Season 2 – Episode 10: Inspiring Creativity through Night Science

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Episode Guests

Dr. Martin Lercher

Martin Lercher is Professor of Computational Cell Biology at the Institute of Computer Science and the Department of Biology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. After studying physics, he did a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge University (UK). He learned evolutionary biology and computational genomics during his postdoc with Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath (UK). His lab pioneers advanced computational methods to model single cells and plants, aiming to understand their physiology based on optimized biomass production under physical and chemical constraints. He co-wrote the popular science book “The Society of Genes” with Itai Yanai. Together, the two have explored the creative side of the scientific process in editorials, workshops, and the popular Night Science podcast. 
 

 

Dr. Itai Yanai

Itai Yanai is a Professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He received his undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering and the Philosophy of Science and his PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University. His lab is a pioneer of the single-cell RNA-Seq approach and its application to the functional study of development, host-pathogen interactions, and cancer cell states. The Yanai lab has used computational and experimental approaches to make contributions to diverse fields including the evolution of developmental gene expression programs, cellular plasticity and developmental constraint in tumor progression and drug resistance, and bacterial genome regulation. Yanai is also committed to communicating science to a popular audience. He recently co-authored a popular science book, entitled “The Society of Genes”, along with Dr. Martin Lercher from Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf. With Dr. Lercher, he is currently publishing editorials, podcasting, and leading workshops on the topic of ‘Night Science’, the scientific creative process.

Show Notes

Dr. Martin Lercher 
Dr. Itai Yanai  
Night Science Workshops 
"It takes two to think" editorial in Nature Biotechnology 
Night Science Episode with Daniel Kahneman  
Night Science Episode with Albert-László Barabási 
The Society of Genes (book) 

 Ad: NanCI - Connecting Scientists mobile app 

  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins 

Your Turn Recommendations

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman 
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron 
Night Science Podcasts 

Transcript

Oliver Bogler
Hello and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute where we explore all the different ways people fight cancer and hear their stories. I'm your host, Oliver Bogler from NCI Center for Cancer Training. Today, we're talking about scientific creativity, an often overlooked but vital element in a successful research career and how you can take practical steps to nurture it, evoke it and connect with others around it. I'm going to admit I'm really excited about today's conversation.
Listen through to the end of the show to hear our guests make some interesting recommendations and where we invite you to Take Your Turrn. 
So it's my pleasure to welcome two very special guests, Dr. Itai Yanai, professor at the Institute for Systems Genetics and in Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Welcome, Itai.

Itai Yanai
Thank you, Oliver. It's fantastic to be here.

Oliver Bogler
And Dr. Martin Lercher, professor and head of the Institute of Computational Cell Biology at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. Welcome, Martin.

Martin Lercher
Well, thanks. Thank you so much for inviting us.

Oliver Bogler
So it seems obvious that scientists need to be creative, of course, as well as rigorous and thorough, ethical and informed and probably many other things. But we rarely ever talk about creativity, let alone teach it to early career scientists. Why is that? And what are you doing to change that?

Martin Lercher
Well, we think it's a disaster that it is like that. And we want to make our contribution to change that. Why that is? I think it's partly historical that, you know, it seemed more important to distinguish science from non-science, from philosophy, for example, which is great at generating ideas, but not good at throwing out wrong ideas. So historically, scientists training has focused on what we call the day science part, on the testing of ideas, and not so much on the generation of ideas. So I think that's at least part of the explanation. Itai, what do yobu think?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, well, it may also be that it's more straightforward to teach the day science. We can have a kind of control over the day science part because what is day science? Day science is you have a hypothesis and you're going to test it. You're going to design an experiment. You're going to build in controls. You really are calling the shots in day science and it's harder relatively to sort of wrap our minds around the notion that we cannot control the creative process like that.

Oliver Bogler
So you've both used the term day science that may be new to our audience. What is day science and is there a night science?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, these are terms that were coined by the biologist Francois Jacob, who together with Lwoff and Monod shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for elucidating essentially the principles of gene regulation for the first time. And so this Nobel Prize winning biologist, when he writes his memoir called The Statue Within, he could have taken a victory lap.

He could have said, I'm such a genius. Look at this amazing work that I did. I'm just brilliant. And of course, a brilliant mind will do brilliant things. Instead, what he does in that book is paint a picture of the reality of doing science, where you're in constant confusion. You're in the cloud, as another biologist, Uri Alon, likes to say. And so he distinguishes in this book two modes: day science and night science. Day science is what from the outside, we traditionally call science, which is this march of rationality, this controlled experiments that we talked about before. And so day science is when you put on your lab coat and you know what you're going to do, but night science, that's that part where you're confused. That's that part where you need to be creative. And Martin, don't we think that there's something about this dichotomy. Doesn't it just like cut to the core of what it means to be doing the process of science?

