Engineering Chair: Most People Should Not Go To College - #567

The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize. The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that. What you’ll hear: -Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out -What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs -Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that -How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised -What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience -Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right “Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi CHAPTERS 00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department. 01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable 02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job 05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life 08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space? 12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am? 13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop 15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened 18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now 19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away 22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built 26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard 28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink 30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on 31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss 34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years 36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger 38:44 Should engineers read Plato? 39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy 40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease? 43:14 Why he had to write the book 48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment 51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one. 53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M. A. G. I. C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  Perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  My guest today is my good friend Darren Lepone, Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester, in a school he's actively marketing to undergraduates. He's one of the best mentors and educators I've ever met. I was devastated when he left UC San Diego. And he just told me that most people shouldn't even be in this program. I want to know if he meant it.

• 1:31Brian Keating?

  Is academia like kind of an irredeemably clout-chasing, you know, kind of money-grubbing pursuit of attention, maybe significance, and we have importance? What is academia? What has it become? And what, where do you think it can go?

• 1:47Speaker 03

  This is a tough nut to crack because when we have promotion and tenure cases, we want to be able to look at a metric that is reliable, that's standardized across fields, which is impossible, but at least sort of within field. So we look at H-index, we look at number of citations, we look at number of grant dollars brought in per square foot of lab space that the individual has. But at the end of the day, you want to know, what did that person do? What is the accomplishment? How have they made a deep and lasting impact in the field? And that accomplishment is quite difficult to judge.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  And oftentimes, there's a time component, too. It's a, it's a, impact is a lagging indicator. What if a paper gets one citation today, but then it gets 1,000 citations 10 years from now because it became so important? And so, just like capitalism takes, leverages the human competitive instinct, we're kind of stuck with these metrics in order to evaluate each other and to give each other raises and promotions. So it's an imperfect system, but it's what we have. Only one out of every 20 PhDs becomes a tenure-track professor. The numbers are not very favorable

• 3:13Speaker 03

  for the median person who wants to go into the field. And it's just, I don't mean median in a pejorative sense. I just mean statistically, it's a very difficult path. No one knows that a grad student did the work, that a grad student who made 35 grand a year and forewent retirement savings for their entire period of training and probably won't recover it by the time they retire, that the financial burden is probably more so on them than it is on the taxpayer. So I was trying to tell the story of the people who had to go to grad school because they couldn't do anything else. They went into research because they could not do anything else,

• 3:57Speaker 03

  like an artist, or a musician, or a chef. That's what they had to do, knowing that the chances of getting an independent faculty position are, you know, 1 in 20 or lower. Would I have studied inorganic chemistry and space groups and oxidation potentials and the Schrödinger equation? If I was not forced to? And I'm a highly motivated, really nerdy, really nerdy individual. Would I have done that for four years, 11 years after high school before I got my first job? I don't think I would have. I was lucky in the sense that I had scholarships and my debt load was not, was not high. If you look at the net present value of my decision

• 4:41Speaker 03

  by the time I retire, was it a good decision? I don't know. I probably would have done okay making $85,000 with a bachelor's degree. There are people for whom it does not make sense to go to college. I would say that perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high, because the prevalence of high-paying jobs for individuals who are willing to tolerate certain types of activities can be quite high. And I think that's where we need to focus on as educators in the area of building physical items.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  We need to re, we need to re-materialize work and encourage people to work with their hands, to encourage the building and craftsmanship and artisanship that's informed by theory because those jobs are going to be the hardest to replace. Physical AI is going to require an enormous amount of energy and also material science and mechanical engineering innovation, along with the enormous energy demands in server farms, for example. That's quite a long way off, in my opinion. Laundry folding robots notwithstanding.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  And so, there will, for the next several decades, there will be room for somebody who will be designing a telescope, for somebody who's designing a satellite, somebody who's designing and building a reactor that can strip perfluorinated alkyl substances from drinking water. And it's the tolerance, it's the grit to be doing that with one's hands, right?

• 6:38Brian Keating?

  I gave you some materials, some extremely interesting engineering that may or may not contain life on it.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Can I touch it?

• 6:47Brian Keating?

  You can touch it.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:48Brian Keating?

  That is your gift for coming on the podcast. It's a real live or dead meteorite, depending on how you look at it. And you can have it too. Guaranteed, I'll send you one if you, like Darren and me, have a.edu email address and, like Darren and me, you live in the United States. So go to briankeating.edu and I love to send those out and connect to my beloved.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  I'm not going to get in trouble with TSA.

• 7:09Brian Keating?

  No, they might ask you what you do for a living, which you describe in the book as well. So this material was delivered by Outer Space. It has some interesting deformations, material science compositions and stuff, but it does have organic materials on it because I've touched it and, you know, sneezed on it and whatnot. But you originally, it seems like, if I recall correctly, you wanted to study sort of origin of life or get involved with that. What was the kind of impetus for that? Want to say? And how far have you strayed from that interest? Or have you?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I've always been a bit of a humanist. I've read a lot of books. My mom had a lot of lefty novels, Aldous Huxley and Jane Goodall. And I, although my parents were quite conservative, actually, this was, you know, from her, from her past. She had this box of dusty books. And I read quite a lot of them. And when I got to college at BU, I had a fantastic chemistry professor, John Straub. And I was working with him on an independent concentration. And when I started college, 9/11 had just happened. The second week of school, the second Tuesday of school was 9/11. And so, I was originally biomedical engineering.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  And then I suddenly said I wanted to learn how people behaved, how they, how they interact with each other, what their life circumstances led them to their behavior. So I changed my major to anthropology. And then, but then I veered back, regressing to the mean, and said, "Well, how can I combine my interest in people and psychology with chemistry?" And it took 20 years of an independent career to finally sort of arrive at where I am right now. But at the time, I was, John Straub introduced me to Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, who were scientific humanists. And they wrote about, you know, the selfish gene theory

