much to you that I don't think you've needed as a way to have a faculty member invest in you. It's really about your own intellectual development and are you at a point at Amherst when you want to do that. And so I do think it is something that should be strongly encouraged and maybe there even in some way that we could have some sort of capstone project if you didn't because it was a squeeze. If in my junior year I thought oh really, I've been committed to being a math major but really I like this biology and I need to take these film studies classes, so maybe this squeeze is putting that as all of your time as a senior and maybe that's something that you could do at a different time but maybe there's some intermediate of a capstone if we want to say because I think it is about the intellectual development and having someone who commits to that with you.

- So my experience with my thesis was probably a little unusual. My dad was a graduate student as I was growing up so he got his PHD when I was about 10 or 11 so we kind of grew up with his dissertation as a additional sibling in the family. So when I came to Amherst, the idea of being able to do a thesis was kind of exciting for that reason. There was already a pathway but my road into doing a thesis was on the one side I was very interested in clinical psychology even before I really fully understood what that was about and was really lucky enough to take several classes in child psychology here in psychopathology and then even a course in psychotherapy. Fortunately they didn't send us out to do therapy but they did actually provide an opportunity to intern at the Northampton State Hospital. So as an undergraduate, I had an early experience of being able to see what a health system was like from the inside out and to spend time weekly over the course of a semester with people who had profound psychiatric difficulties. What I learned from that experience though was that despite the challenges that they had, each of the patients at the hospital had a perspective or a take on the kind of problems they had and also in the kind of care that they were receiving. Now, we codify that in terms of the patient's experience of care. The second experience that I had at Amherst before I even got to the thesis was serving as a research assistant in professor Lisa Raskin's neuroscience lab. I had a tiny tiny role in the research that she was doing. I helped to prep the animals and prep the the conditions for the experiment and the surgeries and so forth but what I learned from that was a kind of precision about another field about the importance of looking at a problem from a different perspective. In this case she was working on hunger and appetite and also to be a respectful steward of the animals that we were working with in the lab. By the time it came to do a thesis, I worked with the clinical psychologist, professor Harp Copeland and my thesis was I think one of the first qualitative theses in the psychology department that included a very large qualitative research interview study of patients with psychiatric illness. At the same time Lisa Raskin and some of the other neuroscientists, I engaged with them regularly talking about the project even though it was outside their particular area of expertise and they kept me honest around what I would be able to learn from a qualitative study and what I actually was unable to learn and I think it was that experience back and forth that was absolutely critical, certainly set me up well for graduate school and for my PhD but I think it was also the experience that Julie was mentioning that has informed every bit of mentorship and teaching that I do now.

- [Shirley] Brad.

- So I want to echo what Julie said about the importance of mentoring in this very small college. I had a very close relationship with my thesis adviser, Joel Gordon, did an experimental thesis. Another thing is that I learned that doing experiments is extremely difficult. I had read the scientific literature on the phenomenon that I was investigating. I assembled my experimental apparatus, turned on the electronics and what I saw in the oscilloscope had absolutely no resemblance to what I expected. So I learned that you know that going between again, observations and reality is very difficult and also that I should become a theoretical scientist, not an experimental one. You asked about whether theses should be required. For me it was a great thing. I have a daughter who was a physics major at Swarthmore and is now on a successful career path because she's in evolutionary biology. So she's a biological scientist at Harvard. She did not do a senior thesis. Instead, she did research in two different distinct areas. Astronomy and geophysics but more importantly for her, she spent the time that a thesis would have required doing radio journalism. Swarthmore developed a program called Wars Radio where they put together broadcasts looking at the the war in Afghanistan but this experience for her learning communication skills was far more important to her ultimately than what she would have learned. She's a mature lady and she can pick up the thesis research later.

