Talkign Biotech Podcast #398
Telling Science's Story with Sam Kean 

Co-Hosts Gracelyn Byrd and Dr. Kevin Folta

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[00:00:00] Kevin Folta: Hi everybody, and welcome to this Week's Talking Biotech podcast by Colabra. So today's guest will be author Sam Kean and we'll talk about his book, the Violinist Thumb, and other topics in modern biotechnology and in science communication. But today we have a co-host. So we're we sitting here with Gracelyn Byrd.

Gracelyn is an agronomist with US Sugar and has a master's degree in agro ecology and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Florida. And was a student in my developmental and cellular biology class this last semester and showed us interest in podcasting. So welcome to the podcast, Gracely. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Yeah. So but you're, you're an agronomist with US Sugar, correct? Okay, so what brings you back to a PhD program? 

[00:00:49] Gracelyn Byrd: I was hired by US Sugar to work in the research department where I was in charge of small plot fertilizer research, and shortly after I started, they asked if I would be willing to go back and get my master's because that would've been appropriate for the work I was doing.

And shortly after I started my master's, which I was able to do online while I worked, they asked if I would be willing to go back for my PhD because our company's chief soil scientist is getting ready to retire and they figured it would be much easier to. Pay for the education of somebody internally to go get their PhD in preparation for that role, rather than it is to find a soil scientist with an expertise in sugar cane willing to move to CLE in Florida.

So, a little far out of the way. So here I am. 

[00:01:35] Kevin Folta: Do you live in Cleon for real, in 

[00:01:37] Gracelyn Byrd: real life? I actually live in Moore Haven. The property taxes are a little cheaper in Glades County, Florida. But yeah, I have a house there. I purchased a house trying to be a good adult Right before I found out I was coming up here temporarily.

So I'm, I'm renting it out to a young coworker and his wife. They're also trying to save for a house, so I'm trying to pay it forward. Yeah. And, and giving them a good deal while I'm up here. Yeah. 

[00:02:02] Kevin Folta: Cause nobody knows CLE in Florida, but there's not much in Clewiston. I mean, it's, 

[00:02:07] Gracelyn Byrd: it's America's sweetest town.

Okay. That's, that's our, that's our claim to fame down in the sugar belt. Down in the sugar belt. Yes. 

[00:02:13] Kevin Folta: And so most of the sugar that you're, that we're producing here in Florida is coming from sugar cane, not sugar 

[00:02:18] Gracelyn Byrd: beets, right? Yes, that's correct. Sugar cane is responsible for about 45% of our total domestic sugar production supply and about.

Half of that is grown in Florida. The other half is Louisiana and then Texas actually has a couple acres of sugar cane as well. 

[00:02:36] Kevin Folta: Yeah. And so sugar beets mm-hmm. Are mostly grown up north somewhere? Yeah. 

[00:02:41] Gracelyn Byrd: Yeah. In the, in the Minnesota. Dakotas, Colorado. Colorado. I think California has some in the northern part.

But I admittedly don't know. A whole lot about sugar beets, except I know they, their molasses doesn't taste good, so they have to buy molasses from us if they're making brown sugar because, Whenever you have brown sugar, you actually add molasses back to the arty refined sugar. Yeah. So, well 

[00:03:07] Kevin Folta: someday we gotta just talk about sugar and sugar harvesting and all the ways it's done.

So it's really an interesting process and, and a lot of interesting edges on it too that, you know, politically and, and pushback from different groups that don't like different aspects of it, but, but it's a really interesting process. You, do you want to just touch on how it's done? Yeah, 

[00:03:25] Gracelyn Byrd: sure. So sugar cane, and I won't speak to sugar beet cause I know less about it.

But sugar cane is a giant tropical grass. In the stalks, it stores sucrose that's created as a byproduct of photosynthesis for energy, and it is able to store. A ton of sucrose in these stalks, which we harvest and then send to the mill. And the mill produces raw sugar. That raw sugar's then refined and purified to 99.9% sucrose.

So we actually are pretty vertically integrated in Florida, so we are not only growing the cane, we're harvesting the cane and shipping it to our own mills and refining it in our own refineries. And all of our sugar produced is sold domestically in the United States. Oh, 

[00:04:12] Kevin Folta: really? Great. How many big sugar producers are 

[00:04:14] Gracelyn Byrd: there now?

