The Leap: This Is Going To Kill Your Career

Betül Kaçar started out as a biochemist. But then she found her calling: investigating some of the hardest questions in evolutionary biology.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com. WNYC Studios is supported by Wise. Wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a Wise account, you can send, spend and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Download the Wise app today. Terms and conditions apply. WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 1:02Flora Lichtman?

  Science Friday is supported by Dell. Gifts mean more when they have the power to unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 laptop. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet with a long battery life, beautiful design and powerful performance with Intel Core processors. The XPS laptop unlocks more of what you love. Plus, at dell.com, you'll find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping and flexible financing, and big savings on monitors and accessories. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 1:51Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, I'm Flora Lixman and you're listening to Science Friday. On the podcast today, the next episode in the Leap in Audio series I made with the Hypothesis Fund. Today, what it takes to follow your heart in science. Do you remember people saying, like, that's a bad idea?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:11Flora Lichtman?

  Like, what did they say? Like, give me a flavor of that.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  That that's a bad idea. But it was very, it was not sugarcoated. This is a bad idea. You're not going to get a job. But no department will hire you. There is no funding. It's not a thing.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  But it just didn't stop me. I thought, well, I'm sorry you think that way.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  And you're wrong.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Because I believed that if you actually put your heart into something, something that you create out of love and beauty and that you give yourself into it, that it can be ugly. I thought, how is that possible?

• 2:50Flora Lichtman?

  This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  My name is Batul Kachar, and I study the origins and early evolution of life on Earth.

• 3:14Flora Lichtman?

  Small questions.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  As small as it can get.

• 3:21Flora Lichtman?

  Where did we come from? How did we get here? Why do we exist? These questions have lit up human brains for, I don't know, probably all the time. They're so big and so fundamental, they almost seem like they couldn't have concrete answers. And so they're usually probed with religion and philosophy, not with data and experiments. Batul Kachar, somewhat audaciously, is trying to change that.

• 4:04Flora Lichtman?

  Batul grew up in Istanbul, and she came to America to get her PhD at Emory University in Atlanta.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  At age 20, knowing nobody, it's your classic American immigrant story. Well, hey, it's a classic for a reason.

• 4:18Flora Lichtman?

  At the time, people told Batul how brave she was for leaving home, for going so far away. But she didn't see it that way. She was just excited.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  It was, oh, my God, all the things I'm going to learn. I can't wait. And they have books, and all kinds of books, and libraries are so great. And they have these couches and giant windows, and you can sit in them and read. Like, that was the thought I had flying.

• 4:39Flora Lichtman?

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

• 5:00Speaker 02

  I was interested in this context that gave rise to the enzyme. So the question became more about how the enzyme happened to be the way it is, rather than what it does to a cell.

• 5:13Flora Lichtman?

  Batul thought to understand what it does today, she had to know its past. Why do we have this enzyme? Where in our giant family tree did it develop? And why? Her interests were drifting away from molecular biochemistry and toward evolutionary biology. At the same time, she had this fellowship that had her teaching evolution in high school classrooms, and she found herself in a cultural crossfire.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  If you want to teach our kids about creationism, let's teach them about intelligent design.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Alabama has approved inserting a disclaimer in biology books that calls evolution a controversial theory.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  So when you realize that a certain topic or a certain area is thought to be dangerous to learn, I wanted to study that more.

• 5:58Flora Lichtman?

  Batul immersed herself in the evolutionary biology world. She was an outsider, so she was reading everything she could. She started attending biology seminars.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  It's almost like, you know, you open a curtain or something, and then there's this most amazing view. And then you basically want to tear that curtain down, right? Like, it's just like you want to see the whole thing. And to me, evolution and asking these questions was that moment where the curtain was lifted a little bit, and I had to open it all the way.

• 6:27Flora Lichtman?

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

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Nobody questions why are you studying a disease? But when you say, I want to understand how the enzyme that gives rise to a disease happens to be on this planet, that's first place, then you get eyebrows.

• 7:11Flora Lichtman?

  It was more than eyebrows.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  I was warned that these sort of problems are not going to be solved in your lifetime. So don't, don't pursue and you will kill your career if you change fields post PhD. Just, just go to a Parkinson's lab or study proteins and prefire proteins until the end of time.

• 7:33Flora Lichtman?

  This feedback felt hard to parse, so I asked Harmeet Malik, a champion of Bhutul's work and a leading evolutionary biologist himself, what he made of it.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  It's probably a mix of this is not something I can do, so you shouldn't do it. And it's a mix of, you know, you're early in your career. You really need to make sure that you get some successes. And this, even if it works, is going to take so long. It's going to be, you don't want to stake the success of your entire career on that. And unfortunately, the second thing, even though it's a very benign and even like a somewhat positive sentiment, we hear about that a lot in science, right?

