2015 Breakthrough Prize Symposium Welcome Panel (Part 2)

at this time I'd like to welcome our four new breakthrough Prize laureates to the stage this year's recipient of the breakthrough prize in fundamental physics saw Perlmutter from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory two of this year's winners of the breakthrough prize and life sciences Jennifer Doudna also from UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier from the Helmholtz Centre for infectious disease and finally one of this year's winners in the breakthrough prize in mathematics Terence Tao from UCLA please welcome our guests [Applause] good to see you good to see you alrighty this is great if you thought those last guys were interesting this is gonna be this is gonna really knock your socks off so now now we're getting the rubbers meeting the road here these are these are the people who who are really really at the intellectual frontier and I'm gonna I'm gonna go I'm gonna go through each person here and ask ask them to tell us a little bit about what they do but we're not gonna get bogged down too much in in in a lot of the explanation which which you heard last night in that in that terrific that terrific evening that we had but we're gonna try to get to some of the some of the fun stuff and some of the motivations I mean science science is kind of you know to to the general public scientists can science can be kind of intimidating it can it can be hard to understand it could be it's kind of elitist maybe but when you talk to people who are doing it you realize that it's just exciting and it's it's it's a supreme act of human creativity and it has all the drama and serendipity of you know of any human story so now that I've raised your expectations and here we go Saul can you tell us you were you you were working in in cosmology and and and you you had there was a bit of serendipity involved in your measurements of supernovas you're you were trying to figure out you have the trying to show that the universe universe acceleration was slowing but you found but something went wrong so my colleagues a Brian Schmidt and Adam riess and I were all two teams were doing what we thought was going to be a for me actually one of the most fun projects I could imagine because we were finding we were measuring the what we thought would be the slowing rate of the expansion of the universe gravity would slow down the expansion and we the reason I thought was such a great project was because whatever answer we got would just be amazing philosophical result if if it turned out that it was slowing some but not enough to ever stop slowing then we knew at that point that the universe was Infinite and it would expand forever and I mean measuring just the brightness of these dots of light these super no explosions and finding out the universe is infinite I thought was great alternatively we could have found out that the universe was slowing enough to come to a halt and then someday collapse in which case we could have been measuring the you know that the universe was gonna come to an end and I thought you know measurements little dots of light and being able to walk around with a sign saying the universe is coming to an end I mean it's you know you couldn't go wrong and yet and yet when we actually made the measurement we found out something that was none of the above you know it turned out that it was you threw the Apple in the air and you wait for it to come down and it didn't they just blasted off and the universe apparently is speeding up in its expansion and and of course you know even for a scientist even better than a amazing answer to a question that you thought you had is discovering a whole new question and and so that was the that was the surprise I mean I love stories like that because it's it really you know chose it's completely the opposite of the stereotype generally held by scientists about science that it's finding answers you know and it's really finding you know finding crazy questions that you didn't know so then you you you said you were motive made it purely by personal gain while you're doing this and okay that was a joke thank you and next you find out that the you know the real estate market you know that the university is going to always expand then yeah I know you know which way to put your all right Jennifer Doudna and Immanuel Immanuel sharp on ta you guys have a great story which by the way is the cover story and this issue of Scientific American shamelessly promoting right now it's available right outside you have a great story because you were you were doing basic basic research would you consider it basic research in in how bacteria fight viral infections right can you tell us a little bit about how that went you-you well I don't know which one of you might want to start or the other I don't know which which went first but you started you started doing this work and then you started to call it you you you you got the idea to collaborate yes so actually I was not initially interested in understanding our bacterial fight their own viruses I was interested in this question at the beginning of my career and then I moved a little bit away from this to really try to understand the mechanisms that ductile pathogens are are using to cause diseases in humans always with the focus on really fundamental mechanisms with the hope to find targets for new intent effective new therapeutics and it's just by focusing on one of these regulatory pathways that I came to link one one certain molecule of RNA was a Chris Parker system and so I was back to