Is it, there's US Sugar is a big one with a mill. Florida Crystals is another big producer in Florida that has a mill. And then the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida is a cooperative of a lot of smaller growers, but we all have to work together to kind of make sure everybody's mills are running and, and that we're getting all of the food out that we need to.

Yeah, they still produce in Hawaii. They don't, I believe that ended in about 2016 and I don't know for sure, but I heard that they were regulated out of 

[00:04:46] Kevin Folta: business. Yeah. That, well, that seems to be consistent with how Hawaii's working, that a lot of the inputs that you needed to maintain sugar. Just made it 

[00:04:53] Gracelyn Byrd: impossible.

Yeah. It's really I'm sure it was hard to get fertilizer and, and any other inputs over there. Yeah. Could be really difficult. 

[00:05:00] Kevin Folta: Yeah. Everything has to be important, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so we will be speaking with Sam Keene today, and this was your big idea. So what inspired you to ask Sam to come aboard?

[00:05:09] Gracelyn Byrd: So you had offered to let students who wanted experience trying to. Speak on a podcast to come on to your podcast, and I wanted to take you up on that offer. I, biotechnology is not necessarily my area of expertise, so I was trying to think of somebody that I could invite that might be interesting to your audience.

And I thought about my favorite author, Sam Keene. He wrote a book that I absolutely love called The Disappearing Spoon and other True Tales of Madness, love, and the history of the World from the periodic Table of Elements that how whims the, the name is super whimsical and it matches his style of writing throughout the entire book.

I just really fell in love with his writing. I have the audio books and the books in print. I actually gave them to the Advisors on my master's committee as gifts once they told me I passed my final oral exam. 

[00:06:03] Kevin Folta: Well, that's highly recommended because I, I teach the stuff that's in violin, Islam.

Mm-hmm. And I never knew the stories with so much detail, and I realize how boring I must be. To be, you know, just kind of skimming the surface and especially in these days where information is everywhere, to be able to personalize these stories and develop characters and talk about what is happening and give context, yeah.

Really makes these things so much more valuable. And I think, I think these books, Have made me better as a modern teacher. Mm-hmm. And, and I'm really glad that you've, you know, thought of this. How did you like the molecular biology class? Now? You don't have to say it. 

[00:06:41] Sam Kean: I 

[00:06:41] Gracelyn Byrd: liked it a lot. I really did. I, and I am very grateful that y'all let me into the class.

I felt like if the fire hydrant was turned open, but, or opened on me. But I feel like I grew a lot in the class and my understanding of the more molecular components of what I do on a more. Physiological or macro scale, and that's always useful. I like you said, the way that Sam Keene kind of. And his writing breaks down and, and adds fine details into these larger concepts.

That's what I felt like your molecular biology class did for me. That's 

[00:07:17] Kevin Folta: funny. Yeah. I always, I always do like to incorporate some stories in my section anyway. Mm-hmm. Where we do talk about some of the cool stuff that happened because the texture of what happened in Photobiology especially was so cool and so weird and happenstance and.

The thing, the stories are so rich and they've even written books on it. I think I got one here on my shelf. Yeah. It was written more as a documentary than it was as a scientific textbook. Mm-hmm. And that kind of style just is really attractive. So that's what's really cool. And I'm, I'm really glad you thought of him as a guest.

[00:07:47] Gracelyn Byrd: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you were glad. 

[00:07:50] Kevin Folta: Well, let's welcome him, him aboard right here. And our guest today is author Sam Keene, the author of The Violinist Thumb and many other books. So welcome to the podcast, Sam. 

[00:08:01] Sam Kean: Hi. Thanks for having me. 

[00:08:02] Kevin Folta: Yeah, thank you very much for joining us. We were really excited to do this.

You were Grace Lynn's choice and actually I'm a little embarrassed to say that she was the one who introduced me to your work and I absolutely love it. It really compliments what I do as an educator and and I really was glad to find this. I'm looking forward to this today and maybe I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit too much by saying that, you know, you've, Talked about all these important stories in science and all your different books, and how do you think that history will look at the Covid pandemic someday when we, you know, turn an eye backwards 

[00:08:35] Sam Kean: on this.

I think when it looks back, we're gonna see a couple of different things. I think if you're just talking about the pure science aspect of it, you people are gonna be kind of amazed that we were able to get a very successful, very safe vaccine out as quickly as we did. There's really no precedent for getting a vaccine out this quickly, and the methods they used were new methods.