• 8:11Flora Lichtman?

  This is where science's lofty ambitions bump up against the reality of how the career works in practice. In practice, there's a tenure clock. You're measured on how many papers you publish, how much funding you pull in. And there is just very little incentive for someone, especially early in their career, to take a big bet and change course because if it doesn't pay off, their whole career could be screwed, which is why people counsel caution.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  And honestly, that is the advice that many of us would give to our trainees as well, just to make sure that, you know, your bread and butter, your foundation is like really strong before you kind of take these huge leaps of science.

• 8:52Flora Lichtman?

  So some people might hear this feedback and tone down their ambitions, you know, decide on a more conservative path.

• 9:01Flora Lichtman?

  That is not what Bhutul did.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  It's my life, it's my career and I'll do whatever I want.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  The more pushback I received, the more I knew I need to do it, like this is worth doing because this is how humans are, right? Like if something is interesting, we don't welcome it. We don't, we, we want to believe that, right? We want to believe that you show someone or so, show the field, to show the world some amazing data and everyone gets behind the work that you do. That's not how it works.

• 9:31Flora Lichtman?

  The thing that I love about this, though, is like, what I'm hearing you say is like, "Evolution was a hot-button mess." And people in your field were telling you, "The questions you're asking cannot be answered." And I think a lot of people would say, "Oh, I'm gonna turn in the other direction." But there are some people who say, "Oh, a big, huge mess where you're telling me I can't do something? I'm gonna run right at it."

• 10:01Flora Lichtman?

  Is that you? Like, is that who you are?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Looking back, yeah. I mean, and looking forward also, yeah. Like, and looking at today, also, yes. I think so. I didn't even think about it.

• 10:14Flora Lichtman?

  Did you have moments of doubt?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Doubt about what?

• 10:17Flora Lichtman?

  Just about what you were pursuing? That it was, that it is too hard, that they were right?

• 10:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:26Flora Lichtman?

  Did you have doubts about other things that we could probe?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  I never doubted that. It was just something that I had to do. Like, it wasn't, there was not much thinking to it. It was more like a feeling, right? You are in love.

• 10:43Flora Lichtman?

  Batoule followed her heart and tuned out the noise.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  You need to, like, have this bubble that you surround yourself with, your own atmosphere. Like, I'm not gonna let this take me down. I think that some of us are so used to this sort of pushback from such early age that we have that resilience.

• 11:11Flora Lichtman?

  To understand why Batoule seems impervious to all these people warning her off of the research she wanted to do, we have to go back to how Batoule grew up.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I was the first woman in my family to attend the school. And I'm not talking higher education. I'm not talking going to an IVS school or, no. Education, periods, learning how to hold a pen.

• 11:36Flora Lichtman?

  Patoul grew up around a lot of extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. The women were the caregivers. They hadn't gotten the chance to get a formal education. But Patoul, even as a teeny tiny kid, had a different vision for herself.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  I went to school. I was five years old when I started elementary. I really insisted. I was told. In fact, the first grade teacher did not want me in the class because I was too young, like two years almost younger than the rest, and did not want my parents to enroll me. But I'm told that I basically pulled her skirt and said, "Excuse me, but can you show me my seat?"

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And then she burst out a laugh and then says, "Well, maybe she's ready for it." I don't know what it is. It's just...

• 12:27Flora Lichtman?

  Like where that came from?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  No. No. I really don't. It's something that I felt very strongly, I can say. It's just a very strong force in me.

• 12:40Flora Lichtman?

  When kids have a strong force in them, sometimes their parents bristle, especially when that force butts up against how things are usually done. But Patoul's family supported her getting an education. And her dad especially found other ways to add oxygen to Patoul's personal atmosphere.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Like, he would take these moments of acknowledging my mind.

• 13:01Flora Lichtman?

  Like what? Give me an example.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  This will sound very funny, but I asked... We were having dinner, and you know, this is Turkey 90s. People are smoking. So he asked me to bring his cigarette. So, "Can you grab my cigarette?" So I grabbed the cigarette. I remember Parliament's light. It's like, I don't know if 90s kids can resonate with the cigarette packages of their parents, but I do. And I grabbed the lighter.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And then he was a businessman himself. So he had a lot of people working with him. And when I brought the cigarette and then handed him the lighter, and then I left the room. But he stopped me and then he turned the room and he said, she's only 11 years old and she knew that I will need a lighter, not just a cigarette. And she she thought about it herself and and and she put it together. It sounds funny. You may think, is this your biggest achievement in life? That you did not forget the lighter? But at that time, you have to understand, this was a room of packed with men. And for him to stop the conversation, to acknowledge something so tiny that I did, to offer all these men around him to acknowledge my mind. I was like, that's right. I am smart.

