The Leap: Everything Else Is Boring

Karmella Haynes doesn’t need to fit in—in life or in work. So when a research space didn’t exist for her, she created it.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Bayer. 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. Having the right people in your corner for life's biggest milestones makes all the difference. Like a friend who's there when you're house hunting or checking out a new ride, State Farm is there too, helping you choose the coverage you need. With a State Farm agent, you know someone is there to help you along the way. And with so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help choosing a plan that fits your needs, so you can continue celebrating all of life's milestones. Head to statefarm.com to get a quote. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 0:48Flora Lichtman?

  The scientific poster session. This is a standard feature of scientific conferences. Picture a big hotel ballroom with rows and rows of bulletin boards. Tact to them are shiny, white-printed posters. There's a little bit of a fifth-grade science fair vibe to the whole thing, except the posters are generally less engaging and harder to make sense of. And they always kind of look the same. They're crammed with text and technical images. Which is why, when biologist Carmela Haynes decided to do something different with her poster, it was a bold choice. You painted your scientific poster.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, OK, well, that was one moment where I was just, you know, I was like, OK, I'm going to do this just to see what people say.

• 1:41Flora Lichtman?

  Here's the setup. Carmela was wrapping up her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. She had a job offer at Arizona State. She had just submitted a paper, and it was accepted. She was riding high, so she decided to submit to present at this international synthetic biology conference, which is her field.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  And I submitted an abstract, and I really, really, really, really wanted to be selected for a talk.

• 2:06Flora Lichtman?

  But instead, the selection committee was like, no talk, you can do a poster.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  And so now, I got to admit, my ego, it's like, a poster?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, your poster, all right. So then I said, well, you know what? Hmm, let me, let me do something different with this. So.

• 2:25Flora Lichtman?

  So Carmella, who's not only a biologist, but an accomplished painter, decided instead of going to Kinko's, she was going to bring a three by four stretched canvas.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  And then bring it with me to the conference, hang it up. And I actually had paints with me because I was working on it while I was there.

• 2:42Flora Lichtman?

  And she proceeded to live paint, her scientific poster, complete with intricate, accurate graphs and figures during the conference.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  I just felt like I had the freedom to just, you know, do something, little cheeky, but also in, in, in good spirit.

• 3:05Flora Lichtman?

  Here's the thing that I noticed when I heard this story. It's like, yeah, okay, fine. You had freedom, you could try something. It was low stakes. But Carmella, like, it feels to me like you're doing this all the time.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16Flora Lichtman?

  Like, whether the stakes are high or low. Not to be provocative.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:20Flora Lichtman?

  But because you want to do what you want to do.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yes. That, that sounds right. And, you know, how else is there to live?

• 3:33Flora 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.

• 3:50Flora Lichtman?

  Carmella Haynes works at the cutting edge of the cutting edge. She is pioneering a new field of science at the intersection of two other new and complex fields, epigenetics and synthetic biology. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get turned on and off. And synthetic biology is building molecules to do work inside of organisms and cells and biological systems. So Carmella is engineering molecular machines that turn genes on or off, or change their level of expression. There are about a million possible applications for this kind of research. But Carmela has done a lot of work around designing her machines to thwart cancer cell growth.

• 4:35Flora Lichtman?

  And she is really out there, kind of inventing a new field of science.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  The number of people who are really doing this, I mean, it's tiny.

• 4:45Flora Lichtman?

  This is David Katz, an epigenetics professor, who knows Carmela and her work.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  It's a small field. There's a handful of people who are even trying this. And, you know, when you're pioneering something, it's never easy. You know, it's scary to go out there in front.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I kind of imagine, I'm a very visual thinker, and I kind of see the whole body of science as being like a plant. So that stem growing taller and taller is sort of that stepwise approach to sort of building up knowledge. But then you've got those leaves, right? These little shoots that come off of the main stem.

• 5:25Flora Lichtman?

  Are you trying to be the shoot?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm trying to be the shoot. I want to be the leaf.

• 5:31Flora Lichtman?

  But that's not an easy place to be. And so this is what I wanted to know. What propels Carmela to the front? What makes her the kind of person who wants to be the leaf? To hang up a giant canvas and live paint her research while her peers are tacking up posters that basically all look the same? If you ask Carmela's big sister Sharon Wallace where that came from, that tendency, she'll tell you it started when Carmela was a little kid.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  She, you know, just walked to her own beat, basically.

• 6:10Flora Lichtman?

  Sharon is the oldest. Carmela is next. And then they have a younger brother and a younger sister. They grew up in St. Louis. And from a young age, Carmela stood out.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  She excelled in everything. So we knew, oh, this kid is different.

• 6:25Flora Lichtman?