Much quicker and it'll probably make the vaccines much easier to produce and mass produce in the future. So science-wise, I think it's gonna be pretty amazing. Then of course, there's all of the sort of political stuff that has been writing on top of the pandemic kind of the unprecedented mistrust involved in something that's very safe life-saving measure.

So I think it's gonna be a bit of a mix in terms of the overall. Understanding of what the, what the results of the pandemic were and how the role science played in it. So I think it's going to be interesting to see kind of the, whether the political angles are really the part that stands out and whether that's what it's more remembered for or for the good scientific work that got done.

Yeah, it's 

[00:09:44] Kevin Folta: interesting because I, I really believe that there will be some sort of Something that happens where this technology is very useful that will eventually win the hearts and minds of those who are against it. And I guess that's kind of how science works. 

[00:09:58] Sam Kean: It's interesting you do see, if you look back in history, even back in Edward Jenner's day, people were frightened.

They were scared of vaccines back then. There are political cartoons of people, you know, turning into cows or little cowhead are erupting on their skin from the blisters because Edward Jenner famously used on the cowpox. To inoculate people against smallpox for the first vaccine. So you see these fears of vaccines and things going back a long ways.

And yeah, maybe the science will eventually sort of triumph there and drown it out. But in the moment now, it's it feels like it's kind of overwhelming in the other direction and that the, the politics seems like the more, the, the bigger, more pressing thing. 

[00:10:41] Gracelyn Byrd: Yeah, I feel like a lot of your stories kind of paint similar pictures throughout the history of scientific developments.

Even the violinist who, for whom your book is titled his town believed that he had sold his soul to the devil and that's why he was so good at playing the violin and they refused to bury him and the church cemetery. So I think that this might be what another one of those times or situations, but I'd like to know What inspires you to tell these types of stories in the way that you do, where you connect the scientific discoveries and the people involved with them to the world around them, and as well as the social and the social context associated with that.

[00:11:25] Sam Kean: I'd say there's a couple reasons I like doing these types of stories and writing about science in the way I do, which is really narrative, really story-based, things like that. Because I'm really, when I'm, I'm doing a book, I come kind of writing for two audiences. I have two audiences in mind. One is just your normal.

Everyday lay reader, someone who's not involved with science on a day-to-day basis. You know, probably took some classes in high school, college, whatever, but really hasn't done much in the field since then. And for them, what I'm trying to do is introduce them to the field to teach them how genetics works.

They probably have read about genetics, maybe are curious about it. They wanna know a little bit more. And the books I'm writing, the stories I'm telling are a way to get into that. It can be a little less intimidating than, you know, picking up a scientific paper that probably seems impenetrable. And human beings, we like other human beings, we're social creatures, so it does help.

To have a human being at the center of the stories, it can help you get into the story and make some sense of it if there is another human being, a character that you really care about at the center of the story. So for lay readers, everyday readers, it helps them get into the story, helps them make it a little more digestible and understandable.

I think. But I'm also writing on some level for the scientists in the field because they will, of course know the general science, the basic science involved. I'm not gonna be teaching them much about that. But in school, I mean, I was a, a physics major in college, so I know what I'm speaking about here.

There's just so much material you have to learn to get a degree in a field that you really don't get to appreciate. All of their rich history of the field. And so for scientists, I'm kind of trying to open up the, the history of the field to them and help them appreciate where their field came from, the controversies of the past, some of the ideas even, it's kind of funny, they, they start recycling.

You see ideas in the past come back and they take on a new urgency for what seems like very modern problems. So you can learn a lot about the field and I think help appreciate the field better if you know about its history. So that's kind of what inspires me is kind of trying to help both groups get something, but something a little different.

For sure, 

[00:13:37] Gracelyn Byrd: and as somebody who's write, trying to write her project proposal for her dissertation, it makes me feel much better to realize that some of these people who have made these great discoveries were even more screwed up in the head than I am or, or an even more. I guess chaotic situations than I am.

But I think that it's important, and Dr. Fulta really emphasizes this with his students and just in the rest of his career, that scientists should also be communicating their own work to lay people. Where do you think today's scientists are really missing the mark when it comes to trying to advocate for their research in the public sphere?

