In the Paths to Science Policy series, we talk to individuals who have a passion for science policy and are active in advocacy through their various roles and careers. The series aims to inform and guide early career scientists interested in science policy. This series is brought to you by the GSA Early Career Scientist Policy and Advocacy Subcommittee.

Today, as part of the ECLP Policy and Advocacy Interview Series, I’m with Manuel Elias-Gutierrez, a senior researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Could you tell us a little bit more about your career path and your current work?

I started in the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1980 as an assistant, worked there for 18 years, and became a full professor. At some point, I was invited to work on sabbatical leave here in Chetumal for six months, but six months turned into several years. Doing science here felt like another dimension, far away from the distractions of excessive bureaucracy known to academia. When my wife and I moved our labs here, people said it would be a career-ending mistake, but here we are years later and still going strong. Here, I have been able to develop all my research in freshwater biodiversity. Mexico is one of the most biodiverse places on earth, and we are applying modern techniques, such as DNA barcoding, to understand the ecology and diversity of freshwater zooplankton and fish species like never before.

How has public funding for science changed in Mexico in the last few years?

Let’s start from the beginning. In the 1980’s, the government realized there was a big “brain drain” happening, where most scientists were leaving the country to work overseas. They then started a fellowship known as the National Investigator System, popularly known as SNI. Nowadays, being part of the SNI is a must for any researcher in Mexico; for many, it can account for half of their income. In order to keep our SNI fellowship, we have periodic evaluations. Depending on the level, you were evaluated every three to five years. The evaluations are a mixture of the peer-review and tenure-review systems: if you are not producing papers, not graduating students, or grants keep being rejected, you can be turned away from the SNI and lose that economical supplement. Imagine suddenly losing half of your income! On the other hand, this system is what makes science in Mexico so productive. The scientific community is small; there are only about 41,000 members of the SNI, but because of the constant evaluations, we are a very active community with constant publications. It is basically the same publish-or-perish mentality as in the US or Europe. You must be productive, or you are downgraded or expelled from the SNI.

Besides the SNI fellowship, most researchers keep their labs running through grants from the National Council for Humanities, Science, and Technology. Funding from the council has been traditionally stable. I got my first grant in 1990 and continued with granted projects every year until 2017. But since 2017, things have changed drastically. Cuts to science funding started during the previous president of Mexico, and although we thought things would change under the current president, we are still gravely suffering from deep cuts to our funding. The national council and other government agencies started funding fewer grants, and the few proposals that are accepted are only funded partially, at 70 percent of what is asked in most cases. Funding has never been as good as in the US or elsewhere, but at least it was consistent. Most labs were able to build a good infrastructure before the deep funding cuts happened. It is a very complicated situation right now. I can only speak from personal experience, but I know that many colleagues are in the same boat. We have PCR and other machines that have been running for more than 10 years, but since we do not have enough funds, we end up paying for repairs from our own pockets in several cases. And it’s not only repairs. Lately, we have had to use our personal funds to pay for publication fees and travel expenditures for conferences and meetings. Many even use their own money to pay for gasoline and pickup trucks for research field trips. And insecurity in the country has increased: in the past, we never had an issue. Recently, several colleagues were assaulted on a sampling trip. With the new rules, it’s also harder to get funding from exterior entities for trips and collaborations. It is so complicated now that the number of international collaborations I had has been severely impacted.

Even when you secure funding from outside sources, the government can also interfere with that. For example, a couple of years ago, we got a grant from the United Nations, but we were not able to use it completely. When we received any external funding, we were forced to deposit it in a centralized institutional trust. With those funds, we started the construction of a new room for our labs, but then the government said all institutional trusts would be over, so everything was stopped. Because of the new rules, we cannot use any non-government funding for equipment, like PCR machines or even computers; this “work” computer I am using to talk to you was bought with my personal money. Things were not perfect before, but they have not gotten better either.

Is there a concrete reason behind these changes? The Mexican government seems to constantly accuse academics of only doing “neoliberal” science. What is meant by using this economic term in the context of science, or is it just being used as an excuse?

There does not seem to be convincing logic behind it. One of the strongest proposals from the new government was to save money, which they have accomplished in other areas. But they have tried to apply the same logic to scientific funding. I am not entirely sure why they keep using the term “neoliberal science.” I believe they are referring to the accusations that, during the previous government, the Council of Science was giving too much money to enterprises and private companies. I have not seen the financial documents myself, but it is agreed upon by many colleagues that the Council was only using six percent of its funding for these private companies. I am not sure if you can really say that it is an excuse, but whatever has fueled these changes has led to surprising alterations to how we do science. For example, even if you get a grant rejected, you could request the peer-reviewed evaluation, which I have done in the past. But for one of my latest rejections, I was not given a peer-reviewed evaluation. Out of the whole country, less than 50 grants for a particular call were being funded that year. There has been an extreme cut to scientific funding, which is extremely sad.