- I'm gonna take a slightly different tack on this problem. Ever since we've had our discussion on the phone, I've been thinking about why my thesis was so important to me and I mentioned at the time that it allowed me to have a close relationship with Bill Pritchard who's still an active member of the English faculty I'm happy to say and it allowed me to dine out for many many years on discussions of Charles Dickens and The Murder of Evil, a title that I'm sure my wife is cringing in the audience but you'll hear more about but as I thought about it, one of the things that really struck me as an important byproduct of the thesis experience, was an experience which I have to say parenthetically I don't think everybody has to elect. I think you can have close relationships with faculty and learn all these other things without doing a thesis but I remember initially when I said I was gonna do a thesis that the way I thought about doing a thesis was to say am I gonna do with thesis on Shaw or Chaucer or Dickens or Shakespeare and I chose Dickens, got some advice from Dan Mott and some other folks and I sat up in my room on Valentine Hall and I read many long novels and it was I really doing a thesis at that one. I was reading long novels and then going down to Valentine Hall and having lunch. I really was doing a thesis I had developed a question. I read a lot of novels, I noticed that the good characters were weak, that the interesting powerful characters were evil and yet things worked out in a good way in these novels. How did that happen? What was the narrative device that allowed good to conquer evil when evil was stronger than good? And how would that play out in Dickens' life and I learned from that that the scholarly experience is one of reading a lot and thinking but you don't think productively until you have a question and I find this true in my own life now as a faculty member with students and postdocs who are trying to do experiments. What is your question I say to them You can measure RNA levels and 15 different cell lines. What is the question and that is what drives knowledge and that is what makes theses work.

- I think that's a wonderful description. I want to turn a little bit to thinking about this wonderful new building and I think Bob in his comments mentioned that this is one of the rare examples of a science building that is really meant to accommodate a broad range of sciences as opposed to a single science. I think we heard I think from both Andy and Biddy at one point in their comments and I believe this deeply and I have told my friend John Middleton this on many occasions that I don't think you can be a great liberal arts college if you are not taking science seriously. If science isn't sort of at the center and integral to at least a good fraction of the curriculum. But a word that that has come up occasionally in our conversation and I want to explore it further which is this sense that another reason why you would never want to now have sciences in utterly separate entities is because science has become so interdisciplinary. And so Julie I know that you work in a field that's extraordinarily interdisciplinary. In fact I think all of you do, truth be told. What does it take to really function well in an interdisciplinary environment and what advice would you give all of these people at Amherst as they think about taking this building that is designed to be that way and really making it happen?

- So the first part... So interdisciplinary research to me and I remember I asked this question of Inger Damon when she got her honorary degree and I said she's the director at CDC of the Ebola Response Team. I said what ILS class is your career and that's sometimes how I think of it for myself. If I was assembling this, what would be the ILS the first-year seminar. Which faculty would I need to bring together and how do I think in that sense I would echo back to Mary Catherine Bateson and Composing a Life where she talks about a life as not just a linear path but as a patchwork quilt. And so you cannot achieve that without having tremendous domain expertise because being a generalist is great but if you're gonna really function in an interdisciplinary team, there has to be some part of it that they say oh we can't have this meeting without Julie because we're gonna need to talk about this part and I think that's what I really come at this. It is thinking about what is my domain expertise but then where can I reach and yeah, I'm in a field that's very technology driven. I actually love that part of it. I love organizing large data sets but it's the quantitative component of it that I really love doing that part of the analysis and I know incredibly well when the technology is going to move what I can now do but I need to have the conversations mostly with my clinical colleagues about what are the questions that you've been having in hospital outbreaks that we could, I have this new technology. Let's do this. Let's get there before anyone else gets there because we know how to communicate with each other and understand each other's strengths.

- Yeah it certainly strikes me the vocabulary becomes really important if you're going to build interdisciplinary teams that can speak in a fluid way amongst one another.

- Yeah but it's like an organic chemistry class. You go down to sort of synthesize down to basic principles. So for myself as a math major, I love logic but that means I can work really well with a hospital epidemiologist because she is asking the question what is the likelihood that these two patients came in carrying the same multi drug resistant organism versus the probability that there was a transmission in my hospital? That's a mathematical question that is... And so there are a lot of ways that if we really understand what are the questions people are asking that translates and she may see that as a word problem and I may see it as a Sudoku puzzle but it's the same thing.

