What's the best way to become a professor? The answer depends on where you are
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Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, how the paths to professorship vary across the world. How swapping out misfiring mitochondria helps cancer cells avoid destruction. And as a ceasefire comes into effect, we take stock of the impact of the war in Gaza on science. I'm Nick Pachachow. And I'm Benjamin Thompson. Who should become a professor?

At face value, it may sound like a straightforward question. We want the best of the best to reach the highest echelons of the ivory tower. But how do you assess a researcher to determine that they are the best? Scientists spend all their time measuring stuff and comparing stuff, so surely there's a standard way to do this, right?

Well, according to a new study in Nature, it turns out that measuring excellence is done in a lot of different ways across the world. And those different ways could be blocking some people from getting these sought-after positions. I'm originally from Honduras.

And when I was in Honduras and tried to progress into getting into academia and pursuing a research career, there are many barriers coming from a low-income country. This is Yancy Flores Breso, one of the researchers behind the new work. So whatever my career track was encouraged in me was very different.

from what was asked in other places. Or there were things that were not available to me that were asked for. Like, for example, if you have publications in an international journal, this is very difficult to ask from a person coming from Honduras or any other low-income or middle, low-income countries, because we don't have the money for that.

Because of this personal experience, Yen-Sze felt it was likely that excellent researchers could be excluded from getting top-notch science positions simply because of where they're from or what institution they worked in. It doesn't mean that people lack the skill, the capabilities, or that they're not good enough. It's just that maybe they haven't had the opportunity or they have different opportunities to grow.

So Yancy and a team of researchers from the Global Young Academy, an international society of scientists aiming to give a voice to young scientists across the globe, set about trying to identify what's required to get a professorship in different places in order to create a database of what the different criteria actually are around the world.

The hope was that this database could be used by hiring managers and university administrators so they could better understand what researchers have been working towards in their past. For example, someone coming from Honduras might not have a lot of publications in an international journal. Instead, they may have more local publications, as that is what is encouraged and possible there.

This could be at odds with what the hiring institution is looking for. So if we measure them with the same rules...

Some things will be off. So what this paper is saying is that we cannot use standard rules to measure candidates from different places. After collecting criteria contained in policy documents from 190 academic institutions and 58 government agencies from around the world, the team used statistical analyses to find commonalities and differences.

they found that different institutions valued different things. For example, there were key differences between the Global North and South. Institutions in the Global South often put more emphasis on publications and awards than on visibility and engagement. But there were also some surprises for Yen-Tse and the team.

For example, institutions in high-income countries seem to be moving away from using publications and citations, or bibliometrics, as a way of rating candidates. Which is quite different from what institutions in upper-middle-income countries were doing. It was obvious that high-income countries or countries that are

are the main players in science, are starting to care more about the quality of their research and the other aspects like integrity, you know, and they ask about the impact socially, but not measured by impact factor, let's say. And upper middle income countries, which are the emerging players in science, you know, they are relying a lot in bibliometrics.

So it's like something that they maybe saw that the high-income countries had earlier and then they're using it. But while the other ones just realised that this doesn't work, this doesn't help, upper-middle-income countries haven't realised this. Many studies have suggested that bibliometrics are a flawed way of measuring a candidate's quality. But that isn't to say that high-income countries didn't consider publications at all.

In fact, 92% of all the documents the team surveyed specified some quantitative measure like number of publications or citations. It's just that in the high-income countries, this was amongst a suite of other measures. Smriti Malapati, a senior reporter here at Nature, has been writing a news article about this paper.

She asked different researchers, not associated with the study, about the reasons why these upper-middle-income countries focus on bibliometrics. The researchers I spoke to said that it's a very difficult thing to figure out. One possible reason could be that assessing researchers based on quantitative metrics is

is a cheaper way of assessing researchers. You know, these numbers are easy to get and to look at, whereas it probably requires more labor and is more expensive to hire and rely on large peer review panels to assess quality. And so maybe that might be a reason why many of these countries are still relying on quantitative metrics. Yeah.

As for the high-income countries, it could be that concerns about transparency and journals gaming the impact factor system have started to have an effect, as many organisations have been pushing for a move away from bibliometrics because of this. But having this knowledge is one thing. The real question for Yancy and the team is will this help researchers from across the world be assessed for promotion fairly?

