Story of Impact - NYAS

From management styles to creating the right culture, learn the secrets of academic researchers who produce impactful science and diligent scientists.

Published December 30, 2008

By Adrienne J. Burke

Image courtesy of Microgen via stock.adobe.com.

Phil Sharp, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine and trained a scientist who won the same award 13 years later, says he learned from his first mentors how to nurture budding talent. While Sharp was still a grad student in chemistry at the University of Illinois, Victor Bloomfield gave his career a boost by telling other scientists about his work and by sending him to scientific meetings. And his postdoctoral advisor, National Medal of Science recipient Norman Davidson, encouraged Sharp to pursue his own research and engage with other faculty at Caltech.

As he continued his studies under 1962 Nobel Laureate James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Sharp learned that “if you surround yourself with very exciting people and research projects in an environment where ideas are always percolating and you can add your own perspective, then it’s easy to do cutting-edge research.”

Sharp certainly makes it seem that way. Progeny of the MIT lab, where 30 years ago he discovered the split gene structure of higher organisms, now populate faculty posts at nearly every major university in the country. Sharp Lab alumni include Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, National Academy of Sciences members, and Andy Fire, who won a Nobel in 2006 at age 47. As a group, so-called Sharpies share such fond memories of their days under his tutelage that they organized 20- and 30-year reunions at the lab. Sharp counts them among the happiest days of his life.

Good Scientific Citizenship

Academic scientists such as Phil Sharp, who are as well known for producing excellent science as they are for developing following generations of top-flight scientists, are a unique breed. Within a system that gives recognition, money, and tenure for scientific achievement, good scientific citizenship generally goes unrewarded. Those who conscientiously nurture their successors’ careers are motivated by pure altruism.

And they are largely self-taught. Unlike in industry, where scientists in supervisory roles are typically immersed in management training, few universities offer even basic leadership instruction to newly minted principal investigators.

John Inglis is president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, which publishes books on scientific management. He, says, “Postdocs who not so long ago did something really great and are given a lot of money and have to set about building a group are immediately faced with all kinds of challenges. Very seldom has anybody talked to them about how to do this leadership thing and how to cope with all the human situations that science throws up when you’re dealing with a creative endeavor.”

It’s no surprise then that the iniquitous university workplace—where senior investigators take credit for students’ work, schedule lab meetings on holidays, or provoke postdocs to hoard supplies and lock up their data by pitting them against one another—is no mere myth.

Carl Cohen, president of Scientific Management Associates in Boston and author of Lab Dynamics: Management Skills for Scientists, says lousy leadership is rampant in science. “Scientific projects get destroyed, interactions go astray, and students flounder, not because the science itself is wrong, but because scientists are not attuned to personal dynamics,” he says.

Searching for the Right Fit

Maryrose Franko, senior program officer for graduate science education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, advises students against pursuing postdoc appointments based only on the principal investigator’s scientific accomplishments. Franko says many graduate students resolve to put up with whatever misery they must for the chance to work in a prestigious scientist’s lab. But, she warns, that strategy can backfire.

One promising young postdoc Franko knows signed on wittingly to the lab of a less-than-supportive P.I. “I warned her, ‘He’s a shark’,” says Franko. “But she said, ‘I don’t care, he’s the best in the field.'” Now, three years later, the senior investigator has prohibited the postdoc from taking her research to her first faculty appointment. She’s dependent entirely on a referral from him to get anywhere.

Kathy Barker, author of the popular lab management advice book, At the Helm, says that people frequently tell her that they wish their P.I. had taken a course or read a book about how to run a lab. “One in three people I talk to have had bad PhD experiences,” she says.

But does it matter? “The fact is that very great science can come out of groups that are disasters in terms of human relationships,” says Inglis. “A certain amount of money was spent, a certain number of people left science because they were so disillusioned about how the research enterprise works. But does any of that matter if the end result was a significant advance in our understanding of how a cancer cell works?”

Training First, Science Second

David Baltimore, past president of Caltech and Rockefeller University, would say it does matter. “I want to do great science, but that’s not the primary thing. The primary thing is the training, because that’s what’s going to last,” he says. To scientists like him, the advancement of the research ecosystem is more important than any single scientific discovery. And, as Barker points out, providing a future P.I. with an excellent experience can have far-ranging results: “Once you’ve been in a wonderful lab, you want to make your lab like that.”

Just what makes a lab wonderful? Even the most highly acclaimed leaders aren’t sure of the keys to establishing an excellent research culture. Says Sharp, “It’s sort of like cooking. You can follow a recipe, but you only know it works when it works.”

Asked to explain his secret to having trained nearly 100 accomplished scientists, including department chairs at Columbia, Duke, Harvard, and MIT, David Botstein says, “It’s a reasonable question, but I don’t know.” Botstein, who taught at MIT and Stanford before becoming director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton, says he sees it as his job to produce great students. But he has no formula. “I can only tell you what seems to work for me.”

Indeed, conversations with a dozen P.I.s widely recognized as great mentors reveal that few have any scripted approach to mentoring.

A More Guide than a Boss

George Church, director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, has launched some of the most promising young systems biologists in the country. Princeton Associate Professor Saeed Tavazoie, who zoomed from PhD thesis to tenure in just five years. So did Jay Shendure, an assistant professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington who was named to Technology Review magazine’s TR35 list in 2006 for a remarkable genome sequencing technology he developed in Church’s lab. But like most of his peers, Church candidly reports that he has never studied management or even thought much about it.

Nevertheless, these senior investigators have gleaned and put into practice a certain amount of lab management wisdom over the years. The advice they impart comes down to four simple maxims:

Hire well;
Be more guide than boss;
Do your best to foster an open, congenial, collaborative culture; and,
Put teaching and your underlings’ careers first, your research second.

While great lab leaders unanimously disdain micromanagement, hiring is one function they control carefully. “When you try to appear to run a laissez faire lab, you have few leverage points,” says Church. “The big one is whom you select. That affects tone, ambiance, and subject matters, so you need to exert quite a bit of certitude.”

Surprisingly, brilliance isn’t necessarily the first trait they seek in postdocs. “I don’t look for people who are very smart,” says Church. “If you got into grad school at Harvard or MIT, I don’t have to worry if you’re smart. I’m mainly looking for people who are nice.” Church says he is careful to not let his lab revolve around him, and he also shuns candidates who seem most concerned about their own success.

“Immersed” in Science

Phil Sharp looks for postdocs with a track record: “They’ve advanced a problem, can articulate what the problem is, and they have a view of the world that is developed and sometimes different,” he says of ideal hires. In grad students, he seeks those clearly “immersed” in science. “They read, they talk science, they work in the lab with a lot of commitment, and they go to lectures and come back with ideas.”

Bob Weinberg, a Whitehead Institute founding member and cancer research pioneer who has trained more than 100 scientists in his MIT lab, says his top criterion for selecting grad students and postdocs is that they be able to get along well with others. “I ask about that before I ask about scientific mettle,” he says. “How generous are they with their colleagues? How often do they share? I have turned down an applicant not because they weren’t brilliant, but because I’d heard they weren’t the most pleasant to have around.”

In fact, Weinberg makes it a point to survey candidates’ past mentors and labmates before making an offer. “You often have a postdoc around for three, four, five, six years. It’s kooky not to invest time in that detective work,” he says. “I don’t want people in my lab all to be in love, but I would like them to get along and share.”

Janet Thornton, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, goes a step further to have “a group of people who get on well together,” she says. She asks existing staff to screen incoming candidates, and takes their reviews seriously. When the feedback was, ‘if you recruit this person, the whole group will resign,’ she quickly rejected the applicant.

Pride and Ownership

“True grit” is what HHMI investigator Pippa Marrack looks for as “one of the best predictors of future success.” What’s true grit? “It’s about being brave enough to go for the core of the problem, and being persistent and not giving up when something looks like it’s going wrong,” says Marrack, who has run a lab at the National Jewish Medical & Research Center in Denver with her husband John Kappler for nearly 30 years. “It’s being able to persevere when the reviewers say your paper is crap.” Marrack says a one-day interview “can occasionally reveal when someone has done something in their lives that lets you see they have courage.”

Independence is another sought-after characteristic, especially among senior leaders with multiple responsibilities and busy calendars. “As my own life became more complicated running universities, increasingly over the years I have made independence a very important part of the equation,” says Baltimore. “The worst thing I can do is accept people who can’t handle independence.”

In fact, the freedom to pursue independent research is what most of these accomplished scientists say they most valued about their own training. “Dulbecco was a hands-off mentor, so I was given as much freedom to do what I wanted to and that made an impression on me,” says Bob Weinberg. Everybody in his lab has their own project, and knows up front that when they leave they can take it with them. That way, he says, “They can take pride and ownership in what they’re doing.”

Controlled Freedom

David Baltimore recalls that Richard Franklin at Rockefeller University “was a wonderful mentor because he gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to within the context of working on problems in virology.” Baltimore says the experience taught him the “tremendous importance of allowing young people to find their own way.” Over time, he says, “I’ve just developed great respect for what trainees can do if you support them and provide critical intelligence while letting them define as best they can where they want to go.”

Janet Rowley, the 1998 Lasker Award winner, famed for having identified a specific genetic translocation in leukemia, was mentored by 1966 Nobel Laureate Charles Huggins. She says that when she started up her lab at the University of Chicago in 1969 she approached lab management the same way she did child rearing. “You give people a lot of freedom, you’re there to help them if they need it, and you let them go,” she says. Rowley also says she prefers flexibility to rules and regulations: “You don’t know where creativity is going to come from, and as lab director you have to be open to it coming from an unusual direction.”

