Episode 2: Demystifying Nature vs. Nurture

Lisa Stubbs  00:00

Genetics give you susceptibilities. They say you are prone to this kind of problem, but you don’t develop that kind of problem necessarily, unless you’re exposed to the right environment.

 

Jack Faris  00:13

So it is kind of nature and nurture.

 

Lisa Stubbs  00:15

and nurture, always, I think.

 

Jack Faris  00:20

Hello and welcome to our podcast, PNRI Science: Mystery and Discovery, where we go beyond the jargon to dig into the passion and people behind the science. I’m your host. Jack Faris, CEO of Pacific Northwest Research Institute, a 68 year old genetics and genomics research institute in Seattle. I’m also a regular guy,

 

Anna Faris  00:41

Dad, no, you are not a regular guy.

 

Jack Faris  00:44

Oh boy, here we go. That’s my daughter, Anna Faris who’s gonna help me out, so to speak, with this endeavor. Anyway, I say I’m a regular guy who happens to spend his days around really smart people, and I’m here to interview piano rise brilliant scientists, to share what excites them about genetic research, what inspired them to become a scientist, and what are those myths that we would love to bust about science. Join me and Anna as we dig into the mysteries that may very well hold the key to our future health breakthroughs. 

 

Anna Faris  01:17

Dad, that was great. Oh, I’m really proud of you. Dr Lisa Stubbs, demystifying nature versus nurture in this episode of PNRI Science: Mystery and Discovery, my dad Jack interviews PNRI senior investigator. Dr Lisa Stubbs, whose research delves into the intersection of nature versus nurture to understand how chronic stress and genetics influence pregnancy outcomes. This project is very near and dear to my heart and to my dad’s heart, because I gave birth at 30 weeks, which is quite early, and

 

Jack Faris  01:58

I am happy to say that that little baby is now nearly 12 years old. He’s big, strong, handsome, smart and quite funny. He’s doing great. 

 

Anna Faris  02:09

Beyond this phenomenal project, Dr Stubbs shares with us how an octopus inspired her to become a scientist and illuminates the history of the Human Genome Project.

 

Jack Faris  02:19

Which, by the way, imagine just opening an enormous door into a vast, unending treasure trove of potential discovery. It’s just amazing what that has unlocked. 

 

Anna Faris  02:31

Pop in your headphones and enjoy the awe inspiring power of science.

 

Jack Faris  02:37

I’d love to have your perspective on a substantial chunk of the history of biomedical science. What are your thoughts about how science has progressed?

 

Lisa Stubbs  02:49

The Genome Project came along right around the time, or started to become much more crystallized right around the time I was in graduate school, and then as a postdoctoral fellow, it really started to take off. And in my very early independent career as a researcher, as a lab director, and I got in on the early wave. I was involved in it from the earliest stages, and it really had a different point of view, and that was, this is a big undertaking, boys and girls, it’s time for us to work together. It’s time for us to team up. You can’t just close your doors and work on your own little project. We’re only going to make this work if we if we collaborate, and if we work in teams. And it took a really long time for the biological research community to get their hands around that, and they still aren’t, to some degree, partly because of culture, partly because of that’s that’s the way you say. NIH funds a lot of the research, and there’s been some effort to try to push teamwork. But what the Genome Project did is it told us what we can do if we do team up and sort of break down the walls of our laboratories and and work in multi disciplinary groups, but the culture of biomedical research still is pretty seriously locked into individual labs with individual space, and you got your individual students and your individual everything is, is very much group oriented, small group oriented. And there’s, there’s more collaboration than there was before the Genome Project threw open the doors to so much data, so much information that we didn’t have before. No one group can do it on their own. So I think there’s a lot more collaboration than there was before, just because you can’t be a specialist in everything. There are some groups that are but it’s very rare, and they need to team up in order to be able to solve the problem. Because the problems are huge, and the groups that are pulling together multidisciplinary points of. You are crushing everyone else. They’re making the big breakthroughs. They’re inventing the new methods. And the big breakthroughs are coming because groups pool their resources, they pool their ideas and their efforts towards something bigger. And more and more of that is happening. So I what I imagine that is there going to be more of a trajectory in that direction, that that’s such an efficient way for us to work, and it makes it is the way the big breakthroughs are made. And my guess, my maybe I’m being optimistic. Maybe 10 years is too, too little for this. But I would imagine in 10 years, the trajectory will continue. There’ll be fewer individual, teeny labs chipping away at Tiny problems, and there’ll be more collaboratives, more cooperatives, more big groups that work together to solve big problems. That’s what I think.

