full interview_david schneider_1.mp4
David Schneider [00:00:00] I'm David Schneider, I'm a professor at Stanford Medical School.
Speaker 2 [00:00:04] Perfect. And what is your scientific focus?
David Schneider [00:00:08] Study how you recover from infections. I want to understand how sick you're going to get when you get sick and how you're going to recover so that you get back to where you started.
Speaker 2 [00:00:20] What drew you into this? Can you use the sort of terms microbiologist?
David Schneider [00:00:25] Yeah, so I'm a microbiologist and I'm interested in understanding why microbes make us sick and how microbes make a sick. And what I wanted to study is not just how sick we get but also that we recover because that's what's important. You know, we want to get back to where we were to begin with.
Speaker 2 [00:00:47] Of what part of this, I mean, it's a very noble field. I think you wanna make people get better, right? Is the idea, were you always into that?
David Schneider [00:00:55] I've worked in a bunch of different fields. I started working in developmental biology. I looked at some signaling. And in choosing to do this, this is something that evolved while I was at Stanford. So when I started, I was hired to look at mosquitoes and how they transmit malaria. And we came up with some experiments along the way. That sent us in a new direction. We were asking, at first, what does it take to fight an infection? That's the way most immunologists work. You want to understand how you kill the parasite that's invading you. And then we did a genetic screen and found that we could find mutants that were unable to control microblood, and that's what we expected. But we found about an equal number of mutants can control the microbloode, but they still That's sick. And so we decided to look at that more carefully because that was something people hadn't really been studying. And it's something that came up during COVID where you would see people who seem to have equal amounts of virus in their circulation and some were deathly ill and some didn't even know they were sick and I'd like to understand those differences.
Speaker 2 [00:02:15] So was there that kind of a-ha spark that said, like, this is for me?
David Schneider [00:02:20] Yeah, the aha moments are often slower than you'd think. You know, there's not a aha. There's a, well, there was one set of experiments one of my students did. Janelle Ayers is the student's name and Janelle was asking what happened when you made a mutation in a particular gene in fruit flies? Did it change the way infections worked? And she tested a bunch of different bacteria. And so she came in with the result for the first bacteria. And then she tested six more and got five different results, which was really cool because usually the way things have been described is you'd expect one thing to happen. But we saw many different things happen. And that told us it was complicated. And complicated can be good. It means you've got a whole bunch of new stuff to start dissecting.
Speaker 2 [00:03:12] Take a real pleasure, a real joy in the investigation of it, right, not just the finding the answer.
David Schneider [00:03:19] Yeah, so I think to survive as a scientist, at least for me to survive as a scientists, all the parts have to be interesting because you spend a lot of your time pounding your head against the wall where things aren't working and that pain, you have to find some way of tolerating that. So I think it's good to be able to enjoy the process rather than the final results because it takes a long time to get to the final result. And often they aren't. What you want or what you expected. So yeah, it's important that you enjoy the process too.
Speaker 2 [00:03:57] And why do you think this, what you find in your work, is important for the world at large to understand?
David Schneider [00:04:06] Yeah, so what I think is important in my work is that it can lead us to find new ways of helping people who are infected. So when we, you know, we were worried about antibiotics and anti-parasitics being that the parasites and the viruses and the bacteria are quickly able to become resistant to whatever we throw at them. And that's going to happen every time because that's how evolution works. And so. Any time we come up with a way of killing the microbe, the microbes going to find a way around that. But there are other ways of helping, which is to make you tolerate the infection, to make basically not care that you're infected or to care less that you are infected. And those are the sorts of things that we'd like to do. I think it's the kind of thing that nurses do rather than what physicians do. They make it bearable for you to be in the hospital. And I think we're looking at the science of that.
Speaker 2 [00:05:08] Parallel because nurses are and good doctors any good you know health care professionals trying to make something that can be scary and hard to understand a bit more digestible right? Is there a parallel then to what you're doing in terms of communicating the ideas?