Martin Lercher
Yeah, when we teach workshops about the creative process in science, I think that's the most important message that we give people, that there is this dichotomy, that there are these two complementary processes in science. When we think about how science works, we always think about what we call day science, right? The hero of day science is Sir Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who said, you know, we cannot prove that something's true, but we can falsify something. So that's what we need to do as scientists. 
But in reality, there's this flip side that we hardly ever talk about. And we have to constantly switch between those two modes of doing science, between day science where we test ideas, and then we have to transition into night science where we have to think about, you know, is this really how it works? Is there maybe something else that I'm missing? Is there a question that I'm not asking that I should be asking? And then once I found that question, I can move back into day science and test that. So just understanding that there are these two sides is already a big step towards using your own creativity.

Oliver Bogler
So of course, scientists are trained exhaustively in day science, right? I heard you mention Martin that you have a workshop that you teach, you and Itai teach on night science. So what are the skills that you're teaching attendees of those courses?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, we like to say that what creativity is, is essentially a bag of tricks. And we scientists, we pick up the tricks over the years. What Martin and I have been thinking about is whether we can do that in a more straightforward, streamlined way that reduces needless suffering, because the tricks that we pick up along the way are tried and true. They've been tested and they are very teachable. We can all become more creative. And so what the workshop is essentially is a set of sessions where every session we discuss a specific thinking tool that we impart. And these are general tools. It's not to solve a specific problem that a participant comes with, although we do practice on those, but these are general tools that can help you solve any problem really.

Oliver Bogler
Can you give me some examples?

Martin Lercher
Oh well, the simplest and we believe most powerful example seems almost trivial. It's just to talk to someone. We wrote an editorial about that with the title, It Takes Two to Think. And we think that if you're very lucky, you have a science buddy. You have somebody who you know very well, somebody you like, a friend, with who you like to talk about science. 
And the crucial thing is, it's not just about talking, it's about how you talk. And there we borrow this idea from improvisational theater. In improvisational theater, actors get on a stage, they don't have a script. And that's the same when we try to figure out something, when we try to figure out what could be the answer to some problem that we have, what could be the question that we really want to ask.
We don't have a script. And if we say an idea, right? If I say an idea and Itai says, no, that's nonsense, right? Then that kills that idea. 

Itai Yanai
That's it, the conversation's over.

Martin Lercher
And maybe that idea really was stupid, but I think it would kill it prematurely. We first have to figure out together what's in there, right? Whether we can develop it into something interesting. And...

Itai Yanai
And even if I said something stupid, there might have been a reason why I said it. And if we're curious and if we genuinely like the other person, so it works incredibly better if the participants are friends, then you say, just like Daniel Kahneman said on our podcast, when one person would say something with his collaboration with Amos Tversky, the other person would say, well, you know, on the face of it, it sounds like a silly thing to say. It sounds wrong, but we are programmed to dismiss any idea we hear and there, you know, let's be kind to one another. There must be a reason also why the person said it. Let's, let's try to explore that. And if you have the patience and if you have this sort of really openness in your heart to explore it, then magical things happen. An idea can be born.

Oliver Bogler
That sounds very different from your typical research group meeting where...

Martin Lercher
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, as humans, we have this general tendency. We like to shoot down other people's ideas. If you say something that sounds strange to me, I'm going to tell you why it has to be wrong. 

Itai Yanai
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

Martin Lercher
And yeah, it's a lot of fun, especially in journal clubs. And as scientists, of course, we're even worse than the average person, because we're trained to do that. We're trained to falsify everything that comes our way. But we have to. We have to suspend that if we are in creative discussions. We have, as again Daniel Kahneman said, we have to leave our critical weapons at the door and not dismiss something that the other person says just out of hand.

Itai Yanai 
I mean, I think the basis of it is that when we're doing science, we really need to have two minds. There's two modes of thought. And it's really the interaction between these two modes of thought that constitute doing science. 
There's the hard thinking, very critical, very precise, and that's what we call day science thinking. That's the one that we're trained to do. That's the one where the public expects the scientists to talk like that, to use this kind of hard thinking. And our complaint is just that we are not giving full justice, we're not discussing the other mode of thought, this night science mode that's softer, that's more indulgent, that's more improvisational. 

And it's easy to make fun of and yet it's absolutely crucial because that's where the ideas come from. And one facet of modern science is that we really, in the end, expect people to be good at both of these kinds of thinking. You really need both. And so what Martin was discussing before that there's this big problem in modern science is that we only sort of give the glory to the hard thinking without teaching or even acknowledging the soft kind of thinking.

Oliver Bogler 
Night science thinking is almost disreputable, right? I mean, if you if you did it in a more public setting, like a lab meeting, that would be really hard. So I understand the need to be in a safe space with a trusted individual. 

Itai Yanai
Yeah, you have to pull down your shades.

Oliver Bogler
So I wonder, as you teach this to early career scientists, I imagine, how do they respond? Do they do they take to it readily or is it is it kind of tough to get them past their already existing scientific training.