- So Harold you spend a lot of time trying to stimulate that kind of work both at the NIH and the NCI. I mean how are you thinking about it today?

- I have an instantaneous withdrawal reaction to the use of a buzzword like interdisciplinary. Nevertheless as Julie and I know, it is an integral part of the way we do science together but the college has to think about is how do you promote the right kind of interdisciplinary work and the first thing you do is you get people to know each other and get them side by side in a building like this where they can mingle and feel that if you were biologist, you can find a nice person who's approachable as a computational biologist but this can never work as a top-down command as you can't say you're all in this building, now you've got to be interdisciplinary. So what works is having questions, scientific issues that can only be solved by people working together and like Julie and perhaps different domain. I find that my need for statisticians, for computational biologists, informatics people, folks who build certain kinds of devices from looking at mutations and large number of cancer samples working with clinicians, these are things that happen. One of the things that I find reassuring is that in some sense, the narrow definition of a discipline is unraveling a bit and a lot of people who might have thought of themselves as a computational scientist who can write software suddenly realize they're really bioinformatics. that they're using their computational skills to interpret biological problems and those of us who do cancer genetics begin to think of ourselves with people who know something about the computational process even though we can't write the software. So we become overlapping, not so much colliding disciplines but I think it is the underlying issues that can only be solved by a multiplicity of approaches that eventually leads to the kind of work that we all want to see happen.

- Brad what about Earth Sciences?

- Well I think Earth Sciences are like other sciences but I want to make a comment beyond Earth Sciences. I don't think this is a very deep and profound question. I think it's it's... It's the field of--

- Sorry. I'll try to do better.

- Attack the moderator. I'm sorry I didn't mean to be... We're scientists. We are all very curious. We're natural scientists, we're curious about a lot of things. Sometimes we have things that get in our way of exploring all the things that we're interested in but if you put us in an environment where we can see into each other's offices and we run into each other at the coffee machine, we're gonna start talking and you don't need to worry about how to make this happen by hiring these people and providing this environment. It's going to happen so that's that's why I think we don't need to worry about this question in particular. I think it's just going to...

- What you don't want to do as someone who ran a government granting agency, you don't want to say here's a grant for disciplinary work because then what happens is the people write a grant proposal that will satisfy your fairly immature criteria. They'll get the money and they may not do what you want them to do so I think, it's got to be driven underneath from people interacting from questions being raised, not by saying we've got to have interdisciplinary programs.

- Yeah I think we're in agreement This is a grassroots movement. Not something you impose from the top down.

- I think from the perspective of students, we may sometimes assume that there's confidence that people have in their curiosity and sometimes that's the case but I also think that part of the job of teaching and mentoring is to take that question that may not be fully formulated yet, that would result in the kind of question that Harold's talking about but is the start of something and help students to develop that confidence in their own curiosity and to follow that where it leads hopefully to other people to other disciplines and so forth. The second thing is and I may be a little less sanguine about this is that I think there are also important skills of collaboration that we sometimes assume people have and sometimes we dismiss them a bit by calling them soft skills when they're in fact the sort of smart skills that are necessary for teams to function and for people to manage creative tension well. So from a student's point of view, I think that there is something about being able to trust your curiosity and there's also something about learning how to collaborate with people and learning how to manage tension and disagreement in productive ways that I think is really critical to being able to do the kind of science that folks are talking about here.

- You're raising a very important point that's not gonna be obvious to the people outside of this business. In my own field for example, we need statistics, we need bioinformatics. Sometimes people who have those skills and bring that discipline to the problem are not given adequate levels of credit. People who come in and give you statistical verification of what you think the answer is. It was your question, your experiment. That's got to change and that the skills of collaboration are a vital element in all this in allocating proper credit and that's gonna bring us to another issue, you want to bring up of how teams work.