my former love which actually I had left also because this was a kind of research that was considered to not be really that fashionable you know studying bacteria and and how they interact with yeah with bacteriophages the viruses of bacteria it's considered a little bit as old microbiology even though a lot of the tools that we are using in molecular biology now there's all the tools that we are using for manipulating genes are controlling from fundamental research trying to understand how the bacteria defend themselves again in against invading DNA when it was not that fashionable and I think it's from it's a very good example of how there is really a very very important to not especially follow the fashion or follow the dogma and just follow your curiosity and and and maybe by deciphering a pathway you will find something interesting and then you will combine to two passwords that maybe we're not meant to to interact and then yeah and then you can just follow and so and discovering that you will not have expected to show this one molecule led you back so how did you start working how did how did you start working together I think it's a great example of a project that that came about really through serendipity I mean I I think we are people working traditionally had been working in very different areas of science we might not have even met each other but you know I had gotten interested in what I thought at the time was a very esoteric project you know to try to understand how bacteria fight the flu using very small pieces of RNA stolen from viruses and it seemed like a fascinating you know just biological phenomenon and so I had you know very very little bit of grant support from the National Science Foundation and actually also from the Gates Foundation to do this work and so we started started with just the one person in my lab investigating this and eventually you know it was so interesting that more and more students started to join the project and we got we actually got invited or I got invited to an American Society of microbiology meeting something I would have never attended I'm not really am really not a microbiologist at all but that's where I met Emanuel and we realized in talking that first of all we really liked each other's which is great that's important for collaboration and also we realized that our laboratories had complementary expertise my lab is really a lab that's always been interested in molecules and how they work what they do in particularly RNA molecules and her lab as she said you know had an interest in a particular pathogen that had this CRISPR pathway and so we we got together to understand the fundamental mechanism of a protein called caste 9 that was clearly important somehow in the function of this immune system in instruct pyogenes that that manuals lab was studying and that led to you know we had no idea where that fundamental research would go but as soon as we figured out how this protein worked we realized this could be an incredibly exciting tool for genome engineering I love stories like that I love it because you know it involves you know not just following some logical plan of research but it involves a lot of serendipity and curiosity and meeting people that you'd happen to get along with and there was also another connection in your lab right there was a there were you eat you eat you because you were separated Geographic so me I'm using a lot of skyping because my research sponsors everything laboratories and I have moved a lot around the world so I'm collaborating very easily but there was there were Polish speakers exactly so actually my students I mean all the project started with with my student when we discover their the component that would be involved in this pathway and then when we I mean when I contacted Jennifer actually she chose to ask Martine linic postdoc from Czech Republic to join the project so that was my student associations came from from Poland and actually they can understand one another I mean it's like yes so they could speaker was sure he was speaking polish and math never met each other right but you know I came back from this conference and I said to Martin who is a post in my lab you know there's this really exciting project would you like to work on and he said yes and so he started talking with Christophe in a manuals lab across you know 6000 miles and using Skype and they pretty quickly figured out they had both grown up in a sort of Eastern Europe on opposite sides of the Polish border and they actually both spoke the same dialect of Polish I mean of all the serendipitous things right and so they actually communicated often in their native you know language and so this was just a really fascinating connection we couldn't have planned it but it actually made the social aspects of the science that's very and I think what is really important also in the collaboration is a generosity from my partners you know it is very generous I think it's the same thing for Martine I mean when you collaborate you should not be afraid to just tell all your ideas just to just go ahead general was very that's great it's always what you know scientists are a bit scared of because you have tough competitions and your SQL that you're going to be scooped by you know someone if you say something but I think if it's very important because yeah you know you need you want to go ahead with your ideas with a pathway and and you need also true to see whether someone is going to to catch an and we're gonna respond and so it's important for so and of course this collaboration led to technology