Episode 144: Night Science – Exploring Curiosity and Creativity in Research and Biotech (RE-RELEASE)

Science doesn't just happen under fluorescent lights. Sometimes it starts after dark. You're listening to Bio from the Bayou, empowering biotech leaders with the tools, assets, and expertise to improve healthcare outcomes.

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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. If you work in biotech, you already know what day science looks like. It's protocols. It's the scientific method. It's Gantt charts and IND prep and beautiful slide decks that make the work you do nice and clean and inevitable. But that's not really how ideas really start. It starts with what we're going to call night science. And I first heard this T— this term with today's guest, Ani Williams. Now, let's take our listeners back to a faraway galaxy. It was a reception actually at a conference that you and I met at. And this is where we started talking about this. I think we were talking about probably science. I, I think, I hope. And before we get into how we got on the topic, why don't you give a little bit of an introduction to yourself and then we'll dive right into what Night Science is.

Absolutely. I'm Ani Williams. I just recently got my doctorate at Penn State, did my master's work at Kansas State. I'm working with Lacey Alexander on the vascular health in women with endometriosis, some women's reproductive health, women's vascular health stuff. I guess the biggest explanation for my whole personality is I was raised on Kansas farms and work in academia, and I think I have a good combination of all of those things that lead us to where we're at today.

That's perfect. It's probably why we got along. I mean, we talked, I think we started talking about endometriosis. We were at a women's sex difference, sex-based medicine conference, and we were just talking about endometriosis. And then I think we kind of got into, you had a hypothesis, I believe, and you were like, you prefaced it, and this is where you brought up the term night science. You said, before, which I loved. It was very much like, hang on, before I say this crazy thing, this is night science.

Yep.

And I loved that. It gave you this freedom to like, here's an idea that I had, don't hold me to it. This is just something I've been thinking about. So, so where did you first hear the concept of night science and how do you use it?

I'm not 100% sure where I first heard it. I know that it happened, I learned it at Penn State and it was either my boss, Lacey Alexander, or one of my professors. It might've been Gustavo Nader. I'm not sure who exactly it was. But I heard it and it latched on. That was so door opening and it was, my horizons were expanded. And so I use Night Science very much like you said, it's kind of this asterisk of, I'm gonna say something that isn't real. Like it's this little disclaimer that I get to use.

Okay.

That is, I either have something that I know for a fact is dumb, but I have to say it out loud to someone who will clock me on it. Or it's this like, I have this idea, it's not really well-founded, but it's this thing in my head and it's sciencey, science adjacent, evidence adjacent. And yeah, it's just this very freeing term of, we're working in science, but I have this really creative, not boxed-in idea.

I love that. It's the thing that you write on the napkin or the whiteboard, or maybe you're having, uh, some drinks at a reception and you're like, okay, what if? Or you're having a margarita. A holiday margarita on the podcast right now, which I love because that sort of sets the scene of where I've come up with some of my best ideas, not the podcast, but usually with a glass of wine in hand. And that is because it kind of frees you up. And I feel like science became incredibly buttoned up, as it should be. I mean, we have to, especially in the industry we're in, we're developing new drugs and things that are going to go into people one day. So we want to make sure that we get everything exactly right. But The problem is that I feel like that if we only reward this polished grant publication-ready version of the story, that we end up quietly killing off the next ideas and the next breakthrough that we're having, and to not have the interesting conversations where a lot of these, you know, kernels of ideas can turn into a drug one day. And that's what I really loved about what you said about— Night science, which by the way, I mentioned this, I did go research this and Ian, I'd love to know if this is who you figured out said it too. So it was somebody that actually won a Nobel Prize, if that makes you feel better, Audie.

It makes me feel a lot better. Yes.

We have that validation. François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965.

Yeah, that's, that's who I found as well.

Yes.

