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Amy Herr
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Amy Herr's research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences and translating that work to provide better clinical diagnostics. Amy is Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
Transcript
Speaker 1: Spectrum's next.
Speaker 2: Mm MM.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.
Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest this week is Amy, her associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Amy is a teacher and a researcher. Her research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences [00:01:00] and how to translate that work to provide better clinical diagnoses. She is a pioneer in the new field of proteomics. Brad swift and I interview Amy, her.
Speaker 5: Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and welcome. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. How did you become interested in bioengineering? So I am actually a trained mechanical engineer and I think what really peaked my interest in bioengineering was during graduate study in mechanical engineering. I realized that a lot of [00:01:30] the measurement and instrument challenges that exist that face engineering today really are in the life sciences. So this messy area where things are not necessarily tractable or well-described protein measurement is an area that I've been interested in for some time and I've been working on. And it's especially challenging from the perspective of designing instrument technology, measurement technology. What are protein biomarkers and what makes them elusive? Yeah. So protein biomarkers really is just sort of a catch [00:02:00] all phrase for indicators of disease state, um, indicators of living, organisms, response to treatment, just sort of indicators of what's going on in the organism at a particular time.
Speaker 5: So there's many different types of biomarkers. You may have heard quite a bit about this genomics revolution and our use and understanding of information that's coming from nucleic acids. And what we're really looking for in Dow is building on what we've learned from our understanding of nucleic acids. How can we try [00:02:30] to understand proteins, which are the effectors of function, if you will, in living organisms and really try to use that information from proteins to understand all of these questions surrounding disease. So who has a disease, who might respond to specific treatments, who might not respond to specific treatments? How you are responding to specific treatments and in our mind it's released the next phase of what genomics has laid the groundwork for an area that we call proteomics. Can you give us a quick run through [00:03:00] of how molecular diagnosis works now and what new things you are trying to detect and what new information we can get from those?
Speaker 5: I guess it has been striking to me as an instrument designer, innovator developer. If you take a look at our understanding of the role of proteins in disease right now, there's a treasure trove I would say, of information that's come out of basic discovery. So trying to understand what proteins are upregulated or downregulated or modified in [00:03:30] response to disease or treatment of disease. Right. So I would say there's definitely more effort that needs to be done in discovery, but we've done a lot of great work in discovery. A huge challenge and unmet need to use the engineering design terminology that exists right now is we have these potential indicators of disease or response to disease or prognosis, but very, very few of them have made it into a clinical setting into a diagnostic. Right now there are less than a hundred [00:04:00] different biomarkers that are being used for diagnostics.
Speaker 5: That includes nucleic acids of DNA, RNA and proteins as well, just metabolites as well, right? So very, very few of the known existing bio molecules are being used in any way as a diagnostic measurement. And so there's really a huge gap right now between all of these promising markers that have been identified and those that are currently being used to make a diagnosis. So one of the things that we're [00:04:30] trying to do is to just build a basic framework for measurements that will allow people to make many, many, many measurements of a particular biomarker of potential interest so that you can look at many, many different patients' samples, many, many different disease states. We won't be really data limited. So the technologies that we use right now for a lot of these protein biomarkers to see whether or not the promising ones actually answer a clinical question, they're really rate limiting.
Speaker 5: [00:05:00] They're really slow or they require a lot of material and in some cases this biospecimens these materials from patients are precious, hugely limited, right there, sparingly available. So we're just trying to think about ways that we can use these microfluidic architectures that require just tiny amounts of sample to run one measurement. How we can use those to scale up to make thousands of measurements. We're right now tens of measurements can be difficult and to make those measurements on, you know, a [00:05:30] microliter of sample from a patient as opposed to tens to hundreds of microliters. So that for us, this so-called biomarker validation question getting from yet this might work too. Okay, here are the clinical questions this marker can or cannot answer as the gap that we're trying to fill. Are you building these instruments? A major focus of my research group is looking at innovating new instrumentation, new technologies.
Speaker 5: So by understanding the underlying physical principles [00:06:00] of the types of transport that we use. So electrophoresis and diffusion and by understanding unmet clinical or life sciences needs. So questions or challenges that currently exist out in life sciences laboratories or in clinical laboratories. We're basically trying to bring those two aspects together to develop new tools. All of the new tools that we develop are developed really to meet an unmet need either in the clinical setting or the life sciences setting and they're built with an understanding these underlying principles, but they all [00:06:30] have to be validated. So when we make a measurement with a new tool, we have to have some confidence in how well our measurement reflects our current understanding of the systems. And we typically do that by using conventional gold standard measurement technologies where appropriate. I think recently we've just come into this really interesting and exciting gray zone where we can make measurements that there really are no existing tools to be able to validate whether our measurement makes sense or not. And so we've had to put some effort and careful thought [00:07:00] into how do we validate our measurements using maybe indirect approaches so that we can say with some confidence the limits and the benefits of the tools that we're introducing.
Speaker 4: You said earlier that a lot of your research comes from trying to meet the unmet needs of both the life sciences and the technological aspects. How do you go about picking which needs to meet? Do you find ones that you think, okay, well this is doable, or do you find ones that you think, maybe no one else can do this? I'm going to work on it?
Speaker 5: Right. [00:07:30] That's a great question. So as an engineer, as an engineering designer, one of the first things that we do is really try to understand the world around us and try to understand how people approach existing problems, how they define those problems, why they approach them in a particular way. But I think this is one of the most exciting aspects of the work that we do. It's certainly true that if you get this first stage, this identification and understanding of unmet needs wrong, you're going to go down the wrong path, but if you get it right, you can make a huge difference in terms [00:08:00] of how people are approaching either science or medicine and our work is really translational in that way. So we're engineers and we're passionate about making excellent measurements and as you say, measurements that are currently not possible are the measurements that we're really looking to impact.
Speaker 5: Measurements that are currently possible but needs significant improvement. We do focus on those as well, but when you can find a measurement that when you're talking to a biologist and explaining kind of what you can do and they look at you and say, oh my gosh, there's no [00:08:30] way I could do that right now, then you know you've hit upon something that's really important to at least consider further to fill a gap and unmet need that's out there at the present time. In many ways, I think it reminds many of us of why we chose to be engineers in the first place. I mean, certainly I can speak for myself and say I'm really excited about being able to make measurements that no one else can make. And understanding how those measurements, how good they are, how much more improvement they need, and maybe trying to understand the physics and think about [00:09:00] is something possible that we've discounted to date. But I think in many ways connecting with the end user also adds another layer of excitement and passion and motivation because you can really see how your work in the lab can make a difference in the world around us.
Speaker 6: Aw. [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum k A. L. Alex Berkeley. Our guest today is Amy her in the next segment, [00:09:30] Amy talks about her lab at UC Berkeley. [inaudible]
Speaker 5: how long has your lab been up and running? So my lab has been a, at Berkeley six years before I came to UC Berkeley. So I did my doctoral research at Stanford in mechanical engineering and then I loved a research and I wanted to continue doing research and so I worked for five years at a national lab and then coming to UC Berkeley was a big change in many ways, but I think [00:10:00] I'm working with an excellent team of, in many cases, junior colleagues here now, training them, postdocs and students just being invigorated every year with the fresh approaches that students, the frust questions that students ask about why are we doing some things in the way that we're doing them, or why is our understanding limited in this way as a faculty member? Just a huge source of inspiration and motivation over the six years. Has Your approach within the lab changed much?
Speaker 5: Our lab has certainly changed. Yeah, [00:10:30] and I think as an individual, you as a researcher over the course of six years, certainly I will have also changed. You learn as you go and you learn on a technical level for sure. Absolutely. I would also say I've learned a lot from my groom to the students and the postdocs and the way that they approach problems. It's been just a fantastic honor to be able to work in bioengineering here at UC Berkeley with an amazing group of people who all come with different perspectives. And I've really pushed the research directions [00:11:00] in my group in ways that I couldn't have imagined six years ago. And they also come from very different disciplines as well, don't they? And has that mix changed for you over the six years? Yeah, that is absolutely true. So bioengineering, when I was in graduate school, which I'd like to think was in a long time ago, but it was, I finished almost a decade ago now.
Speaker 5: It didn't even really exist. Right. It was just kind of starting and the graduate level widely at universities around the u s and globally as well. So most of the faculty, if you look at bio engineering, our formal training is [00:11:30] not in bio engineering. We're too old for that, I guess. And so the students who currently come to do doctoral study at UC Berkeley and with our partner institution, University of California, San Francisco, they all come with different backgrounds. More and more of them are coming with a biomedical or bio engineering undergraduate degree. But we certainly, you know, in my group alone have had students who have come from uh, aeronautics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, just a wide range of backgrounds. As someone who essentially [00:12:00] witnessed the genesis of an entire field of engineering and especially one that is so connected to the world. Can you tell us what that was like and how that's affected you?
Speaker 5: Yeah. Seeing bioengineering starts really and become just the huge discipline in the really impactful area of research and study that it is today has been really inspiring. It's also does raise a lot of questions, questions about what is the appropriate curriculum for undergraduates who are studying. Bioengineering is something that [00:12:30] the faculty in my department, we talk about all the time. We try to refine our approach to this really, really important basic study that students undertake in their undergraduate years. Right? So there's that aspect of it wanting to make sure that we help them prepare themselves to be the best engineers possible when they leave UC Berkeley on the other hand, just seeing the huge advances that engineering is making in medicine and the way that it's changing the lives of people and has been for some time [00:13:00] for the better is really inspiring. I will say I often notice that students that I come into contact with here, they're really driven to make a positive impact in the world around them.
Speaker 5: And I think that is really at the core of what engineers want to do. We want to understand, but we also want to make something, we want to make a positive impact with what we're doing and maybe I think in a very practical sense that's what an engineer is. I wanted to ask you a little [00:13:30] bit about what you've referred to the engineering mindset and I think it's a really interesting perspectives to want to maybe put us in that mind frame. Yeah, I think the engineering approaches to really just question question what you're observing, question what people are telling you. And so the engineering mindset I think is to be skeptical and to be observant, to not listen to necessarily what people tell you, but to use your own eyes and to discuss with peers or mentors [00:14:00] to try to understand and make sense of all of the different perspectives you're going to get when you're trying to understand the problem.
Speaker 5: And so as engineers, we're always challenged with getting into kind of one way of thinking and that can push you down a path that could be productive. But if you really step outside and try to integrate a really holistic view of the world or the problem you're trying to understand, you might happen upon new approaches that users would never have dreamed of. Right? So there's that aspect. I think the engineering mindset is also to be objective. And in [00:14:30] our case in bio engineering, trying to be as quantitative as possible and to understand the limits and the advantages of being quantitative. And then certainly in bioengineering, there is a huge aspect of our mindset, which is to translate our solutions out into the world around us so that we can have a positive impact on society and the world more broadly. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k l x Berkeley. [00:15:00] Our guest today is [inaudible]
Speaker 6: Amy her in the next segment, Amy offers advice to students interested in bio engineering.
Speaker 5: Can you explain how you're using mathematics to reveal biological systems and create new medical applications? Yeah. One of the big things that we've seen lacking in instruments to make protein level measurements is any sort of quantitation, so a lot of the technologies [00:15:30] are just qualitative. You can see the presence of a particular protein of interest or okay, maybe it's higher presence in one sample versus another, but inherently in the way a lot of the conventional approaches, the conventional assays are run, there's very little confidence in being able to pull out exactly how many micrograms and material are present in a sample two it's hard to do comparisons between different samples except in a very qualitative way. What we're working on are technologies that are quantitative. [00:16:00] So that can allow you to pull out absolute mass level or concentration level information about how much protein is present in a particular sample.
Speaker 5: And the hope there is that by doing that we can allow ourselves to create large databases of quantitative information about how much protein or particular form of protein is present under specific conditions. So you can imagine if you were doing a study, for example, on a particular biomarker [00:16:30] of interest, so prostate specific antigen, let's take, right. So if you knew that a particular isoform of this protein was present in certain cases, you could actually quantify how much is there. Enter that information in a database and a researcher say in Norway, who's also making similar measurements, but maybe on a different patient cohort could also upload their information. You can compare head to head. So these data sets could get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then potentially looking at questions of cell signaling [00:17:00] and in proteins that carry that signaling information. Perhaps integrating those quantitative levels of these particular proteins back into bioinformatics models that have been developed would lend insight into the exact response of a protein signaling pathway to a particular stimulation and give those bioinformatics models some actual numbers to work with as opposed to just relationships between specific proteins and are you building some of those models?
Speaker 5: So a lot of what we do is collaboration with [00:17:30] specialists in protein signaling pathway models. So my lab is into bioinformatics lab, so we don't do a lot of that ourselves. But through our collaborations with the bioinformatics community, we know that quantitative levels of proteins at particular times is really important to these dynamic models. And so that's a major focus of our work as well.
Speaker 4: It's interesting that you bring their PSA test up because I think that's been getting a lot of attention lately. I'd say look at more data. They're realizing it's not quite the silver bullet that people thought it was. [00:18:00] Are there any other examples like that that waste have completely overturned people's ideas of what we were seeing once we look at this large scale data? Yeah,
Speaker 5: in particular a very striking example that you bring up the test for free versus total prostate specific antigen in blood. Right. And that's been used for many years as an indicator of prostate cancer. I think there are just three beautiful studies that have come out in the last year, one from UCF that have really pointed to the fact [00:18:30] that actually some of these PSA tests are really good at finding prostate cancer. They're just really bad at telling us if it's an aggressive or a slow moving prostate cancer. Right? So the prognostic information, how the patient is going to fare in the long run is just not there. So we're finding the prostate cancer, but we're not able to determine whether we should just watch full weights and see what happens or if we should actually embark upon some treatment. That's been a big interest of our group is looking [00:19:00] at specific diagnostic questions.
Speaker 5: Who in the case of prostate cancer, can we improve prognostic information and trying to look at specific forms of the protein. So in this case, working with the researcher at Stanford Medical Center looking at different glyco forms of prostate specific antigen that may be more indicative of longterm outcomes for the patient. That in particular is a really interesting one for me because we started working with this researcher maybe six years ago before these big studies came out that showed the prognostic usefulness of the PSA [00:19:30] test was not so good and I definitely remember us submitting several proposals to funding agencies and basically getting the comments back that will we have an indicator for prostate cancer right now, we don't need another one. And so just even over the short time that we've been working on it, seeing that just turned on its head because of this ability to integrate all of this patient level information across countries and across different sites to try to understand how good is this test really have led us to realize it's not, as you [00:20:00] said, the silver bullet that we once hoped or thought that it was. I think that's a really good example. I think in some of those same studies, mammograms have also come out yet, right, is not necessarily answering the diagnostic questions that they hoped that that diagnostic would answer. What advice would you give to a young person thinking about bioengineering, about preparing for work in a multi disciplinary lab?
Speaker 5: I think major advice that I would give to a young [00:20:30] person who's thinking about working in an interdisciplinary lab like those that you'll find in bioengineering, but also across the campus for sure. I know this interdisciplinary focus is something that permeates engineering right now and I think rightly so on many levels. Many of the problems that we're trying to solver so big are complex. That having these different inputs is just critical. I honestly think that is part of our community. We've not done a great job of communicating to either new engineers or people who are thinking about going into engineering and just this idea that [00:21:00] I can work on these really big challenges with teams of amazing people trying to have a positive impact through my work. I can get paid to do that. I can travel the world to do that. I can work on many different types of problems over the lifetime of my career.
Speaker 5: Just an amazing career path really for anyone to consider. It's certainly very exciting and it certainly challenges you and it allows you to operate in these spheres that you would never imagine you could. So either with [00:21:30] different teams of people or just on problems that you maybe never even imagined you would come across. I think some of the advice I would give a undergraduate here at UC Berkeley, I would definitely urge them to seek out opportunities, clearly urge them to seek out mentors, so people who are maybe several years older than them, so people who are role models, who they might want to be like when they quote grow up. Right? We all have those people that we look for no matter how old we are. Look also for people around you who are maybe just a couple years [00:22:00] older than you, who have gone through a programmer or embarked upon research in a particular field and pick their brain about what worked for them and what didn't.
Speaker 5: If they went back in time, what would they do differently or what are they so glad that they did? I think just finding these resources and making use of them and then paying it forward when your time comes and you have the experience to share insight with other people and advice is advice. You don't have to take it. But I do think it's certainly in my own career really helped me to listen to it and then weigh it for myself. [00:22:30] I think in an interdisciplinary field like bioengineering focusing on getting the rigorous fundamental understanding of engineering and the particular area that you're interested in is really key. Certainly advisees, I urge them to consider either a minor or some sort of emphasis material science, mechanical or electrical engineering cause it might help them out a little bit. But just making use of the resources that are around you and finding those resources is something I would urge students to do. I'd love to [00:23:00] know your favorite protein. Oh my favorite protein. I think actually right now it would be prostate specific antigen. Yes. Because there is so much controversy around it for sure. Yeah. So it was a good question. Sure. Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:23:30] [inaudible]
Speaker 5: on the webcast of spectrum, we've chosen to include a new section of Amy's interview suitable. The more technologically inclined among us, she would discuss her exciting work inventing novel means of biological measurement. One other term I wanted to have you weigh in on is the term scale dependent physics and chemistry, and how is that important to your work? So [00:24:00] we are a bioengineering lab. We're an instrument innovation and development lab. So what we look at, or are there new ways to make protein level measurements that can inform our understanding or our approaches to disease? Right. And that's through this portal of proteins is indicators of disease. It's really interesting as you look at some of the basic fluid and material transport phenomenos. So things like diffusion or things like, in our case, we're interested in electro migration, so charged analytes. If you apply an electric field, [00:24:30] they're going to migrate, right?
Speaker 5: They're going to go towards the cathode or the anode depending on their charge. These sorts of physical transport phenomena can really benefit from shrinking link scales. So in our case, we're interested in using tiny channels, so channels that hold fluids, liquids in particular channels that have a dimension about the size of a human hair. So they're very small. As you scale down channels to that size, you start to get some really beneficial properties that come out about the fluids. And then in particular, the use of [00:25:00] the electric fields benefits from those tiny channels because the channels have a very high surface area to volume ratio. So as you shrink a channel down, you get more and more surface area for a tiny volume. And that essentially means that if we apply a field, an electric field along a fluid that's in that channel, we can apply a very, very high fields and those high fields are going to make the fluid start heating something that's called jewel heating.
Speaker 5: So in the electric circuits you have in your computer, for example, if you apply a field, you're moving electrons, not liquids, [00:25:30] but you're still getting this jewel heating because of the motion of those particles. As we have these really high surface areas, we can dissipate heat really effectively. So we can apply high, higher and higher fields than you could even say a millimeter diameter channel. Now we have channels that are microns in diameter, so orders of magnitude smaller and they cool very effectively. So that allows us to access a transport spaces that aren't accessible kind of in the macro scale.
Speaker 5: So my [00:26:00] lab is really focused on taking fabrication approaches that have been developed for the semiconductor industry. So moving electrons around in tiny channels, if you will, and applying that with those sorts of approaches to now, not moving electrons but moving fluids, right liquids around. Um, and the reason we do that is because as we scaled the channels down, the channels that hold the liquids, we get beneficial properties. So heat dissipation is one of those beneficial phenomena. It really starts to [00:26:30] become more and more efficient as we scaled it. The dimensions, the cross section of the channel down. So in our case we like to use these tiny structures, these tiny fluid channels. Again, diameter of about if human here in cross section because it allows us to operate under really, really harsh conditions if you will. So at very, very high field strengths. In addition to that, another beneficial aspect of scaling down is much of the transport that happens inside these tiny channels really ends up relying on diffusion [00:27:00] as being the major mechanism of transport and diffusion a is very efficient over short distances, over long distances.
Speaker 5: The scaling is not necessarily favorable and it might take you a long time for a molecule to diffuse a long distance, but as we use these techniques, these fabrication techniques to develop micro and Nano fluidic channels, those distances in those channels are tiny. So microns or nanometers and that means diffusion all the sudden becomes a very effective transport mechanism. [00:27:30] So we use these effective transport scalings these beneficial scalings to allow us to do things like mixing. So we can bring two analytes or two reagents in contact with each other and just rely on diffusion to get them to mix. Whereas in the macro scale we would want to stir or agitate the fluid in some way so we can use passive approaches and rely on diffusion to get effective mixing. Whereas on the macro scale we would have to have some sort of active stirring in order to get those, those species [00:28:00] to come together and react.
Speaker 5: So are these techniques being applied to both your understanding of biological systems and in your applications that you're trying to build? It's a great question. So I think primarily a lot of the physical phenomena that we're using are really trying to drive towards efficient assays, efficient measurement technologies for specific applications. So for example, we might be looking at a particular protein mediated signaling pathway [00:28:30] and we might be really interested in different isoforms or different versions of proteins, the same protein, but maybe it has some sort of phosphorylation modification on it. Um, and by using these really efficient separation mechanisms like electrophoresis on the micro scale, it's electro migration properties, we can actually start to resolve species or separate them when if we were to use a less efficient architecture, we might not be able to separate them basically and tell them apart. So it allows us to in some ways [00:29:00] access information that sometimes is not accessible using conventional methodologies, conventional assays.
Speaker 5: Um, but it also lets us get at looking at reactions for example, on timescales that you just can't do using macro scale techniques. So being able to look at very fine time points because we have really precise control of fluids using these micro architectures, these microfluidic channels. So there's kind of two answers. One, we want to look at specific proteins as related to clinical [00:29:30] questions. So those applications and in many cases we can do that more efficiently. But on the flip side, the fundamental understanding of biology, we might want to look at timescales that we can't measure box systems as well. Have you discovered anything really new and exciting with this novel level of precision? We have started to move into an area that's a little bit unknown and recently some of the work that's being generated in my lab and we're excited to be preparing now for communication to the broader technical [00:30:00] community is being able to look at protein signaling pathways on a single cell level.
Speaker 5: So flow cytometry is one example of technology that exists that allows you to look at literally millions of individual cells and you've basically stained those cells with antibodies to a particular protein. So the cell is going to glow a particular color because the antibody has a floor for conjugated to it. The cell is going to glow as particular color of the antibody binds to an analyte of interest of a protein of interest in that cell. But the [00:30:30] problem is with flow cytometry, if you're looking for proteins that we don't have antibodies that are specific to them. So some of these isoforms for example, there's not an antibody that's just specific to a particular isoform. It's very difficult to to make a flow cytometry measurement or there's other cases, for example, with stem cell research or circulating tumor cells. We have so few starting cells that if you use flow cytometry, you're basically going to lose all of the material before you can make the measurement.
Speaker 5: [00:31:00] So using these microfluidic architectures, we can um, do separations of single cells and be able to look at isoforms of particular proteins even if we don't have antibodies specific to one of the isoforms. If we have an antibody that's specific to all of the isoforms but we can resolve them from each other before we use an antibody to probe for them. Or if we have such a tiny starting population of cells like circulating tumor cells, we're going to be able to make measurements of the protein signaling pathways on those, you know, 10 or a hundred cells [00:31:30] that are of interest that we just can't do using conventional technologies. I should say. One of the major methods that my group has been working on over the last couple of years is this idea of western blotting. And this is a really powerhouse work horse analytical technique that's used in clinical and research labs all over the world.
