Inspiring Creativity through Night Science [Video]

In this episode of Inside Cancer Careers, Dr. Oliver Bogler interviews two guests, Dr. Itai Yanai, who is a Professor at NYU School of Medicine, and Dr. Martin Lercher, who is a Professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. They are also co-founders of Night Science, which is the creative aspect of scientific research. They discuss the importance of scientific creativity and explore why it is often overlooked in scientific training and how it can be nurtured. Drs. Yanai and Lercher then discuss their early inspirations for pursuing science, their career paths, and the importance of interdisciplinary thinking.

Show Notes

Dr. Martin Lercher

Dr. Itai Yanai

Night Science Workshops

“It takes two to think” editorial in Nature Biotechnology

Night Science Episode with Daniel Kahneman

Night Science Episode with Albert-László Barabási

The Society of Genes (book)

Ad: NanCI – Connecting Scientists mobile app

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins  

Your Turn Recommendations:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Night Science Podcasts

 TRANSCRIPT

Oliver Bogler

Hello and welcome to Inside Cancer Careers, a podcast from the National Cancer Institute where we explore all the different ways people fight cancer and hear their stories. I’m your host, Oliver Bogler from NCI Center for Cancer Training. Today, we’re talking about scientific creativity, an often overlooked but vital element in a successful research career and how you can take practical steps to nurture it, evoke it and connect with others around it. I’m going to admit I’m really excited about today’s conversation.

Listen through to the end of the show to hear our guests make some interesting recommendations and where we invite you to Take Your Turrn.

So it’s my pleasure to welcome two very special guests, Dr. Itai Yanai, professor at the Institute for Systems Genetics and in Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Welcome, Itai.

Itai Yanai

Thank you, Oliver. It’s fantastic to be here.

Oliver Bogler

And Dr. Martin Lercher, professor and head of the Institute of Computational Cell Biology at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. Welcome, Martin.

Martin Lercher

Well, thanks. Thank you so much for inviting us.

Oliver Bogler

So it seems obvious that scientists need to be creative, of course, as well as rigorous and thorough, ethical and informed and probably many other things. But we rarely ever talk about creativity, let alone teach it to early career scientists. Why is that? And what are you doing to change that?

Martin Lercher

Well, we think it’s a disaster that it is like that. And we want to make our contribution to change that. Why that is? I think it’s partly historical that, you know, it seemed more important to distinguish science from non-science, from philosophy, for example, which is great at generating ideas, but not good at throwing out wrong ideas. So historically, scientists training has focused on what we call the day science part, on the testing of ideas, and not so much on the generation of ideas. So I think that’s at least part of the explanation. Itai, what do yobu think?

Itai Yanai

Yeah, well, it may also be that it’s more straightforward to teach the day science. We can have a kind of control over the day science part because what is day science? Day science is you have a hypothesis and you’re going to test it. You’re going to design an experiment. You’re going to build in controls. You really are calling the shots in day science and it’s harder relatively to sort of wrap our minds around the notion that we cannot control the creative process like that.

Oliver Bogler

So you’ve both used the term day science that may be new to our audience. What is day science and is there a night science?

Itai Yanai

Yeah, these are terms that were coined by the biologist Francois Jacob, who together with Lwoff and Monod shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for elucidating essentially the principles of gene regulation for the first time. And so this Nobel Prize winning biologist, when he writes his memoir called The Statue Within, he could have taken a victory lap.

He could have said, I’m such a genius. Look at this amazing work that I did. I’m just brilliant. And of course, a brilliant mind will do brilliant things. Instead, what he does in that book is paint a picture of the reality of doing science, where you’re in constant confusion. You’re in the cloud, as another biologist, Uri Alon, likes to say. And so he distinguishes in this book two modes: day science and night science. Day science is what…