 

Jack Faris  06:03

That pivotal, as I get it, catalytic development of the human genome project. I think we get from you a sense of how, what a fulcrum that was for vaulting the field forward, at the time, very much from the periphery, I had a sense that it was that had some elements of controversy, that there were questions about whether this amount of investment was going to pay off usefully. Could you talk a little bit about that particular era? Oh, yes. And the degree to which there was something short of consensus? 

 

Lisa Stubbs  06:38

Oh, there was some way short of consensus. There were people who were really pushing for the project, and there were people who were pushing most people were pushing against it, partly because of this cultural issue that I talked about, and the idea of the small labs doing their own thing, and how successful that had been for such a long time, it fits the NIH Funding mold a lot better than the big group science does, and everybody knew that if, if NIH and other funding agencies started investing in these big science ideas and these big science collaboratives, that there would be less money to go around for the small groups that are working on a tiny little aspect of, you know, brain development or heart development or whatever, and that that would stop the progress. And indeed, we need people. There’s a lot that can be done with a really big data analysis the big, big leaps forward in terms of conceptual understanding of how the genome works and how genes work, and which genes are important for which diseases and so forth. And that’s really important, and that has to be done by consortiums and and groups. There’s still a need for people to stop and say, How does this gene lead to disease? Okay, we know that this gene is is the one that’s responsible. But how does it work? And that still requires hand work instead of machine work. It still requires somebody to spend a lot of thinking and time focusing on little details. So there’s, there’s, there’s a place for both. And at the time that the genome project came along, most people were doing the detailed work on a small number of genes that we knew were associated with diseases or a small number of diseases altogether. Sometimes we didn’t know which gene was involved. They were just studying the aspects of the disease. And there was a feeling that knowing the genome sequence would just be overwhelming. Nobody would be able to figure it out. Certainly, at the time that the sequence was made, was generated, we didn’t know how to analyze it. It’s taken us all this time to get to the point where we can analyze it properly and have the tools to investigate it further in a big way, in a more genome wide way, the genome sequence was finally announced as finished in 2003 here we are, 21 years later, and I think the promise of it is really just beginning to explode. And it took that 20 years and people thought we can’t, what are we going to do for 20 years? We have to have some money to do these other things, or we won’t be able to interpret the genome anyway. So don’t do this, because it’s going to take money away from us. It’s going to change the model of how biological science is done, and it’s going to give us data that we don’t even know what to do with. How are we going to figure this out? So in the meanwhile, it’s sort of like, it’s sort of like the moonshot when they said they were going to the moon, we didn’t really know how to get there. When we said we was going to sequence the human genome, we didn’t really know how to get there. But we figured that out in the meanwhile, and then we had to figure out what, how to handle it, how to how to analyze it, and that was, it’s taken years. To get to the point where we can analyze it properly. And so there was a lot of controversy about that. In the meanwhile, my lab is going to shut down while you spend all this money on the sequence. And so it got pushed forward, basically by people outside of the biomedical research arena, technically, by the Department of Energy. Politically, they just decided they needed to have that sequence for their own reasons. But they were physicists, and they were used to working in these big projects, and they thought that’s the way to go. But they also could see that at the end of those 20 years, there was going to be tools in the hands of the world, scientists, physicians, patients, that we couldn’t get any other way. So it was pushed through by the physicists for political reasons, by the DOE people and people who were doing biology as well. And they just went ahead and paved the political way and got it started. And then NIH had no choice but to join in. And I think if you listen to say Jim Watson talk about it and so forth, he says the same thing. We had no choice, but we couldn’t stop it, so we had to take it over.

 

Jack Faris  11:11

That’s utterly fascinating, those folks. And there were many, as you say, who were either skeptical or outright opposed to the Human Genome Project in 2024 have many, if not all of them come around to say this was a good thing we did. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  11:34

Yes. I don’t know of any who haven’t, who are still working anyway, I haven’t heard from all of them. Some of them are some of them are retired or or have left us, but most came around fairly quickly, actually.