Speaker 5: Basically it's an assay that allows you to separate the protein contents of a particular sample, so to resolve species proteins by differences in molecular weight, for example, and [00:32:00] then it allows you to come in with an antibody that's specific to a target of interest and see at a particular molecular weight. Does this antibody recognize that protein? If so, most likely that is the protein that I'm looking for, that's my target or the candidate that I'm looking for. And so we've pushed in several different lines of inquiry, new ways to make this specific measurement. It's two measurements, molecular weight and this binding to an antibody or an immune regent of interest. We've really benefited from materials design, so developing [00:32:30] materials that we can change basically from molecular sieving matrices that are useful for the separation stage. Two materials that actually immobilize the of interest upon exposure to light and after we immobilize the proteins, we can come in with the antibody and probe to see if that particular band at that specific molecular weight is the target of interest. This is, I think, been really informative from the perspective of allowing us to design these systems to operate, say, at the single cell level [00:33:00] or to operate on clinical samples that are difficult to analyze using conventional technologies.
Speaker 2: Mm MM.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: The music heard during this show was written in, produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to [00:33:30] us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x hit yahoo.com join us into
Speaker 7: [inaudible]
Speaker 3: [00:34:00] probably.
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30:00|Bruce Ames Sr Scientist at CHORI, and Prof Emeritus of Biochem and Molecular Bio, at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick Ph.D. biomedical science, postdoc at CHORI in Dr. Ames lab. The effects of micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage, and aging.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi there. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of our two interviews with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Dr Ames is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute, director of their [00:01:00] nutrition and metabolism center and a professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a phd in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute and Dr Ames lab. She currently conducts clinical trials looking at the effects of nutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging. In February of 2014 she published [00:01:30] a paper in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal on how vitamin D regulates serotonin synthesis and how this relates to autism. In part one Bruce and Rondo described his triage theory for micronutrients in humans and their importance in health and aging. In part two they discussed public health risk factors, research funding models, and the future work they wish to do. Here is part two of Brad Swift's interview with Dr Ames [00:02:00] and Patrick. Speaker 4: Is there a discussion going on in public health community about this sort of important that Rhonda, that one, Speaker 5: I think that people are becoming more aware of the importance of micronutrient deficiencies in the u s population. We've got now these national health and examination surveys that people are doing, examining the levels of these essential vitamins and minerals. 70% of the populations not getting enough vitamin D, 45% [00:02:30] population is not getting enough magnesium, 60% not getting enough vitamin K, 25% is not getting enough vitamin CS, 60% not getting enough vitamin E and on and on, 90% not getting enough calcium testing. It's very difficult to get. So I think that with these surveys that are really coming out with these striking numbers on these micronutrient deficiencies in the population, I'm in the really widespread and with triage, the numbers that tell you may be wrong because the thinking short term instead of long term, really what you want to know Speaker 6: [00:03:00] is what level [inaudible] indeed to keep a maximum lifespan. And our paper discussed all at and uh, but I must say the nutrition community hasn't embraced it yet, but they will because we're showing it's true and we may need even more of certain things. But again, you don't want to overdo it. Okay. Speaker 4: So talk a little bit about risk factors in general. In health, a lot of people, as you were saying, are very obsessed with chemicals or so maybe their risk assessment is [00:03:30] misdirected. What do you think are the big health issues, the big health risks? Speaker 6: I think obesity is like smoking. Smoking is eight or 10 years off your life. Each cigarette takes 10 minutes off your life. I mean, it's a disaster and smoking levels are going down and down because people understand. Finally, there's still a lot of people smoke, but obesity is just as bad years of expensive diabetes and the costs can be used. [00:04:00] Whatever you look at out timers of brain dysfunction of all sites is higher in the obese and there's been several studies of the Diet of the obese and it's horrible. I mean it's sugar, it's comfort food and they're not eating fruits and vegetables and the not eating berries and nuts and not eating fish. And so it's doing the main and the country is painful. Speaker 5: I think that the biggest risk in becoming unhealthy and increasing your [00:04:30] risk of age related diseases, inflammatory diseases comes down to micronutrient intake and people are not getting enough of that. And we know that we quantified it, we know they're not getting enough. And so I think that people like to focus on a lot of what not eat, don't eat sugar and that's right. You shouldn't eat a lot of sugar. I mean there's a lot of bad effects on, you know, constantly having insulin signaling activated. You can become insulin resistant in type two diabetic and these things are important. But I think you also need to realize you need to focus on what you're not getting as opposed to only focusing on what you should not [00:05:00] be getting. Yeah, Speaker 6: a colleague, lowest scold, and I wrote over a hundred papers trying to put risk in perspective. That part to been in pesticide is really uninteresting. Organic food and regular food doesn't matter. It's makes you feel good, but you're really not either improving the environment or helping your health. Now that you're not allowed to say that, things like that in Berkeley. But anyway, it's your diet. You should be worried about getting a good balanced time. So if you put out a thousand [00:05:30] hypothetical risks, you're lost space. Nobody knows what's important anymore and that's where we're getting. Don't smoke and eat a good diet. You're way ahead of the game and exercise and exercise. Right.Speaker 4: And in talking about the current situation with funding, when you think back Bruce, in the early days of your career and the opportunities that were there for getting funding vastly Speaker 6: different. [00:06:00] Well, there was much less money in the system, but I always was able to get funded my whole career and I've always done reasonably well. But now it's a little discouraging when I think I have big ideas that are gonna really cut health care costs and we have big ideas on obesity and I just can't get any of this funded [inaudible] but now if you're an all original, it's hopeless putting it at grant, [00:06:30] I just have given up on it. Speaker 5: Well the ANA, the NIH doesn't like to fund. Speaker 6: Yeah. If you're thinking differently than everybody else you do and they're only funding eight or 9% of grants, you just can't get funded. I didn't want to work on a 1% so I'm funding it out of my own pocket with, I made some money from a biotech company of one my students and that's what's supporting my lamb and few rich people who saw potential gave me some money. But it's really tough [00:07:00] now getting enough money to do this. That's an interesting model. Self funding. Well, Rhonda is trying to do that with a, she has a blog and people supporting her in, Speaker 5: I'm trying to do some crowdfunding where instead of going to the government and then all these national institute of cancer, aging, whatever, which essentially uses taxpayer dollar anyways to fund research. I'm just going to the people, that's what I'm trying to do. My ultimate goal is to go to the people, tell them about this research I'm doing and [00:07:30] my ideas how we're going to do it and have them fund it. People are willing to give money to make advances in science. They just need to know about it. What did you tell him what your app is? So, so I have an app called found my fitness, which is the name of my platform where I basically break down science and nutrition and fitness to people and I explained to them mechanisms. I explained to them context, you know, because it's really hard to keep up with all these press releases and you're bombarded with and some of them are accurate and some aren't and most of the time you just have no idea what is going on. Speaker 5: It's very [00:08:00] difficult to sort of navigate through all that mess. So I have developed a platform called found my fitness where I'm trying to basically educate people by explaining and breaking down the science behind a lot of these different types of website. And it's an app, it's a website that's also an app can download on your iPhone called found my fitness. And I have short videos, youtube videos that I do where I talk about particular science topics or health nutrition topics. I also have a podcast where I talk about them. I'm interviewing other scientists in the field and things like that. And also I've got a news community site [00:08:30] where people can interact posts, new news, science stories or nutrition stories, whatever it is and people comment. So we're kind of building in community where people can interact and ask questions and Speaker 6: Rhonda makes a video every once in a while and puts it up on her website and she has people supporting at least some of this and she hopes to finally get enough money coming in. We'll support her research. Speaker 5: No, I think we're heading that way. I think that scientists are going to have to findSpeaker 6: new creative ways to fund their research. Uh, particularly if they have creative ideas [00:09:00] is, Bruce mentioned it because it's so competitive to get that less than 10% funding. The NIH doesn't really fun, really creative and risky, but it's, you need somebody who gets it. If when you put out a new idea, right, and if it's against conventional wisdom, which I'd like to do with the occasion arises, then it's almost impossible anyway. Speaker 4: Even with your reputation. Speaker 6: Yeah, it's hard. I've just given [00:09:30] up writing grants now. It's a huge amount of work and when they keep on getting turned down, even though I think these are wonderful ideas, luckily I can keep a basal level supporting the lab. I found a rich fellow who had an autistic grandkid guy named Jorgensen and he supported Rhonda and he supported her for a year and she was able to do all these things. Yeah, my age, I want to have [00:10:00] a lot of big ideas and I just like to get them out there anyway. We shouldn't complain. We're doing okay. Right. It's a very fulfilling job. There's nothing more fulfilling than doing science in my opinion. Yes. Speaker 7: You're listening to spectrum and k a Alex Berkley. Today's guests are Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr Rhonda Patrick of Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. [00:10:30] Oh, Speaker 4: the ames test. When you came up with that, was that, what was the process involved with?Speaker 6: Well, how do you devise that? Well, I was always half a geneticist and half a bio chemist and I thought you Taishan is really important. And nobody was testing new substances out there to see if there were mutagens. And so I thought it'd be nice to develop a simple, easy test in bacteria for doing that. That [00:11:00] was cheap and quick. And then I became interested in the relation of carcinogens to mutagens and so I was trying to convince people at the active forms of carcinogens were muted. There were other people in that area too, but I was an early enthusiastic for that idea and anyway, it's just came from my knowledge of two different fields, but that's a long time ago. I'm more excited about the brain now. The current stuff Speaker 4: doing obviously is it's more [00:11:30] exciting. Yeah. Do you both spend time paying attention to other areas of science? Speaker 6: I read an enormous amount and every 10 or 15 years I seem to change my feel of and follow off something that seems a little hotter than the other things and I've been reasonably successful at that, so that's what I liked to do. I am constantly Speaker 5: about all the latest research coming out. I mean, that's like pretty much all I do is I'm very excited about the new [00:12:00] field of epigenetics, where we're connecting what we eat, our lifestyle, how much stress we are under, how much exercise we do, how much sleep we get, how this is actually changing, methylation patterns, acetylation patterns. In our DNA and how that can change gene expression, turn on genes, turn off genes. I mean how this all relates to the way we age, how it relates to behavior, how it relates to us passing on behaviors to our children, grandchildren, you know, this is a field that's to me really exciting and something that I've spend quite a bit of time reading about. So for both of [00:12:30] you, what have been in the course of your career, the technologies, Speaker 6: the discoveries that have impacted your work the most? Well obviously understanding DNA and all the things it does was a huge advance for biology. And I was always half a geneticist, so I was hopping up and down when that Watson Crick paper came out and I gave it in the Journal club to all these distinguished biochemists and they said very speculative. [00:13:00] I said I was young script. I said, you guys be quiet. This is the paper of the century. And it made a huge difference. And there's been one advance after another. A lot of technical advances, little companies spring up, making your life easier and all of that. So it's been fun going through this. Speaker 5: I think, you know, in terms of my own research, which got me to where I'm at now, a lot of the, the technological advances in making transgenic mouse models, [00:13:30] knocking out certain genes, being able to manipulate, doing, inserting viral vectors with a specific gene and with a certain promoter on it and targeting it to a certain tissue so you can, you know, look specifically at what it's doing in that tissue or knock it out and what it's doing and that tissue. That for me is a, been a very useful technology that's helped me learn a lot. In addition, I like to do a lot of imaging. So these fluorescent proteins that we can, you know, you use to tag on, look at other proteins where they're located both tissue wise and also intracellularly inside the cell. Doing [00:14:00] that in real time. So there's now live cell imaging we can do and see things dynamically. Like for example, looking at Mitochondria and how they move and what they're doing in real time. Like that for me is also been really a useful technology and helping me understand Mitochondria. And how they function, dysfunction can occur. So I think a, those, those have been really important technologies for me. Speaker 6: And then computers change biology. Google made a huge difference. You can put two odd facts into Google and outcome Molly's paper. You'd spend years in a library [00:14:30] trying to figure all this stuff out. So Google really made theoretical biology possible. And I think this whole paper that Rhonda did, she couldn't have done it without Google. That's was the technology that opened it all up. This is so much literature and nobody can read all this and remember it all that we need the search. And so is this kind of a boom in theoretical biology? Well, [00:15:00] I wouldn't say there's a boom yet, but there's so much information out there that people haven't put together. Speaker 5: Yeah, people have been generating data over the years. There's tons of data out there and there's a lot of well done research that people haven't put together, connected the dots and made big picture understanding of complex things. So I think that there is an opening for that. And I do think that people will start to do that more and they are starting to do it more and more. Speaker 6: So in the past there really wasn't a theoretical biology that was certainly Darwin was [00:15:30] theoretical you could say and lots of people had big ideas in the unified fields, but it was rare. Speaker 5: I think we have more of an advantage in that we can provide mechanisms a little easier because we can read all this data. You know people like Darwin, they were doing theoretical work but they were also making observations. So what we're doing now is we're looking at observations other people have made and putting those together. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] [inaudible] and [inaudible] is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. This is part two of a two part interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Speaker 6: Are there, are other scientists active in the longevity field whose work you admire that you would love to collaborate with? [00:16:30] Well or associated with? Always collaborates. So science is both very collegial and very competitive. You think somebody might get their first. But one of the tricks I like in my lab is we have half a dozen really good people with different expertise and we sit around a table and discuss things and it's no one person can know all medicine. And so [00:17:00] anyways, that helps. Yeah. And it might be collaborating with this guy now because both of you contribute something that the other person doesn't have a technique or whatever. And in three years we might be competing with them, but that's why it's good to keep good relations with everybody. But business is the same way companies compete and collaborate. Yeah. Speaker 5: I, I personally am in terms of the field of longevity. Uh, I admire the work of Elizabeth Blackburn [00:17:30] who discovered, uh, won the Nobel prize for be playing a role in discovering the enzyme telomerase Speaker 6: that was done at Berkeley, by the way. Speaker 5: Yeah. And she's now a professor at UCLA. So I would be really excited to set up a collaboration with her. Speaker 6: Well, what are the lab's research plans going forward now? Uh, well, other than Ryan Reinders next two papers. Yeah. Rhonda has these papers to get out. And I'd like to get the whole business [00:18:00] of tuning up our metabolism on firmer ground, convince nutrition people who are expert in one particular environment or most people studied B six for their whole lives or study Niacin for their whole lives or magnesium. And I buy it at the experts in a particular field to think about triage and what protein do we measure that tells you you're short a not getting enough, the vulnerable ones and get that idea [00:18:30] out and do a few examples and convince people that RDA should be based on long term effects rather than short term. And then Rhonda and I were talking the other day and we both got excited about drugs. This money to be made. Speaker 6: So pharmaceutical companies compete on getting new and better drugs and they can be billion dollar drugs but nutrition, nobody can make money out of it. And so there, [00:19:00] do you want to do a clinical trial on Vitamin d the way you do with the drug? Food and drug wants a double blind randomized controlled clinical trial. That's the gold standard for drugs. But it's not for nutrition is nutrition. You have to measure if 20% of the population is low on vitamin D, you don't want to do a study where you don't measure who's low and who's high because otherwise it's designed to fail. So you have to measure [00:19:30] things. Now, vitamin D actually many more deficient, but a lot of vitamins, 10% of lower 20% is low and you can't just lump them in with all the people have enough and do a randomized on one clinical trial and think it's going to mean something without measuring something. Speaker 6: Rhonda has one of her videos on our website to [inaudible] all these doctors who saved the vitamins are useless. They're all based on clinical trials that are designed for drugs [00:20:00] and they don't measure anything. So you have to know who should deficient and then taking that amount of value and makes you sufficient. I think, uh, some interesting re ongoing research in our lab is also the cornea bar. Yeah. So yeah, Joyce mechanical amp is directing a project on the Corey bar. We were deciding how do you get vitamins and minerals into the poor and we made a little bar, which is kind of all the components of a Mediterranean diet that people [00:20:30] aren't getting enough vitamins and all the vitamins and minerals and fish oil and vitamin D and soluble fiber and insoluble fiber and plant polyphenols and we can raise everybody's HDL in a couple of weeks and this is the mass of people aren't eating, they think they're eating good tide aren't and obese people or have their metabolism all fouled up and you were even learning how to make progress there. So Speaker 5: cool thing about it is that you can take a population [00:21:00] of people that eats very unhealthy and they are obese, meaning they have a BMI of 30 or above and you can give them this nutritional bar that has a variety of micronutrients. It has essential fatty acids and some polyphenols fiber and give it to them twice a day on top of their crappy diet. You don't tell them to change your diet at all. It's like keep doing what you're doing, but here, eat those twice a day on top of what you're doing and you can see that, you know after a few weeks that these changes start to occur where their HDLs raise or LDS lower. I mean there's, there's a lot of positive effects, you know, lower c reactive protein. So [00:21:30] I think this is really groundbreaking research because it's, it says, look, you can take someone who's eating a terrible diet completely, probably micronutrient division in many essential vitamins and minerals and such are eating a bunch of sugar and crap and processed foods and on and on and on and yet you can give them this nutritional bar that has a combination of micronutrients in it and you can quantify changes that are positive. Speaker 5: I think that's a really exciting ongoing project in our lab, Speaker 6: Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick, thanks very much [00:22:00] for being on spectrum. It's a pleasure. Absolutely a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Speaker 7: Aw. [inaudible] to learn more about the work aims and Patrick's are doing. Visit their websites. Bruce seems.org and found my fitness.com spectrum shows are archived on iTunes yet we've created this simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a Alex spectrum Speaker 3: [00:22:30] and now a calendar of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kreisky joins me to present the calendar on Sunday July 13th the bay area meetup, random acts of science will host an event to do science with paper papers, one of the most commonly available materials with a variety of science applications. Everything from the dynamics of classic paper airplanes launching paper rockets and building structures in [00:23:00] Origami will be discussed. The group will also learn about fibers and paper and how to create their own homemade paper. Raw materials will be provided, but attendees are also welcome to bring their own. The event will be held July 13th from two to 3:00 PM outside the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. It is free and open to anyone interested in coming basics. The Bay area art science, interdisciplinary collaborative sessions. [00:23:30] We'll have their fifth event on Monday the 14th from six 30 to 10:00 PM at the ODC theater, three one five three 17th street in San Francisco. Speaker 3: The theme is monsters. Professor John Haffer. Nick, we'll introduce the audience to a peracetic fly that turns European honey bees into zombies, author and translator, Eric Butler. We'll explain how literature and film have made the Vampire [00:24:00] a native of Eastern Europe into a naturalized American with a preference for the Golden State Marine biologist David McGuire. Well, disentangle the media fueled myth of the shark from its true nature and Kyle Taylor, senior scientist for the gluing plant project will show off plants that glow in the dark. Admission will be on a sliding scale from absolutely nothing. Up to 20 bucks. Visit basics.com for more info. [00:24:30] That's B double a s I c s.com. On Saturday, July 19th you see Berkeley molecular and cell biology Professor Kathleen Collins will host the latest iteration of the monthly lecture series. Signs that cow Professor Collins will discuss the connections between the seemingly incontrovertible fact of human aging. A fascinating enzyme known as telomerase and malignant cancers. Speaker 3: While cancer cells can grow indefinitely [00:25:00] all normally functioning human tissues will eventually die out. This is because with each success of cell division, the protective cap or a telomere at the end of each chromosome is gradually degraded while the enzyme to limb arrays or pairs this damage in embryos. It is not fully active in adult human tissues. Perhaps to prevent the uncontrollable growth of cancer cells. Professor Collins will discuss telomeres and telomerase function and how they affect the balance of human aging [00:25:30] and immortality. The free public talk will be held July 19th in room one 59 of Mulford Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The lecture will begin at 11:00 AM sharp science need is a monthly science happy hour for adults 21 and over the pairs. Lightning talks with interactive stations on the back patio of the El Rio bar at three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Speaker 3: [00:26:00] The theme for July Science Neat is backyard science and we'll feature the science of things right here in the bay area from plants to plankton and beetles. Two bikes. Admission is $4 and the event will be on Tuesday, July 22nd from six 30 to 8:30 PM and now a few of our favorite science stories. Rick's back to present the news. The rocky planets that are closest to our son generally have an iron core [00:26:30] that makes up about a third of their mass that is surrounded by rock that makes up the other two thirds. Mercury is an exception and is the other way around. With a massive iron core that takes up about percent of the planet's mass. This has been difficult to explain. If mercury had been built up by collisions the way that Venus and earth and Mars where we'd expect it to have a similar composition in a letter published in nature geoscience on July six Eric s [00:27:00] fog and Andreas Roofer of Arizona State University report their simulations that suggests that collisions may have stripped away Mercury's mantle, some moon and planet sized rocks would bounce off of each other, sometimes knocking one body out of its orbit while the impactor and the leftover debris coalesced into a planet. Speaker 3: This model is consistent with Mercury's high abundance of [inaudible] elements that have been observed recently by NASA's messenger spacecraft [00:27:30] in their so called hit and run model. Mercury is missing metal would end up coalescing onto Venus or in your report compiled by UC Berkeley. Scientist has definitively linkedin gene that has helped Tibetan populations thrive in high altitude environments to hit or too little known human ancestor. The Denisovans, the Denisovans along with any thoughts when extinct around 40 to 50,000 years ago about the time that modern human began to ascend [00:28:00] and Aaliyah is a version of a gene in this case and unusually of the gene e p a s one which regulates hemoglobin production has been common among Tibetans since their move several thousand years ago. John Habit areas at around 15,000 feet of elevation. Well, most people have Leos that caused them to develop thick blood at these high elevations, which can later lead to cardiovascular problems. The tobacco wheel raises hemoglobin levels only slightly allowing possessors [00:28:30] to avoid negative side effects. So the report, which will later republished in the journal Nature details the unique presence of the advantageous aliyah. Among Tibetans and conclusively matches it with the genome of the Denisovans. This is significant because as principle author, Rasmus Nielsen, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology writes, it shows very clearly and directly that humans evolved and adapted to new environments by getting their genes from another species. Nielsen added that there are many other [00:29:00] potential species to explore as sources of human DNA Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 4: This show marks the end of our production of spectrum. I want to thank Rick Karnofsky, Renee, Rau, and Alex Simon for their help in producing spectrum. I want to extend a blanket thank you to all the guests who took the time to appear on spectrum over the three years we have been on Calex to Sandra Lenna, [00:29:30] Erin and Lorraine. Thanks for your guidance and help to Joe, Peter and Greg. Thanks for your technical assistance and encouragement to listeners. Thanks for tuning in and Speaker 7: stay tuned to Calico [inaudible].
Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick, Part 1 of 2
30:00|Dr. Ames is a Senior Scientist at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, director of their Nutrition & Metabolism Center, and a Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a Ph.D. in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute with Dr. Ames. Bruce Ames Sr Scientist at CHORI, and Prof Emeritus of Biochem and Molecular Bio, at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick Ph.D. biomedical science, postdoc at CHORI in Dr. Ames lab. The effects of micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage, and aging.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm mm mm Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Rick Karnofsky. I'm the host of today's show. This week on spectrum we present part one of a two part interview with our guests, Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Dr Ames is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital, [00:01:00] Oakland Research Institute, director of their nutrition and metabolism center and a professor Ameritas of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a phd in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute in Dr Ames. His lab, she currently conducts clinical trials looking at the effects of [00:01:30] micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging. Here's Brad swift and interviewing doctors, aims and Patrick Bruce Speaker 5: Ames and Rhonda Patrick, welcome to spectrum. Thank you very much. Sue, can you help us understand the term micronutrient and briefly explain what they do? Sure. Speaker 6: About 40 substances you need in your diet and [00:02:00] you get it from eating a really well balanced style, get them more about eight or 10 of them are essential amino acids. So they're required for making your all your protein. And then there are about 30 vitamins and minerals, roughly 15 minerals in 15 five minutes. So you need the minerals, you need iron and zinc and calcium and magnesium and all these things, you know, and the vitamins [00:02:30] and minerals are coenzymes. So you have 20,000 genes in your body that make proteins, which are enzymes that do bio or Kimiko transformations. And some of them require coenzymes, maybe a quarter of them. So some require magnesium and they don't work unless there's a magnesium attached to the particular pace in the enzyme. And some of them require vitamin B six which is something called [00:03:00] paradoxal, goes through a coenzyme paradox of phosphate. Speaker 6: And that's an a few hundred and enzymes and they make your neurotransmitters and other things. And if you don't get any one of these 40 substances, you'd die. But how much we need is, I think there's a lot of guesswork in there and we have a new idea I can talk about later that shakes a lot up puppet. And so when your research, you're trying to measure these [00:03:30] micronutrients obviously, well people can measure them in various ways. Somebody can just measure in blood and say, ah, you have enough vitamin D or you don't have enough vitamin D. But some, for example, calcium and magnesium marine, your bones, but they're also used for all kinds of enzymes and if you get low, the tissue might get low, but you keep your plasma up because you're taking it out of the bone. So just measuring [00:04:00] plasma isn't useful in that case. Speaker 6: But anyway, there, uh, each one is a little different. Do you want to talk about the triage theory? Okay, I could talk to about that. Now. Some years ago we kept on finding when we had human cells in culture or mice, that when we left out various vitamins and minerals or didn't have enough, we got DNA damage. I'm an expert in DNA damage and we're interested in how [00:04:30] to prevent DNA damage. We sat leads to cancer and so I kept on wondering why is nature doing this when you're not getting enough of magnesium or iron or zinc, you getting DNA damage and then one day it hit me. I, that's just what nature wants to do. Through all of evolution, we'd been running out of vitamins and minerals. The minerals aren't spread evenly through the soil. The red soils with a lot of iron and the souls that have very little iron. Speaker 6: [00:05:00] Selenium is a required mineral, but there's soils with too much saline and we get poisoned. And then the areas where it, you don't have enough selenium so you get poisoned. So it's a little tricky. Back in 2006 I had this idea that nature must do a rationing when you start getting low on any vitamin or mineral, and how would you ration it? The proteins that are essential for survival get it first and the ones that are preventing [00:05:30] some insidious damage that shows up as cancer in 10 years or calcification in the arteries. That's the [inaudible] papers, those proteins lucid. And I call this triage ship. It's a French word for dividing up those wounded soldiers that the doctors can make a difference on. So anyway, I publish this with what data? That wasn't the literature, but it wasn't completely satisfactory. We didn't, hadn't really nailed it, but it was an idea. Speaker 6: And then Joyce McCain [00:06:00] in my lab wrote two beautiful reviews, one on selenium and one on vitaminK , and they both fit beautifully. And people who work in these fields had shown that the clotting factors get it first because you don't get your blood clotting and you cut yourself every week or two, you'd just bleed to death. But the price you pay is you don't make the protein that prevents calcification of the arteries so [00:06:30] people can die of calcification the arteries. But that takes 10 years. So when nature has to face keeping alive now so you can reproduce or you're getting calcification arteries in 10 years, it does this tradeoff. And also you don't have enough vitamin K. My ptosis doesn't work quite as accurately. So you'll lose the chromosome here or there and you get cancer in 10 years. But again, it's the trade off between short term survival and longterm health. Speaker 6: It all [00:07:00] makes perfect sense. It was a very plausible theory. That's why I came out with it. But it's true for vitaminK and the mechanism used in vitaminK is different than the mechanism and sleeping. So each system has developed a different mechanism for doing this racially. And so that changes our view of vitamins and minerals base. You're paying a price every time. You're a little low on one with them. So it's the disease of aging. So basically when you should have any vitamin or mineral, [00:07:30] it accelerates your aging in some way. You can accelerate some kind of insidious damage. And we're talking about huge numbers of people. 70% of the population is low in vitamin D and we're talking about magnesium, what we said the third 45% 45% these are big numbers and they're cheap boldly saying Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 8: [00:08:00] you are listening to spectrum on a l x, Berkeley. Today's guests are Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr Rhonda Patrick Speaker 9: with the micronutrients and the activity of DNA, RNA. Talk about the effect there, the impact, is there more to talk about that? Absolutely. So there are many different micronutrients [00:08:30] that are required for functions in your body that involve DNA replication involved DNA repair, preventing DNA damage. Things are all very important because we're making 100 billion new cells every day to make a new cell, we have to replicate the entire genome of that cell to make the daughter cell. And that requires a whole holster of enzymes. So if you don't have enough magnesium for those DNA polymerase to work properly, when ends up happening is that their fidelity is [00:09:00] lessen, meaning they don't work as well and they're gonna likely make more errors in that DNA replication that they're performing. And if they can't repair that error, then when ends up happening is that you can get every rotation and depending on whether that mutation has any functional consequences, sort of random, but the more times as occurs, then the more chances you're having of getting a mutation that can, you know, something that's not good and can either cause cell death or it can also [00:09:30] be something that causes dysregulation of the way your genes are expressed. Speaker 9: So it's very important to make sure you have the right co factors such as magnesium for DNA replication, also in your mitochondria and your mitochondrial DNA. When you make new Mitochondria, this is called mitochondrial biogenesis. It's an important mechanism to boost the number of mitochondria per cell. And this can occur during things like exercise when your mitochondria also have their own genome and they have to replicate this genome. Well guess what? Those mitochondrial [00:10:00] DNA were preliminaries. This also require magnesium. And so if there's not enough magnesium around, you're not making your mitochondria as optimal as you could be in Mitochondria. Play an important role in every single process in your body, including, you know, neuronal function. So that's really important to make sure that your Mitochondria Hobby. Also, this is very relevant for things like aging. These micronutrients like vitamin D gets converted into a steroid hormone that regulates the expression of over a thousand genes in [00:10:30] your body and some of those genes are involved in DNA repair and also in preventing DNA damage. So these micronutrients are extremely important for a variety of different physiological properties that are going on in your body every single day. Things that you can't see when you look in the mirror, we're talking about something that's not an acute deficiency that's going to lead to a clinical symptom like scurvy. Speaker 6: We think bad nutrition is the main thing, accelerating all these degenerative diseases of aging and contributing to these huge medical costs and [00:11:00] all of that. And it's something you can do something about because they're all very cheap minerals that are cheap. So the sourcing of the minerals and vitamins, it's not crucial at this point you think? I don't think so. Yeah. Getting them is the the really the key factor think and I think to really reform people's diet, we're going to need the numbers and we're working to try and show that there's some vulnerable protein that goes first when you're short of McNeese. I [00:11:30] mean you should measure that and then you'll know you're not getting enough and all the consequences or you're disabling all your DNA repair fronts. I'm so whatever. Speaker 9: It is ideal to try and get as many of these micronutrients essential vitamins and minerals that you can from your diet. For example, I personally make a smoothie for breakfast every morning, which consists of Kale, spinach, Swiss carrots, tomato, avocado, berries, and I'm getting a broad spectrum of vegetables and fruits [00:12:00] just from that one smoothie. And I think in addition to these essential vitamins and minerals that we know are in these various plants and fruits, I think there's also a lot of micronutrients in there that we have yet to discover that also may be doing important things. However, it's extremely difficult for people to get all of these micronutrients from their diet. And I think in that instance, supplementation can help fill those nutritional gaps. And we've actually shown that Speaker 6: in general, people in nutrition don't like the idea of pills, but people [00:12:30] are learning about all this. But you shouldn't overdo it. Mae West said too much of a good thing is wonderful, but she was saying about sex, not micronutrients, and particularly for minerals in minerals, there's a sweet spot. Too much can hurt you into little canary, Speaker 5: and that's what you're hoping these next generation devices would help people understand where they are situated within, right? The class of vitamins and minerals. What are they up in? What are they down? Speaker 6: So this may be a decades [00:13:00] worth of science to do this, but we're trying to frame the ideas and say, look, this is where we're going. And it isn't drugs that are gonna help you. It's getting your diet tuned up, your metabolism [inaudible] Speaker 9: your doctor can look at a few different nutrients and vitamin D is one test that they do. But there's a couple of companies that are out there right now such as something called wellness effects. They're measuring a variety of different micronutrients in people's blood, including omega [00:13:30] three fatty acids, vitamin D, magnesium, potassium, calcium. So looking at all these different vitamins and minerals and people are quantifying. It's called the quantified self movement where people are getting their vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids measured. They're making dietary changes. If they find out they're low in vitamin D or they're low in mega three or they have low magnesium, they're making dietary changes and then about three months later they go back and they'd quantify the levels again so they can physically measure and quantify this, this change that they're making in their diet. And I think really that's the direction [00:14:00] to go. Speaker 6: Yeah, and analytical methods of Guinea. So wonderful that you can do it on a finger prick of blood. I have two entrepreneurs, scientist friends. One of them has put a machine in every hospital in China and he measures couple of dozen proteins of medical importance and the Chinese are subsidizing this. They think it's going to save money. And another friend of mine from Boulder, first one is built routed. The second one is Larry Gold. And he developed [00:14:30] an alternative to monoclonal antibodies and he can measure 1500 different proteins in one fingerprint compliant. I mean, it's fantastic and he's working to get them all right now it's a discovery system, but we're going to discover what protein tells you. You're low in magnesium and what protein tells you you're low in vitaminK or protein tells you low in paradox and then it's all going to go to your iPhone and you'll get the diagnosis. Speaker 6: We'll cut out the doctors [00:15:00] because they don't know much about Olis anyway, and they're too expensive. So it's not drugs you need for all of this. It's tuning up limit tap of the drugs that youthful. I'm not saying that not and for some things that are absolutely essential, but this area of getting your metabolism tuned up, see, people are worried about a pot Papillion a pesticide and it's all irrelevant. We, we published a hundred papers on that in that era, just saying, look, it's all a distraction from the important thing and important thing [00:15:30] is all these bad diets where eating and obesity isn't just calories in, exercise out a beach. People are starving and what this starving for vitamins and minerals because they're eating sugar and carbohydrate and every possible disease of aging is accelerated and hippies and plus huge costs, years of expensive diabetes and heart disease and cancer, you name it, it's been linked to obesity. So I think it's a big [00:16:00] opportunity to tune people up. Speaker 8: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley [00:16:30] is this part one of a two part interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Speaker 9: So Rhonda, the recent paper you published on vitamin D explain that. So vitamin D gets converted into a steroid hormone in your body and the steroid hormone can regulate this expression [00:17:00] of between 900 and a thousand different genes. And the way it does that is that there's a little telltale sequence in your gene and it's basically a six nucleotide sequence repeat that's separated by three nucleotides. And this nucleotide sequence itself can determine whether or not vitamin D will turn on a gene or turn off aging. And so vitamin D can do both of these where it turns on genes and turns off genes. Well, what we found is that there's two different genes that encode for Tryptophan hydroxylase, [00:17:30] which is the rate limiting enzyme that converts trip to fan into Serotonin. There's one that's in the brain called Tryptophan hydroxylase too, and there's one that's outside of the blood brain barrier in tissues like Mosley got also in your t cells and your Peniel gland and placenta tissue if you're woman, and this is called Tryptophan hydroxylase one and what we found is that both of these genes have what's called a vitamin D response element that tell a sequence I was telling you about. Speaker 9: However, they had [00:18:00] completely opposite vitamin D response elements. One, the one in your brain had an activation sequence turn on and the one in the gut had a repression sequence. The turnoff sequence, which suggested that vitamin D hormone was controlling the expression of these two different genes in opposite directions. Vitamin D's important to turn on Tryptophan hydroxylase and two and your brain so you can make serotonin and it's important to turn it off and your gut to blunt the production of Serotonin in your gut. Serotonin in your gut. Too Much of it causes GI inflammation. [00:18:30] This was a really cool finding because there was a recent paper where they found that autistic individuals, 90% of them had some abnormal tryptophan metabolism and they didn't really identify what it was, but sort of like an Aha moment where it was like trick to fan metabolism. Well, chuck did fan, you need to make Serotonin, and so I started doing some reading and sure enough, there's a whole literature connecting Serotonin to autism. Speaker 9: Serotonin is made in your brain. It's an important neurotransmitter, but during early, early brain development, [00:19:00] it is a brain morphogenic meaning it actually is a growth factor that guides the neuronal proliferation, the development, the migration of neurons to different regions in the brain. It plays an essential role in shaping the structure and the wiring of the early developing brain. And so not having enough serotonin in early, early brain development in Utero can lead to very aberrant brain morphological and functional consequences. You know, this was kind of like, wow, well what if you're not getting enough vitamin D during that critical [00:19:30] period, which is important to activate that gene that converts Tryptophan into Serotonin? Is it possible then that you wouldn't be making enough serotonin in that early brain and therefore you wouldn't have a normal brain development? Also, the Serotonin in the gut can cause a lot of GI inflammation and also quite a few autistics have high GI inflammation. Speaker 9: Also, they have high levels of Serotonin in their blood. There's something that we call the Serotonin anomaly where they've measured brain levels of Serotonin autistics from SMRI and have also measured blood levels [00:20:00] of Serotonin. And there was sort of this weird dichotomy where autistics had high levels of Serotonin in their blood, but they had low levels in their brain and so it was like, well, why is that? Why would they have high levels in their blood, the low levels in the brain and we think we found a mechanism why if you're low in vitamin D, your vitamin D won't be turning on the one in your brain and you won't be making enough Serotonin in your brain and it won't be repressing the one you've got and you'll be making too much and you've got this sort of a a really cool finding. We also in our paper discuss how estrogen can [00:20:30] activate Tryptofan hydroxylase to in the brain pretty much the same way vitamin D does also a steroid hormone and the sequences, the receptors bind to a somewhat similar under dug out of the literature that people showed. Estrogen can turn Speaker 6: on the Messenger RNA for the brain enzyme making serotonin in girls, but it's not doing it in boys, which explains why five times as many boys get autism as girls. [00:21:00] Anyway, she worked out all this mechanism. We kept on explaining one thing after another render would come in every week, hopping up and down. Look what I found and look what I found and I think she walks on water, but she did this wonderful scholarship, which is a good metaphor, but she used to be a surfing instructor when she was incentive. Speaker 9: It's pretty exciting. It was largely theoretical work where we did find a underlying mechanism to connect these dots. So we're hoping now that people in the field are going to continue on and look even deeper. Speaker 6: So [00:21:30] what we think we know is how to prevent autism. But what we are not sure of is whether you can give vitamin D to people who have autism and help some of the symptoms. Uh, biggest people need to do clinical trials on all of this and they haven't done them right. But now that we have the mechanism, you can do them right. The trouble is drug companies aren't going to make money with vitamin D and they know that. And so [00:22:00] they're trying to develop a new drug. But we're hoping that these biochemicals trip to fain and vitamin D and nowhere to tone and and may get threes, which are all seem to be involved, which you can find out by reading Ramdas paper that that is going to at least give him mechanisms so we can do more focused clinical trials. Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:22:30] to learn more about the work and Patrick are doing visit their websites, Bruce ames.org and found my fitness.com Speaker 7: oh Speaker 6: papers take a lot of polishing. Basically we're going into all these fields [00:23:00] that we don't know an awful lot about us and that requires a lot of double checking and sending it to experts and getting criticism. Speaker 9: First you have to learn everything and then you'd have to put, make the connections together and then you have to write it and then there's a whole process. It's very, it's a lot of work. Personally, my favorite part of it is the creative part where you just make all the connections and you find things and you start fitting things together and it's like, oh yeah, you know, it's just, it's almost like awesome rush, but then once you've make all those connections and you do that creative work, then you really have to [00:23:30] do all the tedious, hard digging and working diligence. Yes and that it's not as much fun. Then once you have a good theory Speaker 6: you assume no. Is it explaining new things that you didn't expect and right away this idea explains so many things and it was all really lying on the ground and round it just picked it up and put it together. Speaker 9: People like Bruce and I who liked to make those connections. I think that we play an important role in science as well. Like this paper that we published recently, [00:24:00] while we didn't physically do any experiments, we didn't test our theoretical work. We made a very interesting connection with a mechanism for other people to test. And I think that every once in awhile science needs that because there's so much data out there and now with Google we have access to all this data. So I think that taking people that are familiar with the fields and can put things together like pieces of a puzzle, I think that also advanced the science in a very creative way. Speaker 6: Biology's so complicated that there hasn't been much room for people [00:24:30] who just sit in their office and do theoretical work. And we do a lot of experimental work in lab and Rhonda is carrying on an experimental problem while she's doing all this. But I like to get it in between fields. I was always half a geneticist and half a biochemist and it was wonderful because I saw all these problems. The geneticists turned up and the biochemists didn't know existed and the geneticists didn't know how to tackle this was before Watson and crick and all of that. Uh, I'm pretty [00:25:00] old anyway. I think science is so competitive, but if you know two fields in this an interface, you have a big advantage on everybody else and we like to have people in the lab with many different expertise and put things together. Speaker 10: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you can tune into the rest of Brad's interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick [00:25:30] two weeks from now. Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 4: irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. On Thursday, July 10th the bay area skeptics will host a free lecture by Glenn Branch. The deputy director of the National Center for Science Education Branch will present untold stories from the scopes trial. [00:26:00] If you thought that you knew everything about the scopes monkey trial. Thank you again to commemorate the 89th anniversary of this seminal episode in the long contentious history of evolution. Education in the United States branch will tell the story of the scopes trial as it has never been told before. Focusing on obscure under appreciated and amusing details. The event will be at the La Pena Cultural Center, three one zero five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley [00:26:30] and it will start@seventhirtypleasevisitwwwdotbaskeptics.org for more info and here's the new story we think you'll find interesting in a paper published in nature neuroscience on June eight University of Minnesota researchers at B Steiner and a David Reddish report that they have made behavioral and neuro physiological observations of regret [00:27:00] in rats to regret is to recognize that taking an alternative action would have produced a more valued outcome than the action one took. Speaker 4: The research team created a circular runway with four spokes and feeding machines at the end of each spoke that contained different flavors of food pellets. The feeding was preceded by a tone that indicated how long the rat would wait at a particular machine for food if the rat left one of these restaurants with waiting time below [00:27:30] its threshold only. Do you find an even longer waiting time at the next spoke? The team hypothesized that the rat may regret the choice. Indeed, the rats that fit this description were more likely than control rats to look toward the spoke. They just left and electrodes indicated that neurons in the orbital frontal cortex fired at the same time. Science news talk to cold Spring Harbor Neuro scientist Alex Vaughan about the paper. He [00:28:00] said, the researchers did a great job of designing a task that can discriminate between the regret of making a poor decision and the disappointment that results when one is punished despite making all the right choices. Speaker 8: [inaudible] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. [00:28:30] We have created a symbolic for you. The link is tiny, url.com/calix spectrum. Speaker 7: Oh Speaker 3: [inaudible]. The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex diamond. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Email address is Doug KLX. Hey, young com. Speaker 8: [inaudible].
