MIT Biochemist Reveals How She Funds Breakthrough Research and Raises Exceptional Daughters

Paula Olsiewski [00:00:00] There are many ways to be successful funding scientific research. The government's process generally is a call for proposals, a call for ideas. Then the ideas are judged by a panel of peers and that's how things get funded. This is Joseph Ring. I'm a cattle feed lot operator in Northern Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:33] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today's guest is Paula Slosky, who is a highly accomplished scientist and actually funder of research. She lives in New York City and has been overseeing large projects around air quality, and she has a very unique perspective on ways to mitigate the, the dangers of coronavirus. So we have this fascinating, wide ranging conversation. We even talk about what it is to raise daughters in this modern world. We're gonna get to that. But before we do, I wanna talk a little bit about the Articulate Ventures network. You know, when I think about why it is that I'm able to interview somebody as accomplished as Paula, it's because of my network. People that have introduced me to other people that have introduced me to other people. And you never really know what the value of these relationships will be when you first have them, but that's the value of being a part of a network. So if you're looking around your world and you're saying, I would like to come into collisions with other people, people that I would not have met otherwise, you might wanna consider the Articulate Ventures Network. These are people that found the network through the podcast. Oftentimes the participate in our monthly book club. This month we're reading The Hobbit just to be able to think about dragons and things that we need to face. And they're having constant conversations about things that are directed by the members themselves, people coming in and asking questions that are important to them, and having other people in the network be able to talk about them in a long form.

Vance Crowe [00:02:07] And they're sheltered from the prying eyes of the free networks that happen on things like Facebook and Twitter. So if you're interested, I highly recommend you check it out. It is a very interesting group of people. You can go to Network dot Articulate Ventures to learn more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to our interview with Dr. Paula Salki. Paula Salki, welcome to the podcast

Paula Olsiewski [00:02:36] Vance. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm really excited about the opportunity to talk with you and your listeners.

Vance Crowe [00:02:42] It's funny because I was, I was trying to pronounce your last name and I stumble over it because I only know you as Paula, the woman that we see when we go up to Notre Dame games that makes

Paula Olsiewski [00:02:53] Fantastic

Vance Crowe [00:02:54] Dinners and feeds me too much wine. And so it's, it's interesting to meet you in this professional context because I just know you as Paula

Paula Olsiewski [00:03:02] Exactly. You know, the matriarch of the, what you know is the Healy family, but actually professionally and legally I've always been Paula Zuki. So anyway, something important to me. Been married a long time, just I needed to keep my name and I'm enjoying it. And what's good about it, an unusual name is that you, you want an email, email address on any sort of platform. Usually you can use your last name at whatever that is. So anyway, actually, before we get to start advance, I do, you know, I I, my day job is I, I am a program director at the Alfred Peace Sloan Foundation in New York City. And so I do have to sort of ha put the disclaimer that these remarks are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Foundation. So thank you. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:03:46] I'm so glad you did that because that means that we can just really put the hammer down here and everybody knows these are Paul's thoughts. These

Paula Olsiewski [00:03:52] Are my Exactly, exactly.

Vance Crowe [00:03:55] Well, so you may be like that Doce commercial, you may be one of the most interesting women in the whole world. You have this background in chemistry from Yale and MIT. You work at the Sloan Foundation, you've done everything from biosecurity to synthetic biology and you, you have all this culture from living in New York. So I've been very interested to to, to have this conversation and it's hard to even know where to begin, but you're in a very unique role for what's going on with the pandemic because you have this background in biosecurity, but also air quality. So when you think about the pandemic and what people do and don't know about it, what is something you think is being overlooked?

Paula Olsiewski [00:04:39] First of all, the pandemic is top of mind for me every day, most of the day, you know, we do not have a vaccine. We do not have medicines. And so our only defenses are basically old fashioned and some new public health measures and environmental measures. And your kind introduction, my, when I was working in biosecurity, one of the issues we tackled was if there's a threat in the air, how do you make buildings? How do you make buildings safer? Since people spend 90% of their time in the building. So back, you know, this is sort of after anthrax and so on, we worked with building engineers and building owners and academics and indoor air quality experts to come up with some guidance. And there's actually a, a publication that I'm an author of in 2006 that talks about u using the HVAC systems in buildings to deal with an aerosolized threat. So, and there's also another paper that I wrote with two other colleagues back, I think this is in 2006, called What to Do Before the Vaccine Arrives.

Paula Olsiewski [00:06:11] And the these different measures that I want to talk about, the importance, like people have known about them for a long time, but it's hard to get people to change their behavior. If someone tells you don't eat a cheeseburger, it has too much fat in it. Like, I still want to eat the cheeseburger. Alright? So, you know, public health, they tell you not to smoke, they tell you don't eat the fat, they tell you to exercise more. So, you know, they're always whatever they're asking you to do it, it is always just, it's not really what I wanna do. On the other hand, they have good advice for us as well as these people who work in industrial hygiene and the indoor environment, because again, they've been working on it for 20 years. I mean, they were probably working on it somewhat before the anthrax attacks, but there are un there are amazing scientists in academia and in government who have been working on this pro issue of what to do so that we can have healthy congregation indoors. 'cause isn't that what we want? Don't we wanna spend time with our family and friends indoors? I don't know about you, but like I've been lonely during the pandemic.

Vance Crowe [00:07:23] Yeah, I mean it's the very fabric of society is the ability to, to collide with other people. Refresh my memory because I remember anthrax being a big deal, but I couldn't tell you anything at all about what that situation was all about.

Paula Olsiewski [00:07:38] Alright, so this is a sort of very short snapshot. Someone with access to anthrax, I mean, anthrax can be like in a cow pasture, but this seems to be sort of lab grade, maybe weapons grade put anthrax in a series of envelopes and sent them to a, at least one member of Con Con Congress, Senator Dashell to NBC news. And I'm particularly sensitive to that because the Sloan Foundation offices in New York City are in Rockefeller Center. And that letter went to Rockefeller Center. Alright, so people, so it, it was in the air, people were terrified of opening their mail. There was a lot of concern over how do you decontaminate the Senate office buildings? How do you decontaminate the postal, the devices? It turns out the, the mail, the the big pieces of equipment used to sort of sort mail quickly. They would squish the envelope and it would just dis be a great dispersal mechanism. So the people working at the post office were very concerned. And then there were also some social concerns because if you are a very important senator in Washington DC you might have access to better options than if you're, you're a, you know, post office worker working at a post office in New Jersey.