for gene editing but is from everything we hear is going to make some pretty big incredible changes in genetics and and and make make you know genetics far easier to do genetic manipulation far easier to do and far far cheaper and will lead to a lot of good things okay teri Tao is a mathematician and I the mathematics is a tough one it's you know I have read your biography and I still can't really say what you do and I think you know it's kind of the opposite in some ways to some of these more pragmatic sciences that we've just been talking about but so III I know that you started at a very young age you you were you showed a math propensity to do math a very young age what what is it what is it like to have that gift and and and and have have we and when I say we I mean society have we made it easy for people like you because you have a gift you know and and and and it it's a it's a it's a gift that that we all benefit from and I'm just wondering how what that journey has been like and and and what what we can you know what how people have helped you on it okay yeah so I've loved mathematics as long as I can remember one of my earliest memories was this childhood in three years old my grandmother was washing the windows and I was I was demanding that she put the detergent on the windows in the shape and numbers and I always liked you know my parents told me that if they wanted to keep me quiet and evening there give me a math workbook and I I think I always liked things were very clear rules things were black and white I was terrible the humanities as it as a child I think I had an English assignment wants to describe what was going on in my house and I just went to each room and wrote down what a list of everything all the or the objects that were in every room so and I always had very little mind and I always liked sort of very very abstract things so naturally gravitated mathematics I was very lucky to have so much guidance I think my primary school headmaster and and and high school teachers and and then later professors in college were very accommodating they they allowed a special schedule where I would go to school say in primary school with people my own age and then our take math classes four or five years ahead of my age group in high school and then when I was at high school I teach classes in college I'm poor mom had to drive me around every day like five times a week five times a day but yeah and I think was maybe I was perhaps lucky that when I was growing up there was the what there was not much President for this sort of thing and there was a lot of leeway for the individual administrators to actually then there was a little bit for me yeah so how do you figure out what to work on well I have so a lot of it so following your nose there's questions you're interested in and and when you solve a problem naturally other problems is no just men actually appear afterwards but a lot of it is serendipity as as as we saw much my favorite collaborations out things I just didn't expect but I'll be talking to a colleague and and they would mention a problem which which turns out this is connected just to something I was interested in well my favorite collaborations is with an it was with an applied mathematician man you can des they were working on he and another colleague Justin von Berg were working on a way to try to improve the image reconstruction for MRI I can take fewer measurements of human body and then try to get a sharper image as possible and the the current imaging methods needed maybe two or three minutes of imaging to get it a decent image so they would but they took a test image theory they would test image took fewer measurements the standard reconstruction didn't work very well so they tried a newly construction method hoping to get a slight improvement mm-hmm and what they do what did they end up doing when they ran the simulation for the first time the the reconstructed image look almost perfectly like they would you know using only that maybe a tenth the measurements that we thought was more necessary and but they couldn't explain why and so Emmanuel came to me and said I've got this funny result and he was able to translate this problem which was very practical into a problem about a very mathematical problem about random matrices actually and I looked at this in said that this can't be right you if so little data and you're getting such a perfect reconstruction so I actually spend the night trying to disprove then trying to kid trying to show that what he was saying could possibly work but then I found I keep that ik that there was a explanation why this was happening and so we started working together and yeah and now actually yeah we have we have algorithms that can speed up memorize my factor 5 or 10 it's the only practical thing I've ever done it's funny you know people don't I I don't normally think of mathematics as being collaborative but how does that happen is it did you just do you go to conferences do you Skype people do you seek out advice by people working in some area that you need advice on all of the above yeah it's it's changed a lot cockers culturally I think maybe 50 years ago it was definitely a very individual competitive environment people raised to be the first to prove a theorem were very jealous of all this it had my partial progress they would keep it to themselves right and they tape you will wait until you know your papers were published before sharing them too much and it was yeah but but now it's it's it's changed I think the nature of mathematics has changed I mean the