Mathias Craig, Part 2 of 2
30:00|Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of loads Speaker 1: [inaudible] and news. Speaker 4: Hi listeners, my name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of two with our guests, Mathias Craig Co, founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of [00:01:00] eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Monte has, Craig is an engineer by training from UC Berkeley and MIT. He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about adapting and localizing technology through projects they undertake with remote isolated communities. Monte has also talks about the future of applied technologies and blue energy in developing areas. Here is part two. [00:01:30] As you work with the technologies that you choose from, how much are you changing those technologies? Are you able to feed back to the people who are actually manufacturing and designing those things? Speaker 1: When we started the organization, we thought of ourselves as sort of a technology creator. When we started working with small scale wind power locally manufactured small scale wind turbines, you know, we were early pioneers in that working with the earliest pioneers like Hugh Pigott, as I had mentioned in another group up in [00:02:00] Colorado, went by the name other power. We really saw ourselves as the primary design. We spent a lot of time. We did design workshops, we did a lot of cad drawings and we were really deep into the technology when we thought that technology was going to be 80% of what we could contribute. What we learned a number of years later was that that's not where we can add the most value. There's a lot of people around the world that can work on technology that had better setups and more experience, more resources to throw at the problem, and we needed to leverage [00:02:30] that. Speaker 1: That was one key realization. Now, on the other end of the spectrum though, we know that just taking technology from around the world and plugging it in never works. It's a lot of romance about that, but the reality is there's tweaking. There's adaptation that has to take place generally not with a cell phone, not with a pencil against her self-contained units, but with systems. These are systems, not products generally and for that you need adaptation and so we started thinking ourselves as technology [00:03:00] tweakers or packers, hackers or we use the word localize a lot to mean not inventing, but how do you take something that is successful somewhere else in a completely different context or if you get lucky, you find something that's operating in a relatively similar context and you say, okay, what needs to change for that to be effective where we are? Speaker 1: We have a ton of examples of this and we found we're very good at this and it's a place where we can add a tremendous amount of value. One example is you have [00:03:30] the mayor's office in Bluefields, which is where we're, we're operationally headquartered there on the Caribbean coast has a lot of requests for latrines to be installed for the communities. It's very poor sanitation in the area. They want to comply with that request. Right now there's thousands of latrine designs out there. How does a severely under-resourced government office figure out which one is going to be appropriate for the local context? The answer is they can't and it's just paralysis there and that's an example of where [00:04:00] we've built very strong partnerships and where we can add a ton of value. We can do that study, we can look at the designs, we can go visit a design in Honduras and check it out and say, oh, this design Central America.Speaker 1: Certain cultural similarities. Certain cultural differences can be very different environment, so let's try it out, but it seems promising. Let's test it for a year and let's study. Let's study the the decomposition of the waste. Is it working? Is it not working? And we did a pilot a few years ago looking at a solar latrine where [00:04:30] you you use passive solar heating, sort of greenhouse effect to help decompose the waste faster. We thought it was very promising. It didn't work in Bluefields because very high humidity, the rainiest part of the country and it didn't work like in the highlands of Honduras, but we saved a ton of money by studying that for a year rather than going out and building a thousand units because there was demand for latrines, so we did a lot of work on that. We've done that now with the water filters, with the well [00:05:00] drilling techniques and technology done that with cookstoves biodigesters everywhere in the technology portfolio. Speaker 1: I'd say we've had a hand in localizing the technology, adapting it and seeing what's going to work and then helping to roll it out slowly. At the end of last year we built our first latrines and built 55 latrines. We'd been studying and working on the trains for over two years. And one of the key elements of being able to do that technology localization are [00:05:30] the students and the international fellows that come work with us on the ground for either short term programs in the summer summer fellows that come in or longer term fellows that come for three months, six months or a year and work with us on adapting the technology. So behind that latrine program of two years, they was, you know, over half dozen students that did research that contributed to their schoolwork on campus and pushed the design forward. [00:06:00] So that's part of our global leadership program. They get the benefit of learning what real technology design is like in the field and learn about that social element that they don't hear about in class generally. Speaker 1: And what we get is we get to move along sort of the r and d side of things. And do you have a good relationship with local governments? Is that one of the things you try to cultivate? Yes, and I think that's something that sets us apart from a lot of nonprofit organizations in development, [00:06:30] generally speaking, but also in Nicaragua's, we've chosen to engage the government directly. The government in some form is what is going to be there and is representative of the people's will in some form. There's always challenges and just like we have in this country about how representative is it, et Cetera, but at the end of the day, it's the ultimate authority in the region and so if you choose to go around it and not engage it as many organizations do, we feel that you severely [00:07:00] limit the potential for your longterm impact. So we engage directly.Speaker 1: It's not always easy and we engage at different levels. We engage the national government. We have an office in Managua and the capital city where we're in constant contact with the ministries, with all levels of national governments. We engage there over on the coast. We engage with the regional government. We engage with the indigenous and creole territorial governments. It's a semi-autonomous region. [00:07:30] It's a very complex governance structure in the country, but we engage at all those levels. To discover what their plans are, to help build capacity where we can, you know, we learn and we teach. And then in the best cases to coordinate, you know, we've done a project with the Ministry of Health. We work with the Ministry of Health, the local nurse. We designed an energy system, install it, the Ministry of Health puts in the vaccine freezer and fills it with medicine and we both train the nurse. Well now that is a very [00:08:00] challenging collaboration to manage, but it leads to very big impact if you're willing to do it the right way. Speaker 1: You know, one of our strongest partners is the municipal office of Bluefields, the municipal government, the mayor and his staff where we're collaborating on a number of initiatives both within the city of Bluefields and the surrounding communities around water and sanitation, around building a biodigester for the slaughter house so that all that animal waste will cease to be dumped into the river untreated [00:08:30] and will actually become a useful byproduct of methane for cooking. And how many may oriel administrations have you dealt with in the Bluefield? There's been sort of three that we've worked with. Nicaragua is a highly polarized country, politically even more so than the United States. You know, we like to think where the extreme example, but not even close. When you look at the world that Greg was highly political and highly polarized. And when I say highly political, meaning that many [00:09:00] government functions and the services that they deliver are dictated by political affiliations. Speaker 1: So the risk of engaging as we do is that you end up on one side or the other and we're on the side of civil society. We want to help strengthen Nicaragua and strengthen the population of Nicaragua regardless of political affiliations. And so in our internal policies, that's very clear. We work with different political parties and in fact we play a very big facilitator [00:09:30] role convening people who would never meet on their own. If we can get the PLC and the Sandinistas to sit down on a table and think about a water and sanitation issue where they politically cannot meet by themselves. We have broker meetings between u s government officials who can't officially sit down or meet directly with with sanity, still government officials because of US policy, but they can be in a meeting talking to us and that can be overheard. Conversations that can be very productive. Speaker 4: [00:10:00] Spectrum is public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Monte Craig Blue Energy Blue Energy is a nonprofit working along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Speaker 1: Are there technologies out there that you'd love to use, are introduced that you just can't really approach? [00:10:30] Oh absolutely. There's a very clear answer to that. For me, it's mobile payments outside of blue energy. Last year I was part of a Fulbright nexus program, a relatively new program. They launched looking at issues of entrepreneurship, climate change and energy in the Americas. So with 20 of us scholars last year and one of the topics I was investigating was pay as you go solar micro grids or home solutions as a new way of opening up access to electricity [00:11:00] to more remote populations in a cost effective way. And it's very powerful, but it hinges on a few technologies. One is the mobile phone. That's going pretty well already. It's exploding worldwide. Nicaragua has pretty good coverage on a population basis, on a geography basis. That's not great in particular in the region we work in because it's isolated and low population density, so not a strong incentive for the network providers, but it's still coming. Speaker 1: It's coming and every year is, oh, there's one more cell tower. The communities are getting connected [00:11:30] piece by piece, so that's great. Now if you can layer this concept of mobile payments on top of the cell phone network, it allows you to think of lots of creative ways of delivering your services more cost effectively. For example, if you designed the communal energy system, you can envision a system where somebody has a cell phone, they have a payment application on the cell phone, they make a small payment, you know, a couple of cents. They can pre buy a certain amount of energy and then you have a remote control meter [00:12:00] on their charge controller in their home that you can activate through the cell phone network. So they pre-buy, you receive your money digitally, you turn on their system and provide them x number of units of energy that they pre-bought and when it runs out it goes off the operates. Speaker 1: Just like the cell phone and most of the world, they don't have plans, monthly plans, you pre-buy credit, you use them when you're out of credit, you can't make a call. You could do the exact same thing with energy. If you had this mechanism and in a place like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua where the cost of making a payment [00:12:30] is often as much or more than the payment because you have to take a long boat ride and if it's rainy you could take your days and you have to buy fuel and if you could just do that over your cell phone, you reduce the transaction costs tremendously, which opens up just a ton of new solutions. You know, microfinance, which is taken off all around the world. One of the biggest challenges on the Korean coast in Nicaragua is in microfinance. What people are doing is they're making micropayments over a long period of time, 12 months, 18 months, multiple years in some cases. Speaker 1: [00:13:00] But if paying a dollar costs you $2 to make the payment, it all breaks down. If you could make a $1 payment for a couple pennies on your mobile phone, and that's not to mention the traceability, you get digital records of all transactions in a place where it's very hard to collect information. You can also envision it as a mechanism to push back a lot of information to the user. For example, they could remind them to perform maintenance on their batteries rather than sending [00:13:30] a technician out there to check the batteries. Very easier to train somebody how to check the batteries. The problem is they forget to do it, so if you could send them a text every couple months, check the water level on your batteries could have powerful implications in terms of the cost effectiveness of the life cycle of that system for very cheap. That's the one, it's just to me that would revolutionize how we work and I think that the barrier is mobile payments are starting to take off around the world, particularly in east Africa, parts of Southeast Asia [00:14:00] where the underpinning technology platform is strong enough of the cell phone network and government regulation or non regulation is incentivizing in one way or another.Speaker 1: The creation of those payment systems. There are a few starting to pop up in Central America, but central and Latin America is very far behind the innovation that's been happening in Africa and in Nicaragua in particular. It's just getting off the ground as one initiative and Pesto in the capital city of Managua, [00:14:30] but it's not clear when or how they're going to expand to a more national network. If that's not something that blue energy will create. It's something we can advocate for and speak about, but ultimately we're sort of waiting for that next wave of innovation and technology to come out there so that we can build our services on top of it. Do you have any insights or challenges for engineers out there building technologies that you could potentially use? Like the latrines and solar [00:15:00] and wind? Absolutely. I mean, I think that engineers, especially at fancy institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, are often sort of skewed towards thinking about flashy, shiny, new high tech things, which are very fun and exciting and can have an impact on their own, right? Speaker 1: But if you're thinking about engineering and technology for the developing world, it is my belief now that you can have a much bigger impact [00:15:30] by looking at simpler technologies and making incremental gains on those. It's not a sexy, right? I mean, studying latrine for multiple years, you're like, how complicated is a latrine? Right? It doesn't have a ton of moving parts. It's from an engineering perspective, it's a little boring, frankly, but there is surprisingly a ton of work to localize the technology to have it create impact and people's first reaction is, hmm, that sounds kind of boring. Second reaction is we ought to be able to figure that out quickly, but that's not true. You know, haven't latrines been figured out? [00:16:00] Aren't there already latrine designs? Absolutely. And there's latrines that work very well in specific contexts and the challenge is not to go and vent a brand new latrine if you're doing that good for you and maybe you'll invent the best one ever. Speaker 1: But for the majority of engineers out there, we don't need all of them going out there and renting a new latrine. Most of them, I believe could be most productive if they want to work in the development space to think about the process of localizing technology that already exists fundamentally in other [00:16:30] places and doing the tweaking. When you're in the field and you're working with people and you've seen the impact it's creating, it's very exciting and that's what the summer fellows we receive from. We have a partnership here with UC Berkeley, with the cal energy core, four of their fellows come and work with Berliner g every summer. You can ask them. It's a very rewarding experience and a very exciting experience that doesn't look very exciting on paper. Studying latrines for example, but you get out in the field see the impact. Make the progress and learn the social dimensions which ultimately [00:17:00] are the most critical, so I think a lot of the opportunity for creating impact if you're a young engineer is be willing to get your hands dirty, get out there in the field, understand that it takes time and focus on making a real meaningful contribution that's well documented and that builds on the previous person's work and that is prepared to interconnect with the next person who's going to come down. Speaker 1: If you can achieve that, that's how you have a huge impact over time. You're not going come in in six weeks [00:17:30] and sign some brand new thing that's going to solve the water and sanitation problem in the developing world. Those solutions don't exist. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to the spectrum KLX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy Matiaz Craig is our guest. Blue energy facilitates sustainable development in eastern Nicaragua. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] Have you learned things about sustainability in your experience in Nicaragua that might reflect back on the developed world? I think that is one of the most critical things that I've learned in the last 10 years is that this really is a two way street. It's very arrogant for people from the quote unquote developed world to go into a poor community in the developing world. See, for example, that they don't have a sanitation solution and say, oh, [00:18:30] what they need. Obviously here is this kind of latrine, like you're an instant expert. Like they've never thought of this before and you're an expert. Why? Because you come from the developed world and you can lecture them and train them on sustainability and what do you really know about sustainability? Last 10 years have been very humbling. We in the United States, for example, as a country, don't live anywhere near sustainably, right? Speaker 1: We're consuming resources just left and right. And one approach is to say, oh my gosh, I don't want to [00:19:00] be a hypocrite, so I'm not going to go help. And some people take that path. I know I'm not sustainable, so I'm not going to go help people be sustainable, but I don't think that's very productive. I think what is most productive is to engage in that process out there in the field with an explicit intent of thinking. What can you learn from that experience and how can you take that back to where you come from. That is now an explicit part of our model where we have really two initiatives. We have the community development side, which is the physical work that [00:19:30] gets done in Nicaragua and we have what we call the global leadership program, which is bringing people in in part to contribute to the community development work, but the longterm impact of the global leadership program is to build more awareness in those people who are going to go back to their home countries and be leaders in their community around issues of sustainability for example, and climate change and all these other critical topics because their greatest sort of point of leverage is back in their own community, right? Speaker 1: [00:20:00] They can come contribute some in the field, learn something, but if they go on to be a mayor of their town, for example, like that's going to be a huge impact where a business leader in their community with a more heightened sense of awareness of these critical issues like sustainability work on greening initiatives in their town back in the developed world where we're burning through most of the world's resources. Right? I know that. I know I can have a much bigger impact by cutting my electricity consumption in half than I can by installing [00:20:30] a 50 watt solar panel in a remote community. From a global perspective, obviously locally, that 50 watt panel has a huge impact, so I think we have to approach this as a give and take. We can contribute in the field if we do it in an appropriate longterm way, and that we need to be open to that learning experience in the field and take that back in the developed world. Speaker 1: I think that's vital. What are the future plans for blue energy? We made [00:21:00] a critical decision a couple of years ago that for our community development work, we're going to stay geographically concentrated. We're gonna stay focused on Nicaragua with a strong emphasis on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. We feel that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done there and we have 10 years of experience building relationships, understanding that the culture and society, the key ingredients we feel to actually having a meaningful impact and those are things that we've invested heavily in and we feel [00:21:30] that they don't scale very well and so we feel that if we were to expand geographically, we would have to change our model and work in a different way that would be less impactful. We'd have bigger numbers and less impact. We feel strongly that we can have the most impact by staying focused in this geography until every person on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has access to basic sanitation, clean water and electricity. Speaker 1: Why would we go work anywhere else? Was the question we finally asked ourselves then. Oh, right now [00:22:00] the way that we have an explicit model for creating impact beyond Nicaragua, it's through the global leadership program and there's different components to that. One I mentioned earlier was bringing in international people to work in Nicaragua, take that transformational experience back home with them and be agents of change in their own lives, in their own communities all around the world. The second component is the institution to institution strengthening. That's when we work with a local government office and train them on it tools [00:22:30] so that they can be more effective in their work. Or we work with another development partner and share technology, so it's a way to have an impact beyond any border, but it's not us going out and physically doing another project. And then the third one is sort of based on the practical action, which is one of the organizations I mentioned earlier that has been an inspiration to me is doing a better job of documenting case studies and the learning and publishing that experience documents that can be shared globally. Speaker 1: We are often [00:23:00] requested people say, oh, I see you worked on, you know this bio sand filter. Can you tell me how it's gone? Well, right now that's a long conversation and we do that, but it's not very resource efficient. If we had really well written out, documented case studies of our experience, what worked, what didn't and why and publish that for the global community, I think that could have a big impact and how can people get involved in blue energy? Well, the first thing we need is to grow our support base financial support base. The number [00:23:30] one thing that people can do to help blue energy is to contribute financially to the organization because honestly we feel we have a model that's working very well. We have a very committed, dedicated staff and what we need to do is do more of what we're doing. Speaker 1: The second thing is if you are a student or young professional who is looking to compliment traditional classroom education with experiential learning and personal learning and growth opportunities, you should take a look at our global leadership program. [00:24:00] There is a program fee associated with that that helps us run a professional program that is financially self-sustainable and helps fund the project work that you actually do in the field that has local impact. The primary opportunity for that if you're a current student is during the summer and if you're a young professional, we have longer term fellowship opportunities that range from three months to a year. Some of them requiring a two year commitment, but that's an opportunity to really get out there and go through the full cycle, you know, help develop, project, execute, analyze [00:24:30] it. At the end you get an opportunity to see the full picture and that's an opportunity for professional and personal growth that people again have leveraged for all sorts of future opportunities. Speaker 1: And then the third thing is technology partnerships. Organizations that we can partner with that are champions of a particular technology, like the water filter for example, that we use. We learned that from an organization in Canada called cost c. A. W. S. T. They issue new plans every year. [00:25:00] We share back our design iterations with them so that it can be incorporated into the evolution of the plans. We're always looking for organizations like that. Just the caveat is we're looking for people that have a longterm commitment and are into design iteration. We're not necessarily looking for the flashiest new gadget that somebody just conceived of. We're looking more for long term technology partnerships. Matiaz Craig, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: [00:25:30] To learn more about blue energy, visit their website. The URL is blue energy group.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you to get there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l [00:26:00] x spectrum. Speaker 4: Now several science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks in honor of its 40th anniversary. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is sponsoring a series of lectures describing the research behind four Nobel prizes. The laureates are also longtime users of the national energy research. Scientific Computing Center is super computing resources. The last two lectures are being [00:26:30] held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in June. These lectures are free. Tuesday, June 3rd mapping the universe. The Speaker is George Smoot of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley lab. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006 for his work on the cosmic background explorer. The lecture will be in the building 66 auditorium, Tuesday, June 3rd noon to 1:30 PM then on Wednesday, June 11 [00:27:00] data computation and the fate of the universe Speaker as salt Perlmutter of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This lecture will be in Lawrence Berkeley lab building 50 auditorium, Wednesday, June 11th noon to 1:30 PM now we'll follow up on a previous spectrum news story. Speaker 4: [00:27:30] The Berkeley News Center reports scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the west coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean born radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Following their analysis of the first collection of Kelp samples along the western US coastline Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima [00:28:00] via the North Pacific current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach and Kai vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley. The new results are from samples primarily collected from February 24th through March 14th our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radio isotopes [00:28:30] in west coast, giant kelp or bull kelp. Manly said these results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year. Information about the procedures and results including the results of the first samples analysis are available to the public at the website. Kelp watch.berkeley.edu the researchers [00:29:00] will continually update the website for public viewing as more samples arrive and are analyzed, including samples from Canada. The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July. Speaker 4: The Muse occurred during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. [00:29:30] If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com us in two weeks Speaker 7: at the same time. [inaudible].