• 14:22Flora Lichtman?

  As Batou grew up, it became clearer and clearer to her that if she wanted a life that looked different from the women who raised her, education was the key.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Because I have never seen any uneducated woman who was also independent. The education is the only way for me to make a life for myself. And so that was very clear in my mind that all the diplomas will be mine. Like, I will get everything.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  And

• 14:53Flora Lichtman?

  Did you?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  I think I did, yes.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  But for me to decide that I'm gonna actually get a PhD, I don't know who I thought I was. Like, it's it's kind of, I like that I had that. I dared and I didn't think that that's not my place.

• 15:11Flora Lichtman?

  So now, when people tell Batou something is impossible, she's skeptical, reasonably so, because she has done impossible things in the past. It's also given her clarity on how best to use her time.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  When you realize that education is a privilege, at least for me, it's it's it wired me up. There's no experience that will ever erase that drive from me. I will never forget that I can hold a pen and I can write. So now, what do you do with it? What is the biggest question you can ask? What is the most important thing you can do with your life?

• 15:58Flora Lichtman?

  Which brings us back to Batoul's science. The project she landed on after she wrapped up her PhD sounds a little like science fiction, like an echo of a story we've all heard.

• 16:15Flora Lichtman?

  It's a dinosaur.

• 16:21Flora Lichtman?

  Batoul isn't trying to make Jurassic Park. What she's doing is harder, in a way. She's going for pre-Cambrian Park, something much, much older.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yes, dinosaurs are babies. Like, they're born and dead, I guess, yesterday. But it's, yeah, we're talking really old things.

• 16:41Flora Lichtman?

  T-Rex lived 80 million years ago. Batoul wants to resurrect life forms from 3 billion years ago, when Earth was super different than it is today.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  So we want to understand the limits of life and how it can express itself and how differently it can express itself. It's sort of a re-extinction process that we bring the dead back to life. And then the fun begins.

• 17:07Flora Lichtman?

  Understanding how this works gets technical fast, so let me just give you the Mr. DNA version. Batoul's idea is to resurrect bits of the oldest life forms, specifically the proteins in ancient microbes, the proteins that were essential for life's survival. So the first step is analyzing the sequences that code for today's proteins and using them to extrapolate the sequences of their ancestors. Step two is using those ancestral sequences to resurrect extinct proteins in the lab. And step three is putting those ancient proteins in living microbes to see how they operate, with the hope that they can give us insights into early life on this planet and how life persevered through huge changes

• 17:52Flora Lichtman?

  in Earth's climate and atmospheric history. And if you're like, whoa, that is a lot, you're right, it's super ambitious.

• 18:02Flora Lichtman?

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

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Some senior person took the microphone and just grilled me.

• 18:34Flora Lichtman?

  Like, like how?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Like, why are you doing this? This is, you know, what is this? It was not easy. My knees were shaking. So in the moment, I was extremely terrified. And I thought that was a bad idea that I... But, you know, I'm in the moment, so what can I, can I say? I'm really sorry, everybody. This was a huge mistake, and you're right. So I, I'm like, this is not the time. So I parved through it.

• 19:01Flora Lichtman?

  And instead of slinking away embarrassed, Batoul did the opposite. She saw this as an opportunity to learn and to enlist people in her quest.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I received a lot of help. People shared so many papers with me that I missed. I didn't think it was a humiliating experience. I thought it was the best thing ever, because I would not be able to get that feedback nowhere.

• 19:26Flora Lichtman?

  This wasn't the only bump Batoul hit. And it wasn't the only time she found a creative way around it. Batoul applied for a postdoctoral fellowship, and she got rejected. But instead of giving up, she went back and asked them to tell her in excruciating detail what was wrong with the proposal.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I asked them to be as brutally honest as possible with me. And I told them, please help me so that you don't have to review my application for the next five years, because I will keep trying. I remember telling them that.

• 19:56Flora Lichtman?

  Do you remember that application?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 20:00Flora Lichtman?

