Innovation & Policy with Sudip Parikh

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to a special edition of AMSEcast as we celebrate 250 years of American innovation. With much appreciated support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, we’re undertaking a series of AMSEcast interviews focusing on American innovations as part of our commemoration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.

0:57 On this episode, I’m honored to be joined in person in Washington, D.C. By Dr. Sudip Parikh. With undergraduate studies in journalism, and then in materials science at University of North Carolina, and his PhD in macromolecular structure and chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, Sudip has an amazing career that’s included service as science advisor to the Senate Appropriations Committee, as vice president at Battelle, senior vice president and managing director at DIA global, and today as the 19th chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, and executive publisher of the Science family of journals, a post who began in January 2020.

1:38 Sudip, thanks so much for joining us on the AMSEcast. Thanks so much for having me. I’m honored to be here. It’s a real, real pleasure. You’ve had such an amazing career that’s touched on so many points of science and engineering, I kind of thought we would look at our key theme of innovation by approaching it in three big buckets, if that’s all right with [laugh] you. So, kind of, dissemination of information, advocacy, and product development. So, I know you were an expert in developing a host of healthcare products and therapies. When you were in that business, what did you find were the primary instigators of innovation, and what were the primary obstacles to innovation? That’s a great question. The instigators were really when disciplines got together.

2:20 That’s where it got exciting, particularly at a place like Battelle. When you can bring together molecular biologists and engineers, and you can build a device to deliver a medicine, it’s exciting. And it’s exciting for the basic part of it, which is, I just love great engineering. You know, seeing a little gadget that can make something happen in a perfectly precise way every time, no matter who does it, is a feat of engineering. And then there’s the audacity of thinking that we can work with molecules, at the molecular level, in living things and fix things. There’s an audacity to that that’s incredible. And so, you put those things together, and you realize the power that is in our hands. And then you think, my gosh, what if we brought together four or five of those disciplines?

3:02 What if, in the mix, you add computational power, AI now? You know, there’s just so much that comes together when you bring these disciplines together. So, that’s the instigators. Things to hold you back: silos. You know, in every organization, no matter how wonderful they are, you have silos that build between these disciplines. Some of those silos are real in terms of walls and buildings, and some of them are in our minds, which is the jargon that we have to create for precision. And so, how do we lower those real barriers and those virtual barriers? And at a place like Battelle, one of the things we did for the physical barriers was just to say, hey, we’re all going to be in a room. We’d have big rooms that you could set up in any way you wanted, and the teams would all be based there.

3:42 You bring the molecular biologists and engineers into the same room, so you could break down the concrete walls that way. The mental barriers are harder. They require actually spending time together and getting to know one another, and talking over a table, maybe while you’re having lunch, and seeing, oh, now I see what that three letter acronym means. It actually is something relatively simple. I just needed to understand that. And that can happen over time, and I think we’ve got to do more of it if we’re going to get more innovation. I think in this day and age, too, not to sound like the old guy here, but as we do social media, and emails, and that type of thing, in terms of our communications, that back and forth over the lunch table, I think, is getting less. So, how do we keep those silos, if we break them down, how we keep them broken down is a challenge.

4:23 There’s so many things that I can—you know, we sort of look down on social media sometimes, but, you know, it’s a great start. It’s a great start. It’s a great exposure. In the right spaces, social media is a wonderful place for a biologist to interact with an ecologist to interact with a physicist. But then there’s going to be a next step. And that next step really requires some real time together, where you can get to know one another. And there’s also that bond of trust that you create when you do that. When you create that bond of trust, then it’s fun to have an intellectual exploration of what’s possible, and it’s hard to do that over 180 characters. And you’re right. I’ve seen this in just about every field. Before I ran science museums, as I told you, I ran presidential museums, and great staff members, but silos would develop just almost naturally over time.

