NEB Podcast #70 -
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Manager & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewee: Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D., Baker Family Director of Sarafan ChEM-H, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology and of Radiology, Stanford University
Lydia Morrison:
Welcome to the Lessons from Lab and Life Podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I'm your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today I'm joined in front of a live studio audience by Nobel Laureate Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi. Dr. Bertozzi's impact in the field of glycosylation has been profound, helping enable our current understanding of disease and inflammation presentation and potential vehicles for treatment. Carolyn, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Lydia Morrison:
We're so excited to have you here. You have such a lauded career, and we certainly want to cover some of the incredible moments in your professional journey, but I was hoping that we could start in the present. So I wanted to know if you could tell our listeners what your lab focuses on. I know it's glycobiology and the role of glycans in disease progression and inflammation and infections. Could you share with us what your lab at Stanford University is currently focused on?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yes, thank you. So as you mentioned, we work in the area of glycoscience, and that means that we study the biological functions of mostly cell surface associated glycans, and a big part of our technology platform to study those glycans comes from chemical biology. So I would say we're kind of a hybrid of a chemistry lab and a biology lab, but with a focus on sugar molecules.
Lydia Morrison:
And what are you currently studying in the lab with regard to those sugar molecules?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Well, right now the two big research areas in my lab focus on cancer immune therapy, and it turns out there's a role for cell surface sugars in modulating the responsiveness of immune cells to cancer cells. We try to develop new therapeutics that target those pathways. So that's a major area. And then there's a newer area of interest in the lab, which is in the glycobiology of the blood-brain barrier.
And we're trying to understand how cell surface glycans contribute to the integrity of that barrier, which tends to erode as we age, and also how we might leverage the glycans at the blood-brain barrier to be able to better deliver certain types of therapeutics across that barrier to treat diseases of the brain.
Lydia Morrison:
Wow. Really some amazing applications of glycobiology to human health challenges that we're currently facing, and obviously targeting of cancer therapeutics and immune response to cancer is such an important field in terms of moving the needle in terms of translational science and therapies.
I'm curious, you won a Nobel Prize just over two years ago for the development of bioorthogonal chemistry. Could you explain what bioorthogonal chemistry is to our audience because I think that'll be really important as we talk about the role of these glycans in being markers of cancer cells or other infections or inflammation responses?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Definitely. So bioorthogonal chemistry is a type of chemistry that my lab first invented back in the late 1990s. And at the time, we were motivated to develop these types of chemistries because we very specifically wanted to study cell surface sugar molecules using imaging technologies. And at that time in the 1990s, there were some really amazing tools that had just hit the scene for imaging of proteins in living cells and living systems, living animals.
And those of us who study glycans, the glycobiologists amongst us, were jealous because we didn't have those kinds of tools to study glycans. They were pretty much confined to studying proteins. So when I started my own lab, which was at UC Berkeley at the time, the first goal was to come up with a new technology that we could use to study sugar molecules using imaging like fluorescence imaging, for example, on live cells and in live animals.
And the idea that we had was to basically arm the sugars with a chemical handle that we could then use to conjugate imaging probes. But it turns out to do that in living cells and in living animals, you have to have a type of chemistry where a probe and a sugar could come together and form a bond in a way that doesn't interact with any other molecule on the cell.
And there wasn't really any chemistry at the time that was suitable for that. So we rolled up our sleeves and said, "We have to invent some new chemical reactions that we can use for this." And that was the genesis of bioorthogonal chemistry originally.
But then as the years went by, it turns out that those same chemical reactions that we used to image sugars were really useful for lots of other applications in biology, both in research and more recently in making therapeutics. So I think it was the widespread impact of the chemistries beyond my lab is what was recognized with the Nobel Prize.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, it certainly seems so. And you mentioned some of the imaging that you did with those, and I saw some of the videos earlier, and I've always thought that fluorescence imaging in cells in vivo is so powerful because you can really see how things are moving, these tiny molecules that we talk about and think about. I think that that obviously super powerful, and you were recognized with a Nobel Prize for it. What was it like to win a Nobel Prize on a personal level and how do you feel like it affected your career?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Well, on a personal level, it's pretty surreal. I mean, it's such an unusual experience for a scientist. I mean, very few people... Of all the highly deserving people that have made an enormous impact in science, a very small fraction of them are going to end up in a Nobel laureate situation. I recognized at the time how rarefied that group of people is.