Paula Olsiewski [00:09:21] And I am sorry to say, I don't even remember what it's, and so, so the, this is when I, and the Sloan Foundation president at the time, Ralph Garry and others said, okay, we've gotta figure out how to deal with this stuff in the air. We really ha like, and also at that time, masks were not popular. And Ralph at one point said, well, if there's something in the air, what side of the mask do you wanna be on? Okay. It's just so, it's so, it's so, so anyway, the other issue in sort of talking about like, you know, bioterrorism and what's in the a, you know, anthrax in the air and bringing it back to the pandemic is that generally, I'm not saying this is true of all medical professionals, but generally they have been, you know, it's so rigorous to get, become an MD or a physician's assistant or nurse. They really don't spend time on aerosol physics, environmental engineering, industrial hygiene. I mean, they just, you know, they, they, they wanted to go to medical school. They wanted to go to nursing school. They wanted, you know, they wanted, so they, they've taken the classes that they needed in college to do that. And then they're in a very rigorous code. So often they did not appreciate the need to sort of look at buildings as a way of protecting ourselves from bio threats.

Paula Olsiewski [00:11:03] Whether they're naturally occurring or, you know, manmade and they, or, all right, so one of the programs that came out of the Sloan's Bioterrorism program was called the Microbiology of the Built Environment program. And, and the reason we got into that is when we were looking at buildings and, you know, what's in the air and so on, we realized that we didn't know what, what the natural microbial profiles of just ordinary buildings looked like. We, we didn't know no one studied it. And so when after the anthrax attacks, you had all sorts of efforts to like develop sniffers for what's in the air. And they would, they would say, oh, it looks like we have something terrible there. And it's, oh no, it's not, you don't have some terrible bioterrorism threat. That's it. Turns out, you know, that's sort of a naturally occurring harmless microorganism in your, in Texas or in Toronto or wherever you are in the world because there is, there's a, there's a, some sort of geography associated with the, with the microbial world. Just as you know, a coral reef looks different from a, a forest.

Vance Crowe [00:12:28] Yeah, exactly. Why sourdough tastes different in San Francisco as it does in New York. Just the, the

Paula Olsiewski [00:12:32] Exactly. Oh, and the hands of the, alright, so then there's the hands of the baker. Alright, so, but I, my I'm, I'm just, I'm sorry I'm fidgeting a little bit, but I get all excited when I'm talking about this. So, so we said, okay, we wanna study ordinary buildings where people live, work and play. We want to take the tools that were developed to sequence the human genome. So we, that was a big, big project. A lot of tax dollars in the Department of Energy, a private effort led by Craig Vent, who was actually one of my grantees, amazing scientists to like really understand what's indoors, just basically first catalog, what's indoors and how does it change, how does the building impact it? How do people impact it? So very basic questions that scientists would ask of natural environments. It's sort of like, well, what's in those hot springs at Yellowstone? That's interesting. And actually what came out of some of that research is novel enzymes that work at really high temperatures that are part of our industrial processes now. So, so some of the medical doctors whose opinions I value, I use as consultants said to me, Paula, you're just funding a fishing expedition. You know, we know how disease transmits. And I just said, I'm not so sure. Like, you know, I appreciate your opinion.

Paula Olsiewski [00:14:04] Anyway, so we've we've made a long progress since I was, you know, listening. And I, and I take, when people are critical of a program that I'm running, I I always listen to them because I wanna, I wanna understand what's going on in the building. I wanna understand, you know, how to protect myself and my family and my colleagues from the threats posed by the pandemic. How, like all of these things. But I wanna understand how it works, why it works, and why we know it works. It's also good to understand our limits to knowledge that, well we know this much, but we don't know more than that. But with future research we'll learn a lot more. So I vance, I don't know where we went on this, but you know,

Vance Crowe [00:14:50] So it sounds to me like you, you were trying to develop systems to detect what was in the air and what you discovered was like there were things in the air that we weren't expecting to be here, but in almost in a way that it's a false positive. It's, it's, we at first are alerted about it and then it doesn't turn out to be a real thing. But did you discover things that were in the air that were not false positives, that were positives and like, oh man, we gotta get that cleaned up,

Paula Olsiewski [00:15:13] Samantha, you're sitting in a room. I'm sitting in a room. Alright, now one of the things that the government fund research was in stale funds is work on the human micro bio that we as people have, are covered by microbes. They're in our digestive system, they're just about everywhere. And there's some, and what the microbes in the skin of my elbow are different than the skin the microbes found in my armpit versus, you know, wherever you wanna look. And that these microbes, the reason we didn't know a lot about them, well sometimes you don't even look for them. But the another reason is before we had these modern se techniques for sequencing genetic material to then come up with sort of like the fingerprint or the blueprint for the microbe or viruses, DNA or RNA, we did two things. We meaning the scientific community, we would attempt to grow the microbes. So it would take a sample and then we'd try to grow them. Now I know you've done a little work on farming vans and if you don't have the right conditions, can you grow corn everywhere?

Vance Crowe [00:16:35] No uhuh. Yeah.

Paula Olsiewski [00:16:37] So, so in terms of, here are these scientists that, you know what, so it turned out the scientists who are using what we call culture dependent methods, we're ba we're studying the, the microbes that grew the fastest under the conditions that were developed. And this was before we knew that microbes communicated with each other. And if you have one microbe there, it will influence how another microbe behaves. This is before we knew that microbes sent chemical, sent these chemical signals to each other. But again, so this is sort of like a whole, this is a wonderful about science. All these things we didn't know 15 years ago are relevant. Okay, so you are in your room. I'm in my room. Alright, so let's say we're gonna, we wanna do a quick experiment. You know, Paul, what's in your room? I'll say, you know what Vince, some grantees led by a scientist named Jack Gilbert determined that when people come into a room after i, I can't remember how many hours, but less than a day, the room, the microbial profile of the room looks like the people. So your your you, your, your room, your office, the microbial profile will resemble you, your home. It will resemble your family. If you have guests coming to stay with you for a while, the guest microbial imprint will, will join your family's imprint.