Some of the researchers Smriti spoke to seem to think that this dataset will be useful to do what Yancy hopes.

It's really useful to be aware of the differences in how researchers are assessed across different regions. And researchers are really mobile. You know, they move from one region to the other. And it can be kind of challenging to really fit one framework of assessment into another framework of assessment, especially when you're moving and hopping between one region to the other. Yeah.

Now, this assessment only focused on promotion to professor. And even though it looked at hundreds of documents in dozens of languages, it still only captures a fraction of the tens of thousands of scientific institutions worldwide. So future work will need to fill these gaps. But for Yancy, she hopes that this work will help push a rethink of policies about hiring...

to help create a more diverse science. There's no like a tick in the box questions that can be answered by different candidates across the world. It's something that you really need to look into that person to see the strengths and the potentials of each candidate.

And this is not a negative thing. This is a good thing because at the end, it brings diversity into academia. And it's not only diversity of like backgrounds, it's also diversity of thought, you know, of strengths. Like a colleague of mine says, you know, you don't build a good football team just having like excellent quarterbacks, you know. That was Yancy Flores-Bresso from the University of Cork in Ireland and the University of Washington in the U.S.,

You also heard from Smriti Malapati, senior reporter here at Nature. For more on the path to professorship, we'll put links to the paper and Smriti's news article in the show notes. Coming up, how swapping mitochondria with teethels helps give cancer the edge. Right now though, it's time for the Research Highlights with Dan Fox. South American mummies have tattoos, and now researchers are uncovering their extraordinarily fine details...

with lasers. Tattoos have been a tradition for over 5,000 years, but tattoos bleed and fade over time, obscuring the original art. Now a team of researchers have used an imaging technique called laser-stimulated fluorescence to examine tattoos on the 1,200-year-old mummified remains of individuals from the pre-Columbian Chiang Kai culture who lived in what is now Peru.

This technique makes the skin under the tattoo appear white, yielding a high contrast image. It allows the researchers to see lines as narrow as one tenth of a millimeter on the mummy's skins, revealing intricate geometric plant and animal designs. This tattoo art was more intricate than the decoration on Chiang Kai pottery and textiles and more intricate than the art of any other pre-Columbian civilization in Peru.

The authors say that this imaging technique has the potential to reveal other hidden details of ancient tattoos, including how humans developed complex tattooing methods. If you want to learn more, that research is inked onto the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Flu could be cut down to size with a simple pill.

Although most people with flu recover without taking medication, effective antivirals are needed to treat those at high risk of severe disease.

Now, researchers have tested the drug Seraxavir Marboxyl in 588 people aged between 5 and 65. Participants either received the drug or placebo within two days of symptom onset. And the team tracked how quickly fevers broke and symptoms including cough, fatigue and sore throat improved.

The drug relieved symptoms nearly a day faster than a placebo, with viral levels of participants dropping to almost zero just 22 hours after taking the medication. Most side effects were mild or moderate and ended on their own and the authors say that an extremely low number of infections showed resistance to the drug. There's no side effects to reading that research over at Nature Medicine.

Next up, I've been finding out how some cancer cells transfer their misfiring mitochondria into immune cells to help them avoid destruction. Now, cancer cells are insatiable. To fuel their ability to quickly grow and repeatedly divide, they need energy, and that is made by their mitochondria.

But cancer cells also need to make large amounts of the building blocks required to construct things like DNA. And a lot of these are also made by mitochondria. These tiny subcellular organelles are not just powerhouses, they're factories. Mitochondria contain their own tiny genomes to help them carry out this manufacturing work.

But in cancer cells, mitochondrial DNA can often mutate, preventing the organelles working as well as needed. However, some cancer cells are known to overcome this hurdle.

How? Well, experiments have shown that they steal working mitochondria from nearby neighbors. Cancer cells are very efficient at taking up mitochondria in mouse models. They take them up from a number of different cell types, including various immune cell populations such as T cells. This is Jonathan Brestoff, who researches how mitochondria are shuffled between cells.

In cancer cells, this mitochondrial theft seems to represent yet another way for them to survive and thrive.