David Schneider [00:05:28] Yeah, so with science communication, it's important because you need to tell your story. And there have been times when I've given talks, usually when I'm talking about something new and I want to get an idea out, and I look at the audience and they're just dead. No one's nodding, no one's smiling. You know, nowadays it would be they're all looking at their phones. And so when that happens, I think that usually means that I haven't explained it properly, because if I'm... If I'm doing my job, they should be alert and coming along with me. And so I try to explain things in ways that keeps that going.
Speaker 3 [00:06:08] That you have a unique way of doing it.
David Schneider [00:06:10] Yeah, so one of the tricks I use when I do that is I try to be deliberately playful, and I do it on purpose, because I've been in situations where people, when I was doing something new, that people did not agree, and they would say that this is just impossible. It's theoretically impossible. You do the experiment and it works, so yes, it's theoretically possible, but it means the theory is wrong, okay. See, you have to come up with a way of telling them that without just pushing the data at them because that tends not to win the argument. So it helps if you, what I find helps is if I present it in a way that makes them laugh a little bit, in a away where I'm not posturing and looking really serious. And I find that, yeah, so I find the playful approach helps in that way. There'll still be people there grimacing, but there'll be fewer.
Speaker 3 [00:07:11] So what have you created?
David Schneider [00:07:13] But if I created in order to do that, I started, I think when I really started doing this, I worked more with animation. So I would do, I would make cell animation and I would stop motion animation. And I like doing that and I still do that occasionally. But that, and that works great when you're giving a talk and you have your computer and you can project it on a screen. But it doesn't work if you're sitting there and talking to someone or you meet someone on the street. You don't wanna pull out your phone and show them an animation. You'd rather have something you can show them that's physical. And so that's where the idea of making physical objects comes from. And so some things I'll make are small, like badges or jewelry. And some things are a little bigger. It's more like doing close-up magic.
Speaker 2 [00:08:04] Do you find, is that a reaction you get from, say, students where the render, the 3D render doesn't quite do it for them but they hold something in their hand and it kind of clicks more?
David Schneider [00:08:15] Yeah, I think for some students, they'll see things better physically and they work with it differently when you have a physical object. And I think people work differently. So I gave a talk once and someone came up to me really excited afterwards and asked me a bunch of strange questions because they were excited about the way I presented of my data. Their theory was that I was deeply dyslexic, and that's why I had no text on my slides. It was all figures, all graphs, and it might be true, but it turned out that she was the same way and presented data in the same way, and that was her explanation for why she did this. But her husband would talk in math. He would write equations, and they'd talk about the same thing, but they had very different ways of showing it. So I think. It's important to, if you want people to understand, it's good to show them in different ways. So when I give a talk, I'll often, I show an equation, I'll show what the graph looks like, I'll bring out a toy and show them how that works. And I think that means that more people are going to understand it.
Speaker 2 [00:09:30] Can you touch on just how critically important that is? If you discover something that is critical to our health, but nobody understands it, nobody cares, talk about the importance of art and the creativity that you're viewing in this process in order to communicate those ideas. Why that's...
David Schneider [00:09:51] Yeah, so it's important when scientists communicate, I guess when you're doing science that's very similar to what everyone else is doing, you have a standard way of talking about things. And so there it's sort of important to stick to that method and talk about it in that way. When you're trying to do something that's a little different or cross-disciplinary really. It can be harder to talk to people because they aren't used to the language that the other people use or they they might not Understand the language, that comes from the other discipline and so you have to come up with a way Where you can talk about it so that everyone understands
Speaker 2 [00:10:36] Do you have students who come in, think I'm going to go into this incredible science program, and suddenly I am making art and they don't quite, they're a little taken aback by it.
David Schneider [00:10:48] Oh yeah, so the students I, the students who often I end up working with or work in or end up coming to take my class, many of them have had backgrounds in the arts before they came to graduate school. And now they come to graduate and there's some who have the attitude that, okay, I'm a scientist now and I'm serious and I am only going to think about science. And I think that that's not great for them because they had always done these different things and so I think they might gravitate towards these classes because this is a way for them to express their artistic side which they'd always been doing and now they can do it in a way that relates to their science.