5:07 So, how you are aware of that, how you break those down and keep them down is important. So, I want to get to AAAS. Can you tell us a bit about what AAAS is, when it was created, and what it does? The AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was created in 1848, 176 years ago. It was founded by a group of scientists in the United States who wanted to get together and talk about science, and they modeled it after the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 87 of them got together in Philadelphia—they were all guys because it was 1848—remember, this pre-Civil War, right, so anytime you have an organization that’s 176 years old, they are of their time. Now, the thing I like to talk about with AAAS is that over that 176 years, it has both had evolution and revolution so that it is still relevant, and I would say, boldly at the front of innovation, and also in creating a scientific enterprise that looks like America and that takes advantage of the creativity that comes from a diversity of thought.

6:08 And so, that’s happened through evolution and revolution. I know, talking about the evolution of creativity in America and what makes America unique in that way—in many ways, I think—what do you think the role of immigration has been of getting in new ideas from around the world into this nation? The United States has such an amazing story. I love everything about the story of immigration, and the beacon that this country is. It has drawn folks for, you know, two centuries, over two centuries, and when you look at the innovations that have happened in the country, they are a mix of both people that are here and people that have immigrated here.

6:49 They are a mix of hard work and sweat that must happen after an idea. That doesn’t happen just because you have an I—there’s a bazillion ideas out there; most of them never amount to anything because people don’t follow through. This is a place where you can do that. It’s a place where it’s encouraged, and it’s a place that, over the past 80 years, we’ve also said we’re going to support science and the scientific enterprise, and we’re going to support technology. And when you put that mix together—Ronald Reagan had a great quote at his very last speech where he says, you know, “There’s one thing to celebrate about America is this, which is that, you know, when you move to another country, you can be a person in that country, and you can even participate in it, but when you move to America, no matter where you are from in the world, you can be an American.” And that’s why you end up with an organization that’s 176 years old and has a CEO named Sudip Parikh, and has a board that is majority women.

7:39 And it’s still Nobel Prize winners, it’s still National Academy members, it’s still leaders in scientific fields, but it changes over time because this country has this great aspiration, and that aspiration is powerful, it’s inspiring, and it’s never quite reached. It’s always asymptotic, right, if I’m talking to scientists. We’re never going to reach perfection, but we’re always going to be working harder to make it just a little bit better. And sometimes we have setbacks. Immigration is a key part of that story, and it’s a part of the story that I hope we never change because it is, you know, when you’re calling on 7 billion people from around the world for creative talent, it’s amazing what’s possible.

8:20 You had service on Capitol Hill. We’re sitting here in Washington, D.C. Today, and we talk about America, this being our wonderful nation’s capital. When you worked here, what did you find were the key elements when you were working with members of Congress? How did you garner support for innovation? Because innovation, by definition, can be risky, unknown. How did that work with folks who most likely were not coming from a scientific background? Yeah, you know, most of our politicians are lawyers or business people by background, and what I found, though, is that in Congress, most if not all, would tell you they support research and development, they support science and technology.

9:01 But then there were champions, and that was really critical. There are some folks who would make this their number one issue to say, I want to see more funding go into research and development. I want to see investment in basic research. And that’s where the conversation had to happen, which is, how do you have a conversation about basic research? How do you do that in a way that makes sense to folks? And what I found is that, as scientists and engineers, we’re taught to be both precise and accurate, right? It’s that whole thing about a target, and if you’re precise, the three arrows end up right on top of each other, and if you’re accurate, they also end up in the middle of the target, in the bull’s eye. And we’re taught to be both. We want all three arrows in the center of that target. But to have precision requires having jargon.

9:43 It requires being able to talk about things in very specific ways, and when you do that, you are unintentionally creating a barrier to communication. And so, you have to realize that when you’re talking in terms of policy or you’re talking to politicians, you have to modulate, do I need to be precise in this conversation, do I need to be accurate in this conversation, and how much can I modulate it so I can get the point across? And so, you know, examples of that are, if you’re talking about an experiment in biology and you want to use the name of a molecule, my gosh, those names, you know, as a structural biologist, I get confused by them. And so, you have to take that and say, is that important to this conversation? And one of the things that came out while I was in Congress was the structure of the ribosome.