Mexico is one of the top five most biodiverse countries in the world. We used to have a special government entity dedicated to supporting biodiversity, the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity. It was even well-regarded by the international community, but it has been reduced to almost nothing. For example, lots of colleagues have voiced concerns for biodiversity regarding the “Maya Train,” a new government project that runs through the Mexican South. But the government has disregarded those concerns and avoids doing any independent risk-assessment projects that I am aware of. Personally, I know those areas have very fragile ecosystems. In one of my projects, we are currently working on how a tropical storm turned Lake Bacalar—the most beautiful lake in the world in my opinion—from blue to a brownish color that could lead to an ecological collapse in the area. The train might greatly increase the transportation efficiency and the economy in the south, but no studies have been made about the tourist impact on these extremely fragile ecosystems, some that even contain hidden biodiversity. Sadly, science seems to have become a low-importance, secondary-level issue in Mexico. Nevertheless, my colleagues and I concentrate on our work and our science, and we will always keep working to move our projects forward. We do not let ourselves be defeated by external factors.

In previous interviews and articles about this topic, you seem concerned about academic freedom and the future of science in Mexico. Are you still worried? What does the future hold for Mexican principal investigators and graduate students?

There is currently a discussion in the Mexican Congress regarding a new law on humanities, sciences, technologies, and innovation. It is basically trying to centralize all science in Mexico. Many colleagues fear it will turn into an excuse for the government to make unilateral decisions regarding science policy. The new law proposes government officials across several agencies will be responsible for advising the national council about the decisions on science. No representative from the scientific community is being considered. Right now, we still have academic freedom, but lots of colleagues and early career scientists feel too much uncertainty for the future. Lots of academics are not sure about their job stability anymore. People with families and kids are not sure whether they should be planning to leave soon. I talked with several of them before this interview, and the consensus was to underline how much uncertainty we are dealing with here in Mexico.

Regarding the students, it boils down to the same: the future is too uncertain to take on such long commitments as a PhD or a long-term project. In the last years, I have had a hard time getting students to come here, and now I know for a fact that our program has decreased its class size almost by half since the pandemic because students are not trusting the future of science in Mexico as much now. On a positive note, I see the younger generation of students as being more willing to collaborate with each other and organize. I grew up and made my career with the old system, where individuality and small-sized collaborations were praised. We have a hard time coming together against all this uncertainty, but early career scientists now are organizing, so there is hope in the future. Yet, it is not easy to publicly voice our concerns. The rules can be changed at any time and make our job as researchers harder. For example, a few years ago, a new rule came into effect that for researchers to leave the country (even for a conference), they needed to ask permission from the government first. That only changed after a big scandal broke out in the local newspapers.

Sometimes not even scandals are enough. Coming back to the topic of the “Maya Train,” lots of scientists voiced concerns about the damage this will do to the local flora and fauna, and the national council even commissioned a report. Yet, they did not like the findings, so they decided not to promote it. It was eventually published, but no government agency was allowed to participate on the report and its publication had to be privately funded; the findings were effectively censored. In my whole academic life, I have never seen such an attitude from our authorities. It deeply shocked me. All my life I have been away from politics. I have tried to avoid it and concentrate on my research. I cannot stay silent anymore. For the future of Mexican science and the future of all early career scientists, we must speak up. All that I have talked about today is based on my personal experience. These are the things we are currently dealing with as Mexican scientists. Funding is scarcer than ever, and I am concerned Mexico will go into another large brain drain. I hope our authorities will see the light and understand our true needs as researchers. Seeing young scientists still interested in this career and fighting for academic freedom in Mexico and abroad keeps my hopes high; I certainly believe we will overcome these hurdles and Mexican science will continue!

GSA announces a new funding opportunity for members. 

In the ever-evolving landscape of scientific research, access to funding is often a significant hurdle for scientists and researchers. Recognizing our membership’s potential to create change and the need for funding, GSA has developed a new initiative: the Starter Culture Microgrant Program.

Use funds to design your own project

This new initiative funds up to $2000 for a single project that will benefit the genetics community and gives GSA members of any career stage the opportunity to:

• Respond to your community’s needs by providing small starter funding for localized projects.
• Benefit students and faculty with projects that are organized by and/or target scientists in need of funding.
• Have broad and far-reaching intellectual, practical, and geographic impacts which are not limited to institutional events in a single location.

The project idea

GSA wants to provide funding opportunities to our members for projects that benefit the community. Proposed initiatives can include any type of event or project that responds to the needs of scientists at any career stage.

Projects you might consider include: 

• Organizing a workshop within a local primary school 
• Contributing to an extant program in your local community
• 3D printing equipment for labs that otherwise don’t have funding 
• Reaching out to underrepresented international communities in low or middle income countries
• Creating scientific programs for a summer camp

All applications should include details about the need for the proposed initiative, potential benefits to your research community, equity and inclusion considerations in organizing and offering the program to your local community, and the anticipated geographic reach and the career stage of participants. 

Application

Starter Culture Microgrant Program applications will remain open year round. The Microgrant Review Committee will meet once every quarter to determine the awardees, and up to $2,500 will be funded per quarter across successful projects. Awardees will be announced each quarter, and GSA will market supported initiatives year-round. The principal applicant or at least one corresponding applicant must be a current GSA member at the time of application submission.

Start planning now! 

The Starter Culture Microgrant Program launches today! The Microgrant Review Committee has developed an application checklist to help you develop a successful application. If you have questions about the program, a potential proposed activity, or the application, please reach out to engagement@genetics-gsa.org. 

GSA President Hugo Bellen and Vice-President E. Jane Hubbard are among the co-authors of a recent Perspectives article in Development titled “Model organism databases are in jeopardy.” The article describes the importance of model organism databases (MODs), the threat posed by NIH MOD budget cuts, and possible solutions.