But while this has been well studied, less well understood is the opposite. Most of the literature has focused on transfer of mitochondria to cancer cells, but the ability for cancer cells to transfer mitochondria to other cell types in the tumor has not been well described. But that might be beginning to change. Enter Yosuke Togashi, who wanted to find out whether cancer cells do transfer their mitochondria to T cells and see

see what effect this might have. T-cells play a vital role in killing cancer cells.

But dysfunctional mitochondria can be found in tumor-infiltrating T cells, and this dysfunction is known to impair the cells' cancer-fighting capabilities. And this led Yosuke and the team to the question. If cancer cells are known to be taking functioning mitochondria from T cells, could they be giving broken ones back in return?

This is what Yosuke and his colleagues wanted to investigate, and they've got a paper in Nature about it this week. Initially, the team took groups of cancer cells and T-cells derived from patient samples and grew them together in the lab. By sequencing the tiny genomes of the mitochondria from each group, they could see that mutations specific to the genomes of cancer cell mitochondria could be detected in the T-cells after a couple of weeks.

This was a strong indication that the process of mitochondria transfer to T cells was happening. But it wasn't conclusive. The team needed to see it happening. Mitochondria movement can be watched by staining technology. Cancer cell mitochondria was stained by red reporter protein. By tagging the mitochondria with a red fluorescent protein, Yosuke could track where the cancer cell's mitochondria went.

They also tagged the T-cells' own mitochondria green. Once the two cell types were mixed together, the only thing left to do was wait and watch. At first, the T-cells have green colour, and we use time-lapse technology, and gradually green disappear and gradually red increase. This didn't happen in every case, though. Sometimes there was a gradual, incomplete replacement of mitochondria in a T-cell.

Sometimes it was partial replacement, and in other cases they saw no replacement at all.

It was good evidence that the process was happening, though. But how? In the direct transfer method, the cancer cells make tiny pipes called tunnelling nanotubes that reach out and attach to the T-cell.

In the indirect method, the cancer cells release these extracellular vesicles, essentially tiny membrane-bound sacs, which can bind to the T-cells. Both of these methods have been shown in other work to be involved in transporting mitochondria between cells. And while it's not clear exactly what's going on in this situation, both appear to play a role in delivering dysfunctional mitochondria from cancer to T-cells.

And this replacement wasn't just seen in human cells in a dish.

Yosuke showed that in mouse studies, T-cells within tumours also picked up dysfunctional mitochondria, which have knock-on effects on the ability of these immune cells to function. If T-cells receive abnormal mitochondria from cancer cells, T-cell function is impaired. These T-cells showed evidence of entering senescence, an ageing state that limits their ability to function correctly.

In addition, the team also looked at a different type of dysfunction in T cells known as exhaustion, which also results in these immune cells being unable to do their job. So it seems that in cases like this, cancer cells are able to get a double win.

They can steal healthy mitochondria to help them thrive and donate malfunctioning ones to immune cells to hamper efforts to destroy them. These insights impressed Jonathan, who you heard from at the start. He's written a News & Views article to accompany the work. The reason why this is important is for two reasons. The first is that our conception of the ownership of mitochondria is...

based off of a widely held assumption that the mitochondria that are present in a cell were manufactured exclusively by that cell type. This paper opens up a new concept, which is that there can be sufficient mitochondria exchange between cells that the mitochondria you observe in that cell type might actually originate from another cell. This is a conceptual advance, and that's why I think this paper is so particularly striking.

Another implication, which is that the authors demonstrated that if you disrupt mitochondria transfer from the cancer cells to the T cells, that it unlocks greater susceptibility to immunotherapy against those cancers.

So it may have practical and translational implications that may impact future drug development. Jonathan also stressed that seeing this transfer in human cells is important, but that there's a lot to learn about the mechanisms behind the transfer system and why it doesn't happen every time.

Yosuke thinks this too, and wants to better understand other aspects. For example, the mitochondria that come from the cancer cells survive destruction in the T cells, and there's not an entirely clear picture as to why. It's also unknown whether this transfer process happens with other types of immune cells.

But as Jonathan says, this work, along with previous studies showing evidence of mitochondria transfer between non-cancer cells, really challenges the idea that a cell makes its mitochondria and there they stay. Perhaps there is a whole transfer network waiting to be discovered.