 
Martin Lercher
Usually the audience at our workshop is mostly, as you say, young researchers, PhD students, or sometimes post-docs. And they've already been in this research machinery, right? They have some insights in how it works and they know how confusing it can be. So they really appreciate to see that acknowledged, right? And to hear that it's actually a part of the process. It has to be like that. You know, when Itai and I did our first fully independent project together, actually, a long time ago, we were young post-docs. And, you know, we didn't really appreciate that dichotomy ourselves at that time, right? And we were very confused and it was very frustrating that at points in that project, we didn't know anymore what we were really doing. We didn't really know anymore what the question was that we tried to answer. And just hearing that that's normal and that's actually a good and important part of science is already important. So these people really appreciate it.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, I think they are relieved. What I experience when we give our workshops, pardon, when I look at their faces, when we talk to them afterwards, they're so relieved because they've been so confused at how they're admitted to this program of doing a PhD and yet at no moment does anyone take them aside and tell them, okay, this is how science works. This is how you're going to get your ideas.
Instead, they're sort of made to believe that it's going to be obvious. It's not obvious at all. And so I think when we put this label on, you need the night science part, you need then this other kind of thinking, and we teach them the tools of the creative process, I think they're just relieved that, okay, it's going to be okay. We are going to be taught how this is going to be done.

Oliver Bogler
That's fantastic to hear. And I would like to mention that you very generously share the course materials on your website at night-science .org. So anybody who's interested in diving in can find them there.

Martin Lercher
Yeah. So, so really the reason why we put it there is A, because we think it's really important for anyone in science who's not thought about these things before. But B, we really want this to be taught as at many places as possible. We give our workshops, but we can't possibly give workshops to every PhD student on the planet. We really need help with that. 
We think it's important that people get this kind of training. And we really want to help other educators to give that kind of training. And, you know, of course they can develop their own material, but they can use whatever we have in whichever way they like, in whichever way they think is appropriate.

Oliver Bogler
You've also been sharing these ideas in a series of editorials in Genome Biology and more recently in Nature Biotechnology. What have you written about?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, so each piece is a thinking tool. It's a trick that we think all experienced scientists know and yet should be taught in a normal way. Right now, what happens is if you're a PhD student, it really depends on what kind of a mentor you have. If you have a mentor that teaches you these tools, then you're lucky.
And if you don't have a mentor that teaches you them, well, then you will not know how to do them and you're going to suffer needlessly. We think this could be taught in a regular way. We think that these pieces are putting these tools out where anyone can get them. And so it kind of democratizes the teaching of the process. 
And we hope that these materials, as Martin was saying, are put together in a course that's adopted everywhere. So we think that just like graduate students are taught experimental design and bioethics, they should also be taught a course, perhaps called ‘process’, on what are the thinking tools, what is the way of generating ideas. We think it's just crucial. 
And you know what, I think we can't overstate the importance of this. I would go as far as saying that it's a matter of national security. So, Oliver, you work for the government and so I think you'll respond to this. This is a matter of national security for us to have the most creative research possible. And there's been a trend lately in science to have larger and larger groups work together when we know that actually, large groups, while they're good at executing a big idea, are far less good at coming up with the idea in the first place. For that, small groups, as we were saying earlier, it takes two to think, are much more creative. And so I think that what hurts us is that it sounds like this is a soft kind of science, but actually, it's crucial. 
Actually, I want to tell you a story. I was in line to check in a suitcase at the airport and I was talking to the person ahead of me and she said, oh, you're at NYU. What do you teach? And I said, oh, you know, I'm teaching this new course about the creative scientific process. And she said, sounds like bullshit. And then she caught herself, but you know, because she was a New Yorker, she said the truth out right away with no filter. And I think she speaks for all of us. You know, it does sound like too soft, but really, you know, we require it. So I think it does catch on because I really believe it's super important.

Oliver Bogler 
So you've shared one reaction with me, Itai, quite forthright. I wonder what, in more general terms, the response to your editorials has been.

Itai Yanai
Oh, to that, it's been fantastic. I think, Martin, what do you think?

Martin Lercher
Yeah. No, no, I think, well, the response has been fantastic. But to be honest, there's more people who listen to the podcast than read the editorials.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, yo, these kids today Oliver.

Martin Lercher
Yeah, yes. Nope.

Oliver Bogler
Well, okay. So you mentioned the podcast, Martin, tell us about that.

Martin Lercher
Yeah, so in the podcast, you know, or let's start, let's start earlier. We started writing those editorials. And basically, Itai and I would improvise together, you know, about what should we write the next editorial, like what should be the topic? What do we think is important? And we covered a lot of we think important tools for scientific creativity. 
But then we thought, you know, that's just Itai and I, right? There's so many other creative scientists out there who have their own tools, which may be different from person to person. And we need to talk to those people about their creative process. And that's how we came up with a podcast. And actually, initially, I was a bit hesitant. Itai had to repeatedly come with that idea until I finally agreed. 

Itai Yanai
Yeah, it wasn't easy, Oliver. It wasn't easy to convince him.

Martin Lercher
But now I love it.

Oliver Bogler
But it was worth it.

Itai Yanai
He's like, I'm going to be one of these podcast people. Oh, my God. You know, I'm going to have to wear different clothes.

Martin Lercher
Exactly. No, anyway, so what we do in the podcast is we talk to these other creative scientists about their process, about how they do science, about how they mentor people, for example, how they discovered what for them was the right way to have ideas to solve problems. And it's really interesting, there are some tools that come up again and again, but there's other tools that are very specific to the person. And so it's been very interesting for us and we get very good response from our listeners about that.

