Night Science
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
Night Science
4 | Oded Rechavi: biology’s Indiana Jones
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Oded Rechavi, Professor of Radical Science at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Having watched Indiana Jones as a kid, Oded jumped on the opportunity to sequence the DNA of the skins on which the dead sea scrolls were written, figuring out how different fragments fit together. Inspired by Michael Crichton’s book Prey, he uses parasitic worms to deliver drugs into the brain. To add more creativity to a project, he always involves someone from a distant field. Listen to this episode to hear why he thinks PhD training is the best time to do night science!
Oded’s lab challenges basic dogmas regarding inheritance and evolution, using simple powerful genetic model organisms. In particular, his lab has shown that when challenged, worms synthesize small RNAs that they give to their progeny to regulate genes, resulting in heritable changes several generations down the road. Oded’s lab is also developing useful parasites, investigating the neuronal basis of rational decision-making, and tries to do as many crazy experiments as possible.
For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org.
Oded: I think that the best thing you can do is talk with very different people and try hard to think how you can work together, despite the fact that supposedly these are two different fields.
Martin: Welcome to the Night Science Podcast.
Itai: Where we explore the untold story of the scientific creative process.
Martin: We are your hosts.
Itai: I'm Itai Yanai.
Martin: And I am Martin Lercher.
Itai: Oded, I haven't talked to you in like endless amounts of years.
Itai: It doesn't seem that way to me though, because I follow you on Twitter.
Oded: I apologize in advance for that.
Itai: All right, let's do this.
Itai: So today, we're so fortunate to have Oded Rechavi with us.
Itai: Oded is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Tel Aviv University.
Itai: Oded has an inordinate fondness for Tel Aviv University, I would say, because he did all of his degrees there as well.
Itai: He started out with his bachelor's degree at the interdisciplinary program in neuroscience.
Itai: He also did his PhD there with biochemist Yoel Kloog.
Itai: And after his PhD, he went to take a bite out of the Big Apple.
Itai: He went to New York City, did a postdoc with Oliver Hobert at Columbia.
Itai: That's where I'm assuming he fell in love with the nematode C. elegans and started to study the notion of intergenerational inheritance.
Itai: So it's this kind of ancient concept that originally received a sort of bad name through being dubbed Lamarckian and being pretty dubious if acquired characteristics could be passed on.
Itai: But Oded took on this challenge.
Itai: He then went back to Tel Aviv, started his lab, called it the Laboratory for Radical Science, and basically started to establish the principles by which this RNA inheritance occurs.
Itai: And Oded's work is very interdisciplinary.
Martin: One example of that is a study that he did recently of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Martin: These are , fragments of parchment that were discovered mainly in caves around the archeological site.
Martin: And most of the fragments were collected from art dealers.
Martin: So it's not clear for all of them where they came from originally.
Martin: And so what Oded and his lab did is they sequenced the DNA from the animal skins on which the scrolls were written.
Martin: And this allowed them to distinguish between fragments that originated from different animals.
Martin: And in this way, they could assign fragments to different scrolls and even to different geographic origins.
Martin: And both of this is very important in the interpretation of these scrolls, which could be called the most significant archeological discovery of the st century.
Martin: Oded is what we would call a true night scientist.
Martin: And in part, maybe this follows from the fact that his first love was art.
Martin: After his compulsory military service, he lived in Paris soaking in the art world there.
Martin: And a few years ago, he tweeted, I would like to organize a conference of all the scientists I like on Twitter.
Martin: And this led to a Woodstock of biology conference in Tel Aviv, which was hugely popular.
Itai: And Oded, we noticed that on your website, you preface the list of publications with a quote from a Bruce Springsteen song, “You can't start a fire without a spark”.
Itai: And one can't help but recognize that the fire may be day science, the spark may be night science.
Itai: And that's what we want to talk to you today.
Itai: So hi, Oded, thanks for joining us.
Oded: Hi, thanks a lot for inviting me.
Martin: Oh, it's great to have you here.
Martin: So actually, Itai's interpretation of this Bruce Springsteen quote, is that how you would see it as well?
Martin: Or what's the spark for you?
Martin: What's the fire?
Oded: I think the spark could be pretty much anything.
Oded: The spark here that I was talking about is maybe not necessarily the idea, but a small step towards understanding or even towards asking questions that weren't asked before.
Oded: So, for example, if we're talking about transgenerational inheritance, I think that the spark is the work being done not only by us, but by many scientists now in C. elegans nematodes, and this will hopefully lead to a fire that catches also other organisms and researchers that study this from different angles.
