Why Half of Promising Alzheimer's Genes Have Never Been Studied

Listener intro (station ID) [00:00:00] It's not so much about policies not being aware of the potential problem, but that some of the things that we think to understand about that phenomenon might be wrong. I'm Steven Fairbanks, a writer and teacher from St. Louis, Missouri, and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:21] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we interview Thomas Steiger. Thomas is from Austria and he is now a professor at Northwestern University and he does something pretty interesting. He is trying to discover where are the gaps in science. Sometimes scientists can get focused on just a few genes in the human genome project or just a few ideas when looking at aging. And he wanted to discover what are the blind alleys we're going down? What are the reasons that we keep studying just a small percentage of the entire huge ocean that we could be looking at? Now, Thomas is a mild-mannered guy and very humble, but this is an interesting conversation because he is trying to push and prod and figure out what can he do to stimulate one of the next great scientific revolutions. I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm glad to be here to be facilitating these up the graph conversations. We are doing this and the rest of our time. We spend doing Legacy Interviews here in our private recording studio in St. Louis, Missouri. If you have a loved one that is great at telling stories or somebody that you've always wanted to get to open up to tell you about their childhood, about where they came from, about why they made the career choices that they did or how the experience of parenting and being married for many years was like, then consider going to Legacy Interviews dot com. There you can sign up to have me do a private interview with your loved one for right here in our studios where we'll discover these things, put them together confidentially and send them to you so you can have it recorded as a time capsule for as long as you hold that video.

Vance Crowe [00:02:06] We are excited to do this. This has been wonderful work and if you are interested, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. Alright, now without further ado, let's go to my interview with Thomas Steiger. Thomas Stoger, welcome to the podcast.

Thomas Stoeger [00:02:22] Hey Vince, thank you for having music guest.

Vance Crowe [00:02:25] So you study all different sorts of things about the genes and which ones are being used, but one of the things that caught my eye is that you were working in the realm of trying to stop or slow aging. That seems like a tower of Babel. So how does one even begin to say, let's try and stop human aging?

Thomas Stoeger [00:02:45] Yes, there are many things that people have already tried and I think that like over 500 different series that scientists already had like decades ago on what causes aging and why we age. So like there are many great ideas out there. One thing that I am trying to spot is opportunities which have not been explored, although there's a lot of research about aging. See there are the things that have not been investigated that could that be more, that be need to understand about the aging.

Vance Crowe [00:03:16] So when you say not well understood, I mean like people know, hey, if I exercise, if I keep my flexibility, you know, I just had Laslo babai on, he said, Hey, if you eat well, you know you'll slow down aging but you're talking about something far deeper than that. Yeah,

Thomas Stoeger [00:03:33] Possibly yes. Or at least always the hope. So basically we know some things that's slow aging. Basically it's we shouldn't smoke too much, we should kind of not eat too much and we should do some exercise and that really helps us actually to live longer and live a more healthy life. But still all of us age and there seems to be some things that we cannot overcome just by those factors. So the dream would be to find new ways that maybe add to the things that we already know about aging so that we can prolong life and that we can make people live healthier for longer time.

Vance Crowe [00:04:13] What's your intuition? Where will you find these things that people haven't found before?

Thomas Stoeger [00:04:21] Main intuition would be that this relates to things that are more difficult to spot. So scientists often gravitate so scientist difficult, so scientist often find themselves kind of approaching the least difficult problems first and it could be that there are some things that are a little bit more difficult to tackle but have been missed by past scientists. And the general approach that I'm taking is my research is to compare data that has been collected in a very unbiased way against the scientific literature and asking that other discrepancies.

Vance Crowe [00:05:04] And so what does that mean? Like you're, you're like combing through papers and trying to spot errors.

Thomas Stoeger [00:05:10] So that's a side project that I'm actually doing with the collaborator at the University of Sydney where we also try to spot errors and that's part of it but it's even broader. So basically looking at things not necessarily that they're wrong in the literature, but things that are not represented in the literature. So we are basically, if one looks at a lot of data, many, many, many measurements about aging, like how things that change as we get older, as animals get older things, what are the things that change but actually have never really been studied by any scientist in greater detail in any publication it's gonna fill these gaps of knowledge.

Vance Crowe [00:05:56] So as I was looking at your stuff, you talk a lot about using machine learning to be able to discover these like gaps in the knowledge. And when I hear that term machine learning, you know, I can feel my eyes starting to roll back in my head because so many people have used that term for so many things that it feels like it's like like back when people were like we're gonna, we're gonna do cloud computing, oh we're gonna do ai, but it doesn't really mean anything when you use the term machine learning, what are you talking about and how does it work?

