Episode 17 - Caroline Lynn Kamerlin: Deep interdisciplinarity, enzyme promiscuity, and science in society

In episode seventeen, Caroline Lynn Kamerlin talks about the art of asking bold and impactful scientific questions, as well as how to engage in truly interdisciplinary research, something she sees as a consequence of her formal background in natural philosophy. We talk about the emerging concepts around enzyme promiscuity, how this view has steadily become accepted in the field, and how it affects not only research but also human lives. That leads us to consider the ever-emerging problem of bacterial resistance and public health, and since public health is just two steps away from science education, we do venture there too.

Transcript

Milosz: 0:00

Welcome to season three or the phase space invaders podcast. This is your host Miłosz Wieczór speaking. Today, after the holiday break, we continue on the journey through the world of computational biology with Caroline Lynn Kamerlin, a professor of molecular design at Georgia tech and the professor of structural biology at Uppsala university who primarily studies and designs the catalytic mechanisms of enzymes. Notably, she also authored many perspective and opinion pieces and is a regular columnist from the EMBO journal. I do encourage you to go and check out her often thought-provoking essays there, which touch on issues from open science to life choices and politics with Caroline's trademark openness and honesty. So mirroring these broad interests, our discussion covers a lot of ground. We discussed the art of asking bold and impactful scientific questions as well as how to engage in truly interdisciplinary research, something Caroline sees as a consequence of her formal background in natural philosophy. We talk about the emerging concepts around the enzyme promiscuity, how this view has steadily become accepted in the field and how it affects not only research, but also human lives. That leads us to consider the ever emerging problem of bacterial resistance in public health. And since public health is just two steps away from science education. We do venture there too. After all, it's one of those conversations that would probably never. And if not for the time constraints of the podcast, And I hope you enjoy listening to Caroline sharing her insights as much as I enjoyed talking to her. Let's go! Okay. Caroline Camerlin, welcome to the podcast.

Caroline Kamerlin: 1:53

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Milosz: 1:56

So I know that the main focus of your research agenda has been all things enzymatic, right? And I understand this even predates your work with Ariah Warshall, who famously thought about enzymes a lot. That couldn't help noticing your passion for, for the big questions of biology and chemistry, and then stepping back and seeing the diversity of topics that you work on, you know, aggregation, transcription factors, and so on. I very much sympathize with the standpoint and, thought that we are so lucky as computational people to have this unifying methodological lens where we can be a sort of generalists about fundamentals of life. And, this integrative synthetic stance is this something you yourself aspire to from the outset or were you just simply attracted to so many interesting fundamental questions in biochemistry along the way?

Caroline Kamerlin: 2:48

So I'm going to take a bigger step back from beyond chemistry and looking even bigger at just a microscope of science. so effectively, when I think back on my own career, I had some, like everyone else, I had to make choices. And I'm also a classically trained musician to quite a high level. But when I was thinking about what to do and what not to do, for me, chemistry was the one thing I couldn't imagine myself not doing. So that was something I was always very passionate about. If I weren't a computational chemist, I would have probably done experimental spectroscopy, which was the other thing I was really excited about. But over the years, you know, as I interact with people from more and more disciplines, you start basically coming across people who do very niche things. And then you start thinking, why do we make the choices that we make? So when you're going through your career doing chemistry, biology, physics, this is all obvious. It's kind of normal tunnel career trajectories, right? But then you meet people that do things like seismology or other niche topics. Now, the reason I'm getting to this is because I was a postdoc in LA and I thought a lot about earthquakes, which is why I got really into seismology. first of all, as a discipline, seismology is really cool. But the other thing that's really cool is if you look at what seismologists are doing, they're creating computational models, and then you suddenly see the same math that we use to model enzymes and biological systems being used to model earthquakes. so this is just an example, but a lot of the core underlying math in different disciplines is very similar. And then zooming back into your question about biology, what I think makes that really exciting. is that this gives us a tremendous breadth in the type of problems that we're able to address because we can use methodologically and philosophically similar approaches to address a lot of questions. So for me, in a sense I have, there's a core to my research team, but I frequently follow the questions that excite me. And so, as you said, a lot of this is about enzymes, how do they function? How do they evolve? But then there are a lot of cool problems. And I think it's important for us also as computational people, because we have this advantage. And we have tools that are really versatile and can be applied to so many things that we do actually take advantage of that. The most far out thing I've done, and this was a collaboration with my husband, Peter Kasson, who's a biophysicist. So during the pandemic, one of the things he pointed out to me is a lot of this epidemiological models that, for example, the team from Imperial were using. are just Monte Carlo simulations, right? So we're biophysicists. We can do Monte Carlo simulations. So I ended up using the same skills that we have from our discipline, and I have a really well cited epidemiology paper with my husband, who is a medical doctor, and this is his background. But again, methodologically, really, it's so transferable, and I think we should exploit this. That's a long answer to your question.

