Talking Biotech Podcast 389 - Science Controversies in Social Media 
Guest:  Dr. Liza Dunn, Bayer CropSciences
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[00:00:00] Kevin Folta: Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast by Colabra. And today we're speaking with Dr. Liza Dunn. She's the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Sciences, and someone who's been on the podcast a few times before. So welcome Dr. Dunn. 

[00:00:16] Liza Dunn: Hi. Glad to be here. . 

[00:00:18] Kevin Folta: Yeah. I'm glad to have you back on again.

It's like been here like I think your second or third time? Second. Second. Second time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, always a lot to talk about and I just wanted to kind of use today as kind of a, a little bit of a mishmash of different topics that people are hearing about, just to kind of help clarify them. For the average listener who may not underst.

The nuances of some of these popular topics. So we'll cover a fair bit of ground today and just see where it leads us. Um, but I really wanted to start out with your background because it's your technical background that makes you rather unique. So tell me a little bit about your medical background and really what makes you an authority in the area where you work.

[00:00:59] Liza Dunn: Yes. So that's, that's kind of interesting. So I'm an emergency medicine physician and a medical toxicologist and lots of people say, how on earth did an emergency doctor wind up in agriculture? And I got to agriculture sort of through the scenic route. Um, when I was 21 I was working backstage at a concert venue in St.

Louis called the Fox Theater. And, um, I was, Gonna major in, or I was majoring in technical theater, so LA light sound, um, you know, stage management, those kinds of things. Um, and my father, who was a physician at the time, asked me if I wanted to go on a medical mission with him to Haiti. Um, so he was gonna be doing metal medical work in the rest of our family.

Was gonna be taking care of babies in an orphanages, feeding them and things like that. And I fell in love with a little boy by the name of Fritz, um, who was the first kid I'd ever seen with malnutrition. And it made me realize, wow, what are you doing with your life? And so I wound up changing my major, um, to anthropology.

Went and taught English in Poland for a year after I, uh, uh, graduated from college. Um, and then really thought maybe I'm gonna do medicine. So went into medicine, did emergency medicine because I was interested in doing, um, uh, humanitarian work. Um, so, uh, wound up loving emergency medicine and you got to take care of all sorts of diseases.

People with infectious disease, people with obstetric problems, people with, um, broken bones, a whole variety of things. And what I loved about it, it was, uh, was you had access to so many. Wonderful brains and so many different, um, problems. You never knew what was gonna walk in the, the door, but I realized I was a jack of an all trades and a master of nun, so I decided that I was going to further my training in medical toxicology.

So I went and trained in medical toxicology for two years and then came back to Washington University in St. Louis. Started the medical toxicology fellowship program there. Um, and um, then in 2010, um, the earthquake hit in Haiti. Um, and I organized relief mission with several of my residents, um, back to Haiti, um, in 2010 and realized I was not seeing a whole lot different than it had been 21 years before.

Um, and realized as a physician you put a bandaid on the problem. Right. Um, when you are dealing with humanitarian relief problems, but what was I seeing that was really kind of the underlying problem that kept people in the, at the same level of poverty through the, between those 21 years. Right. Um, I realized if I was leaving, I was gonna be taking away a whole skillset with me and not leaving anything sustainable.

And I realized, you know, you were really. Malnutrition and insect borne illness. So what, what can you do in the global health arena that can help address those problems? And I started looking at, um, GMOs. I started looking at Golden Rice and realized that Golden Rice was a really, really interesting, uh, way of preventing, um, blindness.

One of the leading causes of blindness in children worldwide is vitamin A deficiency. Um, and. Uh, golden Rice was genetically modified to produce beta keine, which is a precursor of vitamin A. Um, I thought that was really cool science and really interesting, uh, way of dealing with a public health problem.

Um, because three grasses feed most of the world, um, over 60% of the world anyway. And those are ri rice, wheat, and corn. And while they fill you up, um, they don't have a lot of micronutrients. So I really got interested in that as an avenue for, um, Treating some common problems that you associate that you find with malnutrition.