Thomas Stoeger [00:06:28] Basically I try to make computer is copy way that all of our scientists would cumulatively approach science so that basically the computers can say, oh these things are likely to be studied. And when we kind of have this understanding of how scientists approach science, which basically traceable Swiss machine learning, we can actually always ask what are the things that maybe a computer or then an extension of scientists would not be investigating? What are the things outside of the machine learning? What are the things that we can predict and what are the things that seem interesting but are outside of what we would predict scientists to study

Vance Crowe [00:07:12] And what have you found?

Thomas Stoeger [00:07:14] So we have found that basically no matter which disease we are looking at roughly half of the elements that seem to be most promising in this large ampath data sets have actually never been investigated by any scientist, which is a surprisingly large number a picture, for instance, Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease basically concerns many, many people and affects the lives of many families and there's a lot of effort trying to mitigate Alzheimer's and promote research into Alzheimer's. And one of the nice things that the United States National Institute of Health is doing is to release a list of genes which they suspect to be very rewarding research targets. So basically genes in code for the all of the elements that make up ourselves and there's a finite set of those and amongst this set that is actually very visible, only half of them actually have been studied in greater detail by any scientists studying Alzheimer's disease. So it suggests that there might be a lot of things out that I don't really know.

Vance Crowe [00:08:30] Yeah, I thought it was actually really interesting you were talking about how kind of human nature goes around and impacts science. So one of the things that I found interesting was the, if it's new junior researchers coming up and they say, ah, I'm gonna study Alzheimer's but I'm gonna look after this gene that nobody's looked at before, very, very few people think that is very relevant. The consequence to their career which you discovered was that it's likely that they will not advance, they will not end up ultimately getting their own laboratory if they discover just if they went after a gene that was not well known. Is that because they, they e, everybody already knew there was nothing to find there and that person went errantly looking after this or why do you think this is happening?

Thomas Stoeger [00:09:18] I think that is certainly a suspicion that many will have that maybe it shouldn't be investigated. That also holds probably for many of the genes that have not been investigated to greater detail. But this argument all becomes very suspicious once when all the data suggest that it is important for something that's important for societies and no matter kind of which disease it is with like different for instance lung cancer or Alzheimer's or other diseases, there still seems to be the same that junior researchers progress less in their careers when they start to explore and even publish on a less investigated team. I suspect that it is has to do with some social mechanisms. I think I don't really know the right answer yet. I, I have some ideas but I think if we would understand actually what's going on, we could actually design better science but since all of these things still prevail, I'm actually not sure if all of the ideas that I would have actually turn out to be correct but Well

Vance Crowe [00:10:24] Let's hypothesize for a little bit, I mean one of the ideas that comes to mind for me is that maybe you have a professor that falls in love with their research and they end up liking people that also study the same kinds of genes and so you end up being like hey I want to talk about these things. We have a really deep knowledge so it's easier to build relationships. And then my guess is that who gets laboratories may may be largely determined by your science but also largely determined by the relationships you have with other people.

Thomas Stoeger [00:10:56] Absolutely. There definitely is this element also that's one of the hypothesis out that it basically is no community tribe of studying a certain gene, particularly if it's like new, there's no one else out there that's not like a conference that's not someone who could kind of write reference letters maybe or who could basically provide reactions like things that take time to manufacture. So like being part of a community definitely has some advantages and there's also this idea about science actually being a tournament type of economy. So basically it's best to be the first one to discover something but even kind of being second in a tournament in also most sports, it's actually much better to actually be the best in a sport that no one is watching. Interesting. So basically it could be this tournament type of dynamics.

Vance Crowe [00:11:56] So what about you? How do people, are you like viewed in this world as like, like a cop coming around here being like, hey I've got new ideas on the way you guys ought to do your research. How has your stuff been received? Because you're basically saying like, hey I think you guys might be heading down the wrong paths.

Thomas Stoeger [00:12:13] So it has been received differently by different people. I should say that some of the kindest and nicest and most supportive people that I actually have met are people that work at the National Institutes of Health. This also include some collaborators that actually try to actively try to better science and understand science better so that interventions can be designed on the side of individual scientists, particularly younger ones. They really like it because they see all of these vast mature topics they could be explored in the future and no one is really studying them yet. So it would be a lot of opportunities and kind of fascination from one of one kind of motivating part but also a little bit heartbreaking is when sometimes family of someone who has like a severe disease kind of was calling in the office kind of asking for advice like feeling that like the disease is not studied enough. So that's kind of, I think that's one of small government realizes that she's more than just like academic ivory tower from the, from some scientists. They're also kind of very skeptic though basically they see it as something that could divert resource or could even kind of damage the reputation of science itself. So I think that's also a very valid concern. The people lose some trust in science and basically putting some information out there, the science could work even better or more efficiently can also sadly be understood in a way where people that care about science feel that someone is attacking science, which is not my intent.

