In this episode, YS Chi speaks with John Pham, the editor in chief of Cell, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. He is just the fourth person to lead the journal in its 47-year history.
Here is the remarkable story of the youngest son of Vietnamese immigrants who, until recently, never imagined himself as leader, let alone as the editor in chief of Cell. In this episode, John discusses many of the big issues in scientific publishing, from diversity, equality and trust in science to research integrity, transparency in data, and open access. He reflects on the importance of the work that he and his colleagues do and how it feels to have an example of that work recognized by Dr. Anthony Fauci during a congressional hearing in 2020. He also shares his thoughts on where he hopes to take Cell in the future.
These are the reflections of a reluctant leader who had a calling for science and for doing "good things to help people".
This podcast is brought to you by RELX.
In this episode, YS Chi speaks with John Pham, the editor in chief of Cell, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. He is just the fourth person to lead the journal in its 47-year history.
Here is the remarkable story of the youngest son of Vietnamese immigrants who, until recently, never imagined himself as leader, let alone as the editor in chief of Cell. In this episode, John discusses many of the big issues in scientific publishing, from diversity, equality and trust in science to research integrity, transparency in data, and open access. He reflects on the importance of the work that he and his colleagues do and how it feels to have an example of that work recognized by Dr. Anthony Fauci during a congressional hearing in 2020. He also shares his thoughts on where he hopes to take Cell in the future.
These are the reflections of a reluctant leader who had a calling for science and for doing "good things to help people".
This podcast is brought to you by RELX.
The Unique Contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com
John Pham:If this past year can tell us anything, it's that our work matters. Last year, Tony Fauci testified in Congress about the Coronavirus and the pandemic, and he waved a Cell paper during his testimony.
YS Chi:Hello, and welcome to our second series of Unique Contributions, a RELX podcast where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business. I'm YS Chi and I'll be exploring with my guests some of the big issues that matter to society, how they are making a difference and what brought them to where they are today. My guest today is John Pham. He is sales editor-in-chief, the fourth in the journals 47 year history. Cell, of course, is one of the world's leading scientific journals and has a special and important place within the scientific community. In a climate where science, reason, and logic have not always been very welcomed in the past few years. I will be asking John what it means to be an editor of a scientific journal today, how he is using his platform to advanced trust, and where he hopes to take Cell in the future. John, thank you for joining the podcast. It's great to have you with us today.
John Pham:Thanks for inviting me YS.
YS Chi:I think you're one of our only guests to have their own Wikipedia page, I understand.
John Pham:Is that right? You know, that's a funny thing. It's humbling actually. It's hard to believe that somebody put something like that together. But yeah...
YS Chi:It means that you're an impactful person. Anyway, so tell me, how have you been over these last 15/16 months? And how have you been able to perform as editor-in-chief while working from home?
John Pham:I mean, I think that there's actually been some pluses and minuses. The technology has actually allowed us to connect with people in disparate places more easily. I think it's become, our workplace has in some ways become more inclusive, because we can include more people from different locations. But of course, people with children. I don't have kids, but it's been more challenging with staff who have kids, childcare has been difficult. And so, juggling that with the influx of science that we've been handling, that we've had the privilege of handling lots of COVID science obviously. But yeah, the situation has been good in many ways, and challenging in many ways. But me personally, just how I've been coping is I've been cooking a lot, and I've been gardening and doing things to help calm my mind a bit and feel some separation between work life and home life.
YS Chi:So in the past, you didn't really have time to cook or garden did you?
John Pham:No, we ate out every day, Mike and I. That's not the most healthy thing. I think one positive thing about the pandemic is that we've been eating better because we've been cooking. And I have been growing vegetables on our roof and our apartment now is filled with plants that didn't exist before because it just felt being in this space. I live in a condo, it's kind of, noisy, and it's city life. But bringing the outdoors in has been very good. It has been calming for me, and it gives me something to do and makes the environment kind of nicer. So those are the kinds of things that I've been doing just to, just to make it through, how about you?
YS Chi:I've been very well, and you know without children, it's been easy for me. But I am fully expecting an invitation when I go to Cambridge next time for a cooked meal by John. Okay?