Speaker 2 [00:11:36] Do you believe in that distinction? You are a scientist or an artist.
David Schneider [00:11:40] No, I think you are, you're one person, right? And I, you know, we often talk about work-life balance and I'm not even sure that's, you now, how do I want to say it? About work- life balance, I you have one life. And so, you choose what you're going to do. So I don't think you're a pure scientist and then you walk home and you're a pure member of your family. I think your- You're the same person who's moving between those different realms. So I don't, and with art and science, to me it's really similar thinking. You know, when I'm thinking about how something might work biologically, I'm turning over an idea in my head, and I have a picture of what that is, and if I'm looking at it from a way that someone would call art. I'm just, I'm making an object that shows what that picture is in my head.
Speaker 3 [00:12:41] It's very profound, Alec. So is there art in that? Yeah. Or is it just, you know, because a lot of what I say, this is to repeat to some degree what you said before. But you're working like almost in metaphors. You're working, like, you're using objects. You're using things in order to sort of explain what it is that you do. And there's a certain artistry and creativity in that.
David Schneider [00:13:06] Yeah, so I guess one of the questions is, am I doing craft or am I do art? Am I someone who can build things and use them metaphorically to tell a story? Does art have to be something above that where I have emotional content as well? I think where that comes in sometimes is if you can sneak in the emotional content and it will... It helps get your message across better. So for example, I can think of an animation I did with a student and she's showing various ways of being sick. She's in all of these different poses and they show up one after another in this movie. And then there's one of her lying on the ground being dead. And there are always a couple of people who crack up at that. And that's good, you know, when you get. When you get people surprised and they laugh, that means you know that it went in and they understand what's going on. So yeah, I think that that's probably more art than science at that point.
Speaker 2 [00:14:12] Don't forget, push back from your colleagues.
David Schneider [00:14:16] Yeah, you know, there's some people who will be upset that I'm wasting taxpayers' money. I've never done this with taxpayers' moneys, so it's not an issue. There's some question of, well, maybe I should be serious all the time because I work on something that's important. But what I find is that I think better when I'm relaxed and thinking in a, you know, I'm better able to make connections. That's the kind of. Insight I have, where I'm making connections between things, and I think the art helps with that, rather than distracts me from that. There really are situations where I've solved problems by drawing it, or by sculpting it, and then I can come back and do the experiment, and it really helps me get past roadblocks.
Speaker 2 [00:15:06] I asked this of one of your students, your colleagues, but this idea of as you get older in school it's sort of less colorful, less playful, you've kind of kept that playfulness alive. These people saying you should just be serious, what are they missing?
David Schneider [00:15:24] Yeah, you know, I don't think playfulness costs you anything, except maybe the respect of people who aren't playful. And it's not as exciting to, it's not as much fun to hang out with those people. And I think. I guess it depends on what the definition of playfulness is. If playfulness sort of a way of really combining ideas that might not go together and allowing yourself to think different things and bring them together, then it's really important to be playful because if you aren't, you can just keep doing the same thing and not coming up with new ways of looking at things.
Speaker 3 [00:16:09] One of the things that artists always say is it's like, well, the blank slate kind of scares me. It's almost like you need a certain kind of parameter in order to be creative or to be able to fulfill that. Is that true in science?
David Schneider [00:16:24] Oh, yeah. In science, you're almost always building on something that's happened before. So you have a template. You're never starting from a blank slate. There's some problem that you're trying to solve or some natural thing that you are trying to describe. And then you use the tools you have to figure out how you're going to move forward. And with art, you know, there are things you can do to practice the creativity. I'll say that again without burping. In art, there are things you can do to practice the creativity. So you can exercises where you'll draw something, look at it, change it slightly, draw another iteration, and keep doing that and see how you can change the picture and see what it morphs into. It's not something where you can necessarily predict where it would go from the beginning, but you end up someplace new and interesting.