Vance Crowe [00:14:00] Yeah, I mean I think that like to describe your work in terms of the value it creates for other people, I was looking at some stuff on COVID and how you had suggested like look, you know, of the number of avenues that we could go towards, the things that we could look at to say how can we treat this and what are the cau causal mechanisms that are happening here? We're really just in a very narrow frame set and we really should widen it out. If you are gonna steal man the other side of this and say, ah no I we shouldn't be widening it out because that's gonna dilute us. What, how would you say that the, the people that think that you're harming things, where do they have a good argument?

Thomas Stoeger [00:14:43] They have good argument for trying to be first in something. So if scientist a a tournament or maybe it's about something that you maybe you want to patent or something that maybe you can show certain leadership maybe actually for something it is important to put resources into try to be the first on everything. So I think there will be at one point like a trade off which is not easy just like what's the right balance of kind of pursuing some things as quickly as possible versus kind of diversifying. But basically it's a good argument to be made to be fast with investigating something.

Vance Crowe [00:15:22] You know, I was like, as I was reading this, I was kind of thinking about the Pareto distribution, right? How and this for anybody that doesn't know this is that 80 20 rule, right? Where 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients or you know 20% of a given population will be the the ones that get most of the resources and then everybody else has to divide the remaining part. Is there a chance that the reason that the work gets focused on just a small number of genes is because it's a Pareto distribution and these genes work because 20% of the genes are doing 80% of the work?

Thomas Stoeger [00:15:59] Yes. So it is a pato distribution. It's even like more like depending on which set of gene to takes, it could even be like that the 20% almost accountant for 90% of their work, it's a per distribution, the distribution could come from multiple different things. It means that there's some kind of disproportional effort going to some it could be that once it is properly attracts even more things. So stepping back the question is should we biologically expect that? And so genes and code for proteins, and this has recently been a nice study where they investigated how proteins bind each other, which proteins bind each other and in the literature it would look like more similar like a peral distribution which would basically indicate that some genes are encode for proteins that connect to many more proteins and then a disproportional binding. And as you, we last I guess of it kind of a long distance directions, but then there's now been some people that actually tried or combinations of which protein can bin and which protein and they found that when, when now is able to do these exhaustive experiments, these underlying distributions actually look different. So which indicates that the, for the biomedical research, this distribution doesn't come from the inner biological importance but more from the way the scientists approach biology and still have to a lot to learn.

Vance Crowe [00:17:36] So you know, if you're a scientist and you're studying the genes that impact something like Alzheimer's, your great, you know, quest, your, your like thing that you're trying to get to is to discover whatever the genes are that will unlock people from Alzheimer's. But in your world where you're kind of in this meta level of research where you're trying to discover the holes that are kind of in a a bunch of different areas, what is your, you know, highest peak, what's, what's the great goal that you continue to pursue

Thomas Stoeger [00:18:11] Basically to enable others to do more research like that? So basically by try to understand science and the status scientific approaches to that, I also once actually asked how many different genes have the most successful and productive researchers worked on during the career. And I'm not the best biology that is of our times, but like basically the very best biologist will maybe like study like 10 genes but probably know since like roughly 20 years that we have at least 20,000 genes that are considered very interesting. So basically there's no way that anything laboratory or even though anything institute can actually approach that problem, it's what is it magnitude bigger than any scientists could do. So think my ultimate goal is actually to enable others to actually kind of follow the passion of discovery and see what's hiding behind all of these things that seem to be very important but no one else in the world is investigating them to greater detail.

Vance Crowe [00:19:15] Yeah, I was reading, I'm not sure if it was in the New York Times or the Economist where basically they were looking back on the human genome project and I remember when when the human genome was first mapped and basically people were like, we did it, we got the map and now all we gotta do is like, you know, take our ship around to this continent and that one and we're gonna you know, explore everything. But now all these many years after that's happened, we really have only mapped maybe 15% of all of the, the interesting genes, meaning that the 85% that remains has decades and decades worth of research to to be going after. And that your research kind of concluded that we aren't even going after them. Like the speed with which we're going towards new land is, is very slow relative to continuing to to pour down the path of the same ones we've known before.