Well, he is the first one who framed day science versus night science. He wrote it in a memoir. Where he describes night science as this messy, intuitive workshop where the raw building materials of ideas are kind of made. And in contrast to what we think of as science, which is day science, which is this clean hypotheses and even tidier experiments. So one, we have the validation of a Nobel Prize winner actually saying like, this is totally a thing. I think we have our own night science moments in our own lives, but there's some pretty famous ones, what I'm gonna call like famous night science moments, and that is— I immediately think of— I'm a microbiologist, so I think of the guy that discovered— Barry Marshall, who did Helicobacter pylori and discovered that it caused ulcers. So everyone that thought that ulcers were caused by stress, and they were like, no, I think that this might actually be caused by a bacterium. We're seeing these little spiral guys in ulcers, and what if these were infectious? And everyone's like, get out of here. Bacteria can't live in acid.

You're nuts.

And they treated them like they were crazy, and they were— and they went— but he went with it. I wouldn't take this knight science into a knight experiment like he did, where he actually drank a culture of Helicobacter pylori, developed gastritis, then cured it with antibiotics. Don't necessarily recommend that, but— That self-experiment and questionable ethics. But it's still very much demonstrated that causality that he'd been thinking about and putting it out there in the universe, and everyone told him he was crazy. So that's, that's one of the ideas that I had. And then the other one was a guy, and I'm gonna totally say this name wrong, and it doesn't matter how many YouTube videos I listen to how to pronounce it correctly, and that is Kekulé. Kekulé, who is this chemist that, that figured out the structure of benzene. And it literally is this definition of night science because They knew that benzene had like 6 carbons and 6 hydrogens, but they didn't understand the structure of it and whether it was a chain or what it was. And August Kekulé was literally— and he told his audience of a fancy university, I'm sure— that he was dozing and sleeping by the fire, and he kept dreaming of a snake that was biting its own tail. And that's when he had his eureka moment of like, it's It's got to be a ring. So he's literally having a night science moment of, like, this structure we've been trying to figure out is this Ouroboros snake thing. And that's where the structure of benzene came up. And so I really love that idea. That's something he had been thinking about and studying and probably getting too much into his head about, like, what does this look like? And dude just probably— now, there's been arguments of whether he was on opium too, But not—

Not perfectly with night science. That's—

I feel like, yes. Yes. Now, not that we're encouraging our listeners to take opium, but he definitely was in a state of mind of dreamy imagination, shall we call it? And that's how he— all of these things that he's just been struggling with from a science perspective kind of freed him to think of it. But I would love to know if you have your own examples of night science that you have thought of, Ani.

I think my exercise physiologist, the one that comes to mind, and I don't know if this even necessarily qualifies as origin story night science, but kind of this concept of, oh, they really did that, is basically anything that was like pre-Helsinki Declaration. Anything that was a little bit like, what can we do to people? But— Operation Everest, what? Yeah, just the whole like, oh yeah, we're just gonna do things to people all the time. Operation Everest I, the 1946 altitude chamber example of— it was immediately after World War II and they had made such advancements in flight and how high up in the atmosphere can human beings go. And more or less, the US Navy was like, well, what can we do to people? How high can we get them? And—

Oh no.

You know, if we take out the mountainous terrain, if we take out the people shooting at you, What can we do? And they did Operation Everest. They put these people, these former aviators into an environmental chamber and got them up to the equivalent of more than 50,000 feet of altitude.

Right.

It was a little over 50,000 feet. And they realized at 25,000 feet, people were passing out. They stopped cycling at, you know, 22, and they just like kept going. And it was this whole It really was, this is what the limitations of human capacity to tolerate a hypobaric environment is. And it's, it was really just founded on this whole idea of, oh, we already kind of put people up there.

Right.

The actual limit of that scientifically. And so it's, I think that's kind of my go-to example of it's just doing stuff. Like, you kind of— It's just doing stuff. It's just doing stuff. You get an idea, you lose some barriers, and whether or not you follow up on it and how that happens is, you know, a different story. story, but you've got this just curiosity-driven idea, and then the follow-up is continuation of that, or maybe we turn it into day science and it becomes something more important. And that's my favorite example of you're just doing stuff.

You're just doing stuff.

That's just what it is.

So why do we— why do you think that so much of our modern research training focuses on this This very prescribed— well, I mean, why do you think that we, as a whole, as scientists, adhere more to day science and that we don't think about this piece that probably got us into science in the first place, which is what I think you touched on, which is curiosity?