And then al also being a toxicologist, um, seeing so much insect borne illness there and realizing in, uh, the west you don't see a lot of insect borne illness. And why is that? Well, it's because we have access to vector control mechanisms. So, um, if you think about it, the World Health organiz. Was established to prevent outbreaks of the plague before we had good control mechanisms for plague.

Um, and so pesticides are critical for public health. They prevent us having diseases from encountering diseases of, um, the, the, uh, middle Ages. And so, um, I wound up getting offered a job, um, by a man that who's a toxicologist that I know by the name of Dr. Get Dan Gold. In 2015 and I thought, I don't know if I wanna work for nCino

And, uh, wound up, uh, looking at the job, um, a couple months later and I was so amazed by the company. It was so unlike anything that I'd ever heard about in academia and anything I'd ever heard about in sort of lay discussions. I took the job and the day I took the job, Bayer bought the company . And so, so, um, which was really interesting though, um, because it wound up being, I, I wound up being part of the world's biggest life science company and the, the.

you know, motto of the company is Health for All and hunger for none. And I really feel like that's been my whole career trajectory. Um, and uh, it's, it's, it's a fantastic job. It's a fantastic company. Um, and I, I've learned so much, um, from having this access to. Even this global access to the best brains in, uh, you know, in in, in agriculture and in pharmacology and consumer health.

I, I've been able to make fantastic connections around the world and learn about so many other different scientific disciplines. It's, it's just a fascinating. 

[00:07:00] Kevin Folta: No, that, so that fits really good. I really wanted to get your background because your story and all of this makes such a big, uh, part of, uh, why you do what you do today and, and why, why it's in, why you're involved in these questions and the ones that, uh, always come back.

Well, let's first touch on public health. You're talking about that, you know, and I've heard you talk about this before and it really is an intriguing distillation. All of the major public health advances that gave us a longer lifespan are based on just a handful of technologies. And in the discussions online of some of these technologies, people always say, well, this is why we're in the worst health that we've ever been in as a species.

And I always go, well, I think it's the other way around. So what's the story? 

[00:07:47] Liza Dunn: So the story on that is the 20th century was one of the most amazing centuries that we've lived through, despite two world wars and several huge famines, right? The 20th century bought us a 35 year increase in life expectancy.

So in 1800. People live to be 30 on average, by 1900. We were hit in the right bull age of 45 and 45% of the American population barked by 2000. We were getting close to 80 and 2% of the population barked. And how did that happen? Well, that happened because we had five public health advent, um, advances that.

Revolutionized, um, human health and wellbeing and, and, and wealth as well. Um, so those five things were the introduction of water sanitation, food security, vaccination. Antibiotics and vector control. And because of those things you had a dimunition of diarrhea, illnesses, and other water waterborne diseases like so, like cholera, right?

Which Which is how epidemiology started. Epidemiology started with John Snow discovering. That cholera was coming from, um, a, a water pump and contaminated water in, in, in London. Um, so you know, Bo Water dis born diseases are still a really big thing in the developing world, and you can get lots of problems from them.

Uh, e coli, infections, uh, cholera, uh, typhoid, all sort. If you've got fe fecal contamination of water, that's a big problem. Right? Uh, food security. Food security. Uh, you know, up until the fifties, uh, we were not making, having anywhere near as much. Um, uh, Yield in, in our crop production. Um, it, we had very, sort of inefficient ways of farming.

Um, and several inventions really made farming a, a huge, uh, huge advances in par, gave us huge advances in farming, which improved yield, uh, improved food, food, food security from my a infectious disease standpoint as well. Um, Uh, fungal infections of crops, uh, elaborate my mycotoxins and that that has big public health IMPA impacts.

Um, and the, the ways you can control that is with, you know, weed control, uh, vector control, and then antifungal medications. Um, prior to the advent of those kinds of things, um, you would have large outbreaks of, of, uh, diseases like ergo. Um, which, uh, caused hallucinations and made people have miscarriages and have their fingers and toes fall off because the blood supply got caught off mass, mass outbreaks of this.