Milosz: 5:39

I see. That's so cool. I mean yeah, we can definitely use the fact that we have this physical grounding or mathematical grounding, right? Then the question becomes how much, field specific knowledge there is that, it's kind of easy to overlook. But as you say, if you have someone who can guide you into this tangent field. That's something that's, great to use. How much do you think we should try to integrate again, those distant disciplines into our, even thinking about science, as opposed to just being specialized in a small, small subfield? Hmm.

Caroline Kamerlin: 6:15

the most radical examples I've seen of this kind of integrating distance disciplines. So there's a person on Twitter, a professor in Israel, Oded Rechavi, and he is mainly famous because he has these really funny memes. So he has a huge amount of followers for his science names, but he does great science as well. And, but he does worm research basically. And my understanding is he looks at epigenetic inheritance and memory in one. So you have, him on one side, then you have a friend of mine at Uppsala a very famous geneticist does really, really stellar work on ancient DNA. So his name is Matthias Jakobson, he has beautiful papers, then they and a bunch of other people suddenly collaborated and published a really high impact paper analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls. and you, I think you'd be able to find this. I don't remember where it was published, but a very, very, very nice journal. And this is a complete u turn for all of them. they brought basically their specific field expertise together to solve something completely different that you wouldn't have imagined any of them doing individually. so to answer your question, I think the really important problem is the balance between the generalist, specialists's the main specific knowledge and being able to be flexible. But the advantage of big collaborations, as long as you have a genuine common goal, and you're really there because you want to solve this problem, not just like piggybacking and stuff like that. that's the way we're going to solve the big problems of today and tomorrow by bringing together this really broad knowledge. So

Milosz: 7:48

Right. That sounds promising. question I would have is, do we even have spaces where we People like this can meet and talk. All right. How do we foster this crazy interdisciplinary, not just, you know, biochemistry versus biophysics, but I don't know, archeology versus biophysics or people who would not meet on the campus in regular everyday life.

Caroline Kamerlin: 8:11

there are schemes and we need this model more generally. So I was, about 10 years ago, chair of the young Academy of Europe. And many of these young academies and their senior counterparts, of course, are cross disciplinary. So they have divisions for chemistry, for life sciences, and so on. But you also have historians, archaeologists, sociologists, people working with literature. And through these, meetings of these academies, this is how I got exposed to work that's so far away from what I do. I also have a couple of sociology papers because of contacts I made with these people. And so, academies are a wonderful way to meet other people. I've also had for example, I had a fellowship from, the, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the so called Wallenberg Academy Fellows, and, uh, they also funded fellows from across disciplines, and then we had annual meetings, and, but I think the one thing that's not equitable with this setup, of course, is, um, that right now these setups exist if you're elected into an academy, or if you have this, uh, very hard to get fellowship, and things like that. And I think we need to create these spaces more broadly so we can bring people together from other disciplines. There was an amazing meeting. I only went once, but it was one of the best meetings I attended. So I went to this in Manchester many years ago, the Euroscience Open Forum, ESOF, and the ESOF was this wonderful conference. It was a hybrid science and policy conference. And so, and you got to see really cutting edge earth sciences, but also science policy. sadly, there was an announcement the last I knew there are discontinuing these meetings, but having more meetings like that as well, space where we can really bring people together is very valuable. I actually think social media, complains about social media a lot, one of the nice things about social media is you, yes, you have all this misinformation and that stuff, but you also have people who are leading experts in their field talking about what they do, right? So again,

Milosz: 10:07

Mm hmm.

