Randy Schekman in Kansas City: Talking about Curiosity-Driven Research and a Nobel Prize Surprise

In Kansas City, ASCB members Randy Schekman (left) and Abdulbaki Agbas (right) talked about “painless” publishing . KCU photo by Bret Silvis

In Kansas City, ASCB members Randy Schekman (left) and Abdulbaki Agbas (right) talked about “painless” publishing . KCU photo by Bret Silvis

Nobel laureate and former ASCB president Randy W. Schekman was the keynote speaker in March for the Kansas City University (KCU) of Bioscience and Medicine’s 100th Anniversary Research Symposium. Schekman sat down for an interview with KCU faculty member and regional ASCB Ambassador Abdulbaki Agbas. This version has been condensed for length and edited for clarity.

 

AA: Today’s topic is going to be reshaping the scientific world.

 

RS: Small subject.

 

AA: You’re the Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal, eLife, which is now in its third year. How would you define painless publishing with eLife since every publication, of course, is painful?

 

RS: That sounds like a marketing phrase—painless publishing. Ideally, it’s painless. In practice, of course, no paper is perfect. Why I even had one of my own papers rejected by eLife a couple of weeks ago. A painful experience—so I can empathize with people who have this happen. Nonetheless, the ideal at eLife is to be more constructive than other journals. The way we strive to be constructive is that we have the reviewers confer with each other in an online consultation session. After they’ve rendered their own views on the paper, but before the author finds out what the decision is, the referees confer and comment back and forth on their independent comments. By that, we hope to come to some consensus about whether the paper is going to be published or not. So the hope is that for those cases that are favorable that it’s constructive advice rather than just lots of complaints about doing this and that. And I think in many cases we succeed but not always.

 

AA: I know that you abhor journal impact factors. But should journal impact factors ever be considered in gauging a scientist’s reputation and productivity?

 

RS: No. No. No. Journal impact factors were created for librarians to decide which journals to subscribe to. I think that’s an appropriate use of the impact factor. Beyond that, it is not a measurement of scholarship for an individual contribution and, therefore, it should not be used as a surrogate measurement of scholarship. The number itself is contrived; it is not based on anything that really pertains to scholarship and, therefore, it should not be used.

 

AA: My question is about curiosity-driven basic science vs. translational science. NIH and other private funding agencies focus on the translational sciences. Universities substantially invest in translational sciences. Taxpayers want to see the dollar spent for the effective treatment of deadly diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases. What is your thinking on this issue?

 

RS: It is a constant matter of public education. First of all, science education at the primary and secondary levels needs more attention. We have a scientifically illiterate population in this country. It is difficult to persuade people who don’t accept anything beyond their own eyes that investing in basic science is valuable. They need examples that are tangible. It is our obligation as scientists not to simply stay in the laboratory but to go out and educate the public about the value of basic science. Of course, the public invests money because they want health outcomes. It’s not the National Institutes of Basic Science; it’s the National Institutes of Health. So the people need to understand from the many examples that an investment in basic science pays unexpected dividends in applications to technology and to medicine.

 

AA: So how would you prioritize these two research lines?

 

RS: University faculty and even medical school faculty should be encouraged to pursue basic science. Basic science can have practical applications or it can just be things that don’t obviously have an immediate practical application. In this evening’s talk, I’ll start with the example of my PhD mentor Arthur Kornberg who discovered the first enzyme that copies DNA. It was his intention to understand how a cell divides its chromosomes, which had no practical application whatsoever. Years after his discovery, that enzyme was used to generate an enormously important technology called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that is used in forensic science. It’s used everywhere in molecular biology, becoming an enormous market in its own right. Who would have predicted that? No one. Those who think that they can predict that or who try to supervise research in a practical direction are usually wrong.

 

AA: So how do these things happen?

 

RS: I would say it’s a natural outcome of exploring the universe. If you know the natural world better and better and gain a deeper understanding, opportunities to exploit that knowledge for practical purposes will develop. It’s just a given. You and I understand it because we see it every day, but the man in the street who pays his taxes wonders why his money is being spent on studying baker’s yeast in my laboratory. What good is that? This needs to be explained in language they can appreciate.

 

AA: In winning the Nobel Prize, what was the most surprising thing to happen?

 

RS: Most surprising thing? It’s a little bit of a story. I was an undergrad at UCLA and later UCLA put out a lot of publicity saying that I was the first UCLA graduate to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. I went to UCLA in the late 1960s when they had the greatest college basketball team of all time, and my hero when I was a student at UCLA was the best college basketball player of all time. His name then was Lewis Alcindor—now it’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar—and he’s a very famous guy. He was my hero. I went to every home game, but of course I didn’t know him because it’s a big school. Apparently, Kareem read some of UCLA’s publicity about me. So after the Nobel, I read in the Huffington Post an interview with him where Kareem talked about his interest in developing a camp for inner city youth to study basketball and science in the mountains outside of Los Angeles. In the course of the interview, they asked if he had a favorite scientist and he said me. I was blown over. UCLA invited me to be their major commencement speaker that year, addressing an audience of 20,000 people in Pauley Pavilion, which is their basketball arena and where I’d spent those years watching him perform. And they invited Kareem to introduce me. There are pictures of the two of us on stage and, you know, I’m shorter than he is.

 

AA: He’s definitely a tall guy.

About the Author:


Abdulbaki Agbas is in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Kansas City University of Medicine & Biosciences and serves as the regional ASCB Ambassador.