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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. Is this something that happened in college for you?
Carol?
There were these courses I'm listening. Okay, So there were these certain classes in college that were like designed to weed people out. Okay, yeah, Psychology intro to psych was one of them, because everyone wanted to major in psychology. So what they did is even if you took ap psych and you got a five, you still had to take intro to Psychology and they made it a terrible class, so only the hardcore students would stick with it. Also, organic chemistry, Okay.
I did not take that in college.
This was like, you know, you're not going to be a doctor in life, do you take it in college?
God?
No?
Okay, no, no, no, no no no, no no no no. It's like what but it was notorious for weeding people out. Like you want to become a doctor, you can't do it until you take out you know.
I have this conversation with my daughter who has a friend that's pre met and she said, you know, they make these classes hard so that they absolutely weed out and figure out who's really going to be serious.
And sometimes I go to the doctor and I'm like, you really pasted? Okam, you did? They didn't let you out along the.
Way past fail You know what they call what do they say, doctor got aldis or our Premand yeah, all right. We've got a great guest though, to really maybe make you think differently about students taking science courses and so let's get to them.
We got Josea Nelson because you think there's a better way. He's professor of chemistry at California Institute of Technology. He runs the Nelson Lab. The lab calls itself quote a multidisciplinary research group. It's focused on developing the next generation tools for organic chemistry. Joseah joins us from Pasadena, California. Also with us is Janet Lauren. She's a Bloomberg News higher education finance reporter. She joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio and.
Jenna, we need to say thank you because Hosea comes to us courtesy of you. Just tell us how we came to your attention.
We had met at a dinner and he was talking about teaching chemistry and the challenges of teaching and learning, and we were talking about this and I said, wow, this would be a great guest on Bloomberg Radio your career.
And you are so right, So hose come on in on that. So this whole concept of like weeding people.
Out wrong, absolutely wrong, you know, And I think I'll stand here in front of everyone and on behalf of all organic chemists apologize for taking that strategy and towards education. It doesn't really serve education. Well, I don't think.
That's interesting because I if there's a way to do this, you know, it's no matter how you slice it, this is difficult stuff. And I think that's why it is, you know, sort of used to weed people out. But is it difficult because we don't have the right education getting into college, Hosea. Or is it difficult because the way it's taught, it's not taught in a way that is digestible based on the way that people we understand the way people learn.
You know. I think it's a little bit of both. And you know, I think that a major challenge is organic chemistry represents a wealth of knowledge across all sorts of scientific disciplines, and we tend to when we teach it kind of introduce all of those things at once.
There's three different ways to look at this problem. And instead of kind of building people up and giving them the foundation they need to progress through those three different ways of looking at the problem, a lot of times we just kind of throw it all towards them in
the beginning. And you know, I think you guys alluded to it in your discussion that perhaps you know, there's been a sentiment amongst organic chemists and scientists that there's some sort of bar that we need to place in front of students, you know, to decide who has the necessary tools to move to the next level instead of
thinking about it as education. Hey, we need to educate future doctors so they know a little bit about organic chemistry so they can learn biochemistry and medicine, if that makes any sense.
So, can you tell us a little bit about your career path and how you decided you wanted to be a scientist and progress to become a chemist and you know, doing what you're doing in your lab.
Yeah, And the reason I'm really passionate about education is because of it. So I actually failed high school chemistry not once, but twice, and actually dropping out of high school, and then eventually I found a well paying lab technician a summer program and our summer job and did that and fell in love with experimental science and working in
a laboratory and making discoveries. Because, as it turns out, you know, the chemistry or the science we learn in the class is very different than the practice of doing science or the practice of chemistry.
Why did that not turn you off when you failed chemistry and school? Because I think that is the quickest way for people to be turned off from something. I didn't do well in every subject, and I was turned off by stuff I didn't do well.
And you turned off, and then you also there's a narrative that forms around you of like, well, maybe you're just not a chemistry type of person or something.
Yeah, I think I think that's that? Is that true? And to be honest, you know, I was turned off and did not pursue my science education or education at all subsequent to that. And so, you know, I think one of the challenges that we face as educators is thinking about how to engage people and and kind of give people value and and and personal validation that goes beyond memorizing the letters associated with orbitals or doing a calculation, and so a lot of what we do now is
try to relate. And actually it's a primary goal when I'm in the classroom, is we try to really relate what we're doing in the class to bigger societal problems or bigger personal problems. You know, how does chemistry and science impact medicine. How does the the you know, the screen of the iPhone you're you're working on right now in the middle of class, you know, how is that fueled by science? And so I think we need to do a much better job in that regard.