Oliver Bogler
Yeah, I've been listening myself. It is endlessly fascinating because as you say, each answer is not the same and you can learn a lot. And you've got some really, you know, very well known scientists on there. So I think you're also making it more respectable to admit that the creativity doesn't just come from the day side, but also from that night side.

Martin Lercher
Yeah. 

Itai Yanai
That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Martin Lercher
So, you know, actually, sometimes we have PIs, professors who also attend the workshop. And generally, they also love that. Of course, they know a lot of that stuff because that's what they do, but they hardly ever think about that. That's also something that the guests in our podcast tell us, that they're really grateful for us prompting them to consciously think about how they do things, because it's not something that we ever discuss. 
And of course, it's not something that Itai and I invented. It's not that we said, oh, suddenly we have to have this creativity in science, which was totally uncreative for hundreds of years. It's been there all the time. It's just never been discussed. Philosophers of science, for example, have talked about the context of discovery versus the context of justification. But it's not something that's ever filtered into the science world.

Oliver Bogler
So any favorite moments from the podcast that you can share?

Itai Yanai
What's your favorite moment, Martin?

Martin Lercher
Well, one favorite moment you've already spilled the beans on, it was Daniel Kahneman on how to talk with your collaborator. I think that's one of my all-time favorites. So what about you?

Itai Yanai
I really like the one with László Barabási. He said that he doesn't believe in experts, which is such a shocking statement. And he explained, he said that when he was a student, he came to his professor with this idea that he was very excited about. And the professor who was an expert in that field said, no, it doesn't seem right to me. I don't think it's a good idea. And so Barabási dropped it. And then just a couple of years later, what he experienced is that someone else wrote that same idea and it transformed the field. And so Barabási realized that very often the people who are closest to a field, like the experts, you would think the experts of a field, they should be so intimately involved in the field that they would recognize what is the next idea when they're told it, right? That they would recognize, oh, this is important. This transforms the field. Instead, what Barabási says is actually they're too close if they don't recognize it. And I think that's profound.

Martin Lercher
Yeah, and in the same line, actually, Todd Golub, who's the head of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, he was saying that he really likes to hire scientists who he expects to totally change field, where he expects in five years they're going to work on something totally different from what they've ever done before. And because he thinks that those will be the moments when the really cool things happen in science.

Oliver Bogler
Yeah, we all think about cross-disciplinarity and changing fields as being important. That's fascinating. 

Itai Yanai
Yeah. Oh, can I say, can I say one more moment? 

Oliver Bogler
Yeah. Please, of course.

Martin Lercher
There's so many, aren't there?

Itai Yanai
But I remember we talked to Agnel Sfeir. She's at Memorial Sloan Kettering. And she said that when she sits in a seminar and she hears someone present a project, what she's thinking in her mind is something that, that when she does it, it keeps her so engaged and she's like really super present. 
So what is that thing that she does? She thinks to herself, what can I take from this? What about this that I'm hearing now, can I import into any one of the projects that's ongoing now in my lab? And it's this kind of thinking, it's really active listening. Normally, we're just passively trying to understand what the person's saying. And if you change that to now active listening, to execute the operation of this thing that I'm hearing, how does it map onto something that I know? Like doing that operation just profoundly changes your relationship to that idea. So I thought that was a really deep insight.

Oliver Bogler
Yeah, I mean, I've been listening, as I said, there's so much in there. They're all available on the website again and wherever you can find your podcasts.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, for just $5 .99 a month.

Oliver Bogler
That's not true. 

Martin Lercher
No, no, no, that was a joke. Itai, you have to emphasize that that was a joke.

Itai Yanai
No, we'll give people a discount. 

Martin Lercher
Stop it. [laughs]

Oliver Bogler
Okay. Listeners of Inside Cancer Careers get free access. So you've been doing this work together for a while. What's the future? Where are you going with your night science endeavor?

Itai Yanai
We didn't intend to do this. The way this project started was from a totally different motivation. We really, Martin and I, we're really just friends. And we wrote a book together before called The Society of Genes that you mentioned. And actually, I'm not sure you mentioned it. We did an earlier event this morning and someone mentioned it.

Oliver Bogler
You have now, so go ahead.

Itai Yanai
So, yeah, so Martin and I, we wrote this popular science book called The Society of Genes, and it was so much fun that we wanted to do another project. So we were just looking for a project. That's all ancient history, because now this project has taken on a life of its own. I mean, it really seems like we've hit upon a need. There is just this empty space in science where teaching the creative process should be. And so we've now made it our mission to address that. And as we've been talking about, we developed a curriculum and we are being we are being invited from all over the world to come and teach it. And so that's not scalable. 
What we want to do is provide the material and really train the people that could themselves become the trainers. And our goal is that this is now going to be addressed and it will be taught. And if we're successful, then in a few years, it will just be part of how we train our students, which will be really cool if we can achieve that.

Oliver Bogler
 We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, we'll talk to our guests about their careers. 