10:24 Now, the ribosome is a beautiful molecule that is really critical to life. Life doesn’t exist without it. And the beautiful thing that was learned at that time was that the protein is gigantic, but actually the thing that does the catalysis, where the critical reaction happens, is done by RNA. And there’s something profound about that. What it tells us is that reaction critical to life began with RNA, not protein, and what that means is that there’s implications for the development of life overall, there’s implications for medicine. And so, I took this to one of the senators, and I said, “Gosh, Senator, look at this. This is the structure of the ribosome. Look what it’s telling us.

11:07 It has all these implications about life.” And the senator looked at me and said, “Sudip, that’s a great thing. It’s a great argument for an agency that’s a few billion dollars, but the National Institutes of Health is a, at that time, $24 billion agency. Tell me something else. Tell me something more.” And you know, you can say that, well, gosh, the ribosome is different in different species and in different—germs versus humans—and I said germs, right? You don’t say [unintelligible] . You say germs—and suddenly you realize, ah, it can be the basis for therapies and treatments. And suddenly it becomes valuable for a $24 billion agency, not a $7 billion agency. You have to be able to have those kinds of conversations, be able to modulate precision and accuracy for what you’re trying to accomplish. Always curious, those champions you talk about on Capitol Hill.

11:48 What differentiates them? Why do they become champions? Is it a matter of personal interest, constituencies, that type of thing, or is it something else? You know, it can be a unique story every time. Sometimes it is the fact that they happen to represent a district that has a large facility in it. You know, usually the person who represents Oak Ridge is a champion for the Department of Energy, almost always, Democrat or Republican. So, that’s one way. The other is that they have a story. For example, in support of biomedical research, they might have a story in their family where biomedical research has made a difference, and that becomes a powerful source of their entry into support for the sciences. And then in other cases, it is just that they happened to be put on a committee that they didn’t even realize what it was, and they learned about it, and they became intrigued.

12:34 And we see that all the time. You know, the current ranking member on the House Science Committee is Frank Lucas, a wonderful member of Congress. He will tell you, you know, he’s a farmer, and he’s also one of the best champions of science that we have in Congress because he recognizes the value of science and technology to the country. As a former farm boy, I can tell you, I’m proud of that. That’s great [laugh] . So, from your experience again on Capitol Hill, if you look back at our history, are there any specific policies you see that came out of Washington, you say were really important to helping spur innovation? Those of us in science policy, we all point back to 1945 and we point back to Vannevar Bush who was working for Roosevelt, and in 1945 he basically wrote himself a letter with some questions, and had Roosevelt sign it, and then he answered those questions, and that turned into something called the Endless Frontier.

13:22 And it basically describes the model that we’ve built upon ever since then, which is this idea that the government ought to fund basic research, that basic research ought to be carried out, for the most part in academia, and that at the same time, would be training a future workforce, and that as discovery happened, the industry and the private sector would take it from there and turn it into products for consumers, and for the nation, and for national security. Now, that’s a beautiful idea in 1945, and we often give it too much credit. And one of the things that I say is that Vannevar Bush would be blown away if he saw the enterprise that we have today because it looks nothing like what he described. In fact, we have built organically on top of it, a much more beautiful, much more powerful, much more profound scientific enterprise.

14:08 That enterprise has federal investment as heat and light, about $200 billion a year of federal investment, but then it has private sector investment of around $700 billion a year. Now, Buch never imagined that. He never imagined there’d be $700 billion worth of investment by the private sector. And philanthropy: billions of dollars of investment by philanthropy, he never imagined that. That higher education would take on roles related to product development, he never imagined that. And so, one of the things that I’ve become really an advocate for is to say, yes, we should give proper credit to that time in 1945, and the policies that were created then, but we also have to recognize what the enterprise looks like today, so that we can make the right kinds of policy prescriptions and recommendations that are needed to get us to the future.