Mathias Craig, Part 1 of 2
30:00|Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l ex Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar [00:00:30] of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. This week on spectrum. We present part one of two with our guest Monte as Craig Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Matiaz Craig is an engineer by training right here at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about applying and localizing technology through projects that they undertake with remote isolated communities. Give a listen to part one. Monte has. Craig, welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. How were you initially drawn to technology? Speaker 1: It started really early for me. I was a tinkerer. I always thought that I would be an inventor when I was young. So I think the, the attraction came, came super early and [00:01:30] then when I studied here at UC Berkeley in civil and environmental engineering, I started getting exposed to technology. Just sort of took it from there. Speaker 3: When was it that you started down this path of connecting technology with sustainability and equitable development? Speaker 1: So I started thinking about that again while I was here at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to take a number of classes in the energy and resource group with Professor Richard Norgaard and Dan Cayman, which was really inspirational [00:02:00] for me. And I started to see renewable energy in particular as an opportunity to use technology in a green, sustainable way. And also I liked the international element of it, but this is a global issue around the environment and also around issues of energy and water. And it was easy to see how they could fit together. I think it really started here. And then in graduate school I was at MIT and I had the opportunity to take a class called entrepreneurship in the developing world with Professor Alex Pentland [00:02:30] over in the media lab and that was my first sort of insight into how I might combine those things. Practically speaking in an organization, Speaker 3: when you first started trying to couple those things, energy generation, sustainability, what was the status quo of things? Speaker 1: What was the landscape like? What year was it? I started thinking about renewable energy and wind power back in 1999 when I was a student here at Berkeley. It [00:03:00] was a class project in 2002 at MIT and we launched in Nicaragua in 2004 I think the landscape for small wind in particular, which was what drew my interest initially, it was pretty sparse out there. There weren't many organizations doing small scale wind for development. There have been some small scale wind turbine manufacturers in Europe and in the United States for a number of decades on a commercial scale, but they weren't really thinking about emerging markets and how wind [00:03:30] might contribute to rural electrification in those places. And we formed some nice partnerships, one with Hugh Pigott from Scotland who was the original inventor of the wind turbine design that we were using and worked with him for a number of years to add our own contribution to the design and evolve it. Speaker 1: And were there other groups in the field that you kind of model yourself after? We didn't really have any models for the small scale wind, but there were some organizations that I looked up to and kept track of [00:04:00] in terms of community development, the how to implement technology in community situations in the developing world in particular, one group was called it DG. It was intermediate technology development group. It's now called practical action. They've been around since the 60s promoting how do you do responsible development in communities, deploying technology, but thinking about all the other dimensions around that work. And then another group I have a lot of respect for is out of Portland, Oregon, green empowerment. They've worked a lot with practical action as well. [00:04:30] It's a holistic view on how to use technology to create impact, but with a recognition of all the other components that have to go into that work. Speaker 1: And what was the learning curve like for you and your organization in the early years? Very steep. When we launched the organization, we had a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of ideas, but we did not have formal business training. Our level of experience in the field, we had some historical experience in Nicaragua, but trying [00:05:00] to launch your organization at work there is quite different than visiting. So I'd say the learning curve was extremely steep. That's been one of the most rewarding parts of this job for the last 10 years is every day I feel like I'm learning something new. And I think in the beginning of the organization we didn't have a very solid structure or a very big organization in terms of number of people. And we've had a lot of turnover over the years. And that's where I think the learning curve remains fairly steep for the institution because you have to [00:05:30] figure out how do you bridge those changes within the organization and how do you document your learning so that you don't have to constantly re learn the same lessons and you get to move on to the next lesson. Speaker 1: When we launched the organization, we had no money, no experience, no major backers, no big team, and we really built it from scratch. And I think there's a lot of learning along the way there. What were the biggest challenges in the early days? Well, the challenges have evolved a lot over the 10 years. [00:06:00] In the early days, I would say the biggest challenge was cash. You know, cash flow for an organization is always a critical issue. And I think in the early days when we had actually no financing, that was a huge issue because we weren't able to pay salaries. It was a struggle to scrape together a little bit of money to buy materials. You know that's okay early on. In fact it can be quite healthy for an organization to start that way because it forces you to be very efficient and to think three times about doing anything before you do it. Speaker 1: [00:06:30] Finding the talent that you need to tackle something as complex as infrastructure in the kind of region that we're in is very challenging and so you can sometimes attract the talent, but then how do you retain it? And it's not only a money issue, it's not only being able to pay people a fair wage, but it's a very dynamic context, a very dynamic environment. And people come and go. You know, if you invest a lot in training, which is a core part of our philosophy, build local capacity, but then that person moves on, [00:07:00] moves to the u s or you train them well enough that they can be employed in the capitol city and has a bit of a brain drain there. So you can't think of, okay, we're just going to invest a lot in this handful of employees. You fifth think, how are we systematically going to continuously train people that we onboard, retain them as long as we can and maybe help them move on to new bright careers. But I think that turnover issues is a big one. Speaker 2: You were listening to spectrum [00:07:30] on KALX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy. All Monte has, Craig is our guests. What's your current Speaker 1: assess for going into a new community? How do you do that? I would say we do it very slowly and thoughtfully. Our approaches. We want to pick communities where we think there's a tremendous amount of need, but where there's also we say in Spanish that the contract parties, the, the commitment [00:08:00] from the people we're going to work with, that the solutions that we're providing and building with them are things that they actually want to commit to and invest in. Early on in the organization, it was a bit throwing darts at a board and to where you're going to start, but in the last five, six years it's become much more systematic and we spend a lot of time visiting with communities. Generally how it starts is one of the leaders from the community comes and finds us. Now we have enough of a presence, enough of a reputation [00:08:30] on the coast that we're a known entity and somebody, you know, the leader of a community comes, says, oh, I saw this water project in this other community. Speaker 1: We would like that as well and we don't just jump at that. We say, okay, duly noted. Thank you for coming. And then when we're out doing, say maintenance or a service visit in another community, we will stop by that community and have a look and start having the meetings. And it's a long process of getting understand the community at first, sort of informally. And then if we think there's an opportunity actually [00:09:00] going into a project development phase where we're starting to look at what the specific needs are, what are the solutions that we could provide, how might they match? And then doing things like understanding the power dynamics in the community. Okay, this one person came and solicited the service and they said they were the leader, but what does that mean? Are they an elected leader? Who Do they represent? Or the head of the fishing cooperative or the head of the church or the head of the communal board. Speaker 1: So we're very cognizant of the fact that communities aren't monolithic and the community [00:09:30] doesn't come speak to you. Somebody does with an agenda and you want to understand who are they representing and you want to understand if they're a minority voice, what do other people think in the community? Who makes decisions? How do they make decisions, understand all of that before you get into a project. Because infrastructure projects to be successful really require longterm relationships. They aren't widgets, they're not selling them pencils and just transactional. They walk away with a pencil, everything's [00:10:00] fine. If you're putting in a water system or an energy system requires operation and maintenance, maybe upgrades in the future, you want to connect those services to economic opportunity to ways to improve health, to support education. There's a lot of moving parts and you want to make sure that the people you're going to work with will stay committed and that the solution will actually provide some benefit and not be just a neat gadget out there on the field for six months and then not work. Speaker 1: So I think [00:10:30] it's very deliberate. We typically add only a couple of new communities per year and then we continue to work with the communities we've historically worked with. Our philosophy is to add new services, to look for new ways to leverage what we've done in the past. If we did a solar lamp program in the past, maybe now they're ready for a larger solar system. Now that they've seen solar and they've worked with it for awhile. So we look at how can we sort of keep moving up the ladder in terms of providing better and better services with more impact. [00:11:00] So within that meeting with them, you know, assessing what the community's like, what's the dynamic around what sort of technologies you'll use and how much education is involved in all that. Different technologies require different levels of involvement, different levels of commitment. Some of them are simpler. Speaker 1: For example, if you're doing a solar lantern project, you don't have to have the buy in of the entire community in a longterm plan necessarily to do a fairly [00:11:30] self contained technology such as that versus if you're doing a solar powered water pumping storage distribution system for a new pilot farm where you might have a lot of stake holders, a lot of moving parts. So we definitely look at how cohesive is the community. You know, some communities are communities by name only because on a map they have one name but it's 50 families that don't really talk or work together on things. Other communities are very tightly knit, [00:12:00] are very into communal goals. And that has a tremendous effect on what solutions we perceive as being viable. Not necessarily ones that we'll do, but even within the sort of the viable range. Because solar water pumping micro farm project requires a lot of coordination. Speaker 1: So if it's a community that's very fractured and very individualistic, that kind of project probably isn't going to work. So that might not be on the table today. So we're always thinking in time horizons to you might see that, oh there could be [00:12:30] an opportunity for that two, three years from now. So it's very much not a cookie cutter approach we put in as much if not more time on the community engagement side of things as we do on the technology. And that's reflected in our staff. You know, how we allocate our time and effort and a lot of that's based on the history of your experience of doing this. And when it hasn't worked. Absolutely. When we started the organization and my brother and I and other members of the organization early on, we know from history going back [00:13:00] before the organization at our mother's work in these communities that the social dimensions are critical. Speaker 1: The technical solution alone will never work. You have to understand people and communities to make that pairing. But I used to think it would be about 80% technology and 20% social, which I thought was a huge improvement over a lot of development initiatives, which are 99% technology, 1% social and almost always fail. So I thought, oh, very progressive and forward looking at us to think 80 20 now I know it's the other way around. [00:13:30] I mean now I say I don't think technology is ever more than 10 or maybe 20% of a solution both in terms of budget but time and the challenges you face and what you have to overcome. You know, you come in with certain ideas about what people need and the right way of doing things. But often those aren't very well informed and they often aren't very well rooted in the reality of the local context. Speaker 1: And I'll give you one example. When we started, we thought communal solutions are the best. So we're going to do community based [00:14:00] solutions versus home scale solutions. So we went in and in the communities we worked in the beginning we just implemented community based solutions. But as I just mentioned earlier, in some of those communities, there isn't a strong social cohesion and the community actually doesn't really want to work together on issues. Well if you come in with a community based solution, it's not going to work very well, but you feel that that's the way it should be. So you start to let go a little by little about your preconceived notions about the way things ought to be and [00:14:30] how they should go. And you start to listen more and listen and observe and adapt your solutions and your methodologies to the reality of what's out there. Speaker 1: And will you often start with a gateway technology, like you were describing the home solar lantern idea or do you sometimes go all in and say this community is ripe for a big project? I would say now we have the full spectrum there. I'd say most communities we are looking for a simpler solution and gateway or beachhead, you know a way to get in there because [00:15:00] we know that if you implement a relatively simple technology to start with, the main value that you're getting is that interaction. You're getting to know the community, but without project do they meet their end of the bargain? You know, are they actually contributing? Like they said they would. If things go badly, you don't lose much. Right? So it's a cheap way to have some immediate impact and get to know and understand the communities better over time and then sort of move up that ladder of complexity where you can have even greater impact. Speaker 1: Some [00:15:30] communities though are very well organized and it looks like all the ingredients are there for successful engagement. It's just they've never had the opportunity. So in those ones, sometimes you skip ahead and you think, okay, maybe we can start with a more complicated system. The main cases that I can think of in my head where we've seen that is where one of the few other development organizations on the coast, because there really aren't many, has already been working in that community and you can leverage the [00:16:00] progress that they've made. And we have some great examples north of Bluefields where probably our strongest partner [inaudible] has been working for over 25 years. Really, really strong community engagement training on the basics of improved farming techniques, financial literacy, just doing great work. So if you go into a community that they've been working with and you start to plan a bigger project, those committee members have already benefited from 10 years of training. And so we notice a huge difference there. [00:16:30] And so for those communities we can think about jumping ahead. Speaker 3: Mm [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Matiaz Craig Blue Energy. When you start working with a community and you're having success and you've been with them for a number of years, is there a point at which you walk away or the flip side of that, [00:17:00] if it fails, do you say, this isn't going to work? We have to move on. Speaker 1: Our approach with the communities again is the vision is longterm engagement because we know that the challenges that they're facing are very deeply rooted. I mean, these are decades, centuries old barriers that they're facing. You don't solve that in a quarter. You don't solve that in a fiscal year. It's a longterm relationship. Our approach is more continue to build the relationship and think about entering and exiting particular solutions. You might try [00:17:30] a solution and then it turns out that solution in this community doesn't work. It doesn't mean the community is broken. It doesn't mean that they're not worth working with. It means that that's not the right approach. So yeah, there's definitely times where we've entered in, as I mentioned earlier, with the communal approach. It's just pushing this boulder up hill year after and you're trying to build this community association. And it's not working. And we've made some tough decisions in our past where you say, okay, we tried that for a couple of years, we invested a lot. Speaker 1: It [00:18:00] did not work. You go take out that equipment but you don't abandon the community. So now based on what we've learned, what is a better solution? And that's an interactive conversation community. And it's a tough conversation when you go in to take out a technology, sometimes you have to clear the table, acknowledge your mistakes, go back to that conversation about what might work and then reenter with a new solution. And so we certainly have done that. The amount of engagement and commitment to any particular community [00:18:30] in any particular year has a lot to do with funding. These communities are often very difficult to reach. Remember, there's almost no roads on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, almost no civil infrastructure of any kind. So it's a major commitment to get out there and work with these communities. And it has a lot to do with our funding. Speaker 1: So one community we might work with do a number of projects. Then there might be a little, if there's no funding and then we might re-engage, we stay in conversation with them, but we're not out there doing site visits and as frequently if there isn't a budget for it, but I [00:19:00] don't think that we've ever said, no, we're not going to work with this community anymore on anything. We've never reached that point, but certainly solutions have evolved over time. Are there any of these communities, would you consider them indigenous people? Absolutely. I think that's one of the most interesting things about Nicaragua that's often not known outside of the country is that Nicaragua was colonized by the Spanish and the British at the same time and you have two fundamentally different histories on the Pacific [00:19:30] side and on the Caribbean side of the country you have much more homogenous population on the Pacific. Speaker 1: The Spanish, we're sort of building a new empire, a new society, and their approach towards indigenous populations was particularly aggressive and resulted in almost total elimination of indigenous populations. Whereas on the Caribbean coast, the British just had a very different approach. They didn't want to build a large British colony. On the Caribbean coast, they were more interested in the geographic and strategic importance [00:20:00] of that territory. So they wanted control over it. They actually promoted certain indigenous groups on the coast to work for them. So the mosquito Indians were sort of chosen as the most sophisticated, the largest population. So they were given uniforms and armed and the Bible was translated into mosquito. Of course there was a lot of brutality and everything, but it wasn't an extermination policy as it was on the Pacific. And so you have a very different ethnographic history on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has historically been largely indigenous. Speaker 1: [00:20:30] And then since the time of the British colonization, afro descendant populations that that were brought over during the slave trade and some that different waves. And it's a very complex story. I can't really do it justice here. But on the indigenous side, there's believe seven or more indigenous groups on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, we interact primarily with three of them. So a lot of the communities we work in are indigenous communities. And then we also work with creole, which is one of the Afro [00:21:00] descendant groups. And Garifuna communities, which is a different effort to send an it group that are descended from escaped slaves. It's a very complex ethnographic history on the Caribbean coast, very ethnically diverse, multicultural, and that's part of the beauty of it and there's a certain strength in that. It's also part of the challenge because each of those communities has very different worldviews. Speaker 1: Is there linguistic diversity within the cultural diversity? Still [00:21:30] there is a lot of linguistic diversity and in fact linguistic diversity is what is the pre blue energy story. That's what brings us to Nicaragua in the first place because our mother collector involved is a linguist who specializes in indigenous languages of the Americas in particular and she works on language documentation and revitalization and that's the work that actually brought her to Nicaragua in the early eighties and had [00:22:00] her working out on the Caribbean coast with the Rama people, which is one of the indigenous groups to the south of Bluefields with a language that was really unwritten and was dying out. Native Speakers where there was only a handful left to very old. And so our mother has spent, you know, it's been an ongoing project. It was very intensive during the 80s but it still continues on to this day, continuous generation of new content where she wrote a dictionary, she wrote the syntax and then she's been creating pedagogical materials, [00:22:30] books about the birds and the plants and things that are important to people there. Speaker 1: So that's deeply ingrained in our fabric, both as people, but also I think in the organization of blue energy where we came in thinking more about technical solutions, but we have this history and this, this very important understanding that comes from her work. Really dealing with people and culture. The technologies that you're using, how many of them are you manufacturing locally and how many [00:23:00] do you have to import? So when we first started, we really came in with the idea that local manufacturing was central to what we wanted to do and that it was intrinsically good. We were focused again on the small scale wind turbines that we were committed to manufacturing right there in Bluefields. I think one of the key learnings that we've had is that local manufacturing certainly does have pros. You do get to create more local employment. You do get to build more local technical capacity. Speaker 1: [00:23:30] Those remain true, but that you also have to look at the opportunity cost. If there's a very high precision part, for example, if your machine that needs to be built, if you can't meet the quality standards locally to be able to consistently produce that part within those specifications, but you continue with the local production anyways. What's you're doing is you're creating a future cost. Your maintenance services will need to be greater in the coming years. And in an environment like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua [00:24:00] where maintenance can be very expensive because it's hard to get places, it's hard to train people to do certain kinds of technical work. You might actually be creating a quite large future cost. And so I think we got more realistic and a deeper understanding of what the pros and the cons of local manufacturing where. And one of the things we came to realize with the small scale wind turbines we were producing was that given sort of the fractured market on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, [00:24:30] we couldn't produce a high enough volume of the units to justify the kinds of investments in setting up the manufacturing and managing quality control that would be required to guarantee that every unit coming off the assembly line was in top shape and wasn't creating future problems for the organization. Speaker 1: That in addition to some other issues of there being a lower wind resource than we had expected and the price of solar coming down dramatically in the last 10 years. And essentially in most cases out competing [00:25:00] small scale wind except in the best wind sites. We decided in 2011 to actually cease producing small scale wind turbines. And at that time we also took just a deep look at all the different technologies that we were working with. So what we have today is it's a mix. You know, we don't try to manufacture solar panels, we don't try to manufacture inverters. Let's buy a high quality internationally available inverter. And let's put our focus [00:25:30] on other things where we could have a greater impact. So on the electricity side, most of the components are off the shelf. And then what we do is we do the design, the need assessment, how many inverters do you need, what size, what size, solar panels, what kind of solar panels? Speaker 1: Right? We do that work, assemble it all, and then we do some local building of components like the structural house of the system. For example, for other technologies like [00:26:00] the Bio sans water filter, like the cookstove, the designs that we're working with, there's a huge gain for local manufacturer. From a technical standpoint, they're very easy to manufacture, so they don't compare to trying to build a solar panel or a wind turbine. So when you do an analysis there, you realize that makes perfect sense to manufacturer the water filter locally in Bluefields. And so we do that. We have a shop space where we manufacture all those water filters locally. Cookstove similar issue. [00:26:30] It's largely built from locally sourced materials, different kinds of mud and rock and things that we've worked hard to identify in the region that we can optimize and so again it wouldn't make sense to try to bring that in from China or Speaker 4: even the capital city. Makes sense to manufacture that locally. Speaker 2: [inaudible] to learn more about blue energy, visit their website, blue energy group.org in part two Mathias [00:27:00] discusses adapting technologies, technologies he would like to work with and the future of blue energy. Now Rick [inaudible] present some of the science and technology events happening locally Speaker 4: over the next two weeks on May 20th Science Festival Director Kashara Hari Well Interview Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of freakonomics superfreakonomics and now think like a freak as part of a Commonwealth club program [00:27:30] at the Castro theater four to nine Castro street at market in San Francisco. The new book aims to help show how to use economics to analyze the decisions we make, the plans we create and even the morals we choose. Tickets. Start at $10 for more information, visit Commonwealth club.org carry the one radio are hosting a free event on Thursday May 29th doors at six 30 show at seven [00:28:00] to produce the program. Sound off at Genentech Hall on the ucs F Mission Bay campus, 616th street in San Francisco. Sound off, we'll feature Dr Kiki Sanford, who we'll interview three scientists. First, UC Berkeley is Dr. Frederick. Loosen well, discuss communication, sound processing. Then ucsfs. Dr. John Howard explores the role of auditory feedback in speech. Speaker 4: Finally, UC Berkeley's [00:28:30] Aaron brand studies the love songs from jumping spiders. rsvp@soundoffthateventbrite.com here's Rick Kaneski with a news story in a paper published in science on May 12th Amy Ogan, Benjamin East Smith and Brooke middly of the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington report that a marine ice sheet claps is potentially underway for the Thwaites [00:29:00] glacier basin in west Antarctica. The ice sheet has been long considered to be prone to instability. The team has applied a numerical model to predict glacier melt and they found that it is already melting. At a rate that is likely too fast to stop. The team predicts runaway collapse of the shelf and somewhere between 200 and 900 years in nature and news is summary of the paper. Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds called it a seminal work saying [00:29:30] that it is the first to really demonstrate what people have suspected, that the Thwaites glacier has a bigger threat to future sea level. Then Pine Island music occurred during the show was written and produced. Alex Simon, Speaker 3: thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time.
Diana Pickworth
30:00|Archaeologist Dr Diana Pickworth. She is presently a Visiting Scholar in the UC Berkeley Near Eastern Studies Department. Formerly Assoc Prof of Mesopotamian Art and Archaeology and Museum Studies at the University of ‘Aden in the Republic of Yemen.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. Our guest is archaeologist Dr Diana. Pick worth. She is presently a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley Near Eastern studies department. Dr Pick worth is completing the work related to the publication of two volumes [00:01:00] on excavations carried out by a university of California team at the site of Nineveh in northern Iraq. Formerly she was an associate professor of Mesopotamian art and archeology and museum studies at the University of a sudden in the Republic of Yemen. Diana pick worth is an elected fellow of the explorers club and a member of the American School of Oriental Research. Here is that interview. Hi, this is Brad Swift. In today's spectrum interview, Rick Karnofsky [00:01:30] joins me, Rick [inaudible] and today's guest is Diana. Pick worth Diana, welcome to spectrum. Speaker 1: I'm honored and delighted to be here. Speaker 3: Diana would you begin by talking about archeology and how it got started and how it's blossomed into its multifaceted current state. Speaker 1: There's no doubt that the enlightenment in the 19th century sparked a huge interest [00:02:00] in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire. And so during this period, the European countries, England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, we're sending consoles and ambassadors to visit the Parshah and Istanbul. What happened was these countries became competitive in their desire, both the land and knowledge. And this was fueled somewhat by [00:02:30] Darwin's research and in 1830 his work on the Beagle and subsequently his publication of origin of species spoked enormous questions about the Bible. And it was this desire to understand the truth about the Bible. It had been viewed up until that point is a given that it was correct [00:03:00] and it challenged the world view at the time. And avast and I think changing Manoj and so layered from England, Botha from foams moved east of Istanbul into northern Iraq. And what we see is these two men really pitching at each other to stake a claim for that country to excavate in there tells that they [00:03:30] both discovered in the appetite risk space on and is that how the Fertile Crescent got started? Speaker 1: That whole idea of Fertile Crescent, that was a little later, but the Fertile Crescent represents an area where settlement could first begin and so the ice Asya hat is really a points on a map. It's a way of looking at how [00:04:00] geography, rainfall, and natural geographic circumstances create a circumstance where humankind can prosper and it can farm in what is called dry farming. And so what we find, it's an all running up from about the middle of their Dead Sea on the Palestinian literal all the way up in a circle across the top of what [00:04:30] is today, northern Syria and northern Iraq. Those sites date from as early as 9,000 BC and there's no doubt that's where we are. We all finding humankind's first farming and settlement currently. Then what's notable about the transition from the 19th or the 20th century in terms of archeology? I think on the one hand a tremendous continuity so [00:05:00] that those sites that would claimed in the 19th century tend to still be excavated by the same country. Speaker 1: There's an unspoken but still I think quite rigorous concept that a site is handed on. The perspective has become much more global so that we have people excavating in the Middle East, from South Africa, [00:05:30] from South America, from the United States, and these teams in most we would call the new world are essentially funded or sponsored by their universities. That still remains in the European countries. A tradition of sponsorship by the government and this makes a huge difference. They are able to continue with a very shore knowledge of funding [00:06:00] year after year. You talked a little bit about the Fertile Crescent. What are other examples of old settlements? What's the oldest settlement? I think in photo Cresson, certainly one of the most remarkable sites is Choteau here. And this was excavated by the University of California by Ruth Traynham and has some of the earliest illustrative material and [00:06:30] war paintings in that area. And representative, uh, no doubt of the earliest farming settlements. And it's a dense occupation. Surprisingly, there are dense a little later we see sites that we defined by this ceramic heritage, so at this point we have new written documentation but how suna and hello laugh of these very early pottery sites that are named [00:07:00] essentially from the first site, but we find a spread of occupation across the area. Further east, I'm a hindered Daro 2,900 BC is in what is modern day Pakistan and without doubt one of the earliest settlements Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you were listening to spectrum on k a l experts like archaeologist, [00:07:30] Diana [inaudible] is our guest. Speaker 1: How closely does archaeological training in universities track with the real world application of archeology? I think in many cases very well. One of the requirements of an archeologist above all others I think is flexibility and sturdy resilience, but there are three aspects we're trained theoretically [00:08:00] and this I think is where to refer back to your earlier question. There is a change from 19th century archeology today. We're trained to pose a theoretical question to come up with a hypothesis that we will try to test on the ground. I think an area background knowledge is essential training varies in this regard. For example, [00:08:30] in Germany, archeologists are expected to work all over the world whereas we tend to direct our training two area studies say that my area Mesopotamia and Arabian studies really requires a basis of language study under knowledge of the history of the area and so one becomes a specialist in a particular area. Speaker 1: The practical training [00:09:00] is fairly consistent. I think we begin in in the states, the students are sent in the summers to excavations and throughout their graduate career it's hope they'll have an opportunity to really work in different types of sites and all of us begin or hope to with a semester in a field archeology school so that ones practicing perhaps in a situation where one can't cause too much [00:09:30] damage within the United States field of study, how much might one drift from their graduate area into another area of the world as they start their career? That's an interesting question. In my experience, people do really tend to stay within their area of specialization. We're talking about as much as maybe six to eight years of a language study. The geography and the history of an area [00:10:00] becomes embedded in one's training and in one's doctoral dissertation, so I personally don't think there is such a broad shift. Speaker 1: I think theoretically once capable, there's absolutely no doubt and we find also that students who find themselves not to have strong language studies tend to move into pre history. If you're working in pre history, then really one can go anywhere. It doesn't matter. [00:10:30] There are loopholes in the system, some of the technical methods that are being applied to dating things. Does that mess up the history of it all, the timing, the dating, a lot of the earlier work, does it get overturned in terms of how old is this settlement? I think DNA has made an enormous, perhaps the most significant difference and whole groups of people have been shown to not be native to where [00:11:00] they have claimed in their own written literature that they've always left that spin. I think a delightful surprise, very interesting surprise. Certainly high and duel found that everyone going to the Polynesian islands was going in 150 degrees opposite direction from what he had anticipated. Speaker 1: So we do find that as time passes, the studies can be refined, but I would say it's rather a question [00:11:30] of refinement than are there just totally wrong assumptions. Can I call it it all about what proportion of work is done on newly found settlements, settlements that might've been found in the past couple years versus settlements that we've known about for some time? I think the introduction of Google and satellite imagery has made a vast difference to what we can do most recently in [00:12:00] a northeast Iraq in what is now the Kurdish settlement. Recent work by Harvard has discovered an enormous number of settlements and all of the previous research before they went into the field was done using satellite imagery and so that was unavailable until quite recently. It saves money. There's no doubt with satellite imagery. We can sit in an office in Berkeley and look at the satellite [00:12:30] sites surrounding a large site. We can see a pattern perhaps of movement along a track through mountain ranges from settlement, so that's enormously expanded. What we can do in the office before we go into the field. [inaudible] Speaker 6: spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is archeologist in Diana. [00:13:00] She is a visiting scholar of the Near Eastern studies department. Speaker 1: Can you start to talk about some of your own work in Iraq? I first went to Iraq as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. I was invited by Professor David Stronach who is the director of the excavation for our first season. There were six graduate students and it was a relatively short season [00:13:30] to explore the site and decide how an excavation would be approached and what would it be involved. I was very determined to go. I had spent most my undergraduate time studying art history and museum studies, but as time went on I became more and more interested in archeology and really love living in the Middle East. I had lived in the Middle East a long time before. I have [00:14:00] a degree in education. And so I had worked as a governess in the Middle East in Yemen, and I was very keen to go back and the first day I climbed up onto Keon check, which is the tail of Nineveh. Speaker 1: I just knew that I'd found what I wanted to do and it was so wonderful and I liked it very much indeed. And I've been there ever since. Okay. And is there any prospect of going back to Nineveh [00:14:30] presently knew? No. Saul is extremely dangerous at the moment, and so unfortunately that's not a possibility. Certainly we've been invited back and I know that I could go back if it ever becomes a safe to do. So what's happened to the tail is hard to know. The other sad aspect is that there has been an enormous growth in the size of Mosul, the city adjacent on the other side of the [00:15:00] Tigris river. Your time in Nineveh. What was the big accomplishment that you thought you folks had achieved? I think in the three years that we were there assessing everything. Today as we write up the reports, it's incredibly encouraging. Speaker 1: We chose about six different areas of exploration that would represent aspects of the long duration at the site. It's an extremely [00:15:30] old city. And so one exploration on the side of the tail was a step trench down and this has been aided by erosion from water so that we were able to get down to 2,500 BC, um, without digging down through it. We could go in from the side. So there was a component that was of a very early period. The Small [00:16:00] Eminence just south of the sail or the citadel of the city where the royal family lived was also explored. And we expose there a really beautiful elite house, you could say, an administrative house and the surrounding area of that. We also worked up on the northern Northwestern corner by the sin gate. And inside of that we found a very fine [00:16:30] industrial area so that we were able to demonstrate that there was pottery making on the site as well as some metalla Jay, I think. Speaker 1: And then on the wall on the southeast corner, David [inaudible] excavated the [inaudible] gate to Housey. Uh, no gate had really been fully excavated by a Western team, although some of the other gates had been partially [00:17:00] excavated by the Iraqis. And that was where we found the evidence of the destruction of the city, which was extremely exciting. After Iraq, you moved back to Yemen? Yes, I had always studied Yemen. I have roped both my masters degree and my phd on the material culture of Saudi Arabia. And so I had written on the stone [00:17:30] statuary of the mortuary temples and it's very fascinating. A great deal of the material had been moved to Europe, so that had one tried to estimate how much there was there. It would have been easy to say very little, very little at all, but long detailed research program made it very clear that it wasn't, that there was very little, it was that it had been so widely dispersed. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] And so I eventually visited maybe as many as 25 museums and brought it all together again, which proved to be very interesting. And I was able to do a lot of dating from that. And then my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote here at Berkeley, was on the gemstones and stamps, seals of South Arabia and that I used to demonstrate the connection between these South Arabians, small kingdoms [00:18:30] and the greater empire, tight polity of a neo, Syria or other later Syrian period. And so what one found was that this trading network connected all the way across the Arabian peninsula up to Gaza and then on into the Assyrian Kingdom. And so there are in the British Museum at Gates that were sent by the king of Saba from Maarib to Gaza [00:19:00] and then on to Nimruz. And these were buried underneath the temple and they're signed with the king's name. So we knew that they had to been used in that way. So I had an enormous interest in Yemen and stayed there and taught in the university, essentially in Aiden, continue to work there until rather recently. Speaker 6: This is spectrum [00:19:30] k, Aleks, Berkeley archaeologist and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Diana, pick work. Sorry. Speaker 1: What advice would you give to people who are considering getting into archeology? I think an undergraduate degree in a hard science is really important in the long term and I think that was advice that perhaps [00:20:00] was less prophet earlier. I think there was more stress on art history and I think students today a well-served with incredibly sturdy technological skills, computer skills and science backgrounds and I think to avoid that is to invite a short career. I really do. I think the training of a hard science is also useful. I [00:20:30] think it makes for a strict discipline, critical thinking, theoretical background in thinking on analytical studies is really useful, very, very useful. And then field training this, no doubt. I think that field training prior to going into the field for the first time at least exposes warm to some of the surprises that will arrive. Speaker 1: I think for most archeologists [00:21:00] you have to think on your feet and so unless one is well-prepared and has made detailed studies of what one's going to do, then it's vital to err on the side of caution when you put the first spade in because otherwise it's destroyed and gone. And so those types of preparations, which are easily available. Field schools are available everywhere. So that prepares, I think an archaeologist for the field work aspect. [00:21:30] But Sonia, small part, the fieldwork is such a small part of the overall, it's like a blip in the middle in a way. There's a long lead in of preparation and research and location choice. Then that's the excavation and then an incredibly lengthy period of um, producing the data and getting it out. And the computers help that most excavations today. It's all of the data is going straight [00:22:00] into the computer and can be sent back to the university, which was an advantage, an enormous advantage. Speaker 1: How do you see archeology going forward? What is its future? What I find is that as one area closes, another will open rather recently, the northern Iraq area of what is now Kurdistan has opened up. It became rather safe up there for awhile. [00:22:30] So that an ability to move say from Syria into that area was seized by many archeologists. So that many teams have been in the field, I would say for the last five years in northeast Iraq. And Kurdistan, I googled to check for you where everyone is digging at the moment. And so there's sort of a narrow tight band of Middle Eastern scholars in Israel and down into [00:23:00] Jordan and that's a huge concentration. And then upon the northeastern potting Kurdistan and we've seen an opening up in Saudi Arabia, so wonderful materialists coming out of the tame excavation, which is led by the Germans, uh, by iHuman. That's been very, very exciting. And they are expanding. There's also been a lot of expansion by more than just [00:23:30] the British into the Emirates and say we have a lot of excavations at the moment and Kuwait behind [inaudible] Ku, Wayne and down into Dubai. So when one door closes, another opens and there are people in Oman as well. No one stays home. It's not appealing. We like to be in the field. Speaker 1: Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you want to mention? [00:24:00] Maybe China. There's an enormous ongoing excavations in China at the moment. It's definitely overturning and changing their own knowledge of their own history. And I find that fascinating. And as a northern southern divide about where the origins of China's more recent civilizations came from and so it's been fascinating for me to watch that. As I said [00:24:30] earlier, I think that we're very flexible people and I suppose that would be where I would move if I could never go back to the Middle East. Diana, pick worth. Thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you. I've enjoyed myself. Thank you. Speaker 6: Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny [00:25:00] URL [inaudible] dot com slash KALX at spectrum. Speaker 3: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me when the calendar on May 7th from seven to 9:00 PM UC Berkeley, professor of psychology and neuroscience, Matt Walker. We'll be it. Ask a scientist at the summer street food park, four to eight 11th street in San Francisco. [00:25:30] They'll discuss research showing that sleep is a highly active process that is essential for many cognitive functions including learning, memory, creativity and brain plasticity. The event is free, although you can purchase stuff to eat from the food trucks there. Visit, ask a scientist S f.com for more info. Why are many body problems in physics so difficult? A quantum information [00:26:00] perspective determining the physical behavior of systems composed of several particles is in general very hard. The reason is that the number of possible combinations of states increases exponentially with the number of particles for quantum systems. The situation is even worse in his talk. Ignacio Ciroc will explain this phenomenon in detail and we'll review several approaches to assessing this difficulty and to overcoming it under certain conditions. [00:26:30] NASCIO Ciroc has been director of the theory division at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum optics since December, 2001 this lecture is Monday May 12th at 4:00 PM in [inaudible] Hall, [inaudible] Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. This event is free. Speaker 7: Counter culture labs is hosting a few free talks at the pseudo room. Hackerspace two one 41 Broadway in Oakland over the next few weeks. [00:27:00] On May 9th at 7:00 PM we'll hear from Ben Novak, who is it? Paleo geneticist working on using clone cells from cryo-preserved museum specimens and genome editing in an attempt to revive the passenger pigeon from extinction. Then on May 15th at 7:00 PM they will host Anthony Evans who was on the glowing plant project. This project raised a half million dollars on Kickstarter to add firefly DNA to [00:27:30] plants to make them glow. He'll discuss the process, how they've handled the public perception of GMOs and why open source science matters. For more information on these in future events, visit counterculture labs.org Speaker 3: now, Rick Karnofsky with an interesting news story, Speaker 7: nature news reports on an article by Gary Frost and Jimmy Bell from the Imperial College, London and [00:28:00] others that dietary fiber may act on the brain to curb appetite in a paper published in nature communications. On April 29th the team discussed how fiber that is fermented in the colon creates colonic acetate and using radioactively tagged Acetate and pet scans. They showed that colonic acetate crosses the blood brain barrier and it's taken up by the brain of rats. They also showed that acetate [00:28:30] administration is associated with activation of Acetol Coa, a carboxylase, and changes in the expression profiles of regulatory neuropeptides that favor appetite suppression. These observations suggest that Acetate as a direct role in the central appetite regulation. Speaker 4: Mm, thanks to Rick Karnofsky [00:29:00] for help with the interview calendar and with the news music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email, Speaker 8: email addresses spectrum, dedicate a lx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same [00:29:30] time. [inaudible].
Cathryn Carson & Fernando Perez, Part 2 of 2
30:01|Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Uh Huh [inaudible]. Speaker 4: [00:00:30] We'll come to spectrum the science and technology show on Katie l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week [00:01:00] on spectrum present part two of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for data science bids is only four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. They are today's guest Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley for Nana Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler [00:01:30] Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the iPod iPhone project while he was a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead the project today. In part two they talk about teaching data science. Brad Swift conducts the interview Speaker 5: on the teaching side of things. Does data science just fold into the domains in the fields and some faculty embrace it, others don't. How does the teaching of data science move [00:02:00] forward at an undergraduate level? Yeah, there there've been some really interesting institutional experiments in the last year or two here at Berkeley. Thinking about last semester, fall of 2013 stat one 57 which was reproducible collaborative data science pitched at statistics majors simply because you have to start with the size that can fit in a classroom [00:02:30] and training students in the practices of scientific collaboration around open source production of software tools or to look at what was Josh Bloom's course, so that's astro four 50 it's listed as special topics in astrophysics just because Josh happens to be a professor in the astronomy department and so you have to list it somewhere. The course is actually called Python for science Speaker 6: [00:03:00] and it's a course that Josh has run for the last, I think this is, this was its fourth iteration and that course is a completely interdisciplinary course that it's open to students in any field. The examples really do not privilege and the homework sets do not privilege astronomy in any way and we see students. I liked her a fair bit in that course as a guest lecture and we see students from all departments participating. This last semester it was packed to the gills. We actually had problems because we couldn't find a room large enough to accommodate. So word of mouth is working. In terms of students finding these [00:03:30] courses, Speaker 5: it's happening. I wouldn't say it's working in part because it's very difficult to get visibility across this campus landscape. I am sure there are innovations going on that even the pis and bids aren't aware of and one of the things we want to do is stimulate more innovation in places like the the professional schools. We'll be training students who need to be able to use these tools as well. What do they have in mind or there [00:04:00] are other formats of instruction beyond traditional semester courses. What would intensive training stretched out over a much shorter time look like? What gaps are there in the undergraduate or graduate curriculum that can effectively be filled in that way? The Python bootcamp is another example of this that's been going on for Speaker 6: for about four years. Josh and I teach a a bootcamp on also python for data science that is immediately before the beginning of the fall semester. Literally the weekend before [00:04:30] and it's kind of, it's a prerequisite for the semester long course, but it's three days of intensive hands-on scientific bite on basically programming and data analysis and computing for three days. We typically try to get a large auditorium and we got 150 to 200 people. A combination of undergrads, Grad Students, postdocs, folks from LVL campus faculty and also a few folks from industry. We always leave, leave a few slots available for people from outside the university to come and that one a has been very popular at [00:05:00] tends to, it's intense to have very good attendance be, it serves as an on ramp for the course because we advertise the in the semester course during the bootcamp and that one has been fairly successful so far and I think it has worked well. Speaker 6: We see issues with it too. That would be that we would like to address three days is probably not enough. Um, it means because it's a single environment, it means that we have to have examples that are a little bit above that can accommodate everyone, but it means they're not particularly interesting for any one group. It would be, I think it would be great to have [00:05:30] things of this nature that might be a little bit better focused at the life sciences and the social sciences that the physical sciences, so that the examples are more relevant for a given community that may be better targeted at the undergraduate and the graduate level so that you can kind of select a little bit in tune the requirements or the methodological base a little bit better to the audience. But so far we've had to kind of bootstrapping with what we have. Speaker 6: There's another interesting course on campus offered by the ice school by Raymond Lecture at the high school called working with open data [00:06:00] that is very much aimed at folks who are the constituency of the high school that have an intersection of technical background with a broader interdisciplinary kind of skills that are the hallmark of the high school and they work with openly available data sets that are existing on the Internet to create basically interesting analysis projects out of them and that's of course that that I've seen come up with some very, very successful and compelling projects at the end of the semester Speaker 7: about the teaching and preparation in universities. In [00:06:30] the course of doing interviews on spectrum, a number of people have said that really the only way to tackle sciences interdisciplinary, the big issues of science is with an interdisciplinary approach, but that that's not being taught in universities as the way to do science. Sarah way to break that down using data science as a vehicle. Speaker 5: I can speak about that as a science and technology studies scholar. The practice of interdisciplinarity, what makes it actually work is one of the [00:07:00] the most challenging social questions that can be asked of contemporary science and adding into that the fact that scientists get trained inside this existing institution that we've inherited from let's roughly say the Middle Ages with a set of disciplines that have been in their current form since roughly the late 19th century. That is the interface where I expect in the next oh two to five decades major transformations in research universities. [00:07:30] We don't yet know what an institution or research institution will look like that does not take disciplines as it sort of zero order ground level approximation to the way to encapsulate truth. But we do see, and I think bids is like data science in general and an example of this. We do see continual pressure to open up the existing disciplines and figure out how to do connections across them. It's [00:08:00] not been particularly easy for Berkeley to do that in part because of the structure of academic planning at our institution and in part because we have such disciplinary strengths here, but I think the invitation for the future that that word keeps coming back invitation. The invitation for the future for us is to understand what we mean by practicing interdisciplinarity and then figure out how to hack the institution so that it learns how to do it better. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:08:30] you're listening to structure fun. K A, l ex Berkeley Fasten Kirsten and Fernando Perez are our guests. They're part of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science for Bids [inaudible] Oh, Speaker 6: it seems that data science has an almost unlimited [00:09:00] application. Are there, are you feeling limits? I don't know about limits specifically because I think in principle almost any discipline can have some of its information and whatever the concepts and constructs of that discipline can probably be represented in a way that is amicable to quantitative analysis of some sort. In that regard, probably almost any discipline can have a data science aspect to it. I think it's important not to sort of [00:09:30] over fetishize it so that we don't lose sight of the fact that there's other aspects of intellectual work in all disciplines that are still important. That theory still has a role. That model building still has a role that, uh, knowing what questions to ask, it's still important that hypotheses still matter. I'm not so sure that it's so much an issue of drawing arbitrary limits around it, but rather of being knowledgeable and critical users of the tools and the approaches that are offered. Speaker 6: Because in terms of domain [00:10:00] applications, I actually recently saw at the strata conference, which is one of these more industry oriented big data conferences that took place a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley. It's in Santa Clara. One of the best talks that I saw at the conference was an analysis half the poem, if I told him that Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso After Picasso painted this very famous portrait of her. And that poem has a very, very repetitive rhythmic structure. It has very few words and it's a long poem with a very peculiar linguistic structure. And [00:10:30] this hardest, I, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's an artist who works kind of at the intersection of digital arts in, in linguistics wrote basically a custom one off visual analysis and visualization tool to work on the structure of this poem to visualize it, to turn it into music. Speaker 6: And it was a beautiful talk. It was a beautiful and very interesting talk and this was kind of the exact opposite of this was tiny data. This was one poem and in fact during the Q and a they asked him and he said, well I've tried to use the tool [00:11:00] on a few other things and there's a few songs in hip hop that it works well with, but it's almost, it's almost custom made for this one poem, right? So this was sort of tiny data, completely non generalizable and yet I thought it was fascinating and beautiful talk. So that's kind of an example that I would have never have thought of as as data science. Any examples of misapplication? Speaker 5: I think we can admit that data science is a buzzword that is [00:11:30] exactly through, it's almost indefinable nature creates space for people to do methodologically problematic and in many cases also uninteresting work. Just throwing data into an analysis without asking is this the right analysis will get you stupid or misleading answers. It's the garbage in out principle. So yeah, like any intellectual tool in the toolkit, [00:12:00] there are misleading conclusions that can be drawn and one of the powers that Berkeley brings to this effort in data science is a focus on the methodology, the intelligent development of methodology along with just building things that look like tools on their own. I think that's going to be the place with the sweet spot for universities because of the emphasis on rigor and stringency and reasoning [00:12:30] along with just getting out results that look good and are attractive Speaker 7: with data science. Are there infrastructure challenges that are worth talking about either in industry or at an academic institution? Because I know that computing power now through Amazon, Google organizations like that are enormous and so industry is sort of giving up the idea of having their own [00:13:00] computational capacity and they're using cloud virtual universities I would think are following suit. Speaker 6: Yes, there is work being done already on campus in that regard. We've had some intersection with those teams. The university right now, uh, we've had since last year a new CIO on campus, Larry Conrad, who's been spearheading an effort to sort of reimagine what the research computing infrastructure for campus should look like. [00:13:30] Considering these questions precisely of what is happening in industry, what are the models that are successfully being used at other institutions to provide larger scales off competitional resources across all disciplines and beyond the disciplines that have been traditionally the ones that have super computers. Well, there's a long history of departments, again, like physics, like competition, fluid dynamics, teams like quantum chemistry teams that have had either their own clusters or that have large budgets who have access to the supercomputing centers at [00:14:00] the doe labs and things of that nature. But as we've been saying today, all of a sudden those needs are exploding across all disciplines and the usage patterns are changing and that often what is the bottleneck is maybe not the amount of raw compute power, but the ability to operate over a very large data sets, so maybe storage is the issue or maybe throughput biologists often end up buying computers that look really weird. Speaker 6: Too many supercomputing centers because they, the actual things that they need are skewed in a different way and so there are certainly [00:14:30] challenges in that regard when we do know that Berkeley is right now at least in the midst of making a very concerted and serious attempt at at least taking a step forward on this problem. Speaker 7: A lot of data is derived from personal information. Are there privacy concerns that you have [inaudible] Speaker 5: they're all quite definitely in so many different ways that the input of experts who have thought about questions of consent, of privacy, [00:15:00] of the challenges around keeping de identified data d identified when it is possible through analytics to understand what patterns are emerging from them that is going to be so key. Especially to working with social data. And so one of the still open questions for all of us working with data that is about people is how to develop the practices that will do the protections necessary [00:15:30] in order to avoid the kinds of catastrophic misuses and violations of privacy that many of us do. Fear will be coming our way as so much data becomes available so fast with so many invitations to just make use of it and worry about the consequences later. That's not the responsible way forward. And I would like to see bids and Berkeley take on that challenge as part of its very deliberate agenda. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] Okay. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about institutional reactions to bids. Oh, Speaker 7: are there any impediments that you've run into within the bids process [00:16:30] of getting up and running? Cause it's been going since, uh, Speaker 5: it's not been going on that long as it, it's only December of 2013. Pretty recent, but I'm sure there's gotta be some institutional pushback or no, it's, it's been incredible actually how much support the institution has given. What bids is though, is a laboratory for the kind of collaboration that we're trying to instantiate. And so you have 13 brilliant Co-pi eyes each with their own vision and figuring out where [00:17:00] the intersection is and how to get the different sets of expertise and investments where they, where those intersections lie and how to get them aligned. I mean, that's, that's one of the fascinating challenges in front of beds as a laboratory in the small, for the process at large that we're trying to do Speaker 7: on the tools and programming side. How would you break up what languages are providing, what kind of capability, [00:17:30] and are there new languages that are ascendent and other languages that are languages that are losing their grip? I'm sort of curious. It's a, it's another trivia questions that I think might have some interest for people. No, I think there's, there's clearly an ascendance. I think naturally the expansion of the surface of people interested in these problems Speaker 6: is naturally driving the growth and importance of high level languages that are immediately usable by domain scientists. We're not full time programmers [00:18:00] and professional programmers. Traditionally a lot of the high end computing had been done in languages like c, c plus plus for trend and some Java that are languages that tend to be more the purview of, of people who do lots of software development. And a lot of that did happen in departments like physics and chemistry and computer science, but not so much in other disciplines. And so we're seeing the rise of open source languages like Python and r that are immediately applicable and easy to use for data analysis where a few commands [00:18:30] can load a file, compute some statistics on it, produce a few visualizations, and you can do that in five lines of code, not having to write a hundred or 500 lines of c plus plus. Speaker 6: Right. And so the languages like that are, they're not new. Both I think are came out in the late eighties early nineties python came out in 1991 but they're seeing a huge amount of growth in recent years for this reason. There's also a growth of either new tools to extend these languages [00:19:00] or new languages as well. Tools for example, that connect these languages to databases or extensions to these languages to couple them to databases in better ways so that people don't have to only write raw sequel, which SQL is not the classic language for interacting with databases, so extensions to couple existing languages to database back ends. A lot of work is being done in that direction and there are some novel languages. For example, there's a team at MIT that about two years ago started [00:19:30] a project for a new language called Julia that is aimed at numerical computing, but it's sort of re-imagining. Speaker 6: What would you do if you wanted to create a language like python with the strengths of language like python or Ruby or r, but if you were doing that today with the lessons of the last 20 years, that would be good for numerical computing, but it would be easy to use for domain scientists. That would be high level, that would be interactive, that would feel like a scripting tool, but that would also give you very high performance. [00:20:00] If you had the the last 20 years of lessons and the advances in some of the underlying technology and improved compiler machinery that we have today, how would you go about that problem? And I think the Giulia team at MIT is making rapid progress and it has caught the intention of people in the statistics community of people in the numerical analysis and algorithms community. Some prominent people have become very interested in how to become active participants in its development. Speaker 6: So we're seeing both mature tools like python and are growing in their strength and and their importance. At the latest Strada Conference, [00:20:30] for example, there was a an analysis of kind of the the abstracts submitted that had r and python in their names versus things like excel or sequel or Java and Python and are clearly dominating that space, but also these, these kinds of more novels, sort of research level languages that whose futures still not clear because they're very, very young, but at least they're exploring sort of the frontier of what will we do in the next five or 10 years. And is this an area that's ripe for a commercial software creators who develop [00:21:00] a tool that would be specific to data science and sort of the same way that Mat lab is kind of specific now it's kind of a generic tool for mathematics. Obviously my answer here is extremely biased, but I'm, I sort of think that the space for a, the window to create a proprietary data science language is closed already. Speaker 6: I think the community simply would not adopt a new one. There are some existing successful ones such as mat lab, IDL, which is smaller than Madlib. It is widely used in the astronomy and astrophysics. [00:21:30] And Physics Communities Mathematica, which is a project that came out of the mathematics and physics world and that is very, very sophisticated and interesting. Maple, which is also a mathematics language. Those are successful existing proprietary languages. I think the mood has changed to these are products that came out in the eighties and the nineties. I think the, the window for that, uh, as a purely proprietary offer has closed. I think what we're going to see is the continued growth and the rise potential. You have new entrants that are fundamentally [00:22:00] open source, but yet that maintain, as I said earlier, a healthy dialogue with industry because it doesn't mean, for example, in the art world there are companies that build very successful commercial products around are there is a product called r studio that is a development environment for analysis in our, and that's a company, there's a company called I think revolution analytics. Speaker 6: I think they built some sort of sort of large scale backend high-performance version of our, I don't know the details, I don't use it, but I've seen their website. I think they're a large company that builds kind of our for the enterprise. So I think [00:22:30] that's what we're going to see moving forward at the base. People want the base technology, the base language to be open source. And I think for us as universities and for me as a scientist, I think that's a Tenet I'm not willing to compromise on because I do not want a result that I obtain or result that I published or a tool that I educate my students with to have a black box that I'm legally prevented from opening and to tell my student, well, this is a result about nature, but you can't understand how it was achieved because you are legally prevented from opening the box. [00:23:00] I think that is fundamentally unacceptable. But what is, I think a perfectly sensible way forward, is to have these base layers that are open on top of which domain specific tools can be created by industry that add value for specific problems, for specific domains that may be add performance, whatever. Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having us here. Thanks much. Speaker 8: [inaudible]Speaker 9: [00:23:30] all spectrums. Past shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k Speaker 1: a l x Speaker 8: spectrum Speaker 1: Rick Curtis Skin. I will present a few of the science and technology events [00:24:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 10: Counter culture, labs and pseudo room present gravitational waves, results and implications with Bicep to collaborator Jamie Tolan at the pseudo room, hackerspace to one 41 Broadway in Oakland on Sunday, April 27th at 7:00 PM recently, scientists from the Bicep to experiment recorded their data findings demonstrating [00:24:30] evidence of gravitational waves that may imply cosmic inflation. The bicep to experiment is an international collaboration of research and technology from many institutions including a team at Stanford University work. Jamie Tolan works. Jamie will discuss the results of the bicep two experiment and its scientific contribution to current theories that attempt to explain the why, what and how of our universe. The event will be free. Speaker 1: On April 30th UCLA professor [00:25:00] of geography, Jared diamond will give this year's Horace m Albright Lecture in conversation. Diamond is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, guns, germs and steel and this lecture he will discuss his newest book, the world until yesterday, what we can learn from traditional societies. The book is about how traditional peoples differ from members of modern industrial societies and their reactions to danger. He will then produce B in a question answer session with the audience doors open at 6:00 PM [00:25:30] the event is free and open to the public on a first come first served basis will be held Wednesday, April 30th from seven to 8:30 PM in the International House Auditorium at two two nine nine Piedmont Avenue Berkeley. Speaker 10: The theme of Mays science at the theater is science remix. Joined Berkeley lab scientists at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California on May 1st at 7:00 PM they'll discuss how discovery [00:26:00] happens. Help you show what science means to you and reveal why science can be as personal as you want it to be. Light refreshments will be served, but bring your imagination and participate at this free event. Speaker 1: A feature spectrum is to present new stories about science that we find particularly interesting. Rick Carnesi joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 10: Nature News reported on April 13th that a team of scientists from [00:26:30] Caltech have estimated that Mars's atmosphere was probably never thick enough to keep temperatures on the planet surface above freezing for very long. Edwin kite now at Princeton used from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catalog more than 300 craters and an 84,000 square kilometer area near the planets equator. The sizes of the creators were compared to computer models with varying atmospheres. Dance [00:27:00] or atmospheres would have broken up small objects as they do on earth, but the high frequency of smaller craters on Mars suggest the upper limit of atmospheric pressure on Mars was only one or two bar. This most likely means a temperatures on Mars have typically been below freezing. Did the team notes that their findings do allow the possibility of scenarios of Mars having a slightly thicker atmosphere at times. Do you perhaps to volcanic activity or gas is released by the large impact events and these could have [00:27:30] made Mars warmer for decades or centuries at a time, allowing water to flow. Then Speaker 1: science daily reports one of the first social science experiments to rest on. Big Data has been published in plus one. A chair of investigators from Simon Fraser University analyzed when humans start to experience and age-related decline in cognitive motor skills. The researchers analyze the digital performances of over 3000 starcraft two players, age 16 to 44 starcraft two is a ruthless intergalactic computer [00:28:00] game that players often undertake to win serious money. Their performance records, which can be easily accessed, represent thousands of hours worth of strategic real time. Cognitive based moves performed at various skill levels using complex statistical modeling. Researchers distilled meaning from this colossal compilation of information about how players responded to their opponents and more importantly, how long they took to react after around 24 years of age, players show slowing and a measure of cognitive speed that is known to be important for performance. [00:28:30] Explains Joe Thompson lead author of the study. This cognitive performance decline is present even at higher levels of skill, but there's a silver lining in this earlier than expected slippery slope into old age. Thompson says older players, those slower seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the games interface more efficiently. The younger players enabling them to retain their skill despite cognitive motor speed losses. These findings says Thompson suggests that our cognitive motor capabilities are not stable across our adulthood, but are constantly [00:29:00] in flux and that our day to day performance is a result of the constant interplay between change and adaptation. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 11: and music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview was edited by Rene Rau. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email [00:29:30] address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same tone. [inaudible].