• 9:01Speaker 03

  and how life were lumbering robots built on self-replicating genes that would co-opt things in their environment in order to replicate themselves. Not because they wanted to, but because that's what they did. That's what they'd always done and what we're going to continue to do. And so, I became, you know, the first thing I saw when I saw these micrometeorites is I wonder if there are any chiral amino acids on them? Because that is one, perhaps my favorite theory for the origin of biological homo-chirality.

• 9:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So what is chirality?

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Right. So every carbon atom has four bonds that point the vertices of a tetrahedron. And there are two different ways that you can arrange those bonds, the right-handed version and the left-handed version. They're non-superimposable mirror images.

• 9:50Brian Keating?

  So this graphite in this pencil is carbon in it, right? But it's that matter to itself. It's not organic.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  That graphite is a different alatrop of carbon. So it's planar. It's all sp2 hybridized, so it has to be saturated.

• 10:03Brian Keating?

  High school chemistry coming back. Thank you, professor.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  That's why they called, that's why, that's why they gave me the chair job.

• 10:11Brian Keating?

  You just got me back to 10th grade. Thanks, Darren.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the graphite in the carbon is not chiral. Some of the graph, some of the carbon in coal is, some of it is not. Because you're right, and you have a mixture of hybridization states. But most carbon atoms in DNA and proteins are going to be chiral. And so all helices of the same type, so all keratin helices in your, in your hair and fingernails, all DNA helices, they're all made of, they all twist the same direction because of this.

• 10:46Brian Keating?

  Right-handed, right?

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yes, it depends on.

• 10:49Brian Keating?

  Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm a nonic for remembering all these different bases. In cosmology and particle physics, we only have left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antine. And I'm always like, how do I remember those? So I just remember life may have originated from, from outer space, from neutrinos and cosmic rays and stuff. And those are left-handed, so they would only, you know, cause an interaction between something if that's right-handed. And that's how I remember that DNA. Also, you can remember from Jurassic Park, you know, life is, is right, life finds a way. And so life is, anyway, that's how I remember it. But again, I got a three on the, no, four on the, three on the AP.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  So there aren't that many ways that you can create new chiral information from scratch in a proxy. So leave homochiral, you only get one in antiumer. That's one mirror image. Ibuprofen is sold as a mixture of both. One of them is useless, one of them is biologically active. And so how do you, how do you create the homo chirality to begin with? In the pharmaceutical industry, you have a chiral catalyst, which is often an enzyme, which is biological in origin. And it catalyzes some reaction, which then, which then biases the formation of every other bond to form in the way you want it to. Sometimes you might use tartaric acid, which is an antiamerically pure.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Louis Pasteur, who discovered an antiameric excess, literally used a polarized microscope and tweezers to pick out, just pick out the, the crystals by hand of tartaric acid. And so one of the ways in which homo chirality is theorized to have arisen is because of polarized radiation in outer space. And so when you have meteorites that have, you know, we're pretty sure we're not contaminated by biologically homo chiral species, there's, there is often a, an antiameric excess, an excess of one mirror image over the other. And it's conceivable, and there are people that know more about this than I do,

• 12:51Speaker 03

  that one in antiumer degrades more quickly in space because there is polarization.

• 13:28Brian Keating?

  An alien wakes you up at 3:00 in the morning, you know, who are you? Are you a scientist? Are you an engineer? Are you an academician? Are you a chair? You know, in your work life, I assume you're, you're a father, I know, and a husband, and very devoted. But let's, let's leave that aside. What are you?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  I'm an organic materials chemist. So materials that are grass-fed and pesticide-free, materials that are carbon-based. So polymers, you know, everything in this room, everything outside is covered in an organic medium or made of, composed of organic media. Anytime you look at something that's nominally abiotic, like a piece of glass, a metal fork, it's all covered in adventitiously absorbed organic media. So all of our interaction with the everyday world is mediated by structures that are composed of carbon-carbon bonds.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  And so what I try to do is to understand and manipulate these materials so that we can make better products, so that we can understand how our senses gain information from the world. I think if I were ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering, I would want my citation to be, "For contributions in using human subjects to understand the physical world." And by that, I mean, we study the tactile sense quite often. We were very interested in how the skin deforms when it touches a textile

• 15:06Speaker 03

  or, or a material, how the thermal conductivity draws heat away from it, how it cover, how it interacts with the afferent nerve fibers in the skin and creates a sensation that's perceived in the brain. We didn't have a relationship before our students met at Bird Rock Coffee. And so one of my students was a one, was a part-time barista. And another one was a, was a frequent, you know.

• 15:31Brian Keating?

  How low we pay our students, come on. Throw us under the bus a little more, dude.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, they're unionized, so they're, they're fighting a good fight. And so they got together and they were talking in, in line at Bird Rock about what they work on. And one of them was interested in haptics. And the other did biostatistics for psychophysical experiments, primarily for vision. And so they got together and they started designing experiments on the way in which we perceived materials to be soft versus hard, sticky versus slimy, moist versus dry. There's a multifactorial analysis that you can probe if you have access to material synthesis in a clean room, but also have access to a lab with the expertise of Rama Chandran.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  And so you can analyze what characteristics of the surface and bulk of primarily organic media that allow it to be perceived in a certain way by touch. So seven peer-reviewed publications later, we have a better understanding of that now than I think, than I think the field did.