So it definitely affected me pretty profoundly in terms of understanding what that platform is like and how rare that is, and what a privilege it is to have the platform of a Nobel Prize, both to execute your own science, but also to articulate to the world with a microphone that most people don't have about your philosophies of science.
So it impacted me because I think it definitely made me look inside and try and understand what can I do that's beneficial now that I might not have been able to do before. So it has definitely inspired me to use my voice in ways that I might not have been able to before.
But then in a very practical sense, the Nobel Prize comes with certain expectations and responsibilities, and that includes participating in events, especially on an international stage, serving in advisory roles in different situations, either for the government, less so now than a few months ago.
But for pharmaceutical companies and the industries that I participate in. For example, women in science, there's very few women Nobel laureates in the sciences, and right now there's only... By the way, I was female chemistry Nobel laureate number eight.
Lydia Morrison:
Wow! Congratulations!
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
And only five of us are alive today, and only three are in the United States. So when people ask me to come to an event and be the voice of a female chemistry Nobel laureate, there aren't that many other people. There's not like a whole bunch of alternatives. So I definitely feel some pressure to accept these invitations and capitalize on these opportunities and do what I can to break down barriers, but it's time-consuming, right?
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. I could see there being a level of pressure too as being one of the sole female representatives of Nobel laureates. You're obviously an amazing communicator, and I think that I really appreciate that you talk about using your voice to communicate science and to spread the messages about science that are really important.
Obviously I'm a huge fan of science communication, and I think it's increasingly important that we all be good communicators about our research and the importance of science in moving therapies forward, in moving technologies forward, in protecting our planet. So many important roles for science. You mentioned also that it's been an opportunity for you to grow into more biotechnology adventures.
You co-founded your first biotechnology startup in 2001, and I believe since then you've added 13 more. So you're at a total of 14 companies that you've helped found at this point, which is amazing. What made you pursue industry interests initially, and then what keeps you coming back because clearly you're a bit of a serial entrepreneur?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
That's correct. And I guess my interest in founding companies started in graduate school. I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley, which is in the Bay Area, and that's one of the places that was the birthplace of the biotechnology industry. And even when I was in graduate school in the late 1980s, there was a lot of excitement and a lot of energy out there in that part of the world around companies like Genentech and Amgen.
And people in the chemical sciences have a long-standing history of mostly going into the biopharmaceutical industry after their PhD. So most of my friends were headed for industry in some form. So when I was in graduate school, I worked for a PhD advisor who was really keen to start companies, and it was quite fashionable at that time for young professors at Berkeley or Stanford or UC San Francisco to try to translate their work out into a spin-out company.
So I kind of saw that as a spectator, as a PhD student. And then that first company you mentioned, that was the first company I formed. I was a fairly young assistant professor at the time. And the company was really led by my postdoc advisor, and it was based on the work I had done in his lab several years earlier. And so he supplied the energy and the experience. It was, again, kind of like a second part. I was Robin and he was Batman.
So that was a really interesting learning experience and shocking in a way. That company didn't make it. We got close to an IND ready asset that we had in licensed, but the economy was bouncing around at the time and it was hard for us to raise a series B of financing without diluting our series A investors to a point where they weren't content with that. So that was an example where the science was amazing.
It worked as we had hoped. We got very close to putting a molecule into the clinic. But strictly for business reasons having to do with our investors' sentiment at the time, the company was shut down. And until that moment I didn't fully understand that a successful company, part of it is really great science, part of it is luck, and a big part of it is having the winds all blowing in the same direction between your investors and the economy and the markets.