Uh, I think even all the way into the fifties, there were case reports where big populations in France would, uh, would get, have Ergotism, um, and, and, uh, die from it. Um, you know, You had toxic weeds in the food supply and now we mo monitor for toxic weeds in the food supply. So food security is a big thing.

Vaccination, hands down, uh, you know, uh, eradicated smallpox from the world. It just hugely, hugely important, uh, way of controlling diseases that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, uh, throughout, uh, millennia. and then, uh, antibiotics. Uh, what's really interesting about antibiotics is that if you think about it, an many antibiotics come from soil microorganisms, right?

And penicillin comes from a fungus, right? Um, and so when microorganisms is sort of, uh, you know, co-evolved, they make defense mechanisms for protecting themselves from. Other organisms. So a lot of people get concerned about plants having pesticide residues on them. Well, um, plants, um, since they can't run away from you make their own pesticides, um, and they are chemicals that they, they prevent, uh, animals or insects or, uh, you know, uh, other weed pressure.

They make their own pesticides to protect themselves. Predation. Um, and we have figured out how to d turn those chemistries. A lot of them natural chemistries into very beneficial chemistries that we can use to protect plants are crops in a variety of different ways. Um, and then, uh, vector control. You know, one of the, the, the number one.

Killer of mankind is the mosquito. Um, and the mosquito can carry all sorts of diseases, not just malaria, which kills over 3000 kids a day, but kills. They can carry viral illnesses that don't have any kind of treatment. So you have to prevent people from getting that illness in the first place. So Zika dengue.

Dengue is like a hemorrhagic virus, right? So it's a mosquito carries an Ebola alike virus. Um, it, it. Is a lot of death and destruction worldwide. So, um, I think that those, those controls, those things, um, that we in the west tend to take for granted. We have all our groceries on our shelves. We, our houses are not invested with bedbugs and lice and cockroaches and, you know, things like that.

And we, whoa, you know, this is, we think that that's the way life is, but it's not the way life has been. It's only been that way for the. Oh, 50, 60 years, you know, and in places and other places in the world, they don't have access to all these, these, the abundance that we have, and we really sometimes take it for granted.

[00:13:42] Kevin Folta: Now you're a hundred percent right, and, and you're basically talked about, you know, water security and, uh, water hygiene or fluoridation perhaps. And, uh, if you talk about, uh, vaccines and, uh, chemistry that's being used on crops and insects, you must be the most popular person on Twitter. 

[00:14:02] Liza Dunn: I dunno that I'm the most popular person on Twitter, but I love Twitter.

I, I think Twitter's Twitter is quite the place to um, really try to have conversations with people. It's funny cuz you get only a little kind of snippet in there and you can have all the sudden everybody to send on you and have all sorts of opinions and you can understand where they get their opinions because they see the popular.

narrative, and a lot of the people that have these opinions are very, very well intended. Right. Um, because they don't, they, they, we, we all want good, healthy food and water for our children and our families and things like that. And so what they see is they see the sort of, You know, popular narrative about Monsanto and Big, big Ag, uh, they see the popular narrative about pesticides they see, and, and so they're worried about, you know, corporate interests and they're also worried about, you know, harming their children.

Um, what they don't know is how heavily regulated companies are and how heavily regulated. Pesticides and GMOs are, and how critical all of that is for having a lower environmental, uh, footprint. So if you're worried about planetary health, um, there, the, the goal of the agriculture industry is to produce as much healthy food.

So the prices. Affordable, um, as possible with the lowest environmental footprint. And we are regulated to try to do that. And if people had a better understanding that this is, uh, this is something that's critical, they would maybe be a little bit more, um, accepting of new technologies. 

[00:15:57] Kevin Folta: Yeah, that's very true.

It's, it's, it's pretty amazing because when you look at food production and how that is happening around the world, technology and genetic improvement of crops has been at the center of that. And how you went from 1920s, uh, 20 bait bushels per acre of corn to today, 200 in some cases, if you really push it, you know, there's somebody who always does over 400.