[music]

Oliver Bogler
PubMed lists over 270,000 cancer papers published in 2022 – that is a staggering 750 papers every day. It’s great that cancer research is such an active field, but it makes finding the pubs that are critical to your work a challenge. What if you had an AI that paid attention to the papers you read and suggested others as they appear in PubMed? That is exactly what the NCI is building with an app called NanCI. With me to discuss NanCI are two members of the team that are creating NanCI.
Duncan Anderson 
NanCI  is an app for cancer scientists and it helps them to discover the research in new ways and connect with each other and build their personal networks and share information and get to know each other. We've just launched the ability to actually chat with a piece of research, so you can actually have a conversation and ask questions about a research paper itself.
JD Wuarin
Instead of having to read the whole paper yourself, you can now simply ask questions and NanCI will answer those questions. One of the cool features we've also added is that it will read the abstract and figure out what questions you might want to ask the paper.
Duncan Anderson
We're using artificial intelligence within NanCI to help to make information easier to find and easier to understand and easier to interact with. The only information we're using is the scientific data. So the research paper, for example, we don't allow our AI to go off and answer random questions that might introduce all sorts of concerns.
JD Wuarin
And so the idea will be that eventually with NanCI straight from your pocket, you'll not only be able to chat with papers and understand what papers are about, but also based on your interest, it will suggest to you what you might want to investigate, maybe which gene mutation you might want to look at, which new disease might be related to what you're doing. And that's gonna be interesting, I think. 

Duncan Anderson
If you start working in a field which you don't have a lot of experience in, it can be a bit daunting. There's a lot of information to read. We have this idea that you could tell NanCI what the field is and NanCI would go off and present you the key influential papers in that space so you can very quickly get your head around what this new field is. 
So today, NanCI  can be used by cancer researchers in the USA. So it's available from the Apple App Store for the iPhone. And there's a restriction on the downloads, which means that you need to have an email address associated with a cancer research institution.

[music ends]

Oliver Bogler
All right, we're back. Let's start with you, Itai. I'm always curious about what inspires people to get into science in the first place. What was that for you?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, for me, it was a book. I know it sounds like a cliche that a book changed my life, but it really is what happened. I was finishing up my undergrad. I had done this ambitious dual degree in both the philosophy of science and computer engineering. And then I was having a kind of existential crisis on what should I do, this or that, when I started reading this book called The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. And I had actually seen it before, but I was under this misunderstanding. And I thought the book was about how genes make us selfish, which is probably also true, but.

Martin Lercher
Yes.

Itai Yanai
But I didn't realize what the book was really about. And then at one point I just started reading it and I just couldn't put it down for a whole week. I just kept reading it and I was just blown away when I put the book down after finishing it. I said, this is what I want to do. I just I for me, it really came from this philosophical desire to know why we're here. I thought, oh, my God, finally I know why I'm here. Like this is biology explains and this and I thought this is what I want to do with my life to understand why we're put on this earth. What happened before we opened our eyes.

Oliver Bogler
So we share that, Itai. I read this book as a schoolboy. And Sir Richard Dawkins attended the same boarding school in England that I did. So the book was popular there. Ah, yeah, you have it leather bound. But this is actually the copy that I had when I was a schoolboy. Yeah, beautiful. It's a phenomenal book. And I was excited to see it featured in your course. So OK, books.

Martin Lercher
Yeah, actually, you know, I know this part is about Itai, but I have to say, I also read that book towards the end of my school days and I loved it. It's just fascinating. I was so interested in biology when I when I read that. So, you know, apparently we have all three something in common.

Oliver Bogler 
Yeah, that's interesting. So, Martin, was it this book as well or was it something even before the book that got you? 

Martin Lercher
No, no, no, it was this book, this exact book.

Oliver Bogler
Okay. All right, solved. We'll put that into every newborn's crib and we've solved the cancer, the biomedical workforce crisis. Well, Martin, let me ask you then. So, after you read this book, you found yourself on a path towards science. I know you did a research fellowship at the University of Bath. You were a Heisenberg fellow at EMBL. What were those early years of your career like?

Martin Lercher
Well, my earliest year of my career were actually not in biology, they were in theoretical physics. So I studied physics and then I did my PhD in theoretical physics. But, you know, it was nice, it was fun to do all those equations, but I felt there wasn't really any interesting, any really interesting questions, right, that I could possibly be working on. And so I went out of science for a while, but I realized that wasn't for me. I wanted to get back, but I didn't want to get back into physics. I wanted to go into biology. There's so many open questions there, so many fascinating things that you can explore. And so I started my postdoc at the University of Bath, working with Laurence Hurst. And initially, I had just started in biology. I knew nothing. I read a couple of books before, a couple of textbooks. So really, I was working like a PhD student. So Laurence was telling me, oh, you know, there's this question, and you could get this kind of data and then analyze it. And I, you know, I dutifully got that data and downloaded it, did some analyses. And, and that way, I very quickly got into a mode of just doing this comparative genomics research, which was very different from anything I had done in physics before. But then a colleague of mine started combining these evolutionary analyses of genomes with a model to understand the function of the genes that were evolving, right? To see how evolution is related to the function. And that was fascinating. And that way I got back a bit closer to my original training in physics by looking at mechanistic models of you know, how organisms actually work, right? And what natural selection acts upon.