“We are deeply concerned that the support for these vital databases is in jeopardy due to large cuts in their grant budgets. We fear these budget cuts will slow biomedical research worldwide and create increased waste of resources due to duplication of efforts. Indeed, the cuts threaten to erode access to reliable, expertly fact-checked data and cause an increase in mis-information due to the degraded organization of knowledge and information.”

— Bellen et al. 2021

Want to help? The NIH has put out a request for information on user experience with scientific data sources and tools. This brief survey is a great opportunity to let the NIH know how much you value MODs and how reduced funding for these important tools would impact your productivity. The deadline for responses is October 15, 2021. Skip straight to the survey link here.

Students, postdocs, academic faculty, and industry researchers will all find benefits at the new Industry Sessions at TAGC, to be held April 22–26 2020 in the Washington DC region.

When industry scientists and academic labs collaborate, both society and science benefit.

That’s one of two big-picture messages Kailene Simon hopes will be conveyed through a new series of sessions to be held at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC) in 2020. The other? “You can do exciting, creative science in an industry setting!” says Simon, a senior scientist with the Rare and Neurologic Diseases Group at Sanofi.

Simon is working closely on developing the Industry Sessions with Mark Johnston, who is a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Editor in Chief of GENETICS.

The sessions were originally proposed to meet the needs of GSA’s early career members. “Students and postdocs keep telling us they are interested in careers in industry but don’t know where to start,” says Johnston. “We wanted to help remove some of the mystery.”

But although there is a strong career element to the initiative (there is a recruitment event and an industry career session) the overall focus is on the science. At the “The Biotech Pipeline,” scientists will present on research that has moved from an academic setting to eventual clinical translation. In “Genetic Technology in Agriculture,” researchers will discuss their work improving crops and livestock through genetics. “There have been terrific advances in these areas in recent years that we think attendees will enjoy learning about,” says Johnston. At the Careers in Industry session, Simon will present on transitioning to a biotech career and will interview a range of industry scientists about their experiences.

Both Simon and Johnston hope the sessions will seed industry-academia collaborations.

“We can’t do our job without academic science,” says Simon. “Everything we do is built on the foundation of basic science.” Although industry labs typically have plenty of resources, she says, they don’t often have the luxury of time to explore new research avenues. That’s why industry researchers attend conferences like TAGC, where there are so many new ideas hatching and where they can build relationships with researchers working at the limits of the field. They also get to meet and recruit talented early career researchers into their labs.

The exchange is not one-sided. Academic researchers who spend their careers chasing down new ideas and projects lack the infrastructure to see their ideas applied in the clinic or marketplace. It is quite common, says Simon, for academic labs to receive funds from industry labs, thus establishing a collaboration with the common goal of clinical application. This allows the academic lab to “keep doing what they’re doing,” i.e. pursuing discovery research and building knowledge. Collaborating with industry can provide academic labs with not only funds, but translational expertise, access to clinical or field samples, and the institutional machinery for bringing an idea through development and approval to market.

“Genetics has so much potential for clinical application, I think it’s important that the translational side is also part of the discussion,” says Simon. Like many in the GSA community, she has a particular interest in rare diseases. Gene therapy is the only true cure for many of these diseases, she says.

“If we are to stand a chance of being successful, we’ll need all hands on deck.”

Learn more about the Industry Sessions at TAGC ≫

Learn more about ways to connect with potential colleagues and employers at TAGC ≫

Executive Director and Scientific Advisor Kevin Lee works for several private foundations, bridging funding gaps by building networks of scientists, clinicians, and patients.

In the Decoding Life series, we talk to geneticists with diverse career paths, tracing the many directions possible after research training. This series is brought to you by the GSA Early Career Scientist Career Development Subcommittee.

As the Executive Director for the Lawrence Ellison Foundation, Senior Scientific Advisor for the JPB and Glenn Foundations, and Chief Scientific Officer for the Grace Science Foundation, Kevin Lee works at the interface of supporting biomedical research, coordinating funding, and advising strategic direction for foundations. He has worked in a variety of scientific roles from tenure-track faculty to start-up founder to private foundations, and his breadth of experience allows him to understand the connections between those roles.

What does being a scientific director for a private foundation entail?

Kevin Lee, Executive Director and Scientific Advisor to the Grace Science Foundation, JPB Foundation, Glenn Foundation, and Lawrence Ellison Foundation.

I operate at the interface between the scientists and the management of a foundation—whether that’s an individual donor or an advisory committee. A lot of my work involves logistics like emailing grantees to get progress reports, designing funding applications for committees, and talking with applicants who have questions about a grant application. It’s communicating with one side or the other about funding, objectives, and the progress that scientists are making.

Beyond funding, foundations are best at building communities of scientists that have specific interests and expertise to train the next generation of scientists. I travel a couple times per month to attend meetings, visit grantees that we’ve funded, or meet with scientists to learn about what they’re doing and see if there’s a good fit for what the foundation supports. As I’m currently working with foundations like the Grace Science Foundation that focus on a specific disease, I also play a role in connecting patients and clinicians to scientists, which is even more rewarding.

How did you get to your current position?

