A Conversation with Dr. Julia Kubanek   by Andrew Kerr February 2006 Dr. Kubanek received her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1998. Since 2001 she has been an Assistant Professor at both the School of Biology and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (To save this video to your computer, right-click on this link and "save target as".)

Transcript 00:00 General Background I'm American born. I was born in New Jersey and then my parents moved to Canada when I was three, four-ish, and I grew up outside of Montreal, which is an area of Canada that's similar in weather to Boston, but it's not close to the ocean. As a kid we used to go on vacation at Cape Cod, off Massachusetts, and that's where I got interested in marine science. I just liked going on boats, and going on the whale watching trips. There were actually scientists who were working on these whale watching boats to explain what you were seeing, what the whales were doing, and why there were so few whales, and what had changed over the years. That coupled with just hanging out on the beach and poking through the seaweed and looking at shells and crabs and stuff just kinda got me interested in marine biology when I was a kid. But then I, in school, liked chemistry a lot better. I really liked, as a student in high school and in college, that when you understand chemistry, which is the study of molecules, you're learning about how the world works at a really, really small scale, like at a microscopic, even less than microscopic level. You can't see the molecules under the microscope even, but the sum of all those molecules is what makes a person, or what makes a fish, or what makes a grain of sand, and the study of chemistry as a student is really about solving problems. There's some math, and it's challenging, kinda like doing a crossword puzzle, so I liked studying chemistry actually even better than I liked studying biology when I was young, so I ended up doing a university degree in chemistry. Then I found myself thinking, "Well wait a minute, I still want to be a marine biologist and now I just did all my education in chemistry." Fifty years ago, if you studied chemistry in school that was it, you were going to be chemist for your whole life, or if you studied biology and you learned about all the names for the plants, that was what you knew and you were going to do that for your whole life. Now it seems that education is broader and people are interested in more than one thing and to understand one thing you have to be able to use three different kinds of technology or use different kinds of experiments that involve maybe physics even if you're a biologist or chemistry even if you're a biologist, so it was not a handicap to study chemistry and want to be a biologist in the end. So then I decided to try to combine my interests, so now I teach biology and chemistry at the university here at Georgia Tech and the research activities that my students and I do are on a mixture of biological and chemistry topics. 03:00 On the Scientific Method Science is always messier than any series of hypotheses that you map out on a piece of paper and go about testing, but the spirit of the scientific method is still really really active, and I think the major spirit of the scientific method is to question everything and assume nothing, and to use your natural observation skills, which we all have. Some of us have better observation skills in some areas of life, like about perceiving people's moods, some people are much better at looking at a building and understanding where the supports are in the building just by understanding physical gravity and forces and things like that. I mean, everybody's got their strengths right? But everybody can observe stuff and that's the starting point for the scientific method, to observe stuff around you, and then raise some questions about them. Why is it that people get really upset--if you're thinking about people's moods or behavior, human psychology--why is it that certain criticisms trigger a certain response in people? So as an observer you start thinking, imagining what the possible reasons are, and each of those possible reasons is what scientists would call a hypothesis. And you need to have more than one, because if you only have one hypothesis or only one possible explanation in your mind, then the human psychology of the scientist gets in the way, which is that you get attached to the one hypothesis as if it's your baby and you want to protect it and you want it to make it be true even if it's not true. One of the cures for that is to have lots of potential questions and explanations for why a certain observation could be taking place. And then when you have those formulated in your head, you have three or four possible explanations, you try to imagine experiments that will test them. It works pretty well, and it becomes kinda contagious in the rest of your life. Sometimes you start running your personal life as if it's the scientific method, too. [Laughs.] 