John Pham:Will do.
YS Chi:John, I want to talk a little bit about your childhood because it's quite a story. Because obviously our childhoods do shape us in a very significant way and make you the person that you are today. You were born in the states, but am I right in saying that you were born only a few months after you got here. So a few months could have made you a very different person today?
John Pham:Yeah, actually it was a few weeks. So my parents are Vietnamese, I am Vietnamese. They are refugees from the war, so when the war ended they fled along with many other Vietnamese to the United States. And at the time, my mom was pregnant with me, very, very pregnant with me. So she had me a few weeks before. I think that might have changed the calculus of whether or not they could do that. But they fled with three small kids, my older sisters and my brother. Yeah, and with nothing arriving here, and I was born a few weeks later after they arrived on an army base.
YS Chi:And here you are now leading the world's top journal potentially, right?
John Pham:Yeah. You started the question indicating how things could have been different. Had that all not happened, I think it would be harder to picture myself in the position that I'm in now. And even having had that all happen and my parents emigrated to the United States, it's still hard to believe that I am in the position that I'm in now, given those beginnings. But I'm grateful for all the opportunities and the ways in which people along the way have helped me.
YS Chi:We talked about this before John, you and I, but the path is never a straight line. I want to hear the story of this zigzag you did in college, please.
John Pham:Yeah, so I was a double major in college, I was a music major and a biochemistry major. I think backtracking a bit, thinking about why is it that I did those things. We just actually had an ice breaking event with our team, where we ask each other some questions. And one of the questions was, what got you into science? I was thinking about that, and I remember, being a kid. My parents are Catholic, and that's part of how we were able to make it when I was growing up. Support from the government and the Catholic Church for refugees. I grew up with this very sort of Catholic upbringing. But then, when I went to school and learnt. I remember learning about how genetics work, right? Like with the work of Gregor Mendel and pea plants, and like how heredity works and dominant traits and recessive traits, and what happens when someone with brown eyes has a child with someone with blue eyes, and what the outcomes are, and what the outcomes are for the next generation. Just learning about those things and having explanations for how the natural world worked, that wasn't mysterious, that was concrete and could be explained. If you ask the right questions and did the right experiments, that really kind of changed my worldview. In a way, at the time I didn't really think of it as changing my worldview. But it really made me very interested in explanations for things. So that's how I became interested in biochemistry. And actually, I think music. There was a bit of the same kind of thing in music, right. I didn't grow up, I love classical music, and I didn't grow up with classical music. I grew up with music that kids listen to on the radio and what their friends do. And I remember hearing orchestral music in cartoons. In the Smurfs, TV shows and movies. And like, what is that? Why does it make me feel a certain way? What is behind that? And so, when I went to college...this was before the internet, you couldn't just look it up on Google, I wanted to learn about the structure of music. How is it that chords progress and you shift from one key to another? How do different composers do it and who are all these different composers? So it was those two. I think there is a fundamental similarity and just being interested in how things work. In one case it was music and one case it was chemistry and biology. And I ended up just not choosing, and choosing both of them. That was good, college was a great time to explore and learn.
YS Chi:Well, I guess, a good liberal arts college does give you that opportunity. So John, I'd like to hear how does a PhD student in biochemistry ends up being a editor-in-chief at Cell? Who are the people? What are the events that kind of got you there?