• 16:42Brian Keating?

  Another thing that, that our friend, just getting back to my childhood, you know, mentor from the dead, like I wasn't dead at the time, Isaac Asimov and your BU connections, were the laws of robotics. And now we hear so much about robotics and then, we, we hear less about, you know, kind of the Eric Drexler nanobot than we did previously. We're now hearing about macrobots, you know, that are gonna fold my laundry and, you know, probably grade papers in the future. They can never replace professors, though. I mean, come on.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Never.

• 17:09Brian Keating?

  Our job security, I mean, if we survive COVID, AI, the point being, these nanobots kind of, they were the hot thing, as I said, Eric Drexler's thing, you know. Feynman, you know, my, my, one of my heroes, right? There's plenty of room at the bottom. What's, what's happening in nanoscience right now? Besides the, not chemistry, I'm talking about actual mini robots going into your body, doing stuff or, or building stuff in the meat world. What's, what's the latest in that?

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Sure. So the funny thing about Drexler and the nanobots, and he and Rick Smalley, who was the discoverer of C60 fullerene and various other carbonalotropes, they had this longstanding debate about sticky fingers and how van der Waals forces were going to prevent nanobots from actually working. But I think they ignored the whole field of chemical catalysis, which are nanomaterials and molecular materials that are literally forming bonds by the moleful and metric tonful in, in the chemical manufacturing industry.

• 18:07Brian Keating?

  Bioreactors, yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  So that's, that's been happening. And that, that is, you know, it's never been called, well, it's rarely called nanotechnology. But that is, to be honest, one of nanotechnology's biggest accomplishments. In terms of, of inner space and the magic school bus and the fantastic voyage, we, I have a colleague, Joseph Wong, in the nanoengineering department here, who has been doing work for decades on self-propelled micro and nano motors that can swim around in the bloodstream. And, and so that, I think it's going to be a combination of active control of programmed chemical reactions

• 18:53Speaker 03

  in these nanobots that are actually able to accomplish something that looks like, you know, intelligent behavior. But the, the other big. Impact of nano has been in cancer therapeutics and drug delivery for vaccines, for evasion of the immune system, for targeting in tumor cells. And you don't just inject Taxol or Cisplatin in the bloodstream anymore. You know, that, those are all encapsulated in some kind of smart nano material that has a specifically programmed degradation profile, some kinetics that have been, that

• 19:37Speaker 03

  have been influenced by the ligands that are on the outside sphere. And who could forget microelectronics, too? Although usually you try to avoid quantum effects in microprocessors, but they're as nano as any, as anything.

• 19:52Brian Keating?

  We met in 2018, maybe it was 2019, I can't remember, for the Kyoto Prize, which was awarded to a University of Rochester.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Ching Tung.

• 20:01Brian Keating?

  Ching Tung, who invented the organic LED. Now, to the extent that any of the public knows about organic chemistry and organic nanochemistry and nanotechnology, it's through the OLED. What's coming down the pipeline? Excite people about the future of organic, especially organic chemistry, as you're, you know, one of your many fields of expertise. What are some of the next great breakthroughs? You know, you talked about sustainability, power, batteries, you know, what's coming down the pipeline? What can we get excited about? What can we invest in through your hedge fund that you're undoubtedly starting at Rochester right now?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  The organic LED is a great example. It was invented by Ching Tung at Kodak Research Labs about four miles from University of Rochester. He's actually an American, after he invented it, he was hired by, by my department. His office is down the hall from mine. There is a good chance.

• 20:53Brian Keating?

  He's a mensch. This guy's an incredible mensch. I love this guy.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  There is a good chance that your audience is watching this video through an OLED display. So if you have an iPhone or almost, almost any, almost any screen, chances are it's, it's organic components that are creating the image. And it's now a $70 billion a year industry. Kodak got almost none of the value from that invention, added to the list, but anyway.

• 21:20Brian Keating?

  Rochester, U of R.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  So if you look at organics and carbonaceous material, carbonalotropes, they are ubiquitous and ubiquitously exciting. So the intercalation compounds, anodes and batteries, if you look at the next generation of thin film, cheap solar panels, you have electron and hole blocking layers that are principally organic. The materials in perovskite solar cells, you have the entire history of microelectronics, while we think of it as an inorganic technology, as in silicon, gallium arsenide, other, other materials.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  The only way that those are manufactured, have ever been manufactured is because we have these light sensitive organic polymer films called photoresists that you etch an image in. So you're looking now at materials in drug delivery, in electronics and energy technologies that really require organic materials engineering. We have another project right now that I've, have a proposal under review by the Air Force and Space Force on the use of reconfigurable polymers to suck up space junk in low Earth orbit. And so.

• 22:42Brian Keating?

  Anti-micro meteorite.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Inspired by, by the space amoeba in the original Star Trek episode. And so there, the, the sky is the limit because if you can, if you can put carbon atoms together in almost any combination, you can make almost any functionality.

• 23:00Brian Keating?

