26 July 2023 – On the occasion of the recent symposium honoring Maria Leptin, EMBO is publishing this conversation between Leptin, the former Director of EMBO who is now serving as the President of the European Research Council, and Fiona Watt, her successor as the EMBO Director. Last year, Leptin had a discussion with Fiona Watt for an episode of the EMBO podcast, and we have selected broadcasted and unbroadcast excerpts from that conversation to present here. The topics covered during their discussion included funding, policy making, careers, communication, Open Science, preprints, success and failure in research, and much more.
After the invasion of Ukraine began, EMBO created a solidarity list, with scientists across Europe and beyond offering support to researchers forced to leave Ukraine. The list was inspired by a similar initiative started by Maria Leptin and EMBO in 2017, when then-US President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
“The US is host to graduate students, postdocs, researchers at all career stages from across the world – the country is very welcoming,” Leptin said. “But then under Trump, it clamped down and didn’t let many of those people back in. People who’d gone home, anywhere in the world, couldn’t get back to their labs, and so we put out a call for colleagues to offer space in labs, libraries, or offices.”
Nearly 400 volunteers from 31 countries signed up within the first 24 hours to offer support. Leptin pointed out that EMBO is in a great position to bundle efforts to provide support from the life science community, and more than 500 offers of assistance were made following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I was contacted by a young Ukrainian scientist who was interested in opportunities in my lab: the timing was really good,” said Watt. “I could immediately think of things that we might be able to do to help. Even if we can just help a few people, I think it’s good.”
Leptin pointed out that scientists working on fundamental research questions were also able to provide support during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the academic freedom afforded by funding for purely curiosity-driven research.
“A survey of EMBO Members during the pandemic revealed that around a third had either pivoted their work to look at COVID, or provided material support,” she said. “To me that illustrates the beauty of funding for “blue sky” research: these people were able to switch instantaneously when needs arose because they had the freedom to do so.”
“And when it came to developing vaccines, many of the necessary discoveries that made the vaccines possible had already been made thanks to basic research.”
As heads of major international research organizations, Leptin and Watt agreed that the interface between science and policymakers is particularly important.
Watt, who joined EMBO after four years as Executive Chair of the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC), said: “One of the things I really enjoyed when I was at the MRC was helping inform the government’s strategy for the life sciences. In the room, you would have people from very different sectors: they might be running a big hospital trust, representing a pharmaceutical company, or be from pension funds looking at investments.”
“The shared goal was to inform government about priorities. It was powerful to hear from different parts of the community, what their priorities are, what they’re worried about, and the different routes to execution.”
Leptin, who headed EMBO for 12 years before joining the ERC, added: “Politicians must balance what they hear from many different places and that’s completely right – that’s what they are elected for,” Leptin said. “People like us, at the head of research organizations, have to call on the scientific community to provide input to be part of this conversation.”
“One way we have done this is through the Initiative for Science in Europe. For example, during the past framework programme, we collected several thousand signatures and went to Brussels with a petition and said: ‘look, it’s important that Europe spends more money on research’. And we were listened to. But this it isn’t a one way ‘we tell them’, it’s a dialog. If we understand politicians better and try and listen to them, they will listen to us.”
This dialogue applies not only to securing funding, but also benefits the quality of science, said Watt.
“An analogy I sometimes use for medical research is that if I hear there is a problem of an overgrown field, I might go off into my shed, build a lawnmower, and come out ready to mow the grass. But then I discover it’s a field of wheat!” Watt said. “The moral is that it’s important to involve patients, doctors, nurses, and other people in healthcare early on, not once a research programme is underway. For example, during the COVID pandemic, the most successful responses to a government call to develop ventilators came from people who knew about patient care in that setting.”
“In the past, I have experienced this myself, for instance when I was writing a cancer research grant and talked to a surgeon who saw patients every day. He said: ‘By and large, if you catch the cancer early you get a good result; if you catch it late you get a bad result. But what we don’t understand is why some patients who should do well do badly and vice versa’. I wouldn’t have thought of that without speaking to him: that kind of dialogue is so important. It changed my approach to research.