problems we face and much more interdisciplinary naturally we need more collaboration but plus collaboration so much easier now with the internet most of my co-authors out are in other universities or overseas and and it's just much more fun actually to collaborate the fun that word keeps coming up oh yeah yeah so this is the global brain at work I guess right yeah yeah no I really feel like I'm part of a have a international community yeah so I'm gonna I'm gonna ask everyone this but we'll keep you keep with you so what what are you working on now what's your next thing what do you what's your current obsess it keeps changing I don't know often what I'm working on next year or the year after plans of the they always get derailed by events one thing I'm working on now actually is to study a set of equations called navier-stokes equations that govern the evolution of fluids and it's a long-standing open question in mathematics whether these equations they can ever develop solutions which are smooth initially but develop singularities like maybe could I create fluids which which are putting infinite velocity in finite time which can't happen physically and what I would mean is that these equations are not actually a good model for for their actual physics and so this has been a long-standing question for some time but I think now there is a chance to create to show that this is actually possible that they have a carefully constructed solution of a fluid you can actually make us a self-replicating machine so if the configuration of fluid which which turns itself into into a smaller version itself richness open to an even smaller faster version itself and within a finite amount of time it actually creates a singularity but to do that I have to make a machine just basically do mechanical engineering out of pure water which I don't know how to do yet everybody has an idea it'll be available we're looking at you know what the amazing things I can actually kind of understand that thank you you're very very clear explanation so we haven't we haven't we haven't talked to you in a while I want to ask you the same thing you you you did this you did this really great work and so what are you doing now what have you done for us lately so right after we had seen this surprising result that the universe is accelerating the theorists went to town trying to explain what could possibly cause the universe to speed up in a substantial gravity would tend to slow you would expect and in fact I was noticing that the that there's been a paper a theoretical paper published every 24 hours for the past 16 years or an average trying to explain this and if you ask the theorists you know do you stand by this theory well cheerfully said you know no I'm just trying to expand the range of possibilities the bowls back in your court the you know the observer is the experimentalists you've got to give us a little bit more of a clue to go on as some of the properties of this rice perhaps dark energy if that's what it is or well what else is going on in the universe so we've been the whole community now has really dived into this question of can we develop new techniques for measuring in much much more detail than we did before things like the history of the expansion of the universe these different theories of dark energy if that's what it is predict very slightly different very slightly different histories of the expansion so we need to make that kind of measurement 20 times more precise than we did before and that's going on now with work for I've been involved in the supernova side of that story and for example just just yesterday or last night I guess we were expecting data in from the Hubble Space Telescope that would last to make the measurement much much further one the way the dad didn't come I was asking Adam you're why why we weren't getting our data yesterday and and then there's just a few other techniques on the table because it's a very difficult thing to measure other colleagues here in the in the in the room I've been working on problems techniques to measure the clumping of stuff in the universe the actual material in the universe that forms the galaxies and the clusters of galaxies and that clumping also can tell you about perhaps these different theories of why the acceleration so those are the games that we're now we're not playing so what is it involved to get to increase by 20 times the the sensitivity of these medinet measurements I mean do you do that by yourself or do you have teams of engineers working out or what what I mean these are all again I mean the the you know the projects that we did before we're collaborations of you know 30 you know 20 or 30 people the next projects are collaborations of that size and larger so part of the problem is you know I've one collaboration now that's trying to calibrate the supernovae much much more precisely so you can tell use them as these distance measuring yardsticks with much much more detail than before so that's a project uh international project you know France Germany you know involved Sweden but the there's another angle which is going requiring from more people we've been develop a Space Telescope that would be like the Hubble Space Telescope but with a field of view 100 times bigger several hundreds on it's bigger and that's obviously a project that will end up you know needing you know the whole infrastructure of a of a space a project and so you know that one we were already working with teams of you know 100 people so that's gonna cost a lot of money so what's the payoff here well so this is the