George Church’s lab is so free of rules that he compares it to an artists’ colony. “I couldn’t be in a cookie cutter mold where the lab was real production-oriented like a factory, or so hung up on dogma and protocol that you couldn’t think outside of the box,” he says. Having been trained in a research environment that rewarded creativity and interdisciplinary effort, Church says he has adopted the same system.

Equality for People and Ideas

Church is also a fan of equality for people and ideas. “I try to treat everybody as a peer. The lab isn’t entirely without hierarchy, but it’s historically been pretty flat.” As a result, it operates like a free-market system. “If I want to get something done, I have to sell my idea down the line. If it doesn’t sell, I realize there’s something wrong with my message or it’s a bad idea,” Church says.

While all of the scientists interviewed for this article talk about the importance of being supportive to their trainees, they also all see value in letting people flounder and learn from their own mistakes. Church says there’s a fine line between maintaining a nurturing environment and one that promotes critical thinking. “You don’t want to be so supportive that you can’t tell someone something is a bad idea, but you don’t want to be so critical that they think all their ideas are flawed or that all good ideas come from one person.”

Joan Steitz, James Watson’s first female graduate student at Harvard, has run a molecular biology lab at Yale since 1970 and been an HHMI investigator since 1986. She says surprising things can happen when a P.I. steps back and lets postdocs work on problems they’ve developed independently.

Shobha Vasudevan, a PhD who joined Steitz’s lab from the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, came along with what Steitz thought was a rather dull research project on protein binding. But when Vasudevan started finding proteins associated with microRNAs and showed that microRNAs can activate genes depending on the cell cycle, Steitz says the project “went off in the most amazing direction.” Vasudevan’s paper, which Steitz calls “very important,” was scheduled to appear in Science before the end of 2007.

Creating a Congenial Culture

Across the board, successful leaders abhor the idea of promoting competition among scientists inside the lab as a way to stimulate discovery, saying collaborative, open environments are the most productive. “Most of the truly original ideas that have come from people in my lab come from frequent conversations with their peers,” says Weinberg. “I want them to be talking incessantly. I want that to be part of their style—to be talking to people outside of my lab.”

In that vein, Pippa Marrack says her training at the renowned MRC labs in Cambridge taught her the simple importance of eating in the cafeteria to learn about others’ work. “Everybody, all the Nobel Laureates and the janitors, ate in the same cafeteria at large tables there,” she says. Marrack set up her students’ offices to promote conversation. “We keep our postdocs and grad students in two large offices without cubicle walls to encourage them to talk to each other and come up with ideas together. They do sit around talking, and it’s not always about fantasy football,” she jokes.

Weinberg says he has spent years trying to make sure the limits of his students’ universe are not the walls of his lab. “We’ve been having floor meetings since 1970 with six or seven groups where we all share our research findings. I want people in my group to talk openly about their successes and failures so they can benefit from others’ insights. They may have to go much further afield than me to get input. I want them to develop this habit rather than leading hermit-like existences.”

The Road to Experimental Research

Phil Sharp says he chose MIT as the home for his research because it offered that opportunity for interaction with other scientists. “I’ve been at MIT 33 years, and on the fifth floor of the cancer center all that time,” he says. The laboratories of Weinberg as well as David Housman, Michael Yaffe, and David Sabatini are all nearby. “We live in a group,” Sharp says. “We share a noon Wednesday seminar, we have a party every Friday afternoon, and we have science talks together. My lab is immersed in a group of about 100 people, and in that group are some of the best people in the country in every age group. It elevates us all.”

Another reason a congenial culture is important: the road of experimental research is a rocky one. “More often than not, things don’t work,” Weinberg says. “How do you maintain morale when things aren’t working? I’m not saying I’m the personification of morale maintenance,” he says, “but I think I’ve created an environment where people can help each other through the scientific rough times, if not the personal ones.”

While networking is seen as a benefit, thoughtful mentors tend also to keep their own labs small enough that they can contribute to the success of each person in it. In the late 1980s and early ’90s when funding was at its peak, Rowley says she had as many as 16 lab members. “That’s really as much or more than I could carefully manage. When a lab is 40 or 50 postdocs, I question whether a senior investigator can really counsel that large a number of postdocs carefully, creatively, effectively. I look on very, very large labs with a certain amount of skepticism,” she says.

Produce People First, Science Second

David Botstein says that he has always considered his profession as a geneticist to be not simply research, but a hybrid of teaching and research. “My goal with students and postdocs was in part, of course, to do research that would be of general interest, but also to choose problems and methods that would maximize the students’ learning,” he says.

Botstein argues that putting teaching first is a key not just to generating better scientists, but to producing better science. “The time I spend teaching—up to half my time—makes my research better,” he says.

Rowley agrees. Supporting a young scientist’s success reflects well on a senior scientist, she says. “If you keep asking yourself, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ you reduce your effectiveness. You have to really think about what is going to help the other person be more successful.”

Phil Sharp’s method for helping students develop their careers is to get them to take ownership of an idea and then to plan and execute a series of experiments that advance the understanding of science in that area. “It works best if that interest aligns with my interest in the lab. Occasionally it will align to something only distantly related, but I’ve always found it most important to put the person’s development at top.”

Let Them Taste Success

Church steers postdocs in directions that are most likely to let them taste success. “It’s a soft touch,” he says. “It’s amazing how little it takes to steer, but you don’t want any of your postdocs doing something that is so impossible that there won’t be milestones or they won’t get any credit.”

Even before coaching his postdocs on the problems they chose to tackle, Bob Weinberg sees an important role for himself in influencing their thinking. “I want to impart to them a taste for working on problems that are important and will be thought to forge new conceptual paradigms.”

In discussions over lunch at least twice a week, and in a journal club where they analyze recent scientific publications, Weinberg teaches his people to think critically about research questions. “Is this an interesting question?” he challenges. “Have they focused on something important, or is it trivial in terms of its heuristic value? Are the data really that interesting? Or are they just filling holes in a brick wall?” He says these questions train people to think about whether or not a topic is worth the investment of time.

The Hardest Thing in Science

Baltimore considers “framing the right question” to be “the hardest thing in science.” He says questions have to be audacious enough to be interesting and yet experimentally tractable. “Finding that balance of interest and do-ability is something you only develop with experience and with trying things that are too hard or doing things that are not interesting enough,” he says. “I try to help people find that sweet spot. And when we’re successful, they do wonderful things and they develop a lot of self-confidence, and when they leave my lab they’re ready to establish their own labs and be successful.”

Contrary to the supervisor of the hapless postdoc who has no rights to the data she produced, Weinberg makes it a point to ensure that the research his postdocs do in his lab will help launch their careers. He says, “Some labs have rules that when they train grad students or postdocs, the project stays in the lab. When my lab continues in an area of research, I try to stay out of the way of the person who has gone away so they’re not being undermined by my lab.” To do otherwise, he says, would be very unfortunate. “I’m interested in their soaring, not sinking,” he says.

Also read: Grant Rejection Could Be the Best Thing for Your Career and 10 Things To Do at Every Scientific Conference

Building the Knowledge Capitals of the Future

Cities worldwide are in a race to transform themselves into hubs of science and technology expertise. Here’s a look at how a few plan to achieve that goal—some with help from the Academy.

Published November 1, 2008

By Adrienne J. Burke

If you made a list today of the world’s innovation hotbeds, Mexico City wouldn’t be on it. Sure, the city has become known since the 1980s as an international hub of financial services. And it’s long been seen as a center of manufacturing. But if Mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón has his way, that image will soon change. Not only will Mexico’s capital become known as the Knowledge Capital of Latin America, but it will, in the near future, be respected as a global hub of scientific and technological excellence.

Ebrard, who took office two years ago and recently joined The New York Academy of Sciences President’s Council, aims to trade in the smog-ridden region’s dependence on “old economy” industries for a so-called “knowledge economy” by incubating a sci-tech cluster in the sprawling city.

Toward that end, Ebrard has commissioned the new Institute for Science and Technology to prompt collaborations between academia and industry. He has established a government-funded company, Capital En Crecimiento (City in Growth), to bolster technology infrastructure and improve the skills of the metro-area’s 22 million residents. And he has retained the US-based RAND Corporation to identify Mexico City’s strengths in science and technology development.

Ebrard has also entered a multi-year partnership with the Academy, the first product of which was a week-long innovation conference in September organized by the Academy and local officials. Jorge de los Santos, an Academy member and former director of business development and technology transfer at Columbia University whom Ebrard recruited to run Capital En Crecimiento, says he saw the Academy as a neutral body that could help the Mayor “to have the private sector working with universities on a common strategy and vision.” He adds that the Mayor’s team is “working to create a knowledge hub because our city needs to be good at something that is higher value-added than a service economy.”

“A knowledge-based economy will empower people,” says Ebrard. “It’s people producing and absorbing knowledge and people creating and using technology that will add value to Mexico City’s economy.”

Nurturing a Knowledge Economy

Many economists share Ebrard’s anticipation of a future in which scientific prowess is the key to superpower—or at least super-city—status. Their predictions are at the root of a trend among urban areas worldwide to ramp up capacity to compete for the unofficial title of “Global Knowledge Capital.” Leaders in China, India, and the United Arab Emirates are among those who believe that economic vitality in the 21st century hinges on the ability to generate and deliver scientific solutions to problems such as climate change, energy, healthcare, housing, and transportation.

Juan Enriquez, author of the 2001 book As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, advises a dozen national governments on sci-tech economics. He describes a worldwide movement to excel in scientific innovation. “There’s absolutely a race on to be the capital of ideas, to get the best entrepreneurs and the smartest people,” Enriquez says.