John Pham:I mean, I think that my transition from going from being a scientist to an editor, there were things there that happened where I was thinking about research integrity, and communication of science and best practices and having strong opinions about them. And then, there was a job advertisement in Molecular Cell, the journal where I entered the publishing industry and joined Elsevier and Cell Press. They were looking for someone with my background, and I just applied. That gave me the ability to learn about all kinds of science, but also have an influence on these things that I cared about and had opinions about. And then when I came to Molecular Cell, the path is interesting. You should probably know before I joined Cell Press, I had never led anything before, right? I never considered myself a leader at all. I was... I sang in my college choir, I never auditioned for solos. I'm happy being the person contributing, being part of the team, adding the harmony part. And so when I joined Molecular Cell, I was happy to be part of the team. It was great actually, to move from somewhere. In science, you're often working on something that's a project. It's your project. And then moving to a situation where there's a team. We're putting out this journal together. There are deadlines that we have to meet, and we have to rely on each other. Being in that environment and having, growing in that environment, and then eventually having junior editors that I had an opportunity to mentor and they encountered difficult situations and came to me. I realised that I really liked helping them and I had some capacity to do that. Then a door opened, there was a position open at Molecular Cell. I actually struggled with that for a while, because I wasn't sure. Is this me? Am I going to be the leader of this thing, I'm going to be responsible for it. That took me quite some time to decide, okay, I'm going to try this right. I don't think of myself as this... what a leader usually is, right? This extroverted, confident, charismatic, personality. In many ways that's not me, I've sort of learned to be more of that and can fake it sometimes. But at the time I was thinking, can I do this? I was really encouraged by leaders in the organisation at that time, and that sort of helped move me along. I think there are people in the organisation that saw things in me that I didn't necessarily see in myself, and that helped move me along.
YS Chi:Yeah, we're going to talk about leadership a little later because I think you have an interesting leadership style. We have talked about that in the past, in our various conversations. We're going to jump to your role at Cell though. When you first started as editor-in-chief three years ago, you said that you saw Cell being different in the next five years. Tell us about what you set out to achieve, and now that it's just more than halfway through this first timeline, where are you now?
John Pham:First off, I just have to acknowledge that we're talking about Cell here, right? Cell already was in an excellent position. There's this rich history with the journal, with contributions of many, many people who have made it what it is. So, before you hear me say that I want to make Cell better, we have to acknowledge that Cell was already in a very strong position. But I did want to make it better, and in many ways. For the community, and for our authors, and for the people who work on the team. There were ways I could see in which we could improve our speed. We could be faster and more consistent, more transparent, more fair. The quality of our papers could be better. I wanted to advocate for resources and tools to help us make our papers better and develop policies that make our papers more robust, and more reproducible. So, we've been making progress on those fronts, and of course we always want to attract the best content. To have that content have an impact on the community on the broader society. So, I started by seeing the strength of Cell and just wanting to orient it a little more towards having a service to the community and addressing problems that needed to be solved, and having a broader impact on society. What has happened? We've made progress. We have lots of work still to be done. But, if this past year can tell us anything, it's that our work matters. Last year, Tony Fauci testified in Congress about the Coronavirus and the pandemic. He waved a cell paper during his testimony. The rest of the world probably didn't notice that. But we did. It was a very, very proud moment for us, because it validated the work that we do. That so many of us do in many parts of the organisation. So, I wanted us to have that kind of impact. To have us feel like our work matters and to have evidence for that. I did want us to be different. Again, we were starting off from a point of strength. How to improve? Well, it really, really started with the team. I know I talked to you about this, and you talked about me maybe having conversations about leadership. But at that time for me, a very, very central focus was working with a team, because without a strong team, we can't do anything. So we worked, we've been working over the years to define what our values and our culture are. And for me and for leaders in the team in the organisation to model those values in that culture and to focus on our purpose and align what we do with that purpose.
YS Chi:One of those purposes that you mentioned to me at the very beginning was the trust factor in terms of research integrity. Frustration that comes from incidences that really mar the entire community, right?
John Pham:Yeah.
YS Chi:What have you done about this area since you have become the editor-in-chief?