  We should acknowledge the mastodon in the room. He used to be my treasured colleague here at UC San Diego. And, and it was, no joke, it was a big blow when he left. I mean, I was, you know, I was consolable, but, but, you know, losing a top ranked, you know, faculty member to any university is, is a rival. I mean, it's just no, there's no, you get a grad student or you get a top professor, it means we're not going to get that student or that professor, right? So we're, we're in a zero sum game. I always say academia and science are made up, are infinite games because you can't win science, you can't win engineering, but you can, you can get the Nobel Prize, you can get the N A S E and can get all sorts of cool things. And that sometimes means, often means you don't get it from somewhere else, right? So one of the things that, you know, I must associate with, with Rochester, having a

• 23:44Brian Keating?

  good friend, Charlie Freeman, who's out there as a professor now at Geneseo and went there, was Kodak. And, you know, I still love and, you know, I still have, you know, Kodak printed out on film, you know, filmed, you know, photographs from my childhood, right? So, and this was this huge success story. I mean, it built the town, Baoshin Lam was there too, right?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Xerox.

• 24:02Brian Keating?

  Optical, yeah, three huge companies that all involved optics and imaging and, and printing. And at some level, you know, at some point, lost ground, market share from 99% to, to low did. I mean, you could still buy, you can actually buy a Kodak digital camera, you know, for 99 bucks. It's not, it's not the same quality as, as the, you know, as, as maybe it used to be, but, and it probably is licensed to somebody else for the name, right? But talk about the, the kind of parallel side, the academic, you know, industrial complex, I call it. So, so what is that like? What is the landscape like for, that you see right now? Is it an exciting time? Is it, is it, you know, AI is just dominating everything? The physical world is, is no more. I mean, you're in the nano mechanical world. What do you see as the kind of future of academic industrial partnerships?

• 24:47Brian Keating?

  And, and trying not to make Rochester too attractive, you know? We still need, you know, students here, Darren.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Sure. University of Rochester is the largest private employer in New York State outside of New York City. And so how I describe it is a Hogwarts attached to a massive medical services company. And so we are in the five, six billion dollar a year range, talking about academic industrial complex. The undergraduate population is only, is only 6,000 or 12,000 total students and about 500 million in research expenditures per year. Most of that is in the medical school. So there are a lot of medical device, medical optics companies in the region.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  A lot of that, the vein of optics has still persisted in Rochester, even though Kodak, Xerox and Baoshin Lam have a much smaller presence than they did in the seventies and eighties and the heyday. So we have shifted in the economy from primarily imaging based to primarily biomedical and biomedical services upstream of these consumer and patient facing.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Industries, we do a lot of things that are super important to the economy, but a lot of people would find boring. For example, making machines that make other machines. We have 60,000 engineers employed in Monroe County. And so for example, optimization technologies, there are a design build firm that made all of the equipment, that made all of the mRNA vaccine vials during the COVID pandemic. Javelin Process Systems makes all of the equipment or the vast majority of the equipment that cooks and produces Tostitos salsa and Phil's Heinz ketchup bottles. So these are, these are B to B companies, right?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And so we have a very strong relationship with companies like that, with L3 Harris, Cooper Vision, with Baoshin Lam, which is, which still manufactures contact lenses and refractive optics. We send a lot of students there. We have research contracts with them. So there's still a strong industrial connection, but the flavor has changed over time. But indeed, if you walk around U of R, you've got Baoshin Lam Hall, you have the Eastman as an Eastman Kodak quadrangle, and then the Eastman School of Music. Joseph C. Wilson, the founder of Xerox, is the main boulevard that runs through campus.

• 27:49Brian Keating?

  So going from BU to then going to study at Harvard with Whitesides, was he interested in, in kind of origin of life? I mean, he's, you know, a thousand, like a thousand, what is it, agent X is a 400 now?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Few hundred.

• 28:01Brian Keating?

  So, I just want to have the logarithm of his. So talk about George and, and working in the lab of one of the most famous academics in, in all of history and, and how little time you got, but, but it does seem like you got enough quality time that he really influenced your, your philosophy as a mentor. So talk about George and, and just the many, I mean, quite frankly, you have merit, but you have a lot of luck too. And to work with him is, is part of that, but it's not all it's cracked up.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  When I was an undergraduate, I went, I was lucky enough to get the Beckman Scholars Program, which is an undergraduate research scholarship. And I went to the Beckman headquarters in Irvine and George Whitesides was one of the speakers. And he talked about multivalency and protein ligand or protein drug interactions and how you got much more, much stronger binding if you had cooperativity and binding. And I thought that sounded really cool and interesting and he had such a.

• 28:57Brian Keating?

  Humanistic.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  So humanistic, right? And he had such a presence, has such a presence about him. He speaks with a booming baritone voice. He's 6'1" or 6'2", he looks a bit like Captain Picard and he has a very powerful handshake, even though even at the time he was quite senior. And I, I asked him, you know, what do you look for in, in mentees? He said, I look for somebody who's, I look for somebody who's very strong in thermodynamics and organic synthesis. And I thought that that was.

• 29:34Brian Keating?