Oliver Bogler
Interesting. Physics and biology are quite far apart in the sciences.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, we like to put these human-made divisions between the fields, don't we?

Martin
Yeah.

Oliver Bogler
True, but the way of thinking is also quite different, I find. I mean, you know, or maybe I'm wrong. I'm obviously just on the one side.

Martin Lercher
No, I think you're absolutely right. And I still have a way of thinking that's a bit alien to a lot of biologists. For example, I'm always looking for general patterns. I'm not so much interested in one gene. I want to know something that's true for all genes, or at least for a large group of genes. And a lot of biologists are more of the opinion, oh, no, everything's different. And there's no general patterns. And it's all very specific.
So that's a different way of thinking, but I think it's very good for science to have those differences, right? To have that diversity of thinking.

Oliver Bogler
Definitely. Itai, you earned some frequent flyer miles in your early career, right? After your bachelor's and PhD at Boston University, you did a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and then you came back to the US for a second postdoc at Harvard. Tell us about those years.

Itai Yanai
Well. My PhD was so much fun. I really kind of blossomed in my PhD. I found the postdoc stage to be relatively much more challenging. I think that the career path of a scientist has no stage that's as challenging as the postdoc, right? Because a lot of things have to go right at the postdoc.
When on the podcast we talked with Oded Rechavi, he said that the only time that night science is maybe a less good thing to do is during the postdoc. Postdoc should be just day science. Things have to go right because, hey, you got to get a job soon. And I think it was during the postdoc stage for me that on the one hand, I was having a great time going to different labs. I essentially worked in four different labs and it was great because I met Martin in one of them and I picked up different cultures in different labs for how to do science. 
But on the other hand, it was very challenging because it's not how you're supposed to do it. And even though in academia, we're so supposed to be open minded, we're really not, you know, we really are conservative in terms of what we expect people to follow in their careers. There's a kind of regimented path. And so I didn't do that path. I jumped around from lab to lab and I published papers that I was fascinated by. I was so excited about them. But it was challenging in the sense that I didn't have like a big Nature paper. 
And I think probably Martin could, could say even more about what I was like back then, because he knew me. And I think he would say that I was maybe a creative person, but it wasn't clear that I would make it, because...

Martin Lercher
Yeah, but looking back, you know, I actually while you were talking, I was really tempted to just interrupt you and comment on what you were saying, because you're saying that, you know, maybe the postdoc stage is not when you should be creative. But really, when you look at your postdoc stage, right, so you haven't actually told that story. But you started off with your PhD as doing computational work, right? You were an evolutionary biologist who, you know, did comparative genomics, you're doing computations. And then during your postdoc, you suddenly decided you wanted to be an experimental developmental biologist, right, which was like something totally different, like really nothing to do. 

Itai Yanai
It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Martin Lercher
Yeah. No, but now if you look back, right, it was challenging, but you're doing some awesome stuff now. That wouldn't be possible if you didn't combine those two different things.

Itai Yanai
And by the way, this is what friends are for, you see? But Martin encourages me like this. Thank you, Martin.
Oliver Bogler
So if you'll permit, both of you have crossed fields. Martin, in a broad way from physics to biology, but Itai, you also within biology, many different kinds of fields, right? Computational science, very different from developmental biology. And you're also champions of night science and this sort of different way of thinking. Is that a statistical coincidence or what are your thoughts?

Martin Lercher
Well, the sample size is small, so it's hard to say.

Itai Yanai
I know what you mean. And I do wonder sometime whether there are other kinds of scientists that perhaps have more discipline and patience than I do and Martin does. And they do stay in one field their whole career and they become experts. And those people are not to be ridiculed, they're actually the ones that get the Nobel prizes. They're doing fantastic work. And I do wonder if they would champion the ideas that we're putting forth far less. Maybe they do think it's something to be said about staying in your lane and not moving around and actually not being distracted by other fields. 
Here's one model that we can consider. Science has two kinds of people. There are the specialist and the generalist. If that's true, then I would just argue that you need both. And right now in our funding climate and publishing, schemes and the basic culture of science right now is such that it really is biased in favor of the specialists. You could say we're just a little bit out of balance, out of whack. And so maybe you can see the work that Martin and I are doing as trying to realign the culture so that there are also these generalists.

Martin Lercher
Yeah. I would like to add a footnote, Itai, to what you said, because you said, you know, if you're a specialist in one very specific thing, you know, those are the people who get the Nobel prizes. And it's true, of course, that's a great way to get a Nobel prize.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, you're right.

Martin Lercher
But you can also get a Nobel prize, and that happens also frequently if you cross fields, right, and you bring things together that nobody put together before.

Itai Yanai
That's true.

Oliver Bogler
But I mean, setting aside the Nobel Prize, when you think about, I mean, I'm still rooting for both of you. 

Itai Yanai
You're like, what's up with these scientists? They're obsessed with the Nobel Prize. That's all they talk about.