[00:14:22] Sam Kean: I am kind of, I have mixed feelings on that in the sense that you know, if scientists want to do that, they definitely should. But I think part of the reason people become scientists sometimes is they like being in the lab. They just like tinkering around with equipment. They like, you know, spending the hours working with it, analyzing data, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If they just like being in the lab, I think that's perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable. I would encourage them to get out and do as much communication as they can and as they're comfortable doing, but I wouldn't wanna force it on them because I think it will feel forced and they're not gonna be happy doing it.

But for those who want to do it, I think it will be a good benefit in the sense that you are going to be. Engaging with people kind of justifying your work, and I think that oftentimes I mean they, they say about teaching for instance, that when you're teaching other people a subject, you end up learning the subject really well, and you maybe even, they ask good questions.

People ask good questions. You hadn't thought about. Or present things in a way you hadn't thought about that can add insight or make you think about your work in a different way. And I think engaging with the public as opposed to just students, I think doing that can have those same sorts of benefits and help people appreciate science.

And if you are giving the science directly to them, that's probably gonna be more accurate than other ways they might hear about science. You know, people just telling them rumors, stuff like that. Things that are spreading on Facebook or whatever. So if you're getting out there as a scientist presenting that information, then you can ensure that it's accurate, and I bet you'll enjoy it more than you might think as well.

[00:15:57] Kevin Folta: Yeah. The big problem that I see on this is that scientists are good at speaking the scientists in the language of science. Mm-hmm. And that we're not good at speaking to the public. And too often we've, and I did this too, I used to do it all the time, that I would show up at a public conversation around a contentious topic and say, here I am here to save all you, you know, you dweebs from from yourselves and your misunderstanding in your Facebook pages.

And I'll tell you how it goes because I just finished my PhD and I know everything. Right. And then, you know, that failed miserably. And it took me a long time to figure out that this was really a trust exercise and that, and, and, and nobody teaches this. And at least in our universities, I know I don't teach it here and except little modules in the classes.

And so what, what maybe can our universities do a little better maybe in terms of either giving credit towards science communication or maybe having training for scientists? 

[00:16:52] Sam Kean: I think training would help. Definitely. One thing that I often tell people, and it seems kind of obvious when you hear it, but it's a little harder to do in the moment, is to think about your telling.

Think about your explaining your research to, you know a, a, a child or a friend who doesn't work in the field, or if your parents didn't work in the field, you're explaining it to them. Just think about it in terms of someone who doesn't understand the science or think back to yourself when you were an undergrad or in high school when you were learning the science.

If you had flooded somebody with all of the information that you have all at once, it would be overwhelming. Sometimes you have to simplify a little bit. Hopefully not oversimplify, but you know, simplify a little bit. You do have to try to make it digestible to them and strive to do it. And it is something that does get easier with practice.

The more you do it, the more easy it will be to keep doing it in the future, and you'll get better at doing it. And another thing I think that is difficult to keep in mind, but especially with controversial issues. Is that you need to look widely, you need to look more widely than just the specific belief itself, and understand that if someone believes something controversial, you know, let's say they deny climate change or something like that.

They are very likely to have family members and friends who believe something quite similar. And if they have that, that's probably part of their identity. That's probably part of what makes them who they are, is they believe this controversial thing. And so asking them to change their belief is asking them in some ways to reject friends and reject family members.

And when you look at it that way, you can understand why it's a lot harder for them. To reject those beliefs, even if you present good evidence. So until we tackle that problem, that social problem, it's gonna be much har much harder. And I don't think there's a good simple solution to that, but at least recognizing it as a problem I do think will help.

[00:18:51] Kevin Folta: Yeah, I think that this is where your style comes into play a lot, because I know that for me, the way that I've been able to make inroads in controversial areas has been not to try to change someone's mind, but give them the tools to change their own mind. Mm-hmm. And I think that having a background in science with the little details and seeing that the trials and tribulations that different experts have gone through.

To make progress. It is an effective style, and I'm not a big fan of the concept of, you know, storytelling per se in a scientific concept because it kind of implies that it's a story, you know, that it's fiction. But I think the idea of this narrative format of telling, telling it in a personalized and developed way is really effective.

So, you know I, I, you've made me a better teacher, I think. 

[00:19:40] Sam Kean: Well, thank you. And I do think you make a good point about making it human and when people can empathize with scientists and see them as human and see their struggles and see their triumph, I do think that will help them relate to science and yeah, as you said, sort of giving them the tools to think more in a scientific way.