Oded: This is what I meant because this transgenerational inheritance topic is currently best understood in worms and in other organisms there are many examples for it, but it is less clear how it happens.
Oded: So that was a spark I was talking about, but it could be any spark.
Oded: It could be the idea that sparks a research project or a small discovery that seems very weird at first, but will be elucidated over many years of research.
Martin: Yeah, but let's start at the beginning.
Martin: How did you become interested in biology?
Oded: That's actually a very interesting question because I wasn't interested in biology at all.
Oded: I also didn't study biology in high school.
Oded: So after the army, as you said, I wanted to be an artist.
Oded: And when I was in Paris, as you told in the introduction, I started looking also because, you know, I'm from a conventional house, not from a house of artists.
Oded: So I was looking at the brochure of the university to see what can I study in parallel to justify, you know, my existence.
Oded: Because I'm really not from a Bohemian family in any way.
Oded: And then I was interested in other things.
Oded: I was interested in philosophy.
Oded: I read philosophy books.
Oded: I thought maybe this is what I will study.
Oded: And I was interested also in psychology, which are things that maybe are more closely related to art.
Oded: But then I thought when I come back to Israel, maybe I'll combine some studies of art and these topics, because I knew I'm not just going to be an artist.
Oded: I had to go to the university because of...
Itai: Do something proper.
Oded: Right, to conform.
Oded: But then there was a program in the university for neuroscience, which was psychology, philosophy, and also biology and some brain science, more closely related to medicine even.
Oded: So I signed into this program just because it seems more cutting the edge or more challenging.
Oded: And when I did it, I discovered very fast that biology is the most interesting part.
Oded: And I created a lot also to my PhD advisor, Yoel Kloog, and I worked in his lab already as an undergrad.
Oded: And I think that he had a big part in pushing me towards biology and also in giving me the courage to try new things and to dare.
Oded: I don't know, Itai, if you know him, but whatever you tell him you want to study, he would say, great, do it.
Itai: I didn't know him.
Itai: I feel like I really missed out.
Itai: Tell us, how would a discussion with him go?
Oded: I don't remember even how I thought of it, but I had this hypothesis about how prions work.
Oded: This was really like talking as an undergrad.
Oded: So he said, okay, great, go study prions.
Oded: We actually studied human prions, which required a dedicated lab with the proper safety measures and all kinds of crazy things like that, although his lab wasn't related to this at all.
Oded: By the way, the way that the discussion with him work is that you get into his tiny office, although he was an important man, he was the dean and so on.
Oded: He had a super small office where he smoked.
Oded: He would stay there hours, I'm not exaggerating.
Oded: He would smoke there and you would get out totally fried after hours.
Oded: But it was sort of a creative process.
Oded: He only drank black coffee and smoked for days.
Oded: It was stimulating, you know.
Itai: It seems like he was pretty fearless.
Itai: Maybe you became fearless by proxy if you just mentioned something like...
Oded: He was totally fearless.
Oded: He would not take no as an answer.
Oded: For example, when I started doing this project with him as an undergrad, he never left me and I'm happy for that, but he never left me a choice of whether I join his lab as a PhD student or not.
Oded: You're in and that's it.
Oded: I learned a lot from him.
Oded: Also, the way that he gives the student a lot of freedom to do what the student wants and I'm trying to do the same.
Oded: I'm not micromanaging anyone.
Itai: I have to admit it's inspiring to hear of a professor who would sit down with an undergraduate, talk about something that lab has never done and just encourage it and say, yes, go do it.
Itai: It's not commonly done.
Oded: Also, my PhD project started.
Oded: Yoel worked on Ras Signaling.
Oded: It was a signaling lab and he developed a drug for inhibiting Ras.
Oded: But when I was an undergrad in this lab, I took an immunology class.
Oded: And this immunology class, you know, it's really basic immunology, the most basic that there is.
Oded: And they talked about NK cells and the perforins that they use to perforate the targeted cell membrane.
Oded: So I had the super naive hypothesis that maybe when you perforate the other cell's membrane, other proteins will spill out and move to the NK cell.
Oded: So I told Yoel, and he said, sure, go study this.
Oded: And it doesn't happen like that.
Oded: But we did discover that when immune cells form immunological synapses with other cells, they exchange many proteins that are otherwise not secreted.
Oded: They exchange them with them because of this close proximity and these membrane bridges that form and exosomes that are being secreted at a very close proximity in the synapse, in the synapse.
Oded: But this is how it started, and again, it's totally unrelated to what Yoel does, and he's not an immunologist, but still he said that he will do it.
Itai: I mean, my sort of inference from Yoel Kloog's method is that it doesn't maybe matter so much what you start with.