Well, so, to your— you made an earlier point about, you know, it's not necessarily bad that day science is how we do science, right? It's— we live in a world of misinformation, and it's I think it's so important that things are fact-checked and that you're doubting people all the time and that every time you say something out loud, you need to be ready to defend the thing that you said correctly or be ready to be proven wrong and adapt from there. I think that that's a very important part of doing anything productively in the world today. I think that that's important.

Yeah.

I think that, you know, we got here because We did a lot of night science in the years leading up to, you know, modern era science. And, you know, if you go back and read the old publications, that the methods are written in weird, vague ways and the introduction doesn't quite make sense. And we did a lot of night science kind of already. And now it's okay, we need to replicate things. We need to, you know, say things correctly and we need to do this a little better. But I think you're right that you lose a lot of creativity and you lose a lot of just fun and enjoyment and passion when you're trying to box the world into only day science all the time.

And really justifying. I feel like we have to justify what we do. Obviously, we're funded by, you know, grants, which are funded by the government, which is funded by taxpayers. You always hear of those— the shrimp on the treadmill thing, but it's hard to explain to the public why exactly you put a shrimp on a treadmill.

Yes.

Because it wasn't necessarily night science. It was a way to understand physiology, and this is the mechanism. And there's always a reason for why we're doing these things, and it leads leads to the ultimate thing. But it's— we get very— we're always on our heels and on the defensive, I think. And almost— I wouldn't say fear. Maybe I would. I don't know. It depends on what we're talking about, of just like the fear of being wrong. There's— everything is so much more public these days that— and people don't like it. We change our minds all the time in the sense of like, we discover new evidence.

Yeah.

We know that this was proven wrong, or we found something new. And we're used to that in the scientific method, but the public isn't necessarily. So it becomes this very much, but you said— it's like, well, yeah, we said that, but then we learned more. And that, that makes it hard to speak out, you know, because you're afraid that you're just gonna get, I don't know, a TikTok flame video about you and what you said about science.

So— And I think that there's even along the path of de-science, and I, and again, maybe I'm just trying to force this terminology into people's mindset, but yeah, I think that, you know, as you said, like, you learn a new thing, you have new evidence, and you have to reconsider what that means your existing ideology. You have to reevaluate the theory and adapt the theory, and it becomes something new. And even that turning point of if you have some form of a paradigm shift, you have to let night science in. You have to let yourself be creative to adapt to new information, to adapt to that day science that's happening.

Yeah, I think that, that's— that you have to be— you can't dig your heels in. And I think more and more where we are today, and not just in science, in a lot of things, is that we, we're kind of backed into corners. We dig our heels in, and then, then And we're forced to defend these positions. And that's not how we are as scientists. I mean, we're— well, I hope the scientists that I know are going to be open to the new evidence. So, you know, it depends on how it's brought up. Sometimes you have the ego, the old professor that, you know, they've studied this target for 900 years, and how dare you? How dare you, young upstart, you know, come up with a new idea or hypothesis around it? However, I think that when in the face of data, the most reasonable scientists will go, hey, Yeah, agree. This is new evidence and this is important. But how do you think that, like, what are the structural changes that, whether it's industry or in academia, that we could really help scientists to zoom out and think about being creative and pursuing those ideas that come up with the even greater ideas?

Like you said, you know, everything that we do is about funding. There's, you can't do any work without funding and you can't do any of that without having this Pretty rigid structure. And so I think that if you're going to encourage creativity, if you're a member of an institution or an administration that has value in discovery, has value in innovation, you have to be willing to fund that. You have to really put your money where your mouth is on that. And I understand that there's huge limitations there, right? Like you can't have limitless amount of dollars available for things that are completely unfounded, but I think that, you know, universities, institutions, industries need to have some pocket of funding available for pure exploration. And that, yeah, exploration doesn't need to lack reasoning. It doesn't need to lack background.

Of course.

You know, you can have some defense there, but I, like, for example, I think the American Heart Association has a pocket of funding that is specifically designated for something that does not have preliminary data. You cannot submit preliminary data with There, and I'm blanking on the name of it, but—

That's all right. We'll put it in our show notes.

Yeah.

Later.