Um, how, and all of this has been because of innovations in genetic. And a lot of companies have done this, and many of them been been absorbed in the bigger conglomerates in agriculture. But when you talk about genetics, you talk about food, you talk about it in public spaces, people get concerned and it's because.

um, you know, when you say they're concerned about the health of their kids, they're concerned about the environment. It's like I'm saying Me too. Um, you know, my, my kid's minus two months old, you know, and, and I'm very concerned about her already, and I wouldn't ever let anything happen to her. But, but, so I understand where this comes from.

The problem is, is that I don't get worried about it. I'm concerned about their health, but I don't worry about the things that everybody else worries. Because I understand the regulatory process, but I also understand the basic science of the genetics. And so how do we use things like Twitter? And I kind of know the answer to this, but I'd like to hear your take.

How can we better use Twitter and social media to help bridge that from, you know, concern to to worry, to just good, healthy concern and skeptic. 

[00:17:32] Liza Dunn: Yeah, I, I think that a lot of people are cynical, uh, about science, and I think that, you know, COVID has kind of laid this bear. There's, you know, people have been so negatively impacted by this, uh, this, uh, disease that they look at now, science on a, at a, in a completely different way.

They have a different perspective on public health, on doctors, on scientists just in general. And, um, they wanna know, Who they can trust. And I think that, um, one of the issues for scientists just in general is that they are very good at what they do, but they aren't particularly good at communicating it.

And so what happens is you get sort of two layers of communication. You get a very high level basic communication that often comes from companies, a corporate message. trust us. We know that this is okay. We know we've done lots of studies and that people go, Hmm, I don't know if I, I, I, I'd like to know a little bit more, but if you wanna know a little bit more, all of a sudden you need to have a PhD in a variety of different ex, you know, Disciplines to be able to understand what anybody's saying.

So there needs to be a shift into the happy medium of where you can have a dialogue with somebody who has some scientific expertise that you can trust. And you know, that they are, that, that, that, that they can communicate at a level that's not condescending, but it's not either It, it's just right. It's like the Goldilocks, um, scientific of, of scientific communication.

Not too high, not too low, but just right. And Twitter can offer an opportunity for that kind of discussion. Twitter can be very adversarial and very security, but I think if you think about it, Everybody from all sorts of different walks of life is on Twitter. So all politicians are on Twitter. A bunch of scientists are on Twitter.

A bunch of moms are on Twitter. Um, and and professionals from a variety of dis different disciplines. So the people that follow me are physicians, public health people, but I have a whole bunch of ag people that are following me too. Those communities usually. Interact. And if you think about it, it's a fascinating mix because physicians tend to be urban and tend to be a little bit liberal.

Whereas, uh, ag folks and growers and producers, sorry about the dog growers and producers tend to be a little bit more urban, uh, uh, rural and conservative, and they have questions about each other's science. So, Two and a half decades now, we've had people growing GMOs and really, uh, working on that science, and there's been a lot of questioning about GMOs and their safety coming from the medical community.

And the people, the scientists in the, in the ag community are like, well, we've got so much. Depth in this, and we've done so much work on this and we know that this is really important for food security and that, that this, they're safe. We've done the testing that they, to demonstrate their safety on billions of animals.

You know, this is, this is, this is really, really, Well known and regulatory agencies all around the world agree that this is safe. Whereas physicians are like, well, we are, we're not so sure. And we don't know enough about it, and we don't have access to a lot of information about it. Um, and what we see is eat organic in, in all of this stuff.

And there's nothing wrong with organic, it's just that we have 10,000 years of experience with it and it's not gonna feed 10 billion people. So, so physicians have lots of questions and they have no access to that information. Now enter Covid and there are all sorts of questions about vaccines and these new novel vaccines, which are unbelievable feats of science.