Itai: The point is just to start.
Itai: The point is, okay, you have a hypothesis.
Itai: That's great.
Itai: You know, go.
Itai: If that motivates you to get going, sure, go do it.
Itai: But the real interesting thing will happen when you start looking and testing, and then hopefully you'll find something even more interesting.
Itai: Right.
Oded: And also the important thing in this method is that you go with the excitement of the student.
Itai: Exactly.
Oded: You can put the student on the project, but if he is not or she is not excited about it, then nothing will work probably.
Oded: But as long as they come with full force, that's the important part.
Martin: Yeah.
Martin: But I think still there must be some secret to how to get from some data that you collected to test your original hypothesis to move on to some new ideas.
Martin: Like you said, it wasn't the way you originally expected it to be, but you found something really interesting instead.
Martin: So is there something special that you supervisor did or something that you find yourself doing?
Oded: Right.
Oded: I totally agree with you.
Oded: So for example, I think that the example that I gave is pretty good how it happened because I hypothesized that these NK cells perforate other cells and maybe take up proteins that are otherwise not secreted.
Oded: And the only protein I could check easily as an undergrad was Ras, because that's what you all studied.
Oded: So I had cells that express GFP-tagged Ras.
Oded: And Ras, there are different types of Ras proteins, but some of them go to the nucleus and also move very dynamically in the lab.
Oded: So it made sense that maybe they can be transferred.
Oded: And then I put these cells with immune cells, which were marked with a fluorophore, and I saw that I can separate the two cells and get cells that are doubly stained, even after separation.
Oded: So I thought maybe it's working, but I teamed up with an immunologist, Itamar Goldstein, and that was crucial, who actually knew what he was doing.
Oded: And so he, for example, gave us NK cells that don't have perforin.
Oded: And then we saw that it still works.
Oded: So part of the thing is teaming up with people who are specialists and reading more and learning the subject, but it's a big advantage sometimes coming as a totally naive person to the field and asking questions that people would otherwise not ask.
Oded: And then you dig and you become an expert and your hypothesis become more solid, but also more boring.
Itai: Is that something that you sort of consciously do when you start a project?
Itai: You realize, okay, this is kind of crazy, but you know what would make this less crazy is if we also include an expert in that field and do it as a collaboration.
Oded: Absolutely.
Oded: I do it all the time.
Oded: And I think I probably should.
Oded: It's a good idea not to we're speaking about it.
Oded: I probably should do some non-experts to my field of expertise now because I feel like I'm becoming more boring when it comes to transgenerational inheritance.
Itai: That's funny.
Oded: But yes, I'm trying to come naively to different fields and see what happens.
Oded: That's very important.
Oded: By the way, also in the Dead Sea Scroll project that you mentioned, we can tell the whole story if you want.
Itai: Tell us the story, the real story, not what was published.
Oded: Okay.
Martin: Well, hopefully there's an intersection between those two stories.
Oded: A good intersection.
Oded: But first I'll tell you how it started, which is very important and relevant to your show.
Oded: Using genetics to assemble the Dead Sea Scrolls is very weird.
Oded: The way that it happened is totally by chance.
Oded: I just started as a new faculty in the university in .
Oded: And it was, I believe, in the first month, really, really in the beginning, they had in the university a retreat for new faculty.
Oded: And in this two-day retreat, I sat on the bus next to a person, Noam Mizrahi.
Oded: Now he's a professor.
Oded: Back then, neither of us were professors.
Oded: And we sat next to each other on the bus in a very short trip, probably minutes on our way to it.
Oded: And on the way, we started talking.
Oded: Noam is a great person to speak with.
Oded: You should talk with him.
Oded: It's really amazing.
Oded: And each of us started telling what he studies.
Oded: And he told me about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Oded: I told him about the worms, C. elegans, nematodes.
Oded: And he said, you know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were also worms.
Oded: They dug holes in the parchment.
Oded: And actually, there was a person that tried to use these holes that the worms dug to try to understand how to assemble the scrolls.
Oded: Because the scroll is, if you imagine that you open it, you should have some continuity between the different pores.
Oded: So I told him, yeah, maybe we can also use other clues.
Oded: And he said, yeah, in the s, some people even tried to extract DNA from the scrolls.
Oded: So I said, yes, we can sequence them now.
Oded: The technology is totally different.
Oded: And try to use genetic similarity, just like the police do, to identify a killer, to piece the different pieces together.
Oded: And then we left, and we talked about it some more.
Oded: And then the retreat ended.
Oded: And then I sent him an email after a few days and said, maybe we should do it.
Oded: We didn't know that it will actually happen.