  Very precise.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  That was very precise. And so I said, I want to work with George Whitesides. And so I was at, at BU and I did a lot of running around the Charles River and I would pass by the Harvard chemistry building and look at it in awe. And when I applied and I, I got in, which was. Just out of the question for somebody who came from the beginnings that I did. And I got in and but what was ironic is that as famous as George was, is probably the most famous chemist who's never won the Nobel Prize or who hasn't yet and more famous than most chemists who have won the Nobel Prize is that once you got into Harvard, it wasn't hard to get into his lab.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  And in part, that was because he trusted the system. In part, it was because he didn't have time to interview all the candidates. And in part, it's because, and I don't want to, I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, although, take it as you will, but he was pretty sure that people who couldn't cut the mustard would just drop out of the lab. And so there was a lot of attrition in the lab. Most of the mentoring that I received from George came in the form of written comments on outlines. So he would write in blue ink on the pilot rollerball blue ink pen. He would say things that no good human being should ever say to any other good human being,

• 31:04Speaker 03

  like, "This is a pig's breakfast," I saw on someone. He wrote, "This is illiterate on mine." He would say things that that looked, that maybe even looked meaner than it actually was. Like, one time, my colleague and I were sure that he had written, "I know you want to fit," in blue ink. My colleague and I were looking at it and like, it, it, there's nothing else it could say. But obviously, it didn't say that. But there was, literally, there was nothing else it could say.

• 31:36Brian Keating?

  He was a doctor, after all.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  And so the in-person mentoring was sparse, but he had such a presence. He has such a presence in our lives, everybody who worked in his lab, that we have internalized his direction, his sense of scientific strategy and how to choose an important problem. And that has followed me in my career since then.

• 32:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and even at one point, it comes across as somewhat tender, you know, as you're graduating, he says, "I'm going to be devastated when Darren leaves." I mean, that, you know, could bring tears to a, to a non-organic, to an actual organic physicist. That was a touching thing to read and to hear, and it must have brought you great pride. You had the thousand publication from his lab or something like that, right?

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I was in the lab at the time.

• 32:26Brian Keating?

  At the time, okay. When that came about and soon thereafter, you have a, you know, first author paper with him as your, you know, your co-author. It's incredible. But, you know, a lot of us don't have that benefit. And a lot of times, you hear things, I often tell students in general, it's more important who you work with than what you work on. And yet, you know, at the same time, you know, science is a game of credit and attribution and citation. I mean, literally, our currency is citations, right? And that's why we get so kind of upset when people say things like, "Oh, peer review is the scam and it's kind of undermine, you know, science isn't about peer review and it's just gatekeeping." And I'm like, you know, once I gave a podcast here with a couple of podcasters that I won't

• 33:06Brian Keating?

  name because I was very disappointed the way they've kind of turned their podcast into. But they, I said something like, "We need gates, right? We need a gate, we have a gate around this campus." And the gate keeps people out and it keeps things in. And people, they're like, "You want to trap people here?" I'm like, "Well, I've got a very expensive, you know, dilution refrigerator, it costs about a half million dollars. I don't want that walking off or, or a cup of liquid helium three is going to set you back, you know, quarter million dollars, right?" So, yeah, I quite frankly like to have a gate around things. In academia, I have a gate around my pool. I used to have a pool. I don't think you have a pool, maybe you have an ice rink.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  I have a creek.

• 33:39Brian Keating?

  You have a creek, okay. Sabers are practicing nearby. But it's, you know, we do need gates around certain things. So, and I think that's why academics got so upset. You know, the joke is academics fight so much because the stakes are so low. As a chair, you know, you're kind of in this position, my colleague and friend and past guest, Inavishik at UC Davis, you know, said, "A department chair is not a boss of a professor," right? It's kind of a negotiator that negotiates with hostages, hostages on behalf of the kidnapped, right? So, how do you view being, you know, kind of at a top school and having, you know, a phenomenal reputation there, but, you know, you can't please everybody all the time or you're not a leader? So, walk me through the navigatory, you know, kind of the shoals of being a chair.

• 34:23Brian Keating?

  It's not a job I really want.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Sure. So, my last job at UC San Diego was as associate dean for students and engineering. I had that role for two years. Prior to that, I was the director of the Idea Engineering Student Center. And in the associate dean role, I was basically playing, running interference for the dean. So, I would be doing town halls with students. There is a lot of work that I did that I'm still very proud of and still working on, actually, at UCSD and garnering scholarship, you know, money with former colleagues and trying to enhance the student experience. I'd really like to keep that as a, as a legacy that I, that I have here. The department chair role is completely different.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Number one, it's, it's an executive role. You're the one who has the final say on teaching and service assignments. Also, allocation of lab space, you and the dean, you know, have to agree on it, but the chair is the, is the first responder there. And also, the first person in line for promotion and tenure decisions. And so, the number of incoming emails is lower, not just because U of R is a smaller school than UCSD, but also because my constituency is, is 14 faculty members instead of 10,000 students and, and the dean's office.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  My primary constituency, being the faculty, is I have to represent them at the dean's leadership meetings. I have to represent their interests when I'm talking to students who have an issue with grading policy or I missed a final exam and the professor won't give me a break and whatever. Every, every situation has to be dealt with like, like that.

• 36:17Brian Keating?

  You're kind of giving an answer by way of the description of the duties and not, not necessarily making it something that I'm now more appealing, you know, to me, but that's fine because I need a new, you know, assignment.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  I think what it allows you to do, so, for, for instance, we changed the name of the department recently. It was Chemical Engineering for 110 years, and as of this fall, it became the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering. The reason being that the faculty portfolios, research portfolios, all had something to do with battery separation membranes, water purification and environmental remediation. I do a lot of work in recyclable polymers for e-waste. I do a lot of work in solar cell manufacturing. And so, in this period in which we're facing a demographic cliff, where there aren't as

• 37:14Speaker 03

  many high school kids as there used to be, and universities are not quite, or the American immigration system is not quite as friendly to international students as it was a few years ago, we need to do something to differentiate the product we're offering.

• 37:34Brian Keating?

