Episode 6: Patients + Researchers = Strength

Aimée Dudley (00:00):

One of the things that I think would really surprise people is that there’s a lot of creativity in science. There are a million different ways to answer a question that you might be interested in, and you can, for example, you could use genetics to answer a question. You could use protein structure to answer a question. You could use computer simulations to answer a question. You can use mathematics. There’s no right or wrong way to answer those questions.

Jack Faris (00:32):

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 (00:54):

Dad. No, you are not a regular guy.

Jack Faris (00:57):

Oh boy. Here we go. That’s my daughter, Anna Faris ,who’s going to 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 PNRI’s 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 Ana as we dig into the mysteries that may very well hold the key to our future health breakthroughs.

Anna Faris (01:30):

Dad, that was great. I’m really proud of you. Dr. Aimée Dudley: Patients + Researchers  =  Strength. In this episode of PNRI Science: Mystery and Discovery, my dad, Jack, interviews, PNRI Senior Investigator, Dr. Aimée Dudley, who teaches us all how yeast can tell us important things about humanity. Who knew? Now Dr. Dudley uses yeast to pinpoint which genetic variants cause urea cycle disorders, which are life-threatening to newborns. She works closely with the families and has learned about the incredible passion of rare disease moms. After hearing about them, I want to meet them too.

Jack Faris (02:15):

These parents bring their extraordinary passion, but it’s combined with deep knowledge of the genetic research and also with keen observations of their particular child’s situation. It makes them full partners in the breakthroughs that we’re working to achieve in the scientific enterprise.

Anna Faris (02:34):

So please settle into your comfiest chair and enjoy the awe-inspiring power of science.

Jack Faris (02:44):

Aimée, we’d love to hear about some episode in your scientific endeavor where you’ve had a discovery that has been particularly noteworthy and kind of awesome for you personally. So please tell us the story if you would.

Aimée Dudley (03:00):

I guess it would have to be when I was a graduate student, as I was finishing up the end of my graduate studies, I was working in a lab on my own research project. One part of my graduate work focused on trying to understand how a specific protein complex turns gene on and off, and it was the end of my graduate work, and so I was working really hard. So I would come in at 9:30 in the morning and I would work until about one or two in the morning, and that was for about the last nine months of my PhD thesis. And the reason I bring that up is not just to say that I worked hard, of course I did work hard, but that by the time I got to the end of the experiment, there would be nobody left in the building or on my floor.

(03:47):

And so it got to the point where I was doing the final experiment that was finally going to tell me the answer. I was finally going to know the answer to the question that I was asking. And this was a radioactive experiment. And so you went into a dark room to develop the film, and you put the film through this machine and you waited for it to come out the other end. And I got to the point, I’m standing there all by myself at probably two o’clock in the morning and the machine spits out the film. I looked at the film and I knew the answer and I was really excited. And then it occurred to me that I’m all alone here and there’s nobody for me to tell this answer to. And so until nine o’clock tomorrow morning when I walk into the building and talk to my lab mates, I’m the only person in the world who knows the answer to how this particular mechanism of gene expression works. And that was pretty amazing.

Jack Faris (04:42):

I’m sure it was when nine o’clock in the morning came. Did you have reason to anticipate that others would be interested?

Aimée Dudley (04:49):

Oh, yes, yes. So the field of gene regulation was interested in understanding how this particular mechanism worked. And there had been suggestions based on different types of experiments, but this relatively new technique that we were using was a way to actually look at it directly. And so we weren’t actually looking inside the cell, but it was the equivalent of looking inside the cell and seeing exactly how it happened. And so that definitively proved it.

Jack Faris (05:26):

What does it mean when a gene is turned on?