Thomas Stoeger [00:20:07] Absolutely it and one could even add to that that we ologists and particularly Ologists that work around genes are an extraordinary lucky position in most scientific disciplines. We do not know what we do not know, but we biologists, we kind of know what we do not know. We know that there should be roughly 20,000 things that could be quite interesting, maybe 10,000 extremely interesting and they're kind of only focusing on a couple of thousand so we know what we don't know. So I'm not sure if it's actually special to the human genome project, but the human genome project really enabled us actually to see our ignorance and also enabled us to biologists to create tools that would allow to study some of these other things. So for instance there because of human genome project, it's quite possible to measure gene all the genes in a single experiment. Like how do they change in experiment so we or we know which genes contribute to individual diseases or con contribute to capabilities to severe P pneumonia after COVID-19. So we kind of have these basic measurements. What's kind of missing is not a jump from having these basic measurements to more detailed experiments and characterizations.

Vance Crowe [00:21:26] So it's, it's funny because if you think about somebody that's an astronomer for example, right? They're looking out into the universe and they think ah, you know we, we know that there's black holes and planets and stars and galaxies, but there's a high likelihood that there's just stuff out there we've never heard of. We don't have a name for, we don't even know what we're looking for. But within just the genes, if you're just talking about human genetics, we can say, well we at least know how many genes there are and if we discover things that result or the complications that come from how those interact with one another as a network, but at least there's some finite amount of things that we can explore. So you could presumably get to the end whereas exploring the universe feels infinite and you'll never get to the end.

Thomas Stoeger [00:22:11] Absolutely and I think it does seem like evidence that also astronomy for instance this bias, so for instance the planets that have discovered outside of the solar system, we know that these are unusually big planets. So like from understanding of basic astronomy, so basically the things that we can see, some things are less difficult to spot maybe the big planets and I think that could also be happening for other types of sciences and looking back at biology that something similar actually has also happened. So

Vance Crowe [00:22:43] How does one, like in your world, I would imagine it requires a great deal of creativity because there's not really a map, you are just saying, hey let's look at all of the work that's being done and see if we can discover gaps by creating computer programs. So how is it that you've constructed these experiments in your, in your mind and then gone about creating them?

Thomas Stoeger [00:23:06] So basic, I went in kind of those three stages. In the first one I tried to think what are all of the different things that could affect research? It's probably not, not complete, but like everything I could think of, like basically whether something similar has been studied in other contexts. What are biophysical properties of the genes in proteins encoded by them try to be quite complete. And then it only, after I had accumulated what is now over 100 types of different information about the sciences, including careers of all scientists, I went to the modeling and tried to understand which of these things actually explain science and where the gaps in knowledge. And now in kind of the third stage freely began is actually then taking some of these discrepancies are gaps in knowledge and also actually trying to go back to basic research and study some of those genes and the things that we would know about this, just other context and see do they actually extent, particularly from myself, I'm interested in aging, like can we discuss that, learn something more about aging by looking at these steps.

Vance Crowe [00:24:27] So I wanna like highlight this thing because it, you're you're, you're very soft spoken in the way that you described this, but the level of detail that you went through when you were doing this research and you were saying, hey let's try and find gaps, let's also look at hey in what labs and you're focusing on which genes, how does that impact your career over a period of time? So being able to track just like, hey, what happens to an individual a as they've made these decisions when they are, you know, takes individuals to study science. So they're out there studying science and then what happens to their career, but not just any one individual. You're looking at a mass of them and then saying, ah, well now we can see that there are some causation here. Like if, if you're doing, like we said earlier, you're studying unknown genes, you may not get a laboratory, how does that then create a feedback loop? This is fascinating, right, because it seems really far away from the world of biological sciences, but without that knowledge you would, you could, it'd be very hard to redirect where people are going and just, just even having the idea to think about something like this is, is quite, it's it's just, it's fascinating to me that you would even come up with that.

Thomas Stoeger [00:25:40] Interesting. So basically this argument that people have been studying the same things as in the past has already been made 20 years ago. Apologies, so have repeated that again and again. So I suspect that that the reason why things haven't really changed, it's not so much about quality is not being aware of the potential problem but that some of the things that we synced on understand about that phenomenon might be wrong or that basically something else which is, is needed and there something else given all of the large experimental advances that have been made in the last, you think just for instance about crispr, if those experimental approaches are not sufficient, it might be something less about the science or the methods but something more on the social side that actually is holding us back.