I, I just think that they're so interesting and have so much potential to, to, to use that science. Cure cancer without chemotherapy. And I don't say that lightly. I look at this kind of stuff very seriously. Um, but there are so much suspicion around these vaccines and this technology, uh, based on fear and, and a lot of misinformation that I think that the agricultural community is.

We don't get this, we, and they don't have access to the science, right? And the physicians are like, why don't you understand this? So I do a talk, which is called How Medicine Became Monsanta, COVID 19, and Pitfalls and Scientific Communication where I try to get both of those groups together to have a dialogue so they can understand the benefits and safety of both of those things.

And so Twitter turns out to be a wonderful opportunity. To have those people engaged, and you have to be a little bit brave because you will have a whole bunch of anti-vaxxers that don't like you and have plenty to say, and you'll have a whole bunch of anti GMO people that don't like you and have plenty to say , but you find the people in the middle, and when you find the people in the middle and you answer their questions.

Everybody gets backed into their corner. Um, and, and if, if you are willing to understand that there are a lot of people who are not in a corner. There are a lot of people who wanna know and they just don't wanna have somebody be condescending to them. They don't wanna have somebody be mean to them or call them an anti-vaxxer or, you know, anti-science person.

So Twitter provides an opportunity to start a convers. And that conversation is really expanded with the advent of Twitter spaces. So Twitter, if you ask me, Twitter's really become the news. . Um, and if watch anything, cnn, N N M S N D C, Fox, whatever, part of a huge chunk of the discussion will be what happened on Twitter today, right?

Mm-hmm. . So Twitter has become the news and Twitter spaces have become a, an avenue. For people to have a huge audience, to have real time discussions about things that are happening and things that they have questions about, and it's the first time I've been able to see experts from a variety of dis different disciplines.

Be able to a answer questions or even have discussions and debates that are public about, uh, questions that are going out there. Um, and, and yes, they can get lively and yes, if you aren't used to, if you're not an ER doctor and used to a little bit of chaos , um, they can be a little intimidating at first, but they, they actually are, I think, A really new, innovative way of having open, public, transparent discussions with people from a variety of different backgrounds to, uh, about, about topics and, and controversial topics.

Um, and I think that, that that's a real avenue for people to be able to learn more and, and make a decision and an informed decision based on ha listening to. 

[00:25:14] Kevin Folta: now. Very good. Let's take a break here. I kind of forgot to do that, . That's right. Speaking with Dr. Lizza Dunn. She's the, uh, I forgot your title.

You're the Medical, medical Affairs, medical affairs lead at, you know, you just can't say like the, the top doctor at, uh, Bayer Crop Sciences. And we'll be back with the Talking Biotech podcast by Collabora in just a. So now we're back on collabs talking Biotech podcast, and we're speaking with Dr. Lizza Dunn.

She's the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Sciences. And we're just kind of touching on a bunch of major, uh, topics in modern science. And one of the big ones was we're just coming out of Twitter and Twitter spaces. And one of the things that I've really learned, because I've become, uh, engulfed in a couple of clouds of controversy lately that I get.

Um, Twitter and mention something like glyphosate being okay, or that seed oils aren't okay, or, I mean, seed oils is like a major controversy. You'll have a thousand accounts to send on you and tell you you're gonna die tomorrow because of seed oils, let alone covid vaccines or mRNA or whatever. And one thing that I think I've learned, and I'm gonna launch it here because I'm suspicious, I think that.

Fake accounts everywhere on Twitter right now that do nothing but stoke controversy. And if you look at the, if you look at whoever is causing controversy, they have a handful of followers, maybe very few, and have been on maybe for some time, like older accounts, couple years old, but no followers and not that many tweets.

And the only ones they do are Provo. And they tend to be ar around certain conversations. So it's kinda like they fish for some. So I don't know, have you noticed the same thing at, at all? Yeah. 

[00:27:04] Liza Dunn: So I think that, I think that, yeah, I think there are a lot of bots and I think that a lot of bot accounts will sort of do a swarm and, you know, tell you how terrible you are because you, uh, talk about, you know, these scientific ideas.