Aimée Dudley (05:30)

That’s a great question. So each of our cells and each of the cells in any living organism has DNA and that DNA does something. So what that DNA does is we say it encodes all of the components that you need to build a cell and to operate a cell. And so in order to get from DNA, so the DNA molecules that you have in all of your chromosomes to a working cell takes the coordinated expression of thousands and thousands of different molecules. And those molecules have to be made at the right time in the right amount and brought to the right places. And so when we say that a gene is turned on or turned off or expressed, it means that that DNA is converted into RNA, and then often that RNA is converted into a protein. And so there’s a whole set of complicated machinery that the scientific community is still figuring out that makes all of those processes happen. And so the part that I was studying when I was a graduate student was how DNA gets turned into RNA and specifically how it gets turned into RNA that happens at the right time in the right place and under the right conditions.

Jack Faris (06:56):

And do these dynamics within us, do they take place in mundane behaviors like for example, shooting a basketball, which I used to do often but no longer do, or are they more kind of developmental as my 4-year-old grandson begins to lose his baby teeth and replace them with the teeth for the long haul?

Aimée Dudley (07:23):

Yeah, so it’s absolutely all of the above. So the DNA inside each of your cells is making all of the components of your body. It’s performing all of those functions. So for example, when you’re playing basketball, you need energy and you need to make sure you have the right balance of water and that, but also in terms of development, everything from the first cells that form a human embryo all the way up to the time we die, our bodies are growing and our cells are dividing and changing shape and form in terms of development. And all of those things have to happen at the right time in the right place and in response to the right cues.

Jack Faris (08:17):

Is it possible for you to describe a day in the life of Dr. Aimée Dudley?

Aimée Dudley (08:25):

I don’t know. So one of the things about the day in the life of a scientist who’s actually working in the lab at a bench or at a computer, I think one of the things that would surprise people, because we think about science as it’s a rigorous set of ways in which you approach things, come up with a hypothesis and you test the hypothesis and you analyze things. And so science is rigorous in that kind of way. But one of the things that I think would really surprise people is that there’s a lot of creativity in science. There are a million different ways to answer a question that you might be interested in. And you can, for example, you could use genetics to answer a question. You could use protein structure to answer a question. You could use computer simulations to answer a question. You can use mathematics.

(09:26):

There’s no right or wrong way to answer those questions. Sometimes there are more elegant solutions and sometimes they’re what we call brute force solutions. So an elegant solution might be devising the exact right question, setting up a cell in exactly the right way to let the biology tell you what the answer is. And sometimes there’s a brute force way to do things. So setting up what we call a genetic screen where we’re going to look at thousands and thousands and thousands of cells and find the ones that are performing a certain process in exactly the right way. So sometimes you can get there by brute force, sometimes you can get there elegantly, and there’s no value judgment in doing it either way.

Jack Faris (10:14):

Well, it does seem to me that listen, you talk about the scientific method as we use that in the general sense that that is if not a myth, it’s at least limiting in that it does suggest a particular pathway which doesn’t rely upon very much of a dimension of creativity.

Aimée Dudley (10:37):

I wouldn’t say that actually it’s very easy to become enamored of your own theories. So you read the scientific literature or you talk about things with your colleagues and you think, wow, I bet I know how this works and that’s great, but the next step in that is to test that hypothesis and to test it rigorously. So we might devise an experiment that tests whether or not a cell performs the function that you thought it did based on your reading, but you also have controls and you have positive controls. So controls that show that the experiment, the test that I’m doing is working the way it’s supposed to, just generally not related to the question I’m answering. And you have negative controls, would this thing that I’m testing happen just by chance some percentage of the time? And if those controls show you that the tests that you did isn’t supportive of your hypothesis, you could follow it up to make sure and you should follow it up to make sure that it’s right, but then you really need to move on. And so just because your theory is elegant and you are really excited about it, maybe because you came up with it and you think it’s a great idea, that doesn’t mean that it’s true and we’re always after the truth in science.

Jack Faris (12:10)

Among the big problems of your science is the problem of rare diseases. What are the primary myths and misunderstandings about rare diseases that you’d like to provide some degree of a correction to?