Cathryn Carson & Fernando Perez, Part 1 of 2
30:00|Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum we present part one of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science or bids is only [00:01:00] four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez and they are our guests. Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the ipython project while a graduate student in 2001 [00:01:30] and continues to lead the project here is part one, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us and I wanted to get from both of you a little bit of a short summary about the work you're doing now that you just sort of your activity that predates your interest in data science. Speaker 4: Data Science is kind of an Ale defined term I think and it's still an open question precisely what it is, but in a certain sense all of my research has been probably under the umbrella [00:02:00] of what we call today data science since the start. I did my phd in particle physics but it was computational in particle physics and I was doing data analysis in that case of models that were competitionally created. So I've sort of been doing this really since I was a graduate student. What has changed over time is the breadth of disciplines that are interested in these kinds of problems in these kinds of tools and that have these kinds of questions. In physics. This has been kind of a common way of working on writing for a long time. Sort of the deep intersection [00:02:30] between computational tools and large data sets, whether they were created by models or collected experimentally is something that has a long history in physics. Speaker 4: How long the first computers were created to solve differential equations, to plot the trajectories of ballistic missiles. I was one of the very first tasks that's computers were created for so almost since the dawn of coats and so it's really only recently though that the size of the data sets has really jumped. Yes, the size has grown very, [00:03:00] very large in the last couple of decades, especially in the last decade, but I think it's important to not get too hung up on the issue of size because I think when we talk about data science, I like to define it rather in the context of data that is large for the traditional framework tools and conceptual kind of structure of a given discipline rather than it's raw absolute size because yes, in physics for example, we have some of the largest data sets in existence, things like what the LHC creates [00:03:30] for the Higgs Boson. Those data sets are just absolute, absurdly large, but in a given discipline, five megabytes of data might be a lot depending on what it is that you're trying to ask. And so I think it's more, it's much, much more important to think of data that has grown larger than a given discipline was used in manipulating and that therefore poses interesting challenges for that given domain rather than being completely focused on the raw size of the data. Speaker 1: I approached this from an angle that's actually complimentary to Fernando in part because [00:04:00] my job as the interim director of the social sciences data laboratory is not to do data science but to provide the infrastructure, the setting for researchers across the social sciences here who are doing that for themselves. And exactly in the social sciences you see a nice exemplification of the challenge of larger sizes of data than were previously used and new kinds of data as well. So the social sciences are starting to pick up say on [00:04:30] sensor data that has been placed in environmental settings in order to monitor human behavior. And social scientists can then use that in order to design tests around it or to develop ways of interpreting it to answer research questions that are not necessarily anticipated by the folks who put the sensors in place or accessing data that comes out of human interactions online, which is created for entirely different purposes [00:05:00] but makes it possible for social scientists to understand things about human social networks. Speaker 1: So the challenges of building capacity for disciplines to move into new scales of data sets and new kinds of data sets. So one of the ones that I've been seeing as I've been building up d lab and that we've jointly been seeing as we tried to help scope out what the task of the Berkeley Institute for data science is going to be. How about the emergence [00:05:30] of data science? Do you have a sense of the timeline when you started to take note of its feasibility for social sciences? Irrespective of physics, which has a longer history. One of the places that's been driving the conversations in social sciences, actually the funding regime in that the existing beautifully curated data sets that we have from the post World War Two period survey data, principally administrative data on top of that, [00:06:00] those are extremely expensive to produce and to curate and maintain. Speaker 1: And as the social sciences in the last only five to 10 years have been weighing the portfolio of data sources that are supported by funding agencies. We've been forced to confront the fact that the maintenance of the post World War Two regime of surveying may not be feasible into the future and that we're going to have to be shifting to other kinds of data that are generated [00:06:30] for other purposes and repurposing and reusing it, finding new ways to, to cut it and slice it in order to answer new kinds of questions that weren't also accessible to the old surveys. So one way to approach it is through the infrastructure that's needed to generate the data that we're looking at. Another way is simply to look at the infrastructure on campus. One of the launching impetuses for the social sciences data laboratory was in fact the budget cuts of 2009 [00:07:00] here on campus. When we acknowledged that if we were going to support cutting edge methodologically innovative social science on this campus, that we were going to need to find ways to repurpose existing assets and redirect them towards whatever this new frontier in social science is going to be. Speaker 5: You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez, our guests. [00:07:30] They are part of the Berkeley Institute for data science known as big [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Fernando, you sort of gave us a generalized definition of data science. Do you want to give it another go just in case you evoke something else? Sure. I want to leave that question slightly on answer because I feel that to some extent, one of the challenges we have as an intellectual effort that we're trying to tackle at the Brooklyn [00:08:00] instead for data science is precisely working on what this field is. Right. I don't want to presuppose that we have a final answer on this question, but at least we, we do know that we have some elements to frame the question and I think it's mostly about an intersection. It's about an intersection of things that were being done already on their own, but that were being done often in isolation. So it's the intersection of methodological work whereby that, I mean things like statistical theory, applied mathematics, computer science, [00:08:30] algorithm development, all of the computational and theoretical mathematical machinery that has been done traditionally, the questions arising from domain disciplines that may have models that may have data sets, that may have sensors that may have a telescope or that may have a gene sequencing array and where are they have their own theoretical models of their organisms or galaxies or whatever it is and where that data can be inscribed and the fact that tools need to be built. Speaker 4: Does data doesn't get analyzed by blackboards? Those data gets analyzed by software, but this is software that is deeply woven [00:09:00] into the fabric of these other two spaces, right? It's software that has to be written with the knowledge of the questions and the discipline and the domain and also with the knowledge of the methodology, the theory. It's that intersection of this triad of things of concrete representation in computational machinery, abstract ideas and methodologies and domain questions that in many ways creates something new when the work has to be done simultaneously with enough depth and enough rigor on all [00:09:30] of these three directions and precisely that intersection is where now the bottleneck is proving to be because you can have the ideas, you can have the questions, you can have the data, you can have the the fear m's, but if you can't put it all together into working concrete tools that you can use efficiently and with a reasonably rapid turnaround, you will not be able to move forward. You will not be able to answer the questions you want to answer about your given discipline and so that embodiment of that intersection is I think where the challenge is opposed. Maybe there is something new called [00:10:00] data science. I'd actually like to suggest that Speaker 1: the indefinable character of data science is actually not a negative because it's an intersection in a way that we're all still very much struggling. How to define it. I won't underplay that exactly in that it's an intersection. It points to the fact that it's not an intellectual thing that we're trying to get our heads around. It's a platform for activity for doing kinds of research that are either enabled or hindered by the [00:10:30] existing institutional and social structures that the research is getting done in, and so if you think of it less as a kind of concept or an intellectual construct and more of a space where people come together, either a physical space or a methodological sharing space, you realize that the indefinable ness is a way of inviting people in rather than drawing clear boundaries around it and saying, we know what this is. It is x and not Speaker 4: why [00:11:00] Berkeley Institute for data science is that where it comes in this invitation, this collection of people and the intersection. That's sort of the goal of it. Speaker 1: That's what we've been asked to build it as not as uh, an institute in the traditional sense of there are folks inside and outside, but in the sense of a meeting point and a crossing site for folks across campus. That's [00:11:30] something that's been put in front of us by the two foundations who have invested in a significant sum of money in us. That's the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred p Sloan Foundation. And it's also become an inspiring vision for those of us who have been engaged in the process over the last year and a half of envisioning what it might be. It's an attempt to address the doing of data science as an intersectional area within a research university that has existing structures [00:12:00] and silos and boundaries within it. Speaker 4: And to some extent you try to deconstruct the silos and leverage the work done by one group, share it with another, you know, the concrete mechanisms are things that we're still very much working on it and we will see how it unfolds. There's even a physical element that reflects this idea of being at a crossroads, which is that the university was willing to commit to [inaudible] the physical space of one room in the main doe library, which is not only physically [00:12:30] at the center of the university and that is very important because it does mean that it is quite literally at the crossroads. It is one central point where many of us walk by frequently, so it's a space that is inviting in that sense too to encounters, to stopping by to having easy collaboration rather than being in some far edge corner of the campus. Speaker 4: But also intellectually the library is traditionally the store of the cultural and scientific memory of an institution. And so building this space in the library is a way of signaling [00:13:00] to our community that it is meant to be a point of encounter and how specifically those encounters will be embodied and what concrete mechanisms of sharing tools, sharing coach, showing data, having lecture series, having joint projects. We're in the process of imagining all of that and we're absolutely certain that we'll make some mistakes along the way, but that is very much the intent is to have something which is by design about as openly and as explicitly collaborative as we can make it and I think [00:13:30] in that sense we are picking up on many of the lessons that Catherine and her team at the d lab have already learned because the d lab has been in operation here in Barrows Hall for about a year and has already done many things in that direction and that at least I personally see them as things in the spirit of what bids is attempting to do at the scale of the entire institution. D Lab has been kind of blazing that trail already for the last year in the context of the social sciences and to the point where their impact has actually spread beyond the social sciences because so many of the things that they were doing or were [00:14:00] found to have very thirsty customers for the particular brand of lemonade that they were selling here at the lab. And their impact has already spread beyond the social sciences. But we hope to take a lot of these lessons and build them with a broader scope. Speaker 1: And in the same way BYD sits at the center of other existing organizations, entities, programs on campus, which are also deeply engaged in data science. And some of them are research centers, others of them are the data science masters program in the School of information where [00:14:30] there is a strong and deliberate attempt to think through how in a intelligent way to train people for outside the university doing data science. So all of these centers of excellence on campus have the potential to get networked in, in a much more synergistic way with the existence of bids with is not encompassing by any means. All of the great work that's getting done in teaching research around data science on this campus Speaker 6: [00:15:00] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about challenges in Berkeley Institute for Data Science Phase Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: and it seems that that eScience does happen best in teams and multidisciplinary [00:15:30] teams or is that not really the case? Speaker 1: I think we've been working on that assumption in part because it seems too much to ask of any individual to do all the things at once. At the same time, we do have many specimens of individuals who cross the boundaries of the three areas that Fernando was sketching out as domain area expertise, hacking skills and methodological competence. [00:16:00] And it's interesting to think through the intersectional individuals as well. But that said, the default assumption I think is going to have to be that teamwork collaboration and actually all of the social engineering to make that possible is going to be necessary for data science to flourish. And again, that's one of the challenges of working in a research university setting where teamwork is sometimes prized and sometimes deprecated. Speaker 4: That goes back to the incentive people building tools don't necessarily get much attention, [00:16:30] prestige from that. How do you defeat that on an institutional level within the institute or just the community? Ask us in five years if we had any success. That's one of the central challenges that we have and it's not only here at Berkeley, this is actually, there's kind of an ongoing worldwide conversation happening about this every few days. There's another article where this issue keeps being brought up again and again and it's raising in volume. The business of creating tools is becoming actually an increasing [00:17:00] part of the job of people doing science. And so for example, even young faculty who are on the tenure track are finding themselves kind of pushed against the wall because they're finding themselves writing a lot of tools and building a lot of software and having to do it collaboratively and having to engage others and picking up all of these skills and this being an important central part of their work. Speaker 4: But they feel that if their tenure committee is only going to look at their publication record and [00:17:30] 80% of their actual time went into building these things, they are effectively being shortchanged for their effort. And this is a difficult conversation. What are we going to do about it? We have a bunch of ideas. We are going to try many things. I think it's a conversation that has to happen at many levels. Some agencies are beginning, the NSF recently changed the terms of its biosketch requirements for example. And now the section that used to be called relevant publications is called relevant publications and other research outcomes. And in parentheses they explained such as software [00:18:00] projects, et cetera. So this is beginning to change the community that cure rates. For example, large data sets. That's a community that has very similar concerns. It turns out that working on a rich and complex data set may be a Labor that requires years of intensive work and that'd be maybe for a full time endeavor for someone. Speaker 4: And yet those people may end up actually getting little credit for it because maybe they weren't the ones who did use that data set to answer a specific question. But if they're left in the dust, no one will do that job. Right. And so [00:18:30] we need to acknowledge that these tasks are actually becoming a central part of the intellectual effort of research. And maybe one point that is worth mentioning in this context of incentives and careers is that we as the institution of academic science in a broad sense, are facing the challenge today that these career paths and these kinds of intersectional problems and data science are right now extremely highly valued by industry. [00:19:00] What we're seeing today with this problem is genuinely of a different scale and different enough to merit attention and consideration in its own right. Because what's happening is the people who have this intersection of skills and talents and competencies are extraordinarily well regarded by the industry right now, especially here in the bay area. Speaker 4: I know the companies that are trying to hire and I know that people were going there and the good ones can effectively name their price if they can name their price to go into contexts that are not [00:19:30] boring. A lot of the problems that industry has right now with data are actually genuinely interesting problems and they often have datasets that we in academia actually have no access to because it turns out that these days the amount of data that is being generated by web activity, by Apps, by personal devices that create an upload data is actually spectacular. And some of those data sets are really rich and complex and material for interesting work. And Industry also has the resources, the computational resources, the backend, the engineering expertise [00:20:00] to do interesting work on those problems. And so we as an academic institution are facing the challenge that we are making it very difficult for these people to find a space at the university. Yet they are critical to the success of modern data driven research and discovery and yet across the street they are being courted by an industry that isn't just offering them money to do boring work. It's actually offering them respect, yes, compensation, but also respect and intellectual space and a community that values their work and that's something [00:20:30] that is genuinely an issue for us to consider. Speaker 4: Is there a way to cross pollinate between the academic side and industry and work together on building a toolkit? Absolutely. We've had great success in that regard in the last decade with the space that I'm most embedded in, which is the space of open source scientific computing tools in python. We have a licensing model for most of the tools in our space that [00:21:00] is open source but allows for a very easy industry we use and what we find is that that has enabled a very healthy two way dialogue between industry and academia in this context. Yes, industry users, our tools, and they often use them in a proprietary context, but they use them for their own problems and for building their own domain specific products and whatever, but when they want to contribute to the base tool, the base layer if you will, it's much [00:21:30] easier for them. Speaker 4: They simply make the improvements out in the open or they just donate resources. They donate money. Microsoft research last year made $100,000 donation to the python project, which was strictly a donation. This was not a grant to develop any specific feature. This was a blanket, hey, we use your tools and they help what we build and so we would like to support you and we've had a very productive relationship with them in the past, but it's by, not by no means the only one you're at Berkeley. The amp lab was two co-directors are actually part of the team [00:22:00] that is working on bids, a young story and Mike Franklin, the AMPLab has a very large set of tools for data analytics at scale that is now widely used at Twitter and Facebook and many other places. They have industry oriented conferences around their tools. Now they have an annual conference they run twice per year. Large bootcamps, large fractions of their attendees come from industry because industry is using all of these tools and the am Platt has currently more of its funding [00:22:30] comes from industry than it comes from sources like the NSF. And so I think there are, there are actually very, very clear and unambiguous examples of models where the open source work that is coming out of our research universities can have a highly productive and valuable dialogue with the industry. Speaker 3: It seems like long term he would have a real uphill battle to create enough competent people with data trained to [00:23:00] quench both industry and academia so that there would be a, a calming of the flow out of academia. Speaker 4: As we've said a couple of times in our discussions, this is a problem. Uh, it's a very, very challenging set of problems that we've signed up for it, but we feel that it's a problem worth failing on in the sense that we, we know the challenges is, is a steep one. But at the same time, the questions are important enough to be worth making the effort. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:23:30] don't miss part two of this interview in two weeks and on the next edition of spectrum spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for the link is tiny url.com/kalx specter. Now, if you're the science and technology events happen, Speaker 3: I mean locally over the next two weeks, [00:24:00] enabling a sustainable energy infrastructure is the title of David Color's presentation. On Wednesday, April 9th David Color is the faculty director of [inaudible] for Energy and the chair of computer science at UC Berkeley. He was selected in scientific American top 50 researchers and technology review 10 technologies that will change the world. His research addresses networks of small embedded wireless devices, planetary scale Internet services, parallel computer architecture, [00:24:30] parallel programming languages, and high-performance communications. This event is free and will be held in Satara Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium. Wednesday, April 9th at noon. Cal Day is April 12th 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM 357 events for details. Go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu a lunar eclipse Monday April 14th at 11:00 PM [00:25:00] look through astronomical telescopes at the Lawrence Hall of science to observe the first total lunar eclipse for the bay area since 2011 this is for the night owls among us UC students, staff and faculty are admitted. Speaker 3: Free. General admissions is $10 drought and deluge how applied hydro informatics are becoming standard operating data for all Californians is the title of Joshua Vere's presentation. On Wednesday, [00:25:30] April 16th Joshua veers joined the citrus leadership as the director at UC Merced said in August, 2013 prior to this, Dr Veers has been serving in a research capacity at UC Davis for 10 years since receiving his phd in ecology. This event is free and will be held in Soutar Dye Hall and Beneteau Auditorium Wednesday, April 16th at noon. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting here are to. [00:26:00] This story relates to today's interview on big data. On Tuesday, April 1st a workshop titled Big Data Values and governance was held at UC Berkeley. The workshop was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for law and technology. The day long workshop examined policy and governance questions raised by the use of large and complex data sets and sophisticated analytics to [00:26:30] fuel decision making across all sectors of the economy, academia and government for panels. Speaker 3: Each an hour and a half long framed the issues of values and governance. A webcast. This workshop will be available from the ice school webpage by today or early next week. That's ice school.berkeley.edu vast gene expression map yields neurological and environmental stress insights. Dan Kraits [00:27:00] writing for the Lawrence Berkeley Lab News Center reports a consortium of scientists led by Susan Cell Knicker of Berkeley's labs. Life Sciences Division has conducted the largest survey yet of how information and code it in an animal genome is processed in different organs, stages of development and environmental conditions. Their findings paint a new picture of how genes function in the nervous system and in response to environmental stress. The scientists [00:27:30] studied the fruit fly, an important model organism in genetics research in all organisms. The information encoded in genomes is transcribed into RNA molecules that are either translated into proteins or utilized to perform functions in the cell. The collection of RNA molecules expressed in a cell is known as its transcriptome, which can be thought of as the readout of the genome. Speaker 3: While the genome is essentially [00:28:00] the same in every cell in our bodies, the transcriptome is different in each cell type and consistently changing cells in cardiac tissue are radically different from those in the gut or the brain. For example, Ben Brown of Berkeley Labs said, our study indicates that the total information output of an animal transcriptome is heavily weighted by the needs of the developing nervous system. The scientists also discovered a much broader [00:28:30] response to stress than previously recognized exposure to heavy metals like cadmium resulted in the activation of known stress response pathways that prevent damage to DNA and proteins. It also revealed several new genes of completely unknown function. Speaker 7: You can [inaudible]. Hmm. Speaker 3: The music or during the show [00:29:00] was [inaudible] Speaker 5: produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview with [inaudible] Rao about the show. Please send them to us spectrum [00:29:30] dot kalx@yahoo.com same time. [inaudible].