Oded: And then started a long process of just getting the approvals to do it from the research antiquity people.
Itai: Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you.
Itai: How in the world did you get approval to cut up these?
Itai: I mean, of course, you didn't destroy them.
Itai: In the paper, you say you took a little crumbs that even naturally fell off them.
Oded: Right.
Oded: We couldn't cut them.
Oded: We had to use tiny, tiny pieces, and we can't touch them.
Oded: It's the people there that were in the conservation that scrape off a little bit of dust from the uninscribed side of their scroll.
Oded: But it was a long process to get the approval.
Oded: I met with the minister.
Oded: It was a big deal, but it happened.
Oded: And then we started playing with it.
Oded: And because it's such a weird project that I also didn't have funding for at the time, I used my startup money in the beginning.
Oded: I couldn't have a student that this is their PhD work or something.
Oded: That's too risky.
Oded: So I started giving it to, you know, undergrads or people that do it on the side, and my lab manager, Sarit, who did most of the work.
Oded: But we weren't really all in.
Oded: And it didn't work because it's very difficult to do, to sequence DNA from such tiny amounts.
Oded: And then I gave, after a few years, a few years passed, I gave a talk in Uppsala University in Sweden.
Oded: And you know, when you give a talk, they give you a schedule of the people that you'll meet from the faculty there.
Oded: And one of the people that came to meet me, he came to meet me in the cafeteria, ended up being our collaborator and an ancient DNA scholar, Mattias Jakobsson, was one of the leaders in ancient DNA.
Oded: And then he was very excited about it.
Oded: So Sarit went to his lab for a few months.
Oded: He went back and forth to do the materials there.
Oded: And then it started working.
Oded: So this was totally by chance how the whole thing happened.
Oded: And this is something that you can't plan, I think.
Itai: You know, like one big fear I have is that now that we're almost a year into the COVID period, all these kinds of chance occurrences are occurring much, much less.
Itai: Don't you think?
Oded: I totally agree.
Oded: That's a real shame.
Oded: Even people within your lab, it's not the same to talk with them on Zoom or something.
Oded: And I believe also if we talk, if we sat in Yoel’s smoky room now, Right.
Oded: But no, that's not important, but it will be back.
Oded: It's a matter of time, but we will be back.
Martin: So how did the project continue from there?
Oded: So then we sequenced more and more samples.
Oded: It wasn't this project where you just, you know, we do some analysis and then we send them to Noam to make sense of it.
Oded: We sat with Noam the whole time.
Oded: By the way, in the first clustering of the samples that we did when we had the whole set, we didn't even know what each sample was.
Oded: Noam was the only person who knew the identity of the sample, because all the, you know, Q, H fragment is called Q, you know, they have names like this.
Itai: You were blinded to the results.
Oded: Right.
Oded: And then Noam told us, listen, this is amazing.
Oded: They all clustered based on whether they were written in Qumran or elsewhere.
Oded: A little bit more complicated than this, but pretty much like that.
Oded: And we sat for hours, hundreds of hours, in many places, went back and forth also to Jerusalem.
Oded: And he told us the most amazing stories about this cause, because his scholarship is really unbelievable, really incredible.
Oded: So it was a really fun project to work on.
Oded: And I kept adding more and more people to the mix, more and more researchers, and especially bioinformaticians, to deal with the scarcity of DNA in the samples and all the challenges we had.
Oded: We improved the methods a lot.
Oded: Sarit had to work in the cold of Sweden in the winters a few times.
Oded: It was an adventure, but it was the most fun collaboration I've ever had.
Oded: And I had some great collaborations that were really enjoyable.
Itai: I mean, it's a very unusual paper for the journal Cell, right?
Itai: The journal Cell usually is like the height of molecular biology and mechanisms.
Itai: And here we read sentences, and I'm quoting from your paper.
Itai: The discovery of Mass K complicated the debate about the socio-religious background of the songs.
Itai: Should it be taken as a piece of evidence that sectarians fled to Masada after the fall of Qumran or Jerusalem to the Romans?
Itai: Or does it indicate that the work was popular among circles that transcend the Qumran caves?
Itai: Very unusual.
Martin: Yeah, it doesn't sound like Cell usually does.
Oded: By the way, it's the first time into my knowledge that Cell has on the cover Hebrew letters.
Martin: Yeah, it's a beautiful cover, by the way.
Martin: I really like it.
Oded: Yeah, it's an unusual study.
Oded: And we are very happy that it was published there.
Oded: I never got so much press for a paper.
Itai: It was amazing to see all the discussions on Twitter.
Itai: I think you really inspired a lot of people.