Aimée Dudley (12:25)

One of the things that I think is really important for people to understand, and this includes other scientists, is that if you are working on something that only affects a small number of people, that it’s not as important as working on something that affects a large number of people. So for example, we have worked on diseases that only affect, they’ve only been documented in 33 people in the scientific literature. We have helped medical geneticists who are discovering the very first patients to ever have a rare disease. And so there’s this idea that if you’re studying something that is rare, that doesn’t help the rest of us. So if we want to focus our time and our effort and our funding, that our money and our time would be better spent focusing on a problem that affects more people. So that’s not true and it’s not true for a couple of reasons.

(13:34)

The first reason is that for that patient and for that family and for that clinician who is charged with the care of that individual, it doesn’t matter that the disease is rare or not, you have to deal with that. So that’s one thing. But there are many, many examples, especially in genetics, which is my field, where the work to understand something that was incredibly rare or thought to be incredibly rare turns out to benefit a large number of people. So for example, there were what at the time were thought to be very rare individuals who were resistant to HIV. And so it wasn’t just that they don’t get disease that’s as severe as somebody else might get, and it wasn’t that they just don’t come down with the disease, they literally cannot be infected by the virus. And so we now know that that’s a little more common than we thought, but at the time these were thought to be incredibly rare individuals. Somebody happened to realize that this was interesting and important to study. They focused on it. And the understanding that came out of science’s collective knowledge about that and collective understanding about that led to the development of new HIV drugs and changes in the way that we think about treating and even preventing HIV infection. And that’s one of many examples, and we will see more of these as the field of genetics is moving forward very, very rapidly.

Jack Faris (15:14)

And how is it moving forward rapidly? What are the mechanisms that are accelerating?

Aimée Dudley (15:21)

So there are rapidly changing technological innovations that are happening. So I think most people have heard of DNA sequencing at this point. And so DNA sequencing, especially over the time that I have been in science, so the new advances allow us to sequence DNA in different ways that gives us different kinds of information that we didn’t have about it before. So we can know the entire length of DNA that might be present in your genome. We know different kinds of modifications on that DNA, and those have been invisible signatures that are definitely important to the cell, but we’ve just never been able to see them before. And so being able to sequence DNA in new, better, faster, cheaper and ways that give us new kinds of information, that’s one advance. Another advance is also computer technology. So both being able to do computer processing faster, cheaper, and in new ways.

(16:30)

You need fast computers in order to be able to analyze all of this data. There have been advances in both computer technology and DNA sequencing that have the potential to democratize DNA sequencing. So for example, we now have devices in our labs that you could hold in your hand and those can do the sequencing that it used to take a building full of people to do. And in fact, they can do things that you just couldn’t do before. But you can take one of those devices and essentially a gaming computer with a nice GPU processor and you can sequence human genomes with them and you can sequence human genomes with them really quickly.

Jack Faris (17:14)

You are making these discoveries in your teams with these advanced technologies and advanced computing abilities. The same thing or similar things are happening at laboratories and institutes around the country, around the world. What’s the importance and value of how that new knowledge is disseminated and received and used by other scientists?

Aimée Dudley (17:38)

So I think there are two things to point out about that. The first is that there are many collaborative efforts that are gathering, for example, a million whole genome sequences of individuals who have decided that they would like to participate in biomedical research in a way that’s different than what I’ve been talking about by saying that you have my permission to sequence my human genome and you have permission to access for the purpose of research in an anonymous and protected way. My medical records, my Fitbit, and so these are things that people can opt into. One of the things that has also changed over the course of my lifetime is not only of course the advent of social media and the ability for us to communicate and, for example, people to find people with commonalities. So for example, many of the rare disease communities, they’re able to find each other now through social media.