classic issue of fundamental science right which no wonder the whole points in this prize which is the fact that you know we do not understand why it is that over and over again you know magically when you learn something really deep about how the world works somehow it makes us more more capable and I don't think anybody could have possibly guests you know it for example in my field that if you began trying to study questions like kind steins theory of general relativity asks you know about the what happens when clocks travel near the speed of light that I would ever possibly would be a practical you know something you could sell you know and yet turns out that you know nowadays we rely on our GPS systems all of us are you know we probably are here today in this room literally because we walked we followed our GPS is - I would still be driving around and and that depends crucially on things like the fact that generality gives you the corrections it would you would miss you know by genetic you know the plane would miss the runway if you if your GPS didn't use mine Stein's theory Jen relativity but clearly if you'd asked Einstein at that time you know so what do you know why are you doing this you know how's it possible that I help anybody he probably would not have I'm sure he would not have been able to tell you what it was someday at I was to do so you wouldn't want him writing the grants the grant application I think you know to this day when people ask us you know what are we doing with dark energy it's very hard to argue that this should be you know why we sponsoring this in the Department of Energy you know in the United States it's you know clearly we don't really expect that tomorrow it's going to solve an energy crisis even if three-quarters of the universe might turn out to be made out of dark energy that we don't think it's practical in that way but we think that the what you learn about the underlying physics of the universe may turn out someday to allow us to descend we never could have done any other way dark energy sounds like I'd make a great weapon I would think yeah well yeah the dark side of the universe it's neither okay what about you guys are you right now the this technique that you devised that you are you engaged in in refining it working on it have you moved on what are you up to well so in my lab I would say really we're doing two things one is trying to understand actually how it works I think it's quite quite an amazing thing to think of a protein and a little piece of RNA that's able to seek out in a sequence in this human genome and recognize it specifically and allow cells to make a change at that site so we'd really want to understand the molecular process by which that happens and actually Sam Sternberg who's a graduate student in my lab has been one of the people in my lab really driving forward that effort he's actually here today and the other direction we're going in is I think everybody appreciates this is a going to be a very or is already a very powerful technology for genome engineering and in all sorts of different systems and so one of the things that I did with a lot of help from our Dean Steve Martin who's here and others at Berkeley Graham Fleming of course and Penn Haute who's also here is to establish the innovative genomics initiative which is a joint project between UC Berkeley and UCSF we were fortunate to recruit Jacob corn from Genentech to be our scientific director he's also here today and was there last night and the the goal is really to look for opportunities not only to continue to do great basic science and sort of bringing together basic research at Berkeley with clinical researchers at UCSF but also to figure out exciting ways to partner with companies and so we've already been able to establish two very important relationships with companies AstraZeneca is one of them and we're looking for opportunities to move this forward in the future and I think we heard earlier from our leadership that this is clearly an important direction for the future of research and the question that was asked by Wendy a student you know this is I think one of the ways that we're gonna fund basic research going forward is to look for ways to partner with companies and look for opportunities that you know really bring together best of what both have to offer great what about you Manuel yes so we are continuing also understanding the molecular mechanism of caste 9 focusing on the biochemistry which was actually our initial focus try to understand a little bit the details of the biochemistry of the mechanism and also was here because I moved to Germany relatively recently so I have established a number of collaborations in the the regenerative medicine field and also involved in you know in a biotech company and working together with with pharma to develop further the technology for the purposes of using the technology to treat human diseases so you're really following this into an applications phase yes partly horribly that was my lab is really focused mainly on other mechanisms molecular mechanisms involved in the interaction between bacteria and the human host and so we are looking at different pathways and I really want to pursue this research because I just hoped from its new interesting discoveries and and to have the chance to hit in the future yeah interesting pathways I'm not sure whether I think it will be very challenging to hit a molecular pathway that can have so much applications as Chris podcast 9 but at least in the anti-infective field I think it's very important to pursue a fundamental