That's a, that's a, a big help as well. Yeah, 

[00:20:02] Gracelyn Byrd: and just to relate to that a little bit when I was in high school was when YouTube was first out and, and made everything super accessible and I had found a video called If Slaughterhouses had Glass Walls, and I think Paul McCartney was narrating it. And it showed just some brutal images of like, I.

Livestock production that weren't necessarily representative of it. And I quit eating meat for two years, but I was in high school and so I didn't know that you're supposed to supplement your diet if you stop eating meat. And my hair fell out and I had to learn kind of the hard way that even though I'm still surprised that Paul McCartney lied to me cuz he's a, a beetle.

But I had to really get out there. And it wasn't until I actually attended a small agricultural college in Georgia that I realized. People who grew food for us and and who did all of these things, whether it's making medicine or or our food they're not out to get us. They're out to make a living and to produce cool things and to drive the industry forward.

But I know that you have developed quite an, an immersive timeline of scientific discoveries and how they have correlated to different events in human history. So, where do you see the future of science and our society will be in the next 10 to 20 years? 

[00:21:24] Sam Kean: Oh, boy. I mean that's, I what's, what's the old line that making predictions is very hard, especially about the future.

It's, I mean, I wish I knew where it was going. I. A few things I think will, will probably stand out. I think the sort of intersection of computers with science, I mean computers have already sort of revolutionized the way science gets done, but. Right now they're, you know, it's just a lot of data analysis.

They make some things faster, take out some of the tedium. Computers are less do on the discovery end, but I think that probably will change as we ha, you know, start feeding information into computers and the computer can actually do some analysis and come up with creative, original thoughts on its own.

So I think you're gonna see a lot more human computer collaboration, especially with giant data sets. People talk about big data nowadays with things like genomes. There's a bit of a bottleneck though, in that we have tons of data about things like genomes, but we don't know what to do with that information.

There's a bottleneck in analyzing the information, so I think the computer human interaction and artificial intelligence will probably be a big area. You also, I think neuroscience that's one of the big areas that stands out to me as something where if we can get more traction on the data, I think we could have some interesting breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works and sort of the more global.

Things like consciousness that are a bit mysterious right now, and then maybe with a bit of an assist, we can get a better idea of how those things work because we just don't have the capacity right now to analyze them the way they should be. 

[00:23:03] Kevin Folta: No. Very good. And, and so let's take a break here. We're speaking with Sam Kane.

He's the author of The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist Thumb. He writes for The Atlantic Psychology Today. Many other venues that I've seen, New York Times Magazine I'm sitting here with Grace Lynn Bird is our co-host, and this is Collabs Talking Biotech podcast, and we'll be back in just a moment.

And now we're back on collabs talking Biotech podcast. We're speaking with Sam Keene. He's an author of The Violinist Thumb, which is a book I recently was introduced to by the co-host Graceland Bird. Thank you Graceland. And you had the next question. Yeah. 

[00:23:38] Gracelyn Byrd: So my next question was from your book, the Disappearing Spoon, because I really loved how you described the Monte Carlo method and how it was used in the Manhattan Project and how it kind of redefined what it meant to do science.

So what do you think, or can you explain what you meant by that in the book? And also maybe what have the strengths and weaknesses of this change in experimental style been. 

[00:24:03] Sam Kean: So the Monte Carlo method is basically a way of doing science statistically. So what they were doing is they were trying to understand atomic chain reactions and what would happen if, you know, you release some neutrons into a sample of uranium or something like that.

What can you expect to happen? And basically they found out if they tried to do, you know, trace one neutron one by one and tried to do all the calculations, it got to be overwhelming very quickly. So what they decided to do was they tried to model it essentially, and they decided to, you know, run a thousand simulations.

And just see what happened and then figure out what statistically would be most likely and that helped them guide and understand what was going on on a more detailed level. So basically it's the idea that you just run simulations, do things like that. And that really has kind of revolutionized a lot of different areas of science in that you don't have to necessarily know all the details in order to understand the overall behavior of the system.

You can kind of skip the. Tedious and in some cases kind of impossi impossibly and in some cases the impossibly overwhelming amount of detail to get a good grasp on the system. And that's one thing that computers have helped revolutionize is computers can do those simulations much, much faster, obviously, than we can.

And so they've helped us do those kind of things. And as we were talking about a moment ago, with the advent of ai, I think that. Method of modeling is gonna get even more powerful in the future. 

[00:25:40] Kevin Folta: That's really, and your background is a physicist. Do you get more excited by basic science or by the applications?