Oliver Bogler 
When you think about more quotidian ways that this manifests in our lives, like peer review, right? You have a grant or a paper under submission. I mean, I often feel that the specialists in Itai's classification are, can be sometimes the dominant voices in those kinds of settings, right?

Itai Yanai
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. And a lot of times the specialists do not welcome with open arms the generalists coming into their fields with new ideas. And that's something that I experience a lot. I think about it a lot. What can we do to the culture of science? And you know what, I feel it sometimes myself when I work on a problem for a long time. For example, I was thinking for a long time, a long time ago about the relationship between sequence evolution and gene expression evolution. I was thinking about this for a long time. And then I remember this one group, they came at it from a totally different field because they had this technology and they came at it. And I remember feeling a little bit like, oh, they don't know what they're doing. They're you know, who do they think they are? They're not even citing the literature right. And oh, this, this is not new. And I really, I, and so I channel that whenever I come into a new field, I remember what it's like to be on the other side. And I try to be more respectful by reaching out to the experts and talking with them. And just a lot of it is, is psychological and, and you know, good old fashioned human tact.

Oliver Bogler
Yes, yeah, and it's social behavior, right? I mean, we are a group, we know each other, and then here comes this new person. Who is this person? 

Itai Yanai
Outsiders, yeah, who do they think they are?

Oliver Bogler
I mean, in my world, that often, the pain point that we're describing is often around physician scientists who are trying to be both on the clinical side and on the science side. And so, we're very concerned about these people who do clinical work and research because they're trying to succeed in two very competitive and very complicated worlds. And so, you know, it's just something we think a lot about.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, there are a lot of different cultures, the MDs, the PhDs, the MD/PhDs.

Oliver Bogler
So another question that came to my mind as you were talking about is reading, scientific reading, right? What kind of science people read? And that's a question that I think about a lot, right? We're all pretty good at reading in our sort of narrow field, but often the best ideas, and this kind of connects back to the night science conversation, right? You can get ideas from other people, but how do you do that? How do you, given that we're all pretty much overwhelmed by the literature and everything else, how do you put interesting papers in front of people that might encourage them to think more broadly or orthogonally about their research?

Itai Yanai
Yeah, you know, I I think there's a there's a big problem that we don't talk so much about lately that people don't read as much anymore in the usual sense. I think I see it with myself. I remember I used to just sit down and read a paper from beginning to end. That's becoming more and more rare. And I think about why that happens. I think a lot of us are getting used to taking in results in a more superficial way, say on Twitter, there'll be like a tweet-torial or at a conference, you just hear a 15 minute talk about it. And so we're gaining breath, but lacking the depth on particular topics. And I don't know so much what to do about that. 

I think, you know, Martin touched upon this earlier when he said, look, we were writing these editorials. And we notice actually people listen to the podcast more. So people are taking in information in a very different way. And it's interesting to see what's happening. I think we're in this state of flux where right now what seems to happen is the paper as you publish it is fully read by actually an exceedingly small number of people. And yet the gist of it, the content, the main idea, that can get more traction. So I don't know, what do you think, Martin?

Martin Lercher
I think that's true, of course. But Oliver, your question was, how can we encourage people to read more broadly? At least that's how I understood your question. And I think one way of doing that is to encourage people to read popular science books, which are generally more entertaining than the average paper. So it's easier to read them. And they might not give you all the details and maybe some of the things they say in that book might not be totally accurate. But they still give you a good idea of the kind of things that people think about and the kind of tools that people have in other fields. And then when you come across something where you think, oh, maybe this thing that I read about could be useful, then you can dig into it more deeply and figure out is it really going to help you. But it's a great way to broaden your horizons scientifically.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, but I mean, I think popular science is great. I love popular science. But don't you see that people aren't reading books as such anymore? Like, isn't that, I don't know what, for example, I don't know if it's worth our time to write that many more books. Maybe we just need to realize that that's not what the people are actually tuning into.

Oliver Bogler
Well, I'm not sure we're going to solve that one in this conversation. So let me close out by asking you both, what advice are you giving to the early career scientists, the grad students, the postdocs in your research teams, given everything we've talked about?

Itai Yanai
I mean, I tell the folks in my lab that while there seems to be this urgency that a person feels when they come in to pick a problem right away and start working. You know, we all want to be efficient. We all want to demonstrate that we're doing stuff. But really, what ends up happening is you pick a project over the course of two weeks, and then you work on it for four or five years.
So this asymmetry between the shortness of time that you took to decide the problem and then, and so, and what if you pick the wrong one? So what I really encourage people to do when they come to my lab, as I said, take some time. I don't want you to actually choose any project before three months are up. Just think for three months and then, and, and that seems to make a world of difference because if you choose too fast, it could be a fateful decision. I think we really need to focus more, as we say in our workshop, don't we Martin, focus more on the questions than on the answers.

Martin Lercher
Yeah. So, the advice that I would give to people is don't pick a problem where you know exactly how to solve it, where the path from here to the thesis that you're going to write is all laid out and there's a high probability that you will really follow that path. I mean, of course, there's typically a project plan, but in an interesting project, you're never going to get to the end point of that plan. You're going to get to some much more interesting place. 