Paula Olsiewski [00:18:09] So the, so there's certain things about the microbial world that are, that come from the humans. And right now I'm talking about generally bacteria. So these are unicellular organisms. Viruses are a little different because viruses need to live in a cell, they need to live in something. So like the SARS cov to two coronavirus right now is living in us if we're infected. So anyway, I I'm, I'm I I get so excited talking about this, but the, so the point is we are embedded in a microbial world. We, our microbes are very important for how we digest food and our di our digestive tract, i, I don't know if our human number of human cells to microbial cells, the numbers keep changing, but it's at least one to one. But in terms of the genes, so the genes within in a, an organism, so the gene, you, you know, the genes and micro chromosomes are responsible. They have some functions there, but the, my, the, my microbes I think have a lot more function than my human genes. So we're, we're in partnership with the microbes and for good reasons.

Vance Crowe [00:19:33] Well, it makes sense to me why somebody might have the criticism about it being phishing when you talk about the microbiome because it's just so vast. I have a, a friend right now that runs a company that is searching out for microbes that are beneficial, that essentially can be used like chemistry. Yes. And so he's trying to isolate them because in order to get a chemical deregulated to be able to be used in agriculture, the bar is really high. But if you can get a microbe that's naturally occurring in the soil to produce that chemical or to produce that outcome, then the, the deregulation is d very different because it's naturally occurring. But what he always talks about is like we are flailing around in the dark, grabbing one and hoping that we can isolate it enough to make it do what we want, but we don't always even know why it's doing what it's doing.

Paula Olsiewski [00:20:24] Right. And also, there was some interesting work published a few years ago by Kim Lewis, a researcher at Northeastern University, who showed that you needed to get certain microbes to grow, you needed other microbes to grow with them. And he came up with some novel way of getting microbes to grow. Because if you can get them to grow, then you can learn more about them, as you say, what chemical, what, what functions are they, are they performing? And, and, and oh, and I met, I have the other tidbit I forgot to see. So you can see microbes under the microscope. Okay, okay. So you can see them. And so people knew that there were microbes there that they, that were visible, but they couldn't culture. So anyway, that's, I dunno, we've talked a lot about microbes indoors, and it, it turns out the indoor microbes can't be very important to your health. Again, going back to some work led by Jack Gilbert, then at the University of Chicago, now at University of California San Diego, he studied the house dust of Amish children and Hutterite children. I don't know if you're familiar with this work, but

Vance Crowe [00:21:33] No, this is super

Paula Olsiewski [00:21:34] Interesting. And because of your work in, in, with on farms, one group uses traditional farm animals to do the titling and whatever the other group uses modern farm machinery. And I don't know that mu much about farms. So Vance you know more about that. But the point is these, how to write the, how to write in the Amish communities in, in the Midwest, I can't remember exactly where they were, but this paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. All right, so basically there, the genetic backgrounds of the people is very similar. And it turned out that the house dust, it was different on the farms from the Amish where I'm pretty sure they had the traditional big horses and the children could have a lot of access to the farm animals, whereas in the hutterites we're using the modern farm equipment so the children weren't out there, you know, with the horses,

Vance Crowe [00:22:36] The horses

Paula Olsiewski [00:22:37] And so on. And so it turned out that the Amish children have a lot less asthma than the Hutterite children. And so scientists are saying, wow, who knew that the indoor microbes and some of these experiments are done on mice. I don't know if they've been done yet on human, but, but just like had an real impact on whether you develop asthma. Nobody wants their kid to develop asthma, but we don't know why. So this is, this is an example of ongoing work that, you know, the Sloan Foundation has completed its funding in this area, but other of just this whole new field of trying to understand the role of the indoor environment, particularly on the microbiome and how it impacts, you know, the health of children and their futures.

Vance Crowe [00:23:22] Well one of the things that, I have a friend that started an air filtration company and he would go around and

Paula Olsiewski [00:23:28] I wanna meet all your friends. I feel like

Vance Crowe [00:23:29] You're one of them. So, so it was, he, it was interesting because you and I have talked a little bit about air filtration and I'm a little bit nervous about putting an air filtration system in my house for the very reason of the, what's it called? The hygienic like hypothesis, hygiene, hygiene hypothesis. Which is basically saying if you, if your children are in too clean of an environment, then they're gonna develop allergies and asthma. The thing that you're talking about here, right? Where do you fall on that? Like, is it better to clean the air and get rid of the, the bad things? Or is it so there too big of a trade off?

Paula Olsiewski [00:24:03] Alright, so I will disclose that I have a hepa air cleaner in my bedroom, which I've had for several years. This is, this was not purchased for the pandemic. So why do I have this? Well, modern society, okay, we have air pollution that various industries, you know, generate cars, generate whoever generates it. We have different practices to cut that down. But the, there are particles in the air and they're described as PM 2.5 and PM 10. And that PM 10 sort of is the big particles, the PM 2.5 are smaller and can really get into people like when you breathe them in. And so I was at a workshop on particles. So we're not talking about microbes, we're not talking about indoor chemicals or chemistry, we're just saying there are these particles in the air. And it turns out that high heart, you know, polluted air with high particle counts has lots of bad effects when you do these giant studies of hundreds of thousands of people comparing their health outcomes to their air pollution according to their geographic region. So, so for people who are worried about heart health, you really don't wanna be breathing and pollution those particles, reproductive health, it has impacts.

Paula Olsiewski [00:25:46] And so it turns out air pollution has a lot of adverse health impacts. So when I do have my windows closed, I operate my air filter at five air changes per hour during the day to just kind of flush my bedroom. And then at night I switch it to one air change per hour. If the windows are open, it's sort of pointless because I'm bringing in so much outdoor air, why am I just putting it through my filter? You can also learn about your air, outdoor air quality. Very, most of the weather apps, if you really dig into it, you'll find for your location what the particle counts are in your region. So, and so, this is, these are just simple things you can do to sort of help yourself, but you, but again, when I say to people, oh, you know, you open up that weather app, okay, go down here. No, keep going, keep going. Oh, I had no idea all this stuff on, on my local air pollution was here. So armed with information,

Vance Crowe [00:26:49] I know that you're speaking as yourself just as Paula, but you, you talked about your grantees and you talked about Craig Ner who went out in a kayak and started collecting ocean samples and, and then this led to a whole bunch of discoveries about microbiology that was going on in the ocean. You're talking about air pollution. So when you think about who you offer grants to or who you help guide through that process, how are you making sure that you don't create a selection pressure? I mean, to, to, to have funded Craig Benner is an amazing thing, but that you're keeping a wide enough selection area open that novelty things that people don't already know are true, are gonna be there. And, and yeah. How do you, how do you navigate this deciding how to, how to hand out this money?