[00:25:48] Sam Kean: Probably more the basic science. But it's, it is fun to see the applications come out and just, you know especially when it's something sort of unexpected, like something sort of delightful. And I have found myself in. Recent years writing a little bit more about medicine and kind of the human side of things in that it is easier to humanize it when you're talking about things like, you know, diseases, epidemiology, things like that.

As opposed to talking about very abstract things like, you know, quirks and the fate of the cosmos. I think that sounds fascinating still, but the human side is really what more I've been writing about. 

[00:26:24] Gracelyn Byrd: Yeah. And one thing that I've always con. I've always considered myself a little more of a practitioner than I have a scientist, and I'm trying to work really hard to adjust that view of myself.

But before I came and, or before I started graduate school, I worked in the industry for quite a few years in at a precision agriculture company, and one of the most frustrating things to me was when. Science and technology didn't translate easily, or even if it did translate, it might not have translated to every context where you needed to use it.

Do you think I, I'm sure that gap between basic and applied science isn't new. But do you think that gap today is narrower or wider compared to historical context? 

[00:27:12] Sam Kean: I don't see any reason why it would be wider today than it would be in the past. I can't think of any reason why it might be. And in fact, people are probably more aware of it now than they are in the past, so that would probably help.

On the other hand you could make an argument the other direction and that probably the low hanging fruit, so to speak. The things that are easy to translate have already been translated. And so we're only left with difficult tr translation problems now. So this is one reason why I didn't, why I considered myself more the pure science side than the applied science side, was that this gap really frustrated me.

And, you know, I admit I wasn't the best in labs and things. It was much better with work on paper and more theoretical stuff. And yeah, I can see why that gap would be very frustrating. Sure. 

[00:28:02] Kevin Folta: I guess maybe I would be remiss to not ask you this about Violinist Thumb. Do you have a favorite chapter or story from the book that you would like to introduce our audience to, to kind of maybe get them interested in the book itself?

I. 

[00:28:15] Sam Kean: I think probably the title story of the book is, is a really good example of the kind of work that I try to do. So it involves a violinist, obviously a man named Nilo Paganini and he is usually considered the greatest violinist who ever lived. Every king, every emperor wanted Paganini to come play for them because he was the absolute greatest violinist around.

And one reason he was such an amazing violinist was he had these kind of amazingly even freakishly flexible hands. So if you're, if you're listening at home one thing he could do is he could take his pinky finger. And he could bend his pinky finger into a right angle with the rest of his hand just by sort of slaying it out to the side there.

He could also take his hand and he could put his hand flat down on a table, palm down, and he could lift his pinky and his thumb. And then he could touch his pink in his thumb behind his hand with the palm still flat on the table so he could do some sort of grotesque things with his hands that you shouldn't do in polite company.

But this gave him a big advantage when he was playing the violin because he could stretch his hands incredibly wide. He could do fingerings that no one else could do, and that made him a much better violinist than other people. And from a modern perspective, it's almost certain that he had a genetic disorder of some sort because it wasn't just his hands that were amazingly flexible.

He could bend his elbows the wrong way. His knees bent backwards. He probably had a connective tissue disorder of some sort. And I like it as the title story for the book for a couple of reasons. First of all is that we usually think about something like genetics, a science being on one end of a spectrum and something like music, a fine art being on another end of a spectrum.

But in this case, if you know something about the science and also know something about the music, they really do compliment each other and you have to know about the science and the music to really appreciate the whole story. That's something I try to do with the books is try to show you that science.

You could talk about science and music, science and politics. Science really does intersect with lots of different areas of life. And the other reason I like it is because I think there is a good science lesson and a good genetics lesson buried in Paganini story because he did have these amazingly flexible hands.

But Paganini was also a very hard worker and he loved playing and practicing music. He also lived in a time and a place that rewarded the type of music that he was playing and that he was good at. So it wasn't just his hands that made him amazing violinist. It was his hands combined with his temperament and his environment.

All of those things had to come together to really make him who he was, and all of them were big contribution. So we often think about genetics in terms of it being sort of deterministic. It kind of determines who we are. But in Paganini story, you can see that genetics was important, but it wasn't the whole story.

There was more going on with him and scientists nowadays. I think that's the direction the field is really going. They don't talk about isolated genes, but about gene environment interactions, genes and temperament, things like that. It's much bigger than just genetics. And I think Paganini story really shows that while genetics are important, they're not everything that makes us who we are.