Vance Crowe [00:26:33] So in that regard, how do you feel about groups like the NIH and how they have so much influence over what gets studied because they create grants. What has your research taught you about or shown you about how groups like that impact the nature of science and where we're at today?

Thomas Stoeger [00:26:54] Yeah, so for, for the NAHI think that people, it's think on a very long term timescale and very intelligent. I think also looking at some data actually see that when the NIH started programs to promote research into underexplored genes, that these things actually generally work. So that are programs that NIH can design that seem to be working. But one obstacle I think that many people as a policy makers face is actually that scientists hold them back. So basically the PO for instance when think about the research grant, there's like one aspect where me as a researcher has to write a grant and submit it for instance to the NH and, but they then give it to other researchers that then basically review their work basically and give kind of an a score of how well they think this research will work out and how valuable it's, and I think there are many indication that is actually just kind of peer review, dis review and basically other scientists that then discourage the NIH and other policy makers from exploring the unknown further because there's like more risk, there's more uncertainty and if basically they have to compare like extremely fantastic project where it's quite true that it will actually work and will probably benefit like the scientists involved and maybe also the trainees. And then there's like some other project which has more uncertainty.

Thomas Stoeger [00:28:28] It's understandable that many people maybe favor the first one over the second one And I think that is a problem for policy makers to,

Vance Crowe [00:28:38] Yeah, I mean I think I see that in, in all domains, right? In business and everything you bring in the new people that say, hey I wanna try this totally out there idea, which is the thing that will bring you new discoveries, it will knock it knock you into new frontiers. But when you're looking at it and you're an experienced person, you can look at it and say, ah, you know, we've already tried that or we looked around there and it didn't work and these things you can, you can waste a lot of money and some of that wisdom is correct, but also some of that wisdom can have the impact of stultifying things that maybe just barely missed last time and this time if you, if you never swing back to it, you'll never get there.

Thomas Stoeger [00:29:16] Yes, that is very true. I think that could be quite happening. So like then like to your earlier question, I think maybe one thing that for instance policy makers could make and have partially been making is like to set aside a certain amount of money for these kind of projects which are a little bit outside of the main lines of scientific research that would be less d less easy to predict that might be more rewarding in the long run.

Vance Crowe [00:29:43] So one of the questions I like to ask scientists that are deep into the game, but I think it can make people a little uncomfortable is what do you think of the current peer review process? Do you, would you keep it in whole? Would you make dramatic changes to it?

Thomas Stoeger [00:30:03] I think it depends on the con context of basically there's a peer review system in place for individual research publications that access at journals. I think this is overall a good thing also because I think there's actually maybe in like too much science being published. So there's like some arguments that can be said that if there's too many publications it'll actually slow down signs basically making it more difficult for new ideas to surface. So I think actually kind of having a, some kind of a limitation on production of research publications could actually help new ideas for can

Vance Crowe [00:30:44] Wait that's novel. I have never heard anybody say that before that that that one of the consequences of this drive to publish is that now there's more and more publications and as there's more publications out there than the people that are reading this research and saying, ah, I want to know, I want to be up to date on what's going on. The flood of information is actually keeping them from reading enough or knowing what the state of the art is. And so therefore publishing more doesn't get you anywhere faster. It means you have to sort through more and noise potentially.

Thomas Stoeger [00:31:16] Absolutely. So I think one in terms of this is cognitive overload and basically some sociologists of the University of Chicago have basically shown that in research fields that grow bigger and bigger and bigger and the more and more research publications published that the researchers then kind of refer to old ideas and they tend to less and less include new ideas. So that seems at least in the comparison of different scientific fields and as they grow that if they grow to a certain size, the turnover of ideas actually becomes slower and Paolo is a really big field which might actually contribute to some of the things that we're facing.

Vance Crowe [00:32:02] Yeah and the pressure that individuals feel like if you wanna get your, you know, you wanna get into a pretigious university or you want to get tenure, you have to publish and then you're in competition with everybody else that's in that that level. But I had, I had always thought of it as being something that led people to making, having a high time preference, right? They wanna get it out the door quickly as opposed to doing long slow complicated things that maybe you don't get to publish as often. But I'd never thought about the information overload that comes. I mean, and that one seems intuitively obvious. If I have a bookshelf of 20 books or have a a room of a thousand books, I'm far more likely to read 20 books on the one that's the bookshelf of just 20 books.

Thomas Stoeger [00:32:45] Yeah. And basically also with the bookshelf, maybe if maybe if it was easier to get like certain, let's say crime novels, then maybe like some books about art, maybe you would be reading more crime novels and basically there's this additional thing that all lead kind of scientists are certain types of research but new ideas are a little bit more difficult to present.

