The Leap: This Is Going To Kill Your Career

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Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday. On the podcast today, the next episode in the leap, an audio series I made with the Hypothesis Fund. Today, what it takes to follow your heart in science. Do you remember people saying like... That's a bad idea. Absolutely. Like, what did they say? Like, give me a flavor of that. That's a bad idea. It was not sugarcoated. This is a bad idea. You're not going to get a job.

No department will hire you. There's no funding. It's not a thing. But it is... Stop me. I thought well I'm sorry. You actually put your heart into something. Something that you create like yourself into it that it ugly. I thought, how is that possible? This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough.

My name is Betul Kaçar and I study the origins and early evolution of life on Earth. Small questions. As small as it can get. Where did we come from? How did we get here? Why do we... These questions have lit up human brains I don't know, probably all the time. so fundamental they almost seem like they couldn't have concrete answers. And so they're usually probed with religion and philosophy, not with data and experiments. But Tool Kachar, somewhat audaciously, is trying to change that.

Batul grew up in Istanbul and she came to America to get her PhD at Emory University in Atlanta. At age 20, knowing nobody, it's your classic American immigrant story. Hey, it's a classic for a reason. At the time, people told Batool how brave she was for leaving home, for going so far away.

But she didn't see it that way. She was just excited. It was... oh my god all the things i'm gonna learn i can't wait and they have books and all kinds of books and libraries are so great and they have these couches and giant windows and you can sit around and read like that that was the thought i had flying

Batul was studying biomolecular chemistry, nothing to do with the origin of life. She was researching an enzyme in zebrafish that in people can misbehave and lead to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Her dissertation was about how to get it to stop misbehaving. but as she dug in her instinct was to zoom out. I was interested in this context that gave rise to the enzyme.

So the question became more about how the enzyme happens to be the way it is rather than what it does to itself. Batul thought to understand what it does today, she had to know its path. Why do we have this enzyme? Where in our giant family tree did it develop? And why? Her interests were drifting away from molecular biochemistry and toward evolutionary biology.

At the same time, she had this fellowship that had her teaching evolution in high school classrooms, and she found herself in a cultural crossfire. Alabama has approved inserting a disclaimer in biology books that calls evolution a controversial theory. So when you realize that a certain topic or a certain area is thought to be dangerous to learn. I wanted to study that more.

Batul immersed herself in the evolutionary biology world. She was an outsider, so she was reading everything she could. She started attending biology seminars. It's almost like you open a curtain or something, and then there's this most amazing view.

and then you basically want to tear that curtain down right like it's just like you want to see the whole thing and to me evolution and asking these questions was that the moment where the curtain was lifted a little bit and i had to open it all the way

So as Patool is finishing up her PhD, she started seriously thinking about switching fields. Bye-bye zebrafish. Hello, origin of life on this planet. She was interested in the evolutionary history of enzymes. How'd they evolve? It's not the whole answer to where did we come from, why are we here, but it's a bite out of the apple. So she started talking to colleagues and mentors. And they were like,

Wait, what? The question is why are you studying a disease? But when you say, I want to understand, how the enzyme that gives rise to a disease happens to be on this planet at first place, then you get eyebrows. It was more than eyebrows. I was warned that these sort of problems are not going to be solved in your lifetime, so don't pursue. And you will kill your career if you change field. post phd just just go to a parkinson's lab or study proteins and purified proteins until the end of time

This feedback felt hard to parse, so I asked Harmeet Malek, a champion of B'Tool's work and a leading evolutionary biologist himself, what he made of it. It's probably a mix of this is not something i can do so you shouldn't do it and it's a mix of you know you're early in your career you really need to make sure that you get some successes and this even if it works is going to take so long it's going to be you don't want to stake the success of your entire career on that and

Unfortunately the second thing, even though it's a very benign and even like a somewhat positive sentiment, we hear about that a lot in science, right? This is where science's lofty ambitions bump up against the reality of how the career works in practice.

In practice, there's a tenure clock. You're measured on how many papers you publish, how much funding you pull in, and there is just very little incentive for someone, especially early in their career, to take a big bet and change course because if it doesn't pay off, their whole career could be screwed.

Which is why people counsel caution. And honestly, that is the advice that many of us would give to our trainees as well, just to make sure that, you know, your bread and butter, your foundation is like really strong before you kind of take these. So, some people might hear this feedback and tone down their ambitions. You know, decide on a more conservative path.

That is not what Batool did. It's my life, it's my career, and I'll do whatever I want. The more pushback I received, the more I knew I need to do it. This is worth doing.

this is how humans are right like if something is interesting we don't welcome it we don't we want to believe that right we want to believe that you show someone or so show the field to show the world some amazing data and everyone gets behind the work that you do that's not how it works The thing that I love about this, though, is like what I'm hearing you say is like. Evolution was a hot-button mess, and people in your field were telling you the questions you're asking cannot be answered.