“In the past, you had competition for raw material, then for money and resources,” says Mexico City’s De los Santos. “Now the competition is for the human mind. All the cities are trying to attract the best and brightest in the world.” The same way US high-tech hotbeds like Boston and San Francisco have attracted sharp minds from around the world in recent decades, top talent from the US and elsewhere will migrate to cities that emerge as leaders of the knowledge economy, he and others predict.

Ideas about how to nurture a knowledge economy have been percolating since at least 1969, when management guru Peter Drucker used the phrase in his book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. The concept is now widespread enough to have its own Wikipedia entry. Contributors define a knowledge economy as “strongly interdisciplinary, involving economists, computer scientists, software engineers, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, as well as cognitivists, psychologists, and sociologists.” A knowledge employee, they say, “works with his or her head not hands, and produces ideas, knowledge, and information.”

A “cluster”—a concept popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter in his 1990 book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations—is at the heart of a knowledge economy. According to theories about clusters, whether they be business clusters, industry clusters, or science clusters, when information flows openly among stakeholders pursuing solutions in the same field in a concentrated geographic area, innovation happens sooner. Investors and talent move to the region, and the economy thrives.

What It Takes to Make a Cluster

Left to right: Juan Enriquez advises governments on sci-tech development; Sam Pitroda chairs India’s National Knowledge Commission; Russell Jones, founding president, Masdar Institute; Esther Orozco, general director, Mexico City’s Institute for Science & Technology

Silicon Valley—where an industry cropped up around a research university, lured venture capital, and grew wildly as entrepreneurs flooded the area—is commonly invoked as a model of a cluster. But Silicon Valley’s tech roots go back to the 1956 choice of inventor William Shockley to locate his semiconductor company near his ailing mother. Clusters emerging around the world today are by deliberate design. In the view of New York University President and Academy Board Chair John Sexton, few US cities today are pursuing knowledge economies with the “purposefulness” of places like Mexico City.

Experts list several features crucial to knowledge economy success: commitment by the government; a major research university anchor; a critical mass of skilled employees; a technology infrastructure; business, labor, and intellectual property policies that facilitate rapid growth; and an easy flow of knowledge among and between sectors. Mexico City is just one of many regions following that formula.

In China, the State Council in 2006 approved a 20-year “out-line” for science and technology expansion. It calls for a near doubling of R&D investment, banking policies and fiscal incentives to support sci-tech startups and venture capitalists, a system for evaluating researchers and research institutes, intellectual property rights strategy, improved government support of industry, and “an enhanced capacity to build creative personnel.”

Mao Zhong Ying, science and technology counselor for China’s Consulate General in New York, says China will focus its cluster building efforts on four scientific subjects: protein research, nanoscience, growth and reproduction, and quantum modulation research. “In those technologies, we are at the same point as Western countries,” Mao says, explaining one of the principles that economists say will enable cities in lesser developed countries to compete with US and European cities: “These are brand new technologies, so we need to focus on these to realize the benefits of leapfrog development.”

Still, Mao concedes, China has a long way to go training its young people to be innovative and bridging private and public sector researchers.

Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, and Guangdong are presently the country’s most promising centers of knowledge, Mao says. All five have strengths in biotechnology. And local government policies in those cities support R&D investment, enable industry access to academic research, and promote quality science and engineering university education. They’re policies support a shift from a “made in China” period to an “innovated in China” period, he says.

Three years ago in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh formed a National Knowledge Commission to identify strategies for transforming his country into a knowledge society. The high-level, seven-person team’s recommendation to improve access to education will result in a $65 billion expenditure on education in the next four years.

Telecommunications inventor and entrepreneur Sam Pitroda, who chairs the commission, considers human capital the key to a knowledge economy. In the 1980s, the telecom revolution he launched in India succeeded only because thousands of Indians were trained to work on network management and fiber optics. “Knowledge,” he says, “will be the next driver for India. The first challenge is to expand the knowledge base, improve access to knowledge, and improve the quality of knowledge. We have 200,000 students appearing for entrance exams, and only 2,000 get into good technology colleges. So, we need more engineering or biomedical colleges.”

Pitroda argues that turning manufacturing or service-based economies into knowledge capitals also requires a complete re-thinking of urban infrastructures. “In the past we built cities and suburbs based on the idea of manufacturing plants,” he says. “The idea now is to focus on knowledge as the key driver to re-structure everything.”

Indian cities Bangalore and Hyderabad have become famous for their IT booms but aren’t knowledge economy models.

“The cities haven’t transformed,” Pitroda says. “They’re crowded and the infrastructure is not in tune because nobody thought it through.” True knowledge capitals must be designed with a sustainable plan, he says. “Start from scratch and go vertical.” He advocates building clusters that “bring large numbers of people together in a setting where they live, work, and innovate together.”

Start from Scratch

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi could be a utopian version of what Pitroda describes. The $22 billion, eight-year project launched in 2006 by Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan is constructing an entire town focused on engineering solutions to problems in energy, security, climate change, and sustainable human development. The “green” city, designed by Foster + Partners to be entirely solar- and wind-powered with zero carbon emissions, will be anchored by a major new scientific engineering university, the Masdar Institute, to welcome its first students in September 2009.

The institute’s founding president, Russell Jones, former president of the University of Delaware, says three things persuaded him to move with his wife to Abu Dhabi to take the helm: A strategic decision had been made by the government to build a cluster; the graduate-level-only university is being staffed through a partnership with MIT; and research there will focus on solving one of the world’s most important problems—alternative energy.

Jones says the state-funded Masdar Initiative has a $15 billion seed fund (projected to increase to $80 billion) to bring alternative energy companies to the region. His university “is the human capital piece” of the knowledge economy equation, training the scientists and engineers who will staff and startup the alternative energy companies that will fuel the Masdar City economy.

Clusters of Scientists. Science and technology clusters are emerging in some surprising spots around the world. Clusters of scientists exist in some unexpected places too. This map shows the 20 countries outside of the US with the largest numbers of NYAS members.

Identifying Ways to Win

As host to some 20,000 scientists conducting three-quarters of the nation’s research, Mexico City has a leg up on Abu Dhabi in the human capital department. Mexico City is already “a hub for producing human capital,” says Mayor Ebrard. “Graduate students flock to our many universities and research institutes.”

But unlike Abu Dhabi, Mexico City doesn’t have the wealth to build a knowledge city from the ground up. The Mayor’s various initiatives are directed instead at improving upon what exists.

As General Director of the Mayor’s new Institute for Science & Technology, Esther Orozco has dedicated a $17 million budget to five distinct programs for improving Mexico City’s infrastructure and assets. Teams from the institute evaluate the region’s needs in water, energy, and food; sexual, nutritional, and mental health, including addiction; digital connectivity; small business incubation and competitiveness; and science and technology education.

Orozco says the teams address those issues in partnership with experts from government, industry, and academia. In just over a year, their work has resulted in the installation of an optical fiber network throughout the metropolitan area, which she says will “close the digital gap” between Mexico City and more developed cities by providing free internet to all residents.

Orozco’s education team has brought scientists to the city’s street fairs to teach citizens how cell phones and other modern technologies work. An interactive exhibit to educate kids about the effects of drug use will soon open. And a team of scientists and engineers working on the water program has mapped a system to automate the handling of Mexico City’s deep sewage.

Meanwhile, another of the Mayor’s initiatives, Capital En Crecimiento, is looking at additional infrastructure challenges. Jorge de los Santos, CEO of the government-owned company, says, “We’re like the Port Authority. We build tunnels, roads, transportation hubs—anything we need to in order to enhance the competitiveness and productivity of Mexico City.”

De los Santos is also working with the RAND Corporation to identify the sectors Mexico City can dominate. “What sectors should we be targeting to be the best in the world?” he asks. Whether it be personalized medicine, digital design, financial IT, or healthcare informatics, Capital En Crecimiento will build communities within the city with R&D campuses, parks, and housing where technology-focused clusters can grow. “Here you would be able to live, work, study, research, and shop,” says De los Santos, who predicts it will be three years before the first such development is inhabitable.

Mayor Ebrard is nothing but optimistic for his city’s chance to contend as a Global Knowledge Capital. “The East Asian tigers of the 1980s, like Singapore and South Korea, and the rising giants of this century’s first decade, India and China, all had economies smaller than Mexico’s not too long ago,” he says. “India’s mastery of software technology has transformed its economy and raised its global competitiveness. They’ve made tremendous leaps and we think we can too.”

Also read: From New York City to the Rest of the World

Expanding the Immunology Frontier in Medicine

A man smiles for the camera inside a science lab.

Academy member Ralph Steinman tells the story of his life journey being raised in a nonscientific household to going to medical school and studying the immune system.

Published September 1, 2008

By Ralph Steinman

I wasn’t raised in a scientific family and I didn’t have a focus on science early on. In high school I took a vocational test and it concluded that I could be anything. I was interested in everything and I had absolutely no focus until I went to university at McGill. That’s when I first took biology. I really became interested in physiology and medicine, though I took almost every other course in the university. I knew I loved research, but I also liked the practice of medicine a lot. As I went through medical school I became more and more focused on biology and medicine.

All along, at every educational institution, I had great teachers. They did what mentors are supposed to: they provided knowledge, support, and criticism. We always need mentors, not just when we’re starting out.