  Early on, Carmella started painting portraits. Like, in elementary school, she painted her baby cousin.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  It was just, it was so detailed. It was everything from the little baby wrinkles to the little lace on her socks. And, and that was like, wow, that was amazing. That was amazing.

• 6:45Flora Lichtman?

  But Carmella wasn't just unusual in the art department.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I would actually work on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. And it was just that satisfaction.

• 6:55Flora Lichtman?

  As a child?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yes, as a kid, I was a weird little kid.

• 6:58Flora Lichtman?

  I can't do the Monday.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 7:00Flora Lichtman?

  As an adult.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I didn't do them well then. But even if I could fill in a row or a column, that, that rush, right?

• 7:09Flora Lichtman?

  Carmella loved solving puzzles. It wasn't just crosswords. I mean, Carmella was searching for thrills in her algebra class, too. Her teacher would give them bonus credit for solving extra hard proofs.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  And once I was done with the boring homework that everybody else had to do, it's like, okay, proof time. And it just like, when you, everything clicked and you could find the pattern and you were confident that all of the information that you had sort of led you down this path to a solution. Oh, man, when you got to that solution, it was just the most, it was so satisfying.

• 7:43Flora Lichtman?

  This is how Carmella likes spending her time, thinking through problems, which, when she was a kid, sometimes worried her mom and her sister.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  When I went outside, you know, instead of, I don't know, being more interested in, you know, chasing some kid or whatever, I would stop and I would see a flower or a leaf, like, huh, all these flowers have exactly the same number of petals. How does that work? And I would just sit and kind of just look at things and just wonder about how they worked. Yeah, so, you know, to my mom, it was, oh, my gosh, should I worry about my child? She's just sitting there staring over the space. But while I was kind of just like still and silent on the outside, there was a lot going on inside my head. And I was plenty entertained by just sitting and thinking about things.

• 8:36Flora Lichtman?

  You're like the platonic form of a scientist.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:45Flora Lichtman?

  Looking back, it seems obvious that Carmella was born to be a scientist. But she didn't always feel like she belonged. I mean, study after study shows that still, people generally picture scientists as white guys. Carmella didn't fit the profile.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Growing up, right, being a young black girl in science, you know, my identity, everything about who is seen as a scientist and, you know, who belongs in that space was completely opposite of what I was.

• 9:18Flora Lichtman?

  Carmella's dad worked hard to combat that notion. He had his own experience being gate-kept out of science. Carmella says he was a gifted student in high school, and he loved engineering. No one in his family had gone to college, but he had his sights set on MIT. So he asked his school counselor for help. But instead, the counselor talked him out of applying, told him to skip college and get a job instead. That's what he did. But he tried to make sure his kids weren't held back by other people's biases.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  He very deliberately, you know, as part of, you know, doing his dad duties, was to take us kids right out to some five-star restaurant.

• 9:59Flora Lichtman?

  Both sisters remember this.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. It was called the Coal Hole.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  The Coal Hole, that's right, yes.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Yes. So I remember the entrance being like going into a cave. And it was, you know, dimly lit.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  There'd be valet parking, you're like, oh, what's this? And there would be a maitre d' and...

• 10:22Speaker 04

  You know, five-star all the way.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  So we'd all sit down. And so I remember specifically the first time when the waiter came to the table and, you know, started asking, you know, what we wanted. And so I remember looking to my dad, like, OK, can you tell him, you know, tell him what I want to eat? And he looks at me, he says, "Tell the gentleman what you would like to have for dinner." I was like, oh, I actually get to talk to the waiter. It was, uh, yeah. And I just really specifically remember that moment.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Without really being aware of it at the time, just sort of like in retrospect, that was my dad teaching us that we belonged.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Whatever space we walked into, we belonged there.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Carmela, she has grasped that. Out of the four of us, she took it and ran with it. I mean, she ran with it.

• 11:38Flora Lichtman?

  Carmela ran at biology. In high school, she remembers learning about DNA and wondering how you go from blueprints to action. Like, every cell is the same DNA. How do you get a brain cell or a liver cell? The answer is epigenetics, the system that controls which genes are expressed. Carmela followed that interest all the way through her PhD, where she studied a key epigenetics player: chromatin. Okay, so chromatin is this stuff that packages your DNA and then unpackages it, exposing the right piece at the right time so that genes can be expressed. Then, during her postdoc, Carmela learned about synthetic biology, and she had this idea.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  How about, gosh, wouldn't it be cool to like just sort of do a mashup between synthetic biology and chromatin? And I said, okay, I want to engineer chromatin. I mean, I just had this just general idea. I want to engineer chromatin, right? These switches that turn things on and off. I've always wondered how that worked ever since, you know, grade school. And now I'm gonna, yeah, I'm in a position where I can actually engineer this stuff to understand how it works. Okay.