(18:42)

And the other thing that has really changed a lot is people’s relationship to privacy and kind of what privacy means. So my parents and my grandparents’ view of privacy and what you might or might not allow somebody to access in a protected anonymized way for the purpose of biomedical research would be very different than what my children would be willing to post on their social media accounts, for example. And so that’s one thing that’s changed. But another thing that’s changed is enabling our ability to collaborate. So I now have the ability with the advent of the internet and social media and email and Zoom, being able to communicate quickly and easily with the world’s experts on whatever problem we happen to be studying. And this is really moving science forward. You really can’t underestimate the advances that you can make when you can just hop on a call for 15 minutes with the world’s expert in X.

Jack Faris  (19:58)

What kind of misunderstandings, wrong headedness, et cetera, do you think are particularly serious afflictions of science and the role it has in our culture today?

Aimée Dudley (20:11)

One of the really big problems is the distrust of science and the distrust of scientists. And that has become a particularly critical problem as a result of the pandemic and the politicization of things like vaccines or scientific research. One of the things that really gives me hope is actually the rare disease moms, when you talk to them, they are a force to be reckoned with. And one of the first things that they will tell you is that coming out of the pandemic, one of the things that we collectively and they see as a major role that they play is regaining the public’s trust in science. And so why would these women want to do that? Why would they think that of all the things that they have to worry about in trying to advocate for their families, one of the reasons that that is so important to them is because science is what is going to save lives. And scientific research and scientific advances are going to lead to cures, prevention, therapeutics and a better understanding of disease processes. And it’s not just disease, it’s other things in the world, important problems like climate change, genetics and some of the technologies that we in the biomedical industry work on, DNA sequencing analysis, identifying rare individuals who are able to, rare individuals might be a rare plant species that is able to survive high salinity or higher temperatures or drought. Some of these things can help feed malnourished populations. Science really has a lot to offer humanity.

Jack Faris  (22:15)

I’ve been thinking, listening to you talk about the rare disease moms who are deeply engaged, very well-informed and passionate. Hearing you talk about them is adjusting my thinking to in the following way, that in the past we had a sort of a generalized reverence for science based kind of on faith science is good. And often it came along with the conviction that, well, I don’t have what it takes to be a scientist, but I’m glad those people are there. They’re able to come up with polio vaccines and public health measures and do other things, cancer treatments. But the rare disease moms, it seemed to me have a higher level of attachment to a conception of science based on educated trust. So it’s not just a blind faith of the sort. They have invested time, energy, and passion in learning more and more and more about the situation of their children and the way in which science has the prospect of helping them. So I would invite any further thoughts on that.

Aimée Dudley (23:31)

I couldn’t have said it better myself. That is exactly right. I recently had the privilege of attending my first family meeting. It was the National Urea Cycle Disorder Foundation’s family meeting. And it is a rare privilege for somebody who does basic laboratory research. So we don’t work with patients. I’m not a physician. I don’t have patients come into my clinic. I’m a yeast geneticist. We work at the bench, but our work can benefit people with these particular rare diseases that we work on. And it’s an honor and a privilege to be able to meet people and to be able to talk with families and patients.

Jack Faris (24:25)

Could you envision the future in which all newborns have their DNA sequenced and that becomes a mechanism for alerting physicians that this child is particularly vulnerable and we should be watching for this?

Aimée Dudley  (24:41)

So there are two important components of that. The first component in enabling that vision is technological. So would we be able to quickly and cheaply in terms of the healthcare system quickly and cheaply and effectively sequence a newborn, for example, in half an hour after birth. So we take a blood sample and in half an hour the physician gets back a report that says, you should look out for these particular disorders, or there’s no concern about any of these disorders. So that’s the technological part of it. Those technologies are advancing, so for sure within our lifetimes that will be technologically possible. The second important part of that is the social legal and ethical considerations. It might seem to some people like this would be a great thing, we would be able to detect presymptomatically the fact that this individual might have a urea cycle disorder and we could start monitoring them, start them on a special diet and start treatment. That kind of seems like a no brainer. But DNA sequencing identifies all sorts of, right. You can identify whether or not that individual is predisposed to breast cancer or Alzheimer’s. And so are you going to report back the fact that this person at the age of 75 might be susceptible to a late onset dementia? So these are important social ethical considerations.