Steve Blank, Part 2 of 2
30:00|Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a [00:00:30] biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of two interviews with Steve Blank. I lecture at the High School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s in the early two thousands he retired from the day to day involvement [00:01:00] of running a company. He has been teaching entrepreneurship training ever since. By 2011 he was said to have devised a scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the lean launchpad. The National Science Foundation caught wind of this and asked Steve to build a variation for teaching scientists and engineers how to launch startups. In 2013 Steve partnered with UCLA and the NSF to offer the lean launch pad class for life science and healthcare. In part two, Steve Talks about getting [00:01:30] the NSF lean launch pad classes going, the evolution of startup companies and innovation, and now Brad swift continued his interview with Steve Blank. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: In your experience with these scientists and teaching them, are these people self selected? They're the ones who are anxious and eager and there are other scientists maybe back in the lab are reluctant afraid of the process. Speaker 4: So just the personality of it. Yeah, so this goes back to the comment I made earlier about entrepreneurs being artists. It was the implicit comment [00:02:00] I just kind of both through in the beginning, but as important is that you can't assign entrepreneurship as a job, right? If you really think about them, you can't split up a room and say, those of you on the left, you're going to be musicians. And those are you on the right, you're working on the assembly line like, Oh yeah, WTI. I mean, it doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. All right. Entrepreneurship is a calling. Just like art, just like music, just like writing is something you have to passionately want to do, but much like art, we've learned something [00:02:30] a couple hundred years ago that very early on in people's lives in elementary school and junior high school in high school, we want to have our depreciation. Speaker 4: They're not intensive classes, but their exposure to art that people might not know their artists. They might not know they have a passion to paint or to sculpt or to write or to entertain. I will contend because entrepreneurship is an art. We actually need those type of classes early on because scientists didn't understand [00:03:00] that not was their passion to invent and create. They might actually have an equal passion to wait a minute, I actually want to take this thing all the way through when I want to see what happens. If hundreds of thousands of people were being affected by this medicine, not just, here's my paper in the latest publication. It doesn't mean everybody could do that, but it means we've not yet gotten the culture to where we could say, well is this something that kind of excites you? And I think we're getting better to understand what it takes to do that. Speaker 4: Would you have any [00:03:30] idea what that would look like? The kind of exposure that you would be talking about in grammar school or Middle School? Sure. It turns out one of the unintended consequences of teaching the scientists that National Science Foundation is, remember their professors, almost all of them tenured running labs and universities across the country. And so here they take this class from the national science foundation and about half or two thirds of them now go back to their own universities, pissed cause they go, how come we're not teaching this? And so what happens is the National Science Foundation asked [00:04:00] me and Jerry Angle, who was the head of entrepreneurship at Haas, why don't you guys put on a course through a nonprofit called NCIA to teach educators in the United States who want to learn how to teach this class. And so we teach the lean launchpad for educators. We teach now 300 educators a year. Speaker 4: One of the outgrowths of that class was entrepreneur educators from middle school and high school started showing up and I went, you're not really teaching this to kids. They went, [00:04:30] oh Steve, you should see our class. And I went, oh my gosh, this is better than I'm doing. So they'd taken the same theory and they modified the language. So it was age appropriate. And so the two schools that had some great programs were Hawkin school outside of Cleveland and Dunn's school here in California. And in fact they're going to hold their own version of the educator class in June of 2014 for middle school and high school educators who were interested in teaching this type of entrepreneurial education. So I think it's starting to be transformative. I think we [00:05:00] have found the process to engage people early and not treated like we're teaching accounting to do, treating it like we're teaching art. Speaker 4: And again, we're still experiment thing. I wish I could tell you we got it now. I don't think so. I think we're learning, but the speed at which we're learning through it makes me smile. That's great. It is great. The Passion of the educators really is exciting. And Are you able to teach us remotely so that scientists from around the country don't have to come to you and sort of stop what they're doing? I was teaching the class [00:05:30] remotely. It's now taught in person in multiple regions. So that's how we solved that problem. But my lectures were recorded and not only were they recorded, they were recorded with really interesting animation. So instead of just watching me was a talking head. These are broken up into two minute clips and it's basically how to start a company and it's on you udacity.com so if you want to see the lean launch pad class in the lectures, it's on your udacity.com it's called the p two 45 but by accident we made these lectures public to not only the [00:06:00] national science foundation scientists, but we opened it up to everybody. Speaker 4: And surprisingly there is now over a quarter million people have taken the class. I've had people stop me at conferences and have told me that the Arabic translation, which I didn't even know existed, it's the standard in the Middle East. I had people from Dubai and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon literally within 10 feet go, oh well we recognize you. And I went, who are you turning over, Mr Blank, you worthy? I went, what's going on? I laugh not because it's me, but because [00:06:30] this is the power of the democratization of entrepreneurship. I have to tell you a funny story is that I grew up with the entrepreneur cluster was silicon valley and something in the last five years that I've gotten to travel with both Berkeley and Stanford and National Science Foundation to different countries to talk and teach about entrepreneurship. And my wife and I happened to be on vacation in Prague and when I really knew the world had changed as my wife had said, you know Steve, we're kind of tired of eating hotel food. Speaker 4: I wonder if there were ending entrepreneurs and Proc, I didn't want to, I [00:07:00] don't know. You know, let me go tweet and any entrepreneurs and Prague, you know, looking for a good check. Brie hall and hour and a half later we're having dinner with 55 entrepreneurs and Prague television is there and they said, Steve, you don't understand. Here's why. Here's an entrepreneur community everywhere. The only thing we still have unique in the bay area is that entrepreneurship and innovation. We've become a company town. That is our product. Much like Hollywood used to be movies in Detroit used to be cars in Pittsburgh steel. [00:07:30] While obviously there are people who do other stuff, teach in restaurants, put the business. The business to the bay area really is entrepreneurship and innovation. While we tell stories about the entrepreneurs, the unheralded part of that ecosystem is that we have equally insane financial people. Speaker 4: Why Silicon Valley happened was that the venture capitalist in the 1970s in Boston when it wasn't clear whether it was going to be Boston or Silicon Valley to be the center of entrepreneurship, the venture capitalist in Boston continued to act [00:08:00] like bankers, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. They decided to act like pirates and the pirates want and so what really differentiates the observational make with an entrepreneurship is everywhere in the world. Entrepreneurial clusters only happen when all these things, these components, primarily entrepreneurs, but a heavy dose of risk capital capable of writing not only small checks but large checks and doubling and tripling down on startups. That's why you have the Facebooks and the googles and the twitters [00:08:30] around here. You also have a culture let's people know and understand. In the 1950s and sixties people came to San Francisco and Berkeley to live an alternate personal lifestyle, but they were hitting 30 miles south to have an alternate business lifestyle around Stanford and it was this kind of magic combination of great weather, the ability to do things in both business and your personal life that you couldn't anywhere else. These cultural phenomenons actually were and under appreciated until a very smart professor at Berkeley [inaudible] [00:09:00] wrote a book called regional advantage that actually described a lot of these things and open my eyes about why this region actually won. Speaker 1: You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He's a former entrepreneur and current lecturer at the High School of business. And the next segment he talks about how startups has changed since he first began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s Speaker 4: is entrepreneurship then changed as a result [00:09:30] of that. What really happened was the harmonic conversion of a really interesting set of events. One is, is that if you think back on how startups worked in the, in the golden age of Silicon Valley in the seventies and eighties to build a startup required millions if not tens of millions of dollars, not to run it, but just to start it, you needed to buy computers, either mainframes or mini computers and then workstations. You needed to license millions of dollars of expensive software. The only venture people were either in [00:10:00] Boston or silicon valley and they lived on sand hill road and nowhere else, and therefore it was kind of a formal process and the cost of entry was literally millions or tens of millions of dollars. There was no other way to get computing. There was no other way to get money. The second is, we had no theory about startups. Speaker 4: That is, there were no management tools at all. But what happened starting out of the rubble actually of the last Internet bubble, things change in technology in a way. I don't think people outside the technology business appreciate it off. Probably the biggest [00:10:30] one was actually generated by Amazon. It turns out Amazon created something called Amazon web services. And if you're a consumer, all you know is Amazon maybe for kindle and for sure for their books or their website. But if you're a programmer, Amazon has become the computing utility. You no longer have to buy computers from your laptop. You literally log in to hundreds of millions of dollars of computers and you have access to the world's largest computing resource ever assembled [00:11:00] for pennies, for pennies, and you don't need any storage. You're storing it all and online and all the computing. So number one, Amazon web services truly turned computing hardware and software into a pennies per gigabyte and MIPS, et Cetera, in a way that was unbelievable 10 years earlier. Speaker 4: Two is that changed the cost of entry of an early stage venture. You no longer needed millions of dollars. In fact, if you were smart entrepreneur, you could start on your credit card and if you didn't have your credit card, maybe some friends and family, [00:11:30] and that started a very different wave because it changed venture capital. It used to be there were either doctors or dentists or other reform of venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and Mayfield and sequoia. But the fact is that now after a ton of entrepreneurs could start on their credit cards, they still didn't need $20 million. Maybe eventually they did, but they could just take $100,000 or half a million dollars and get pretty far. And that created a new class of super angels or angel investors [00:12:00] that just never existed before. Kind of this intermediate level. And so venture capital changed. And also with that change, it changed where they could be located. Speaker 4: You no longer had to be located to be a investor in New York, Boston, or San Diego. Th that amount of capital could be available in the London or Helsinki or Estonia or Jordan, Beijing. Third is, and I will take credit for some of this, the invention of a new way to look and how to build these startups. It used to be that if you were building [00:12:30] a physical product, you would do something called the functional Spec or you'd get requirements from a customer. You build a specification and then you'd make an early version of the product called Alpha test, maybe a less buggy version called Beta test, which foist on some poor unsuspecting customers and then you'd have a party at something called first customer ship and that process was called waterfall development and from beginning to end typically took years and insight in the software business and Toyota had it even [00:13:00] earlier is that we could build products differently, we could build products incrementally and iteratively and that's called agile engineering and for startups, how you want to build your products is agily and iteratively because almost always what you believe on day one are all the customer features that they need. Speaker 4: It's a pretty safe bet. You're not a visionary, you're actually hallucinating and that most of the features you would historically have built in go unused on needed and unwanted. But if [00:13:30] in fact you could actually test intermediate versions of the product iteratively and rapidly on those customers with a formal process which I invented called customer development, those two hand in hand change the speed and trajectory of how startups get built. And so now you see these startups coming out of nowhere and getting acquired in three years, but they have tens of millions of customer. Where did that come from? Well, in the old days we'd still be writing the software, building the hardware. Speaker 6: Aw, it's [00:14:00] a public affairs show, k, a l X. Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Link a lecture at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. The next segment, Steve Talks about his current work, trying to understand how innovation drives some companies and fails in others. Speaker 4: If I can, the unintended consequence of all this stuff. Remember this whole lean startup stuff has become a movement by itself. Harvard business review contacts me and says, Steve, [00:14:30] every large corporation is now desperately struggling how to deal with continuous disruption in the 21st century. That is all the rules that worked in the 20th century, you know, be number one in market share, you know, like be number one and two, I mean all the Jack Welsh rules, you follow those who be out of business in seven years. Why, you know, globalization in China Inc Internet has made consumers flighty very little brand loyalty. Pricing is almost transparent. Cost of starting a new business is infinitely lower. All of the things [00:15:00] that made you strong in the 20th century as a corporation are no longer true. Some of them are obviously, but not really. And so every large corporation are trying to relearn a set of rules and guess where they're looking for, they're looking at startups of how do we be as innovative as apple as that. Speaker 4: That is, the models are now silicon valley and other technology companies. And so my article, the lean startup changes everything became the cover of the Harvard Business Review and May, 2013 what was interesting is that I started [00:15:30] getting calls from executives whose titles I had never heard of before. It turns out almost every large company is now appointing a VP of corporate innovation. I had never heard of it. You know what's that? And when you go talk to them, and I've talked to a bunch of them, now you find out that they're all struggling to solve this continuous disruption problem by trying to build innovation inside the DNA of large corporations in the u s and overseas and the first sign of companies [00:16:00] trying to do that is appointing somebody typically as a corporate staff person to have some kind of internal incubator. I could politely say, that's a nice first step put it really doesn't solve the problem. Speaker 4: It actually just points out what the problem is and can I digress for another 10 seconds? It turns out that the problem that corporations are having is not a tactical organizational problem. The things I described, the globalization, the effect of the [00:16:30] Internet, et Cetera, are just strategic problems that every corporation is facing. The last time companies faced something, this major was in the 1920s, uh, u s corporations grew from small mom and pop businesses from the 1870s to 1920s and they kind of came up with a form of organization called functional organizations, meaning you had a head of sales, a head of marketing, a head of manufacturing, but by function that was the only way companies were organized. But by 1920, some [00:17:00] u s corporations spans from New York to San Francisco. And so there was a geography problem here. You had a head of sales tryna run multiple geography. Speaker 4: It wasn't even the same time zone. And some companies like dupont had a different problem while they also had geography problems. Dupont made everything from explosives to paint. But you only had one marketing group and one manufacture. How do, how do you manage that? And for about five or six years for corporations, dupont, General Motors, Sears and standard oil, understood. They had a strategy [00:17:30] problem and attacked it by playing with the structure of the company, meaning how the company was organized and they all finally decided that they were going to organize in a radically different form called divisions. Instead of just having functions, they would actually break up like for example, General Motors into the Buick Division and ultimate build division or whatever, or for dupont explosives divisions and the paint division and on top of a thin layer of corporate staff, but now have a company organized by divisions first changed in [00:18:00] 50 years and how companies were organized. Speaker 4: Fast forward 40 years later, the third form of corporate organization to emerged called Matrix organizations where you start with a functional organization, but now all of a sudden we would have specific projects pop up, gee, I want to work on the new fad six fighter. Well, I have an engineering group, but let me put together a team that could pull out of engineering and pull out a product management and put together for our temporary amount of time and then they'll go back into their functions and then be pulled out again. But that's it. Those are the only three forms [00:18:30] of corporate organization. I'll contend that we're facing a common strategy problem that is not solvable by just pasting on vps of innovation. I believe it's solvable by rethinking on the highest possible level is do we need a fourth form of corporate organization? And I gotta tell you I got the answer, but I'm not going to tell you now. Okay.Speaker 5: Is this sort of then turning all the operations research that's been done over the past? You know, since World War II, [00:19:00] that was when it seemed to be salient. Is it on its ear now? Is this, Speaker 4: so if you really think about what we built for the last 150 years is corporations were the epitome of operational efficiency through operations research, the output of business schools. I mean all our stuff has had to be continuous execution, driving to the lowest cost provider and outsourcing and all that stuff. That's great. But you're going out of business and in fact, companies that do that, [00:19:30] I will contend have a much shorter lifespan that companies that now do continuous innovation. That is, if you think about the difference between Amazon and Netflix and apple, when jobs was alive versus standard US companies, the distinction was they were continuously innovating, ruined Leslie, innovating, and it was not some department that was innovating. It's a big idea. It was the entire company was innovating, yet they were making obscene profits. So clearly there are some models of some companies who [00:20:00] have figured out and in fact HP in the 70s and eighties had figured out how to do and then they lost the formula. I think we now actually have a theory, a strategy of how to do that and some really specific tactics. How, I know we could do this in detail for u s corporations and corporations worldwide, but I want to start at the u s and we're going to be talking and writing about that in the next year. Speaker 5: Great. So that's what you're actively working. Speaker 4: Oh, actively working. And I'm Hank Chesboro who have inventor of open innovation here at Haas business school and with Alexander Osterwalder [00:20:30] and venture of the business model canvas. All have been part of some of these discussions. You know, I just get smarter by hanging out with much smarter people. And I'm not the only one who's thinking about that. There are lots of very smart people trying to crack the code and at the same time, companies are raising their hand and the symptom of raising their hand is they're appointing vps of innovation and her likes saying, yeah, you know, here's what we are. Oops, it doesn't quite work. And finance has different rules and but wait a minute, I'm trying to be innovative, but the HR manual doesn't allow me to hire people. No, [00:21:00] no. Legal says I can't use our brand here. So what you're really finding is that it's not an org problem. Speaker 4: It's not anybody's trying to be mean. Is that what we're missing is the CEO and board conversation is, oh my gosh, maybe we need to get innovation in every part of the company, not by exception. That's the idea I'll telegraph for now. And how do you do that without affecting current profits? And it's quite possible because again, there are these experiments of companies that are insanely from a profitable, who've done this. [00:21:30] Now can we just make a teachable and doable by other corporations? And the answer is yes, we're going to go do that. Do you see that pace of technology accelerating? Absolutely. I think we're in the golden age of both technology and entrepreneurship. You ain't seen anything yet. I'm still constantly amazed sitting here smiling. When you say that is why I still love to teach is that, you know, I get to see my students come up with things. Speaker 4: You hear the 400th hotel automation package or the whatever, but you know, and then you see something, again, drones are three d printing [00:22:00] or you could do white with your phone, you're gonna make a turn on or you're a password through. It's just things that are unimaginable. And then you watch the next generation of Steve Jobs that said, you know, the current version silicon valley is you go on much. Who single handedly is val to obsolete the automobile industry? And at the same time just wrecking havoc in this space launch industry, single individual who had, by the way, zero qualifications to do any of those. Congratulations. Welcome to entrepreneurship. He had the will to be disruptive [00:22:30] and he understood that the technology was about at the edge of being able to do what he did. That's how we got the iPod and the iPhone or else in a perfect world and Nokia would still have 89% market share. If I was General Motors and Ford, I'd be really concerned. Steve Blank, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. Thanks for having me. Speaker 6: You'd like more insight into Steve Blank's ideas. Go to his website, Steve blank.com [00:23:00] as Steve mentioned, the Lean launch pad course is available. I knew udacity.com to learn more about the NSF mean launchpad curriculum, search for NSF [inaudible] your local to the bay area. Go to [inaudible] dot com if you're interested in startup appreciation materials for educators, go to n c I n aa.org/l l p. Stretching shows [00:23:30] are archived on iTunes yet it gives created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum and now a few some technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for the calendar. Speaker 3: California's coastal waters are home to one of the four richest temperate marine biota is in the world. The California Academy of Sciences will be holding [00:24:00] a series of lectures and events to explore this incredible diversity of life. They look, explain what makes this region so productive and why it needs to be protected on Saturday, March 22nd from nine to 11:00 AM a variety of Speakers will consider the impacts of human activity on the local marine ecosystems and the establishment and efficacy of marine protected areas. They will also discuss how diversity is monitored in California's oceans and which areas will need to be most closely scrutinized for future impact. For more information on the [00:24:30] March 22nd event. Please visit cal academy.org Speaker 5: on Monday, March 31st University of Maryland professor of human development, Nathan Fox will give a lecture on his recent studies on whether experiences shaped the brain and neural circuitry for emerging cognitive and social behaviors over the first years of life. Something that many developmental scientists take for granted. Foxes study the Bucharest early intervention project [00:25:00] is the first randomized trial of a family intervention for children who experienced significant psychosocial neglect early in their lives. A group of infants living in institutions in Romania were recruited and randomized to be taken out of the institution and placed into family foster care homes or to remain in the institution. He then followed up with the children several times over the next eight years and examine the lasting [00:25:30] effects of the deprivation and which, if any interventions were successful in assuaging the harmful effects, the free public talk will be held on March 31st from 12 to 1:30 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in room 31 50 of Tolman hall Speaker 3: on Wednesday per second. You see Berkeley's department of Environmental Science Policy and management will present a speech by Chris Mooney, a journalist who's written several books on the resistance that many [00:26:00] Americans have to accepting scientific conclusions. His lecture will be titled The Science of why we don't believe in science and we'll examine the reasons behind Americans disinterest in scientific solutions to the world's problems. The free public lecture will be held on Wednesday, April 2nd at 7:00 PM in the International House Auditorium of UC Berkeley. Here at spectrum, we like to present new stories we find particularly interesting. Brad Swift joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley Professor, Dr. Richard Kramer [00:26:30] and his research team have been able to temporarily restore light sensitivity to mice, missing a majority of their rods and cones in healthy mammals. The eyes detect light with specialized photo receptor cells or rods and cones and then transmit a signal to their optic nerve cells which eventually communicate with the brain. Dr. Kramer and his team explored the effects of a similarly light-sensitive molecule known as d n a Q in healthy mice and mice [00:27:00] with a degenerative disease that caused them to lose nearly all their rods and cones. After dosing, the mice with d n a Q, the mice were exposed to lights and their optic nerve activity was measured via electrode arrays. The diseased mice showed strong light sensitivity. The team next examined a small number of animals in light and dark conditions to test whether the sensitivity conferred any perception of the light. In the diseased mice, [00:27:30] the injected mice were better able to form an association between a light stimuli and electric shock than those in the control group. While millions of humans suffer from similar degenerative retinal conditions, definitive conclusions on the broader therapeutic and deleterious effects of the molecule. D n a Q are still years away. Speaker 3: In a recent study published in the journal bio materials, UC Berkeley researchers were able to eliminate the transmission rep [00:28:00] of a common infection. Staphylococcus Aureus is a bacterium that commonly infects patients who've had surgeries involving prosthetic joints and artificial heart, bowels, staff, or aces. Ability to adhere to medical advices is key to experience as once introduced to the body. It can cause severe illness. UC Berkeley Bio and mechanical engineering, Professor Mohammad [inaudible] fraud and others in his lab examined how the clusters of staff warriors were able to adhere so well to certain Yana surfaces as well as the type of surfaces [00:28:30] that increased or decreased the bacteria's ability to clean. They quickly found that while staff [inaudible] can adhere to a variety of flattened curves services, it does seem to have a preference for certain structures including a tubular pillar where the bacteria was able to partially embed itself within holes in the structure. Professor, my fraud expressed hope that the improved understanding of these preferences could allow the design of medical devices built to attenuate bacterial adhesion while escaping the need to chemically damaged the bacteria to prevent transmission Speaker 7: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum to a k a l ex@yahoo.com Trina's in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:29:30] [inaudible].
Steve Blank, Part 1 of 2
30:00|Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].