 

Jack Faris  11:50

It’s it’s encouraging when people can change their minds. Is it an important trait or attribute of a good scientist to be able to revise one’s thinking to change one’s mind, it certainly is. Let’s spend a little time, more than a little time, talking about your work these days. And I want to launch into that by thinking about nature versus nurture, a phrase we hear often, and I sometimes think, well, it really ought to be nature and nurture. And in some ways, that’s a pretty good framework, I think, for thinking about genetics and stress the major components of a project that we are launching that and you’re leading to look at the relationship of genetics and stress on complications of pregnancy. So let me just invite you to comment on on how you want to approach that.

 

Lisa Stubbs  12:40

Yeah, so my background is in genomics and gene regulation, how genes are turned on and off, and how they control developmental processes. And so I’ve always been sort of a developmental geneticist, and I’ve worked in various areas related to developmental genetics over my lifetime, but I’ve always been interested in neuroscience, and when I came to University of Illinois, I was really fortunate to team up with a group of people who were focused on looking at the genetics and genomics of social behavior from the point of view of a multi disciplinary, multi species approach, and that is, what are the really common things that define social behavior and social organisms, whether it’s humans or mice or fish or birds or whatever, there’s a lot of social organisms, and what is what’s common about them that makes them social, because not All animals are social, and what is it that happens to their brains? They animals respond to certain kinds of basic social challenges and social opportunities, as as my colleagues would say in similar ways. So when you think about the process, for example, of threat, if you think about the process of, I’m in my home and someone comes knocking on the door and they’re really scary, or they’re sneaking in my back door and they’re threatening my space, or I am walking down the street feeling, you know, in my own feeling comfortable in my own neighborhood, and somebody comes up and threatens me. Animals respond to threat in a way very similar to the way we respond. Respond to social threat like that, and that is, they immediately crank up their stress response system. And the stress response system is what’s called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal HPA axis, and that’s because it’s the part of the brain called the hypothalamus which is receiving the signals from your sensory systems that there’s a threat. And it turns on some cells in the hypothalamus that send signals down to the rest of. The body, the pituitary and the adrenal system are the kind of first targets, and that puts you in a position to be in what’s called the fight or flight mode. And that’s a really important mode for survival. It’s an adaptive response, which means that if you don’t do it, I mean, you need to do it in order to survive. And you need to do it you need to be able to get out of that threatening situation, respond to it quickly, either run away or get ready to defend yourself. Like I said, it starts in your brain. You perceive the stress. It hits the hypothalamus that sends signals down through the pituitary and the adrenals and other parts of your your body, and that affects your guts, your heart rate, all those things you know about when you when you feel frightened, you your heart starts pounding, and you and you are hyper alert, and you have strengths and Maybe speed that you didn’t have before. It’s affecting your muscles all it’s because the hypothalamus has secreted some and pituitary have secreted some really serious, important activity hormones into your into your blood system, and that affects your whole body, and your body needs to be changed like that by the hormones in order for you to be able to react appropriately and run fast and fight and be alert. But if you are in that state all the time, it’s dangerous. It’s damaging. Once the threat is over, you need to get over it. You need to bring come back down to equilibrium. So there are individuals who are in a kind of hyper stressed mode. That could be because they just live in a really, really stressful world. But even in a really, really stressful world, there are people who are kind of hyper, hyper stressed all the time, and their bodies suffer for it, because they’ve always in that fight or flight condition. And there will be individuals who say, Yeah, I’m in a stressful position, but I can handle it, and I’m just going to bring myself back down to normal, and I’m going to eat properly, I’m going to sleep properly, I’m going to not going to, you know, my body’s not going to go into this failure mode that you would if you were in under stress all the time. So we we respond to even really stressful environments differently because of our genetics, because of the way our brain develops, because the way our body develops, the feedback to the brain from your body, but also your hypothalamus in the first place, and how it how easy it is to trigger that fight or flight response, and how easy it is to turn it off and put things back to normal, back to equilibrium. And so a lot of that comes from how your brain develops in the first place, and that’s determined by your genetics. Largely, can also be influenced by your environment. So individuals come out of the box come out in birth with kind of a propensity to respond to stress in a more intense, a more damaging, or less intense, more calm way. And they’re talking about how nature and nurture work together, their environment can either exacerbate that or it can mitigate it. It can make it not so dangerous. Even if you have that propensity and you live in a calm environment, you might never have those problems. The problems that you can have when you are hyper stressed are things like heart disease, diabetes, HPA axis, hyper activation is definitely important for your insulin levels and your ability to handle glucose. For example, it’s incredibly important for heart function, muscle function and other things. Immune Function. It’s really important for inflammation and immune response. So whether or not those things get activated depending on your genetics, but also your environment. So if you think about stress in pregnancy, it’s got another dimension to it. So the woman that is pregnant is already kind of under some stress, right? Her body is changing. There’s a lot of things that are going on during pregnancy. Pregnancy can be stressful and in a lot of other ways too, and that can depend on your environment and your experience. Maybe you’re pregnant and you don’t know how you’re going to handle that, like you don’t know what’s going to happen to the baby, or you’re not in a secure family situation, or you’re worried about that child having enough resources to grow up properly, and so forth. So that kind of stress can affect women differently depending on their stress susceptibility and depending on the intensity of the worry and the reasons for the worry. But if she’s hyper stressed, a pregnant woman will pass those signals on to her baby. Stress signals are circulating in her system, and it’s not just the HPA axis and the stress signals that come from the brain and HPA axis, there are secondary hormonal and other kinds of physiological signals that are changed in a person that’s under hyper stress and that will be communicated to the baby through the placenta. Placenta is sort of a protective organ in some ways, for the baby, but it doesn’t protect against everything, and so a woman who is under stress, under serious stress during her pregnancy, has a much higher chance of passing on to her child changes in the child’s brain development that will make that child more susceptible to stress themselves, Not only that, but they can have problems like ADHD. Stress during pregnancy is has a higher association with autism spectrum disorders and also anxiety, just generalized anxiety. And so that’s because some of the influence of the stress signals that are in this woman’s body are being passed on through the placenta, and the circulation that they share through the placenta to the child. And that influences brain development in ways that can also depend on the genetics of the baby. And so if the baby is got a susceptibility for one of these disorders that are associated with stress during pregnancy, they’re more likely to have be affected by the mother stress than a baby who doesn’t have those stress susceptibilities. Although everyone, independent of their genetics, there’s there’s just a higher, higher susceptibility of the babies to develop the disorders I talked about, autism spectrum, ADHD, anxiety disorders, depression. Those things are more likely to happen to those babies independent of their genetics, but they’re probably skewed most to the children who have a little bit of a susceptibility themselves. So understanding this is an interesting situation where the mother’s stress and the baby’s stress might be due to common genetics, but it might not be. It might be due to the to the common stress during pregnancy and the inter uterine environment that they share. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  22:41