research right to try to so how is it how has it changed your life to find to find something that has this vast practical benefit because there's now you know you know now you know it sounds like that's become a whole a whole big bandwagon now and and does that so is there a tension between that and the basic research you still want to do or yeah for me I think it's let's put it that way when you do research you never know what you're going to find and you never know what kind of applications it will lead to I just think that for me provides me confidence and I think to my team as well to just pursue the research and to be confident that sometimes it may take some years and sometimes it's also important to maybe try to connect different aspects that are not logically to be connected and that yeah and that one can can be successful and and discover well success is very good for the confidence that's that's good so what what what how do you feel about the the way that CRISPR is perceived by the general public there's been a lot written about it some people worrying about what the you know I mean there the benefits but also some of the misuses of potential misuses of it do you think about that does that affect you do you do you have any any piñas I'm not asking both of you well I would say you know for me I think that's a very good point one of the things that's happened is that this technology has taken off so quickly I mean certainly faster than I think either of us could have could have anticipated that it means that it's kind of out in front of where regulatory agencies might be thinking and and even scientists you know how do you how do how do we use this safely and effectively and so I think that's actually one of the goals of the IGI that we established between our campuses is to think about this you know so the bioethics around this we have an upcoming meeting that includes very prominent people from around the country to come together and really have a day of brainstorming about this and thinking about it and I don't think any of us have alright I certainly know I don't have the answers for that right now but I think it's an important conversation to have and I think it gets to your point about how CRISPR is being portrayed in the media how people are learning about it I feel that it's very important to communicate this science to lay audience to the public and I think you know I'm really grateful to you're a donor and the breakthrough prize folks before putting together the kinds of documentary little film clips that we saw last night and that will be shown I've you know broadcast in the future because I think this is a great way to educate people about the science and maybe get them interested to look into it more or at least to understand the basics of what it's doing yeah so I mean you know so that you know the downsides you know they're the potential dependent potential abuse is that it makes it makes it possible to do things that now could you know takes a big lab and lots of expertise perhaps that doesn't take quite as big a lab and quite as much expertise and that that has a potential for abuse but a lot of a lot of technologies that have we've greatly benefited from over the years have had this same have been two-edged swords as well and and and we deal with them by discussing it and and trying to get out trying to get out ahead of it ethics wise so I think that's I mean I think it's important to say that yeah ok so well I you know we've got a few minutes and we've got microphones around I thought maybe perhaps someone would like to ask a question I can do this all day but you guys are pretty smart you have any hands should I keep going there's a microphone coming for you and please tell us who you are I'm Suzanne Pfeffer Stanford University School of Medicine I just just to be clear for the audience who don't use that cast line technology so people really understand what it can do and that it's nothing to be scared of at all this is an ability for scientists in using a cell line that we study in the laboratory to make a change to fix a genetic mutation that may cause a disease the question that we're hearing about in the future is that the ability to take an embryo perhaps and correct a disease before the baby is born or just to be very explicit so there's nothing to be scary scared of today nothing to fear the technology today but it could be incredibly useful in the future to treat disease also maybe even in a particular tissue we already can use other kinds of technology in the eye to cure diseases of the eye and it may be able to be used locally so I just was hoping you could explain a little bit more clearly some of the bioethics questions that you just raised so that there we shouldn't be concerned this is powerful technology for the future that will help a lot of pace patients we hope that's a great question I mean I guess the point that I would make Suzanne you know and thanks for bringing that up I think is that you know what what I think people need to appreciate is that it really is a very powerful technology it really means that scientists now with you know anybody who in science who has training and molecular biology we've we've had you know even high school students come to the lab over the summer and with a few within a few weeks they are editing human cells they're cultured in the in the laboratory right so there's that so it's very simple to use and and doesn't require a lot of it you know expense or expertise but it's also very powerful technology and so as you alluded to I think you know the kinds of