My key mentors were the ones that I worked with in the lab—Orville Denstedt, professor of biochemistry at McGill, and then cell biologists Betty Hay and Jean Paul Revel at Harvard Medical School. For my postdoctoral work, I wanted to come to Rockefeller and work with Zanvil Cohn and James Hirsh. I had no second choice, in part because they were the only people taking cell-biological approaches to the immune system at the time. I learned immunology sitting right in this very room. We just read papers and that’s how I learned. Working with them led me to the discovery of dendritic cells in my third year at the lab.

The Role of the Immune System

I feel that many people don’t recognize that the immune system is involved in so many important conditions. The vast majority of people may have never heard of the word immunology. Even if they’re taking an antibody that’s making them well, they may have no idea this came from immunology.

The major sacrifice you make as a research scientist is that you don’t get to spend enough time with your family. The other thing one gives up is time outside the lab making science understandable to the community. I do a little public speaking, but I definitely would have liked to have had more time to get out and explain what we’re doing. Not only because it’s fun being with people, but it really is important.

I don’t like superlatives, but if I had to try to describe my most important accomplishment, it was to discover a new dendritic cell lineage of white blood cells and to show that it initiates and controls immunity. It was quite a struggle to get there, but those discoveries in 1973 and 1978 convinced us we were on the path to something new and important, and it opened up the field. Dendritic cells help you to understand how this remarkable immune system is involved in many diseases, and what you might do to prevent or treat diseases.

Focused on AIDS and Cancer

AIDS is our lab’s main target, cancer is another, but we also want to learn to silence or tolerize the immune system in transplantation and many other settings like autoimmune diabetes. And we want to discover vaccines for many more diseases. Some people would say the major application is to use dendritic cells in immune therapy for cancer.

There is plenty of promise, but immunology in cancer is very underdeveloped. I estimate that immunology is less than five percent of the effort at the National Cancer Institute and very little of that five percent deals with cancer in patients—it’s people like me doing models outside of the patient. That’s one of the things I’m trying to change, but it’s going very, very slowly. We need people to see this as an omission in the war on cancer that must be overcome once and for all.

When you list the properties of tumor cells, it is fair to say that one is to evade the immune system. But the immune system also knows how to reject cancer cells. We have a cancer death rate in this country of more than a half million every year and we have 22,000 cancer patients in drug trials, but hardly any are immunologic.

It’s a huge gap that we’re not looking after. A number of immunologists who think this way have gotten together and, with help from various sources, come up with a proposal which we call a cancer immunotherapy network—a mechanism whereby scientists will work together to design the best immune-based studies in cancer patients and make them accessible to patients.

Just Tackling a Problem

I often wonder what I’d be doing if I didn’t take my biology course, but certainly if I had to do it over again I would do the same thing. Undoubtedly, I love a lot of things about my work, including being able to work on a special campus like this and in New York City. I love discovery and the way it happens. I love tackling what I believe to be a big problem.

And I love the scientific profession, its internationalism and the many terrific people who are responsible for one major advance after another. I’m getting old, but because everybody in the lab is so young, I feel like one of them, you know, just tackling a problem.

Also read: Dispatches from the Democratization of Science

About the Author

Ralph M. Steinman is the Henry G. Kunkel Professor and a senior Physician in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at The Rockefeller University. He earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and has been an Academy member since 2002.

Recent awards include the Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003); the New York City Mayor’s Award for Scientific Excellence (2004); the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2007); the Albany Medical Center Prize (2009). In his free time, he enjoys ballroom dancing with wife Claudia, spending times with granddaughters Isla and Syla, and architecture.

A Scientist by Trade, A Leader by Example

When it comes to supporting science, the work of past Academy President Fleur L. Stand is never done. Even in retirement she continued to advance science for the public good.

Published September 1, 2008

By Adelle Caravanos

Contribute. Revitalize. Innovate. Used as a call to action in The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) first ever Comprehensive Campaign, these three words can easily describe the modus operandi of Academy Past President Fleur L. Strand. A member since 1950, the distinguished professor of biology and neural science became the second female Academy president in 1987. But Strand’s dedication and deep involvement with the organization did not end there. More than 20 years later she remains an active member and generous supporter.

Born and raised in South Africa, Strand came to New York in 1945 and earned both her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in biology at New York University. She continued her work at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Strand’s research at the time showed that adreno-cortical hormone (ACTH) has a direct effect on neuromuscular activity—a finding that was considered blasphemous, as it required ACTH to bypass its usual intermediary, the adrenal cortex. Unable to get her research published, Strand became discouraged.

Fortunately, it was around that time that she met David De Wied, the father of neuropeptide research, at an International Physiological Society meeting in Munich. De Wied encouraged her work; his own had demonstrated the same effect of neuropeptides on the brain and on behavior—now a universally accepted concept, basic to this field of research.

Ascending the Academic Ranks

Strand returned to NYU in 1961 and worked her way up the academic ranks to her present position as the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor Emerita of Biology and Neural Science, following her retirement in 1966. She is the recipient of the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award and has chaired the Mayor’s Award for Science and Technology committee. She has authored several textbooks, including one for which she won the American Medical Writer’s Award. Strand was selected as Outstanding Woman Scientist by the New York Chapter of the Association for Women in Science in 1987. She also served on the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Board, from which she reluctantly resigned when she moved to Colorado.

For 58 years, Strand has been an active Academy member, attending and organizing meetings and editing more than eight Annals volumes. She also worked with the editors on The Sciences, “particularly in the choice of the wonderful art that characterized that magazine,” she says. Strand is a lifetime member of the Academy and was elected a Fellow in 1976. Her participation in so many facets of the Academy’s activities culminated in her inauguration as Academy President at the 170th Annual Dinner.

“After I was inaugurated, I was honored to give Surgeon General C. Everett Koop the Presidential Award,” she says. “This was at the beginning of the realization of AIDS as an important social and political issue, and Dr. Koop was one of the first to call for an alliance of American social, political, and medical organizations.” Then, as now, the Academy was the unique, neutral meeting ground where these alliances could be forged, with science at the center of the discussion, she adds.

Madam President

During her tenure as President, Strand was particularly interested in bringing “new young blood” into the Academy, and attempted to do so by initiating a founding group of active student leaders. Although this program did not succeed during her presidency, she is pleased to support the great success of the Academy’s current program, the Science Alliance for Graduate Students and Postdocs. Strand adds that she has kept in close contact with many of her own doctoral students, most of whom are deeply involved in academic or research positions. She says they report on their current research and projects at an annual neuropeptide conference at Strand’s upstate New York home.

Earlier this year, Strand reached out to former Academy leaders, inviting them to support the new Comprehensive Campaign: “Sustainability through Science and Technology.” She called for the creation of a “Past President’s Fund” which boasts remarkably high participation.

Katie Thibodeau, the Academy’s major gifts officer, praises Strand’s dedication to the Academy. “Dr. Strand answered our call to action with enthusiasm,” Thibodeau says. “Her passion and commitment to science and to the Academy’s essential role in shaping science is inspiring and truly valued.”

In addition to her work with past Academy presidents, Strand has pledged her continued support of the Science Alliance, the program for which she planted the seeds more than 20 years ago. Through this and other programs, she predicts that the Academy will continue to strengthen its function as an important, neutral convening organization for scientists, business leaders, and policy makers.

Also read: Scientific Community Mourns Fleur L. Strand

About the Author

Adelle Caravanos is a freelance science reporter living in Queens, New York.

Industry Strategies for Enabling Innovation

Tech experts and entrepreneurs provide their insight on what drives innovation in the digital era, and what you can do to thrive.

Published May 1, 2008

By Leslie Taylor and Adreinne Burke

Image courtesy of Summit Art Creations – via stock.adobe.com.

Every second year since 2004, Finland’s President has presented the $1.5 million Millennium Technology Prize to an individual whose innovation “improves the quality of human life and promotes sustainability in many ways.” World Wide Web developer Tim Berners-Lee and Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the MOCVD technique for manufacturing energy-efficient light, are past winners. And in April, an audience gathered at The New York Academy of Sciences as four finalists for the 2008 prize were announced.

Finland’s “tribute to life-enhancing technological innovations,” is just one, albeit the grandest, in an exploding field of awards, books, conventions, fairs, and symposia celebrating innovative science.

Magazines including Business Week, Fast Company, and Wired publish annual lists of the world’s most innovative companies, and MIT’s Technology Review crowns the year’s Top 100 Innovators. The FIRST Robotics Competition, Tech Challenge, and LEGO Leagues established by Dean Kamen—himself the innovator of several important medical technologies—inspires more than 150,000 youths in 38 countries to innovate and “dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”

Through his Innovation 25 Strategy Council, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, science advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, urges his compatriots to undertake creative technology endeavors. And, as Academy President Ellis Rubinstein notes, leaders of cities the world over are competing for the unofficial title of Idea Capital. Even The New York Academy of Sciences is developing its own Industry Innovation Awards program.

To be sure, definitions for innovation abound. Depending on whom you ask, innovation is lifealtering, process changing, disruptive, sustainable, earthshattering, or breathtaking. Google Engineering Director Alan Warren says innovation is about “taking a set of tools or capabilities and coming up with a new way of putting them together that is going to provide value for the users.” Dean Kamen argues, “it’s not clever widgets and inventions, but it is the wheel, fire, and moveable type.” An innovative technology, Kamen says, “is something so profound that it changes the way people live, work, or play.”

Regardless of how it’s defined, most people know innovation when they see it, and few would disagree with the choice of Tim Berners-Lee or Shuji Nakamura as world-class innovators.

What seems harder to agree on than what defines innovation is what enables it to happen. Are certain conditions necessary to create an environment that breeds innovation? Is innovation most reliant on brilliant people, plentiful resources, or an ideal work culture? Is it about having the perfect combination of those factors, or something else entirely? And how do some companies, such as Google or DEKA, manage to generate one life-altering tool or technology after another?