In my view, I don’t have 100% proof for this theory, but there is some literature support for this and so forth. Genetics give you susceptibilities. They say you are prone to this kind of problem, but you don’t develop that kind of problem, necessarily, unless you’re exposed to the right environment.

 

Jack Faris  22:59

So it is kind of nature and nurture always, I think,

 

Jack Faris  23:11

This project we’re embarking on to examine the relationship of genetic stress and complications of pregnancy, which I like to call the Galas project, in honor of your colleague and leader at PNRI for 10 years, who was immensely influential. How will we get data to explore that relationship? What kind of data will we be using for the genetics for the stress and for the pregnancy outcomes. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  23:44

A lot of these things that I was talking about, the genetics the stress, influencing brain development of the offspring and so forth, are very well documented in human populations, in women, pregnant women, but they’re also really well documented in animal models. And so, for example, mice or rats that are exposed to stress, their babies will also have a much higher rate of problems relating to social interactions, to anxiety and and so forth, and to into learning and memory in some cases. So those are well established facts. The thing is that I can, I mostly work with mice, and so I can decide whether a mouse is being exposed to stress or not. I can control its environment. With humans, you can’t do that so well. And so that’s the problem, because when we go out into to look at human populations, we can’t control their environments. But if you go to human populations that are arguably living in situations that would cause most of us to have stress: low income, low job security, low educational opportunity, discrimination, and so forth. And you look at the women and children in those communities that are arguably living in a lifestyle that would stress most of us out there are going to be some women in those communities, even though they’re living under stress, that develop perfectly normal babies and have perfectly normal pregnancies. In fact, most of them do, and then they’re going to be women who don’t. And so going into those communities, those distressed communities, and looking at groups of women, first of all, clinically, so with clinical partners who can identify the women and diagnose them and and understand their response to their stressful lives as being an exaggerated stress response or not, and then the outcomes of their births, their pregnancies, and then following their children to see if how their children thrive or not is the first step is identifying women who do or do not bear the signature of inordinate stress response under conditions that would stress most of us out. Now, women in these communities aren’t going to be equal in terms of their stress exposure at all, and there can be some things done in the clinic to interview the women. And most, most clinics will do that. They try to identify the women who are under real stress, family stress, or a sick loved one that they’re trying to take care of at the same time that they’re pregnant, something like that, some sort of threatening situation in their life, or burdensome situation in their life, especially burdensome.