research experiments that you just described are fantastic and many labs around the world are already doing this I think the challenge going forward is thinking about you know what about you know engineering human embryos is that a direction that you know Sciences should go wants to go and if yes then what kinds of genetic mutations should be corrected should should it be anything goes or should there be some thoughtful you know approach to how we might do that so that's what I would say yeah it's not to be afraid of but it's definitely something that it's very powerful and I think that there needs to be widespread appreciation for that and it's the technologies that the biology and medicine fields are going to profit a lot at it's changing a lot the face of biology because a number of scientists working on on different model organisms including human cells were not really able to manipulate genes in a simple way and now they can manipulate gene so they can really understand the functions of those genes so this is after the area of sequencing all those genes and figuring out the genetic code then what what other genes doing so since the technology is very transformative at this level and then it's transformative in the medical field because beyond the fact that the technology itself can be used as a as a tool to treat human genetic disorders it can really be extremely helpful to create these models of of diseases that are extremely crucial for the farmer to understand our drugs are working and also in terms of screening for new drugs and it's also important for all the engineering of proteins antibodies and also in the ad bio field so it's it's a very broad technology and I think before to see the negative side era so so many positive output that I think it's important to focus on those ok great right here we have a microphone over there in the pitch Johnson local venture capitalists in a graduate of Palo Alto High School but I wanted to ask a question that just came up in the previous discussion the rewards in science especially in science but in all disciplines if are the deep drillers you for our deep drillers in your subject and you go down as and you discover things but the connecting the deep drilling connecting things in one this one to the next has never been rewarded at least highly by a khadeem do you see any signs of that happening do you anticipate any change so that the connectors of deep of a site of different parts of science and other disciplines are going to be rewarded or an important part of academic academia the connectors one place where I see some motion in that direction came up early in the previous discussion is this area of one of the commonalities of mainly science is now and in fact some math you describing is the data science areas and we've recently started seeing you know attempts to get a chance for people to take advantage of the fact that across the whole campus at a university for example at Berkeley you know there are people who are that is with a real skill set in whatever subject domain they're in they're doing the best in the data analysis side of it and that they can learn from each other and work across the campus much more fluidly than people in you know in other areas with other kinds of expertise so at least it you know some of the campuses now you're beginning in the Universities you're beginning to see the desire to reward that and to find ways to you know give long term positions permanent you know faculty positions that would be able to bridge in that particular way where previously people might have thought that oh you know that person that physicist they're their computer scientist that person is not a computer scientist a physicist now there's they're starting to try there's now an interest in trying to find ways to support those inter connecting people who are able to bridge many fields interesting it's just beginning in some cases you I think already started a while ago to to connect with other disciplines I mean biophysics I mean physics has been integrated in medicine physics is also integrated all the mathematical models now for all the interactions the molecular interaction the new molecular interaction that are discovered so I think I already shown some interconnection bio computational analysis so but but clearly it can be developed further certainly in mathematics is the culture has changed dramatically I mean it used to be that each field subject mathematics was a sort of silo of specialized knowledge and they were almost proud there are some some people in and if you want to be proud that what they're doing is incomprehensible even to other mathematicians but you know now it's I mean if if they find that something they do it is of interest to say life scientists or a linguist or something yeah this is very exciting and and the culture has changed a lot and you know UCLA where I work we have a whole Institute the Institute for pure mathematics we just devoted pretty much to to fostering these connections actually that if we have these programs which are deliberately designed to span a wide spectrum of of expertise from pure math applied math and sciences and even the social sciences we had I think a program on them on the mathematics of a heart and so we had we had cardiologists and and we had we had we had apologists a whole spectrum of people so you know I think the culture is really moving in the inter disciplinary action great and I know a lot of university librarians and educators publishers like or Marr sister company nature are working on ways of of being the glue that