Um, and yes, I, so I. I think that that's interesting. One of the things that I've discovered about Twitter spaces is. Those aren't bots, those are real people with real ideas and real accounts. And so there are people with, uh, there are people with 2 million followers who I talk to on these spaces. Um, the, and so I think that this is, I think that the space mechanism is one of the ways that they're starting to tease out who's a bot and who's.

And because these spaces, so the first space that I was on, Was in December, um, and it was on a Mario NAL space. And they were talking about the vaccine. They were talking about, uh, you know, what was going on with the vaccine and over 348, I think it was 350,000 people. Listened to that space. Now these spaces can be very long.

They can be, you know, any, they can be anywhere from an hour to, to 7, 8, 9, 10 hours, and they're on all sorts of different topics. But I think that's the way you start teasing out who. Who's a real person and who's not. You also, you know, you can also have a back and forth with some of these people, but you, there's a saying on Twitter, I don't know how many people that are gonna hear this are on Twitter, but, you know, don't feed the trolls.

So there are Yeah. People who like to harass you. And I actually don't block anybody, but I tend to mute them. Yeah, I 

[00:28:53] Kevin Folta: block a lot. Um, I, I do feed the trolls a bit because, uh, Twitter is a spectator. And you have a lot of people who don't know who to trust, who are looking at this conversation between the scientists from Florida who has a record of 37 years of public health or public health, public service, and uh, and a troll.

Who's saying, well, in 2015, he took money from Mon. It's like the, it becomes very clear who to trust. Okay. You know, and, and so this is a place going back to trust. Whereas if, and I always say if you're a diamond in the cesspool, rightly, um, you know that this is an opportunity for us as scientists and those who are listening.

Um, who may be laypeople or scientists or whatever to engage in Twitter and engage with class. Take the high road, say, I understand where you're coming from because these are what people truly feel in their hearts, but share your expertise and earn the trust because there are thousands of people watching.

And during the last two weeks of people just like flaming me about glyphosate and about seed oils and about vaccines and nobody on GMOs anymore, that's, yeah, that's ship sailed. Um, I have never had such an explosion of new followers. 

[00:30:12] Liza Dunn: Yes, that's exactly right. And since December I've doubled my number of followers.

It's just been exponential since I've started being on these spaces. Um, and, and the other thing is, Realize that a lot of people get concerned about, you know, the Twitter mob and having people mad at them. And Twitter's not the real world. It Twitter helps you sort of help educate people about public health and things like that.

And so it's a very, very valuable tool, but you can always put it away. Um, I never. Things personally and I, and if I do take things, if I get upset, I just put it down. I won't respond. I think don't let, don't let a bad faith and anger make you mad. Once again, you actually develop much more, um, trust people will trust you if they know that they can answer, they can ask you questions, and, and they, they'll trust you if they can ask you challenging questions.

Um, and you may not wind up even ever agreeing with the person on the other side, but I've. Now had some pretty productive discussions with people that I'm very politically different than mm-hmm. . Um, and so I think it's one of the ways if you, if you can rise above the sturman drawing, it's one of the things that I think will really contribute to healing in this country.

And I think it's important. Um, to try to find the middle ground and, um, find, understand that people who are angry are often coming from a place where they've had a bad experience. Mm-hmm. . Um, and if you can understand that and empathize with them, then that starts building trust. 

[00:31:59] Kevin Folta: And it also has the elements of bias and other cognitive errors that we make.

And that somebody will say, well, every time I've stopped eating corn, um, I feel better. And my stomach problem solved, resolved. And, and, okay, well maybe that's true because when you stopped eating corn, you also started exercising or started drinking more water or started doing something else different.

You know, we make a lot of cognitive errors and. You have to understand that people are sometimes victims of their own self-deception as well as the deception from others in social media and that there are people, but there are people whose job it is 24 hours a day. Seven days a week to make sure that your message never gets out or is contradicted if it does get out and you have a full-time job doing what you do.