 

Jack Faris  26:43

How will we bring in the genetic component? 

 

Lisa Stubbs  26:45

The easy thing to do is to get DNA from them. So the women are the women who want to participate in such a study, will donate blood, usually just a bit of blood. And if we’re lucky, they will be willing to also donate the placentas from their birth, and that’s usually a tissue that is thrown away, but the placenta can tell us quite a lot in terms of how the pregnancy went and how the communication with the baby went, and it’s, like I said, a throwaway tissue. So if we can get some placenta tissue and some blood from these women, we can then use those for downstream purposes. Getting the genetics is usually just a drop of blood, and what we try to do as well is get a drop of blood from the cord blood of the baby. So that’s the cord again, is the umbilical cord is usually thrown away, and you can get cord blood from the baby, and you can put that away, and you can take a little bit of it, just like you take a little bit of the mom’s blood, and that’s enough to give you enough DNA to get the genetic information from both the mom and the baby.

 

Jack Faris  27:55

So this project seems like a natural pregnancy outcomes are important. But are other people doing this, or is this there’s something novel about this approach. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  28:08

There are other people doing this. So there are quite a few studies that have been done. There are some very interesting, very powerful groups that are working in different all over the country, all over the world to understand maternal genetics and to try to get a handle on how stress affects genetics and so forth. There aren’t very many people, many groups that I’ve seen who are trying to put the whole picture together. And so our idea is to go from the clinics, have the clinic, clinical people really be our partners, to identify the women, to treat them, to follow their medical histories. And the genetics is just the first step. And what we want to do because we can take the placentas, we can analyze the placentas, we can look and try to make a functional explanation for what’s going on. And once we understand the genetics, we first of all, we get the genetic information from the mother and the baby, and then that needs to be analyzed computationally. And so we need to partner with computational partners, and we’ve got some really great computational partners who can use statistical methods to try to find genes that are important for these processes or important in particular population groups. So one of the things we’re doing that I think, is a little different than than others, is that we’re interested in focusing on specific communities, specific demographics, and particularly focusing on underserved populations. And so there have been a lot of studies done with wide ranging women from different backgrounds and so forth. Very few studies have really focused specifically on women of color, women of color living under stressful environments, and say, Native Americans, a. The groups of people who are underserved living a lot of times in rural communities or in communities where they have don’t have necessarily have access to fancy medical care, and focusing specifically on those groups to identify genes that are more enriched in those particular populations in general, when you look at pregnancy complications and the genetics, the genetics of anything, you end up finding lots of different genes in different populations, because we all have different ancestries, so we selected for this mutation or that mutation, and they’re different from each other. But if you look at the genes that those mutations are in in population x and population y and population Z, and you have enough of them to really make a story, you can see, oh, they’re all involved in the same biological process. There’s a biological process underlying this phenomenon, and when you understand the biological process, first of all, you understand that what’s going on in population x, y and z is really the same thing, process wise, the reason for their pregnancy problems are similar or the same. They’re the same pathway, the same process, but they’ve just hit different parts of the process genetically. They’ve interrupted the process in different ways. In order to diagnose the women from population x, y and z, you need to know what their individual gene propensities are, their gene susceptibilities are, because you need you wouldn’t be able to diagnose them if you try to test population x, with the marker from population Z, you won’t see anything but population x tested with a marker that has been shown in population x to be important, you’ll be able to diagnose those women. If you try to test African American women with with with a marker that comes from Caucasian European women, you may get nothing, but that doesn’t mean that the process isn’t the same, but it just happens to be interrupted in a different way and in in the women that have susceptibility in the different population. So that’s that’s one of the things we’re doing, is we’re really focusing on specific populations. We have found some novel genes that weren’t found just looking at the population more generally.