Speaker 2 [00:17:21] You know, on the theme of standing on the shoulders of those who've come before, do you see yourself as sort of part of a tradition of medical illustration of scientific communication?
David Schneider [00:17:32] You know, I think everyone, all scientists who have to present their work are communicators and are illustrators, and you have to decide, are you going to do it in the same way that everyone else does it, or are you gonna be as creative in your display of information as you are in the sort of science you do? Because what we'd really like to be is a creative scientist. And Yeah, so I don't know why you would wanna be a creative scientist and then say, okay, but I'm not going to let that enter this other realm of my life where I explain things.
Speaker 2 [00:18:14] It really allows you to look at a problem from a new angle when you sort of redesign the metaphor.
David Schneider [00:18:21] Right, so it's worth trying different metaphors, because each metaphor makes you think in a certain way. And that's useful because you'll have tools for taking apart a problem, so you want to use a metaphor. But sometimes when you try a different metaphor, you can see parts of the problem that you hadn't noticed before, and that lets you study something entirely new. And we have an airplane. Yeah, so there ought to be creativity in science. There are different types of creativity. So there's some parts of science, maybe more engineering. And engineering can be creative, too, where you have to get from A to B, and you know the experiments that you're going to do, and you go through them. I think the creativity comes in figuring out, well, what are those experiments going to be? What are the right ones to do. And then how you put that into the framework of science.
Speaker 3 [00:19:24] But there are others who do different kinds of creativity. I mean, you say, like theoretical physicists out there would just like greening stuff up.
David Schneider [00:19:31] Yeah, so. Yeah, I don't know if this will... So there was this book called, I think it's called On Creativity. It was eventually not banned, but it was pulled by the publishers because it turns out that the author made stuff up in it. And that was, you know, both appropriate and inappropriate because he was supposed to be reporting things. But he talked about two types of creativity. One was a type where you're taking random ideas and bringing them together. And asking, you know, does it work if I bring this thing and that thing together? Does it give me something useful? I think that's the kind of creativity I'm good at. And then there's another kind of more nuts and bolts creativity that they said was exemplified by this poet, Auden. And he would take a poem and stare at it and reduce it until it was the perfect most small. Succinct poem he could come up with. And that's a type of creativity as well. And they're different. And your mind is in different sort of states. I like the kind of daydreamy creativity. But both are important, I think, if you just function in the daydreaming kind of way, you never get anything done. So you have to actually be willing to, you know, put pencil to paper or whatever metaphor you need to actually get your things done.
Speaker 2 [00:20:58] I would never think of the scientific method and daydreaming as being sort of cohabiting.
David Schneider [00:21:04] Oh, yeah, so the scientific method, you know, you often get stuck using the scientific method. You realize there's a problem that you'd like to solve, and all the tools that you have are not going to help you solve that problem. And so you have to find a way around it, and so you look at the problem from different directions. And sometimes, because of the way you describe your science, you don't even... Know how to describe the problem. So I can give you an example. So I used to work on insects. And there was a question of, if you infected an insect with something once, and then a second time, would it react differently? And so the theory says, no, absolutely not, because insects are not supposed to have an adaptive immune system, and they're not supposed to have immune memory. If you infect them a second time, you get a really different result. And so if you were thinking about things saying, no, this is programmed and it works in this one way, you would never do the experiment to look for adaptation. And if you did accidentally do that experiment, you wouldn't know what to do with it because it didn't fit your mindset of how things work. So you have to be willing to look at things from different points of view.
Speaker 3 [00:22:30] It's about failure. Oh, yeah.
David Schneider [00:22:34] Yeah, so failure is something that happens all the time and you just have to get used to it. It's never fun. You have to find a way of tolerating it and just keep pressing through. And I think that might be one thing that we select for in scientists that they tend to be reasonably tolerant of failure and can just fail and fail and keep going because, you know, often your idea is wrong. Or your technology isn't up to what you're trying to do, or you can't get a large enough sample size. So there are lots of reasons why things don't work. And yeah, you eventually either develop an attitude that you're going to work through that or you decide to do something else because it just makes you too sad.