Most of my professional experiences have been based on opportunities that popped up through networking. A lot of my initial contacts came from my academic network and included people like my fellow graduate students. More recently, I’ve gotten involved with a network of others who have positions like mine: PhDs at biomedical research foundations.

After finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, I worked briefly as a technician at the University of California, San Francisco, and that position convinced me to pursue research and get a PhD. I did my graduate work at MIT and my postdoc at Columbia. At the end of my postdoc, I was offered a tenure-track faculty position at Columbia, but my plans changed when my wife’s postdoctoral mentor told me about a biotech company he was initiating with funding from an acquaintance. He gave me the opportunity to be employee number one, and I liked the idea of pursuing something that could have immediate real-world applications. I ran the company as the Chief Scientific Officer for about six years before the investors wanted to move on; we ended up selling the company to what is now Life Technologies.

Kevin Lee and his daughter on a hike in the mountains of Switzerland.

I thought about returning to the academic track, but again, an opportunity came up to work on a Simons Foundation initiative through scientists I collaborated with during my postdoc. This position was really my network helping me; those scientists received funding from Simons and were very influential in getting me involved in reviewing grants. During my work with Simons, I reviewed grants and helped the foundation coordinate some of their activities. Through networking with other scientists in philanthropy, I found out about an opportunity at the Ellison Medical Foundation, which really began my career in philanthropy.

What do you find are key differences between the types of organizations you’ve worked for?

That first biotech company was early stage research, and the work was not unlike the research that might go on in an academic lab, just funded in a completely different way. The objective was not to publish papers but instead to develop intellectual property, so there was a lot of pitching the science to investors or partner companies. One downside of philanthropy is that you don’t have the same type of ownership of the work as you would in academia, but the benefit is you have much broader experience. You stop being an expert in one narrow field, but you get to become a novice at the whole world, which is exciting. There is a big advantage to that, but there’s obviously a tradeoff, too. I sometimes miss the experience of having the pride of ownership of one very deep question.

What skills during your graduate and postdoctoral training helped you get where you are?

Writing grants and applying for funding were very valuable experiences. The people who recruited me to the philanthropy world were looking for somebody who had the experience of applying for funding, and I continue to look for people with that skill. Knowing what it’s like to write a grant and have it reviewed is really valuable. Even applying for small fellowship funding, small pilot grants, or travel grants is a really great experience; it’s helpful to do as much of that as you can.

How do you manage your time?

Kevin Lee on a run with his daughter in Paris.

I try to carve out time for specific objectives, and I try to be as disciplined as possible. One of the things that I’ve been doing is dedicating specific days of the week to work on a specific project.

I also think it’s really good to have outside interests. It can feel like you’re taking up valuable hours by engaging in a non-work activity, but on the other hand, you’re producing a structure that forces you to accomplish things within a given time frame.

If you didn’t become a scientist, what do you think you’d be doing?

I would love to be a cook. It has some of the same benefits of science: you’re doing something with your hands, it’s fast-paced. The good part is that, very unlike science, you can eat the product at the end of it! It’s something everybody benefits from; everyone needs to eat, so you can make lots of friends that way.

About the author:

Tony Patelunas is a liaison on the Early Career Scientist Career Development Committee and a PhD Candidate in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. He strives to build a community of scientists that transcends industries and brings data-driven decision making to policy.

Learn more about the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Leadership Program.

NSF Program Officer Chinonye Nnakwe Whitley combines her skills in business, academia and entrepreneurship to empower underrepresented scientists. In addition to her work on the  NSF EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) team, she leads innovation training workshops for early career scientists.

In the Decoding Life series, we talk to geneticists with diverse career paths, tracing the many directions possible after research training. This series is brought to you by the GSA Early Career Scientist Career Development Subcommittee.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Chinonye Nnakwe Whitley empowers scientists from underrepresented groups and works as a Program Officer for the NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), where she oversees funding opportunities for researchers and educators. Chinonye also developed skillsets in entrepreneurship, a design thinking mindset, and served as an entrepreneurship ecosystem resource to scientists and engineers during her time as a Science and Technology Policy fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which she used to guide her career decisions.

How have your life experiences influenced your career?

Chinonye Nnakwe Whitley

I didn’t come into science at an early age; in fact, I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a general major. I was selected as a McNair scholar my sophomore year, which introduced me to basic science research in physiology and an incredible community of researchers who, like me, were also from underrepresented groups. I hadn’t known that this group of scholars existed! I realized a passion for basic science research and I pursued a PhD at the University of Chicago on DNA repair in mammalian cell systems and DNA damage signaling in baker’s yeast.  

As an African American woman, I’ve faced a number of micro- and macro- aggressions throughout my career; however, my support network encouraged me to succeed. Mid-way through my PhD, my interests changed from running a lab to exploring the business side of science and science policy. After working at a management consulting firm that focused on biotech and pharma companies, I became the Director of Graduate Diversity Initiatives, within the Provost’s Office at the University of Chicago, where I focused on attracting students from URM backgrounds to graduate education. My work included traveling the country to demystify the graduate application process for students and their mentors, and to recruit applicants. I worked across all PhD programs to build infrastructure, ran a summer research program and created a multi-institutional network that offered mentor training to faculty as well as grantsmanship skills to post-doctoral scholars. This experience led me to realize that the ability to positively impact scientists and engineers through my work is what speaks to my heart. Now, as a Program Officer for the EPSCoR program at the NSF, I am a public servant and work to build better research infrastructure and graduate training.