For me, one of the most interesting questions is how frequently are cells exchanging mitochondria? We think of them as constantly fusing with each other and then fizzing and breaking apart within a given cell. But are cells constantly trading mitochondria with each other for their own benefit, whether it's cell communication or for metabolic support of the various cell types? That's a really exciting question. How extensive is this exchange of mitochondria?

in tissues under healthy conditions, or is it really just restricted to this context of cancer? Jonathan Brestoff there, from the Washington University School of Medicine in the US. You also heard from Yoshike Togashi from Okayama University in Japan. To find links to Jonathan's News and Views article and Yoshike's research paper, head over to the show notes.

Hello there, Noah Baker here. In place of today's briefing chat, we're going to do something a bit different and turn our attention to the war in Gaza. On Sunday the 19th of January, after 15 months of war, the first stage of a ceasefire deal came into force. Whilst only the very beginning, many hoped that this could be the start of a long and likely uncertain process of recovery from a truly devastating war. And science too has not been spared.

Joining me now to discuss just some of those impacts is Nature's Bureau Chief for Africa and the Middle East, Esen Massoud. Hi, Esen. Hey, hi, Noah. I'd like to start by asking you a little bit about your approach towards reporting on war more broadly, especially as a science specialist. Well, so Nature has...

I would say, you know, quite a history or at least a story of war reporting. I mean, we look through the archive. We've covered previous wars, wars in the 20th century, wars also in our present time. One of the reasons for that, of course, is that we are, we're human, right? Wars are a very human story. And in that sense, they're a science story.

And then there's a sort of, there's an additional dimension, of course, and that is that, you know, what is the relationship of research to the impact of wars, to the conduct of wars? And there, of course, you know, that's a whole other sort of situation. There are researchers who study so many different aspects of, you know, of the conduct of wars. There are researchers who study how people are affected. And then there are researchers who study, you know, what needs to be done, you know, in a sort of more humanitarian sense or afterwards. So,

There are lots of ways in which we would be covering this. And it's sad. It's really sad to say this. But, you know, we've been doing this probably since the start of nature. Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose there's two questions here. One is the way that science interacts with war and the process of war. But then there's also the question as an institution ourselves and as journalists, how we go about covering it.

just from the nuts and bolts of reporting, for example, when we don't have special correspondence on the ground, like how does one go about trying to seek the information that you might need to find those stories, the way that science is being impacted and scientists are being impacted? You're absolutely right. I mean, not having correspondence is, it's a huge drawback. We're hoping that with the ceasefire, that if it holds, you know, that might change. We're definitely hoping, I think a lot of us in the media space are hoping that might change.

But for the moment, of course, we then have to rely on essentially from secondary sources or we rely on talking to people using email, other online sources, phones and so on and so forth. But I guess when we're doing science reporting, a big source of our knowledge is the published research literature.

And here, because researchers have been so active, both outside of Gaza and Israel and also inside, there is quite a lot of material that we can draw on, material that's coming out of the peer-reviewed literature, so we can use that. There's also a whole panoply of international research.

organizational material, you know, from United Nations agencies, from places like the World Bank, from non-governmental organizations, from even from the business world, from the business community. And so we can draw on that

information we can draw on that knowledge as well. So there are ways. And of course, you know, finally, and in some ways really difficult is, of course, the scientists on the ground and we try and reach them when we can. Absolutely. And I mean, that's something that's really vital trying to access that good quality corroboratable information. I mean, it's something that lots of journalists value very highly. Nature as a science specialist, of course, really, really highly values reliable,

repeatable in the context of research or corroboratable in the context of reporting something like war information. And it's been hard to gather that information in this particular conflict, especially in the early days. I mean, partly it's difficult because of access. I mean, in many ways...

even international organizations have struggled to get access. When we do science reporting, you know, we understand that, you know, the knowledge changes as the evidence changes. And so if we don't know something one month, we'll go back in three months and we might get a different answer. We might go back after seven months and they'll go, oh, we've actually refined what we know. We didn't know this thing before.

but we actually know something better. I mean, one example of this kind of tangible example I missed is, you know, we reported as much as we could about the level of damage to the universities and other scientific infrastructure, I think within about a month of the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas. And we came back to it after about a year and then we just sort of just kept on going and that, you know, that information does get better and does get more refined. And that's something that I think we should pick up on in terms of the ways that this war has impacted science.