that or the connective tissue between scientists or collaborating across disciplines any other questions here we go um hello my name is Libby Willis I am a graduate student at UC Berkeley and this is directed a little bit towards Tarun so though you kind of touched on this already but you know even if you think of how this panel discussion is gone what yo study does seem pretty you know unreachable or let you know esoteric even for a lot of us here you're a scientist and mathematics often seems kind of scary to most people especially younger kids and so how do you foresee you know reaching out to you know younger people or you know either college students or high school students who may be good at math but you know what you're studying just doesn't seem you know attainable or even like able to process so how do you foresee reaching out and kind of spreading math knowledge and what you do well that's that's the great problem right yeah I think yes it's true that that my discipline has done a much worse job than the physicists and the life scientists for selling what we do they're making it accessible to the public I mean you know partly we can justify because we work on things that are more inherently more abstract but we can certainly do more I think I think I was suggested earlier we really should have much more of an emphasis every sort of as part of a folk academic career we should do more public outreach in fact you know so I would I do public lectures I often rather than talk about pure mathematics I often talk about how mathematics is used in the sciences it's being more accessible how they the public lecture I'm most given the most often a key is on the cosmic distance ladder which I sell as a way of using mathematics to measure the universe and yeah because then I can leverage all the lovely pictures and data and and one of the things that that because it's so practical well it's more practical than than most of what I do so yeah but that's yes oh yeah you have to be maybe a bit more creative in mathematics than in in the sciences to to just sell what you do but I think it can't be done I guess I would just add to that so it so I'm obviously not a mathematician but I have a twelve-year-old son who is very very interested in math loves math and what we've found so he goes to public school in Berkeley and you know he is sort of beyond you know what is being done in his classroom right now as are some of the other kids and one of the great things that's happened and I wonder if this is happening elsewhere too but at Berkeley several math professors got together and they actually started a an evening math club they call it math circle for kids and this is incredibly popular I would say there are probably hundreds of kids that come to this every Tuesday night at Berkeley and these these professors do they teach these kids they do it just you know for no pay and they they just come up with really fun creative sort of little games that the kids do and every time I and I picked my son up after math circle and I asked him you know how was it tonight he's always really excited like mom today we learned about topology or you know whatever right and it's really great to see and so I think that through those kinds of outreach things it doesn't cost a lot and you know it's really a way to engage kids in the world of in this case mathematics where they feel like it's fun and you know it's about problem-solving and puzzles you know my son goes to math circle at UCLA too and and it's very very popular I know it so there's a huge untapped demand for this you know their weight in fact we're scrambling to find enough postdocs and students to teach you know ya know that that is certainly a great outreach to us this is great I think we're running a little over here so we're gonna have to cut it short but I want to thank you all for listening and I want to especially thank our really wonderful and panel of brilliant scientists who've to come out and talk with us about what they do thank you let's give it in this give [Applause] so the first of all thank you so much to the breakthrough Prize foundation for the incredible recognition provided to these wonderful scholars Thank You Fred for your great job of moderating that moderating the two panels we were delighted at Stanford to host this event but it couldn't have happened without a really great partnership between the breakthrough foundation and UCSF and Berkeley and Stanford and thank you to the this wonderful audience for joining us today you are welcome to stay for coffee and tea out in the Ford gardens as this room will be prepared for the Life Sciences symposium which starts at 11:00 you're also welcome to join the mathematics symposia which will take place at Bechtel conference center which is about a block and a half away that direction or the physics symposium that will take place at the correct table hall in Gunn C / building which is a little bit around the corner those begin at all three symposia begin at 11:00 and they run throughout the day until 5 o'clock and box lunches will be provided at the symposia a schedule of talks and directions to into each symposium are available at your tables and at the check-in desk at the lobby so once again thank you all for joining us it was a great morning [Applause]

Channel: Breakthrough

Views: 31,635

Rating: 4.939394 out of 5

Keywords: Terence Tao, Jennifer Doudna, Saul Perlmutter, Scientific American (Magazine), Fred Guterl, Breakthrough Prize

Id: VMlBzXdCtIc

Length: 47min 47sec (2867 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 04 2014