Vance Crowe [00:33:18] So now that we're talking about bookshelves, what books do you like reading? Somebody that's pushing the envelopes of science, trying to find gaps. What do you read to to be creative?

Thomas Stoeger [00:33:30] Thanks for the kind words. So ba basically I try to read relatively short things. It's many different ideas. I really love the book of Ray Aman, which is a lot of nice poetry. The most, one of the most recent books that I've read was actually one that's half science, half art, where it tried like to reconstruct how dinosaurs are drawn basically because that we just have fossils and there's like a lot of uncertainty in the reconstruction of how dinosaurs really kind of looked like, like all of the soft tissue for instance kind of gun. So basically there's some approaches of how we can reconstruct how dinosaurs probably have looked like, which is by itself interesting. But then basically the funny part is when they apply the same approaches to current day animals and the animals look very different. Like for instance like a rabbit would, people wouldn't know that they have long years and these things and the head. So basically kind you see kind of how in like despite following very good practices things look very different and it's like something where you have kind this mixture, a little bit of science and like some visualization, very trouble.

Vance Crowe [00:34:51] I've, I've always thought like the ability to draw things that are not, like if somebody ever had me describe a person to one of those portrait officers at, you know, in a crime show where they're like how, how did he look? And then the one person is listening to you make those descriptions and then they turn it around. I couldn't describe my own mother or my own wife to somebody in such a way that they could draw it. So this idea of drawing dinosaurs from just this like small amount of data that's, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years old seems like. Yeah, it's, it's funny I would not have thought about how wrong we could probably be, but we might never know.

Thomas Stoeger [00:35:30] Yeah and many things are right and but like there is this gap of information one has to make plausible assumptions and it's very valid assumptions that people usually draw and they're doing it well. But still there is like some uncertainty and we're seeing the results we actually might not be aware of what is actually a reasonable assumption, what is really backed up. And like if when it's not in the field of doing dinosaur research, one wouldn't really be able to discern things at the first moment.

Vance Crowe [00:36:01] You know, just so St. Louis has this place called the World Bird Sanctuary and it's not very big but it's about maybe a third of a mile long where you just walk down this path on the top of a ridge and there's birds on all sides and you can get within like two to three feet of a, of a bald eagle or of hawks or of an imu, which I had never been close to in IMU before. But that thing looks so much like what I imagine a dinosaur to look like. It's like utterly terrifying when you look down at its claws and there's like these sharp talons, it's, if you've never seen an IMU up close, I highly recommend it.

Thomas Stoeger [00:36:41] Oh, now I have second thoughts about it. But yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:45] So what books did you read as a young person? What science fiction captured your mind back then?

Thomas Stoeger [00:36:52] Oh, I was very bad at reading books. Basically my attention span leveled off after like 50 to hundred pages usually. So I barely actually finished any book. So it kind of then started more, I think this kind of some graphic novels and poetry even realized actually that this has like a faster turnover of ideas and, but some things about, a little bit about design ba basically realizing that this much to learn from books that is actually difficult to foresee. Like, like for instance, one, one of my favorite books is actually like when a book that collects all of the stories. So think there are around 1,500 stories that people basically have told in different cultures over the centuries and there's some people that tried like to collect all of these stories and kind of repair the core of the stories. So that's something I kind of really that that was one of the first ones I really enjoyed.

Vance Crowe [00:38:02] So that's kinda like the arc type of stories, right? Like the, let's figure out all the different relationships that two people could have romantically or politically and trying to isolate them out into, into like about the number of of permutations there could be

Thomas Stoeger [00:38:19] Essentially. Basically. So basically taking like things starting from very it tales, folklore, basically like all of these stories that follow certain patterns and trying to list all of the permutations that have been encountered in the world. So to say,

Vance Crowe [00:38:41] How does a person that is as deep into science as you are now, it's fascinating. I think most people would not be willing to admit what you just said, but I think it's totally a natural thing, right? Like I, I just wasn't that into books, I'd get to a hundred and I'd be done with it. I know a lot of people that are like that, but you're in the deep sciences where you have to read a great deal. How did you overcome that then to be able to get deep enough in to produce good work?

Thomas Stoeger [00:39:08] So one trick is like trying to rotate multiple things at the same time and also kind of reserving some time maybe over the weekend or so for reading a little bit long on some things. But that kind of helped me, plus I kind of got a little bit faster with reading, basically kind of seeing what are the parts that are easy, you know, to follow than others and basically reading those a little bit faster than, yeah, we would have to pay attention.