We asked the leaders of those and three other organizations to tell us what they believe is the key to scientific innovation in industry. We didn’t get the same answer twice.

XEROX: Realize the Customer’s Dream

Raised by a painter-poet mother and an engineer father, Academy member Sophie Vandebroek might seem to have been destined to be an innovative scientist. But her definition of innovation isn’t so heavy on free-thinking and creativity. “You innovate when you make a significant difference to the customers—when they benefit from the product or service that you provide,” says the Chief Technology Officer for Xerox.

Over the company’s lifespan, Xerox has been issued more than 55,000 patents worldwide and continues to win more than 10 every week. But inventing is just half of the innovation equation, according to Vandebroek, who is also president of the Xerox Innovation Group. Her formula? Innovation = invention + entrepreneurship.

An invention can be cool, but it might not change the business process, make a significant impact, improve efficiency, or create new markets, Vandebroek says. “Innovation is a practical and successful application of a breakthrough invention,” she explains, adding that, at Xerox, “the way we innovate starts and ends with the customer.”

To really grasp Xerox customers’ needs and address their “pain points,” Vandebroek instituted a practice by which Xerox researchers host “dreaming sessions” with about 2,000 customers each year. For instance, when Xerox acquired the litigation document management company Amici in 2006, Xerox staff sought out meetings with potential customers of its products—the chief information officers of several top law firms.

Amici offered software to enable lawyers to automatically pull data for trial from among reams of documents containing millions of pieces of evidence. But in Vandebroek’s conversations with CIOs, she discovered that legal professionals need to sift through evidence by hand to decide if it is relevant to a case or if it needs to be kept secure—a tedious and error-prone process. “It was a pain point,” Vandebroek says, but to automate the process and eliminate human intervention was no solution.

Instead, Xerox developed smart document software that used machine learning and linguistics to process and analyze content for attorneys, find facts in documents, and filter private information. Vandebroek says the dreaming sessions enabled her staff to more effectively apply their expertise to the customers’ problems.

In another example of how dreaming sessions contribute to innovation, Vandebroek says a team of anthropologists from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center spent six months conducting on-site observations of some of the company’s large enterprise customers. They noticed that nearly 45 percent of what people print winds up in the recycling bin within 24 hours—an expensive and environmentally unsound habit. Meanwhile, at a Xerox research facility in Canada, materials scientists and chemists had developed a temporary printing system that could make type disappear from a page 24 hours after being printed.

Vandebroek says going on site to experience the customers’ operation is a key to innovation. “If I simply ask my customers what they want, they might not be familiar with the state-of-the-art that allows you to do such things.” She adds, “As Henry Ford said, ‘If I gave my customers what they wanted, it would have been a faster horse.’”

IMAGINATIK: Harness the Wisdom of Crowds

In a world where competition is global and corporations can be as populous as small cities, it’s too risky to rely on a few people to come up with all your good ideas, says Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, a Boston and Winchester, UK-based company that makes enterprise software for collaborative innovation and idea management. Problems can better be solved when you tap into the brains of tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people, he says.

“Let’s say you ask for input from 500 people. Even if 400 can’t be bothered to respond, 100 participate. Of those, 30 will have 38 ideas, of which 10 to 15 percent will be good,” says Turrell. “Because you are working at volume, you’re bound to get one brilliant answer. Always.”

While working on a PhD in the Information Management Department of Cass Business School in London, Turrell studied critical mass and diffusion theory of collaborative technologies, how they spread through organizations, and how people adopt and use them. Based on what he learned, Turrell created a methodology and Web-based software for collaborative problem solving that has been used more than 4,000 times to address a variety of problems.

Hewlett-Packard employed his system as a brainstorming device to solicit ideas for meaningful projects the company could undertake as part of an Earth Day celebration. And Pfizer used it to tap into its own institutional wisdom: To expand its drug pipeline, the pharma want-ed to dig up compounds that the company once had under development but did not finish developing for some business reason, such as lack of interest in a certain drug market.

The company used Imaginatik software to engage the help of 15,000 employees in finding an existing drug ready for phase 3. Compounds that had made it that far along in the pipeline, Pfizer reasoned, have approximately $100 million net present value. They found one within a week.

Turrell says there are tricks that can encourage people to use a collaborative system. A narrow focus and a short time frame will get 30 times better participation than any long-term program, he says. People are always busy, and they procrastinate, he explains, so it’s important to encourage them to do today what they’d prefer to put off until tomorrow. Plus, people are more likely to come up with great ideas in response to a specific query than to a general invitation for suggestions. Asking, “How can we reduce bureaucracy or reduce our energy consumption?” prompts more useful and creative responses than just requesting suggestions on how to improve company performance.

Many of the great ideas that became some of the most successful products, or even whole industries, were developed at the grassroots level, Turrell points out. But leadership—to set goals and identify and provide support for the best ideas—is also critical. Turrell’s favorite recipe for promoting innovation? “Openness to using the thousand eyes, ears, and brains everywhere, but at the same time having a focus and direction.”

GOOGLE: Hire the Best, Then Get Out of Their Way

Google Engineering Director Alan Warren, whose employer is the poster child for 21st century innovation, says it has become so by hiring the right people and fostering a culture where they thrive.

Recent innovations out of Google’s New York City office, such as Google Spreadsheets, which transformed a traditionally desktop-bound application into a collaborative workspace, are the products of the company’s hands-off approach to management.

“You can’t make someone an innovator if they don’t have a curiosity and desire to make things better, to do something new and useful. And you can’t put someone like that in the wrong environment and expect good things to pop out,” Warren says.

Google seeks new hires with what Warren calls “serious horsepower”—people who are not just super smart, but who also have a creative bent. “We ask ourselves, ‘Has a candidate just taken a problem that’s been handed to them by a thesis advisor and worked their way through it, or have they taken [a problem], spun it out this way, figured out how it applies to that, and then come up with this over here?’ We look for that kind of spark,” he says.

Another question Warren asks a hiring committee is to consider is : “Would you like this person sitting in the cube next to you and working on your project with you?”

“We won’t bring someone in just because of horsepower if we don’t think they’ll add to the environment,” he says. He wants people who are happy to let others bounce ideas off of them and who will participate in offsite teambuilding outings such as the recent company-wide ski trip.

That’s because Google developers usually attack projects in small teams. “The natural number that our developers tend to organically subdivide into is three,” he says, adding that it’s “a group size that minimizes the overhead from over-organizing and coordinating.”

The Google philosophy also holds that an overly hierarchical management structure can obstruct innovation. Micromanagement is strongly discouraged. As a manager, Warren believes his job is to bring smart people together then take a step back. “I don’t manage or direct in the traditional sense,” he says. “My job is to help communicate to employees what the company priorities are, what I see as the important challenges and needs out there, and to give them some ideas and directions to go in.”

But it is the job of the engineers to figure out just what needs to get done, he explains. “I manage them by reviewing what they are planning to do, rather than by figuring out what they should do and telling them to do it.”

DEKA: Celebrate Failure, and Move on Fast

Perhaps best known for his electric “human transporter,” the Segway, inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen holds 400 patents and is responsible for creating life-transforming technologies such as the mobile peritoneal dialysis machine (140 million shipped), the iBOT Mobility System—which enables people typically confined to a wheelchair to maneuver stairs and rough terrain, reach high shelves, and greet a standing person at eye-level—and, still under development, a robotic prosthetic arm, designed especially for amputee soldiers returning from Iraq.

Kamen says he fosters innovation at his Manchester, NH, company, DEKA Research & Development, by embracing failure. “In most companies the penalty for failure is substantially disproportionate to the reward for success, which causes rational people to be risk averse,” Kamen says. “DEKA is a place that embraces change and a place that celebrates failure in a weird way.”

When an idea doesn’t pan out, Kamen says it’s important to view the project, not the person or the company, as the failure. “Let it fail quickly, learn, recover, laugh, and move on,” he says. “At the end of any day I’d like to see guys running around yelling ‘Eureka!’ or else I’d like to see smoke and a ball of flames. Spectacular death is better than the warm death of mediocrity.”

Asked whether brilliant people, the right resources, or a strong culture is most important to an innovative workplace, Kamen responds, “You need the right people, resources, and culture. And mostly you need to be able to work really hard.” Modern culture suggests that life is about instant gratification, Kamen complains. “The jingles kids see say, ‘Life is short. Play hard.’ My motto is ‘Life is short. Work hard.’ I don’t think there’s a shortcut to innovation,” says the man who claims to have never had a job or collected a paycheck in his life.

Kamen also suggests that a small company like DEKA, with about 200 employees, is better suited to innovate than behemoths. “Big organizations are good at doing certain things that are important for the world to have, like consistency and quality. Good management is about consistency and never being surprised. But that’s contrary to what innovation is,” he says.

So, what is innovation? “People are comfortable with the way things are,” Kamen explains. “Innovation is therefore so rare it only occurs when some idea or technology is so profoundly better than what existed before that people are willing to change.”

How does he know when DEKA has produced something that meets his definition of innovative? “When you deliver the first one that actually works—something that you think is a big idea and you show it to someone and their deep analytic response is, ‘Wow!’ Then you know you’re on to something.”

NYSERNET: If You Build It, They Will Come and Be Brillant

Academy member Timothy Lance believes that great infrastructure is the key to enabling scientific innovation. Scientists around New York State who are relying on his organization’s vast computing network are the proof of his point.

“Suppose you’ve got a computational model that has some-thing to do with protein folding,” begins Lance, president and chairman of the board of NYSERNet, a private not-for-profit corporation that has delivered state-of-the-art Internet services to New York State’s research and education community for more than 20 years.