John Pham:Yeah, so one thing is to obviously to take the issues when they come, to take them seriously. There are many of them so it's a challenge. There's a long history of papers and sometimes things come up with very old papers. We need to find time to be able to focus on those issues. So we could use help, right? And the organisation, to its credit, just gave us that. We just hired somebody who is the head of our research integrity and author experience. She just started last week. So having somebody in a role to help people like me, editors navigate this really tricky terrain of when issues come up. Because usually, the answer is not black and white, right? There's usually very, very many shades of grey. Trying to figure out what to do, whether or not to publish a correction or publish a retraction, it can be difficult. And then, how does the organisation help scientists understand that a correction has been made. I know that Elsevier has this trust and transparency team now, which is amazing to me. I've talked to some of the people who are working on that team and the things that are on their to do list are things that make me so happy to see them working on. Like, citation integrity, helping scientists to know when a paper has been retracted, helping editors to know. If you're publishing a paper, the citations that are in that paper, are there citations in there that are retracted papers. They're kind of basic things that we're doing now, that aren't necessarily flashy, but are important for the integrity of science. I'm very much an advocate of having editors spend time developing policies around research integrity, and trust and transparency. Of course, when you develop a policy and a requirement, then you have to spend time checking it. So it's not trivial. Also advocating for tools from the organisation and the organisation is providing for us. Image checking tools, tools to help validate data. And as I mentioned, integrity of references. So, there's a lot there. It's not easy with science, there are areas of science that are growing that we didn't know a decade ago, it didn't exist. So we're constantly having to pivot and develop policies to deal with the new kinds of science and the new kinds of data. We just need to be flexible and adaptable, and be willing to change.
YS Chi:Science and scientific publication does continue to evolve, and as you said before to me, I think taking it seriously when it happens and addressing it properly. I think that can really help the rest of the publishing community, kind of learn from and work with you to improve the trust factor everywhere.
John Pham:Yeah, I mean, my focus on this... I think in general, I would like Cell to be. I don't mean to sound super lofty but I want for us to be a team, an organisation, a journal that people look towards for leadership and to be standard bearers for how things can be done and should be done. I think it's very humbling to actually have that influence in the organisation and to see that we are able to play that role, and to be able to not to just play it, but to collaborate with others and work with others to make progress. It's not just us. It's all of Cell Press, it's Elsevier. So the extent that I can focus attention on this and show that this is important to me and to the journal. I want to do that and have an impact more broadly.
YS Chi:And another area where you want to have impact was in the area of inclusion, leading to diversity. It is a topic that is front of mind at the moment, and now that more people are focused on this, we have a shot at making a meaningful change. Tell me how you're addressing this in your own work at Cell.
John Pham:Yeah, so when I first started at the journal. It's not just me, there are many people on the team. Part of what I do, part of what my role is, is to enable them to have their ideas, have them feel comfortable enough to share their ideas, and to enable them to enact those, and to rally the team around it. So when I first started we started working on gender diversity. We develop goals. Our advisory board at the time was heavily skewed towards men. Most of our advisory board members are men and men from the west, particularly from the United States, and our reviewers were mostly men. It took some time for us to be able to gather the data about that. But when we could do that, and then we saw what the results were, it was pretty clear that a small minority of our reviewers are women. So at the time, we decided, okay, we're going to change this. We promised ourselves that we were going to make our advisory board more representative. Our advisory board now is roughly 50% men and women. Before it was, I don't remember what the number was, but I think it was less than 20% women. The same thing with our reviewers, it was something like 18%. We made a goal last year to have our reviewers be 1/3 women. We accomplished that, we went from 18% to 33%. So we've been working along those lines and also made our advisory board less Western. Although we still need to do more work on that. So we had been working along these lines because diverse science is better science, right? The more people that we include, the more ideas, the more better work there is. We don't want to be losing this talent from science. We wanted to do our role. Do something to make sure that different voices are included. Then last summer happened and George Floyd was murdered. It wasn't just us, many people were thinking about this and thinking about their roles in systemic racism and inequality. At the time, our team published an editorial, which was, I have to say, far more pointed than anything I've ever seen at Cell Press. That was a spark for us. That had a number of positive downstream effects that are continuing today, it triggered conversations. We started to hear voices as a result of that editorial that we hadn't heard before. I had many conversations with scientists and community and we learned quite a bit. From that, we started publishing many pieces, sharing perspectives and ideas and we even had a special issue. It's been humbling to see that the work that we've been doing has had an influence in the scientific community and in our own organisation. I can see discussions happening and actions taken that I think that we helped seed and foster. The NIH actually is taking concrete actions now to address systemic racism and talking to leaders there. The voices and opinions that we have shared in the pages of Cell have influenced them. All of that has been deeply meaningful to me and my team and it makes me feel so glad and so lucky to be doing the work that we do. That has been a huge focus. Then on top of that, there's so many other initiatives that have been happening, not just at Cell Press but in the broader organisation. But at Cell Press I can say that, broadly we've been...we're working towards peer reviewed diversity at Cell. We launched Faces of Cell to highlight and make visible the contributions of underrepresented populations and change the view of what we think a scientist is. We launched an I&D statement to allow authors to, number one, to have them think about inclusion and diversity in their design, and execution of their experiments, but also a place for them to explain to readers how they did that. So we just launched that this year. We've been collaborating with external organisations focused on equality and anti-racism. I've been working with the committee on publishing ethics, Coke on guidance to publishers for inclusive policies to help transgender scientists align their identities with their publishing records. So there's a lot of individual initiatives that are happening. And what are we doing? I think, part of what I'm doing myself is just being visible myself, representing my own minority, LGBTQ and Asian communities. Being a good positive example to them and engaging them as often as I can. I'm an introvert. It's hard for me to take time to go and give a talk. But when I'm asked now, I'm really, I'm trying to make the effort as often as I can to say yes.