It took a while for me to get my head around the fact that great science and potential cures for patients will never see the light of day because of all of these other factors, and that's just the way this market works. I learned a lot, but I became a little bit cynical after that experience. And I didn't dive back in again to another company until around 2008. So I took a break from all that because it was really disappointing to have your first company go down in flames like that for nothing to do with the science.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. No pun intended, but it does sound like a tough pill to swallow, but it also sounds like a really valuable learning experience. And I think that we at New England Biolabs have witnessed that same phenomenon of companies having a wonderful idea and the science being true and tested and the funding not being there, or maybe it's the interest of the public, or as you say, maybe just the winds of change affecting it. It certainly can greatly affect the success or failure of a company as it seems you learned. What made you want to try again?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
The second company I formed, again, around 2008, so I was more experienced now in my job in understanding the biotech ecosystem. And I had a graduate student who was really set on starting a company out of grad school. He wanted his career to be one of a founder of a company, be his own boss, launch his own startup. And he said to me, "Are there any projects in the lab that you feel are the closest to being potentially translatable into a company?"
And there was a project that I had been thinking about. It wasn't his thesis project. He worked on something else for his thesis. But I said, "Well, why don't you spend the next six months getting familiar with this other project that these other people are working on in the lab because I think that's maybe where a startup could come from?" And it was a technology that I actually mentioned briefly this morning in the lecture.
It was the aldehyde tag method for making antibody drug conjugates. And in 2008, antibody drug conjugates hadn't yet hit their second wave of popularity. They were in a bit of a lull at that time. And we thought that some of the problems that had soured the industry on antibody drug conjugates were problems we could solve with this chemistry. So we formed a company and we were able to raise some money even in difficult time, 2008.
You might remember it wasn't the best time. It was a recession. But we survived through those difficult years, and eventually we were acquired by a larger conglomerate named Catalent. And so we had an exit. And it wasn't like a windfall type of exit, but it was a success in the sense that we were able to make products. And several of those products are now in the clinic.
Hopefully we'll have some cancer medicines, so over the next few years they get approved if things go well. But the timeline for a startup biotech company that's therapeutics focused to actually producing a product, that's a decade or more usually. So these are long-term investments.
Lydia Morrison:
But it must be so fulfilling to see your technology that you help develop and the companies that you helped start go on to actually make these deliverable products and then to see what the rest of the community can do with them and how they can apply them as well.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yes. I mean, if we have a drug approval where there's actual benefit to patients, then I will celebrate. Until then, it's still a work in progress.
Lydia Morrison:
All right. We'll keep the cork in the champagne. So you keep me posted. You have also formed a foundation, the Grace Science Foundation. Could you tell us about that and why its formation was so important to you?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yeah. So I have an association with the Grace Science Foundation. I wasn't a founder of the foundation. It was actually formed by a gentleman named Matt Wilsey, who is the father of, at that time, young baby girl who was born with a rare genetic disease. And he formed the foundation, it's called Grace Science Foundation because Grace is the name of his daughter, because his daughter had this devastating illness. She was the first patient actually to define this genetic disease.
It had not been discovered before her. They figured it out by taking her to the NIH and having her entire genome sequenced back in 2013 when that was a brand new thing. And since then, the Foundation has identified another 200 or so patients all around the world. And it's a nonprofit foundation that's focused on an advocacy for this rare disease and also to fund research around this disease.
And so how I came associated with the Foundation is Matt reached out to me because it turns out that this genetic disease is it's a glycogene, so it's a glycoscience disease. And he found me and he said, "Could you work on this and help us understand the disease?" And so the Foundation funded a research project in my lab, and we made a discovery that helps us understand the molecular basis of the disease better.
And that then gave us an idea for how to treat these patients. And so Matt and I formed Grace LLC, which is a for-profit biotech company with institutional investors, and we have made a gene therapy to treat these patients. And we've dosed now five patients. It's a phase one to three adaptive clinical trial with a very small patient population, but so far so good.
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing!