Paula Olsiewski [00:27:41] This is a very good question and there are many ways to be successful funding scientific research. The government's process generally is a call for proposals, the call for ideas, then the ideas are judged by a panel of peers and that's how things get funded. The, it turns out though that particular system is fraught with all sorts of biases and so on. Underrepresented groups, including women, often don't farewell in that sometimes novel ideas are just, they're just too risky. They wanna see some preliminary data and so on before you can get funded. So, but, but that is a valid approach. And I have used RFPs request for proposals in some of the work that I've funded. But my approach, and again, every person who funds, you know, works in as a foundation does things differently, is to study a problem, bring together experts from the different fields, talk to them and try to figure out where is the novelty, and then identify and interest people who I think people who are generally working on something else. So I'll give you an example for the indoor chemistry, I have a program to study indoor chemistry.

Paula Olsiewski [00:29:16] The, the way I started this program was similar to the way I started the microbiology of the built environment program. And that you take someone who's a world expert in stuttering studying outdoor environments. So the example we've used is Craig Venter, who's an extraordinary s he's, he's extraordinary. He, he gets his, his people stay with him, they do amazing work and he takes risks, but he supports his people. And it, again, it's my little, my personal opinion about Craig. Alright, so in, so finding somebody who then is willing to switch, you know, go in these, in both cases just from studying outdoor environments to indoor environments. Okay? And I can give people money to do that, but what I can't do is I can't buy passion. I, the, the idea has to be compelling enough for the person, the scientist, so that at 11 o'clock at night, they're still thinking about, well what, you know, these experiments I'm doing indoors, it's really different than what I did outdoors. Is this like a contamination? Is this coming from the people? Like, what is this? So, so one example I'll give is a a, you know, a a one of the leading atmosphere chemists in the world name is John Abbott, he's at the University of Toronto.

Paula Olsiewski [00:30:49] So I've been working with people and studying and so I, I sent him an email saying, oh, you know, I'd like to talk to you about studying chemistry indoors. And you know, he talked to me and you know, I, I can't force him to study. I, you know, he's like, he doesn't need any money from the Sloan Foundation. He doesn't need me calling him up. Alright. But if I'm, you know, I said, I think this could be interesting, you know, would you be interested in, you know, testing it out? Well, no, he's one of the, he's he, along with many other Sloan chemistry grantees are some of the world's experts on the chemistry that's taking place indoors. And again, it's an unexplored place. So he's shown that some of the physical properties of chemicals that occur outdoors when they come indoors, they're a little bit different. They're stickier outdoors, they're more volatile indoors. They're stickier. Okay, so what does that mean in terms of your indoors? Let's out of like, what's sticky? Are there sticky things indoors? Did you ever like clean someplace that hadn't been clean in six months? Yeah, it got sticky stuff on it. Is it hard to get off? Well, you know, it's indoor chemistry and you know, so there, so there, anyway, so I, so there's a lot happening indoors. People play a huge role in indoor chemistry just in terms of the personal care products.

Vance Crowe [00:32:25] Well you, you were talking about this, this concept of passion and that kind of, my, I I want to experiment on an idea with you, which is I use this concept, we all have voices inside of our head. Yes. Some of them say, Hey, you should get up and work out. And another one is like, you should go back to bed. You don't need

Paula Olsiewski [00:32:40] To work

Vance Crowe [00:32:41] Out. Right? And so you have these voices, but there's usually one that rises to the surface and it really directs something deep in you about I should go on this path, even if there is no clear path out there. And you could, you could give it a bunch of different names, but I often use the, the word Damon, right? Not demon, but Damon as this idea of this deep inner voice that directs you to be curious about something. And the curiosity is the thing that is what makes you be able to be passionate, right? Without curiosity. Yes. There is no passion.

Paula Olsiewski [00:33:16] Exactly. I

Vance Crowe [00:33:17] Agree. You describe it. So you're, you're essentially going and finding people that have a Damon that is directing them towards something, or at least being like, Hey, does your Damon say you wanna come over here?

Paula Olsiewski [00:33:28] Exactly. And the, so that's, that's one thing that you can do when you sort of invite people. But the other thing you can do is observe both from afar and if you do a lab visit, the, the climate and culture in their laboratory, not my PhD in chemistry from MITA long time ago I was in a, a lab that was very supportive of women. Chris Walsh is my mentor. I mean, he's an extraordinary person. There are always women in the lab. And as he said, well his wife became the president of Wellesley, so maybe if he married someone else it would've been different. But anyway, the, and he's retired now at Stanford. But anyway, so I was in a supportive environment, but when I stepped out of that door, there were many people who were hostile to women. Before I got to MITI was told by some of my professors at Yale, like how wonderful it was. I was going there and just remember this professor and that professor didn't take women in their lab. And I was, I was grateful to know that at least. Okay, that's fine. But then there's also sort of a climate of hostility and the it, I don't think they do this anymore, but at the time, every month the chemistry graduate students had to take tests you couldn't study for, they were called cumulative exams. And there were five different areas of chemistry that were given at the time.

Paula Olsiewski [00:35:03] Biological chemistry, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry. What am I, what am I forgetting? Did I say inorganic? Organic, physical, analytical and bio. And so for, for graduate student who arrives at MIT, like you know, people have different backgrounds, different, you know, they're all good enough to get in, but it's very intimidating that you now ha are required six months in to start taking tests you can't study for, 'cause you're supposed to be learning chemistry 24 7. So, and then this is something else that I don't do now is you, so you would go to a room, you have like two hours. They would give you all, you would get a handout of all five tests. You could take as many as you wanted. Alright? So you pass them in and then a few days later they posted everyone's grades. You would go outside. There was a secretary named Marian Curley at MIT. And, and it was horrible 'cause you could, because early on you, you know, to, you needed six of these six passing grades. If you had an A and a C, then that gave you a B one A and one C equal two Bs. So that was two passing grades. But it was very, this was horrible. Alright? And so I would go with a couple of the other women, we would look to see how we did, and then we would run to this.