Caroline Kamerlin: 10:09

but there were also top top neurologists doing science communication through Twitter. And I think if people can filter out, that's also a really great way to get exposure.

Milosz: 10:21

Absolutely. I, what I did myself is I created a separate political account and I keep like the political and contentious things in one place. Account and all the scientific stuff in the other and I kick like I on purpose kick out everything that's not science from the other one. So I can have a feed when I feel in science, I just go to that feed and I can read all the scientific news and that's definitely doable. But as you say, like, it would be great if we could have more people working on bringing those very different disciplines together, right? maybe that inspires someone to. think about some efforts to do just that. This is the question of what kind of background people need to engage interdisciplinary research right? Because if you're completely a specialist, it's probably hard to engage with people who have this broader picture. So like, how do we train people for interdisciplinary research? They need to have a much more foundational focus in their education, right? In statistics, in mathematics, physics, and so on.

Caroline Kamerlin: 11:23

So I did undergraduate degree in the UK and I did what you can do in the UK. This was longer ago than I'd like to remember. It was the 25 years ago. But basically, I did a combined bachelor's, master's, so four year program, and I did this at the University of Birmingham because they had a Master of Natural Sciences for exactly the reason you described. So the way this program was set up, the focus was still chemistry, and the MNATSci students, we did all the same core chemistry modules that all the chemists did, but when they were doing chemistry elective courses, we were doing math, physics, Biology a modern language. I speak fluent Spanish, and that's partially because of this degree program. so I think that was really valuable and that really set me up moving forward. Now, there is a price you pay for being a generalist, and so if you put, I work in a lot of disciplines and I know a little bit about a lot of things, so I can see connections that a specialist can't, but I don't know as much about any of those things individually as the specialist does. Right. So I can also get like severe inferiority complex with a nexus of one who's like really, really, really focused. think the training, so programs like the master's in natural sciences, just these more broads, like don't focus narrowly on one thing. really good at least having the option. You don't need to train everyone to be generalists, but people who have a generalist personality will do that more. have, I think one of the biggest problems we have is that funding is still very conservative so this has been a topic for a long time. But, uh, funding also often penalizes interdisciplinary research because what happens is that instead of people being happy about their interdisciplinarity, they get very possessive of their own domains and look at the things people are not rather than the things they are. And so I think we need a paradigm shift in how we value and evaluate research. Also, this applies to tenure and promotion and stuff because people still have this notion of, okay, what's your big question? Like, well, how about spreading your wings, right? So,

Milosz: 13:24

Right. I like the perspective of, us the generalists being the glue of the community, right? People who can take an integrative look. Actually, one of the reasons I started this podcast was that, you know, I looked through the list of my publications and I was thinking, okay, what's my domain? And I, I don't really have a single domain because I also, had this feeling of, wow, everything is interesting. Let's do everything. And then I realized, okay, I can talk to people from different backgrounds. I can probably, you know, provide this, coherence for the field so that people can hear different perspectives. And yeah, that's a big consideration for me as well. And so I was also pleased to see that you write many commentary articles, right? These are not that common. I mean, people do reviews, but. Reviews are more like literature, wrap ups about what was published on this. What you seem to do more often seems to be like answering a specific big question rather than just providing a perspective on what has been published so far.

Caroline Kamerlin: 14:25

one of the things that I really like, so, I started writing guest columns, and I started with, for example, I was interviewed a lot by, uh, a colleague of mine who worked for Science Careers and Researcher Career Questions. I was invited a few times by Times Higher Education to write guest columns, and as you know, I'm very active on social media and quite opinionated.

Milosz: 14:48

True.