Speaker 2 [00:23:29] Creativity has to adapt.
David Schneider [00:23:33] Yeah, so that gets also, well, I guess it gets back to the point of you want to enjoy what you're doing as you're do it. You know, if you're mindful, you're thinking about what you are doing now and you're not worrying about what the result is going to be in three or four years when you finally finish the experiment. And so I think that helps deal with failure.
Speaker 2 [00:23:58] I think you can teach creativity.
David Schneider [00:24:00] Yeah, so I think you can. I don't know that everyone can learn creativity. So, you know what I-
Speaker 3 [00:24:06] I think you can't teach creativity, but you can just use that in a sentence, you were just responding.
David Schneider [00:24:11] Okay, yeah. I think you can teach creativity. What you do is you put the student in a position where they have an insolvable problem. They're not going to be able to get to it using the standard techniques, but you give them a new way of… you force them to pull things together to come up with the solution. The way I try to do it in class is what I do is we will spend a quarter where we start off learning a technique. Things we've done are embroidery or laser cutting or 3D printing or metalwork and then after the people develop at least a little bit of facility with it, you'll say, okay, now I want you to come up with some problem you're having a hard time describing. Like, say... I want you to make a little model using this technique to describe to your grandmother or your parents, you know, someone you love but might not really understand what you're doing, to explain to it using this medium what you are doing. And so then they have to think about things in a different way. They can't fall into the, here I'm writing a scientific paper, and they have to, you now, it knocks them off their tracks and they have to try it in a way.
Speaker 2 [00:25:27] How do you, when you talk about this tradition and. Carrying on work that came before you and work that you are doing will be carried on by someone after you. How do you feel about, is there an end? Do you find the answer or is it just a piece to carry on?
David Schneider [00:25:48] So I think in science, you seldom find the answer. Most of us aren't doing work that ends up in a Nobel Prize that you tie it up with a bow and you're done. It's something that's continuous. And not only is it continuous, but in a while, it will be wrong. So there's this statistician box who said that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. And that might be a paraphrase of what he said. But the reason that's so interesting is it lets you come in with a mindset of humility where you say, okay, today I'm going to describe this in this way and it's going to allow me to understand things better. But I understand that when technology changes and when computers are even more powerful than they are now, people certainly will come up with a better description of how things work. And that's okay, because I'm bringing us to that point where that's going to happen. So I'd say that, you know, I wouldn't look at anything we do as being permanent. That's really rare and...
Speaker 3 [00:26:59] But do you find now that there's a whole school, an ignorant school in my opinion, that will basically say, yeah, but where's the truth? I mean, you know, in science, you don't talk about hard science, it's fact, and why isn't this true, right? And people really want that, just kind of be able to grab onto something. And, you now, but that's not really what science is.
David Schneider [00:27:20] Yeah, so if there's a question of is there is there truth, so. I bet physicists believe that there's truth, they describe, okay, I bet mathematicians believe there's true. You can make mathematical proofs of things that are self-supporting and they're solid within the system that they describe. And I think physics has things like that too. In biology, I'm not so sure that's the case. And I think there are often multiple ways of describing something, and they're all going to be decent descriptions. I think one of the problems is that we aren't good at describing complexity. You know, with science now, we like to be reductionists. We like to say, okay, I'm going to keep studying this until I find the one molecule that's broken, and I'll fix that molecule and everything will be fine. But systems are complicated, and... That doesn't just mean there are a lot of moving parts. It means that they have certain properties, so they can have redundancy. You know, if you want a system to be robust, the way you do that, one way you can do that is to have multiple fallback mechanisms. And so if you break one of them, the system won't fall apart. And so that makes it harder to go in and manipulate the system. You also have things called emergent properties, which means that the parts, are the sum of the whole is larger than the parts. And so you can put all these pieces together, but you can't predict the way that they're going to interact. And so it's hard to move from the very smallest things up. So I think there can be truth when you're looking at the smallest things, but it's to apply that to a bigger system.
