Everything Else Is Boring

FLORA LICHTMAN: The scientific poster session– this is a standard feature of scientific conferences. Picture a big hotel ballroom with rows and rows of bulletin boards. Tacked to them are shiny white printed posters.

There’s a little bit of a fifth grade science fair vibe to the whole thing, except the posters are generally less engaging and harder to make sense of. And they always kind of look the same. They’re crammed with text and technical images, which is why, when biologist Karmella Haynes decided to do something different with her poster, it was a bold choice.

You painted your scientific poster.

KARMELLA HAYNES: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Yeah, OK. Well, that was one moment where I was just– I was like, OK, I’m going to do this just to see what people say. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Here’s the setup. Karmella was wrapping up her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. She had a job offer at Arizona State. She had just submitted a paper, and it was accepted. She was riding high. So she decided to submit to present at this international synthetic biology conference, which is her field.

KARMELLA HAYNES: And I submitted an abstract. And I really, really, really, really wanted to be selected for a talk.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But instead the selection committee was like, no talk, you can do a poster.

KARMELLA HAYNES: And so now, I gotta admit, my ego– I was like, a poster? [LAUGHS] OK. OK, a poster. All right. So then I said, well, you know what? Hmm. Let me do something different with this. So–

FLORA LICHTMAN: So Karmella, who’s not only a biologist, but an accomplished painter, decided instead of going to Kinko’s, she was going to bring a 3 by 4 stretched canvas.

KARMELLA HAYNES: And then bring it with me to the conference, hang it up. And I actually had paints with me because I was working on it while I was there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And she proceeded to live paint her scientific poster, complete with intricate, accurate graphs and figures, during the conference.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I just felt like I had the freedom to just do something a little cheeky, but also in good spirit.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Here’s the thing that I noticed when I heard this story. It’s like, yeah, OK, fine. You had freedom. You could try something. It was low stakes. But Karmella, it feels to me like you’re doing this all the time–

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –whether the stakes are high or low, not to be provocative–

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –but because you want to do what you want to do.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yes. That sounds right. And how else is there to live?

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough.

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Karmella Haynes works at the cutting edge of the cutting edge. She is pioneering a new field of science at the intersection of two other new and complex fields, epigenetics and synthetic biology. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get turned on and off, and synthetic biology is building molecules to do work inside of organisms and cells and biological systems. So Karmella is engineering molecular machines that turn genes on or off or change their level of expression.

There are about a million possible applications for this kind of research, but Karmella has done a lot of work around designing her machines to thwart cancer cell growth. And she is really out there, kind of inventing a new field of science.

DAVID KATZ: The number of people who are really doing this, I mean, it’s tiny.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is David Katz, an epigenetics professor who knows Karmella and her work.

DAVID KATZ: It’s a small field. There’s a handful of people who are even trying this. And when you’re pioneering something, it’s never easy. It’s scary to go out there in front.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I kind of imagine– I’m a very visual thinker. And I kind of see the whole body of science as being like a plant.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So that stem growing taller and taller is that stepwise approach to building up knowledge. But then you’ve got those leaves, right, these little shoots that come off of the main stem that–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are you trying to be the shoot?

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yeah, I’m trying to be the shoot. [LAUGHS] I just want to be the leaf.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But that’s not an easy place to be. And so this is what I wanted to know. What propels Karmella to the front? What makes her the kind of person who wants to be the leaf, to hang up a giant canvas and live paint her research, while her peers are tacking up posters that basically all look the same?

If you ask Karmella’s big sister, Sherron Wallace, where that came from, that tendency, she’ll tell you it started when Karmella was a little kid.

SHERRON WALLACE: She just walked to her own beat, basically.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Sherron is the oldest. Karmella is next. And then they have a younger brother and a younger sister. They grew up in St. Louis. And from a young age, Karmella stood out.

SHERRON WALLACE: She excelled in everything. So we knew, oh, this kid is different.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Early on, Karmella started painting portraits. Like, in elementary school, she painted her baby cousin.

SHERRON WALLACE: It was just– it was so detailed. It was everything from the little baby wrinkles to the little lace on her socks. And that was like, wow. That was amazing. That was amazing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But Karmella wasn’t just unusual in the art department.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I would actually work on The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and it was just that satisfaction.

FLORA LICHTMAN: As a child?