I got a full-time job doing what I do. Two full-time jobs, let alone. And so, uh, in trying to allay the concerns of the concerned mom who makes, and you mentioned this earlier, people who will say, well, I'm just gonna eat organic, they make their precautionary decision. Mm-hmm. because they don't know who to trust.

How do. Earn that trust. And, and I, I would urge people definitely to engage in Twitter for sure. Um, I, I got, um, you know, more followers, but I get emails from people saying, I read saw you heard on Twitter, can you answer this for me? Yes. So it is the conduit. And then the last thing I'll say on this issue is, um, you know, and certainly love your follow up, is we almost might be trending towards, Time when people are starting the real eyes, that kindness actually wins.

[00:33:40] Liza Dunn: Influence. That's exactly right. That is exactly right. Because, you know, if you can deescalate. So it's interesting, there was a, when, when you're an emergency doctor, you have people in high, high stress situations, gunshot wounds, you know, stabbings, and you're, you're gonna be taking care of people who hurt each other and this, you know, want room away from each other.

So I, and then the patients. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Um, but so yeah, so high stress situations. And so what you have to do is you have to figure out how to deescalate those high stress situations. And when you're on Twitter and you've got somebody who's been hurt in some capacity or is angry in some capacity, because if something that's happened to them or a loved one, it's very hard to.

You know, give your scientific message. You need to start deescalating and listening. Um, and that if, if you can learn about how deescalating and listening and empathizing and understanding other people, you really can build some bridges. Um, and, and then, then they really wanna actually ask you questions, real questions.

And so what I'd say is that we'd be, it'd be good if we could learn. Forgive each other a little bit. And if we could learn to, um, maybe accept that, um, the polarization that's due to politics should maybe try, we should try to not think that just because somebody has one opinion about one agenda item that they fall in with a whole sort of litany of things.

Um, Are unacceptable, unacceptable to other people. And and it goes both in both directions. Yeah. So I think that, that that's, it's really important for people to try to, um, be, have empathy for other people's experience, understand that you're not in their shoes, um, and forgiveness. And those are, those are really important principles.

Yeah. You 

[00:35:46] Kevin Folta: took the words right outta my mouth with, uh, you know, walking a mile in someone else's shoes. And a big part of that is, you know, I, I live in a predominantly, very conservative area, but I'm a professor who has, you know, a lot of left leanings. With respect to social issues, those kinds of things, but pretty conservative financially.

And so I don't have, and also with some other issues, I mean, it goes kind of both ways. And the problem is everybody gets mad at me , like you're saying earlier, like, you know, um, and, uh, and, but at the, at the same time, you have to put yourself in someone else's shoes that. I was a business owner. Maybe I would feel this way about these tax policies because I see how it affects my ability to hire and my ability to maintain an income myself.

Um, the way in which it changes the regulations on me, um, the way that, uh, regulations and agriculture. Are, you know, they just killing a farmer's bottom line. And I could see how that would become priority number one. And I don't care what happens to, uh, abortions or trans issues or whatever. Yeah. Because I, my bottom line is at stake, so I have to vote this way.

And, and so thinking about it that way maybe would help us get to little. Better middle ground. 

[00:37:03] Liza Dunn: That's exactly right. I think we, I think that too many discussions get hijacked by us like a social issue, and people don't understand the real world impacts of that. And you know, another thing that people talk about all the time is, you know, um, school closures, right?

And it, it's fine if you've got access to a, you know, a, a a computer and electricity and all of this kind of stuff. But if, if you're a single working mom, Who has to go to work so you can have the pay for the electricity to pay for the computer, to pay for the wifi so your kid can get educated two years.

Is a big deal. And so, so I, I think that a lot of people had, you know, once again, people were well-intended, but they, they have to think about the implications of what they're saying. Um, and so walking in other people's shoes maybe makes it a little bit, makes you more empathetic about things than I think that in terms of scientific communication, some of us, um, some of us are rigid in.

What are prescriptions for? How other people should behave, and I think that maybe we need to be a little bit more fluid in those prescriptions because reality we, we, you know, reality intervenes. 