What are your responsibilities as Program Officer for EPSCoR?

EPSCoR’s goal is to enhance research competitiveness of targeted jurisdictions (states, territories, commonwealth) by strengthening STEM capacity and capability. As part of the team, I am a responsible steward of EPSCoR investments that develop the scientific workforce, increase inclusion of underrepresented individuals in STEM, and promote economic development from funded research. That is a big task! I am part of the team that manages awards for early career non-tenure track faculty to provide the opportunity to conduct research that could transform their careers and research trajectory.

My position also affords me the opportunity to have an independent research and development plan where I can pursue my own interests. My research centers around understanding how broadening participation in STEM intersects with entrepreneurship—especially for women of color.  During my AAAS fellowship, I met my mentor Anita La Salle, who runs the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program. Through her work, I watched shy individuals transform into entrepreneurs who confidently presented their business and research ideas. With I-Corps, I saw how entrepreneurial frameworks could be very effective in teaching skills to empower scientists—especially students from URM backgrounds. Separate from my work at NSF, I lead innovation workshops for scientists and engineers.

Why is entrepreneurship important to you, and how can learning about it help scientists?

Nnakwe Whitley at a workshop to expose first-generation college students to entrepreneurship, which originated from an NSF initiative she helped design as a AAAS fellow.

I was always interested in how my expertise was relevant to the greater community, and I found that innovation training provides the mindset and the communication skills to find ways to positively impact your community, whether it is academic or business. That’s the aspect of entrepreneurship that draws me—it’s a way to empower people.

Look at leading entrepreneurs; they are trying to change the world by meeting the needs of their customers. Entrepreneurship is the practice of solving a problem by building something new, then commercializing it. In my workshops, I train participants on how to be more flexible and creative with their ideas, to better collaborate with others, and to receive input from different types of people. These are skills you need whether you are building a company or a research project. Training in this space ultimately makes you a better scientist.

What skills have you learned from your different positions that are useful for readers to know about?

There are so many different things! For example, business email etiquette was something I did not know about until I was a consultant after graduate school. When you set up a meeting, you send a calendar invitation, and you send follow up emails. When I returned to working with academics after being a consultant, I ran meetings very differently. I prepared written agendas with planned topics that started with introductions and ended with action items.  Agendas make meetings guided discussions with specific direction and endings. I also learned organizational management etiquette and practices. When I came back to academia and sent calendar invitations, many academics gave me the side eye; I had to remind them that these are practices that I learned in order to better communicate and manage my time—and respect their time, as well.

What advice do you have for trainees who are having a difficult time with their career path?

Nnakwe Whitley and Dr. Barbara Natalizo giving the Innovation workshop at the 2018 National Postdoctoral Association’s Annual Conference.

People often think there’s only one perfect job for them, but the reality is that there are many wonderful options for you at any given time. Having to decide what you’re going to do for the rest of your life can feel impossible. Instead, it’s a great asset to have multidimensional mentorship and networking opportunities at professional, technical, and social levels. You may not know everything, but you can seek mentorship and learn from those mentors. When you learn about your options, your career decisions become an informed choice that you make. That way, if you realize that what you’re doing isn’t working for you, you can brainstorm and network your way into another wonderful choice.

Here’s a secret: some scientists may act like they know what they are doing in their careers all the time—they don’t. This is a dysfunctional belief that the culture of science imposes on us. What they don’t tell you is that it is key to seek advice and sponsorship from mentors and your peers to get through the ambiguous parts of your career journey.  You will eventually figure it out so be sure to ask for help! I envision my life in five-year chunks and I think about the steps that can get me there. I can only tell you where I want to be in five years; the choices are all pretty amazing, but I always leave room for serendipity to happen.

About the author:

Didem Sarikaya is the Co-Chair of the Early Career Scientist Career Development Committee and an FRSQ Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Davis. She is committed to bringing forward stories and tools for trainees to learn more about career options so they can develop personally meaningful career trajectories.

Learn more about the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Leadership Program.

An automated drug screening approach gives insight into rare NGLY1 deficiency.

Sometimes, diagnosing and treating an illness is straightforward. Other times, the diagnosis is challenging while the treatment is simple—or vice versa. In the case of a rare disease like NGLY1 Deficiency, both diagnosis and treatment can feel unreachable. The complex challenges of rare diseases prompt outside-the-box approaches—such as the partnership between a rare disease funding body and a fundamental research group. In an article published in G3, Portillo Rodriguez et al. report findings from just such a partnership, outlining a drug screening methodology used to shed light on this rare disease.

N-glycanase 1 (NGLY1) is an enzyme responsible for cleaving sugars from proteins as part of the endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation (ERAD) pathway, which oversees the breakdown of misfolded proteins. In humans, lack of NGLY1 leads to a condition that baffled clinicians and evaded identification until just a few years ago. NGLY1 Deficiency causes global developmental delay, seizures, floppy body, and an inability to produce tears; fewer than 50 patients with the condition have ever been identified, making research on treatments extremely difficult.