But it's— their whole thing is like, it's got to be innovative, it's got to be impactful, and it cannot have been explored before. It's got to be completely new and discovery-based.

Yeah. Well, and I think too, I think of my own personal Knight Science moment. I had a lovely, creative, very, very creative PI. He came to me with an idea And he explained it really well to me as to why he was going off on this harebrained idea. And he communicated, because if we do this, then we'll be able to understand X, Y, Z. And he framed it to me well enough because otherwise I'd been like, you want me to do what? That sounds insane.

Yes.

And what it was is that in infectious disease, I mean, I studied poop, I studied antibiotic-associated diarrhea, and The people that were dying from this disease weren't dying from, like, cholera-type symptoms where they're, you know, shitting their brains out and they're dying of dehydration, but they were dying. And we couldn't figure out why. He's like, well, because when we inject the toxin, which was causing the symptoms, it just kills a mouse. Like, we don't know what happens. The mouse is fine. The mouse is dead. And in humans, we can't figure it out. So he's like, you know what? What if— what if mice were translucent? What if we could see organ systems?

Like, what if—

Ooh.

You know, all of these things. And At the time, this is when zebrafish— zebrafish were sexy and new. And zebrafish embryos are translucent, and you can see all of their organs. And incidentally, you— they don't rely on their organs. They don't need their cardiovascular system for a couple of days. And so what we ended up finding is when we put these toxins on zebrafish embryos, it was all going to the heart, and that we were watching a heart attack occur very specifically. And so the idea, it was that, oh, well, Is this toxin escaping from the gastrointestinal system and actually be— becoming a cardiotoxin and causing cardiac disruption? And never would've thought of that if we weren't like, what if we could see inside a mouse? You know, and how could we do that? Oh, cool, cool beans. I think it's a zebrafish. Go breed a lot of zebrafish, start up an aquarium in our lab, which is what he came to me and told me was start up an aquarium. I was like, oh, God bless. I do not want to just be a zebrafish breeder. I have lots of fish, by the way. Never bought a zebrafish since then.

Probably best.

But that kind of thing of just, I think he, he came to me and told me, here's the problem. We can't see inside humans. We don't know why people are dying. How do we figure this out? And then go from there. And I think a little bit of that communication strategy is something that scientists frankly aren't very good at, to be honest.

Oh yeah, we're awful at it. We're the worst at communicating why we do what we do or what's interesting about it. We have this— we're, we're the worst at it.

Especially the interesting part. Like, we think it's super interesting, but then—

Yes.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, that whole movie, uh, Don't Look Up, that's that Netflix movie about like being really terrible at communicating why things matter in science. Uh-huh.

Perfect, perfect example of like what's happening now. If, I mean, if you want, yeah, it was a perfect mimic of just what's occurring. And I just feel like Jennifer Lawrence sometimes and, and just like, you're going to die. Why aren't you paying attention to this kind of, you know, moment? But yeah, we're a bunch of eggheads and we're not good at the talking things. So, as we say on a podcast, but whatever.

Oh yeah. All right. Well, so when I go home, you know, I go home to my rural Kansas family and they are so supportive of what I do and they love it and they're excited for me. And one of my sisters, she was like, look, I love you. I think it's so cool what you're doing. I don't know how to ask about what you do. I, she, she just was like, I always love when you tell me stories about work, but understand me, I do not know how to ask you about your job. And so I have really had to work on, I, like, my family wants to hear about this. How do I communicate to people who are so outside of this field why what I do is interesting and why am I having such a good time doing it? And so, yeah, I think that that's a skill that we all need to evolve.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I'm the worst at it. And, you know, my, that same PI said, well, you have to be able to explain what you do to your mom. In less than like 4 sentences and really put into the frame of mind, like, why do I, why do people care? And how do I get my mom to care about this? And so I try to think of that. I don't always succeed. And then sometimes if I'm left to my own devices, I'll start out and then I start diving back into the weeds and getting way too nerdy about it. Because I could go into a whole esoteric thing about that K'ek'ek'le story. And Cormac McCarthy wrote an essay on it, which is super interesting. But I will say that's how I hooked my husband on the conversation, because he loves reading Cormac McCarthy. because he likes pain and misery. And I could appeal to him in understanding this whole night science piece because I knew that he cared about that. And then, so he read that essay by Cormac McCarthy about this concept of night science, and we had this whole conversation around it. So sometimes it's just, as I ramble on and on about this, it's just about finding the right hook with the right audience too.