Oded: Yeah, it inspired us.
Oded: I'm very hopeful that I'll have additional projects like that.
Martin: This is really a question we're interested in, of course.
Martin: So if you say you want to do more interesting projects like that, so how do you come up with creative ideas?
Martin: In this example, you told us it was really kind of an accident of sitting next to someone who studied that, even if you then had to pick up the ball and start doing genetics.
Martin: But do you have a conscious method or a habit that helps you to come up with good ideas?
Oded: I'm trying to trace back some of the weirder ideas that actually ended up being paper, published paper, you know, not just thoughts.
Oded: So, for example, we had a project about using Toxoplasma gondii, brain parasites, to deliver proteins to the brain.
Oded: I don't know if you know we have a preprint about it.
Itai: Oh, I saw that, yeah.
Martin: It sounds like a scary idea, actually.
Oded: It is scary, but it's less scary than you would think.
Oded: It's a very interesting project.
Oded: What we did there is we took advantage of the fact that Toxoplasma-infected individuals are mostly asymptomatic.
Oded: Although this parasite infects a lot of people, I think the estimates are a third of the world population, most people, right, it's really a lot.
Oded: In some countries, it's even higher than %, but most are asymptomatic, and the parasite reaches the brain, and then it gets cleaned by the immune system from the rest of the body, and in the brain it secretes proteins to inside neurons.
Oded: So we took advantage of that, and we fused different therapeutic proteins, or proteins that are important in different diseases, to proteins that the parasites normally secrete.
Oded: And we saw that the parasite can deliver the proteins to the neurons.
Oded: We published this as a preprint, we now also added works in mice, that showed that it also works in vivo, it's pretty amazing.
Oded: And I think it believes, when I read the book “Prey” by Michael Crichton, so ideas come from all kinds of places, there's this famous Leonard Cohen quote or sentence, “If I knew where inspiration come from, I would go there more often.”
Oded: No, this is...
Oded: We had another very interdisciplinary project about economic irrationality, that again started by me drinking coffee with the Neuroeconomist, Dino Levy, and trying to think about things that we can study together.
Oded: We each heard the other one speak in a conference and were impressed, and then we said, let's have coffee, and then two months later, we found the right opportunity in the calendar to actually meet, and then we started discussing, and this really unique project came about of studying irrationality in C. elegans, in nematodes.
Oded: So it's hard to force, but I think that the best thing you can do is talk with very different people and try hard to think how you can work together, despite the fact that supposedly these are two different fields.
Itai: And if one sort of takes the upside down of that, is you should be perhaps wary of staying within the confines of your own lab because it becomes essentially an echo chamber, right?
Itai: Everybody in your lab is sort of speaking the same language, and you may not have new ideas.
Oded: Totally.
Oded: And on the day to day, most of my coffees and lunches and so on are with people in my lab.
Oded: Most of my coffees are drank with students.
Oded: And there are advantages because you get to know your group better and they're not afraid of you, and it's nice, but it's definitely good to speak with more people.
Oded: And this doesn't happen enough in COVID times.
Oded: And I should really step out of the lab a little bit.
Martin: Yeah.
Martin: So when you talk to the people in your lab, to your students, for example, do you actually consciously mentor them for the creative part of science?
Martin: Is there something you're trying to teach them or some method you have that pushes them somewhere where they're forced to learn that?
Oded: I probably don't do it consciously, but I try to shake them a little bit by giving them new challenges and also laugh at them a little bit when they are too serious or too pessimistic or afraid to take on challenges.
Oded: A PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or try things that don't work.
Martin: Well, in the end, you have to submit a thesis, right?
Oded: Yeah, but you know, in Israel, if it's not the greatest thesis, it will be fine.
Oded: If you want to continue, you can continue.
Oded: You're not out of the game.
Oded: In the postdoc, unfortunately, if you don't have great product to show, then that's pretty bad.
Itai: Interesting.
Itai: You're kind of saying that a PhD is a time for night science and a postdoc is a time for day science.
Itai: I'd never consider that.
Oded: I think that any other point aside from the postdoc is a time for night science too.
Itai: There's this day science constraint in the middle.
Oded: You can always do day science and it's good.
Oded: I mean, and also at some point, you have to be serious, but you can be daring and take risk at any point in the career, because also again, and I'm talking as an Israeli, and Itai knows this and he will confirm what I say, I believe that also as a young PI in Israel, and it's not true elsewhere, but in Israel as a young PI, your chances of not getting tenure are low.
Oded: It happened and it's very unfortunate when it happens.
Oded: There could be many different reasons, but if you just look at the numbers, the chances are pretty good.