Paula Olsiewski [00:36:35] They also didn't have many ladies' rooms in the chemistry department. So we would have to run to the basement, we'd go by the candy machines and run to the basement and go into the ladies' room and cry all. And then, so, but also people know when you start passing them. And so one of my fellow graduate students, so they can see I'm passing, okay, so he says to me, well, you know, the only reason you're passing is biochemistry is easier than what I'm studying. So you know what I said to him? I said, well, it's so easy, why didn't you take that test? But I'm just saying, okay, so this, this sort of host, this kind of just hostility around me, okay, now who knew, who knew I'd be funding chemistry? Still has feel, still has some problems. A lot of women like it underrepresented groups like it. I think more than half of the undergraduate chemistry majors in this country are women. So I would go visit labs before I actually, actually, before I even invited a proposal and talk to someone, I would look at the pictures on their websites. You know, there's a picture, you know, you go look up professor. So the culture and chemistry is, you always have a picture of people in the lab and what they're doing and whatever. So who was in their lab? Okay, was it all white males or was it a more diverse group?

Paula Olsiewski [00:38:07] All right, so I just looked in terms of who came to their laboratory. Then when I visited, I'd say, okay, when I, I would, it's sort of what I call doing the eyeball test. How do the graduate students look? Are they terrified? Are they miserable? Because the graduate students and the postdocs, like you need the famous professor or the the driven professor to get started. But the graduates and students and postdocs are literally working 24 7 in the lab to come up with their, the findings and do the experiments. And so the, so I would always look at the climate. Now this is some flexibility that I had at the, at the Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Foundation has a, has always had a commitment to diversity in STEM in terms of underrepresented groups and women. But I was just living it. I mean, I, I lived it when I was a graduate student. I just, like, I didn't, I wanted to for it to be better. And the, you know, if you look at the demographics of the indoor chemistry program, we have women, we don't have as many underrepresented groups. But again, at the faculty level, we ha you know, in terms of at the graduate student and postdoc level, we have some diversity. But the other thing is we have an inclusive climate and all fields can be really competitive. Alright? If you want, what's that expression? If you wanna go fast, go alone. But if you wanna go farther, go together.

Paula Olsiewski [00:39:39] So my philosophy in the program was this isn't competitive. This is a collaborative program. So the senior faculty help the junior faculty. It just, and anyway, so I, I find that the, so this is how I've run one small program at a small foundation in New York City, but I think it's, it's gonna have a great impact.

Vance Crowe [00:40:03] So you would be a very good person to ask this question because it is a delicate question, but it's one that I think about a lot. You have raised two hyper successful daughters, one of which is a mathematician on the most elite level. And I married a woman that's an aerospace engineer whose sister is a, you know, high level attorney. And we just had a daughter. And as I hear people talk about separating out and making a distinction between boys and girls, or men and women and where they ought to be or the things that face women, on the one hand, I wanna make sure that my child has the advantages and the space to be, to be able to, to work and, and pursue the thing her Damon, that's what I really want for her, right? But on the other hand, the things that made me the strongest in the world are the thing in, in my own world are, is the adversity that I faced. And so sometimes I wonder, when we think about trying to clear out barriers based on something like sex or race or anything like that, it's not that I think we should intentionally place them there, but I have to wonder if that we aren't going to suffer from the, the, and this is just off the top of my head, the hygienic hypothesis, right? Where you start cleaning things out so much or you start focusing on it so deeply that you have other consequences that come that you don't fully understand. So it's, it's one of the things that I'm very careful because I don't want my child being told that, that she's somehow lesser.

Vance Crowe [00:41:38] And therefore we need to create advantages because I want that child to suffer enough that they can build up the resilience to be the sort of person that can pursue their Damon. And I'm, I'm, so, I, I don't really know what the question is other than

Paula Olsiewski [00:41:52] How do you think about that? I think there's enough suffering in the world that if you alleviate some of it in people's educational processes or research processes, that they will not be totally sheltered from suffering. But it's just sort of like, if you're trying to, you know, let's go back. I love gardening too bad. I don't have a garden here on the 14th floor in New York City, but the, the, you know, if you, you plant some seeds, you don't wanna trample them. Okay? You know, the seedlings come up, you don't wanna trample them. Okay? Once it's a big plant, it's harder to trample. So I think that in terms of sort of mentoring, particularly in the stem fields, particularly for groups who feel marginalized or have been marked, if you just sort of look at the data, the, you know, is it sort of like, oh, you're not tough enough to make it? Or is it just like not worth it if it's that hostile? So I think that, so getting back to raising daughters, okay, I I, I got two daughters. I was blessed with them. I never raised a son, so I can't, I have no insight there. I married a great husband, so my mother-in-law raised great. Alright. But the, I think what one of the things that I, that my husband and I have passed on to our children was a work ethic. You ha it's to do your best.

Paula Olsiewski [00:43:24] You don't start out at the top. Learning is a process, but you, you to strive for that. And as you know, both of my daughters as well as many other people are competitive swimmers. Now that's, they chose it. I didn't choose it. That's a sport where there's a lot of process, there's a lot of practices. You rarely win anything, but you can monitor your personal progress in that. Did you, whatever you're swimming, did

Vance Crowe [00:44:00] You go a little bit faster?

Paula Olsiewski [00:44:01] Did you just go, it's like, wow, you took two 100th off your time. So that's a work ethic and so on. And so they could swim a personal best that, you know, great. They were, I mean, it wasn't gonna win them a trophy at the meet or at the school or whatever, but it was, it was sort of the work ethic and that they could find joy and also just experience hard work. So, I don't know, did I answer the question?

Vance Crowe [00:44:30] Well, I, so the,

Paula Olsiewski [00:44:31] Oh, and we have to get back to the pandemic at some point, but I am having a good time talking about all of these things.