Well, of course, you're at Caltech where students are well beyond you know, basic science. But how do you how do you make it interesting to people who are maybe thinking this could be something for me, but I'm not very good in math or I'm not very good in science, and to sort of bridge that gap.
Yeah, I mean that's a challenge. You know, I think that one of the things in a classroom, if you really want to reach people, you kind of have to meet people where they are. And I think traditionally in science, so a lot of times we spend our time, you know, putting out an ideal preparation level. And if people don't meet that preparation level and they don't do well on
the course, well it's the problem with the person. But the facts are the facts, and the students we have are the students, and their education level is their education level, so we really have to meet them in that regard. And I still am convinced that making our lessons in our curricula bigger than the very fine details of a subject matter is really really important in bringing people along.
You know, I think about education too, and I think about you know, sometimes we're just so taught to you know, two tests are testing and the whole idea of I don't know. It's been an interesting year between I don't want to get political at the war between Israel and Hamas and you know, students trying to protest and they couldn't And we often have a conversation in the newsroom
that you know. College universities are a place to go and have conversations, make mistakes, learn, And I do think about all different subjects played at different parts of your brain. They teach you how to think. Maybe you don't get an A in the class, but it maybe teaches you to think on a higher level, and I just don't know that teaching has gotten around all of that yet.
No, I would agree, you know, I think that the fact of the matter is when I walk into a doctor's office and tell them I'm an organic chemists, oftentimes they tell you how organic chemistry has played zero role in their practice of medicine. You know, what is true is that perhaps the lesson they learned, you know, problem solving and thinking about organic chemists kind of gave them
the tools they need to approach medical problems. And I think the same is through true across any kind of discipline. And it could be a political science problem, it could be an economics problem. But you know, in general, the practice of going after really hard things and problem solving in a logical fashion can be applied in a lot of areas. So, you know, I do agree with that.
So can you tell us about what problems that you are looking to solve and about your work and what goes on in your lab at Caltech?
Yeah, So we are really interested in in in developing technology that will influence medicine, and so we want to discover new chemicals from nature. They're called natural products that can be used as drugs. It turns out that more than fifty percent of on market drugs are derived from nature, a fact that many people don't know. And so we we use new electron miicross co b in spectrosky methods
to discover those compounds. And we also we have another division in our lab that works on new chemical reactions or new ways to quote unquote cook drugs or active pharmaceutical ingredients, and a big part of that is AI. So you know, I think that's something that is important, and I guess evidenced by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week. And this is a big part of science.
So our group is largely funded by the National Science Foundation, and we have a center there called the Center for Computer Aided Chemical Synthesis, and there we use tools in AI to try and help pharmaceutical efforts and biology efforts to think about quicker ways to make molecules that may be drugs or they may be the tools we use to understand fundamental biology.
All right, I hope we haven't lost anybody. But why do we need to do that? Walk us through that next step? Why is that a smart step to take steps to take a bridge to cross? Yeah, So this.
Is I think on a couple levels. You know, you can kind of look at it from a lot of perspectives. So you know, right now, for example, artificial intelligence, as you all know, is just becoming important to all these different elements of society, and that includes science and medicine, and so you know, we are part to this program and the impact of what we're doing will effectively hopefully allow the preparation of chemicals or the discovery of chemicals
for nature to happen quicker. And so you know right now, you know, like the therapeutic drug line, if someone makes a discovery that might lead to a drug, it may take a decade to do the work to actually get it into clinical trials, where we think that using artificial intelligence and machine learning and other data science approaches, we're going to be able to shorten that period. So the impact and the importance in medicine and human health is
really there. I think you can kind of twist it from the other direction and look at it from the perspective of national security, and so there's a lot of people thinking about, you know, ways that we can protect our country from AI driven synthesis machines that may be involved in making weapons and doing other things like that. So from all element of where we're operating, this is really really important.
That's kind of scary stuff. Hey, we have about a minute left and then we're going to do some news and we're going to come back with you, Joseah.
But I'm wondering.
We talked about the connection doctors have or don't have to organic chemistry, but where else do you see your students going and working when they're done.