04:56 On Science and Humanity I sometimes wonder what's going to be the discovery that's going to happen in the next fifty years that we're all going to say, "Oh my God, I can't believe we didn't know that before!" Like, I wonder if there were animals like dinosaurs but not dinosaurs, something else that we still don't know even existed. I think it was either last year or the year before that a bunch of scientists who were working in Indonesia found this other species of humans, basically humanoid people that lived on this island of Flores. They were small people, they were like, people make jokes about it, that they were little people..."little Hobbit people" which presents a certain image of really big feet, which is sort of unfortunate, cause I think they were just little in general. (Anybody who's traveled in developing countries or places like Indonesia knows that a lot of people in those developing nations are smaller anyways nutrition is really really different there, and so people are not that big. So to think that they only came up to here on us might not actually have been all that different from people a hundred or two hundred years ago there either, because of nutritional differences.) But in any case imagine that all this time we didn't know there was another species of human that coexisted with our human species so recently, just some thousands of years ago, which is much more recently than people thought just a few years ago. I think one of the excitements about the idea of growing up to become a biologist or any other type of scientist is to think, "Wow! Maybe I'll be the one who'll get to be part of some kind of discovery that five years after it we can't believe that we never knew that." It becomes a fabric of life. Imagine how people felt when they discovered the first dinosaur bones...and the person who found the first skeleton for a T. rex. That would have been a great, great job to have, to be the one who found that. You never know ahead of time that you're going to be the one to find it. It's a lot of luck and a lot of dedication and the harder you work and the more you do the more likely you're going to be the one who stumbles across the great thing. 07:14 On Going into Science Eventually you grow up and at some point you have to decide, "What's the thing that I'm going to do? I'm not going to both explore the galaxies and explore the depths of the oceans and be out in the Gobe desert digging for human bones." You have to eventually choose something. Now you never have to make that decision before you're 18 or 20 or 22 or 30, so it's not like when you're 12 you're worrying about--you shouldn't have to worry about which of those great things you're going to narrow down. You can imagine all of them and prepare yourself to be able to do any of them. But sometime around maybe when I was 25, I thought, "OK, it's time to really choose something that's a narrower slice of life." My ideas for what my criteria were for a career were, I want to have some fun doing it. I don't want it to be such a drag that I dread going to work every day and can't wait for five o clock to come. So it has to be something that I get some fun out of. It's not going to be fun every day; no job's ever going to be fun every day. But it should be a little bit of fun at some point in the day, and some days it ought to be a lot of fun, enough to keep you going for the next fun day. Another thing I wanted to choose was something I would be reasonably good at, I didn't want the humiliation of always being bad at something, so I wasn't going to become a writer of English literature because I was bad at that in school, and I was good at math and good at science. So I thought, "I'm going to choose something that I'm better at, because that'll be more satisfying, and I'll be more likely to do well at it." And then the last thing I thought...it wouldn't be worthwhile if I didn't think it was important to society, something that was valuable. For me now that can be a little bit of the teaching, but it's also about the discovery of the science stuff, even separate from the teaching. Sometimes those things go together, teaching students and making new discoveries at the same time. Sometimes they're separate. I think that a job is more fun and you do better at it if you're also motivated by the fact that you think it's important. You think you're making a difference in people's lives. Lots of jobs to that; being a doctor does that, there are lots and lots of professions where you make a difference in people's lives. Being a scientist you can make a difference in people's lives. You can make discoveries where you are part of a group or team that eventually finds some cure to some disease, or you could find the explanation for why the environment is in so much trouble and therefore you are able to propose the fix that would allow us to not make such a mess of the environment, or you could explain a genetic process, that means that later on somebody else will be able to develop a drug that would cure a specific genetic disease, and your discovery was not about the drug, but it was about understanding why the problem happens in the first place, and then your discovery saves lives even if you never meet those patients or you never treat them with the drug. 10:08 On the Potential Medical Benefits of Certain Marine Organisms We collected like 150 small samples, like the size of a baseball, say, of 150 different species from coral reefs in Fiji. We have collaborators in Fiji, we collect with them, we work with them there, there are scientists there, and we also work on conservation of reefs at the same time, to try to protect these resources for future generations. And one of the species of our 150 was a sort of fluffy red seaweed. It was sort of burgundy in color, and so we call those red algae; there's the red algae there's the brown algae which are mostly brown, there's the green algae, which are bright green, so all seaweeds are kinda greenish just like plants tend to be green, but the reds tend to be redder than normal. So it's sort of burgundy colored, it has little branching parts, and we hadn't seen it in other places, so it was kind of