Oded: And in the beginning, the most important thing for success and also for life is to be excited about what you do.
Oded: Also, if you go for the other thing, you just say, I'm keeping it safe just to get tenure.
Oded: Maybe you're hurting yourself.
Oded: Maybe you lose the excitement and you end up not getting tenure just because you were too safe.
Oded: It's always good in science to do.
Martin: Yeah, but maybe you're right that as a postdoc, especially as a young postdoc, probably you're more constrained.
Martin: So maybe this really is the hourglass model of creative development as a scientist.
Oded: Right, right.
Oded: I just talked about the hourglass model today, by the way.
Oded: I just had a discussion today about this.
Itai: Oh yeah, developmental biology, like evo-devo hourglass?
Oded: No, exactly, your work.
Oded: I talked with Philip about your work on the hourglass.
Itai: Oh, cool.
Itai: Thank you.
Itai: You know, I'm interested in what you were saying about the tenure and how in Israel, because it's sort of safeguarded, it allows people to take on challenges.
Itai: But you know, when I was just starting out, I would receive these pieces of advice.
Itai: For example, Martin and I were interested in writing a book.
Itai: And people would tell me, you know what, first get tenure, then write a book.
Itai: And I said, but I want to write a book now.
Itai: Did you also get kind of like really bad advice?
Oded: I keep getting them also.
Oded: But you know, Itai, you probably don't remember, but I came to Israel as a new faculty after you.
Oded: You were there for a few years.
Itai: I remember, yeah.
Oded: And I remember talking about with you about tenure.
Oded: I remember that.
Oded: I don't know if you remember.
Itai: Did I give you bad advice?
Itai: I probably did.
Oded: I asked you about tenure.
Oded: And you said, I remember this.
Oded: I'm quoting you.
Itai: You said something.
Oded: I wish I won't get tenure.
Oded: Then I can do something else.
Martin: Yeah, I remember you said that, Itai.
Itai: We were having dinner.
Itai: I remember that.
Itai: And I actually told that to my chair who tried to stress me out.
Itai: And I said, you know what?
Itai: I don't want tenure.
Itai: I thought that was the best trick.
Martin: So, you know, when you have ideas, like for example, I mean, you're talking to other scientists all the time at conferences, right?
Martin: And I'm sure there's many different ideas that could come to you of projects you could do.
Martin: But how do you distinguish the great ideas that you get excited about from those that you think are less promising?
Oded: You definitely get many ideas in conferences.
Oded: That's one thing.
Oded: And it's difficult to distinguish them at first, the good ideas.
Oded: I think that the good ideas are the ones that you continue to think about after a month or two months.
Oded: Because in the beginning, everything is exciting, but then you do a Google search and you see that this doesn't make sense.
Oded: So if you continue to be fascinated by it after a month, then it's a good idea.
Oded: It's only trial and error.
Itai: It's like natural selection, natural selection of ideas.
Itai: You just have lots of ideas and see which one survived.
Oded: There's no other way, I think.
Itai: You know what's interesting about what you just said is that it sort of implies this distinction between your conscious mind and the unconscious mind, because presumably the reason why you're still thinking about it is something subconsciously happening, and then all of a sudden you're aware, oh my God, I keep thinking about this, so there may be something to it.
Oded: Yeah, yeah, I didn't think about it, but yes, I think you're right.
Oded: And there's something also in the idea that talks to you specifically that is interesting to you and you don't know why.
Oded: So like in the Dead Sea Scrolls projects, another person might have been bored by it or something, now becoming a biblical scholar.
Oded: And to me, it talked to me perhaps because I watched the Indiana Jones as a kid or something.
Oded: I don't know.
Oded: But there's something about the idea that talks to you.
Oded: And it takes a while to understand this.
Martin: Yeah, but I think it goes back to what you said earlier that, you know, to do good science, you just need to be excited about what you're doing.
Oded: Right.
Oded: And I think it's a big challenge to keep being excited.
Oded: For me, for example, this COVID period, it's challenging because I want to study new things and to be excited again.
Oded: And it's really hard when it's all so slow and via Zoom and, you know, with the kids at home.
Oded: And so it's hard to keep the same passion.
Oded: And this is a challenge.
Oded: And I know, Itai, I think you're a great example where you just move to another country and switch topics completely.
Oded: That probably gave you a new piece of excitement.
Oded: But I'm trying to see how I can do this.
Itai: A sabbatical is a dangerous idea that you might consider.
Oded: Right, right, definitely.
Itai: Something just came to my mind that the way you said that you sort of motivate students by just listening to what they're interested in, sort of like what Yoel Kloog did with you when you were a PhD student, I think that's great that that's a great way to bring someone new into science.