Yeah, so most of our students actually go to work in the pharmaceutical industry. So graduate students typically go to work in pharma, big pharma. We have a small section of graduate students that go into consulting, and you know, undergraduates a lot of times will end up as you
alluded to, in medical school. But these days a lot of people are using some of the tools they develop in their undergraduate education to be analysts and do other things like that, go off work for Google, make devices that tell you about your body and things like that. So it's quite diverse what our students do.
Let's get right back to Joseah Nelson. He is Professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He runs the Nelson Lab. It's quote, a multidisciplinary research group focused on developing next gen tools for organic chemistry. Joseiah's joining us from Pasadena, California. We also got Janet Lauren, Bloomberg News Higher Education Finance reporter here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio.
Josea was also the winner of the twenty twenty two Blovotnik National Awards for Young Scientists. They intend to and this is I'm reading from what they say to recognize and celebrate exceptional young scientists in the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering and chemistry, and to provide critical support to send innovative work in science and technology that will address
society's most pressing global problems. All right, Josea. Before we went to a break, I said, google your name and you're going to come up with a bunch of stories about fun guy. Tell us about fungal pathogens, the work you are doing, and why we need to kind of sit up and take notice.
Yeah, that's a that's a popular question. The Last of Us made us famous? Actually really, But yeah, I think so, you know, I think that it's television shows they kind of bring sometimes bring some truth to to the reality of their viewers. And so the truth of the matter is, and this is something we talk a lot about in our research group, is that if the next pandemic was a fungal pandemic instead of a viral pandemic, we wouldn't
have things off the shelf ready to go. We wouldn't have therapeutics, we would not have vaccine technology, and you know, fighting our way out of that pandemic would be a lot more difficult. And the reason is, at least from my perspective, is that fungi are genetically very similar to
human beings. It turns out that there's around fifty percent overlap between our genes, and so when we make drugs to kill fungi, a lot of times there's off target effects that are basically side effects to the human beings taking them. And so one of the things we do in the group is that we look for the mechanisms that fungi use in warfare against other fungi and the tools that they've developed through evolution to develop the next
generation of fungal therapeutics. So fungu i have gotten pretty good at killing each other without themselves, and so that's the lesson we learned from them, and that's historically a lot of the way drugs are developed. If you think about penicillin, that came from the discovery that a particular fung guy on a peatriot dish stopped bacteria from growing, and so the funguy made antibacterial agents. And we now know that those are antibiotics, and we prescribe them all
the time. So we take a similar approach, but we focus a lot on fungui to kill fungi. It's kind of interesting to think about.
Yeah, totally, it kind of makes sense. Well, I just think it's interesting because we talked to doctor Sharfstein from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School the public health. There are areas right about viruses and public health and the importance of it and you know how it saves all of our lives. And I just wonder, you know, is it one of those things that is not getting the attention
that maybe it needs to. And I don't know how you see it, like when you talk about it, when you talk about it with you know, public health officials, I don't know, what are you hearing, what are you seeing?
You know, I think this is my conjecture, you know, I think that human beings in society are really good to responding to emergencies, but prepared for emergencies or something I don't think we do as well. And so I think in the community, we've all known for a while that we don't have off the shelf treatments or treatment strategies for fungi in general. And you know, I think, to be honest that, you know, until we have that imminent threat, I'm concerned that we're not going to do enough.
And so when I talk about it, I think from a scientific perspective, people acknowledge it's truth, but yet you don't really see that much investment in those technologies. Now, now that said, I'm part of a fairly large a group of scientists that's funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and we are looking specifically at this problem. But I don't think it's enough, you know, I think that there needs to be an effort ftterally from the NIH. That's my position and take on this issue.
So is there you mentioned NIH, and we're always interested in funding, especially government funding of science. Is there a concern that there may not be the same kind of funding scope in terms of where scientific research money is coming from.
There's a tremendous concern. So to bring some facts, you know, in nineteen ninety eight, the National Institutes of Health established a modular budgetary system. So you know, when you write a proposal to the NIH asking for research money, you can kind of, you know, do it an itemized way, or you could just ask for a standard budget. That standard budget was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in nineteen ninety eight, and it is two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in twenty twenty four. And so what this means is the research funding that used to support the training of eight scientists or so, now you know, will support two and a half scientists. And so the number of people and workforce that we're training and putting towards solving these really incredible, incredible, incredibly important problems and human health is dramatically reduced. And so there is obviously a
funding issue out there, and it's concerning, you know. I think the other part of it is traditionally there's been a significant amount of investment from the private sector, in particular from pharmaceutical companies into the type of research we do. And I know that since two thousand and eight. The financial crisis at that point slowed that down and it
hasn't quite recovered. So now we're in this situation where the people that actually fuel pharmaceutical pharmaceutical innovation and that whole industry are trained by research groups that are underfunded by both the pharmaceutical industry and the government. And so I don't know when this is going to catch up and when this is going to really be born out in terms of how much pharmaceutical innovation we can make, but it's certainly a looming problem from my perspective.