Leptin and Watt also discussed the flipside of communication, for instance the issue of some scientists overstating the potential impact of their research.
“People sometimes feel compelled to include in grant applications that they are going to cure cancer or whatever, and I think that is a real problem,” said Leptin. “If I see hype in anything that I get for reviewing, I take it out. People should know that the committees who look at grants tend to get cross if they see it, and if you say that as the final sentence of your abstract, the rest of your grant will be judged by that.”
Watt added: “A few years back, I read a grant, which was about looking at the function of a gene in the fly, but was pitched as a model for human skin disease. It appeared to be great work on the fly, but not an adequate model for the human disease. It’s not that people don’t see the huge power of fly models, but sometimes the research is being sold in the wrong way.”
Another area of discussion was communication with the public.
“In scientific training, providing opportunities to learn effective science communication is important, but it’s no longer enough to give a talk to some schoolchildren, pat yourself on the back, and go off,” Watt said. “You must ask the children; do they understand what they heard? What do they get from engaging with scientists? It’s so much more about dialogue and not just explaining what you do.”
Leptin added: “The good thing about science is that there is huge diversity of people. If we say from the beginning that this is the mold into which a researcher must fit, we’re losing out. Let those who are good communicators become good communicators, but don’t force them. Maybe you didn’t tick one box but are excellent in another – let people do what they’re good at.”
Staying on the topic of careers, the conversation turned to the fine lines between success and failure.
“Take any top funding scheme, anywhere in the world, and there will be a high failure rate,” Watt said. “What you need is the confidence that if the funding doesn’t work from one source, there are other sources. We always celebrate our successes, but when you are a successful scientist, it’s also important to talk about failure.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy and the system is not perfect, but it’s about having the grit to keep going or the patience to go off and do something else and then have another go a bit later,” Watt said.
Surveys of scientists have shown there is strong support for funding policies that distribute funds more evenly among laboratories and benefit smaller research groups over longer period of times.
“On the one hand, the grant writing process itself is a really good activity,” Leptin said. “Of course, it’s hard at first sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper, but as I get into it, I really enjoy it because I’m forced to think very hard about what I am going to do.“
“On the other hand, where grants run for two years or less, it can seem as if one is constantly rewriting grants, reading other people’s applications, and writing the next round – you don’t have time to think anymore,” Leptin said.
“I’m very much in favour of providing funding to smaller groups: it makes for more creativity, more independent thinking, however then you need to invest in somebody for a decent amount of time, so it’s important to make them long and big grants,” she said.
Leptin and Watt’s discussion concluded with reflections on Open Science and publishing.
“I believe that making your data publicly available, whether in preprint or publication, is essential: someone paid for you to do this, and you shouldn’t hide it,” Watt said. “It’s a big, complex ecosystem, and when it comes to Open Science the trick is in the implementation, for example through the development of effective Open Science publishing policies, encouraging the use of refereed preprints, or archiving records so you can interrogate data some years later.”
“I think the best thing we can do when it comes to compliance with Open Science mandates is help and train people: we’re partners in this, we’re going to get it over the line, and, with any luck, next time it’ll go better,” she said.
Leptin added: “EMBO accepts reviewed preprints as evidence of productivity for postdoctoral fellowship applications. Initially, one fear was that anybody could put anything out as a preprint, but actually people tend to put out papers they think are good and they’re about to submit.”
“Of course, it could be wrong, but if there are referee reports and your response attached then the step between a preprint and an article published in a journal is not big as big as it was, and is more of a continuum,” she said.
“Publication times are getting longer and risky projects take even longer to get to fruition. Therefore, I think we’re doing science a disservice by always insisting on first author, fully published, and accepted papers. However, when it comes to judging application, it’s very difficult to do that in the first place, and I don’t have a perfect solution.”
Based on a discussion between Maria Leptin and Fiona Watt for an episode of the EMBO podcast, moderated by Thiago Carvalho. Answers have been edited for space and clarity reasons.