Now, he says, “Suppose you’ve got a very good lab scientist who knows a lot about proteins and the way they behave. Once upon a time he might have said, ‘To run the model is going to take a week and then it will take another two days to download the results.’”

But, Lance asks, what if you put this incredibly fast computer and network at his disposal so that the model can be run in two seconds? “He might see the results and say ‘That’s interesting, but hey I wonder, what if x is different? Let’s tweak this and see what happens.’ [This experiment] is quantitatively different but it’s also qualitatively different because it’s so quick that you’ve got this brilliant mind able to turn multiple things over and come up with an idea.”

Founded in 1985 by a consortium of institutions grappling with lack of access to high-performance computing, NYSERNet counts among its members New York State’s leading universities, colleges, museums, healthcare facilities, primary and secondary schools, and research institutions. In 1987, NYSERNet deployed a regional Internet Protocol network—the first use of the technology outside the U.S. Department of Defense, and the first statewide implementation.

In the days before the public Internet, scientists couldn’t quickly share data or exchange ideas, Lance notes. And before NYSERNet, research institutions paid for dialup so their investigators could call in to the nearest supercomputing center. By providing them with access to the computational and connectivity tools they need, NYSERNet has advanced research and educational initiatives, and thereby innovation, in New York State.

Over the past three years, in order to end its dependence on carrier-provided circuits, NYSERNet has deployed or acquired a vast network of fiber optic cable—over 1,500 miles of fiber in New York City. When the Large Hadron Collider comes online in Switzerland this year, all data flowing from it to the Americas will be routed through NYSERNet’s primary collocation site at 32 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, Lance says.

“Now the networks are so powerful that we can look at harder problems and bigger datasets, bigger transfers, and more computational cycles,” says Lance. “Of course, there can be innovation by having breathtaking ideas that don’t require any computers and I sometimes kid around that what we’re doing with these supercomputers is enabling ordinary men to do what Gauss would do in his head overnight. But in fact, to visualize some problems requires so much data or computation or tools that the infrastructure becomes an absolutely critical tool forgetting an idea of what’s going on.”

A Shared Life of Advancing Science

A couple pose together for the camera inside the study of their home.

From their honeymoon through retirement, Herbert J. Kayden and Gabrielle H. Reem reflect on their commitment to advancing science in New York and across the globe.

Published September 1, 2007

By Adrienne J. Burke

Image courtesy of Don Hamerman via Update magazine.

Herbert Kayden is known for his research on the genetic disorders of lipid metabolism. In the 1960s he published the first definitive studies on the metabolic pathways of vitamin E and its role in humans. His wife of five decades, Gabrielle Reem, made her mark on science with studies of purine biosynthesis and the mode of action of immunosuppressive drugs.

If you’ve attended a meeting at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) in the past year, you’re already familiar with them: The Herbert and Gabrielle Reem Kayden Auditorium was named to honor the couple’s generous ongoing support of the Academy. And if you’re a longtime Academy member, you’ve likely rubbed elbows with one or both of them. Kayden joined the Academy in 1949, presided over the board for one year, and continued to serve on it for another five. Reem, who jokes that she was an “Academy widow” for that period, has been an Academy fellow for more than 20 years.

The Backstory

Born in Manhattan and educated at George Washington High School, Kayden enrolled at Columbia College with plans to pursue a career in medicine. On the advice of the school’s dean, the mathematician Herbert Hawkes, who believed that no student of science should graduate without a good dose of liberal arts, Kayden balanced his pre-med schooling with humanities studies. “I took only the science that was required to get into medical school,” he says. His course load included literature with the distinguished professor Lionel Trilling and cultural history with the Columbia cynosure Jacques Barzun.

After graduating from NYU Medical School, Kayden served overseas as a Navy ship’s doctor until 1946 before beginning a career in cardiology research at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island. At the time, the elite research hospital treated the city’s chronically ill, hosted clinical wards for NYU and Columbia, and was world renowned for anti-malaria research. “It’s hard to reconstruct the intensity of those sessions and the seminars and the grand rounds,” says Kayden, who was the hospital’s chief resident. “It was an extraordinary group of physicians—the most enthusiastic, bang-up, conscientious group I’ve ever seen.”

The group included Reem, who had landed there as a research fellow after medical studies in Jerusalem, Beirut, Geneva, Basel, and the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine. When Kayden later took a position at NYU Medical Center, Reem went on to become an associate at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, where she worked in clinical medicine. Later, she was appointed professor of pharmacology at NYU, where she studied de novo purine biosynthesis, the mode of action of immunosuppressive drugs, and the regulation of human prolactin expression in lymphocytes.

Elected President of the Academy’s Board of Governors

When he became president of the Academy’s Board of Governors in 1977, Kayden appealed to Bill Golden, formerly President Truman’s science advisor (and now a Life Governor of the Academy), for advice on restructuring the organization. Kayden extended the Academy’s activities into New York City with programs to mentor high school students and host events with the New York Hall of Science.

He also hired NYU Provost Sidney Borowitz to be the Academy’s paid director. “We revised the constitution to cut the size of the board and imposed proper governance,” Kayden says. His influence so many years ago set the stage for the Academy to evolve into an organization that he now praises as one that enables scientists to share their wisdom, knowledge, and teaching with the world.

As Reem recalls her husband’s commitment to the Academy, Kayden remembers his wife’s focus on research being so intense that he once asked the campus police to check on her in her lab late at night. Asked what drove them, Kayden and Reem reveal a mutual enthusiasm for science so strong that they visited a research lab in Sweden during their honeymoon; this obsession has lasted throughout their union. Says Reem, “Science became our passion. Pursuing our research was very exciting, and whatever we touched was new.” These sentiments make it all the more fitting that their names now crown the Academy’s brand new auditorium, with its view of all of Manhattan.

Also read: In Memoriam: President Emeritus Herbert Kayden

How Can Science Help in the Fight Against Poverty?

A global scientific publishing initiative follows the philosophy of the Millennium Development Goals by tackling poverty from all angles

Published September 1, 2007

By Leslie Taylor

For the last decade, a technological marvel, has been saving lives in sub-Saharan Africa. It has no bells and whistles, no microprocessors or moving parts. It is a simple piece of insecticide-treated netting.

Bed nets made from this material remain effective deterrents against mosquitoes for three to five years. Donors, governments, and community leaders have embraced the low-tech tool as a valuable public health intervention and frequently hand out nets during immunization campaigns and antenatal clinics. About $5 buys a net that will shield two children from mosquitoes as they sleep—an incredibly effective means of preventing malaria, a disease that kills more than 1 million people a year.

The nets are a great example of what can be achieved when the scientific and development communities work together to identify needs and implement new ideas, says John McArthur, who was deputy director of the United Nations Millennium Project and is now associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. To put life-saving technology in the hands of the people it is designed to benefit requires the cooperative efforts of scientists, policy makers, and the communities they hope to serve, he says.

A Different Publish-Perish Paradigm

That philosophy of partnership underpins the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to achieve target levels of world-wide nutrition, health, literacy, and environmental sustainability that were set at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. It is also at the heart of a new program called Scientists Without Borders SM that was co-conceived by The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and the U.N. Millennium Project. And now a massive cooperative effort in the interest of global development is taking place among scientific publishers.

This year, halfway to the 2015 deadline that world leaders set for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, 230 science journals worldwide will simultaneously publish papers or special editions on the topic of poverty and human development. Publications participating in the Council of Science Editors initiative include wide-circulation journals such as Science and Nature and more specialized volumes such as the African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies, the Chinese Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, and the Wisconsin Medical Journal.

The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences will publish a volume titled Reducing the Impact of Poverty on Health and Human Development: Scientific Approaches.

A Multidisciplinary Approach

The Annals volume, edited by Stephen Kaler and Owen Rennert of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, takes a multidisciplinary look at the issues facing the world’s poor. Chapters address public health issues in the developing world as well as specific diseases associated with poverty, such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, lymphatic filiariasis, and hookworm. Other chapters discuss the poor’s access to health care services, education, proper nutrition, and housing.

The volume will highlight diverse areas of research. It will include a paper on measles by Samuel L. Katz, chairman emeritus of pediatrics at Duke University, who was awarded the 2007 Pollin Prize in recognition of his contributions to pediatric infectious disease research and vaccine development; a paper titled “Sustainable Transfer of Biotechnology to Developing Countries,” by Eva Harris, who used the money from her 1997 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship to establish the Sustainable Sciences Institute, an organization that helps scientists around the world gain access to state-of-the-art training and equipment; and a paper by Nobel Laureate James J. Heckman, professor of economics at The University of Chicago, about the consequences of poverty for human skill formation.

Poverty Is a Many-Stranded Problem

Bashir Jama, author of “Agriculture in Developing Nations,” a paper in the upcoming Annals volume, spent 19 years with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry before becoming a policy advisor to a U.N. Development Program group working on poverty and the Millennium Goals. He says it’s very difficult to tease apart the problems of poverty and address any single factor in isolation. Agriculture is inextricably linked to health, he says.

For instance, malaria and other tropical diseases can impede worker productivity in farming communities, resulting in reduced crop yields, followed by hunger, and increased vulnerability to disease.

And illiteracy can be an obstacle to heartier harvests. Training in new farm techniques or agriculture technologies can’t be distributed in writing to farmers who can’t read, he notes. Instead, non-governmental organizations and governments must offer in-person training or demonstration farms.