Speaker 3 [00:29:13] That's why people always say, I don't trust science. So they say it was with COVID, it was perfect with COVID. Because obviously the science kept changing, right? And so I don't trust any of those people.
David Schneider [00:29:26] I think scientists are comfortable with uncertainty and comfortable with changing their view of the world. And it happens reasonably frequently that we'll look at something and go, oh, you know, we weren't looking at this in the right way, we've got to figure that out. And so that's just a normal part of the way things work for us. But yeah, I think we have to get that idea across, that it's not that. Yes, we can look at this really carefully, but there are times when we hit a dead end and have to look at it again.
Speaker 2 [00:30:01] Can I can I just ask you real quick you're familiar with the end with the what?
Speaker 3 [00:30:09] The three sisters who do the immunology, I think you said they were big, big.
David Schneider [00:30:15] Remind me a little more
Speaker 2 [00:30:16] They take imaging of bacteria in intestines and create sort of artwork.
David Schneider [00:30:24] Oh, right, right.
Speaker 2 [00:30:26] And if you're not as familiar, you don't have to comment on it. But we're going to go film with them. And I thought you might have something to say.
David Schneider [00:30:34] Yeah, I don't know them that well. I don't know their work in detail.
Speaker 3 [00:30:40] Alright, let's cut. Okay, one other quick question. Oh yeah, sure. Okay, it's collaboration. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you, obviously you work a lot with your future decreases and things like that, but at the same time, I see you collaborate with your students and your students love the collaboration that you do with them. So how important is that sort of generally in science and also in what you do?
David Schneider [00:31:02] So I find for the sort of science I do that collaboration is really important and at every level. So I will collaborate with people outside of my group. That's happened, in the most fun ways that's happened is when I encounter mathematical people. So I'll have been describing something and I'll give a talk or I'll talk to someone in their office and they say, you know, there's a really simple way of expressing that mathematically. And I didn't know it because I don't know that field that well, and so then we can put something together and come up with something neither of us would have thought of, so I enjoy that a lot. And then working with students is really fun. You know, I think that's maybe a difference between people who might want to work in a research institute that doesn't have students versus a teaching university like, like IMAT. And so if you like working with, with students. Then it's great if you can involve them in projects that are not just. Simple tests where they regurgitate the information, although I hope we don't do that very much anymore at all, but where you can make things projects that the students are excited about, and they have a drive to get it done. And those are fun collaborations. And so what I try to do is set up an environment where we can do that. So I have a facility where we could do that, and then I try and gather students together so they can see they're not alone, and there are other students who are doing this as well.
Speaker 3 [00:32:35] That's great.
Speaker 4 [00:32:38] Oh, one more question. Sorry about any more global scale, a little off track here, but with us coming out of COVID right now and the science and medical community dealing with this and finally coming up with these somewhat effective vaccines. Thank you very much. What happens with the next. Problem that we face like this. Do you think there's enough creative mindset or there's too much control within these corporations that are working on this? We have to be really much more flexible in understanding the roots of some of these, for instance. I guess this is kind of a general question.
David Schneider [00:33:22] Yeah, it's hard when a problem comes out of the blue, like COVID, and it's not a virus that you understood very well, and now suddenly you have to work on it. And it actually was corporations that ended up solving the problem, and a lot of teamwork and a lots of centrally controlled drive to get this done. And I don't think there's an easy way to deal with each of these infections. You know, the way we dealt with COVID mostly towards the end is we've come up with drugs that prevent the virus from being able to grow. We come upwith vaccines that prevents the virus from beingable to enter us and to grow, and so those are all things that control the virus. But before that happened, we were trying to improve the tolerance of people, right? So we were saying, look, you're infected, we're just going to try to keep you alive. And I think investment in that sort of biology is also important. You know, in the first year or so before you have these things that can kill the virus, you need to have medicine that's in place to keep people living, to support them while they have these terrible infections.