Now, this is 

[00:31:36] Kevin Folta: really part of what attracted me to the style. And I had to ask you about research on this because I've taught about folks like Meher and Watson and Cricks Quick and for ages. And I thought I was an expert and I thought I knew everything there was to know from the textbooks. But you go into so many details about their personal relationships, their relationships with their advisors.

So where do you get the additional information that comes to us from beyond just a textbook level? 

[00:32:04] Sam Kean: Well, there's really no secret to it. It just takes a lot of work going to the library and digging around and be willing to pull up dusty volumes from the shelf and and page through 'em. I actually have a, so I have the physics degree and an English degree as an undergraduate, but I have a library science degree.

I. As well. Cause I love libraries. I love being in them, doing research, and I think that's benefited me even though I've never actually worked in a library because I enjoy doing the research part. Not as much as the writing, but I like hunting up material. I like finding material. And not all of it's online.

Sometimes you do have to go to the library and just. Sit down and start digging through things and the information is out there. It's just a matter of being willing to go through it, being willing to read it, and then after that, just spin it into a story like you would try to tell a friend or a grandmother or something like that.

What's next for you? So I am working on a book now that I'm quite excited about. It's about experimental archeology, uhhuh, and people have that. Well, what does that, what does it mean experimental archeology? So we all are familiar with regular archeology, just kind of sitting around in the dirt, digging things up, and I love archeology for what it reveals about human beings.

But I always found the day-to-day work a little dull to right about, because again, it's people sitting around digging things outta the dirt. Experimental archeologists though, they try to recreate things from the past. They try to bring things alive a little bit and recreate things. So I've talked with people who have, for instance, recreated Egyptian mummies in modern time.

People who have found old Roman recipes and put on a Roman banquet that I went to I've talked to a guy in Utah who built a giant medieval catapult, and we spent a Saturday out there, you know, flinging boulders at a wall that he'd built, stuff like that. So it really brings the field alive and brings the past alive.

Overall and helps you appreciate things in a really sensory rich way. It's a really interesting new way to do archeology, and it helps you learn about people in the past too, because if you're building some, say an authentic catapult or something like that, you have to use the tools they did, and you discover a lot of things.

You think about things in a different way when you're actually doing the work that they did, as opposed to just, you know, digging something outta the dirt and using your imagination. It's really a new, interesting way to do archeology. And I've been able to travel all over the world and talk with these scientists and enthusiastic amateurs who are doing these really cool projects.

[00:34:36] Kevin Folta: You know what I've really fallen in love with folks like Beth Shapiro, who I've always, Dr. Shapiro always thought did great work, but her book life as we Made it, she's part of the podcast series is about how you can find all this good archeological information from D n A sequence and what we're finding in genomes to unearth and answer questions that are hidden.

Inside DNA and, and it's such a, a fascinating field and, and the way in which new technologies will augment our ability to understand the past is really cool. So good stuff that you're doing that title. 

[00:35:07] Sam Kean: Yeah, I've been really excited about it. It's been, archeology has been a field I've been excited about for a long time, and I wrote about it a little bit in the violinist thumb in terms of what you were talking about, about genetics and archeology.

But this has been sort of a new advance even. Yeah. 

[00:35:21] Kevin Folta: So, Sam Kean, where can we find you on social media or connect with your books? 

[00:35:27] Sam Kean: I have a website that's sam keen.com, just s A M K E A n.com. On Twitter my handle is at Sam underscore Keen, and I have a Facebook page for my books as well that you can find, or, you know, you can find the books themselves probably at your local bookstore or online as well.

[00:35:49] Kevin Folta: So Sam and Graceland, thank you very much for joining me today on this particular episode of the Pod Talking Biotech podcast. It was very interesting stuff. Thank you very much. 

[00:35:58] Sam Kean: Oh, well, thanks for having me. Thank you 

[00:36:00] Kevin Folta: and for everyone listening, thank you for listening as always to the Talking Biotech podcast.

Take a listen or read the Violinist Thumb and Sam Keenan's other books. I really was excited about the violinist thumb and it added a lot of detail and resolution to some stories that I thought I understood pretty well and gave me a much greater appreciation for how. These stories unfolded in real time as well as made me better at teaching them to others.

So thank you for that. Thank you very much for joining us on The Talking Biotech Podcast by Col Collabora, and we'll talk to you again next week.