YS Chi:And it's part of your obligation as a leader to do that.
John Pham:Yes, and I'm learning from you YS too. I see how you are such a great mentor and spend so much of your time volunteering and trying to do positive things that you don't have to do. I'm trying to be a bit like that too.
YS Chi:Well, I have to say personally, I do like the changes that you're bringing about. Yet another change in our world is the whole area of innovation, technology and data. It seems like scientific research is experiencing a golden age thanks to the advances of AI, right? Like machine learning, the big data. But we all know that research findings are only as good as the quality of the data itself. So what are the big challenges for the scientist when it comes to data? How do you think we can support them for data integrity?
John Pham:Yeah, this is alluding back to some of what I said earlier. We're going to have to pivot. Part of it is just being constantly aware of what our policies are, and whether or not they still make sense for what the direction that scientists, science is moving. Data sets now are larger, way larger than they were before and more difficult to assess. There are challenges with archiving and sharing. For some data types there isn't a consensus in the community about what's required and what to archive. And on the reader side, well, there's giant data, it's hard to parse it. You sort of rely on the data visualisation and representation, and sometimes readers might not be able to access that underlying data if journals in the community don't have policies on sharing. So a lot of what we've been doing at Cell Press. This is not just Cell, I have to say, this is more of a Cell Press and Elsevier thing. At Cell Press in particular, we've been focused on providing guidance and establishing policies. We've provided guidance on how to report your data, all of this data and all of your reagents and methods. We launched our methods several years ago to provide STAR. It stands for structured, transparent, accessible reporting. It is a structured way to share information in a way that is standardised. So when readers go, and they look at the STAR methods, they look at a key resources table. They know what it is, and that there's a structure to it and an expectation of what is required. So we've been providing that kind of guidance, moving the community to the degree that we can towards best practices. And then again, developing policies, and as I have mentioned before, policies, once you have them, you just can't have them. You have to actually have resources and tools to help enforce those policies for the different kinds of data that arise. There are also challenges with assessing that data and doing peer review. Reviewers are already busy, and then you give them these gigantic data sets and sometimes they're... Before in the pre giant data set world, we didn't necessarily have policies about having that underlying information accessible to reviewers. That's something that we are addressing now. So to make sure that data, those code, the code, is something that is assessed during the process and vetted before we get to readers. But there are challenges. With data, there are many challenges that the community is still navigating and that we're part of conversations around, like privacy, right? There's a friction between transparency on the one hand, because we believe that transparency is good. Definitely a scientist can take a data set that's already been published and mine it for something completely different, and have that data be in a format where scientists can do that. That's great. That's propelling science forward. But sometimes there are good reasons why you don't want to make information as transparent as it could be. Particularly sensitive around privacy concerns with patient data. If you can disambiguate that data and have that affect someone's privacy. That is an understandable reasonable reason why we might not require perfectly transparent data. So we're still developing, we have a team at Cell Press who have been working on this, they're amazing. Super thoughtful about data, way more thoughtful than I am about this topic. I'm grateful to have them help us deal with this. But we're working on these policies and guidance and the enforcement side. So those are the kinds of things that we're doing to help scientists.