Jack Faris (26:27)

Well, I can’t resist just speculating the possibility that as a mother of a newborn, that I can actually take that flight of fancy, that I could be offered the option of signing up for a full DNA sequencing or a redacted version that says, tell me about these childhood diseases, but don’t look into the future because that’s not my business to know at this point. And that could be, I suppose, programmed in a way that protects anonymity and privacy. But that’s just me imagining a future.

Aimée Dudley (27:05)

And just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you have to. And there are some conditions like the urea cycle disorders that I think a majority of people would say that if you can detect this and know that it was a possibility that this is something that your physician should be looking out for, then that probably is something that would benefit many people. But yeah, these are important questions that we need to have as a society, and that’s another reason why having a scientifically literate society is really important. You might say, well, why is it important that my kid studies genetics or understands the scientific method? Your high school student who is studying genetics, that’s going to be really, really relevant for the next 50 years of their life, both their own personal lives, and if they have children their children’s lives, we are going to need to make decisions.

Jack Faris (28:05)

Good point, indeed. So the frontier, the frontier of science, and in particular the frontier of understanding, treating and potentially preventing rare diseases, you’re able to move forward as I understand it, because of a fairly novel and recent team relationship between scientists like yourself, clinicians who treat patients, and the parents who are so deeply invested in advocating for their children and their families. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that operates and why that’s so important?

Aimée Dudley  (28:48)

Yeah, that’s a great question, Jack, because this really is an important tool in moving forward the research in really powerful ways. So you would imagine that if we as technologists, so my lab has expertise in a certain technology and we’re able to apply it to specific rare diseases, so that’s great, and we could proceed forward, use our technology, make some discoveries, publish papers, get it out into the scientific literature, and that would be great. That would be success. I would get my grants renewed and we would publish papers and graduate students would get jobs. And that is success in my world. However, if I said to you that we decided to start working with clinicians who actually see patients with these disorders because we believe that that’s going to move the science forward in new and important ways, that wouldn’t be surprising to you, right?

(29:58)

Because they’re clinicians, they know a lot about the disease and they have access to patients, and that all kind of makes sense, right? And so that made sense to us, too. And so in the early stages of the project, we were put in contact and started a close collaboration with a set of clinicians at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC and those clinicians realized that this new technology was going to be so powerful for advancing research on, in this case, the urea cycle disorders, that they were really committed to this collaboration. So as busy as they are, we meet every two weeks and have done for over three years. And as part of those collaborations, sometimes we make a discovery and we present data or kind of large scale high throughput data to the clinicians. And there have been moments of eureka moments where the clinician, and this is somebody who has studied this disease their whole career and they see a hundred patients with this disease says, wow, we’ve always suspected this particular thing that your data now shows, but nobody’s ever proven it before.

(31:13)

And so that’s really great that shows you that this is an important discovery. The part of it that is maybe not so obvious is the fact that it’s also really crucial in this collaborative model that we have to include the patient advocacy groups. And so those could be patients, those could be patient families. In the case of the disease we’re studying, it’s usually the families because these are usually children, but the patient advocacy groups. And so for somebody like me, that seems like a nice to have, but it wasn’t exactly clear to me at the beginning how that patient advocacy component was going to actually advance the science. I was very, very wrong about that. Within the patient community, these are of course people who are living, eating and breathing this disease every single day, all day, every day. And they are also scientists. They’re making observations and for example, in the case of this particular disorder, there are several triggers of what will cause a metabolic crisis in these individuals, in people with the disease. There are also treatments that work better or worse for different people. And there are symptoms that these individuals with these diseases have, and the patient advocates, the families are observing these in real time all the time, and a really valuable source of information from educated people, people who are in their way, experts in these diseases. And so integrating that patient advocacy expertise, the clinical expertise, and then our technological expertise, that is the way to do rare disease research, in my opinion.