It's just a little humanizing, you know, that whole idea of you, you take yourself out of the box, you take yourself out of the responsibility of being correct and factual. And like really data-driven all the time. And then it's like, oh, okay, you're just goofing around. And that's where it's, you know, we all can get on board with just goofing around at work sometimes. Yeah.

I bring this up, you know, as a way to, for not just my science startups, but also our wine bar. I come up with the craziest ideas for marketing and ways that we can, you know, bring customers in. And it's usually after a couple glasses of wine and my husband's just like, that's never gonna work for the following reasons. And it's infuriating to me. And so I finally had to say, like, I'm going to jazz and you just have to let me— like, you have to let me play in the space and not say no. You can come up with the nos later. 100%. We have to go through and see if this is reasonable for our employees to execute. Butter candles, horrible idea. But I had to, like, get it out there and then try it out later. And they failed miserably. And then I had a whole bunch of butter candle making materials in my house. That's a story of another day. But, um, I have to have those conversations. And I think of this in startups too, just like we need to have a brainstorming session. You can't be afraid to say crazy, crazy ideas. And, and so we always preface those moments of just like, I'm going to jazz. I'm going to, I'm going to say the crazy thing. I'm going to play in the space and shut your mouth. I'm going to do, let me try this out. And I feel like Night Science does that too.

It does. 100%.

Okay. How do you get into the frame of mind of Night Science? You're struggling with a problem. What do you do?

I think, okay, maybe I am revealing a bit too much about myself, but I think I live in night science and I have to force myself into day science.

I love that. How do I live in night science more? This is amazing.

You should be dumber. I think that that's the thing. I think I have to like— I love that. Well, okay, so this is, again, might be revealing a little too much about myself on this podcast today, but I, when I went to Penn State grad school, I went into it not expecting really anything and having a very strong opinion that I would make an excellent bartender. And so my whole thing about being in grad school is like when I get asked, you know, people interested in grad school, they're curious about joining science and doing this and that. I'm— my only thing is, are you gonna love this? Because if you're not passionate about it, if you're not excited about it, everything about grad school sucks. You're poor, you get overworked. It's— there's not like a great deal going into it. So for me, I was like, I'm gonna do this as long as I'm having fun and I get to love what I do and I get to make an impact and I get to feel excited all the time.

Mm-hmm.

Because other than that, I would love to go work at a bar and just be a bartender. I don't need to go to grad school for that. That's a perfectly respectable career that I would have fun doing, and it doesn't require, you know, a whole decade of post-secondary education. And so—

Grant writing and all that.

Yeah. Yes. I think that I live in night science because I am only here because I love doing this. And I think that a lot of people Yeah. Lose sight of night science, and they get stuck in day science. So I think if you're finding yourself stuck in day science, and getting back to night science and getting back to the joy is really just taking some time to assess your own values. I think that it's a little bit of, why did you start doing this? Was it because you thought you needed to, or because you had a curiosity you couldn't let go of? And it's this thrill that you get to create knowledge and create information and create products that are new to the world? Or are you just in it because, you know, you didn't know what to do and you're just a little lost in your career, which is fine. Not demonizing at all.

Happens to the best of us. We've all been there.

Happens to the best of us. It's part of the journey. Love and respect it. But I think that it's a really good check-in for if I can't do night science, Why am I only doing data science? If I can't find this curiosity and this just freedom to be a little dumb, why am I doing what I'm doing? Because that's very human of us. If you're not letting yourself be human, what are you doing?

Yeah, that's perfect. That's an amazing answer.

And it's—

and that it's not being dumb, it's that curious part of just— yeah, I mean, so we had Walter Isaacson on the podcast earlier, and that's what Da Vinci was doing. He would write like, what does a woodpecker's tongue look like in a notebook? Like, what? Who cares? Was what someone might read, or how awesome. I don't know what that means. And just write it down, put it out there, free yourself up a little bit because yeah, you lose sight of it and then it becomes very lame for lack of a better word.