And I think a lot of people would say, oh, I'm going to turn in the other direction. But there are some people who say, oh, a big, huge mess where you're telling me I can't do something. I'm going to run right at it. Is that you? Like is that who you are? Looking back, yeah. I mean, and looking forward also, yeah. And looking at today also, yes. I think so. I didn't even think about it. Did you have moments of doubt?

Doubt about what? Just about what you were pursuing. That it is too hard. That they were right. No. No. Did you have doubts about other things that we could probe? I never doubted that. It was just something that I had to do. There was not much thinking to it. It was more like a feeling, right? You are in love. Betul followed her heart and tuned out the noise. You need to have this bubble that you surround yourself with, your own atmosphere. I'm not going to let this take me down.

I think that some of us are so used to the sort of pushback from such early age that we have that resilience.

To understand why Batool seems impervious to all these people warning her off of the research she wanted to do, we have to go back to how Batool grew up. I was the first woman in my family to attend the school. And I'm not talking higher education. I'm not talking going to an IV school or education. Period. Learning how to hold a pen. Patool grew up around a lot of extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins,

The women were the caregivers. They hadn't gotten the chance to get a formal education. But Patul, even as a teeny tiny kid, had a different vision for herself. I went to school. I was five years old when I started elementary. I really insisted. I was told In fact, the first grade teacher did not want me in the class because I was too young, like two years almost younger than the rest, and did not want my parents to enroll me.

told that i basically pulled her skirt and said excuse me but can you show me my seat And then she bursts out and laughs and then says, well, maybe she's ready for it. I don't know what it is. It's just... like where that came from no no i I really don't. It's something that I felt very strongly, I can say. It's just a very strong force in me.

When kids have a strong force in them, sometimes their parents bristle, especially when that force butts up against how things are usually done. But Batool's family supported her getting an education. And her dad especially found other ways to add oxygen to Patool's personal atmosphere. He would take these moments of acknowledging my mind. Like what? Give me an example. this will sound very funny but i asked uh we are having dinner and you know this is

Turkey 90s people are smoking so he asked me to bring his cigarette. So can you grab my cigarette? So I grabbed the cigarette. I remember Parliament lights. It's like, I don't know if 90s kids can resonate with the cigarette packages of their parents, but I do. And I brought and I grabbed the lighter.

And then he was a businessman himself, so he had a lot of people working with him. And when I brought the cigarette and handed him the lighter, and then I left the room. But he stopped me, and then he turned the room and he said,

She's only 11 years old and she knew that I will need a lighter, not just a cigarette. And she thought about it herself and she put it together. It sounds... funny you may think is this your biggest achievement in life that you did not forget later but at that time you have to understand this was a room packed with men for him to stop the conversation to acknowledge something so tiny that i did to over all this man around him to acknowledge my mind i was like that's right i am smart

As Betul grew up, it became clearer and clearer to her that if she wanted a life that looked different from the women who raised her, education was the key. Because I have never seen any uneducated woman who was also independent. education is the only way for me to make a life for myself. And so that was very clear in my mind that all the diplomas will be mine. Like I will get everything. Did you? I think I did, yes.

But for me to decide that I'm going to actually get a PhD, I don't know who I thought I was. I like that I dared and I didn't think that that's not my place. So now, when people tell Batool something is impossible, she's skeptical. Reasonably so. Because she has done impossible things in the past. It's also given her clarity on how best to use her time. When you realize that education is a privilege, At least for me, it wired me up. There's no experience that will ever erase that drive from me.

I will never forget that I can hold a pen and I can write. So now what do you do with it? What is the biggest question you can ask? What is the most important thing you can do with your life?

Which brings us back. science. The project she landed on after she wrapped up her PhD. Sounds a little like science fiction. Like an echo of a story we've all heard. That's a dinosaur. Batul isn't trying to make Jurassic Park. What she's doing is harder in a way. She's going for Precambrian Park. something much much older yes dinosaurs are babies like they're born and that i guess yesterday but it's weird yeah we're talking really old thing

T-Rex lived 80 million years ago. Batool wants to resurrect life forms from 3 billion years ago, when Earth was super different than it is today. so we want to understand the limits of life and how it can express itself and how differently it can express itself it's sort of a re-extinction process that we bring the dead back to life And then the fun begins!

Understanding how this works gets technical fast, so let me just give you the Mr. DNA version. Batool's idea is to resurrect bits of the oldest life forms, specifically... the proteins in ancient microbes, the proteins that were essential for life's survival. So the first step is analyzing the sequences that code for today's proteins and using them to extrapolate the sequences of their ancestors. Step two is using those ancestral sequences to resurrect extinct proteins in the lab.

And step three is putting those ancient proteins in living microbes to see how they operate with the hope that they can give us insights into early life on this planet. and how life persevered through huge changes in Earth's climate and atmospheric history. And if you're like, whoa, that is a lot. You're right. It's super ambitious.