Caroline Kamerlin: 14:49

But the thing I really like is, and I recommend everyone to read this, not just necessarily my columns, but more broadly, EMBO Reports has really great front matter, and they have a science and society section, which basically touches on these bigger picture issues. So there's several columnists, not just me. And there are a number, most journals don't, right? Most journals just focus directly on the science. So I really like the fact that there are some journals that actually take these bigger picture issues. And so it was really great when I got this invitation if I want to be a regular columnist for EMBO Reports. And I really, really enjoyed writing for them. I actually just had another column accepted this morning. Stay tuned. And, but basically, it's nice because I care topics, obviously, so I suggest, look, this is interesting, and then we have a discussion, is it suitable, is it not suitable? But I'm given a lot of freedom then to formulate this, how I see fit, and so I've been writing about a variety of issues I care a lot. Researching careers in open science continue to be issues I care a lot about, also other issues I care a lot about. So, for example, I've written a lot about We're facing this really big challenge. I've experienced this directly myself. I have an endocrine disorder. I have fertility issues. So there's a lot of issues with infertility for women in academia. postpone things until we're much older, and this is not talked about, right, sort of, so

Milosz: 16:12

Hmm.

Caroline Kamerlin: 16:13

a lot of discussion about how not to get pregnant. almost no discussion about, well, what if you want to get pregnant and can't, right? But also the really big ethical challenges that we're facing as a society right now. sensitive to this because I grew up in Central Europe. My father moved to Austria when I was quite young. uh, the fact that we have a lot of really, really advanced genetic screening tools right now. Both for embryo screening and screening in early pregnancy. And so we have, unfortunately, a shadow of eugenics hanging very much over us. so this is one of the things I've been trying to write about. I'm not a professional biomedical ethicist, but still, this is an issue that concerns me a lot. But I've also written about things, you know, science funding, the problems with UK and Horizon, and also something I wasn't even aware of until I moved to the U. S., but it drives me really frustrated, is that the U. S. has all these restrictions. on prestigious funding schemes, being limited to green card holders and to US citizens. these apply for PhD fellowships, postdoc fellowships, career development programs. Now, this doesn't affect me personally anymore because I recently became a US citizen. So basically I'm eligible, it still frustrates me because I see my brilliant students and postdocs and colleagues. They're like, they're really, really, really good. And they would. not necessarily get these things. They're good enough to compete, but, they would have a very possible shots and they're not even given a chance because of these eligibility requirements in Europe, where we have eligibility requirements that are tied to where you work, where you're from. So it would be that you have to

Milosz: 17:49

Right.

Caroline Kamerlin: 17:50

amount of your time in the EU and stuff. And to me, that's much more equitable. I don't know if this situation in the U S is going to change, but that's the kind of things I like using my column to raise awareness. So.

Milosz: 18:01

Yeah, I wasn't even aware of that. That's true. And, it just reminds us that, you know, there's a lot of talk about whether philosophy is relevant these days or not, but again, it's time we can see that you cannot really escape philosophy, right? You can do it badly, or you can ignore it, or you can just let someone else do it for you. but unless we ask those general big questions, nobody's gonna do that for us.

Caroline Kamerlin: 18:27

And I like the philosophy analogy because you remember once upon a time science was called natural philosophy, right?

Milosz: 18:32

Right, right, right. Yeah, that's a tangent, but actually, my favorite podcast is from Sean M. Carroll, a physicist. And, he very much embraces this natural philosophy, idea because he combines physics with the philosophy of physics. And, His talks inspired me a lot to think deeply about this, right? how is the actual practice of science intermingled with the underlying assumptions and what we consider theory or evidence or, you know, all those things about our lives that we live as scientists. That's why I love to have those side conversations about those proper aspects of lives of scientists.

Caroline Kamerlin: 19:12

and then following up on this tangent, by the way, thank you for the recommendation. I will check him out. But following up on this, uh, stepping outside our discipline, I mean, I mentioned seismology. So seismology is amazing looking at ground movements and how earthquakes are produced, but disciplines outside our own that I'm particularly in awe. always been fascinated by astrochemistry Um, just I'm in awe of cosmology because I mean, we're as computational chemists, we're trying to go to some of the smallest possible units, trying to understand how the universe works and everything is connected to each other. That's really amazing.

Milosz: 19:49

Absolutely, I tried to follow the, you know, dark matter versus modified gravity debate and it seems to switch every other week, but, this whole tension is, quite impressive.

Caroline Kamerlin: 20:01

But also think how much dispute we have over things we can more or less see. Okay. You can't see atoms, but even like things you can see with Pi OEM and stuff. And now imagine trying to figure out how the universe works.