  I wrote the other day, I did a poll on the most important scientific medium of all time, Twitter, and I did a poll, I said, "Which is older, Oxford University or the Aztec empire?" And it was like 50/50 split. It's like, obviously, Oxford's older, right? But, you know, people have been scratching on a piece of rock with another piece of rock, you know, for literally a thousand years. So.

• 37:55Speaker 00

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• 38:25Brian Keating?

  What is sort of the future of academia? Like, again, not like, who wants to be department chair? Like, okay, fine. That's a very select set at the apex predators of academia, right?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 38:36Brian Keating?

  But, you know, the kind of the entry to the funnel. What kind of product are we delivering to our students nowadays? Just generally, not in your field, in my field, but generally speaking, academia as a whole, higher education.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  It is the perfect time to be thinking about that question because academia has, the critics have never been louder. The societal, the external societal forces and economics have never been stronger. Headwinds have never been stronger. The traditional reason to get a bachelor's degree is to be important, to have something to contribute to civic society, to know the great works, to be familiar with the, with music and art and literature, to know a little bit about, have some skills in numeracy.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  But then comes the more vocational, professional certification, professionalization. And I would put the natural sciences in that category, but certainly engineering. And what kinds of, do we treat those groups of individuals differently? Should we? Should the, should somebody who is sure they want to work in mechanical engineering, should they be reading Plato in a freshman or sophomore seminar? I would argue, yes, they ought to be.

• 40:04Brian Keating?

  But to be fair, in other countries, they don't, right? In other countries, you're going to be a physician, you know, you don't take Plato, you don't read Plato, right? You go straight from A levels in your, in your profession as early as, you know, the end of your undergraduate, so to speak, right? So other countries doing it worse than us because they have that model?

• 40:23Speaker 03

  It may be that academia is not the right place to instill a love of wisdom, of past wisdom. It may be that the person in one of the countries of which you speak find that dusty old box of books, or maybe they're already inclined to go to the, you know, go to the library. Or maybe you need somebody who's probably not an engineer, you know, in the, the ethics department of the company, or someone who has a leadership role, who, who is, you know, interested in, in humanism. That is, that is a tough question. The other issue is what the students and the parents expect to get out of their tuition

• 41:08Speaker 03

  dollars and the debt that they're going to be in.

• 41:12Brian Keating?

  They can debt, we can't discharge in bankruptcy. It's the only form of debt you can't. Tuitions are rising faster than inflation, you know, in most private institutions like, like yours, right? So what kind of product are they getting? I mean, do we think of them as customers? And if so, to what level do you cater to the, I mean, Apple, you go down to the Apple Store, the Genius Bar, you know, and you look at their nano glass techno. I'm sure that's what you do when you go to Apple Store. But, but in all reality, they don't say like, you know, we're going to monitor you, we're going to make sure you're not using certain tools, we're going to grade you, we're going to judge you, we're going to write these, you know, things that determine your future outcome. And, oh, by the way, we're going to charge you, as I said, two quarter million dollars or half a million dollars if you're at a private school.

• 41:55Brian Keating?

  And it's going up faster than inflation by a factor of three or something like that. So, and you can't discharge a debt in bankruptcy, guys. So, you know, take that on when you go to the Apple Store. You'd never do that, right? You'd never even set foot in there as much as you might like the product.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Do you buy into Baal's cost disease theory of why?

• 42:09Brian Keating?

  I'm not familiar with it.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in sectors of the economy that don't scale. So healthcare and education are the, are the two quintessential examples where we can, if you produce widgets and you get more efficient, you can produce 10 one year and a million a few years later. Right. But your class isn't going to go from 10 students to a million students, but you need to survive in that economy where productivity is increasing elsewhere. And so there is, there was a, is an economist, Baal Moll, someone in the comments is going to, you know, correct me exactly, you know, the specifics of this, but it basically says that that's responsible for the increase in healthcare and education costs because we don't scale.

• 42:53Brian Keating?

  Just to push back on whoever this scholar is, in certain sectors of both academia, you know, higher education, say, and in healthcare, costs don't go up. Cosmetic surgery has gone down. LASIK has gone down, you know, the very lasers that Baushen Lam makes, you know, contacts for, and part of their profits because people have LASIK surgeries. They don't need the, right? So that's all gone down because it's elective surgery. It's not paid for by health insurance and covered by our, you know, gubrious health sciences professional. So how do you, how would this Baal Moll or, you know, it sounds like a James Bond mansion or fortress somewhere, right? So, so how would they, I mean, it's not your theory, but how would they react? And there's private educational institutions too, that are, you know, providing services or even state, you know, University of Florida has a very different model than University

• 43:38Brian Keating?

  of California. So, yeah, I mean, how, how, how do you react to that as a purveyor, as the supplier of some of the product? And so it is being commodified.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think it is, there are some who would argue that faculty and that, one, there are too many faculty and staff, and two, that they get paid too much.

• 43:55Brian Keating?

  I think there's way too few faculty. I think there's way too many bureaucracies, administrators, department, no, I'm just kidding.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  There aren't too many department chairs. Everyone should be chair.

• 44:06Brian Keating?

  That's what everybody thinks they are. That's what everybody thinks they are, right? I watch your show, right? I learn a lot more about, you know, chemistry than I think I would do if I sat in on, you know, some of your other, so, yeah, so where, where is this going? I mean, when you could go to AI, you can go to YouTube, you can watch molecular podcasts, you could do, you know, a whole university education in your pajamas for free with no non-dischargeable student debt. Like, make the argument, I mean, I'm kind of like grasping for a lifeline here, Darren, help me out here.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  We've got to save our industry.