Funding for rare disease research can be hard to come by through standard mechanisms—with so few people affected, scarce research funds are rarely diverted their way. When their daughter Grace was diagnosed with NGLY1 Deficiency, Matt and Kristen Wilsey started the Grace Science Foundation, dedicated to finding a cure for the disease and others like it. In 2017, Grace Science partnered with Perlara, a biotech public benefit corporation (bioPBC) that uses model organisms to discover treatments for rare disease. Their goal is to use high-throughput methodologies in model organisms to identify drugs that could impact the rare disease in question.

The report by Portillo Rodriguez et al. is the first publication to come out of this NGLY1 partnership. The researchers developed an assay that let them efficiently screen a collection of 2,650 compounds for any that might modulate NGLY1-related phenotypes. They first generated a new Drosophila model of NGLY1 Deficiency by introducing a nonsense mutation into Pngl, the fly homolog of NGLY1; this model has a readily identifiable larval size phenotype, which let them perform their screen in 96-well plates with three larvae per well. Each well contained a different drug from the Microsource Spectrum compound library; an automated workflow imaged the plates and quantified the size of the larvae to determine which, if any, of the chemicals modified the mutant phenotype.

The screen produced a single validated hit: 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), which is an important signaling hormone that drives metamorphosis and molting in arthropods. While 20E is not a good drug candidate for human patients, the implication of the neuroendocrine axis in the pathophysiology of the Drosophila phenotype gives us more information into the mechanism of NGLY1/Pngl than we previously had.

Anything we can learn about the molecular players that contribute to rare disease brings us closer to finding interventions for patients—as does the availability of a validated screening platform. Because model organisms like Drosophila are so amenable to high-throughput screening of whole organism phenotypes, the hope is that approaches like these will bring people with rare diseases one step closer to treatments.

Citation

Defects in the Neuroendocrine Axis Contribute to Global Development Delay in a Drosophila Model of NGLY1 Deficiency
Tamy Portillo Rodriguez, Joshua D. Mast, Tom Hartl, Tom Lee, Peter Sand, Ethan O. Perlstein
G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics July 1, 2018 vol. 8 no. 7 2193-2204;
https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.118.300578
http://www.g3journal.org/content/8/7/2193

As a Principal at venture capital firm Canaan, Colleen Cuffaro works to identify biopharmaceutical companies that have the next big idea in drug development.

In the Decoding Life series, we talk to geneticists with diverse career paths, tracing the many directions possible after research training. This series is brought to you by the GSA Early Career Scientist Career Development Subcommittee.

Colleen Cuffaro has always had an interest in the drug development process. Before grad school, she planned to join a small biopharmaceutical company, but a serendipitous seminar put her on a course towards venture capital and early-stage investing. During her PhD, she found mentorship, built a network, and honed the skills that led to her current position as Principal at Canaan Partners, an early-stage healthcare venture capital firm. As a venture capitalist, she evaluates the market potential of new technology, invests in companies started by academics, and takes leadership roles in the new companies.

How did your life experiences lead you to your current career?

When I was 16 years old, I took chemistry, and I loved it. A friend’s dad was a chemist at a pharmaceutical company; he told me about his career, in which he got to invent new drugs. I thought that was the coolest application of chemistry, and it seemed like a really cool career path. Later, I was working as an analytical chemist after finishing undergrad when I started to learn about small biotech and pharma companies. I had known about the Mercks and Novartises and Pfizers of the world, but I hadn’t really had exposure to startup companies before.

I went to graduate school at Yale, and I never really considered an academic career. During my PhD, if you asked me where I hoped to be in 20 years, I’d have said “CEO of a biopharm startup.” That goal drove me to get involved in the Yale Healthcare and Life Sciences Club, of which I eventually became president. During this time, Tim Shannon, the general partner at Canaan, came and gave a talk at Yale. He was helping to translate technology from the university to the business world by starting companies with academics who were working on incredibly cool science. I was very inspired by his career and thought it sounded like the perfect job. I reached out to Tim for career advice, and when Canaan had an opening a year later, he reached out to me.

What is your role at Canaan?

When I started at Canaan, I wanted to learn how to start companies, so I joined as an Analyst. At Canaan, the roles are Analyst, Associate, Principal, Partner, and General Partner. You can think of Analyst and Associate as support roles for the investors; they evaluate potential companies to invest in. The Analyst position is supposed to be an apprenticeship, where you stay with the firm for two or three years to learn the business before doing something else or joining one of the companies you worked with. Once you move to Associate, there is some expectation that you’re interested in becoming a Partner, where you would make investments and sit on company boards. Principal is the level at which you begin to make your own investments, and that’s where I am now. I’m still learning from the General Partners, but I have a lot more independence.

What does your typical workday look like?

One of the best parts of my job is that it doesn’t look the same every day. From afar, it might look like just a lot of emails, phone calls, and meetings, but the contents of those emails, phone calls, and meetings are quite diverse. One hour, I could be looking at western blots from a lab at UConn and trying to decide if it’s exciting science that’s worthy of investment, and the next hour, I could be on the phone with a lawyer talking about the nitty-gritty of the investment terms. Some days, I might be traveling to a university to meet with academics to learn about their science to see if there’s fodder for starting a new company. Other days, I might be at a board meeting.

What experiences did you have during your academic training that are particularly useful now?