- Yes how do teams work and do we have the right incentives in place in our scientific laboratories and universities and colleges that would encourage people to think about doing asking a really exciting question that's going to require a large team in order to be solved. Harold you've run an institution, Memorial Sloan-Kettering that presumably, was very interested in setting up the incentives well.

- I think this is a really deep issue right now and because it's not just a place like Memorial Sloan-Kettering, any academic institution now has the challenge of hiring, promoting, honoring people based on their individual contributions and we haven't yet in fact I would say many of us especially in the biomedical world. I'm not sure how it is in your world Brad but we are too dependent on what are perceived as the accolades that indicate that somebody's succeeding, publishing a paper in nature, being the first author or the last author. We have not learned to incorporate team science into our evaluation process for academic success. I know my colleagues in the audience, Peter Barrack is in the English department here and he is of course appalled when he hears about the way in which promotions and appointment committees work in the sciences in the institutions I've been associated with because someone who's a humanist or an artist is evaluated on their individual contributions, the books that they written, the arts they've created is evaluated by a group of peers. When we sit down in certain institutions to evaluate who's doing well, we say how many first author papers in nature and science have been written and that is the wrong way to go and that's work that we as a scientific community need to deal with if we're going to practice what we do preach which is that teams are important.

- So I want to give the audience time to ask their questions but I want to end with a question that I think even Brad will agree is a good question.

- [Brad] Give it a try.

- And it's actually a serious question which is that the scientific enterprise has been slow to welcome in women and people of color and it strikes me at Amherst, in a community that has done so much to create a broadly diverse student body and is working very hard to create an equally diverse faculty and staff that this is an issue that Amherst could very well lead in and I'm just curious how you're thinking about what Amherst could be doing to ensure that when a group is sitting at the next Science Building, we're not still bemoaning the fact that women and persons of color are underrepresented.

- This is an area where Amherst is leading and I think this is a real grassroots effort but it really comes out of the amazing students that we have here. So I've learned a lot from the H STEM class that is being taught here at Amherst which is being human in STEM, science, technology, engineering, math and it reminds me of a small class that I did as an independent study when I was here exploring women in science but they've now formalized it and talked it is a combination and it really came out of Amherst students experiences what is it to be a science major and really how do you balance this juxtaposition where these science classes are perceived to be very competitive and you come in and how do you bring your own experience to that, wanting to be competitive but oftentimes we're still in a period where we all still have, am I good enough for this class and do I fit in and so the H STEM class that is started here in 2015 but has now been brought to other schools, at Yale, at Skidmore. It really is combining what Amherst does best which is the experiential classroom as well as the academic understanding of what reading more broadly and I think it is going to take that kind of transformation because science is losing if we are not including the diversity of voices and it's not just a leaky pipeline. We need to transform the process and I think that is starting here in a way that can then be replicated outside and I don't think it could happen if we didn't have the student body that we do here at Amherst but I think this is an example where Amherst is leading. So the students I would... I mean if anyone so look it up, it's a H STEM and they really have these very impressive reading list but also documentaries and really, I think it is going to be part of how and it has to start... We can't just wait and say you know I'm on some committee that's trying to recruit tenure line faculty. It has to start before that.

- Yeah, Kim.

- So when I worked in the Obama administration for the White House Council on women and girls, one of the areas of focus was STEM engagement and looking at it from the pathway beginning in elementary school all the way through career advancement and I think that's one of the important dimensions of this, that there is no one magic bullet. I think there are lots of different places where we have to focus our attention. I think very right about early scientific education and access to mentors, access to experiences and as we go forward into high school classes, making sure that there is adequate access to AP classes and the kind of mentorship that's needed for people to succeed. I think we also have to keep in mind though that there are these elements of implicit bias that we know exists on systems. Sometimes they exist in persons but sometimes, they just exist in the way we do things as a matter of course and I think the prevailing thinking these days is rather than trying to change individual bias and individual people, let's look across our systems and see where they may unwittingly favor or exclude people. So I think to that end with the leaky pipeline, we know that we lose women at every conceivable point where there's a transition from the major into going into industry. If you're in a graduate program moving into an academic position and from there into tenure. So I think we have to take a comprehensive view and we also have to look for exemplars and best practices such as existed Amherst or Spelman College or other places like that but I think we also need to take that broader systemic view and keep in mind that it's really recognizing that those barriers exist and we have to sort of interrogate the larger systems and see what we can do to make some changes. So I'd like to open... Oh sorry. Of course.