• 44:36Brian Keating?

  What's going to happen? I think our industry is in, COVID didn't kill us, you know, nothing's going to kill us. AI is not going to.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Well, UCSD is still the second most applied to school in America.

• 44:45Brian Keating?

  And the country, that's right, yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's the human capital argument and there's the sheep's skin effect argument that if companies are outsourcing certification to UCSD and University of Rochester, could they have, could the students have learned the same thing? I would argue that in physics and engineering, because it would be very difficult to do that.

• 45:06Brian Keating?

  I have a sad obligation. I have to point out an egregious typo and error in your book, which I missed the first time, and I'm really ashamed and humiliated, quite frankly. And it's, it's hard for me to do this to someone who I like, quite frankly, but you got your H-index wrong in the book. It's, it's not 60, it's 63. So Darren, you're going to have to issue, you know, second edition. We didn't do the patented judging books by their cover segment, so we got to do that now.

• 45:43Brian Keating?

  So talk us through the title, the subtitle, cover art such as it is, and what was, you know, I always say, you shouldn't, and I think I told you this, don't write a book unless you can't not write a book. It's kind of like going to grad school. Like, you shouldn't go to grad school. That should be your first default op, don't go to grad school, you know? But if you can't not go to grad school, and we have a lot of non-traditional people that, you know, go back to grad school late, and I love it, but that was because they couldn't not go there. Talk about the book. Why couldn't you not write this book?

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Science nonfiction is, the subtitle is behind the scenes in university research. I can't tell you how often I heard an incorrect definition of indirect cost recovery. And that's why I.

• 46:25Brian Keating?

  Thank God, Darren. Oh my God, if you couldn't write about IDC, who would? Think of the children.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Think of the children. That is a microcosm of the misunderstanding of how science is actually done. And so there are fantastic resources on PBS and YouTube about the wonderful things that science produces. I'm a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and his book, his first book that made him famous, Kitchen Confidential. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if somebody wrote Kitchen Confidential, but about labs instead of about kitchens?

• 47:02Brian Keating?

  That was a working title for my first book, which became Losing the Nobel Prize, but it was going to be Cosmic Confidential. It was filling this lacuna in our kind of understanding in the, in the public, but also kind of, you know, a Jeremiah ad, but also a warning, but also an invitation. Because it is a great job. Look, I say, you know, I joked before, it's the hardest three hour a week job in the world, but I also say, you know, I, who's going to be a professor? Like, who's going to pay me to be a, you grew up, you know, working class, maybe lower, lower middle class. I grew up fairly poor, even though my father, a late father, was, was an academician. He was a professor. He was the youngest full professor at Cornell in the math department. At age 26, he was a full professor. I mean, you can't do that nowadays. But he was, I didn't think you could be a professor.

• 47:44Brian Keating?

  I'm like, who's going to pay me to taste ice cream and, you know, like, ride the roller coaster at SeaWorld all day? No one's going to pay me to do that. Take it back to where you got your start, at least in the scientific world, which is in Boston. And one of my kind of greatest heroes, in fact, was from Boston. I think he was at Boston College, you were at Boston University. His name was Isaac Asimov. And he not only wrote some of the greatest works of fiction ever written, science fiction, but he wrote a lot of nonfiction science. And it actually got me my, my deepest interest as a teenager in science, his nonfiction, his books, particularly about chemistry, which, you know, is the worst possible, you know, field for me. Biology was bad for me. I, I took AP Bio and we had to dissect a frog.

• 48:28Brian Keating?

  And I was fine with dissecting it, but I kind of heard it scream, like, I might have brought it back to life just to cause it more, no, just kidding, PETA folks out there. But I loved chemistry, but I was horrible. I mean, I couldn't remember all these different reactions and the memorization and, and just... You know, it just seems so formulaic. It was like, I could just go to law school and memorize a bunch of laws. I wanted to be a scientist. Asimov inspired me. What inspired you? What were some of the influences before you kind of became who you are, you know, the famous professor that you are now and your, you know, just phenomenal career? What influenced you at a curiosity-based level?

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Asimov was at BU. You were right the first time.

• 49:06Brian Keating?

  Oh, I was? Okay, great.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  And I have read his Brief History of Chemistry cover to cover. He has all these little nuggets of, of science, science, non, nonfiction, or non, nonfiction. I was always of the belief that science and magic were synonymous. When I would watch 321 Contact and Nature on PBS, I would just, I just conflated the two. Science, that was the only legitimate route to magic. Maybe science even was magic. And when I didn't know what I wanted to do in, in science, but I had a fantastic high school teacher. This is a very common story. We have people

• 49:50Speaker 03

  who inspire us in the classroom and I had, it was no different for me. I had a teacher in high school. I took the regular 10th grade chemistry and then AP chemistry from him the following year. And he had a way of imbuing atoms and molecules with human-like characteristics. And that is where somebody like me, who wasn't maybe so great at thinking about equations and things that were very abstract, but also not somebody who wanted to memorize a biology textbook, because there's a lot of memorization in biology. And so for me, chemistry was the center of the bullseye. But I can understand how other natural scientists gravitate toward physics or biology.

• 50:37Speaker 00

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• 51:04Brian Keating?