Vance Crowe [00:44:36] So when you brought up the gardening metaphor, I I, the thought that came to my mind is jalapeno breeding. So when they started,

Paula Olsiewski [00:44:44] Oh, I didn't know anything about this. So

Vance Crowe [00:44:46] When they started to take jalapenos to the commercial grade where you could produce enough jalapenos that you could have 'em in grocery stores all the time, they put them in these perfect environments, right? So they had all the water they needed, all the sunshine they needed. And they found out that every single year jalapenos became less and less hot. And so the very thing that they wanted was hot jalapenos, right? But because they gave them everything that they needed, they weren't producing capsaicin, which is the oil that is what makes 'em spicy. So what they figured out was actually what we need to do is put 'em in this great environment where they can grow, but then create stress, pull on the branches, shake 'em, make it so the plant itself has to produce this thing because it believes it's in that stressed environment,

Paula Olsiewski [00:45:33] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:45:34] And that's something that I wanna know, like how do you create that stressed environment while still having a good, beautiful garden with lots of fruit?

Paula Olsiewski [00:45:43] Well, but again, I go back to, you know, young children, you know, you don't wanna trample 'em. You wanna teach them to work hard. You want, you know, te teach them to be kind and care about other people and be the best they're be, you know, find their role to make the world a better place. All of these things. But the, when you, when you get to, you know, into a classroom, alright, let's, alright, you've already disclosed one of my daughters is a mathematician. Alright? So I, she grew up in a family with lots of resources, highly educated parents and so on, yet she had, and she went to a wonderful private school for grades K through eight. But for high school she had to go to a public school in New York City called she, she, it's a, it's a competitive test to get in, but the, the school focused on math and science and could provide for her, even though it's competitive to get in and there are lots of competitive students there. It was really a nurturing envir, it nurtured her interest in math even though there were, I don't know, 35 kids in a classroom rather than 18. All sorts of things. But, so she had stress there, but she also, people valued sort of the process. Now that school isn't good for, isn't good for everyone, but it's been great, it was great for her and I, I think it's an asset to the country.

Paula Olsiewski [00:47:21] Alright? So, but we learned really on that about her interest in proclivity in math that we nurtured because if she's interested in it, okay, we, we both took a lot of math. So let's now go to, you know, a gazillion years later I'm at the Sloan Foundation and I also direct some of the work that we do in New York City. We call our civic program New York City initiatives. We don't, as a philanthropic foundation, we don't pay taxes. So we try to do things to help New York City. So we, we fund a, a program called Beam Bridges for advent entering advanced mathematics. And this program starts in sixth grade. You are like you say, oh the solar foundation doesn't do K through 12. Alright, so I said earlier we want the, we want to encourage women and underrepresented groups to get PhDs in STEM fields. Alright? So that means they have graduated from college with a strong enough record to get into a graduate school. That means they graduated from high school with enough math or math skills so that when they went to college they could major in STEM and whatever. So this particular group focuses on, on poor kids and works with poor schools and identifies kids who like math. And it's not like an achievement test 'cause these, these are not at, these kids are at very poor schools, but like, they like to do math problems.

Paula Olsiewski [00:48:59] And some of the work we funded was a, brought 'em in for a summer math at day camp and you know, they had sports, they had fun things, but you know, most every the different, you know, you do math problems and this do math games and that and so on. And it was, I went and visited it before we funded it and it was just like, it was so exciting and like to be there with all these like kids, like sixth graders, like all excited about the numbers and the math and the patterns and what they could see and so on. Alright? So it's like, so, but then it turns out in New York City, and this may be true in other communities, that when you're, sometimes you don't, don't have a choice where you go to high school and sometimes you do. And we already had the example of Vivian got in, you know, went to this famous high school called Stuyvesant High School that produces mathematicians, physicists, Nobel prize winners and so on. But you know, I don't know, seven or only seven or 800 kids a year go there per grade. So, and New York City has, you know, a gazillion students. So when you're trying to, so if you like math and you, this program, it nurtures and they send you problems and they have other more advanced things that they can do for a smaller number of students. But when it's time to figure out your high school, if you think you, you're interested in math, what if you accidentally went to a high school, it didn't have calculus, you're toast. Alright. Because it's sort of just because, so already by like eighth grade you make the wrong choice or, or your school can't help you with that.

Paula Olsiewski [00:50:38] It, it just, so then it really sets you back. So then when, you know, when you get into college. So anyway, so that's an example of, of trying to nurture people, nurture children who are interested in it. Not everyone's interested in it. I mean, I don't like horseback riding. Okay. I don't really like economics. I mean there are plenty of things that I like, you know, tried, studied, whatever. But you know, there are different things that people, as you say, find your Damon. So, you know, there are some sort of, sort of structural problems in that some of these kids could end up without this program, you know, no one would would look and say, oh gee, what's the math curriculum at James Ma? I mean, using the example James Madison High School where, and I, that's a very large high school, so I'm sure they have it. And we also find a program for extraordinary mathematics. Well, we

Vance Crowe [00:51:32] Didn't have calculus where I grew up. In fact, I, I often ask Annie who's, who's quite good at mathematics to even explain to me what is calculus? Because it was, it was something we had pre-calc, but I didn't even, there was nothing, we didn't have trigonometry. We had, we had none of those things. So it's interesting. It turned

Paula Olsiewski [00:51:50] Out fine.

Vance Crowe [00:51:51] Yeah, I did. But not as a mathematician. Right,

Paula Olsiewski [00:51:54] Exactly. So it just, but

Vance Crowe [00:51:57] You said my, my trigger word, my favorite word is patterns. 'cause I think that patterns are the way that we discover new things in the world. And you were talking before about the pandemic. When you look at it from your wide view of, of having grantees and access to science, what are patterns that you have observed about the coronavirus that other people maybe haven't seen so far or can't see because they don't have the access to the information that you do?