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
And we're hoping for the best.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm so glad to hear that it's already in patient trials. How many individuals around the world are affected by the disorder?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
So we've identified, when I say we, the Foundation with its outreach team, has identified 200 patients in the world, which is ultra-rare, but they are in every continent. So some are in Asia, some are in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. And there's a couple dozen mutations amongst these 200 people, which means that they're not all from one founder population.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, so not hereditary.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
It is hereditary. It is hereditary, but the fact that there's so many different mutations means there's probably a lot more than 200 patients in the world, but we haven't found them yet. And it's not easy to find new patients on a rare genetic disease that's not that familiar because a person in a different geography who has a patient with this constellation of problems, and these are babies with developmental disorders and seizure disorders, a lot of neurological problems and developmental delays, and there are a lot of diseases that can lead to those same symptoms.
Many of these patients have probably gotten misdiagnosed as having cerebral palsy or something else. So getting patients who have problems but never had genetic testing and getting their doctors to get them genetic testing, especially in locations without big healthcare infrastructures, is quite difficult.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, and then to try to identify those additional mutations that maybe are those missing mutations.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
But now that there's a treatment, there's a lot more incentive to find the patients.
Lydia Morrison:
And who goes about finding the patients? Is that there are individual doctors who would then have to ask for that testing? Or is there some outreach sort of from the Grace Science Foundation to try to implement or promote more genetic screening of these sorts of populations?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yes, all of the above. I mean, if you're at Stanford Hospital, your pediatric neurologist will get genetic testing and probably will know about this disease as one of 2,000 rare genetic disorders. But if you're in a rural clinic, the pediatrician there, you might not be able to get to a specialized tertiary care center where they have the knowledge and infrastructure to do genetic testing. So location really matters as it does in all aspects of healthcare, right?
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
There's a lot of inequality. And that's just the US. I mean, if you're in other geographies where genetic testing isn't standard, even for common disorders like cystic fibrosis, finding those patients as needle in a haystack problem. You need outreach.
Lydia Morrison:
And then I think also patient advocacy, self-advocacy can be really hard too. Well, it sounds like the progress that you've made is amazing, and I'm so impressed by Grace's parents for setting up the foundation and finding you.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
That's right. They are the most inspiring family and relentlessly committed to curing this disease.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I hope that you see lots of efficacy in the phase one trials, and I can't wait to hear how it goes. So you have had a truly inspirational career, but you were a trailblazer in your openness about your sexuality pretty early. And I hope that you realize what a spark of hope and joy and possibility you represent to still underrepresented LBGTQ+ community members. It was obviously brave of you to have been so open about yourself. I'm curious, what are some of the big challenges that you've faced because of being open and honest about who you are?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
That's a good question, and people ask me this question. I never have a very good answer, unfortunately, because in life you don't get a chance to do the control experiment. So I don't know what my life would've been like if I had been a straight person. I don't think now sitting as I am in this position anybody would look at me and say, "Oh, she got beaten down."
So I think that I'm probably an example of survivorship bias, because I had a lot of privileges along the way that neutralized some of the problems that another person might've experienced, starting with that I was born one of three daughters to an MIT physics professor. My dad and my mom, both of them, were pretty adamant that their daughters were going to have a shot at anything that had they had a son, he would've had a shot at.
And my dad in particular, he was from a very progressive family of Italian immigrants who fled Mussolini's regime, and they were very liberal socialists and grew up in the Massachusetts-Boston-Italian scene. And my dad was born in 1931, so that was the Great Depression, and he grew up very poor. And he was the youngest of five kids. And in his family, his parents, they were poor Italian immigrants who were on food stamps and welfare and so on.
And all five of those kids, they told them, "You've got to get to college. You've got to get a degree. You've got to get education. That's the only way you get out of poverty in this country." And so they did. And so all of my dad and his siblings all went to college on full scholarships, got advanced degrees, and my dad became a physics professor. And so when he had daughters, his daughters were going to be physics professors.
And we strayed a little bit, but not much. And my older sister is a professor of applied math at UCLA, and my younger sister is an occupational therapist in New Jersey. So I grew up with there was never any discussion about whether girls could be scientists or mathematicians.