“As scientists we have fairly good knowledge of the ecology and the technical issues that are slowing down progress or that can enhance production,” says Jama. “But giving people the skills they need when they live in remote areas—in areas with limited energy supplies, no electricity or clean water—is challenging.”

Within select communities known as Millennium Villages, networks of scientists with diverse areas of expertise work with residents to address the intertwining issues of agricultural productivity, health, education, and access to markets. Projects to increase food yields and improve access to education and health services coincide with initiatives to improve village infrastructure—roads, sanitation, communication technology, and energy. Villagers are also given advice on enterprise diversification and environmental management.

Leverage Existing Technologies

Residents of the 12 Millennium Villages in 10 African countries have seen tremendous improvements in quality of life since the project started, Jama says. “In one or two growing seasons we’ve seen incredible increases in agricultural productivity, phenomenal decreases in hunger, improved health with a reduction in malaria and waterborne diseases, and safe drinking water becoming available,” he says.

Successes at the Millennium Village sites were not the result of exclusive breakthrough technologies, but came about because experts in a variety of fields took action to supply villagers with a range of basic technologies, such as fertilizer, medication, and water purification systems. “We have the basic know-how,” says John McArthur. “The question in the immediate term is how to mobilize existing technologies.”

Frequently, technologies created for another purpose or discovered in the course of pure research can be greatly beneficial. “It’s a matter of adapting good technologies that may exist in other countries,” says Bashir Jama.

Seemingly uncomplicated technology can have a dramatic impact. For example, the treadle pump—an inexpensive, simple- to-operate, foot-powered pump that can draw water from a well or spring—has revolutionized farmers’ ability to grow food during the dry season. “It’s a good example of a situation where, if the investment is there, it could really increase irrigation, and improve income and nutrition,” says Jama.

Energy and Resource Use

Improved cook stove technologies have also done much to improve the lives of the poor, according to Daniel Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at University of California, Berkeley, who contributed a paper titled “Energy & Resource Use in Developing Countries” to the new Annals volume. Respiratory illnesses are one of the biggest health problems in the developing world, where most people typically cook using very simple fires—burning wood or dung on just a few stones. “Making stoves more efficient has actually cut down on one of the leading causes of illnesses worldwide,” he says.

Kammen, who is also founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, an organization that focuses on designing, testing, and disseminating renewable and appropriate energy systems, has seen how the timely application of technology can transform communities. His group works on projects such as promoting sustainable biomass energy management in Zimbabwe, evaluating the performance of single junction amorphous silicon modules used in photovoltaic systems in Kenya, and creating new technologies such as the UV-Tube—an inexpensive and easy-to-use household water disinfection device that uses ultraviolet light to inactivate pathogens.

While each country has slightly different needs, Kammen explains, in most parts of the developing world the basic issues are the same. “There’s a lack of access to clean water, a lack of electricity to do things like read at night or run a business, and a lack of access to education,” he says. “There are some constants, and those mean you can work pretty hard on a project in one country and it’s likely to be useful to people in many other parts of the world. It’s not like a solution you develop in Mozambique is only useful there.”

Create New Technologies

For problems of the poor that do not yet have technological solutions, scientists have found new ways to obtain funding to do the research they hope will ultimately alleviate suffering.

Peter Hotez, editor-in-chief of a soon-to-launch Public Library of Science journal called Neglected Tropical Diseases, wrote a paper about hookworm for the Annals volume. He is president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a nonprofit organization that works to provide the world’s poorest people with access to low-cost, safe vaccines and drug treatments for neglected tropical diseases—13 parasitic and bacterial infections that produce chronic and disabling conditions. Many people have not heard of the diseases—including scariasis, hookworm infection, trichuriasis, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, and trachoma—but they are devastating.

“Neglected tropical diseases are one of the primary reasons why poor people remain poor. In some ways [what they do to a person] is worse than death,” says Hotez. “They destroy quality of life and are one of the major reasons we have poor economic development in Africa and elsewhere. These are the diseases that are keeping people mired in this horrible cycle of destitution and despair.”

Yet, until recently, little attention was paid to these scourges. While the private sector has been willing to invest money in research that might lead to an AIDS vaccine, for which there is still a substantial market in the U.S. and Europe, “There’s no way you could ever make a profit on a hookworm vaccine,” says Hotez.

Vaccines and Medication

Thankfully, the Human Hookworm Vaccine Initiative, a public development partnership sponsored by the Sabin Vaccine Institute with major funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is working to develop and disseminate an effective, safe, and low-cost vaccine. “It’s a unique model for making a product for people who can’t afford to pay for it,” Hotez says.

While the vaccine is not yet ready to be distributed, the Global Network for Tropical Disease Control, a program of the Sabin Institute, distributes a “rapid impact” package of medication that includes four anti-parasitic drugs to treat seven neglected diseases. The health kit, which costs only 50 cents per person per year, greatly reduces rates of morbidity, blindness, and skin disease. Yet it is only a short-term solution because diseases such as hookworm have high rates of transmission and re-infection, Hotez explains.

“Millennium development goal number six is ‘to control and fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.’ We feel we can make an impact right now in the ‘other diseases’ category,” he says.

Questions of Investment: Time and Money

While sufficient will and technologies are available to raise the standard of living in the developing world, funding is a primary barrier to success. Too little money is devoted to the cause, and there is no consensus about how the money that is devoted should be spent, experts say.

“A rule of thumb, which varies a little by country and by need, is that it takes a basic investment of about $110 per person per year to achieve the goals outlined in the Millennium Development Project,” says John McArthur. “Right now there is, on average, $25 per person in foreign aid going into these places. That needs to be scaled up two- or three-fold by 2015. There’s not enough money getting to where it needs to go, and a greater share needs to go to practical technologies, like long lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, fertilizer, or drilling bore wells.”

The Need for Collaboration

Bashir Jama worries that, too frequently, what scientists have discovered about issues of development is not being incorporated into national, regional, and global programs. “Decisions are made in a vacuum as though science doesn’t exist,” he says. “Donors, international governments, the policy makers need to take advantage of this knowledge and to link up better with scientists in designing systems that work.”

At the same time, it is important for scientists to make the effort to collaborate with policy makers and with one another in the fight against poverty, suggests Hotez, sharing this quote from Dr. Albert Sabin, the inventor of the polio vaccine, after whom the Sabin Institute is named: “A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might reduce suffering rests on the shelf.”

Also read: Scientists Step into New Roles to End Poverty

About the Author

Leslie Taylor is associate editor of Update and of the Academy’s online public gateway, Science & the City.

The Evolution of an Environmental Scientist

Rosina M. Bierbaum was always mindful of pollution and other environmental matters growing up in Pennsylvania, so perhaps it’s no surprise that she made a career of it.

Published September 1, 2007

By Rosina M. Bierbaum, as told to Abigail Jeffries

I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a steel town, as the middle of five children. We lived only two blocks from the main steel plant, so I was exposed to air pollution issues from a very early age. Particulates in the air coated our cars and windowsills every day, so my siblings and I were constantly dusting! This was before the Clean Air Act.

At age 11 my interest in the environment blossomed when I read Rachel Carson’s other book, The Sea Around Us. I became very concerned about the preservation of aquatic and marine ecosystems. My father’s boat store afforded me many opportunities to study the Pocono Mountain lakes, and increasing signs of pollution worried me.

My ninth grade biology teacher was my first mentor, and a real gem. She arranged for students to work in local college labs on weekends. We studied Drosophila genetics, synthesized aspirin, and tried not to explode things; I really got hooked on science.

After taking an ecology summer course at LaSalle College at age 14, I entered—and won!—local and national science fairs with projects examining how irradiation affected the interaction of algae and bacteria. Using a meat sterilization lamp in my grandfather’s butcher store, I discovered that there were some antibiotic properties in the algae Chlorella that were destroyed by ultraviolet radiation. I went on to major in both biology and English at Boston College and pursued a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at SUNY, Stony Brook.

A Shift to the Science-Policy World

By then, my career goal was to conduct research on marine invertebrates in a beautiful coastal setting for the rest of my life. But one of my many mentors, Dr. Bentley Glass, admonished me to participate in the science-policy world. Since I didn’t even read a daily newspaper then, he essentially embarrassed me into applying for a Congressional fellowship, which I, somewhat unhappily at the time, won. So, I left the ivory tower, but what an epiphany awaited!

In those 20 subsequent years working for the Congress and then the White House, I learned that science is not the loudest voice, that civic scientists must be ready to translate the relevance of technical information to whatever policy issue is urgent, and that one must ensure scientists are at the table when decisions about budgets, treaties, policies, and regulations are made. Economists and lawyers were routinely consulted, but it took some persistence to ensure scientists became part of the group of usual suspects.

I left my position as acting director of the White House Science Office in 2001 to return to academia to train the next generation of environmental leaders in the way I wish I had been educated when I went to DC— not just to know a narrow slice of science but to be able to speak the languages of economics, policy, law, engineering, and negotiation.

That’s my mission now, to combine social sciences, natural sciences, and design in an integrated education to enable tomorrow’s leaders to achieve a sustainable planet.

Also read: The Environmental Impact of ‘Silent Spring’

About the Authors

Rosina M. Bierbaum is the Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and has been a member of the Academy since 2000.

Abigail Jeffries is a freelance science and health reporter living in Tolland, CT.

Using Hydropower to Empower Sustainable Communities

A shot taken of Roosevelt Island, the relatively small strip of land between Manhattan and Queens in NYC.

Academy member Trey Taylor, co-founder and president of Verdant Power, believes that underwater turbines that convert flowing water into electricity augur the future of energy production.

Published May 1, 2007

By Adelle Caravanos

Roosevelt Island. Image courtesy of Tierney via stock.adobe.com.