[00:38:27] Kevin Folta: Yeah. And so, you know, you and I didn't have a, uh, an agenda for today's conversation. We just wanted to see where it goes because pretty much you and I get stuck in an airport together.

We end up on a phone call or whatever. It just goes in a good place and we kind of have to wrap it up soon, but maybe we could conclude by kind of. Following this theme all the way through. A lot of folks who are listening say, yeah, but I'm not an expert in science. I'm not an emergency room physician. I don't have a background in toxicology yet.

You know, I, I really appreciate what Dr. Dun brings the table. Folta pretty good. Um, and I'd love to participate in the conversation how. Important is the power of amplification in 

[00:39:05] Liza Dunn: social media. Oh, hugely, hugely important. Yeah. So e, even if you don't have those backgrounds, I know you have questions. Don't be worried about asking those questions.

And don't be worried about asking tough questions. Ask tough questions, you know? And if somebody is too much of a snowflake to answer those tough questions, , then, then you know you aren't gonna trust them. Right? But if they do answer them and they answer them in a way that is, um, is, is. You know that, that you feel like you can, you may not agree with it, but in a way that's not rude or condescending or angry sounding, I think that you can develop a dialogue with that kind of person and then amplify those answers.

I have questions for people all the time that I have no expertise in, and so, and I've found that Twitter has been a, a wonderful way for me to tap other people's brains that have much more expertise and I try to get like multiple. Um, opinions. So I make the best informed opinion about things that I have no expertise in.

So, um, don't worry if you don't know, feel free to ask. And that's, that's what the beauty of this platform is. 

[00:40:12] Kevin Folta: Yeah. And if you find things that are scientifically accurate within your understanding that you find are com particularly compelling, retweet, retweet, retweet, and share on Facebook and share on Instagram share in your network.

And then this is the way good stuff grows. The people who have been against science know this expertly and they have people whose full-time job it is to write some hideous thing about me or you know, or Eliza. And then, uh, some, then the same people will like and retweet, right? And, and, and they, but they're pushing it into their network.

And the way that we can push back against full-time, you know the handful of full-time accounts. It was a center for countering digital hate. 65% of the fake information on Covid came from 12 accounts. Yeah. Um, so, but there's billions of us, well mil, um, millions of us. And if everybody just took a little bit of time to go out and share a few messages and ask a few questions.

It changes the dynamic. And so maybe a really great way to wrap this up and you know, I'd love to hear your two senses, is here we are as a scientific community on a scientific podcast. And the way that we take the power back here is by sharing each other's messaging. So, uh, I wanna see lots of retweets of this particular episode.

Um, any thoughts on that while we wrap? 

[00:41:35] Liza Dunn: Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. Uh, we do not wanna go back to having diseases of the Middle Ages because of misinformation. We've got, we have made so much progress. We have, you know, better health that we've got, you know, access to incredibly healthy food, um, and incredibly wonderful, um, lifestyles because of, because of, um, Of, of the scientific advances that we've had in public health, and, and I would love to see a positive spin on this instead of, you know, the negative emotions that get brought up by, by, you know, anti-vaccine and anti antibiotics and people, people pushing for raw water and the whole things.

That'll put us right back to 1900 when we lived to age 45. So, 

[00:42:22] Kevin Folta: All right, we're raw water. Great. Note to go out on. No problem. So, Dr. Lizza Dunn, thank you very much for another wonderful conversation. I look forward to seeing you again in person and one of these days, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll take on some sort of project together.

That'll be really cool. We'll get, that'd be great. Thank you very much, and for everybody who's listening, write reviews on iTunes, share with a friend, share with two friends. Tell them to share with their friends. And this is how we make good information spread. There's a turn that's occurring. Uh, be kind in social media, share it with friends, uh, share with, share with your networks, and I think this is the way that we get start to solve the problem.

So thank you very much for listening to Collaboratives, talking Biotech podcast, and we'll talk to you again next.