When we were in school, if there was any hint that a teacher was disrespecting especially my older sister, she was the lead blocker in the family, and she did have a fourth grade teacher actually who at a parent-teacher conference told my parents, "She doesn't seem to have many friends. And if she didn't answer so many questions and wasn't talking about math all the time, then she might be a little more popular. You might want to talk with her about that." And my dad blew up and had that guy fired.
Lydia Morrison:
Rightly so.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
So the next year when I came along, all the math teachers were like, "Oh, there's another one. Don't do anything." So I got a little kind of protection, which means by the time I got to college, I had not been infiltrated with the negative messaging about girls and science and STEM and stuff. That just was not part of the world I grew up in. And I was sheltered, because it was part of everybody else's world, but not mine.
And the smartest mathematician I knew was my older sister, and she was helping my dad grade his quantum mechanics midterms with his MIT students when she was in high school. That's the kind of kid she was. So ahead. So in my world, the best mathematician is this 14-year-old girl. And I didn't know about sexism in science until I was in college, and it was a bit of a rude awakening when I discovered that. But by then, you're already an adult, so your brain is pretty formed.
So I didn't grow up with feelings of the imposter syndrome and lack of confidence that maybe other girls of my generation might have grown up with in the sciences. I was free of that handcuff. And so coming out as queer, for me, it was kind of like, again, no one ever had told me that you shouldn't come out. I was so sheltered, I didn't know. And then when I did, I found out. But again, I think I had a pretty strong sense of that I was right and they were wrong.
Lydia Morrison:
I'm actually starting to think that you might be the control in this experiment as not having been affected by the perceptions of the family and the community around you.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
And again, I was privileged. And when I was applying to colleges, I knew how to apply to college. I grew up at MIT. And when it came time to think about PhD programs, I knew what a PhD was. I knew what it meant to be a university professor. And my sister applied to grad school, so I applied to grad school. None of this was mysterious to me, and that was a real privilege. And even my dad being in a position to advise his children on education and how do you get jobs and how do you do all those things, that was a position of privilege as well.
Even the fact that he was able to get himself out of poverty, again, my family went from deep poverty to Nobel Prize in just two generations. And the reason my dad was able to get into the educated middle class is because he availed himself of government programs, the G.I. Bill, and also he was able to avail himself of a real estate market that welcomed white people, but not Black people into a town with excellent public schools. So I got to grow up in Lexington, Massachusetts at a time when it was a redlined community.
No Black family had the privilege that I had. And because I had these great Lexington High School, 30 kids every year go to Harvard from Lexington High School, and I was one of them, and that was a privilege. So I think you have to really understand your history. So now, yeah, sure, you can say, "Oh, you're a trailblazer. You're out and proud, and all these things, and a woman in STEM," but there was an infrastructure that allowed that to happen, and not everybody has that.
Lydia Morrison:
I would argue that very few probably have that infrastructure that you were able to take advantage of.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Well, it's easy to come out as queer when if you get fired from your job or kicked out of your PhD program, you can go back and live with your parents. Not everybody has that privilege.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, it's scary out there. So not only are you a beacon of inspiration for surmounting some obstacles, although as we've just established maybe not as great an obstacles as they might seem to the outsider, but you're also pretty cool.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
As organic chemists go.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
The bar is pretty low.
Lydia Morrison:
I have to be honest, I was thinking, I was chatting with someone at your seminar and they were saying, "Man, maybe if I had an organic chemistry professor like that, I would've stuck with it." And I said, "I actually loved my organic chemistry professor. I had a good one." I mean, I think there are more of you out there.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Where'd you go to college?
Lydia Morrison:
I went to undergraduate at Smith, and I got a BA in chemistry. And then I went to UNC Chapel Hill for my master's in biochemistry and biophysics, but I never took a biology class before my senior year of college.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
And they hired you here anyways. Okay.
Lydia Morrison:
They did. They let it slide. So I heard you played keyboard, and I'm going to assume it's the electric keyboard, at the Harvard Band with some of your classmates, and one of them was the future lead guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
That's correct.