Jack Faris (33:30)

One of your colleagues at PNRI noted recently in a conversation that I had with her, the study of rare diseases far from being peripheral and kind of lagging behind the mass of biomedical research is actually leading at the front because of innovations like the ones you’ve just enumerated. I would invite your comment on that because it goes back to the point made earlier that just because something is unusual, it doesn’t make it not significant scientifically. In fact, it may well be that it is particularly significant scientifically as well, of course in human terms. So your thoughts about the leadership role of rare disease research,

Aimée Dudley  (34:18)

One of the things that was shocking to me is how little we actually know about what the different genes in the human genome do. So for example, the genes that my lab works on are the genes that have counterparts in human cells. So there are 4,000 genes that have counterparts between yeast and human cells. And the reason we are interested in those is because those are the ones that we can use our technology on. There are amongst those 4,000 genes that are so important that cells separated by millions and millions of years in evolution between a single cell yeast cell that you might use to make bread and a human being. These processes are so conserved and so essential that those genes are present in a lowly yeast cell and they’re present in a human cell. We don’t know what 3,000 of those genes do in terms of their ability to cause disease.

 (35:32)

So, if those genes are so important that evolution is held onto them and used them and their core parts of the human machinery, it’s very likely that many of those actually will cause disease. We don’t know what those diseases are. And so rare disease is what will identify the vast majority of those. One of the ways in which rare disease research is leading the discoveries that will help even people without a rare disease is first by innovating in terms of technology, and second, in terms of making fundamental biological discoveries about what these genes that we don’t currently know, what happens when they go wrong. That’s something that’s going to be critically important because we don’t know what happens when those go wrong or when there’s a variant in them. Those could be causing some of the common diseases like high blood pressure or heart disease or cancer.

Jack Faris (36:46)

Imagine yourself in fifth grade again. What’s the journey from that point in time to becoming a full-time serious, even driven scientist?

Aimée Dudley (36:58)

I was somebody who wanted to be a scientist from the time I was three years old and nobody really knows why. I was just kind of a weird little kid and now I’m a weird little adult. But yeah, nobody in my family was a scientist. I didn’t know any scientists just for whatever reason, it just fascinated me. And so I worked really hard in school. My parents were professional people. My dad was a teacher and my mom was a developmental psychologist. But everyone in my family was really proud and excited about the fact and supportive of the fact that because I was smart, that meant that I would be able to go to college and there was just never any question about that. I had a full academic scholarship to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which was my state university. And one of the great things about being at your big state university is that there are a lot of opportunities to do research. And so I had a teacher and I think as part of my program, I had to do some additional honors work or something, and I asked him, well, could I write a term paper or something like this? I don’t remember what I asked, but he said, well, I don’t really want you to do that, but you could come in my lab and work in my lab. And so I started working in his lab and he happened to work on something that was related to how cells have evolved, so how the cells in certain kinds of plant and animal cells, how did those originally evolve from the primordial soup billions of years ago.

 (38:35)

And so I became really scientifically interested in that question and because I was interested in that question, I wanted to work on a part of our cells called the mitochondria. And so mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells. And so I went to a lab that studied mitochondria in yeast, and that was when I was about 20 years old. And I’ve been working on yeast, which is my favorite model organism ever since. And one of the great things about working in that lab when I worked in that lab as an undergraduate researcher, people might think because I told you that I wanted to be a scientist from the time I was three years old, I’ve always known I wanted to be a scientist. And so you might think that that journey went really smoothly because I knew what I wanted. I had it all figured out, and it was just a straight journey from A to B, but of course it really never is.