• 12:41Flora Lichtman?

  So Carmela looked around for candidates for what to engineer, and she landed on something she'd learned about in grad school: polychome group proteins.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I noticed there was a whole set of papers where these polychome proteins, there was a weird, you know, abundance of them. In cancer cells, all kinds of cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, right? So very diverse cancer types.

• 13:08Flora Lichtman?

  These polychomes were messing stuff up. So in normal cells, we have genes that stop tumors from growing. They're called tumor suppressor genes. They like put the brakes on tumors. So these bad polychomes were interfering with those genes, with the brakes, allowing tumors to grow. So a bunch of people were trying to find ways of attacking the bad polychomes or stopping them from being produced altogether. But Carmela had a different idea.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  I says, OK, so how about instead of doing that, we send in this sort of alternative synthetic weirdo protein that I built?

• 13:44Flora Lichtman?

  That would outcompete the bad polychomes, like a synthetic replica that would muscle out the bad guys and that was engineered to help the tumor suppressor genes do their job.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Right, to get the brakes reactivated, yes.

• 13:56Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, and it worked.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yes, right, in a Petri dish.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  We've shown that we can slow down breast cancer cell growth when we put these things into like a little mini fake tumor. It's a little ball of cells, grows really fast, and then the cells around the edge kind of like stretch out and creep into the extracellular matrix. And so that represents early events in an actual tumor that lead to spread of cancer. Our engineered protein stops that cold, right? So and then the ball of cells actually shrinks a little bit. So we've gotten that far, and that's really exciting. It's like, wow, what would happen if we could actually get this into a tumor? We could potentially stop metastasis from happening.

• 14:45Flora Lichtman?

  It was in a Petri dish, as Carmela stresses, but it was a cool finding. So in 2019, Carmela lands a job at Emory, where she is now. So she has her own lab, she's got a startup package, and she is all in on this idea, this mashup between synthetic biology and epigenetics. Did you have a sense when you started this project, when you were like, yeah, cool, I'm gonna try to do this? Did you have a sense that it was risky or might be a hard road?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 15:24Flora Lichtman?

  As I'm sure anybody in any profession, anyone who has been in a meeting can relate, being out front with a new idea is perilous. But in science, there are particular challenges. One is that you have to raise money to do your work. And it's hard to do that when the field doesn't exist yet.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Once you have a built up field, it self reinforces.

• 15:49Flora Lichtman?

  Here's Carmella's colleague, David Katz, again.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Because you have people advocating for it. People love the science that they're doing, and they want other people who are like minded. When you're small and out there, then there's nobody pushing for you.

• 16:05Flora Lichtman?

  What about even having enough people to vet the proposals? Do you have enough people who are expert enough to even understand what's being proposed and vet it appropriately?

• 16:16Speaker 03

  No, definitely not. Our system is designed to reward people in basically categories.

• 16:25Flora Lichtman?

  And so when you don't fit into a category, you can run up against different challenges. For one, people are sometimes skeptical about your expertise. Like, in one grant application, Carmella got this critique.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  While they were convinced that I was an expert in synthetic biology, I wasn't really a cancer epigeneticist.

• 16:48Flora Lichtman?

  She's also been told the exact opposite thing.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  On the flip side, this person raised concern that while I seem to be an expert in cancer epigenetics, they didn't consider what I was doing to be real synthetic biology.

• 17:06Flora Lichtman?

  This gatekeeping around who gets to be an expert is just one challenge. On top of that, when you're doing a science mashup like Carmella, reviewers who are from one particular field might be scared off by the inclusion of another field.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  If you're an engineering person and you're sitting with Carmella's grant, and it's got this chromatin aspect, and you don't understand it, you're not going to advocate. It's scary to advocate for it because you don't know it.

• 17:31Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  And that's a big problem that we have. And it happens over and over.

• 17:38Flora Lichtman?

  Once you show something can work... Do people change their mind?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  The answer is, is no. I mean, eventually, maybe. The numbers of examples of the lengths that people had to go to get anybody to listen, you know, Barbara McClintock and, you know, jumping jeans transposons, right? People literally turned around behind her back and said she's crazy.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  And she was 100% right.

• 18:06Flora Lichtman?

  This is the thing I've heard again and again from scientists, that although the job of a scientist is to follow the data wherever it takes you, scientists are also just like everybody else on this planet. And so when you are challenging the status quo, when you are trying to be the leaf, even when you have evidence, it can be hard to change people's minds.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's a real thing. You know, this is going on in society as a whole, and science is not immune to this at all. People are people.

• 18:39Flora Lichtman?