Milosz: 20:12

Right, right, this whole question of like, there's a lot of people who go against this idea of physics as a beauty thing, but, uh, yeah, that's a whole another debate. Well, do you have your favorite, biochemical points that you want to raise? Something that, you know, goes against the typical, textbook story, but you think it's important for people to understand or change their mind about, from the opinion pieces or, commentary articles that you wrote. Heh heh.

Caroline Kamerlin: 20:45

science and society and social issues related to science. I think the two things that excite me a lot, so, one of them, I have a recent preprint that's currently under review. We've been publishing a bunch of papers. I remember when, early in my career, I was inspired a lot, well, throughout my career independently, I was always inspired a lot by the work of Van Toppik, but also people like Florian Hofelder at Cambridge, and people who were looking at catalytic promiscuity. And, uh, Science moves really fast. I remember having a big argument with a referee of a review article who was, very patronizingly telling me that not all enzymes are promiscuous. So this is like a very niche thing. it's not been, not been 15 years since then. And I think most people now would agree that all enzymes are promiscuous. So this notion of enzyme promiscuity basically was already kind of like, wow, it took actually decades It was kind of like decades, decades, decades, very rapid acceptance, right? so what I'm kind of fascinated by, and we've seen this in a bunch of enzymes now, and so we have a recent preprint on this. So people think about enzyme mechanism and people are looking so hard and trying to figure out the mechanism. Now I am guilty of anthropomorphizing enzymes, I like to do real world links and so on.

Milosz: 22:00

We all are, to some degree.

Caroline Kamerlin: 22:02

it makes the world easier, right? But what is an enzyme? An enzyme is a very fancy, evolved, large molecule. It's as good as it needs to be and no better. And it doesn't have a plan, it's opportunistic. It'll get the job done however it works. And so we increasingly see not just like substrate or catalytic promiscuity, but also mechanistic promiscuity because enzymes have a lot of chemically active residues in their active sites. And so, uh, I think that I hope will be a paradigm shift that we stop thinking in this really narrow what the reaction mechanism, because for many enzymes, especially enzymes that have large active sites in their promiscuous, I don't think there is such a thing as a mechanism. So,

Milosz: 22:45

So by mechanistic, just to clarify for the listeners, you mean like an enzyme that can utilize multiple chemical mechanisms even within the same substrate. Yeah, okay. Oh,

Caroline Kamerlin: 23:00

catalysis. So, for example, uh, this enzyme we worked on a lot with Dantovic, serum peroxinase 1. It's a promiscuous enzyme that has both lactanase activity. And, it uses two completely distinct subsets of catalytic residues in the same active sites to facilitate this. But then we realized, well, okay, so the natural substrate is smaller than this promiscuous substrate. So if this promiscuous substrate can completely rotate and use a different set of residues, can't the natural substrate do the same thing? And so we tested this computationally. And actually, wait a second, that's exactly what it did. It had a backup mechanism in there. It could use the promiscuous pathway. And then the really cool thing, this was Danny's work, but we did the modeling for this. We have a 2020 molecular biology evolution paper with Dan Paprik, where what Danny did was he knocked out the key residue that makes the native mechanism possible, and then evolved so that the promiscuous mechanism became better than the native mechanism, and he never got that first residue back. So we can even engineer this mechanistic promiscuity, we can control it. And so that's something that excites me a lot. And then the other thing, astrobiologists, this is probably kind of naive, but so, I always saw myself as a, quote, evolutionary biologist. Obviously not organismal but molecular evolution, how the proteins evolve, etc. And then I came to the U. S. and realized there's a lot of interest in protein evolution, but it's an astrobiology this notion that if we want to understand how life emerges on other planets, we have to understand how life emerged on our planet, right? So I'm literally doing the same thing with people are basically this is not package of astrobiology, you know, I'm in my forties. I grew up at a time when people used to brutally mock people who believed in little green men and alien life. I don't believe Star Trek like intelligent life out there necessarily, but essentially getting more involved in astrobiology research community is reading these papers. It's a pretty non controversial idea that there must be some sort of life out there. And if you go back to the cosmology, I mean, look at the vastness of the universe. How improbable is it that our tiny planet is the only place in this vast

Milosz: 25:14

sure.