So where else would universities like Caltech or MIIT or Harvard look for research foundation if perhaps the government and industry are curbing those numbers or they're not going as far as they used to.
I think this ties into education, you know. From my perspective is that, you know, I think we need to do a better job educating on the undergraduate chemistry level for a couple of reasons. Number one is that's going to you know, continue a nice flow of tuition, right, I mean, things are getting really expensive, but tuition also goes and contributes to this research environment private donors, So people that go off and are successful and do well.
Hopefully we'll look back at their chemistry courses and instead of you know, having PTSD, will look back favorably on what they learn there and hopefully make donations moving forward. And finally, I think education is super important so that the next round of policy makers will have had a
favorable experience, undergraduate experience. And so I think, you know, we can look towards donors and philanthropy for money, and that's great, but I still think ultimately the path towards sustainability and scientific sustainability and competitiveness with the rest of the world is going to rely on influence in policy.
Okay, we only have about forty seconds left. It's not a ton of time for my last question, But professor, is there something that keeps you up at night out there, like.
A fun guy that's just gonna like recaunt your last.
Of US comic on me?
Think?
And I know, yeah, you know, I think there's not a particular fun guy. And actually, you know, I'm up. I'm up a lot at night thinking about viruses too. You know, I think that Stars two, Uh, that was a very death disease. I think it was a thirty percent or some double digit percentage fatality. It just wasn't as infectious as as COVID or SARS three. And so you know, any you know, disease that has this you know, the potential as a contagion, and you know, and is
much more lethal. I think, could have a much dramatic, much greater effect on society. And I'm afraid that we're you know, gonna be complacent because we made it out of COVID, you know, relatively intact as a society.
And so like we've had a theme around this today, you know, and I think about this our conversation with you in an earlier guestjose and Nelson, professor of chemistry at California Institute of Technology, and our own Janet lore And of Bloomberg News. This is Bloomberg Business Week. Don't forget, of course, it's a huge week for AI and for Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and meta platforms. We've talked about this over the
last couple of hours. All reporting earnings. In the coming days, traders will be paying close attention to their capex spending to gauge demand for Nvidia's chips, which are prized for AI computing. It's something we kind of kicked off at two pm.
Yeah, so in Vidia is not reporting this week. But what we learn from these companies is how much demand there is for Invidia, their cap ax.
These are their main customers, right, The bulk of what Nvidia sales comes from these guys.
Well, I know Matt Olson's going to be watching this stuff closely. He's chief innovation officer over at Burns and McDonald. It's an employee owned engineering, architecture, construction, and environmental and consulting firm. It plays in a host of industries aviation, infrastructure, healthcare, military construction, consumer product manufacturing, food and beverage production, oil, gas and chemicals, renewable energy, telecom, and more. He joined
the well all over the world too, Yeah, exactly. He joined us here in the Bloomberg Interactive at Broker's studio. Welcome, how are you?
Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's an exciting day, beautiful day here in New York.
It is a nice day here in New York. Hasn't rained in a while, which is very dry, but yeah, it's all good.
Okay.
So the frenzy around AI and public markets, how has that affected your job over the last couple of years?
Yeah, a couple different ways. We plan two aspects of that market. One building the infrastructure, data centers, data centers, the paragrade, two things massively impacted by the deployment of AI, but then also on the need for our resources and our actual deployment of AI within our businesses.
When you say resources are do you do you actually mean the production of electricity.
One of the number of people we need that keep up with the market demand. You know, can we attract enough talent? Is there enough people graduating to execute all the work? The projects are big, you're moving faster than ever before, and we've had to look for ways. You know, as we're bringing more renewable energy onto the grid, we're dealing with a more complex situation. It's not just a
few big plans anymore. Its sources all over the place, and so that means more planning, more construction projects, more things to engage with, and that requires more human capital to make that happen, and something that we haven't decent supply, but we could always use more of here in the US.
Well, tell us about that, Like, what are you looking for in hires and new hires? What kind of backgrounds are you looking for?