So the advice I would give is don't pick the first type of problem. Pick something really interesting. And of course, at the end, you'll have to write a thesis and you have to submit a paper or two. But, you know, there'll be something that you can publish. There'll be something, you know, even if the problem, even if the project doesn't go as well as we'd want to, because of course it's risky to do something that's interesting, but there's still going to be something that you can write up and something that's going to earn you your PhD.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, also, if I could just add to that, you know, when you're in this thick of it of the project and you had the plan and now you're confused by the way it's going, I think the most important advice is to just be open to a change, because a lot of us like to stick to the core, stick to the plan. And there could be like some psychological dissonance, psychological dissonance in saying well, I went to all this trouble of getting this data set but now I'm going to do something totally different then does that mean that I wasted my time before? It might look like that, but really it's this openness to realize that there's now a new direction and to go for it That makes all the difference.

Martin Lercher
Yeah, and maybe one more thing that I would like to add is do something that you're really excited about. I mean, if you're not excited about the science that you do, it's not going to be good.

Oliver Bogler
Yeah, it's hard enough.

Itai Yanai
Exactly.

[music]

Oliver Bogler 
Now it's time for a segment we call Your Turn because it's a chance for our listeners to send in a recommendation that they would like to share. If you're listening, then you're invited to take your turn. Send us a tip for a book, a video, a podcast, or a talk that you found inspirational or amusing or interesting. You can send these to us at NCIICC@NIH.gov. Record a voice memo and send it along. We may just play it in an upcoming episode. 
Now I'd like to invite our guests to take their turn. Let's start with you, Martin.

Martin Lercher
Well, we've talked a couple of times during this conversation about the scientist Daniel Kahneman, who sadly passed away recently. And the podcast that we recorded with him was really inspiring. But we felt that we knew him very well before the podcast because we both read his wonderful book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
Actually, Itai recommended that book to me and he was saying, you know, this is the operating manual of your brain, right? That's how he introduced that book to me. And I totally agree with that. I think it's a wonderful description of how humans think, you know, how we have those two systems, the intuitive one where we are creative, where we come up with ideas, which is very fast. And then the rational one where we execute thoughts very carefully, very deliberately, that is much slower. And they both work very well for different purposes. And it's really interesting to see that explained on a scientific level. So, I really love that book and I've given it to a lot of my friends. And so that's what I'd really recommend to read.

Oliver Bogler
Great recommendation. Thank you. Itai.

Itai Yanai
Yeah, so I want to tell you about this book called The Artist's Way that I started reading. It's by Julia Cameron and it was published 32 years ago. So it's an old book. Now the book has a spiritual side that personally for me, I don't really relate to, but I just want to mention two things in this book that really caught my attention. She gives two pieces of advice for how to be creative.

One is called the morning papers. And that is that first thing you do every day is write three pages. Even if you don't feel like writing, even if you have nothing to write about, make yourself write three pages. So I couldn't do it in the morning. I do it more in the evening. That's when I have more time. And I don't know what she means by three pages. So what I do do, and I find it really helpful is I open a Word document, and at the bottom, it tells me how many words I've been writing. And I just try to get to 1000 words. I think 1000 words is about three pages. And I force myself to write. And every time the same thing happens. At the beginning, I don't know what I'm going to write about. I'm so frustrated. And I'm like, how am I going to do it this time? And then a magical thing happens over the hour. It takes me about an hour to do it. Is that I'll discover something. I'll have like an idea and it actually happens because I force myself to write a thousand words. 
Then the second thing she says in the book is you should take what's called the artist's walk. Force yourself to just take a walk with yourself alone and you're just thinking about what it is that you've been writing about and just reflect on it. And I've been doing that lately and it's been really interesting. So I don't necessarily recommend the book. But I recommend these two tips.

Oliver Bogler
That's fantastic. I mean, it's how do you get your own mind to work in different ways? Right. Really interesting. Really interesting. I'd like to make a quick recommendation myself as well. I would like to actually recommend the Night Science podcasts. If you enjoyed our conversation today at all, you're going to enjoy those episodes a lot more. That's of course it's hosted by our guests. Each conversation is unique. The focus is not primarily on the science that their guests do, but on their, how they come up with ideas, their creative process and how they think. And that makes them, the conversations endlessly fascinating and universally accessible. You don't actually have to be an expert in the science of the guest in order to benefit and enjoy their comments on creativity. So I recommend that highly and give it a listen. 
So let me thank you both very much for your generosity with your time and sharing what you were doing for Night Science and about your careers. Really, really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.

Itai Yanai
Thank you, Oliver, I enjoyed it too.

Martin
Yeah, thank you, Oliver. It was a lot of fun to talk with you about these issues.

[music]
Oliver Bogler
That’s all we have time for on today’s episode of Inside Cancer Careers! Thank you for joining us and thank you to our guests.
We want to hear from you – your stories, your ideas and your feedback are welcome. And you are invited to take your turn and make a recommendation to share with our listeners. You can reach us at NCIICC@nih.gov.
Inside Cancer Careers is a collaboration between NCI’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison and the Center for Cancer Training. It is produced by Angela Jones and Astrid Masfar.
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