Caroline Kamerlin: 25:15

And so for me, that's like such a paradigm shift from everything I grew up in, right? And so that life could be simple, it could be complex, etc. But I think this hunt for the origin of life and life outside our own planet, that's something that really excites me. And I hope that we'll get some meaningful answers in my lifetime. Again, that's a problem with being in your 40s. Science looks fast, but sometimes not fast enough. I think the next decades are going to be really exciting.

Milosz: 25:44

Yeah, we still haven't solved the Fermi paradox, of course, but it's a great question to what extent, you know, the building blocks of life are arbitrary or contingent, right? So, like, you have to have something that can probably pair, as in base pair, to multiply, and then you have to have something that has this kind of chemical variability. Of course, like, amino acids and nucleosides are just one instance of this chemistry, but is it the easiest chemistry that is? Right, like these questions, I think we can, we can somehow start to tackle with modern tools. That's, that's amazing. And on the other, topic of promiscuity, I can see how this is extremely relevant to the questions of, well, medicine design of, of new drugs, right? But also toxicity, So how many of the, substances that we ingest voluntarily or not? Um, might get into biological or biochemical pathways that we have set up for other, other things.

Caroline Kamerlin: 26:43

And that goes back to enzymes and proteins, functional proteins in general. They are opportunistic, right? If the chemistry matches well enough, they'll just do it because they don't have a plan. So, as you said, which I think a lot of people honestly forget this. Because, uh, everyone joins me in enzymes. So, like, a lot of how we think about biochemistry, about these, like, really controlled, like, organized, systematic, etc. This is all basically built on the way of thinking of these things as having a plan. So if you step back and remember, they are just molecules. They don't, like, have a control center. obviously the thing that's amazing is, and that's why life is just so amazing, the fact is, while that's true, everything still needs to work just so. And while we're on the one hand, as organisms, we're very tolerant to insults, On the other hand, you know, it can be something as simple as a point mutation in the wrong place, like you can kind of do what seems biochemically like spectacular mutations when the organism has like all these backup mechanisms and it's fine. And then you do what seems to be like a tiny benign mutation and everything falls apart. And I think that's also one of the things, if you're still looking at small proteins, enzymes, other proteins, But then if you kind of stretch that out back up to the organismal level, I think how biology works is just amazing.

Milosz: 28:09

That's right. There's some selective redundancy, right? some elements have built in a lot of robustness and some are very fragile. I think that just speaks to Again, how contingent and, dynamic our evolution has been, because not everything evolved to have this backup plan in biology.

Caroline Kamerlin: 28:28

We're our own little cosmos, right?

Milosz: 28:30

Right, and how much are we now evolving with the new, well, chemicals and source of food? You know, I had this conversation with my girlfriend the other day, which was how much should we be, afraid of microplastics? And I think nobody knows, right? This is a big question. Everyone is kind of ringing the alarm bell. but we still don't know if it actually affects something enzymatically or all sterically or, you know, it's just an inert piece out there. And same goes for, for many, many medicines, right? Like you mentioned that yourself in in our conversation before the recording, that the many interactions that are kind of omitted or not mentioned, that have real life consequences,

Caroline Kamerlin: 29:11

But also, I mean, one of the things we learned from the pandemic The pandemic was a kind of like really good example of what does it take people to actually get worried enough to change their behavior, right? So

Milosz: 29:24

right?

Caroline Kamerlin: 29:24

a great book about Spanish flu or the 1918 influenza. And there you didn't have to convince people to lock themselves down and stuff because they were watching random people turn blue and die in the street. people very quickly connected the dots and were not so hot and basically being next in line. But COVID was like this. It's kind of like sweet spots of terrifying, but not quite terrifying enough, right? I mean, that's the reason I brought that up as an analogy. So, there's all this, coming back to the microplastics, all this debate about climate change, how much of it is anthropogenic, etc. People are very bad at worrying about things that are happening to them directly. We saw during COVID, so it's very hard to get people to worry about things that might happen in like 10 years, 5 years, let alone a century from now. I always struggle to understand though is, okay, think what you want about climate change. Let's look at the present. We are trashing our planet in a horrific way. I mean, we can see, like, in front of our eyes what we're doing to our planet. Why are people not freaking out about this more?