Experienced people with engineering over almost any discipline, a lot.
And any engineers or are you looking.
For any kind generally in MySpace, specifically electrical computer data scientist roles and responsibilities or a prime However, with the availability of labor, we are cross training people if they are do not necessarily have the background, and that's because we're looking to always be adding to our ranks.
Matt, I'm wondering are you concerned about the presidential election outcome and what it might mean for immigration and especially those with the skills that you might be interested in and maybe are I don't know how much of your talent pool comes from outside the United States and you guys.
Are, Yeah, we do projects worldwide. We're you know with the presidential election. Fortunately, in the infrastructure business runs on very long time cycles, so immediate impacts not one hundred percent clear to you know. Projects that we're working on now will be working on for the next eighteen to twenty four months.
You know.
The key things are that we keep that project pipeline working effectively, that regulation that permits are getting approved, to keep our construction backlog strong and be able to let us complete all the projects that everybody wants to be completed. You know, infrastructure something that's the forefront of everybody's mind. It's something that we used to not talk a lot about, but every day I.
Say infrastructure, Is it data centers or what else? Like what infrastructure covers so much? People can think bridges, but it can mean so much of it.
It is, so I'm curious all of those items for Burns and McDonald, it's across all that space. It's you know, anything that we depend on from water and waste, water, roads and bridges. My specific discipline is mostly in the electrical space, so the power grid and the data centers, the fiber optic and telecommunications of a structure that ties
those resources together. It used to be if you wanted power, you called up the electric utility and you made your interconnection request and your service would be provided, you know, some months later, maybe a year later. Now that's not always clear that that's going to happen in the marketplace that we're now in the space where we're having to really look at what can the grid support, where is
available energy? And then that is one of the primary factors and where we're citing data centers and the scale and the speed of these projects is just getting larger and much faster.
If you think about this like a chain with the weakest link, where is the weakest link right now? Is it the infrastructure? Is it the grid? What the grid can actually handle? Are there areas of the country that can't accommodate what needs will be desired for data centers for electrical consumption?
Yes, I see. The biggest challenge is maybe time scales. It's that we can do a lot with the infrastructure that we have, with the grid that we have, but matching up the what is the source? You know, the super interesting thing about AI and data centers a continuous demand for energy with what are the sources available in that space? And then what is the interconnecting capacity coming through the grid? So is the also exist in one place? Yeah, you know, but is.
The conchainous demand portion the tough part because the way that demand has worked has been so based on the time of day.
Traditionally, I think, traditionally the energy grid has been a demand driven infrastructure. Whatever the demand is, we'll build the supply to meet it. With renewable energy coming a bigger and bigger portion. We don't always uh you know, we'll say that it's consistent, but it can be intermittent that we have to you know, how are we going to put that puzzle together on any given day? And the most efficient thing is can we move the load around to match? You know, can we charge your car when
we have an access supply? Challenging thing with data centers is generally they are a continuous load, although some technology providers are now looking how could we change that up? What you know, does it make sense to follow the sun around the world with our compute loads or only compute certain things? And an interesting diconomy when you're looking at the cost of buying all those chips, building all those data centers versus the supply of energy, which one
how is that going to be balanced out? And which one is going to win at any given time. We always want our tweets faster and our you know, our text messages. We're not a patient society anymore, so how are we going to balance that with just frankly, you know, infrastructure takes a while. People come and they have an expectation, Oh well, you know, why can't you just get that for us done in a couple of months. You're like, there's a few things involved, so you.
Know, we've dond so many stories about our grid being you know, overtaxed and it needs to build out. I am wondering. I'm thinking about our audience who are listening. It's an investing audience, you know, from your vantage point, what do they need to understand when it comes to our grid and our power needs. I get the data center and we're all investing. It's all wonderful about.
I think the biggest perspective that I have is we're trying to do multiple things all at once. We have an asset, you know, it's a very large, complex system that took us a century to build and now in the next depending on which timescale you want, whether or not you're talking twenty thirty, twenty forty five, twenty fifty, we want to reduce our carbon component to that we want to make it more resilient, and we want it
to support an additional load. And we want to de carbon iiced heating, and we want to change transportation and do it yesterday. And that is a lot of things to be done in one piece of infrastructure at the same time. So how do we balance all those priorities.
The presidential campaign right now, we've.
Got the great to take care of right now.
Matt Olson, chief innovation Officer at Burns and McDonald, thank you so much, appreciate it.