  You had this really cool experience as a kid. I had a cool experience with a telescope as a kid that got me into the career that we have today, which, you know, as I often say, is the hardest three-hour-a-week job in the world. You had an experience with a, with a type of observational telescopic device or televisic device. Talk about your exposure, you know, this kind of chance exposure that got you into the important career that you have. But the most important thing that, you know, two white guys with a microphone can do, podcasting. So talk about this Fisher-Price, you know, video camera and how, really, what should parents do? If they want to create a young Darren Lapome, you know, a young Brian Keating, God forbid. Tell me, what are some of your piece of advice as a parent who's also a professor?

• 51:46Speaker 03

  In the late 80s, Fisher-Price came out with this PXL 2000 camcorder. It was a black and white camcorder that would take high-fidelity audio tape, run it really fast, like as fast as a fast-forward to get all of the, you know, to get the data rate high enough. And it would record 10 minutes of black and white video on each side of an audio cassette. The images were terrible. It sucked up light like nobody's business. You needed, so my dad had an early cartridge video camera, like film video camera, and we used these halogen lamps that he had just to get enough so that it wasn't a black screen.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Right. And so I had my stuffed animals act out scenes from Star Wars. And that was my, my earliest exposure to video and audio production. The other ancient piece of technology that I had was a 1980 desktop computer that a family friend absconded with from Kodak. So they used to dump their old equipment and...

• 52:53Brian Keating?

  In the river.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Right, in the river, in the Tennessee River. And so we ended up with this thing. And when you turned it on, it would go, like, it would sound like the Millennium Falcon taking off. You needed a 5 1/4 disc to boot it up. So, you know, what do I do with my own, my own child? You know, she's seven and we, we are interested in creativity and science. So we have a, we have a sewing machine, a 3D printer is on, is on its way. We watch a lot of builder videos. She wants to make animatronics from Poppy Playtime and other things that I shouldn't be letting her play. But that's, that's, I don't know if that's the right answer, but that's what we're doing as scientist parents.

• 53:40Brian Keating?

  One of the last organic chemists that I talked to was Tom Chek, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA. And his book, The Catalyst, it was a phenomenal book, very much kind of Asimov spirit. But in the conversation we had on the podcast, he spoke about, you know, kind of his philosophy, at least as a scientist, was, you know, basically, if you're going to do one thing, do it extremely well. Do it better than anyone can. What's your one-sentence teaching philosophy? And maybe one sentence on research, too. I'll give you two sentences.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  In teaching, one wants to get the students to do their own work. When I was in school, I would go to the lecture. I would not have read the chapter ahead of time. And 60% of it would just, phew, straight over my head. Then when I would go home or back to my dorm room, I would do the problems in the back of the book and I would transfer them to note cards. And I, and that's when I would do their real learning, right? But I wouldn't have done that if I didn't care. And maybe so the effective professors were the ones that I wanted to, I wanted to, I viewed them as a role model. I wanted to please them.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  I didn't want to get an embarrassing grade on an, on an exam. I was excited by their passion for the material. And that made me want to do it myself. I've never been somebody who could just absorb something from a lecture and take a test on it, right? Research. Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on. And no one else is working on will come automatically. So I am a decent organic chemist. Let's say out of physical scientists, I'm 1 in 10. Let's say I know

• 55:28Speaker 03

  something about mechanics, but I'm not as good. Maybe I'm 1 in 5. So now I'm 1 in 50. But I really am interested in neuroscience. And so I don't even have to be that good at neuroscience. I just have to have read a tech, a couple textbooks and be willing to talk to neuroscientists. So maybe I'm 1 in 2. Now I'm 1 at 100 at the intersection of mechanics, organic chemistry, and neuroscience.

• 55:57Brian Keating?

  Shohei Ohtani of, of this amalgam that you made.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's exactly what my last four research grants have been on is perception of the mechanical, the organic media is mediated by mechanical forces.

• 56:14Brian Keating?

  I had a guest here, sitting in that chair, Nikolai Kukushkin at NYU, said in Russian, like, carbon, like, has a name or an analogy. It's like, the aggressor, you know, and then oxygen is like, the devastator. Or no, maybe carbon's the assembler. And they're like, oxygen's the devastator. And you put them together with a little hydrogen, you get the, just the mellifluous world that we're, you know, kind of just so privileged to be a part of. And we're so privileged that you came back on the, on the show and came back to San Diego. And congratulations on all your success. It's, it's just, it's just wonderful to watch you, you know, develop and grow. And, you know, it's kind of like you, you recruited, you know, Fernando Tatis from the White Sox and get to watch him play for the Padres, as I did last night. You know, he still hasn't gotten a homerun. But Darren

• 56:58Brian Keating?

  Lapome, professor, chair, Lapome, it's so great to have you back. Congrats on all your success. I wish you continued success. And hopefully you'll come and visit. Maybe I'll come back to Rochester and get some beef on Weck with you. Probably in the winter. I really like to go there in the winter. That's my dream.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Jocelyn and cross-country skating.

• 57:16Brian Keating?

  Ice skating, exactly. All right. We got to get you on a flight. Thank you so much for coming out. Welcome back to San Diego and have a great trip back. Thanks, Darren.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Darren just told us that most people shouldn't even go to college while he's running the department that recruits them. If that changes how you see a degree, subscribe and turn on notifications and leave a comment. Would you tell your own kid to skip college? For the flip side, Nobel laureate Tom Chek told me why RNA might be more important than your diploma. It's linked right here. Thanks for watching. See you next time. And please don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. It really does help me out with the algorithm that determines YouTube performance. See you next week on Into the Impossible.

• 57:57Speaker 06

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