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yes, as a kid. I was a weird little kid.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I can’t do the Monday–

KARMELLA HAYNES: Right.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –as an adult.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I mean, I didn’t do them well then, but even if I could fill in a row or a column, that rush, right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Karmella loved solving puzzles. It wasn’t just crosswords. I mean, Karmella was searching for thrills in her algebra class, too. Her teacher would give them bonus credit for solving extra-hard proofs.

KARMELLA HAYNES: And once I was done with the boring homework that everybody else had to do, it was like, OK, proof time. And it just– like, when everything clicked and you could find the pattern and you were confident that all of the information that you had led you down this path to a solution, oh, man, when you got to that solution, it was just the most– it was so satisfying.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is how Karmella likes spending her time, thinking through problems, which, when she was a kid, sometimes worried her mom and her sister.

KARMELLA HAYNES: When I went outside, instead of– I don’t know– being more interested in chasing some kid or whatever, I would stop, and I would see a flower or a leaf. Like, huh, all these flowers have exactly the same number of petals. How does that work? And I would just sit and just look at things and just wonder about how they worked.

Yeah, so to my mom, it was, oh, my gosh, should I worry about my child? She’s just sitting there, staring off into space. But while I was kind of just still and silent on the outside, there was a lot going on inside my head. And I was plenty entertained by just sitting and thinking about things.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’re like the platonic form of a scientist.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yeah, [LAUGHS] I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Looking back, it seems obvious that Karmella was born to be a scientist. But she didn’t always feel like she belonged. I mean, study after study shows that, still, people generally picture scientists as white guys. Karmella didn’t fit the profile.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Growing up, right, being a young Black girl in science, my identity, everything about who is seen as a scientist and who belongs in that space was completely opposite of what I was.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Karmella’s dad worked hard to combat that notion. He had his own experience being gatekept out of science. Karmella says he was a gifted student in high school, and he loved engineering. No one in his family had gone to college, but he had his sights set on MIT. So he asked his school counselor for help, but instead, the counselor talked him out of applying, told him to skip college and get a job instead. That’s what he did. But he tried to make sure his kids weren’t held back by other people’s biases.

KARMELLA HAYNES: He very deliberately, as part of doing his dad duties, was to take us kids right out to some five-star restaurant.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Both sisters remember this.

SHERRON WALLACE: Yes, yes. It was called the Coal Hole.

KARMELLA HAYNES: The Coal Hole! That’s right! Yes. [LAUGHS]

SHERRON WALLACE: Yes. So I remember the entrance being like going into a cave. And it was dimly lit.

KARMELLA HAYNES: There’d be valet parking. You’re like, oh, what’s this? And there would be a maitre d’, and five star all the way. So we’d all sit down. And then so I remember specifically the first time when the waiter came to the table and started asking what we wanted. And then so I remember looking to my dad like, OK, can you tell him what I want to eat? And he looks at me. He says, tell the gentleman what you would like to have for dinner.

I was like, oh, I actually get to talk to the waiter. [LAUGHS] It was– yeah. And I just really specifically remember that moment. Without really being aware of it at the time, just sort of in retrospect, that was my dad teaching us that we belonged. Whatever space we walked into, we belonged there.

SHERRON WALLACE: Karmella, she has grasped that. Out of the four of us, she took it and ran with it. I mean, she ran with it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Karmella ran with biology. In high school, she remembers learning about DNA and wondering how you go from blueprints to action. Like, every cell has the same DNA. How do you get a brain cell or a liver cell? The answer is epigenetics, the system that controls which genes are expressed. Karmella followed that interest all the way through her PhD, where she studied a key epigenetics player, chromatin.

OK, so chromatin is this stuff that packages your DNA, and then unpackages it, exposing the right piece at the right time so that genes can be expressed. Then, during her postdoc, Karmella learned about synthetic biology, and she had this idea.

KARMELLA HAYNES: How about gosh, wouldn’t it be cool to just do a mash-up between synthetic biology and chromatin? And I said, OK, I want to engineer chromatin. I mean, I just had this, just, general idea. I want to engineer chromatin, right, these switches that turn things on and off. I’ve always wondered how that worked ever since grade school. And now I’m going to– yeah, I’m in a position where I can actually engineer this stuff to understand how it works. OK.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So Carmella looked around for candidates for what to engineer, and she landed on something she’d learned about in grad school– polycomb group proteins.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I noticed there was a whole set of papers where these polycomb proteins, there was a weird abundance of them in cancer cells, all kinds of cancer– prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, right? So very diverse cancer types.