Vance Crowe [00:39:41] And what do you do with your free time then? What, how do you explore, what do you, what do you spend time doing now that you're at Northwestern University?

Thomas Stoeger [00:39:50] So Atmos Western, I was quite active this in our postop session trying to create like more opportunities for fellow postdocs outside of Northwestern. One thing that I really love doing is running, so like last year also trying to run a club and trying to get a relatively high biology and running close to the lake. I left bordering meeting with friends, also organizing actually in Chicago some volunteering activities. That's not how we make contact.

Vance Crowe [00:40:24] Well Thomas, what do you think is the future of science? Where do you think things are going? Will we have big breakthroughs in our lifetime or are we going to go through a long drought or are breakthroughs happening right now and we just don't know it?

Thomas Stoeger [00:40:38] I hope that there is a break extra that is happening right now, but if we look at the past and history of science, people are of always, no matter which time had the feeling that their times are really special and there is just a break just around the corner and the newest discoveries are exceptional and probably there's some truth in it because people have always been doing great discoveries, but I don't think that our times is more unusual than other ones. Maybe one thing that we can do is really kind of taking this gift of this human genome project and knowing which things we know and which ones we don't know. I personally hope that we can design some more clever ways of science and knowing that there's so many gaps or in knowledge in things that are important to us in our health and society effects of biomedical research, maybe we can navigate and kind of see what's missing there. But otherwise the think things will continue more or less the way can now they'll you some interesting things, but the think things could be faster.

Vance Crowe [00:41:46] If you were advising a young person that's excited and interested in biology, what field would you tell them they should go explore?

Thomas Stoeger [00:41:55] So currently three fields of biomedical research seem more open towards novelty and innovation. So basically I again, kind of looked at all of the publications through computational approaches last best, like more novelty appearing and the three fields where many things are currently happening is theology of aging, then things relating to human vision and I think it's not a coincidence. Nutrition,

Vance Crowe [00:42:25] Yeah, we just had Laslo barba on and then nutrition conversation was mind blowing, right? His belief that we've been really honed down on just the macronutrients, proteins, carbs and fats and a few, a few of the nutritional components, but that there's this massive amount of molecules that we've been eating and we have no idea how it impacts us, how it regulates our bloodstream, how it does that, that conversation alone really opened up my eyes to how easy it is to oversimplify a subject and then have that become what is just known because everyone, you talk to dieticians, people that have spent their entire lives on this, that the, the subjects bar Bassi was bringing up was would they they never talk about it all. And I've been to their conferences,

Thomas Stoeger [00:43:14] Yes, it's maybe again indicating how much scientists used to study only some element of our scientific problem of question and that even like in things that are even close to us and we can experience on everyday basis, like many of the other things, there's still so much more to learn and discover and understand.

Vance Crowe [00:43:35] Yeah, and it's kind of like Michael Levin always talks about whenever I've had him on, he's always saying, you know, you really have to be careful how you define things and what you think you know, because you know, I I've been at places where people are like, we already know the way you get fat is it's, you know, calories in, calories out, proteins, carbs and fats. And for a long time if you don't have another framework with which to explore that, then you just accept that wisdom as true and you don't even, it doesn't even become something that you could question because it's the thing that's always been there.

Thomas Stoeger [00:44:10] Yes. And to some extent we also rely on the information that we get and that we have access to there many and when when can't think about all of the different topics you have to work at the same time. So at some extent there seems like some kind of trust that we have to in the things that we are hearing.

Vance Crowe [00:44:31] Yeah. And there's a weird challenge, and I find this on the podcast, right? Like if I want to explore ideas that are outside that are like what I call up the graph, I will inevitably interview people that other people say, that person's a crazy person. Right? You know, that person is saying things that are, that are so wrong that you're doing something bad by giving them a platform to those ideas. And it though that's really obvious when you're talking about things like, you know, somebody that denies the holocaust, right? Like that okay, that that may be an idea you don't want to explore, but you also need to be really very, very careful that you don't get guided to say, oh no, those people, their ideas shouldn't be discussed at all. I I I used to work at Monsanto and people that were non GMO that thought, hey GMOs are all bad. It becomes very easy to get into your club and say anybody that doesn't like GMOs is just entirely wrong. Everything that they're saying is incorrect and we should throw it out. But it's, it's very difficult to break away from your tribe and try to be open to ideas that your tribe says shouldn't be allowed in.