Itai: But there's a counter side to it, which is the imposter syndrome.
Itai: I wonder how you deal with that when you sort of recognize that a student you're working with has this notion that, oh, who am I kidding?
Itai: I can't do this.
Itai: I'm not into ancient DNA.
Itai: Who am I kidding?
Itai: How do you, what do you tell them?
Itai: Right.
Oded: That's very difficult to deal with when someone is insecure.
Oded: Yeah, I don't know.
Oded: I never constantly thought about it.
Oded: And again, it's natural selection.
Oded: This type of students that will be willing to even entertain me when I tell them that they can study something like this are probably naturally more daring and less prone to be affected by the imposter syndrome.
Oded: By the way, one of the students that worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls is a very, very critical person who always thought that everything is going to fail and nothing will come out.
Oded: And I won't tell his name, but he ended up being totally crucial.
Oded: He was unbelievably important for the project and did an amazing job, although it was difficult to handle this insecurity or this fear of nothing coming out of it.
Oded: But we did because we were a group and because it was fun.
Oded: It's a nightmare, but because we always had Noam and all these interesting stories and because we were a group and we were laughing all the time, that made it happen.
Oded: So I think that the interaction with the students should be fun, making jokes.
Oded: So, for example, like some student comes to me and she tells me, you know, I don't remember exactly, but she said, this doesn't work because of this and this and this, you know, super technical reasons.
Oded: And then I thought, oh, I mean, your problems are so, you know, what is the word?
Oded: I forgot, like terrestrial or like day-to-day, I mean.
Oded: Like technical?
Martin: Pedestrian?
Oded: Yeah, pedestrian.
Oded: It was a joke.
Oded: She knew I was laughing.
Oded: And despite the fact that she was dealing with this annoying thing for, I don't know, a week, we laughed about it.
Oded: And also, I mean, I didn't know the answer of how to help her otherwise.
Oded: You just had to figure it out.
Oded: But be understand that it's a sort of a game and we have a good job.
Oded: We are in a safe place.
Oded: We control our own hours.
Oded: We can do what interests us.
Oded: So we have a really a loophole in the world.
Oded: So even the difficult time should be taken with the perspective.
Itai: Yeah, I mean, I really feel that humor is crucial.
Itai: And, you know, the science, I feel, is so technically hard and conceptually hard.
Itai: The science is just hard.
Itai: You can go easy on the person and that's the big difference.
Oded: And we really have a good job.
Oded: I mean, people complain all the time.
Oded: And I also make these jokes on Twitter about academic life and being rejected from journals and so on.
Oded: But it's all a joke compared to what other people have to face in the real world.
Oded: It's not all so bad.
Martin: No, it's just like we're playing a game.
Oded: Right, right.
Itai: Many of your tweets constantly remind me, which I'm so grateful for, Oded, is that we really live in this world that people outside of it maybe can't understand, right?
Itai: That you say more of a comment than a question.
Itai: All of us have been in seminars or some of your comments are like a co-first author.
Itai: How do you explain outside the academic world the dynamics of co-first authors?
Itai: But we live this.
Itai: We know intricately the details from all sides.
Itai: So you really remind us that we live in this parallel universe to our other Earth inhabitants.
Martin: Oded, so far we talked mostly about ideas for new projects, like how do you come up with a new project?
Martin: But there's a lot of questions that come up in the course of an ongoing project and a lot of creativity is required to make progress when you encounter a hurdle.
Martin: So do you have any techniques, anything you typically do when you are at such a point where you're required to do some night science to just be able to continue with the project?
Oded: Yeah, I think that's a different type of creativity.
Oded: And there, for me, what works best is just endless hours of talking to the people involved and other people, and also reading, just reading a lot of literature.
Oded: This is a more technical thing, but then the ideas have to come from a more grounded state.
Oded: You just need to dig in and do the work and read and talk, talk, talk all the time.
Oded: And also write.
Oded: Sometimes you just have to write it and play with it and try to put it on paper and see how the story works and maybe there's a big hole that you've been missing and you can only see it when you organize yourself.
Oded: So that's a totally different creativity.
Oded: And I do think that this is a very creative process and it requires originality.
Oded: It's not just technical.
Oded: It's very, very creative, but it's different.
Oded: There are more boundaries and more constraints.
Oded: And the other type of creativity comes from being unconcentrated in the shower or something like this.
Oded: Here you have to stare at the words at the papers and just read and try to figure it out like a math question.
Oded: So it's different.