- I just want to say a couple of things more about what Kim was getting into and that is the need to recognize the problem and define it and it has been a chronic problem and many of us have been saying for 20 or 30 or 40 years that we're failing to give opportunities that are adequate and... To women and to minority groups in science and what we need I think and Amherst has taken the first step in a really important way of having a lot more minority students at Amherst than they had before but you also need to acknowledge that there are lots of problems today at the individual levels, systemic level and counter those with powerful programs and the one that I continually come back to is one that Shirley is also very familiar with. The Meyerhoff Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where minority students are brought in and are told this is tough and you've got to learn to study in certain ways, maintain and work together and you're gonna get help but breaking into systems that have not been welcoming for many years, requires a sustained effort that's special. You can't just be there and absorb it and do it because there are too many other things that provides you pathways to success and if you're gonna make it in science, certain things have to be done in the way people study, the way they get into laboratories, the way they're mentored that allow a place like UMBC to produce a lot of PhDs and MDPhD's more than other schools do and we can learn from that.

- Absolutely. Brad.

- I just want to say that I think this is one of the most important questions which is facing us now.

- Thank you. Thank you Brad. I feel so much better.

- I don't think you need to worry about the answer to that but a lot of people do. This is a really serious question. I haven't been struck with the seriousness of this question for the last 20 or 30 years but for the last 10 I have and I have nothing useful to say other than my great hope and my belief is that Amherst College is taking the lead on this and will continue to be a major player in solving this problem and I think it's absolutely fundamentally important that we do that.

- Absolutely. So we have microphones that will be available to those who would like to ask the committee questions. We have a question right here in the front if we could get and then we have one at the back and then we have two over... We are going to have lots of questions. All right. But I saw your question first, all right.

- Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. My question picks up on some of the themes that you were just discussing. So my observation is that there's a potential tension that's playing out at Amherst and at other college campuses between the desire for students to figure out where they're going to specialize and go deep in a specific area with the idea of having breadth and exploration and being able to take advantage of a liberal arts education. It played out even to some degrees when I was here almost 30 years ago and so some of what you're highlighting is for non-scientists to feel like it's safe to take physics or chem or even computer science and I think that many of the societal pressures that students face, prevent them even here from being able to explore and I don't believe that the answer is to force it through a core curriculum but I'm curious to what extent you see that playing out and then how you think about making the exploration of science safe for non-scientists.

- I'm not sure we're exactly the right group.

- Shirley, you may be. University president.

- To asking that about Amherst but I can tell you that in my own experience is it was critically important certainly at Princeton I can tell you that we create science courses that were not dumbed down so it was not to to teach pablum science but where there was a question, a question that could really activate the creativity and the interest of students and could then be sort of probed in a way that revealed to them the nature of the scientific method and so the goal was not for that student to end the semester with 27,000 facts about that science, but to leave that semester saying, I really now I understand how Brad goes about asking questions about what is going on in tectonic plate movement. In my experience, that's the right answer to your question.

- Again to the sort of problem centered inquiries. So I know that other schools perhaps at Amherst as well courses that are focused on statistics for social justice for example may draw a different group of students. They are learning the same statistical approaches but the problem may be focused on a set of issues that traditionally has been approached perhaps outside of the sciences and now we're saying, we need to combine science and sociology etc if a change is going to be made. I think another way to approach this.