Paula Olsiewski [00:52:28] Alright, so one of the challenges I have is I'm so embedded in it, I often forget what is not common knowledge. Alright, so one of the, alright, so we have no medicine, we have no vaccine. The medical community, you know, pharmaceutical community, there's all sorts of partnerships. And I, I really think it's great the way the government has been funding the manufacturing so that the, if these candidates turned out to be good, they're already manufactured. Alright? So we don't have to then wait another year. So I think there are lots of good things, but it takes time. You just, and I even, I'm even, I even volunteered. I didn't

Vance Crowe [00:53:10] Know that was happening. I didn't, I didn't realize that that was happening. So they're, oh

Paula Olsiewski [00:53:13] No. So a, one of the, one of the important things, alright, so vaccines can take a long time to develop and 'cause you have to figure out, okay, what is gonna give you the immune response? And remember this coronavirus, nobody knew about it. Okay? This is a, they called it the novel coronavirus. All right? Fortunately with those techniques I talked about for like reading the DNA sequence, the scientists quickly were able to isolate, you know, the genetics, an RNA virus isolate the, you know, determine the sequence and start working on vaccines. And fortunately there are people who studied coronaviruses just 'cause they thought they were interesting. So for example, I have a colleague in North Carolina named Ralph Barrick who studied, he's been studying coronavirus, he's studied the SARS one that caused the SARS outbreak. The one that people in this country aren't that familiar with the Mers Middle Eastern respiratory virus. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:54:18] We've talked about it on this podcast. Yeah. All right. No,

Paula Olsiewski [00:54:20] But I'm just saying, so he's studying Coronaviruses, right? He's studying 'em. He doesn't, he doesn't know we're gonna have a pandemic. He is, but he's studying them. So what's good though is when we, when this is a, he's there as an expert and has expert advice. 'cause he's already been trying to develop, you know, work in this space of like, how do you think about therapeutics? How do you think about vaccines? So this is my plug for the importance of funding basic scientific research because you know, we need to, we need to learn about these things. So anyway, and so I know that he's involved with one of the efforts to develop the vaccine. There are many efforts. There's a, a company up in Boston named Moderna, very interesting RNA company. And the reason I know about it is it turns out I, at my PhD advisor's 75th birthday scientific conference, I met a very interesting scientist there who, who actually works up there. So I was, I was, I learned a lot about that before, before the coronavirus. And oh, this is, I forgot to tell you sort of a few things. Fans, one life is a job interview. Two, always be open to new ideas. And three, I can never know too many people. That's how I go through life, alright? It's just sort of people, you're meeting people, all sorts of opportunities have come my way that I didn't even know existed.

Paula Olsiewski [00:55:54] So I, that's why I give the job. Life is a job I interview. I'm always interested. So again, when I met this woman who got her PhD in the Wallace lab after I did, but it was like, it was so interesting to me what she was doing in terms of at this RNA company and how she had been in academia and so on. And so who knew that a few years later, you know, her company is like at the, is it one of the companies at the forefront of vaccine development? So, and, and I personally, so I'm in a risk group for coronavirus. I'm above a certain age. So I saw an advertisement in a, in a local newspaper that said, wanted volunteers for the coronavirus vaccine trial. So I, I'm in the, I'm in their database, I've filled out the paperwork. Maybe I, so maybe I personal, that's one thing that I can personally do for the pandemic.

Vance Crowe [00:56:47] So you went and you went and got a shot and you don't know.

Paula Olsiewski [00:56:49] Well, not yet, no. There, there's, I've like signed all the paperwork because they have to like study your medical records and in terms of, you know, am I really healthy enough? Do I really, do I have some strange underlying condition that you don't wanna,

Vance Crowe [00:57:01] All of that is living your beliefs. I mean, I gotta, I gotta see a

Paula Olsiewski [00:57:04] Very, no, but that's the point. Alright,

Vance Crowe [00:57:06] Very impressive.

Paula Olsiewski [00:57:06] So what can I do in this pandemic? Okay, so the, you know, I'm glad our tax dollars are being used to sort of like fund the manufacturing of the vaccines while they're being developed. So we're gonna throw away a lot of stuff, okay? 'cause not all of 'em will work, but the ones that work, we, we will have a whole manufactured supply. And also you can deal with the supply chain issues. Do we have enough vials? Do we have enough needles? And everybody's taking different approaches. Is it one shot? Is it two? Is it, you know, can you drink it or sneeze it or smell it?

Vance Crowe [00:57:42] So you may find this interesting, I think one of the most interesting people I've met since Coronavirus started around the, this concept of coronavirus is a, is a guy named Kevin McKernan. I don't know if you know him. No.

Paula Olsiewski [00:57:54] He

Vance Crowe [00:57:54] Runs a company called Medicinal Genomics. And his concern was because he does not, he doesn't grow cannabis, he actually runs the tests to be able to genetically sequence your cannabis to be able, he worked on the human genome project's. No,

Paula Olsiewski [00:58:09] No, that's important because it, it, I mean it's,

Vance Crowe [00:58:12] Well, and so his, it's legal research,

Paula Olsiewski [00:58:14] All the three states,

Vance Crowe [00:58:16] Well in his research was we are not so certain that coronavirus can't be spread onto cannabis and that you could be lighting it on fire and having people breathe it in. And so he started sequencing the, and, and really researching into this. So you're always saying about you wanted to, to meet, you know, you can never meet enough people. Oh, Kevin McKernan, I think is of all the people that I've interviewed the most, the most novel and the most interesting. So I write him anytime a new study comes out, I'm always asking you. He's a very, very interesting guy.

Paula Olsiewski [00:58:48] Okay, so Vance, we're gonna do a little experiment on your show. I want you to hold your hand up in front of your mouth. And now I want you to say, Peter Piper picked a peck, picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Vance Crowe [00:59:01] Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Paula Olsiewski [00:59:05] So did you feel anything on your hand?

Vance Crowe [00:59:06] Oh yeah. I mean, I know all about that. The peas that pop 'em out and send.

Paula Olsiewski [00:59:10] Alright, well so one of the things that we, because we're getting talking about coronavirus and what we can do sort of for healthy congregation, protect our families, yet hopefully, you know, live as normal lives as possible. So people have trouble understanding invisible things have trouble. Like what really is in the air? I mean, my air looks fine, I don't see any cloud, you know, I don't see you smoking a big cigar with a cloud of smoke. But it'll be an important metaphor later. Alright? But the, by doing that simple experiment, Peter Piper. Alright, just talking, you could, you could experience the air being expelled from you. Alright? And the, and depending upon if you, if you're just breathing, you can feel it. But when you're talking loud, talking is gonna be a stronger singing is gonna be stronger. Really excited. You've had a couple drinks, you saw your old friend, you yell, it's, so this is just how people are. We're this is we've, this is normal. Alright, so now think about we have this novel Coronavirus and 40 of the pe 40% of the people who are infected either show, are, never have symptoms or wander around for days before they get symptoms, but they're infectious. So how do you protect against that?