Milosz: 30:31

Yeah, absolutely. I think, there's great potential in devising ways to visualize the consequences, right? If you can have a virtual reality game that is set in a planet that's two degrees warmer, and it's a game, like people can actually have fun playing it, that might make people much more aware of like the consequences. But I think, yeah, the way you say it, people just use the words and the words never carry. This direct, phenomenological impact, right? You can just play with the words. Oh, it's going to be hotter or it's going to be this or that. Until you experience this, it doesn't really hit.

Caroline Kamerlin: 31:10

And it appears to me that it's not even, it's not a question of protecting the world for our children. Because we're beyond that point. Like, at our age, this is protecting the world for ourselves. But people are not only not worried about the state of the planet for the next generations, they seem to be deeply unworried about the state of the planet five years from now, and that they themselves are personally going to experience the consequences of all of this. And so I think it's alarming and fascinating insight into human psyche is like this society, but also it's just really there's just so much of the environmental side, right? It's not just climate change. It's how we're putting so much trash into our oceans. We're polluting our rivers. We're killing off entire species of animals and destroying biodiversity. And so I feel like what we really as a society should be doing is reacting to that. The other

Milosz: 32:03

Hmm.

Caroline Kamerlin: 32:04

have a deep concern about, and this is not to be a therapy session about the things that worry me, but I feel like, uh, outside of people who work with antimicrobial resistance, we don't take the issue of antimicrobial resistance as seriously as we should. uh, one of the things that concerns me, just my own personal experiences, I've been working with AMR for longer than that. I've cared about it anyhow, but just really like close up seeing what happens. So before my father passed away recently, in both January and March, he had pneumonia that was really, really hard to treat with antibiotics. In the end, they managed to get it with a cocktail, but he barely escaped with his life, especially the second. this is something that would have been very treatable 30 years ago, right? And so then I've been talking to friends and they've had loved ones who have recently had similar problems that they've ended up in hospital, like various types of infection that would have been very treatable with antibiotics, but the antibiotics we've come to rely on, they're no longer working as well as they used to. And there's a lot of scope for us as computational chemists, right? Because there are enzymes in these bacteria that are breaking down these antibiotics, we can contribute to drug discovery, etc. So during the pandemic, because I was still working with AMR, I always used to make the dark joke that we may have forgotten about the bacteria, but they haven't forgotten about us. So, I think, really, this is somewhere, I'm not suggesting everyone should stop what they're doing and work on just AMR, but I think we really need to, at the policy level, at the society level, but also where we can contribute as computational chemists, we really should be doing much, because the future without antibiotics is truly terrifying, and I think people don't understand just how terrifying that's going to be.

Milosz: 33:46

Yeah, we had a conversation with Syma Khalid. On the podcast exactly about this, about like how to think computationally about what the antibiotic has to go through she also, considered, bacteriocins, right? There's this molecules, if I remember correctly, their proteins that directly, kill much more specifically than antibiotics. and also, obviously bacteriophages so there's a lot of potential that yeah it's still it's a bit like fusion energy right it's always like five years away and you never hear about major breakthroughs in the end

Caroline Kamerlin: 34:19

And I think this is also you're touching on just a very important question about we think about how we set up our funding for science and stuff. So it feels like we're being Reactive rather than proactive. So we wait until something is really bad before actually investing into it And especially because we're even thinking like, you know for everyone knew that there's going to be a bad pandemic This is something even I was being taught in high school in the 90s So, uh, I remember, you know, we went through all the various pandemics of the past century and we were told that sooner or later something will come. We dodged the bullet with SARS and MERS, but for non specialists, we knew that. But our pandemic preparedness was clearly very abysmal. We know that environmental and climate issues are going to be a really serious problem. And in fact, they're already becoming a serious problem. Look at all these freak weather events, right? Climate change isn't just getting hotter. The increase in tornadoes, hurricanes, all these other problems are also climate change issues, right? again, I really think that we need to learn to be more, uh, proactive rather than reactive. Because it's easier to solve problems before they happen, not as or after they're happening.