Because it's hard and it's stuffy and it's, you know, living your life in tweed and sometimes You just want to wear the paint-smattered smock. Like, I think you just gotta like let yourself be creative and fun and, you know, not the most knowledgeable person in the room. And that's a great time. It's a great place to be.

Yeah. And I think most of our listeners wear suits and put on the pantyhose. And it's good that we think back to those days where we didn't have to put on the Spanx and the ties and all of that jazz to do our jobs. And to think about like why you got into this in the first place. And I am one of those people that I get excited genuinely to go to work every day, and I still have to force myself to go, okay, what's the curious part of this story? Like this specific problem, because emails come in and Zooms come in, um, present company aside, and it becomes that tedium. And then you're just, you know, a corporate shill. Um, but don't spit out your margarita.

Thank you. I almost did. It was close.

Yeah, I mean, I am a suit and I'm fine with that, but you know, hey.

Suits are cool and we, we like a well-fashioned suit. We're not knocking suits. Just want to be clear about that.

Suits the outfit, but suits as the archetype?

Ugh.

There we go.

There we go. Get out of here, suits.

Well, all right. Any last words of advice for our suits listening, myself included, out there, or the tweeds and the patches on the, whatever you think of as you think of a professor? What, how do you get people to not think so seriously?

I think, again, I've been dogging on it this whole time, but I do wanna reiterate, data science is important. Being correct and factual, it matters. It's good. It's a good thing to be most of the time, especially in front of other people, especially in front of non-science people. I just also think if you're living your life in this rigid box of an idea of a person and you've not let yourself be a person in a while, Take a minute and think about why. Think about why you're doing this, what brings, what draws you to it, and what draws other people to it, and why does anyone else care what you're doing? Because if you can't come up with an answer to that, who's going to?

I love it. Well, I'd like to thank you once again for agreeing to come on and talk about this amazing subject that I really have a lot of fun talking about, but it was also really fun to research too, and thinking about like all of the examples. And there's lots of examples out there of how we've gotten some really good ideas from old white guys dozing by a fire, man, and thinking about snakes. So—

Plus or minus some opioids. Thank you for having me. I've had a lot of fun doing this. This was really cool.

Well, it was great to meet you. It really put me on a new course in my own career too, of just like, I do need to live in night science a little bit more. And I'm kind of on a mission, as probably some of you, if you've listened to this podcast at length, I'm trying to bring— make science cool again. And draw the public back in and remind scientists of why we got into this in the first place, because we have a hard battle to fight and we need everyone to be curious, including the public, and make science cool again. So thank you for helping me a little bit in that mission and hope to catch up with you in real life, probably talking about night science and a little bit of day science with a little bit of cranberry margaritas. Is that what we're— what we're doing right now?

That is what we're inviting into the mix. Oh, yes.

Amazing. So, I mean, this is the holidays that we're recording. So this is like Christmas time because it's a Christmas margarita, but this will probably be released around Valentine's Day. And I feel like that it's perfectly wonderful to have as a Valentine's Day treat too.

So just, just saying. It's kind of obligated. If you're not drinking a cranberry margarita for Valentine's Day, what's the point? What are we doing?

What are you doing? What are we doing?

Where's the love in that? But you're not doing that. Not encouraging alcoholism. I want to be clear.

Yeah, but we're not, we're not encouraging that, nor opium as a matter of fact.

Yes. Or drinking bacteria.

Yeah. Don't, don't do any of those things. Although we did get a Nobel, you know, I mean, something came out of that whole drinking bacteria thing. So, I mean, it is—

But like, do a new weird thing. If you're gonna do, if you're gonna do something a little weird, make it a new one at least that we can't already warn you about.

Yeah. Don't, yeah. And don't drink bacteria just because you're bad at mouth pipetting like I was. So, you know. All right guys. And with that, I'd like to thank our guest again, and I'm gonna put a whole bunch of weird stuff in our show notes, I think. It sounds like, Ian, we're going to have some selections of— I'll put that Cormac McCarthy novel in there, or essay, some information of things that we've talked about today. And be sure to check them out and join us again from Bio from the Bayou.

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