 

Jack Faris  32:25

And do those genes have some consequential effect? 

 

Lisa Stubbs  32:30

Well, that’s the thing we need to do next. So you can find genes. If you look in populations, you can always find susceptibility genes. Figuring out how they work is a different thing, and so that’s where we have to go back in the lab and go back and do a little bit of our cottage industry experience and say, What does this gene do? Why is it causing pregnancy outcomes to be abnormal? We can really get a good fix on what the gene does. Why mutations in that gene might lead to pregnancy complications or not, and exactly where they fit in these processes I was talking about these biological pathways that are shared between the populations but are affected by differences in individually different genes.

 

Jack Faris  33:19

Am I correct that  – do we have some early data, even at this preliminary stage, that is at least indicative that there’s something important? 

 

Lisa Stubbs  33:30

Yeah. So what we found is by focusing on a population, our first population that we’ve really analyzed fully is a population from the Baton Rouge area. And this population is very has a very high population of African American women. These all women from the same community, which I think really does help, the same small community, although there are quite a few of them. When we focused on that population, the genetic marker we found was present in the women who didn’t have gestational diabetes, which is what the pregnancy and complication we were particularly focusing on in this group. But the women who had gestational diabetes were overwhelmingly likely to not have this genetic factor. So what that tells you is that the genetic factor is protective. The women who have it don’t have gestational diabetes, the women who did have gestational diabetes did not have this factor. So it means that having the factor is likely to be a protective genetic factor. 

 

Jack Faris  34:38

So is it too radical to imagine that at some point determining an expectant mother’s absence or presence of that of what appears to be a protective marker or genetic factor would enable us to say this pregnant woman needs to be particularly careful about moderating stress levels. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  35:06

In this case, it’s the minor allele, the minor factor, the minor version of the gene, which is the protective allele. And so it would be more like saying, if you don’t have this, you’re more likely to be to develop gestational diabetes than others, but it’s, it’s by itself. It’s probably not a really great predictive factor. You might be able to tell the women, we wouldn’t want to do that until we do more research, but we might want. You might be able to eventually tell the women, then, who have the allele, you’re probably fine for gestational diabetes. Like I said, we got this, this particular factor, just by looking at a very small population of women. If we increase the population, we’ll get more factors, and some of them will be susceptibility, and some of them will be protective. Hopefully they’ll all fit together into a pathway or two that we can begin to say, if you’ve got any of these factors, you’re more likely to have gestational diabetes because this process is interrupted, where, if you have any of these other factors, you are probably protected. 

 

Jack Faris  36:11

Are there strategies, if we have that knowledge to reduce the likelihood of gestational diabetes? 

 

Lisa Stubbs  36:17

The thing is that just telling a woman that she’s more likely to develop gestational diabetes, you can’t change your stressful environment. She’s probably living in that environment. It’s not likely that she’s going to be able to do anything about that.  You can watch them more carefully as a doctor and catch things early.

 

Jack Faris  37:09

And there’s value in that. 

 

Lisa Stubbs  37:11

Yes, there is.

 

Jack Faris  38:09

In addition to gestational diabetes as something we like to avoid in pregnancy, Another phenomenon that is quite costly in financial terms and human terms of preterm birth. Yes. Do you think that the same kind of analysis might lead us to understandings of the relationship of stress and genetics in preterm Yes,

 

Lisa Stubbs  38:34

and that’s what we want to look at next. We started with gestational diabetes because there was already a study going on that we could easily get involved in at the Baton Rouge clinic, and now the Baton Rouge clinic is all on board for recruiting other kinds of patients, including preterm birth. And there is a very large population of women with with preterm birth and other pregnancy complications like preeclampsia at that clinic, that particular group of clinics, we were interested also in broadening out to other populations, as I said, and have some really interesting clinician groups that are interested in working with us. 

 

Jack Faris  39:12

So it’s hard for me to imagine any scientific endeavor more important than understanding how mothers and babies can be healthy. So yeah, looking forward to that,

 

Jack Faris  39:30

Going way back, well, not so far back, going back in time, a few years at least. When did you first discover within yourself an inclination towards science. How did that happen?