14:56 What got us to today, all those wonderful policy prescriptions that got us to today are not going to help us win the future. They’re not going to get us to where we need to be, and so we’ve got to recognize that. And so, when I think of what is a great policy prescription, one is just money. This country has been an incredible supporter of science and technology, like the world has never seen before, and what that’s meant is other countries are now following us, right? They’ve seen the power that comes from that because they recognize that economic growth, normally—when you’re an economist, you say it comes from a couple things. One is it comes from the growth of population. It comes from demographics. You get incremental growth because you added another person. The other way is a rise in productivity, which is that, hey, those people can do more stuff and make more stuff, and that increases your economy.

15:44 But there’s another thing, and that is science and technology. It’s a wild card. It can lead to step function changes in economic growth. And if you can get step function changes in economic growth, you can build a society that goes to the Moon, that goes to Mars, that cures disease, that feeds eight billion people, you can do that when you have that kind of disruption, which is what the country invented. Our good friend, Guru Madhavan, who helped connect us here today, has spoken pretty eloquently to me in the past on AMSEcast about striking a balance between innovation and maintaining current systems and infrastructure, and how we do that moving forward. So, how do you see us striking that balance of having those disruptive innovations but also maintaining our infrastructure and systems that we have?

16:31 It’s a really critical question. In 1945, if you’d asked somebody in policy, they would say, “Well, gosh, the federal government is in charge of the infrastructure.” Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, these are the places where big infrastructure is going to be. Big telescopes at Arecibo and elsewhere are going to be government funded. When you look at it from the point of view of 2024, we have to realize that infrastructure, now because of the fact that the private sector is also investing, some of that infrastructure that is the backbone of our technology, whether it’s the internet, artificial intelligence, or even in biology, is coming from the private sector. We have to be recognizing that there has to be a level of coordination and situational awareness between the federal government, and industry, and philanthropy that has never been seen before.

17:17 Because we have to know what is the linchpin of this particular area of science and technology? We have to understand well, who’s supporting that? Who is making sure that if we are wanting to make our grid dependent upon lithium, where are we getting that? Is somebody taking care of the supply chain? Who is looking at all that? And in the past, we allowed that to happen organically, but we can’t do that anymore, and that’s part of what I mean when I say that what got us to here isn’t going to get us to there. As the publisher of the Science family of journals, as we talk about these ideas for the future, what do you see as your role of disseminating those ideas, versus talking about, kind of, incremental changes to our current knowledge? So, in terms of bringing radical new ideas, if that’s the right word, to the table, versus incremental changes.

18:04 What a privilege it is, first of all, just let me say this out loud, it’s a privilege for me to get to be the executive publisher of Science. The journal was started by Thomas Edison in 1880. He gave the first $10,000 for it, and then when he got bored of it, Alexander Graham Bell gave the second $10,000 for it. And so, it has this rich history going back to 1880, and it is the manifestation of that idea of multidisciplinary science, right? It has every kind of science in it, and the front matter is really about, how do you synthesize that for a physicist to be able to learn about biology? And when you can do that, and when you can say, okay, there’s going to be incremental work that happens—and that might be published in Science. It might not be, might be published somewhere else—but when there are these moments of inspiration that come because of basic discovery, CRISPR, you know the idea that you can edit genes, and you can do it in a way that takes advantage of the human genome project that, you know, that we spent billions of dollars on, that only comes about when you’ve got people talking to one another across disciplines, and that happens at a place like Science.

19:04 It’s not the only place, but I would say that we are wedded to the idea that communication, that dissemination, is critically important. We’re not wedded to the idea that it’s always going to be a paper magazine. I appreciate that. What I’ve learned is that anybody who has a small pox inoculation, so who has the scar on their arm from that, so that means they’re over 50, they like reading a paper magazine. That’s where they see the synthesis. What we’ve also learned is those of us who don’t have that smallpox vaccination, because we eradicated smallpox, those folks, they like to see that synthesis in a different way. They’re going to want to see it online. They’re going to want to see it through newsletters. They’re going to want to see it through social media. And so, we are wedded to the idea that synthesis has to happen, and that multidisciplinary science is the way forward, and it’s the only way we’re going to solve big problems.