rare, but we collected a little handful of it, and that species had some very potent effects on cancer cells and bacterial cells. Initially we didn't know about the effects on HIV. So anyways we decided to pursue, because chemists had not studied this seaweed before, to identify what the chemicals, the molecules inside of it were, we thought that because the crude extract had some effect on the disease targets, and the chemists had never studied this species before, the chances of us discovering a new chemical structure, a new potential drug, was higher than if we worked with some of the other species that had been previously studied or whose biological effects on the disease targets wasn't as strong. So from that we worked on that one species, and a bunch of us who worked chemically on it we extracted it, we separated all the chemical components, we purified the compounds that were killing the cancer cells, and we've now identified 17 different molecules produced by the same species of seaweed collected at four different places around Fiji. We have published 3 out 17, we have another 7, so for scientists a big part of finishing off the work is to announce it to the world--the work doesn't do anybody any good if other people don't ever know about it--so we write these papers and publish them, so we've got now a total of seventeen chemicals, new structures, that have not previously been known to science before, so that means that this seaweed, this red algaa, is making molecules that are unique, it's making molecules that no other organisms on earth are known to make. It might be that no other organisms on earth do make these molecules. Maybe these molecules are completely unique to this one group of seaweeds, which means the genes that make the enzymes that make the molecules are unique. So it has some kind of very special potential and we don't know yet whether these are actually going to be drugs. When I decided I wanted to do something in my life that was going to be useful to other people, I had to accept that just because I'm working in this area of drug discovery doesn't mean I'm going to be the one who discovers the cure for cancer. If there's me and 500 of my friends or colleagues all doing something and two of us are part of a team that discover a cure for cancer, I'd be perfectly happy even if I wasn't one of those two. Just knowing that that's going on out there is enough to keep me going because we're all working towards the same common goal. So we don't know if these particular chemicals from the red seaweed are going to be useful, because like you were talking about a few minutes ago, the toxicity issue can be a problem, so these molecules do not only kill cancer cells. In fact they kill cancer cells, they kill bacterial cells, and then we found out that they kill HIV or HIV particles as well, although, the HIV effect is weak enough that it's not something that I think the drug companies want to pursue right now; they have better things already on their plates than what we have to offer for HIV. So we're focusing more on the cancer angle. So we haven't tested all our new compounds yet for effects on cancer. We still have some hope that we'll find one that's really potent compared to the others. So far they're looking OK, they're looking useful, but probably not the revolutionary new drug of the future. So we're still looking for more. But this species that we found of the red seaweed seems to be a special species, so we're going to continue working with those kinds of organisms, those kinds of plants. 14:27 On Teaching Biology Well Teaching biology and learning biology as a student I think is more awkward than the other types of science that we know about right now. Now that I'm teaching biology, I'm starting to recognize the things that used to frustrate me when I was a student, which is too much emphasis on memorization and what seems like an unrelated series of facts that don't connect to each other. You have to learn about the circulatory system and you have to learn about photosynthesis, and they're all, it's all these bits and pieces that sort of come together to be biology. Which is how we learn it, and that's how the books are written, and that's how we teach it a lot, but that's not necessarily the way in the natural world biology works. I think there are now some unifying concepts that are increasingly being used to try to structure the learning and the teaching of biology, to be more problem-solving oriented and more question-asking oriented, and one of those major unifying concepts is evolution. Evolution, despite what appears to be a large public controversy, among scientists is not controversial at all. There's lots of discussion among biologists and other types of scientists about how evolution happens, but there's virtually no debate about whether it happens. There's so much evidence that it happens that what gets exciting is to understand what are the processes, and that includes evolutionary processes at a molecular level. So genetics, and how DNA and proteins change over time, and at a population level, with the total sum of all of those molecules being the organisms that then lived. All aspects of biology that I know about touch upon evolution at some level. I think that we can do a better job of exciting young people about biology when we really understand and talk about what happens with evolution and how that affects all scales of biological systems, from the molecule, to the cell, to the whole organism, all the way to an ecosystem that contains lots of different species that are all evolving at the same time.