Trey Taylor is in the business of sharing ideas. The co-founder and president of Verdant Power, LLC, a sustainable energy company, has built a career around assessing market forces, bringing together the best and brightest minds in a field, and passionately working for a cause. Most recently, that cause has been renewable energy, in the form of hydropower.

Taylor’s eclectic and varied background gives new meaning to “more than the sum of its parts.” His knack for storytelling and talent for explaining complex ideas betray his years of studying history and political science at Portland State University and graduate work in urban education at the University of Minnesota.

But more than anything, it is Taylor’s skill at recognizing the needs of a market—and the means by which to fill them—that has propelled him through a successful career marketing for such large multinational corporations as Procter & Gamble, ITT Corporation, and British Telecom. Transitioning from marketing to advertising, Taylor became a master at networking while serving as director of advertising for some of the country’s largest trade associations: the American Council of Life Insurers, the Health Insurance Association of America, and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI).

A Hydropower Epiphany

While at EEI, the trade association of investor-owned utilities, Taylor began thinking about how new, computer-based technologies were creating an increased need for electricity. The deregulation of electrical utilities at that time meant no more power plants were likely to be built. This sparked his interest in renewable energy, and in discovering sources that hadn’t been tapped to the extent that they could be.

It was an “ah ha!” moment for Taylor. He says, “After realizing that more than a third of the world’s population didn’t have access to electricity, but lived near some form of moving water—one of the greatest untapped renewable energy sources in the world—I formed a company to commercialize technological concepts for converting kinetic hydropower to electricity.”

In 2000, Taylor co-founded Verdant Power and brought together a team of engineers and scientists to design turbines for placement in rivers and tidal estuaries where they could harness the power of flowing water. Unlike traditional hydropower technologies such as dams, underwater turbines which local communities can easily install. This was the case for Verdant’s first customer, New York City’s Roosevelt Island.

Exceeding Expectations

With support from various state and local groups, Verdant runs the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy (RITE) project, which relies on a field of water turbines to convert the kinetic energy of the East River to electricity for the island.

In December 2002, the output of Verdant’s first turbine there exceeded expectations, producing an average power output of 14.5 kilowatts per hour. “That single turbine produced 8,000 kilowatt hours per month, delivered to a Gristedes supermarket,” Taylor says. “Now you start looking at the math: What if you had 300 turbines? It’s pretty cool!”

In early April, Verdant Power installed four additional turbines for Roosevelt Island that will provide electricity not only to the supermarket, but also to a parking garage, where hybrid electric buses will plug into tidal power. The company will conduct an 18-month environmental study of the turbines to gather empirical evidence demonstrating that the turbines are not harming fish that pass through the area. A concurrent operational test has several goals, two of which are to optimize the manufacturing of the next generation of turbines and to expand the Roosevelt Island field.

A Hybrid Renewable Future

Taylor is excited to expand Verdant’s work on the island, and eventually to other sites in the United States and around the world. He foresees hybrid renewable energy systems consisting of complementary uses of wind, solar and hydropower, along with fuel cells. “Therein lies the answer for the future of energy production in the world. We can start getting these systems right, and then integrating them in really cost-effective ways,” Taylor predicts.

Taylor now divides his time between Verdant Power’s offices on Roosevelt Island, Washington, DC, and Toronto. He and his team are exploring the installation of turbines in the Saint Lawrence River and are working with the Brazilian government to bring the technology to rural villages in the Amazon basin. Additionally, the company is looking into prototypes for use in man-made canals such as the 11,000 miles of irrigation channels in California.

The possibilities for new applications and hybrid integration are what fuel the company. But for Taylor, the picture is even bigger: “What I get excited about is the new thinking, not only among academicians but also other entrepreneurs. It’s the mass collaboration, open source energy, all these ideas come pouring in for applications and problem solving,” he says. “It’s a different way of looking at electric energy production than the old utility mind-think—the idea of powering and empowering sustainable communities.”

Also read: Sustainable Development for a Better Tomorrow

About the Author

Adelle Caravanos is a freelance science writer based in Queens, New York.

Exploring the Science of Haute Cuisine

French chemist Hervé This is a founder of the field of molecular gastronomy which uses the tools of science to explore the methodology and mechanisms of the culinary arts.

Published March 1, 2007

By Adelle Caravanos

Image courtesy of NORN via stock.adobe.com.

Students in introductory chemistry courses are taught one important and seemingly obvious rule: Do not eat in the laboratory. But for French chemist Hervé This, eating in the lab is the whole point.

This (pronounced “Teese”) is one of the founders of the field of molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary knowledge and practice. Along with physicist Nicholas Kurti and science writer Harold McGee, This was among the first to use the tools of science to explore the methodology and mechanisms of the culinary arts.

This will speak at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) on April 10, as part of the Science of Food series. Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, his first book available in English, was published in September 2006.

It Started with a Soufflé

While preparing a Roquefort cheese soufflé for friends one Sunday in March 1980, This—then an editor at Pour la Science, the French edition of Scientific American—stopped at a line in an ELLE magazine recipe that called for adding eggs two-by-two. Why two-by-two? This wondered. With his scientific curiosity piqued, This tempted the fate of the dinner by adding all the eggs at once—resulting in a dish that was “edible,” but lacked the signature pouf of a perfectly prepared soufflé.

When another party of friends called the following Sunday, This repeated his informal experiment, this time adding the eggs one at a time. Pour la Science did without its editor the following day, as This stayed home to tinker with the recipe and postulate about the precisions, or old wives’ tales, which peppered this, and many other recipes, of France’s haute cuisine.

Since that day, This has collected more than 25,000 of these precisions, with the admittedly lofty goal of putting each one to the test. He continued experimenting in his home laboratory (otherwise known as his kitchen) and in 1986 met Kurti, a physicist at Oxford who shared the same passion for science and cooking. The two began collaborating almost immediately, writing papers and hosting a series of meetings in Erice, Sicily, which were attended by the few active researchers in the newly created field of molecular and physical gastronomy, including McGee and biochemist Shirley Corriher.

In 1995, This was awarded the first PhD in molecular and physical gastronomy, and he took a part-time position in Nobel Laureate Jean-Marie Lehn’s chemistry lab at the Collège de France. Five years later, he quit his day job at Pour la Science to work as a full-time researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).

Rules are meant to be challenged

The French culinary method, viewed by gastronomes as close to perfect in its practice, is rife with detailed recipes and long lists of instructions, many of which seem almost silly. To this day, the same set of traditions that calls for cooking green beans uncovered (lest they turn blue in the pan) predicts that a menstruating woman cannot get mayonnaise to emulsify. With assistance from his wife, This debunked both tenets.

This breaks the old wives’ tales into four categories: “Some precisions seem wrong and they are wrong; some seem wrong and they are true; some seem true and they are wrong; and some seem true and they are true.” He says, “I’m most interested in ‘right’ precisions that seem ‘wrong’.” For example, one particular precision instructs a chef preparing a suckling pig to immediately cut off the animal’s head after cooking, to preserve the coveted crackling skin. Although this traditional advice seemed misguided to This, his experiments showed that the pig skin indeed softens if left on the body (due to a layer of water vapor that cannot escape unless the skin is cut).

It Takes a Kitchen-full

As This’s list of old wives’ tales grew longer, he decided to enlist the help of both the culinary and the scientific communities. He began challenging his friend, world-renowned chef Pierre Gagnaire, to create recipes using some of the precisions. These monthly challenges led to a series of more than 60 collaborative molecular gastronomy seminars in Paris.

For each meeting, sponsored by the INRA, scientists, chefs, and students are given a culinary precision in advance (for example: Is it true that omelets become dry when they are over-whipped? And what does “dry” exactly mean?). At the seminar, participants perform preliminary observations and experiments, and decide on protocol and methodology to be used to conduct more controlled tests at home. The attendees reconvene a month later to share their results and reach a consensus on the accuracy and practicality of the precision.

Learning a New Language

Often, the participants at This’s seminars find that it is not the results, but the interpretations, that demand further study. On one occasion, Gagnaire explained to This that when French chefs make wine sauce with butter, they are taught not to whip the ingredients. According to the grand master, shaking the pan ensures the sauce will be “brilliant.”

“Even when Pierre is telling something to me, I do not trust him, technically. I trust nobody, I have to check,” This says. So the chemist set up an experiment to test the preparation methods, and found that visually, the sauces looked no different. But looking at the mixtures through a microscope, he observed that when the sauce was whipped, the melted butter droplets were very tiny.

The reverse occurred with shaking: larger droplets formed. He worked on a calculation, relating the distribution and size of the fat droplets to the energy transferred to the pan. The difference was clear: “Brilliance” is not a visual quality, but a description of the flavor (which is affected by the distribution of the fat in the sauce).

“I know that chefs very frequently use some words to describe taste, not appearance,” This says. “So probably, Pierre has seen an effect, but the words are wrong. [Chefs] can discover very minute effects that we scientists have to interpret.”

The Science and the Practice

This is careful to note the difference between molecular gastronomy—a science—and its various applications, which include molecular cooking, note-by-note cooking, and culinary constructivism. By his own admission, This is not a chef, although he aspires to change the way people cook around the globe. “Cooking in the next century will have nothing to do with cooking today,” predicts this.

“We are sending probes to Mars,” but we have yet to discover the secrets of soup stocks, says This. For him, the stock pot is the final frontier.

About Hervé This

Hervé This is a physical chemist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and author of Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (Columbia University Press, 2006.) He will speak at the Academy on April 10 as part of the Science of Food series.

Also read: Better Data Means Better Food

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