19:51 And we’re also, we are energized by the idea that it’s going to change radically over the next ten years and twenty years. Because it’s one of those things that happens like a phase transition. Those of us who read the magazine, we read it, we read it, we read it, and then all of a sudden, [snaps finger] it changes. I just snapped my finger, for those of you on the podcast. You know, it changes like that: it happens, slow, slow, slow, then fast. And we want to be at the vanguard of that because we recognize that if we can be involved in dissemination, then we can be a catalyst for what comes next. Is there a thought as you make that transition, that any process will have to change? I know peer reviewed; is that part of your process? Will that support, or perhaps not support talking about innovation, new things in the journals?

20:32 It requires rethinking what stages are dissemination important? So, for example, pre-prints are before peer review, and they’re incredibly valuable. We are incredibly supportive of peer review, even though it happens before a paper ever gets to us at Science. And the reason we are is because we know that as people put their ideas up in a pre-print server, they can have a conversation online that is radically faster than what was imagined in the 1600s, right? In the 1600s, you’d write things down in a book, that book would get disseminated over the course of 20 years, and over the course of 20 years, you’d start to get feedback. We can take that down to 20 minutes because what can happen is you’re sharing that online. Now, that has to still be part of the story.

21:14 There’s another part of the story, which is, how do you get to a version of record? How do you get to a place where, all right, this is the finished product for that, so that we can then use that for citations and for the formal part of getting science done? But we have to be able to think in terms of two things at once, which is that there is a need for that process, but there’s also a need for this fast, dynamic, in-the-moment communication of science because that’s how we’re going to get to vaccines faster, when needed; that’s how we’re going to get to treatments faster, when needed; that’s also how we’re going to solve big problems like, if you’ve got to temporarily build a bridge over a river because a boat ran into your bridge, how are you going to do that? And how are you going to crowdsource ideas to make that happen in the fastest way, and in the most efficient way, and in the most affordable way?

21:56 So, you’re really talking about how we maintain this edge and innovation we’ve had for 250 years, for the next 250. Amen. I’m all about that. How are we going to do that? Because if people are copying what we’ve already done—and that’s great, we were leading for that very reason—now is the time to say, how are we going to stay at the vanguard? That’s right. Ask that question. My last question for you is related to that: we do so much work with K through 12 students at AMSE and K-25. What do you think are the best ways to inspire that next generation of scientists, engineers, and innovators as we move forward? I think that there are several things. One is, when you see great stuff, there’s nothing like seeing great engineering.

22:36 When you see a beautiful bridge, when you see a rocket, when you see a robotic mission to a far off planet, there is nothing like that. And that’s what inspired me. That’s what inspired many others, I think. The other is when you see that person who’s doing that work in your community. When you recognize that we can see the mountains of Pluto. I love the fact that we know that there are methane-covered mountains on Pluto. That blows me away that we know that. And when you recognize that the person who made that possible is living in your community, or who grew up in your community, that makes a world of difference, to recognize there’s a connection between that thing that seems like magic, and it’s actually not magic. It’s math, and it’s physics, and it’s engineering.

23:18 We want to be able to see that in our communities. And so, if we can do those two things, which is first of all, to inspire with great works, and then the second is to show that it’s human. It is human. And that there are some folks like Einstein who are extraordinary, but so much of this happens from humans that are flawed, we make mistakes, and yet we are inspired to do something great. We are inspired to do something that pushes humanity farther. And when you see that, how would you not want to be involved in science? Now, there’s a whole bunch of practical things involved, which is, we got to make it a better job, better profession. If you want to be an engineer, we shouldn’t make it to where you’ve got to be able to afford tuition at a high price to get to your first job in engineering.

24:00 If you want to be in molecular biology or in the sciences, you shouldn’t have to realize that you have to wait ten years or twenty years before you get to your first investigator-initiated grant. We have to fix the things that are involved in the professions that make it harder and make it tougher for folks to be creative and innovative and lead. But the inspiration, my gosh, it’s all around us. Well, certainly an inspiring conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us in AMSEcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. It was terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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