- I'm not an undergraduate teacher on normal circumstances but I think another way to approach this to get a whole campus involved as I say let's spend a few weeks maybe in the middle of the winter talking about some societal problem. AIDS or something in the political world where every discipline brings something to bear whether it's nuclear physics on international negotiations where science becomes part of the fabric of disciplines that are required to solve a global problem.

- We have a question in the back.

- Thank you a question of observation and a challenge. My name is Larry Young, I'm a colleague of both Brad and Kim. I went from Amherst College as a physics major in the class of 1956 really 1956. Our physics this is pre Merrill, we were taking physics in fair weather, learned a tremendous amount not only from the physics faculty but at lunch at Valentine and the interdisciplinary conversations among the students was formidable and went on to MIT and I'm a chaired professor in astronautics and the Harvard MIT program now. What's the challenge? What are we missing? Remember back to the earliest days and CP snow two cultures at a scientific society and how separate we are, we haven't made much progress there and we look at the US Congress and the absence of scientific training and acumen among the people who are running our government to distribute and distributing the funds. How well do you remember that going up with your hat in your head and getting a lot of contributions. We used to have, this is going back to my undergraduate days we had a MIT combined planned program here at Amherst College and with others where are you one would spend three years at the liberal arts college, two years at MIT. Put together technology with liberal arts. I think that despite all the good words, we are not making great progress on the introduction of technology into the education which we call a liberal arts education. So for my friends on the Amherst faculty, keep up that fight. We cannot I think turn our backs on these bright students we have around here and let them say well I don't have to know that. I'll hire somebody.

- There may not but I suspect everyone on this panel agrees with your sentiments of the importance of what you're saying is the ideal of a liberal arts education and I think that's exemplified by the commitment of the college to this building today.

- I just want to say one thing also. I agree about the importance of the tables in the dining hall. Sharing this liberal arts experience with your colleagues in English and American Studies. I think that it's a crucial part of the education of all involved

- Yes.

- Hi, so I'm not in college yet but I've been thinking about wanting to go into STEM. So what would your advice be for young people especially young girls who are thinking about going into STEM?

- You're the youngest girl up here. The future is bright and for me, I especially think I still feel like I do come back to... I have very thorough quantitative skills and training that I got here at Amherst and that means that I really feel like there's a role for me. So I think it's a great option and I don't think of it as a purely technical skill. I mean I really think that it's an integrated part of who I am that I really love large data sets and analog data analysis. And it's the same way that I like to organize all my computer files and all my spices at home. It's just like you know it is what I'd like to do. I really like to organize things and data to me is one of those things. And so I think it's some place in which we are breaking down barriers. I do think that you know when Kim talks about the implicit bias I'm sitting there and I'm like I'm gonna sit at the head of the table because I called this meeting and I am the one doing the analysis and so I feel like it's really given me a voice and a role and a great career that's let me really enjoy my intellectual life and also given me opportunities to meet amazing people.

- Can I just offer one other piece of advice that I often give. The best way to discover whether you really want to be a scientist is to get into a laboratory as quickly as you can and there's lots of evidence that say that particularly for women, that the earlier you can have a positive research experience the greater the likelihood you will actually stay in STEM. So wherever you end up going to college, what I would do is try and begin to develop what your taste is and the kinds of scientific questions that might really engage you and then find a faculty member who would be willing to take you into his or her lab and give it a try. I think it's the very very best test and then I would really follow Harold Varmus' advice and that is when when you're told something, always ask why. How do you know that? Why do you say that? In other words always be kind of digging below the surface of the facts that often get confused with the process of science and then really test your guard about whether the kind of questions that you hear being asked in that particular science are questions that you could imagine waking up in the morning thinking about and going to bed at night thinking about because if you're a scientist, that's what you do.