And that can make it hard for a young investigator. Because science isn't just about coming up with a cool idea and then executing it. You also have to people on it to get funding to get collaborators a job get papers accepted And so when Batool was a postdoc trying to get an early version of this project off the ground, when she was still, you know, trying to talk people into the idea that this wasn't some crazy Michael Crichton fantasy,

She was invited to give a talk at a conference, and she got some pretty serious pushback. Some senior person took the microphone and just grilled me. Like how? Why are you doing this? What is this? It was not easy. My knees were shaking. So in the moment, I was extremely terrified. And I thought that was a bad idea. But you know, I'm in the moment. So what can I say? I'm really sorry, everybody. This was a huge mistake. And you're right.

So I'm like, this is not the time. So I povered through it. And instead of slinking away embarrassed, Batool did the opposite. She saw this as an opportunity to learn and to enlist people in her quest. I received a lot of help. People shared so many papers with me that I missed. I didn't think it was a humiliating experience. I thought it was the best thing ever because I would not be able to get that feedback.

This wasn't the only bump Batool hit, and it wasn't the only time she found a creative way around it. Batul applied for a postdoctoral fellowship, and she got rejected. But instead of giving up, she went back and asked them to tell her in excruciating detail what was wrong with the proposal. I asked them to be as brutally honest as possible with me, and I told them,

Please help me so that you don't have to review my application for the next five years. Because I will keep trying. I remember telling them that. This is Melissa Kirvin Brooks, one of the reviewers on that fellowship application. Melissa is the future workforce lead of the NASA astrobiology program. And she says, even though this was over a decade ago and she's reviewed thousands of applications,

Betul stuck with her. I remember so much. There are a handful of people that I remember so much about and Betul is certainly one of them. Part of it was that she was very brave. For somebody to be willing to try something that hadn't been done before, it takes a certain type of person. And she was also very super modest.

This is not my strength, but I know that I can use my skills and adapt them. She was willing to learn. Batool revised the application and got the fellowship. We knew that she was going to become a leader in the field. A field she had to carve out. That was another thing Batool ran up against. The silos of science. Her work is so interdisciplinary, it didn't fit neatly in one discipline. Where should I ground it? Should I base it on biophysics?

or cell biology. She landed her first professor job in the astronomy department at the University of Arizona. I was very proud of it because I thought, wow, I'm the first biologist in this country who's hired in an astronomy department. Because Earth was a very different planet when these life forms evolved, they're aliens in a way, and they might give us clues about the existence of life on other worlds.

Being in this department, it allowed Batool to zoom out even further. That experience definitely helped me conceptualize biology in the context of planets and stars. From Arizona, Batool went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ultimately, I realized my career through many different disciplines. It was far from a straight path. Research isn't a straight path either, as almost all scientists will tell you. And what Batool is trying to pull off scientifically is really hard.

But she's making progress. Those questions that raised eyebrows 15 years ago, she's starting to get some answers. She's successfully resurrected a couple of extinct proteins in the lab. Even more amazing, they function when she puts them into living organisms. And she's using them to start to glean insights into the evolution of early life.

Other people are doing bits and pieces of this kind of work. But Betul might be one of maybe two or three people in the world who do all of those things. Now, each of these things has like some question mark.

and I can easily see us having debates about them but you know that is like almost paralyzing and it was really wonderful to have somebody like Betul who's got this i'm gonna take no prisoners and i'm i'm just gonna do it you know you always have that thing in the back of your head is that if i had to start from scratch What would you rather be doing? And I was like, oh my god, I wish I had thought of this experiment.

Harmeet was so impressed with the work. He recommended Batool for a seed grant from the Hypothesis Fund, which enables scientists to nominate other scientists for funding to pursue their most ambitious ideas. ideas that might otherwise not get funded the hypothesis fund also makes this podcast

And already, Harmeet says, Batool is creating a path that others are following. Her successes. have not just motivated her and her lab, but they kind of motivated other people who would be maybe on the fence about whether we should do this. She started a whole sort of new branch of research. She's a rock star. It's remarkable how important persisting is in this business and probably in many things where you are trying to break a new ground. You need to survive.

you know what just like that protein that survived i need to persist i need to exist to tell this story I asked Patool if she thought her own story helped explain her science or what draws her to it. Yes, because I'm a biological system trying to understand itself ultimately, right? When you're trying to understand life and its origins and how it all happened, you're really exploring you. It is an exploration of ourselves.

So our backgrounds and our stories inevitably shape the way we do science. so me being this alien visitor in an alien place right and i moved to united states knowing nobody i found it poetic that i ended up asking the history of the systems that I study. I was interested in their journey. To me, they were the aliens.

Where did you come from? What have you been through? Tell me a little bit more about yourself. You seem really old. I mean, four billion years is a lot of living. I want to hear about it. Transcription by CastingWords mixing and scoring. Munger. Music by Joshua