 

Lisa Stubbs  39:42

I was really, really a nerdy kid and very, very interested in nature, so we lived in Puget Sound, and I my favorite trips were going out to the beach and. Walking along the beach, especially along the coast, the rugged coast here, and looking at things on the beach and looking at animals in the pools and the tide pools and so forth. And I just became enamored with marine life. And I we also had a wonderful aquarium in the in Tacoma, where I grew up, the point defiance aquarium, which I just fell in love with and spent every moment I could in. And I particularly fell in love with the octopuses, because they had octopuses in these in these little round tanks surrounding a main big tank, which had a lot of the fish swimming around, and the octopuses were alone in their little tanks, and the tanks were open. And so we could, you could just look right at them, and they would look back, and then they would change colors as they’re looking at you. And I thought, Whoa, that thing is incredible. They would and they made eye contact. And it was, to me, it was just amazing that something like that could make eye contact and change colors when it saw me, you know, and that just fascinated me. So I just, I just decided early on that I loved the sea life of the Puget Sound so much that I wanted to become a marine biologist. And I, you know, it was the days of Jacques Cousteau. And a lot of kids wanted to do that, but nobody in my family had ever been anything like a scientist. My father was an attorney. My brothers were all attorneys. They became attorneys. The ones that were younger than I am then, and my sister even went to law school. There was just nothing in our family, all teachers and very scholarly people, but nobody had ever done anything science or mostly literature on things other fields and history. But I just decided I really wanted to be a scientist. I really wanted to be a biologist, and I didn’t even know what that meant in high school, I was always aiming to go into science, and finally got myself convinced that I had the wherewithal to do scientific research and do science because I was good at those subjects, and by the time I got to college, I was going to be a marine biologist. And then I realized from talking to people who were actually in the field and doing undergrad internships and things like that, that being a marine biologist in those days meant putting on your Wellington boots and trudging out into the mud flats at four o’clock in the morning on a winter day in the Puget Sound and that all you really could do is just catch things and look at them. And there wasn’t anything else you could really do with marine biology in those days except observe things and putting on a wet suit and diving in the dark Puget Sound waters, and I just decided that’s probably not what I wanted to do with my life. I was lucky enough that right when I was in college, the molecular biology revolution was really taking off, and I took some really classes that I really enjoyed, and got involved in biochemistry, got involved in molecular biology, got involved in genetics. Really started to enjoy those fields, and I decided to ride the wave and go into molecular biology and then genomics, as that came to be as well. So I rode the wave in some ways, just because that was what where the opportunities and the excitement were in those days, and I I just wasn’t suited to four o’clock in the morning in my Wellington boots as a way to make a living. And I was lucky that way, because now, if I was a young person trying to figure out what to do with my life. I would be studying the genetics of the octopus. There’s no question, because now you can do that. The sequence is available. You can read them in the lab. I would be all over it. I would be doing the genetics of the octopus, trying to understand how those marvelous brains, which are not related to our brains at all, they evolved entirely separately from ours, but they are incredibly clever creatures, and how that how those brains function, would be so fascinating.

 

Jack Faris  44:10

Thinking of you as a nerdy little girl who loves school. Was that nature or nurture?

 

Lisa Stubbs  44:17

It was both.

 

Jack Faris  44:19

Which is, which is a great way, maybe, to bring this to a conclusion. So Dr. Stubbs, thank you. I know that many, in fact, I’m sure everyone in our audience is looking forward to the fruits of this project that you describe and appreciate that the things that come from, it will be the product of the work of the cottage industry scientists, but also the multidisciplinary teams that you identify as being an important part of the present and future of biomedical research. So again, thank you so much. 

 

Anna Faris  45:00

Thank you for joining my father and me for this episode of PNRI Science: Mystery and Discovery, to learn more about PNRI and get connected to our groundbreaking science. Go to pnri.org/connect. We would love for you to join us for a tour of our labs or a virtual event with our scientists. Thank you for listening, and we hope you’re inspired to learn more about genetics and chat with your friendly scientist neighbor. I’m your host, Jack Faris, CEO of Pacific Northwest Research Institute. I’m also a regular guy. Dad, what do you think? How’d I do? Better!