Lydia Morrison:
Can you share with us what place music has had in your life?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yeah. Well, first of all, playing in a college band with Tom Morello was probably the most closest to fame that I've really come. Yeah, that's like flying close to the sun. And Tom was the lead guitar player and the leader of the band, and he actually wrote original compositions even in college that we performed. And he was the only one of us that was clearly the musical star. The rest of us were kind of hacks to the point where we knew that he probably would become a successful musician.
He was two years older than I was. So he graduated when I was just finishing sophomore year. And he wanted to go to Los Angeles and try and break into the music scene, and he wanted the band to come. And I was thinking, oh my God, if I drop out of college to go be in a rock band in Los Angeles, first of all, my parents will kill me, and then I'm going to flunk my O Chem midterm. So it just didn't seem like the right thing for me, which I think I made the right decision in hindsight.
Lydia Morrison:
Feels like it.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
He went on. And when I was in grad school, Rage cut their first big album, and I got the CD, which was the medium at the time. A CD is a round substance. It's very shiny on one side. And I listened to that and I was like, oh my God. And here I am in grad school thinking, I think I messed that one up. But the keyboard was my instrument as a kid, and I played in a lot of music groups. Even in high school, I played in the jazz quartet, and I accompanied the musicals. And then I got busy as it happens.
So I didn't really play much after graduating from college. I didn't have a keyboard when I was in grad school. I lived in a tiny little shared apartment. And I didn't really get back into it until I had kids. And then you want your kids to take piano lessons. So I was like, I have to be a role model, so I started playing again a bit. And then what happened was I kind of switched just about two years ago over to playing the electric bass, which I always had fantasized about the bass.
Are you a bass player? Oh, our audio person here is a bass player. So when you grow up in the '70s and '80s, you want to play the bass, right? All the best bands, it's all the bass lines. And I was Earth, Wind & Fire and all the funky bands from the '70s. That was my favorite music. And so I always wanted to play the bass. And then what happened was someone gave me a bass as a gift knowing that, and I was like, all right, now I really have to play it.
So I got on YouTube, as one does, and did some tutorials. And so I have learned the bass, and now I have a band that I play in with a bunch of 50 something women from Berkeley mostly and I'm the bass player now.
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing! What kind of jams do you guys play?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
We cover anything and everything, but it can't be too complicated because I'm still a beginner. But yeah, we're doing a lot of classic rock.
Lydia Morrison:
That's so fun. Do you guys play out at venues or are you mostly garage?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
We're not good enough. We had one gig.
Lydia Morrison:
Here's the imposter syndrome.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Oh, no. The thing is that the great thing about being in your 50s for anybody who's there, nobody will admit it, but is that you just don't care anymore.
Lydia Morrison:
I care less and less all the time.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Yeah. In my 30s, I don't think I would've been looking for gigs at my skill level, but now we're like, we have to gig before we die. We can't just put it off when you're 50s. So we got a gig. One of the band members was friends with the woman who founded the Berkeley Center for the Blind, and that woman was celebrating her 80th birthday at the center with a bunch of other blind friends.
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
So we gave a gig, and the big joke was, too bad they're not deaf. So that was our first performance. And we only had five songs, and we did our five songs. And after that, the women were like, "Oh, that was so great. Play another one." And we were like, so we had to go back to the beginning and do the same five...
Lydia Morrison:
You didn't know that you would need a sixth encore.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
I know. So that's where we're at right now.
Lydia Morrison:
Awesome. I want to ask for your set list, but I'll let you keep some secrets. So I think that there's a shared feeling here at NEB, which is one that our founder Don Comb I think really instilled in the company, and that's that there's this real connection between art and science and the creativity and curiosity of it all. Do you feel like there's a connection between art and science? And if so, could you define it in your words?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
There's definitely a connection between art and science, music and science, everything in science, I think just because all of these things do come from the human brain and all of these circuits touch upon each other. And so I think that people who flex their creative muscle in one medium have a stronger creative muscle for another medium.