  And it's even harder to change people's minds when you don't fit the mold, when you don't look like the cookie cutter scientist, when you are the only black woman in the room.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I feel like the types of things that I do, right? Sort of doing things that may be perceived as provocative and, you know, challenging. I kind of look at, you know, folks, my peers and folks who are more senior than me. And it seems like, you know, if you come from a certain, you have a certain identity, you do similar things and you are a thought leader. You're a trailblazer. You are bold.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  And, you know, the, the difference between maverick and genius and oddball and loner, you know, is just perception. And the scientific community, I think, has more room for those geniuses to play around if, if you're, you know, a white male.

• 19:38Flora Lichtman?

  David has seen this firsthand at conferences with Carmela, how people respond differently to her when she expresses an opinion that goes against the grain.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a few people who go, you know, that kind of reaction.

• 19:52Flora Lichtman?

  In science, people often express strong opinions. It's just that certain people are penalized for it. Not everyone can get away with standing in the back of the room and challenging the status quo.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  She would be seen as, wait a second, you know, she's being difficult, right? As opposed to just scientifically trying to push us all. It is a real difference. There is a, there is a difference in response.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  No, I had to be fair, you know? I've also seen, you know, white guys who have these, you know, certain provocative ideas and they get pushed back. So that's not to say that it works for them all the time, but I will say that it seems to work for them more often than someone like me.

• 20:35Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. I'm sure that adds a layer for you of having to wonder, like, is this feedback because I need to change something about my science or my approach? Or is it coming from somewhere else?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yes, right? So it's really tough, that uncertainty. Because I don't want there to be the racism and the misogyny. I don't want that. So I would prefer that, oh, maybe there's, you know, some kind of fundamental flaw. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe I need to fix, you know, this technical aspect to really make this work. But then, the problem is that there's a lot of examples of feedback that I'll get that sort of are very ambiguous. And I'm left wondering. I have this moment a lot, unfortunately, where it's, okay, what is it this time?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Is it the racism, the misogyny? Or both? Or is there, is this really fundamentally flawed?

• 21:43Flora Lichtman?

  The challenges are layered. So it makes me wonder, you know, what keeps Carmela out on this limb?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  I started witnessing and experiencing things that intensified my commitment to doing that research.

• 21:58Flora Lichtman?

  She told me the story about visiting a cancer treatment center at Emory.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  And I get kind of tear even thinking about this moment. So as soon as I walked through the door, I saw a family, and it was, you know, a black family, right? There was an older woman who, you know, her family was sort of escorting her out of the elevator in a wheelchair. And she was, it was clear that she was a patient. And I just, I don't know, I had a moment.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Considering the disproportionate impact that cancer has on Black folks and folks who are traditionally underserved,

• 22:40Speaker 02

  I just, I saw me.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  I saw my family.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  And I just, it just hit me that, oh, this is, this is why I'm doing this. This is why I'm doing this.

• 23:06Flora Lichtman?

  There are a lot of ways to do cancer research, and there are a lot of ways to use science to help underserved communities. But Carmela has chosen this very specific and challenging path. She's choosing to carve out a new field to take this new approach. She's adding like 10 layers of hard on top of something that's already hard. Why?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Because, I mean, to be honest, everything else is boring.

• 23:37Flora Lichtman?

  It's fun to be the leaf. And more than that, plants need leaves to grow.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  The norm is not necessarily good, right? Or healthy for people. And I think that's particularly relevant in science because some of the problems that we have to deal with really need creative solutions. If you keep doing things the same old way, how do you expect to really solve any problems?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  So I would say that, yeah, you know, me marching to the beat of my own drum and doing what I want, I just, I like inventing and creating and making things that are going to help a lot of people. I'm drawn to it.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  That's just how I am.

• 24:32Flora Lichtman?

  Fifteen or so years after Carmela was painting that poster, she's now invited to give talks all over the world. She's shaping the future of the field. She founded a conference called AfroBiotech that brings together Black scientists across biotechnology. Carmela is clearing the way for other people with creative ideas, making room on the stock for new leaves to emerge.

• 25:07Flora Lichtman?

  The Leaf is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. Carmela has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a scout for her bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. You can learn more about this recognition and volunteer role on the website. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Devon Taylor, Pejao Van Ghe, and David Sanford, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Boudocarp, fact-checking by Nicole Pasulka. Thanks to Malcolm Campbell and Pam Silver. And thank you, too, for listening.

• 25:51Flora Lichtman?

  We're back tomorrow with a conversation with former FDA Commissioner David Kessler about those GLP-1 drugs you've heard about, like Zempeq and Wegovy.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  The drugs work primarily. I'm not saying this is the only way they work. They work essentially through their adverse effects.

• 26:09Flora Lichtman?

  We're going to talk about the science of how they actually work. You don't want to miss it.