Milosz: 35:31

absolutely find it extremely ironic that there's a lot of conspiracy theories that come out of the fact that governments had preparedness plans for pandemic and the people will point to them like Oh, look, they knew that there was a pandemic happening soon, that's why they planned for it. Like, what do you expect people to do not to plan for, for a major disaster? this is kind of thinking patterns are incredible, but

Caroline Kamerlin: 35:57

it's also because most people don't actually realize how many pandemics we had in the past century.

Milosz: 36:04

oh yeah,

Caroline Kamerlin: 36:04

It also goes into this question of our education system. Shouldn't we be teaching people more about these things, right? The big problem, I think, with the education thing, so I don't want to criticize our colleagues in education, uh, that there are finite amount of school hours in the day and 12 years of education. And we're at a state where there's just so much human knowledge. And so teaching them everything in that time is impossible, right? But

Milosz: 36:31

yeah,

Caroline Kamerlin: 36:31

like, feel there's a lot of stuff. This comes to this issue of public trust in science. I feel that we really need to be team working because eroding public trust in science I think is just a serious problem for all of us.

Milosz: 36:45

yes, absolutely. I don't know what the solution to that is, but on education, you know, we should also think that. Kids don't just learn at school, right? Kids go to school and they have all their puberty family problems, they're just adolescents figuring life out. So it's much harder to convey important messages to someone at this stage. Maybe we should think about teaching people after they finish high school, right? And convey those fundamental messages.

Caroline Kamerlin: 37:13

Also, if you think about this, I mean, you make a very valid point that they learn outside school. And a lot of them learn from TikTok or whatever the next TikTok is going to be. These things change so quickly. years ago from YouTube and stuff. And already in YouTube times, because YouTube has all these recommended videos on autoplay, there was this, dark joke about the conspiracy theory only being six clicks away. So you search for something benign and then six videos later, you're kind of like in this really dark side of the internet conspiracy theories. But I think that's actually a serious issue because in parallel to all of that, there are amazing science communicators, right? So we were talking about physics communicators. Brian Cox does so much wonderful work in science communication. there are great people also doing great work. And so I think we both scientists. We don't all need to have science communication skills the quality of Brian Cox's, I think Communicating to the general public is a responsibility. We all have a scientist that we should take more seriously many scientists Unfortunately, we like to live in our own little bubbles, but communicating with non scientists is really important But with education, I feel like we really need to work hard on teaching, children and teenagers critical thinking skills and how to actually be able to assess. And a lot of these conspiracies, part of why they're successful, is that, uh, they're, some of them are so polished. Like, if I basically started talking about little green men, you would basically think that's There are still, I'm sure there are people, if I did a polish enough video about little green men aliens talking to me. That will believe me, right? Because you can reach everyone. if you basically don't do obvious, if you're doing just very, very subtle things, tangentially conspiratorial, then you can get a lot of people to believe you. And that's really scary. So I think we do really need to do that. to teach people and also adults nowadays, essentially how to deal with misinformation and stuff and going on a slightly political tangent, like, essentially, the future of democracy as a successful political approach really depends on people being able to rationally judge information and make informed choices.

Milosz: 39:22

Absolutely. couldn't state it better. Eh, okay. Thank you. Thank you a lot. Carolyn. Carolyn. I think in the vein of being generalists, uh, you know, we covered a lot of ground, so thanks a lot for, for your opinions and your experiences and the points we, uh, were able to make.

Caroline Kamerlin: 39:42

this was really fun. I really enjoyed talking to you and just wrapping up on since we talked about people like Brian Cox and science communication being so important. I wanted to also thank you for taking the time to organize this because hopefully having people and having these discussions that people can then access. I don't want to be arrogant enough to think necessarily just talking to me, but you've talked to great people like Syma as well. And so hopefully things like this series of podcasts will contribute to making a difference.

Milosz: 40:09

Thanks a lot. I can aspire to inspire scientists to inspire others in turn. So hope there's a chain of events that enables that. Wonderful. Thanks again. Hope you have a great day.

Caroline Kamerlin: 40:20

The same to you. Thank you.

Milosz: 40:22

Thank you for listening. See you in the next episode of Face Space Invaders.