Paula Olsiewski [01:00:42] They're like, okay, so we know that when people talk or breathe or whatever, they're expelling the virus who are infected. Now some of it sort of falls onto the surface. Remember, you know, you don't, you don't wanna touch surfaces, keep washing your hands, okay? So you could have touched the surface that someone just spoke loudly at the bar and you have a exposure route that way. Some of it also sort of like, will just naturally decay. I mean it's, it's a virus. It's not living in something that, so there's people study the natural decay, but some of it is just gonna linger in the air, it's, it's, it can just keep floating around. It just, okay, so think about like you're at that bar that for some reason they allow smoking, most places don't. Okay, so like a big puff of smoke. Okay, where does that go? It's sort of like your breath. It goes all over the place. I mean, if I'm sitting here and someone over there smoking a cigar, or I'm gonna note, so it's just like thinking of just like, what's going on in the room. So how can we, how can we protect ourselves from those things? Alright, so this gets back to most times we want the building to help us, us.

Paula Olsiewski [01:02:20] So can we bring in more fresh air from outside, either by opening windows or operating the heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems of an enclosed space. Sometimes those are giant central systems. Sometimes they're window units for air conditioning. So, so what can you do to sort of make your air better? Can you dilute it out? You know, dilution is the solution to pollution, right? So can you dilute it out? On the other hand, if you have a pile of something that smells really bad there and you don't move, remove that source, then it's still gonna be bad. Okay? So that goes to, we'll have fewer people in the room, okay? 'cause if they're the source, but then, alright, so if the air is gonna be filtered, alright, so you can dilute the air by either opening a window or having your system taken more outsource outside air, or you can filter the air. So this gets back to the HEPA filtration we were talking about. Okay? You can buy standalone units to filter the air, or you can look at your central, your HVAC system and say, oh, I can upgrade. I'm currently using one that's graded an 11. If I can take it up to a a, a grade of Merv 13, that'll just filter more stuff out. Again, in some establishments, and I've heard these like from homeowners in Florida who are upgrading their indoor, you know, Florida, it's kinda hot.

Paula Olsiewski [01:03:56] So you, you, you're indoors when it's really hot. But also some buildings can you put UV lights into your HVAC system? All right, so let's go back to Florence Nightingale. Sunlight kills germs. Fresh air is good. Scientists at the Department of Homeland Security have shown that sunlight kills coronavirus. So when you're outside, it's dying fast. Alright, so if you, and the re what kills it is the ultraviolet rays. Think of a rainbow long red at the top. Violet at the bottom is the shorter.

Vance Crowe [01:04:33] Oh, I know. That's one of the reasons use are violet. It's the most exciting part of the light spectrum.

Paula Olsiewski [01:04:38] So anyway, alright, good. So ultra violet is even, alright, so, but those are the rays that can inactivate virus, whatever. So you can put them in HVAC systems. So those are things that people have to first know what's available. Then they have to make choices, like in their space, in terms like, as I said, remove the source. So if you only have, if you usually have, for example, like the church that I go to on Sundays, I've made some choices. It's impor, it's important for me to go to church. I wanna go to church every week. Alright? So I go to the first, the first session. Why do we do that? Because no one's been in the church all night. Alright? Our, our church requires masks and we'll talk about masks in a minute. They require social distancing and they have Purell, whatever. So I feel that when I go there, every, I can participate in the service. This is very important to me. I'm not in, if I, if I'm an asymptomatic carrier, I don't think I'm, I am infecting anyone because I'm either with my husband or else there are no people close by, limited occupancy. And, you know, that's something I can do. So I'm very happy because I, that was like one when we, when things were really bad in New York City, that was, that was not an option. And I just, you know, the thing for me is my community not just like watching it on TV and trying to read along.

Paula Olsiewski [01:06:16] So that's a, that's a choice that I've made. And, but again, doing the assessment in terms of, it's a cavernous building, so there's a lot of air in there that limited source in terms of the people we're, we are wearing masks and we're not near each other. So, you know, so it talks about masks, air and distance. So, but last night New York City opened indoor dining. So I love eating at restaurants, but I'm gonna be really, I mean, I sort of use the same analogy they used in terms of going, you know, to my religious services. Like, is is the place gonna be full when I get there? Even if it's limited capacity. So that's, there's a bigger chance of, I'm saying the people are the source of the virus. Alright? So you have a source of a bad smell of a source of a virus. Like, you know, if you eliminate the source, you eliminate that, the issue. But, you know, can I sit near a window? Is it a cavernous space? So we have a lot of air. I mean, just so I, I need to think about these things because I haven't been in a restaurant since the end of February. I've been, I've experienced outdoor dining and I have enjoyed that, but I'm very selective 'cause I wanna make sure I'm not next to the people because you know what, when I'm eating and drinking, I can't wear a mask.

Vance Crowe [01:07:53] It's definitely going to be an interesting thing to see how culture restarts and, and how the gears get going, and then how they slow down again and how they start back up. It'll be interesting to watch and it's, it's good that we have all of these different places to experiment and try things out. Paula, this has been a wild ride from Coronavirus through, you know, the studying of, of, of different ideas. This is really a lot of fun. So thank you so much.

Paula Olsiewski [01:08:21] I've had a great time Vance, and I, I am grateful for the invitation to speak and I hope to see you soon in person. And

Vance Crowe [01:08:29] If people wanted to learn more about your work at the Sloan Foundation,

Paula Olsiewski [01:08:35] You can just go to the sloan.org. If you wanna learn more about the indoor chemistry, you can go to indoor chem.org. If you wanna learn about microbiology, the built environment microbe.net, you can see we always try to like disseminate. And Jean, we never even got to talk about sewage surveillance for the coronavirus as an early warning system. But maybe

Vance Crowe [01:09:01] That's a whole nother reason to have you come on. So thank you so much, Paula.

Paula Olsiewski [01:09:05] Oh, thank you Vance. This is great.