  This is Melissa Curvin-Brooks, one of the reviewers on that fellowship application. Melissa is the future workforce lead of the NASA Astrobiology Program. And she says, even though this was over a decade ago, and she's reviewed, you know, thousands of applications, Batul's stuck with her.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  I remember so much. There are a handful of people that I remember so much about, and Batul is certainly one of them. Part of it was that she was very brave. For somebody to be willing to try something that hadn't been done before, it takes a certain type of person. And she was also very, super modest. She would say, "This is not my strength, but I know that I can use my skills and adapt them." She was willing to learn.

• 20:46Flora Lichtman?

  Batul revised the application and got the fellowship.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  We knew that she was going to become a leader in the field.

• 20:57Flora Lichtman?

  A field she had to carve out. That was another thing Batul ran up against: the silos of science. Her work is so interdisciplinary, it didn't fit neatly in one discipline.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Where should I ground it? Should I base it on biophysics or cell biology?

• 21:13Flora Lichtman?

  She landed her first professor job in the astronomy department at the University of Arizona.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I was very proud of it because I thought, wow, I'm probably the first biologist in this country who's hired in an astronomy department.

• 21:25Flora Lichtman?

  Because Earth was a very different planet when these life forms evolved, they're aliens, in a way, and they might give us clues about the existence of life on other worlds. Being in this department, it allowed Batul to zoom out even further.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  That experience definitely helped me conceptualize biology in the context of planets and stars.

• 21:47Flora Lichtman?

  From Arizona, Batul went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Ultimately, I realized microbiology is where this work belongs. So as you see, I've been through many different disciplines. It was far from a straight path.

• 22:03Flora Lichtman?

  Research isn't a straight path either, as almost all scientists will tell you. And what Batul is trying to pull off scientifically is really hard. But she's making progress. Those questions that raised eyebrows 15 years ago, she's starting to get some answers. She successfully resurrected a couple of extinct proteins in the lab. Even more amazing, they function when she puts them into living organisms. And she's using them to start to glean insights into the evolution of early life. Now, other people are doing bits and pieces of this kind of work.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  But Batul might be one of maybe two or three people in the world who do all of those things. Now, each of these things has like some question marks. And I can easily see us having debates about them. But, you know, that is like almost paralyzing. And it was really wonderful to have somebody like Batul who's got this, I'm going to take no prisoners. And I'm, I'm just going to do it. You know, you always have that thing in the back of your head is that if I had to start from scratch, what would you rather be doing? And I was like, oh, my God, I wish I had thought of this experiment.

• 23:07Flora Lichtman?

  Harmeet was so impressed with the work. He recommended Batul for a seed grant from the Hypothesis Fund, which enables scientists to nominate other scientists for funding to pursue their most ambitious ideas, ideas that might otherwise not get funded. The Hypothesis Fund also makes this podcast. And already, Harmeet says, Batul is creating a path that others are following.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Her successes have not just motivated her and her lab, but they kind of motivated other people who would be maybe on the fence about whether we should do this.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  She started a whole sort of new branch of research. She's a rock star.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  It's remarkable how important persisting is in this business, and probably in many things where you are trying to break a new ground. You need to survive, you know, just like that protein that survived. I need to persist. I need to exist to tell this story.

• 24:02Flora Lichtman?

  I asked Patel if she thought her own story helped explain her science or what draws her to it.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Yes, because I'm a biological system trying to understand itself ultimately, right? When you're trying to understand life and its origins and how it all happened, you're really exploring you. It is an exploration of ourselves. So our backgrounds and our stories inevitably shape the way we do science. So me being this alien visitor in an alien place, right? And I moved to the United States knowing nobody. I found it poetic that I ended up asking the history of the systems that I study. I was interested in their journey.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  To me, they were the alien. Where did you come from? What have you been through? Tell me a little bit more about yourself. You seem really old. I mean, four billion years is a lot of living. I want to hear about it.

• 25:18Flora Lichtman?

  The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Devon Taylor, Pooja Van Ghe, and David Sanford, fact checking by Nicole Pasulka, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks for listening.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  This podcast is supported by the New York Community Trust. As a savvy New Yorker, you've probably heard of donor-advised funds, or DAFs, a tax-smart and streamlined way to give. But did you know there's a way to use your DAF to make a powerful difference today? And an enduring local impact? That way is the New York Community Trust, your community foundation. Your DAF at the Trust comes with personal service, unique giving ideas, and the satisfaction of knowing you're helping your community today and tomorrow. Visit give2.nyc today.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Earth Justice, the nation's leading environmental law organization. Earth Justice goes to court to fight for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wild places we love, and our right to a healthy environment. And they do it all free of charge, because the pursuit of justice shouldn't have a price tag. Become a supporter today at earthjustice.org. Earth Justice: Because the Earth Needs a Good Lawyer.