Itai: Oded, I have a question for you about failure and sort of like how we as scientists should relate to the concept of failure.
Itai: And, you know, probably I'm trying to think about how people may see you as a star scientist, that everything goes their way and everything they touch turns to gold.
Itai: The reality, I'm assuming, is much more complicated.
Itai: So how do you deal with that?
Itai: How do you deal with some projects not going your way?
Oded: Projects not going my way is one thing.
Oded: It's not that bad because I have many projects and I will survive if a project doesn't work.
Oded: But it's not always the case.
Oded: I mean, if you're doing a postdoc and your project doesn't work, then it's a problem.
Oded: But I deal with failures all the time.
Oded: And, you know, also in my postdoc, when I just started, I had some projects that didn't work.
Oded: And this was very frustrating and very hard.
Oded: And I remember just going to play basketball instead of coming to the lab.
Oded: And also, you know, I had applications that didn't go my way.
Oded: And I had directions that I started in the lab that ended up being nothing.
Oded: This happens all the time.
Oded: It happens more often than not.
Oded: In science, it's just a volume thing.
Oded: You just need to do many things because most don't work.
Oded: And dealing with it is very difficult.
Oded: You have to have a family or not necessarily a family, but some structure of support, other people helping you, remind you that there's life outside of the lab.
Oded: You know, I'm thinking about things that didn't work, like for my PhD, where I was so hopeful that this particular experiment will work, and I thought this will upgrade my paper so much.
Oded: In hindsight, who cares, you know.
Oded: It's years ago, and I barely remember.
Oded: But back then, or you know, you get this decision email from Nature on a Friday.
Itai: Editorial decision.
Oded: And it totally destroys you for two days, but then a week later you're laughing about it, because it's ridiculous.
Oded: So it's about perspective.
Oded: If your whole life depends on this editorial decision, then it's a problem.
Oded: So you have to have a life outside of the lab, and you have to have people that don't even know about the existence of this world, parallel universe of ours.
Oded: And this helps a lot.
Oded: And I think it's very important for students to get out and breathe a little bit.
Oded: And otherwise, if you're totally, totally consumed, then it could be devastating.
Oded: And the reason that people fail in science is that because they can't step outside.
Oded: And then a failure can break you.
Martin: I mean, one way to virtually step out is social media.
Martin: And, you know, like was already mentioned, you're very active on Twitter.
Martin: But does Twitter also play a role in your creative process?
Oded: I think it's a way to step outside, like you said, exactly like you said, and also to see that everyone is experiencing the same things.
Oded: So I can make a stupid joke on Twitter about getting off the train in Cold Spring Harbour Station instead of Syosset, and , people like it, you know.
Oded: Small detail, but still people understand it because we live in this world war.
Oded: And also creativity-wise, it's very helpful because you get a lot of data from many different people very fast, and it just flows at you, these new papers and people takes on them.
Oded: So it's sort of like a hyper-exposure experience to science, which for me is creative, for some people it's not so good, they think it's confusing.
Oded: But I think it's very helpful for me.
Itai: You know, my wife, Michal, she says that scientists tend to be, in her opinion, manic depressives, like they're always like high on an idea or they're low because something doesn't work.
Martin: Or they just got a rejection letter.
Itai: And I've heard Obama say that you should never let your highs be too high or your lows be too low.
Itai: And I think that's great, but I don't know if I can do it personally.
Itai: Can you do it?
Itai: I like my highs high.
Oded: I'm okay with highs too.
Oded: What I tell my students, it is, by the way, something that I do consciously, is I kind of celebrate the successes, like even the smaller successes.
Oded: You have an experiment that works.
Oded: So some people tell me, listen, I won't be happy until I get three repeats.
Oded: No, no, be happy now.
Itai: Be happy now.
Itai: It's champagne time.
Oded: And then be disappointed later.
Oded: It's fine.
Oded: But the rare opportunity that you pat yourself on the shoulder when something works and be happy and go celebrate.
Oded: I think it was Jonathan Hodgkin.
Oded: So maybe I'm wrong.
Oded: Itai, this interview that said that whenever he had an experiment work, he would go and buy a painting.
Oded: You know this?
Itai: That's a great idea.
Martin: He must have a fantastic collection by now.
Itai: Yeah, in my PhD, I would always take a break every time I got a good result.
Itai: This is a good time.
Itai: Before you realize it's an artifact, take a good break.
Itai: Well, Oded, I really enjoyed this conversation with you.
Itai: Martin, did you?
Martin: Well, I surely enjoyed it very much.
Martin: It was very inspiring.
Oded: Thank you very much.
Oded: It was really fun talking to you.
Oded: Thank you.