A very important skill I gained during grad school was how to break down large problems and questions into manageable pieces. In this job, I spend a lot of time reading the literature and distilling large amounts of scientific research down into a conclusion that informs the decision to invest or not. I apply skills I learned in developing the aims in my thesis research to breaking down these investments into prioritized questions, and then I diligently tackle each of them. That’s something I think graduate students are very good at. You might go to a seminar on a topic that has absolutely nothing to do with your thesis, but you learn how to listen and gather enough information to be able to ask intelligent questions. That’s very similar to what we do every day as we sit and listen to pitches. I may not be familiar with the topic, but I can extract enough information to make decisions about whether or not I think it’s a good investment.

How do you manage your time to work efficiently?

It’s incredibly important to be efficient in this job. You need to know what to address first so that you don’t waste your time on things that don’t need immediate attention. Prioritization is critical; otherwise, you can feel like you’re drowning. I’ve also found that having defined time in my day where I’m not doing work or thinking about work is important for me. I do Ironman triathlons, and at the peak of my training, I’m training 20 hours a week. To be able to fit that into a busy work schedule, you need to have defined time where you’re truly focused on the specific task at hand. By training in the morning before I get into the office, I can put my head down and focus on work once I’m there.

Are there additional skills you wish you had picked up during graduate training?

I think it would have been helpful to have more exposure to both the science and the business aspects of turning a lab discovery into a viable drug. To address this gap, I proposed and helped start the Canaan-Yale Fellowship program, which provides medical and life science graduate students at Yale the opportunity to gain exposure to drug development. The students do small projects to help evaluate if an investment we’re considering is worth making. In exchange for the time they’re spending in helping us with those projects, we teach them about venture capitalism. We teach them all the things that I wish I had learned before I started at Canaan.

As a mentor, what do you look for in mentees?

It’s important for a student to show that they are hungry to learn. I think we see a lot of young people today who, for whatever reasons, feel the need to overstate their experience, but for me, it’s very important for someone to come to a role like the Canaan Fellowship and just be eager to learn. I want them to be open and to absorb everything they can from us. That’s the way I’ve always approached things: be humbled by the experience of my mentors and take it all in.

About the author:

Tony Patelunas is a liaison on the Early Career Scientist Career Development Committee and a PhD Candidate in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. He strives to build a community of scientists that transcends industries and brings data-driven decision making to policy.

Learn more about the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Leadership Program.

As night fell, astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan watched a plant’s leaves, symmetrically arranged side-by-side on a stem, clamp shut. It was 1729, and he was studying the dramatic nocturnal movement of Mimosa pudica. Strangely, he found that the plant behaved the same way even when it wasn’t exposed to natural cycles of light and dark, making his observation the first known example of a circadian rhythm that didn’t depend on external stimuli. Circadian rhythms are biological cycles that repeat daily, matching one full rotation of Earth. After this discovery in a weedy creeper, the planet would rotate tens of thousands more times before scientists studying the daily habits of a household insect exposed the mechanics of the biological clock.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young for their studies of the circadian clock in fruit flies. But their discoveries weren’t just insect idiosyncrasies—they held true across much of the living world, from animals to plants and even some bacteria. And, as many researchers building on their work have found, circadian rhythms have immense importance in human health.

This story is not an isolated example: it’s the sixth time a Nobel Prize has been awarded for the study of fruit flies. In fact, a surprising number of Nobels—along with the insights and practical outcomes of biological research—have emerged from a few seemingly insignificant species: vermin, creepy-crawlies, and microscopic blobs. Alex Cagan’s artwork below samples just a few recent examples.

Sometimes, such research has been ridiculed—notably by politicians looking for examples of wasteful spending. In some ways, this is understandable. Research with clear, immediate applications is the easiest type to justify to the public. But the type of science that instead aims to fill gaps in our understanding of the world—known as “basic” or “foundational” research—doesn’t focus on specific applications, like a disease cure or a drought-resistant crop, so no one can predict the real-world impact of any individual line of inquiry. However, understanding the world we live in and the creatures we share it with has proven an essential fuel for technological, agricultural, and medical advances.

Art by Alex Cagan, @ATJCagan. Click to see a larger version. For more information on these Nobel prize-winning studies see: (1) Aplysia sea slugs, (2) Caenorhabditis elegans worms,  (3) Tetrahymena ciliates, (4) Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies,  (5) Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast

From fruit flies to cancer drugs

The most well-studied species on the planet are called model organisms, creatures chosen for intensive research because they are particularly suited to laboratory studies. Fruit flies, for example, have played a crucial role in unraveling the principles of genetics and evolution. Such fundamental insights can eventually lead to human health and other applications, but not in a predictable way.

For instance, in the late 1970s, scientists undertook an epic hunt for genes that affect the development of fruit fly larvae. This work uncovered several important biological pathways that govern how simple eggs transform into complex animals and earned Eric Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard the Nobel Prize. Among the genes discovered was Hedgehog, named for the spiky embryos that result when it is mutated. Related genes were identified in mammals, and decades of work eventually revealed their connections to cancer and other diseases. 

Since 2012, two drugs that specifically inhibit tumor growth by targeting the Hedgehog pathway have been approved by the FDA to treat basal cell carcinoma, giving patients with advanced cases of this type of skin cancer a better chance of survival. Yet Wieschaus and Nüsslein-Volhard hadn’t set out to cure a disease—they were simply trying to understand how life works.