 (39:29)

I made all of the mistakes and had all of the growing pains that any kid does. And I was working in this lab, this yeast lab as an undergraduate, and I was working under this really great mentor. Her name was Jennifer Pinkham. Jennifer was a fantastic mentor. She never had kids herself, but she used to always tell me that there are lots of ways to reproduce yourself. And so she really took on this mentoring role very seriously and she mentored a lot of people who have gone on to become scientists and MDs and vets. At one point when I was having some existential crisis of a 20-year-old undergraduate, Jennifer said to me, I think I was probably crying in the middle of the lab and I was a mess. And she said, Aimée, I’m going to turn you into a scientist and I’m going to make you a good one. And that way there, when everything else in your life falls apart, you’ll always have this to come to. You’ll always be able to come into the lab and to sit at the bench and to just do science. And that was a gift that she gave me and it was really incredible.

Jack Faris  (40:40)

It is quite beautiful. People do remark on the importance of mentors and obviously that kind of support and wisdom can be crucial. What other things make for a really good mentor?

Aimée Dudley (40:51)

I’ve always thought, and it’s one of the things that I think I learned from Jennifer, is that a really good mentor is not somebody who has always had everything go well for them. They’re not somebody who’s lived this kind of charmed life. A really good mentor is somebody who has, I’ll speak for myself, not Jennifer, screwed a lot of things up and had to dig their way out of them. And they can help you dig your way out of at the time that you are facing, especially as a young person at the time, you’re facing a problem that seems like a really big problem. You think that this is a fatal problem and I just don’t know how to dig myself out of it. And there are people who do. And knowing when to reach out to mentors, knowing when to reach out to people, even more senior people who you think, well, I don’t want to bother this person. That’s our job.

Jack Faris (41:56)

What would you say to a parent who realizes that her three-year-old has a strong inclination towards science? How would you advise them?

Aimée Dudley  (42:09)

I mean, I would of course encourage them to be supportive and encouraging. Science is in some ways so accessible now. I mean, we have the internet now. We have ways to research things that are not limited in kind of the limited go to the library and look something up in an outdated encyclopedia kind of way. Science moves so quickly now. So it’s really an amazing and exciting time to be in science. But one of the other things that I think is surprising about science to people who don’t actual scientists is that in addition to the fact that there’s a lot of creativity in science, there are a lot of ways to integrate other things that you’re interested in into science. People might be surprised to know that there’s a lot of art and a lot of photography and a lot of computer programming. Maybe that’s not so surprising.

 (43:05)

But if your child is really interested in art or really interested in, some kids really like looking under the microscope, some kids really like manipulating chemicals. Some kids really like blowing stuff up. And so all of that has a place in science. So one of the things that I would really like to see educators do is to encourage kids, for example, who are really interested in photography or 3D printing or who really like to develop apps or blow stuff up to encourage them to use that as a hook to excite kids about science. The other thing that I think is really surprising about science to a lot of people is how collaborative it is. One of the myths about science is that you have this genius working by themselves in a lab and somebody who kind of looks like Albert Einstein in a white coat is just so bright and that’s how science is pushed forward because individuals working alone through their shared genius are making these discoveries and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Science is really collaborative, and even though a lot of us are introverts, it really is a highly interactive, a highly collaborative process. We’re always talking to other scientists in my lab, we’re always working together on projects. So we’ll have somebody in my lab who is particularly good at analyzing protein structure and they’re working together with somebody who has 20 years of experience doing yeast genetics and with somebody who is an expert at statistical analysis and they’re all constantly working together on a collaborative project to jointly solve some big problem.

Jack Faris  (45:00)

That’s inspiring to think, and I think we, all of us who have been listening to you are grateful that there was a three-year-old girl who decided this is what I want to do. Thank you very, very much, Aimée.

Aimée Dudley  (45:15)

Thanks, Jack.

Anna Faris (45:31):

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?

Jack Faris (46:07):

Better!