FLORA LICHTMAN: These polycombs were messing stuff up. So in normal cells, we have genes that stop tumors from growing. They’re called tumor suppressor genes. They put the brakes on tumors. So these bad polycombs were interfering with those genes, with the brakes, allowing tumors to grow. So a bunch of people were trying to find ways of attacking the bad polycombs or stopping them from being produced altogether. But Karmella had a different idea.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I says, OK, so how about instead of doing that, we send in this alternative, synthetic, weirdo protein that I built?

FLORA LICHTMAN: That would outcompete the bad polycombs, like a synthetic replica that would muscle out the bad guys and that was engineered to help the tumor suppressor genes do their job.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Right, to get the brakes reactivated. Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. And it worked.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yes, right, in a Petri dish. Right. We’ve shown that we can slow down breast cancer cell growth when we put these things into a little, mini fake tumor. It’s a little ball of cells, grows really fast. And then the cells around the edge kind of stretch out and creep into the extracellular matrix.

And so that represents early events in an actual tumor that lead to spread of cancer. Our engineered protein stops that cold, right? So and then the ball of cells actually shrinks a little bit. So we’ve gotten that far. And that’s really exciting. It’s like, wow, what would happen if we could actually get this into a tumor? We could potentially stop metastasis from happening.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It was in a Petri dish, as Karmella stresses. But it was a cool finding. So in 2019, Karmella lands a job at Emory, where she is now. So she has her own lab. She’s got a startup package. And she is all in on this idea, this mash-up between synthetic biology and epigenetics.

Did you have a sense when you started this project, when you were like, yeah, cool, I’m going to try to do this, did you have a sense that it was risky or might be a hard road?

KARMELLA HAYNES: Absolutely. [LAUGHS] Yes, absolutely.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: As I’m sure anybody in any profession, anyone who has been in a meeting can relate. Being out front with a new idea is perilous. But in science, there are particular challenges. One is that you have to raise money to do your work. And it’s hard to do that when the field doesn’t exist yet.

DAVID KATZ: Once you have a built-up field, it self-reinforces.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Here’s Karmella’s colleague, David Katz, again.

DAVID KATZ: Because you have people advocating for it, you know? People love the science that they’re doing, and they want other people who are like-minded. When you’re small and out there, then there’s nobody pushing for you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about even having enough people to vet the proposals? Do you have enough people who are expert enough to even understand what’s being proposed and vetted appropriately?

DAVID KATZ: No, definitely not. Our system is designed to reward people in basically categories.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And so when you don’t fit into a category, you can run up against different challenges. For one, people are sometimes skeptical about your expertise. Like, in one grant application, Karmella got this critique.

KARMELLA HAYNES: While they were convinced that I was an expert in synthetic biology. I wasn’t really a cancer epigeneticist.

FLORA LICHTMAN: She’s also been told the exact opposite thing.

KARMELLA HAYNES: On the flip side, this person raised concern that while I seem to be an expert in cancer epigenetics, they didn’t consider what I was doing to be real synthetic biology. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: This gatekeeping around who gets to be an expert is just one challenge. On top of that, when you’re doing a science mashup like Karmella, reviewers who are from one particular field might be scared off by the inclusion of another field.

DAVID KATZ: If you’re an engineering person and you’re sitting with Karmella’s grant, and it’s got this chromatin aspect, and you don’t understand it, you’re not going to advocate. It’s scary to advocate for it because you don’t it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah.

DAVID KATZ: And that’s a big problem that we have. And it happens over and over.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Once you show something can work, do people change their mind?

DAVID KATZ: The answer is no. I mean, eventually, maybe? The numbers of examples of the lengths that people had to go to get anybody to listen– Barbara McClintock and jumping genes, transposons, right? People literally turned around behind her back and said she’s crazy. And she was 100% right.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is the thing I’ve heard again and again from scientists, that although the job of a scientist is to follow the data wherever it takes you, scientists are also just like everybody else on this planet. And so when you are challenging the status quo, when you are trying to be the leaf, even when you have evidence, it can be hard to change people’s minds.