From dung gnats to developmental disorders

Different model organisms cater to different scientific needs. For example, mice and rats are mammals, like humans, which means we share much of our biology. The stripy zebrafish has a transparent embryo that allows scientists to watch development happen in real time. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans can be rapidly grown in dishes, and because its cell divisions can be individually tracked through a precisely defined ballet, it’s another good choice for studying development. The mustard cress Arabidopsis thaliana is a fast-growing weed with a tiny genome that is much easier to study than the massive genomes of key crops like wheat and corn.

Without knowing why scientists choose particular species, model organism research can appear frivolous—and some creatures scientists choose to study may even seem disgusting. Take, for example, the dung gnat Sciara coprophila. Studies on this poop-loving insect revealed the phenomenon of genomic imprinting, in which genes are turned on or off depending on whether they were inherited from the father or the mother.

As it turns out, imprinting exists in humans—and has important consequences. For example, there is a stretch of chromosome 15 that is turned off in the copy inherited from the mother but turned on in the paternal copy. If the paternal copy of chromosome 15 is missing or has a mutation in the imprinted region, the result is Prader-Willi syndrome. This serious disease is characterized by cognitive disabilities and constant hunger, often leading to obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Another nearby region of the chromosome shows the opposite pattern: the maternal genes are normally activated while the paternal ones are turned off. Individuals missing the maternal copy of these genes have Angelman syndrome, which causes developmental delays, seizures, and frequent smiling and laughing.

Insights from model organisms have long helped scientists understand the biology behind such genetic diseases, but in recent years model organism researchers have become even more directly involved in diagnosing the millions of people affected—and in searching for treatments.

Lessons from microbes

Some model organisms differ even more from us than insects do. For example, humans and the yeast cells we use to make bread and beer last shared a common ancestor a billion years ago. Yet brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is one of the most thoroughly studied organisms on the planet. These single-celled microbes share many characteristics with human cells, but they can be rapidly grown in great numbers in a flask or petri dish, and they have a life cycle and genome that make their genetics easier to study.

Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for research on yeast, including the 2016 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, awarded to Yoshimori Ohsumi. The prize was for his work on autophagy, a kind of cellular housekeeping that helps clear the cell of damaged proteins and other potentially toxic debris. The role of this recycling and disposal system in human disease was not appreciated until Ohsumi and his colleagues’ work in the 1990s revealed the yeast genes that orchestrate the process. Thanks to the knowledge and tools made possible by this basic research, studies of autophagy in animals have exploded since the 2000s, revealing its complex roles in embryonic development, cell starvation, infection defense, neurodegenerative disease, and cancer.

The road from a discovery to its impact on society is rarely straight. Few of the scientists in these stories could have predicted how their work might one day be applied. Every day in labs across the country, scientists start down new paths that could eventually lead to the next cancer drug or technique for controlling disease-carrying pests. But it will only be possible to follow these new paths if we, as a society, continue to support the pursuit of knowledge—with or without clear applications.

This post was co-authored by Nicole Haloupek and Cristy Gelling based on an article we wrote for the March for Science blog. The text has been revised and updated to include the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

President Trump has proposed crippling cuts to federally supported research —including a reduction of medical research funding by nearly a fifth—that would be a disaster not just for innovation, but for Americans’ health and economic prosperity. Cuts at this unprecedented scale would have both immediate and long-term consequences: Promising research projects abandoned, labs closed, and cures to diseases like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and drug addiction remaining beyond our grasp. We would squander our investments in training a skilled scientific workforce that populates the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, hindering our ability to develop new drugs. In the long run, the loss of funding would impact America’s healthcare system.

The proposed $5.8 billion cut to the NIH budget would be the equivalent of eliminating the entire budget for cancer research, or eliminating thousands of research grants! The proposed draconian 19% reduction would damage or halt projects ranging from child health to aging. Beyond the NIH, other agencies—including the USDA, DOE, and EPA—that fund the genetics community would have their budgets slashed.

While thousands of researchers would lose funding, forcing people in all stages of their careers out of research, it is the public who ultimately suffers the most from such broad and deep cuts. Advances in treating disease will slow. Agricultural innovations that protect the nation’s food supply will be abandoned. New sources of energy will not be developed. Our ability to predict severe storms and weather will falter. Monitoring of emerging infectious diseases will be less effective.

But the President’s budget outline is just a proposal: It is Congress that will ultimately decide how the budget is allocated. Medical research has traditionally been an investment with broad bipartisan support. It was the Republican-controlled Congress that gave the NIH a $2 billion funding boost for 2016, and had proposed additional increases for 2017. It was the Republican-controlled Congress that in December passed the 21st Century Cures Act with additional funding for NIH initiatives. Representatives from both parties have already expressed concern about the cuts to the NIH. Your actions in the coming months will make a difference.

Speak out about the importance of research funding and basic science. Contact your Senators and Representatives; their contact details are in the FASEB Legislative Action Center. Find advocacy resources via the Advocacy Toolkit. Participate in FASEB’s action alert pressing Congress to complete the 2017 budget (click on “advocacy campaigns” under the “Actions” section). Show your support in the March for Science on April 22^nd being held in DC and in marches around the country (GSA is an official partner of the March).

Stay tuned for updates on GSA’s efforts to fight this budget proposal and tips on how to make your own voice heard on Capitol Hill.

Lynn Cooley
President, Genetics Society of America

Jeannie T. Lee
Vice-President, Genetics Society of America