YS Chi:Yes, and definitely a role that Cell Press should play as a leader. And it's another of open x trend in scientific publishing, but science in general. Another open x, open science, open data, is open access publishing. There are different levels of open access as we have now discovered over the past 20 some years. Now, Elsevier is one of the largest open access publishers in the world. But this doesn't come without its challenges and controversies. So I was wondering, from your unique perspective of Cell Press, where do you see open access publishing going in the future? Do you think it is going to develop gradually or more rapidly?
John Pham:Yeah, that's a big, big topic. Just sort of baseline philosophy here, I think that access is important, right? If my mission is to support scientists and their science, and to have that science have as big as an impact as it possi ly can, and influence on he scientific community and on he broader public. Of cour e, greater access is better. In order for that work to h ve impact, people need to be a le to access it. So we want as m ny readers as possible to be a le to read our content. We w nt open access, we w nt accessibility. The challenge is making that sustainable, as ou know YS. Right now there re different models for o en access. Some models make se se for some types of journals nd are more challenging for othe s. For example, for Cell, we do't publish very many papers. So he current prevailing model of o en access is gold open acce s, where the author pays. ut that's hard for authors to ay that amount, and it's hard or us because we don't publish t at many papers. So the ba ic fundamental philosophies t at guide our thinking about th s, that guide my thinking about t. Yes we want access, but we w nt sustainable access because it costs money to publish. To h re people like me and teams of people who care about this st ff to publish, and to have he infrastructure to support th t. So access and sustainability ut also author choice. Some auth rs want open access, they c re about it. So if they want t, they can pay that in an o en access journal. If they do't want open access, immediate o en access, then they can go he subscription route and not h ve to pay article publish ng charge. At Cell and Cell Pre s, we haven't historically offe ed the gold open access option. ut that actually changed this ye r. So now Cell is a hybrid journ l. So if you want and suppor ing this philosophy of author choice and sustai ability, if you want as an aut or to publish immediate open a cess you can do that. We give y u an option to pay an articl publishing charge and you ca do that. If not, you can go the subscription route. I suspec that over time, given these hoices, the community will m ve towards greater and greate adoption of immediate open a cess. But right now, I'm more o a 'it's going to be slow', it's not going to be immediate, it's going to be a bit slower. It's getting faster, it's wrap ing up, and eventually I can ee a day where Cell is comp etely immediate open acce s. But for now, we're some here in between. It's not like we haven't developed ways in w ich to improve access. So even in the subscription model of C ll pre 2021, where you coul only access Cell content if y u were a subscriber. We were still finding ways to try to m ke that content accessible. So w were technically green open ccess. All of our content at ell Press, research content at ell Press is freely available a ter one year, so there's an mbargo period. We also did do something that Elsevier en bles us to do, which is to give uthors share links to their wo k. So when we accept a paper, we say, there's going to be...you re going to get an email with this link that gives anyone tha clicks on that access to our work for a couple of months. So you can put that on social edia, you can do whatever y u want with it, share it. So we ave tried ways to align thes various aspects of our princi les. Now we're just moving on path towards giving our author even more options.
YS Chi:I think that's really one of the critical elements when we have these changes happening. Is for it to be either very abrupt and it happens rather unilaterally, or it happens gradually by testing many different options. Eventually we will find the one, two or three right ways of doing so, but science certainly deserves a combination of sustainable solutions.
John Pham:Yeah.
YS Chi:So I think that's encouraging to see that Cell Press is taking even more options as pilots and then implementing them.
John Pham:Yeah, I think it's great. It's good to see that change, and the support in the organisation. There are lots of very smart people in the organisation and in the community thinking and working about this. The kinds of deals that we've struck recently, are very complicated to me, I have a hard time honestly wrapping my head around them. But the fact that we can do this and find a place where organisations like the California Library and Elsevier can work together to find solutions. I think that's great. I mean, that's exactly what we need, is these kinds of partnerships.