DAVID KATZ: Yeah, I think that’s a real thing. This is going on in society as a whole, and science is not immune to this at all. People are people.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And it’s even harder to change people’s minds when you don’t fit the mold, when you don’t look like the cookie-cutter scientist, when you are the only Black woman in the room.

KARMELLA HAYNES: I feel like the types of things that I do, right, doing things that may be perceived as provocative and challenging, I kind of look at my peers and folks who are more senior than me. And it seems like, if you come from a certain– you have a certain identity, you do similar things, and you are a thought leader. You’re a trailblazer. You are bold.

DAVID KATZ: And the difference between maverick and genius and oddball and loner is just perception. And the scientific community, I think, has more room for those geniuses to play around. If you’re white male.

FLORA LICHTMAN: David has seen this firsthand at conferences with Karmella, how people respond differently to her when she expresses an opinion that goes against the grain.

DAVID KATZ: Yeah. Yeah, there’s a few people who go, ugh– that kind of reaction.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In science, people often express strong opinions. It’s just that certain people are penalized for it. Not everyone can get away with standing in the back of the room and challenging the status quo.

DAVID KATZ: She would be seen as, wait a second, she’s being difficult, as opposed to just scientifically trying to push us all. It is a real difference. There is a difference in response.

KARMELLA HAYNES: Now, I had to be fair. I’ve also seen white guys who have these certain provocative ideas, and they get pushback. So that’s not to say that it works for them all the time, but I will say that it seems to work for them more often than [LAUGHS] someone like me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. I’m sure that adds a layer for you of having to wonder, is this feedback because I need to change something about my science or my approach, or is it coming from somewhere else?

KARMELLA HAYNES: Yes, right. So it’s really tough, that uncertainty, because I don’t want there to be the racism and the misogyny. I don’t want that. So I would prefer that, oh, well, maybe there’s some kind of fundamental flaw. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong. Maybe I need to fix this technical aspect to really make this work.

But then, the problem is that there’s a lot of examples of feedback that I’ll get that are very ambiguous, and I’m left wondering. I have this moment a lot, unfortunately, where it’s, OK, what is it this time? Is it the racism, the misogyny, or both? Or is this really fundamentally flawed?

FLORA LICHTMAN: The challenges are layered. So it makes me wonder, what keeps Karmella out on this limb?

KARMELLA HAYNES: I started witnessing and experiencing things that intensified my commitment to doing that research.

FLORA LICHTMAN: She told me the story about visiting a cancer treatment center at Emory.

KARMELLA HAYNES: And I get kind of teary even thinking about this moment. So as soon as I walked through the door, I saw a family. And it was a Black family. There was an older woman who her family was escorting her out of the elevator in a wheelchair. And it was clear that she was a patient.

And I just– I don’t know– I had a moment, considering the disproportionate impact that cancer has on Black folks and folks who are traditionally underserved. I just– I saw me. I saw my family. And it just hit me that, oh, this is why I’m doing this. This is why I’m doing this.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Now, there are a lot of ways to do cancer research, and there are a lot of ways to use science to help underserved communities. But Karmella has chosen this very specific and challenging path. And she’s choosing to carve out a new field to take this new approach. She’s adding 10 layers of hard on top of something that’s already hard. Why?

KARMELLA HAYNES: Because I mean, to be honest, everything else is boring. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s fun to be the leaf. And more than that, plants need leaves to grow.

KARMELLA HAYNES: The norm is not necessarily good or healthy for people. And I think that’s particularly relevant in science because some of the problems that we have to deal with really need creative solutions. If you keep doing things the same old way, how do you expect to really solve any problems?

So I would say that yeah, me marching to the beat of my own drum and doing what I want, I like inventing and creating and making things that are going to help a lot of people. I’m drawn to it. That’s just how I am.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 15 or so years after Karmella was painting that poster, she’s now invited to give talks all over the world. She’s shaping the future of the field. She founded a conference called Afro Biotech that brings together Black scientists across biotechnology. Karmella is clearing the way for other people with creative ideas, making room on the stalk for new leaves to emerge.

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The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. Karmella has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a scout for her bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. You can learn more about this recognition and volunteer role on the website.

The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman and produced by Annette Heist. Editing by Devon Taylor, Pajau Vangay, and David Sanford. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Fact-checking by Nicole Pasulka. Thanks to Malcolm Campbell and Pam Silver. And thank you to you for listening.

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