Thomas Stoeger [00:45:41] Yes, absolutely. I, I mean I think one thing that you are also doing here is just kind of this idea of almost inquisition of kind of asking why and like asking for the reasons. I think that is something actually that also helps like to see if people have thought about it, what are the reasons they come to a certain belief. This the example that you mentioned and this people basically having very strong beliefs that is decision that people can, can adopt different identities and there's this idea and that basically if you see one identity under some threat or something that's out of their control, maybe they become very, very protective of one thing.

Vance Crowe [00:46:25] Yeah. And it's, it's like you feel righteous when you're defending a group, right? So if you're saying, and I, this was something that happened to me all the time when I was doing my work with Monsanto is that if you threaten somebody's identity, they don't necessarily come back like with the you're threatening me. They come forward with the idea of like, I'm here to protect my group and because I'm protecting the group, I am righteous and my like emotional level that I bring to this is, is perfectly acceptable because everyone I talk to when I turn around and say, Hey, did you see what I did for you group? All those people around you are supporting you getting that emotional about that. And I'm certain this is happening in the, in the field that you're talking about with science getting too slimmed down into one area. Maybe it's not the emotional vitriol of the anti GMO, but it's still that same kind of team mentality.

Thomas Stoeger [00:47:19] Absolutely. It it, and I think people have also observed something similarly. I think starting for instance, I think the early day of in Calvinism is an example of maybe it was extreme views. There was a lot of the arguments actually made that people in like they, they they have to do things for the others and even if things maybe would feel maybe not completely right and maybe actually some people will do things that they wouldn't personally want to do, they would argue that it is for the group and they basically have to help the others. So it's a little bit tricky because they think that's this delicate balance of seeing what might be good for others and trying to care about that. But actually that also can lock things in a sometimes not so fortunate way.

Vance Crowe [00:48:12] Yeah, I mean I think that this is something well understood, right? When you're trying to get young men to go off and fight in war, one of the ways that you can do it is to create, to that generate that level of loyalty that comes through enduring pain and sacrifice and suffering together. So one of the functions of bootcamp is to make it, so I've gone through some trying, you know, really intense experience and so now I'm going to be far more trusting of the guys that were to the left and right of me. And then when we are all going to do something like shoot at other people because I'm doing it for them and not just for my own good, I'm much, much more likely to do this and this accrues across all sorts of, of domains. Like I one time remember reading a story about a, a social scientist that knew if you do something that's really exciting with somebody else, that the dopamine that that get that gets happened makes people more likely to fall romantically in love. And so he got a rickshaw in Thailand with this girl that he'd been trying to court and they go through the streets and they're running and it's really exciting. There's traffic everywhere and he can tell she's just getting really, really excited and happy and they get done and he's like, what did you think? And she was like, oh my gosh, that driver was amazing.

Thomas Stoeger [00:49:33] Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:49:35] But it's true, right? You go through this exciting thing, you have these good feelings and you wanna be around other people. You like them, they become a part of your group.

Thomas Stoeger [00:49:43] Yes. And well, yes, there's like some poetry there that is basically reinforcing these things. So probably it's like if it's, if it's dead it must be there for some recently in a way that worked the past in sense.

Vance Crowe [00:50:01] So as you look around at the world and you're like saying, Hey, when I'm not doing research, when I'm not focusing on this stuff, what do you pay attention to? And how much time do you take away from your work? I mean I know you have your hobbies like running and your organizing. Do you watch the news?

Thomas Stoeger [00:50:18] The news? I tend to read the news mostly like in the morning, generally New York Times, a few international newspapers. I think international perspective is quite interesting to see how things are covered in different regions. Basically it's mostly reading the news in the morning. It's a kind of morning routine.

Vance Crowe [00:50:39] Yeah, I haven't really thought about that, but I would, I almost only read the news. Yeah, I like, there's almost nothing on television or YouTube the way that I would get news that way. Almost, almost never. And and now that I think about it, it's probably because it's so much more emotional. I don't like the emotionality of it.

Thomas Stoeger [00:50:56] Yes, that is, I can understand that. I think. I think for it's also a little bit about kind of the time. So things that sometimes the, actually I'm not sure. It could just be like a habit that I picked up once and enjoy.

Vance Crowe [00:51:12] So Thomas, if people wanted to learn more about your lab or find out about your research, where would you recommend they go?

Thomas Stoeger [00:51:19] Googling for Thomas Stoger Northwestern and they'll find me,

Vance Crowe [00:51:23] Well Thomas Stoger, this was very interesting. I'm excited to see what doors you open into science. Thank you so much for coming on.