- And I would just add to that that if you have that lab experience and if you're waking up and going to sleep thinking about a problem that motivates you, the other thing that can be very very helpful is to really think about the kind of advising and mentoring you're receiving and is someone sponsoring you. Are they putting you forward for the kinds of experiences that you'd like to have? Do you have the kind of relationship where you can say I'd like to go here to this meeting? Is that something you want me to do as well and then the experience that Amherst is having right now of providing so many more internships for students during summer is absolutely critical. There's a fair amount of evidence that shows particularly for women who in science who have a sponsored internship or postdoctoral experience that network of relationships that they develop through the sponsored internship is really really critical, not just the experience they have at school but also with those who are practicing science in industry or in the government.

- We have another question over here.

- I work in the medical field and you mentioned the vaccine issue and one of the things that's really troubling to me is how science has become political and things get framed in the context of conservative or liberal views and I'm just curious as they're more as leaders in the scientific field that we can get away from this and frame things go back to science and make things not about your political views but more about fact?

- Harold. You've had a lot of experience in this.

- It's a very tough question. As Shirley mentioned the beginning, I've had fair amount of experience in government in science and mainly working for the NIH which is one of the few institutions that seems to have bilateral protection that is there's no party that is associated with it the way there is an association of party affiliations with certain attitudes toward climate change or perhaps a certain aspects of medicine like vaccines or abortion or other testy issues and I don't see a simple way to deal with this except again, to go back to an emphasis on early education and the sciences. I don't think these problems exist in Europe because Europe makes a big investment in education at the early levels. They pay teachers well, it's a respected occupation to be a high school teacher with a university degree and where you're serious about science in the classroom and I think until we do that, we're gonna have these problems.

- Another question. Yes. Yeah.

- Hi, I wanted to return to a theme that's related to several that have come up but it's the question of the intersection between public policy and science and communication and science and looking on the scientist side of it and returning to that question of how beyond the intrinsic value of an intimate liberal arts education, how scientists can have what they need to really be able to succeed in terms of public policy and communication beyond their depth in their field and I'm wondering I don't know if anyone on the panel or anyone else in leadership here can speak to whether Amherst is able to provide for faculty and students anything beyond that intrinsic value of the liberal arts education. I'm familiar with you mentioned the radio journalism program that your daughter does at another institution. I'm aware that Allen Alder offers for scientists and science faculty, communication training. There are many things out there. Is there anything that Amherst is able to do at this point now that we have this exquisite science facility just to return to the magic of why we're all here to help those students and faculty thrive in terms of communicating what they do.

- Catherine do you want to respond to that? Just because a the Catherine Epstein, the Dean of the faculty who would know the answer to that question.

- That's a great question and I think what we're trying to do I we do have very small numbers of programs in terms of public writing, we took over after something from Welsley and getting students to think about writing in their discipline for the public. So that's just sort of a starting idea along those lines. I think more broadly we're really focused on students sort of collaborating together, the kinds of soft skills that Kim I think mentioned a little bit about we really want to get students to be working together and thinking about what it's like to work across difference on an intellectual problem that they're really passionate about. So I agree there's certainly a way to do more of the kinds of things that you're discussing and we look forward to introducing more of them now that we have this amazing building and that we can work with. Oh great idea. Yes Biddy, okay. We do have a public speaking program where now we have competitions at the end of in the spring semester where people compete to give their senior thesis ideas in like two minutes. It's like a two-minute TED talk and this has been really popular and students have competed very effectively for them and there's some kind of a prize. It's not a tiny prize either. I mean it's a nice prize that people can walk away with and what we did was we actually took our old rhetoric prizes and turned that towards this program. So yes, thank you Biddy.

- Just another dimension of this too I think is the education process for scientists of understanding how public policy actually works. In other words I think there are many places in the process where influence can be exerted but if you aren't sure how to do that or the value of participating in public commentaries or public comments, I think you're not likely to see that as part of your repertoire of activities. So I think in the civic engagement project that I mentioned that Harvard Medical School is among others is sponsoring, they're trying to build in just a better understanding of where the inflection points that scientists can participate in trying to shape public discourse.

- I think Catherine having now been forced to stand up is now going to give us the hook.

- Alright, thank you very very much. So Shirley and Julie and Kim and Brad and Harold, thank you so much for talking with us this afternoon.