YS Chi:Indeed. Speaking of smart exciting things, we got to get back to where you came from, which is science. So sitting where you are, give us some enlightenment about what are some of the most exciting things happening in science today?
John Pham:Well, I just want to talk about exciting papers that we recently published. We published a paper about insects co-opting the genes of a plant that it used to defend itself from the insects, and sort of this molecular thievery that happened over evolution, which is super cool. But I have to say, I'm from a molecular biology background. Through and through molecular biologist. I led Molecular Cell for many years, so I love molecular biology. But I have to say one of the great things about joining the Cell team is just the ability to learn about all the other biology out there and to be able to handle papers and talk with my team and talk with the reviewers and authors about that work. So some of the things that I found particularly interesting lately that I've noticed and enjoyed reading and learning about from scientist is neurobiology. How the brain works, what individual circuits exist for specific behaviours and the kinds of tools that neurobiologist use are so cool. You can figure out what a specific neuron is that's involved, in say, fear or aggression. You can turn on that very individual specific neuron with light, and switch on aggressive behaviour in an animal, in a mouse let's say, that is not aggressive and switch off that aggressive behaviour in an animal that is aggressive. Just that level of detailed understanding, where scientists are with their technology is just mind blowing, and how we're learning about human behaviour and how the brain functions through that kind of work. It's just fascinating to me and I had a paper about socially interacting bats and how their brains...there's so much interesting stuff about neurobiology.
YS Chi:Yeah, I think that's the one area of biology that we understand the least for the moment.
John Pham:Yeah. I don't want to just call out neurobiology, there are so many other interesting areas of science and that I'm interested in. But that's just one. I'm also very interested in microbes. So fascinating. We published a paper not that long ago about the viruses in the ocean. There's vast unknown and we're just at a stage of cataloguing them. The microbes in our gut, the viruses that exist within us. What the populations are like in a healthy situation, what they're like in a disease situation. I saw a talk about different microbes and different cancer types and how they're different and how those microbes might be involved in either the healthy state or the disease state. Right now, it's just a big, vast unknown, we're still cataloguing and trying to understand what's even there, but technology has brought us to that space. For us to be able to do this. Without sequencing technologies, we wouldn't be able to do these things. Not that long ago, it cost billions of dollars and took over a decade to sequence one human genome with the Human Genome Project. Now, you can do it in a day for a couple $100.
YS Chi:Right.
John Pham:And it's because of that kind of improvement in technology that we can now start understanding. Okay, well, what are these other microbes out there, and what are they doing?
YS Chi:Well, on the one hand it sounds really exciting. But at the same time John, it's almost daunting to think about studying science when it's moving that fast.
John Pham:Yeah. But that's what makes our work interesting. Right?
YS Chi:Well, certainly it makes editors work very interesting and I think that the fact that our editors and the scientific community can move and make adjustment to that speed is really remarkable.
John Pham:Yeah, I'm constantly amazed and impressed by scientists and what they're able to do.
YS Chi:At this point, unfortunately, we have to wrap up our conversation for the audience. But I do want to come full circle back about being remarkable, because you're a Vietnamese refugee who studied lots of things on opposite ends to find your calling in science, and then now in a scientific support position through Cell Press. I am sure John, knowing you, this is only like chapter three or four of your life. Tell me about chapter five, six and seven, just briefly, without having to give away everything because it may or may not happen. As a writer, what would you like to see in those chapters?
John Pham:I mean, I think that I would just hope to be able to look back at those chapters at the end of the book, to be able to look back and say that we did good things to help people. That I was involved in motivating people, building support for things that ended up being good. If I can do that, then, whatever those chapters are, the specifics of them don't matter to me. I think it's the overall, what is the purpose of all of this and did we accomplish that?
YS Chi:I had the privilege of speaking with John who said, he claimed that he was not a leader and here he is talking about motivating, building support for the world to be better. If that is not leadership quality, I don't know what it is. John, thank you. It's always fun and a pleasure to speak with you, and thanks for sharing your thoughts with the audience.
John Pham:Thanks YS, it's always great to talk to you and thank you for inviting me.
YS Chi:Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to hit subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes as soon as they're released, and thanks for listening. Stay well.