And so I think doing a creative endeavor like music or art, that just builds your creative muscles and you can exert them in science as well. So I'm sure there's some neuroscience explanation for these things, how these things mutually benefit each other, but then there's practical things as well, right?
Lydia Morrison:
Dexterity.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Oh, sure, yeah, that's really practical. If you can play the piano, then you can pipette. And especially if you can text, you can pipette.
Lydia Morrison:
Everybody would be great pipetters.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
This is the thumb generation, But I also think aesthetic, just appreciating beauty. I think what drew a lot of us into science, I imagine, is just the beauty of it. Just like when you learn about a new system and the way it works, it just gives you chills, and you just feel like, "Ah, that's cool." And if said, "Well, why is it cool?" It's just cool. You can't even explain it. And in that sense, it's like a beautiful piece of art that moves you, and you just know it when you see it.
And it might be different for you than it is for you. Just like when I see a new chemical reaction, I'm like, "Ah, that's really beautiful and cool," but you might not think so. But then you might see the latest cryo-EM structure of a CRISPR-Cas9 and you're like, "Oh, that's so neat," and I'm like, "All right." But the point is I think that just the ability to appreciate beauty and aesthetic.
And also, music catches your ear when it's something new and you haven't heard something like that before, and you're like, "What's that? Oh, that's weird. What is that?" It might be a little prickly at first, and then you start to appreciate it. And I think in science, we're like that too. There's something out of the ordinary and you're like, what? And you might not even believe it at first.
Lydia Morrison:
Absolutely.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
So I think that just the emotional content of science and art are very similar.
Lydia Morrison:
I think that was very well said. Thank you. So you've had this outstandingly successful career. Are there moments in your career that stand out to you, either moments of discovery or reflection that resonate in your memory as really pivotal moments?
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, I've been running a lab now for almost 30 years, and I still have some really vivid memories of certain... I mean, sometimes it's a key experiment that worked. And the minute I saw the data, I knew it. I'm like, this is going to be big. There's some moments like that.
There were moments where we were really frustrated and gave up on things, only to have them get resurrected later because of a new insight. There's things like that. I mean, I even remember this morning I talked about the first bioorthogonal reaction that we invented, which was called the Staudinger ligation. And it didn't end up being the most impactful in the long-term, but it was the first.
Lydia Morrison:
It was the first step.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
It hinted at a possibility, and the student who did the defining experiment where she tried to do that chemistry on cells for the first time. And at that time, my lab was still pretty small. I was young, and we didn't have our own flow cytometer. So she had to go down to the other end of campus to bum flow cytometry time off of some other lab. And when she saw the data, she was so excited.
And she had her ice bucket with her tubes in it. And she had the print out of the data because it's before computers and everything. And she ran from the bottom of campus all the way to the top with this bucket and this thing. And she burst into my office. And I was in a meeting with people, and she just blew open the door carrying these things and dripping in sweat.
And I'm like, "Okay, are you okay?" Because she was just like, "You won't believe this," and she showed me the data. And immediately that person I was meeting with, I was like, "Get out." We huddled around it. That was so vivid. I remember what I was wearing. That's the kind of memory it was. And there's a few of those kinds of moments.
Lydia Morrison:
So sort of like the aha moments, the resurrection moments, and then really moments of other people's pure joy and inspiration from science.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
And sometimes it was some other lab did a big thing because they were able to leverage something that we did and just seeing that. And I was like, oh, I'm so glad they did that. And it made me feel good like we did something besides just publish our own papers.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I think that one could argue that you have been a part of many successes over the years and not a small part. And so on behalf of New England Biolabs, I would just like to thank you so much for the amazing work that you've done throughout your career. It's obviously been huge building blocks toward the future of healthcare and medicine and better understanding of the diseases that afflict us as humans. And for being here today to share those stories with us and to share your presence with us as well. It's been really an honor to speak to you.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi:
Oh, thank you. The honor is mine. Thank you so much for hosting me today.
Lydia Morrison:
Our pleasure. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons from Lab and Life Podcast. Please check out our show's transcript for helpful links from today's conversation. And as always, we invite you to join us for our next episode.