Impacts on universities is one of the most tangible things that I think I can think of immediately outside of the impact on people, scientists themselves that we can point to. We know that science is very, very important to Palestinians and to Israelis. Culturally, it's important in terms of spending on R&D, in terms of access to institutions and

all of that has been turned on its head in many, many, many different ways by this conflict. Can you give us a kind of an overview of how science has been impacted by this war? Well, it has, and it's been hugely and in very, very different ways. I mean, from the Israeli side, you know, one university, Ben Gurion University in Negev, you know, they lost 84 people in the October 7 attacks. I mean, that was a pretty devastating impact on one institution. And just more broadly, scientists in Israel have had to go and join their war efforts.

And so actual day-to-day scientific work, if it's not directly related to the war, is pretty much nothing like what it was before. Elaborations have really dropped off. And then from the perspective of the Palestinians, from the perspective of Gaza, I mean, it's just a whole other dimension to what's happened. I mean, as you say, universities, knowledge, scholarship, learning is equally important to both of these communities. And

For the Palestinians in Gaza alone, 21 universities and colleges for a population of 2 million. That's pretty impressive. And from the data that UNESCO, the UN Science Agency, put together, as of September, they estimate that 15 out of the 21 have been either

destroyed or severely damaged. I can think of relatively few scenarios in my experience as a science journalist where you can point to such a significant impact on the academic infrastructure as a result of a conflict. I mean, we're looking at a situation now where there is, it's hard to really fathom how this can be rebuilt at this point in time. 100%. Looking ahead, I mean, the first thing, of course, is that the ceasefire has to hold.

And so at the moment, you know, we've got sort of six weeks of the present situation and then hopefully a slightly longer period, hopefully not a very long period before we get to the third phase of the plan, which is, you know, what do we then think about in terms of reconstruction? I think what the researchers that we've been talking to are saying or advising is that

very quickly, let's not wait. Let's quickly get to a needs assessment. And that will require some research, some science on the ground now while there is space and scope to do this because there isn't an active, it's not an active war zone. And then that needs assessment could then

inform the reconstruction that is to come, you know, after the third phase. But there's no reason why the needs assessment should wait. Water, clean water is just non-existent at the moment. Access to food aid, having, you know, beyond that more of a functioning economy. And then you've got, of course, the whole story around bomb buildings, environmental remediation, you know, just even removing human remains and giving people a decent burial. All of those things, you

are where the next level will go. We know that rebuilding infrastructure, rebuilding economies and so on, these are all really important. But of course, we must never overlook the fact that there are people that have been directly impacted, lives, livelihoods, families that are going to come back and find their lives very, very different. What are the people on the ground that we're speaking to saying, what are the scientists that you're speaking to telling us

about how they're looking forward, what they want to do next. There are sort of two ways to think of this. There's ways in which research can help things rebuild. But then there's also ways that researchers can try to pick up their life again. It's all of the above, Noah. And I think, you know, for I mean, this is where, you know, you asked me earlier about, you know, how do we go about this?

as science journalists because this is not something that we do that often. And it is, it's some of the most difficult aspects of reporting because, yes, on the one hand, people are, you know, trying as much as they can to still do their data collection and their publishing and keep in contact with their collaborators, you know, where they can, but they're doing this

where they happen to have a home or where they have to suddenly find some firewood because that's how they're cooking. There's no gas or there's only a particular window when they've got... They might have a phone signal or a mobile signal so they can keep in contact with people. And that's before, you know, before any knowledge of what's happened to their own homes. You know, do they have homes to go back to or are they looking like they're going to be living in much more temporary accommodation in tents and so on, you know, for a longer time. So that...

You know, that's difficult. You know, I'm not going to mince my words. I can't sort of, there's no getting around the fact that

This is some of the hardest aspect to report. And I think for scientists trying to go back to their institutions, they're faced with the reality that many scientific institutions, universities, for example, we are aware were specifically targeted by the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, as they believe they may be places that were harbouring Hamas operatives. And so the destruction there, whilst...

pretty comprehensive across the whole of Gaza, is particularly extreme. And so how that can be picked up again is really a question that we're going to have to keep watching. It is. I mean, we are going to have to keep coming back to this. I'm hoping that we're going to do this. I mean, we've done a few stories, you know, in the 15 months. Let's hope, you know, fingers very, very firmly crossed that this ceasefire holds because that's the key thing. You know, that's the key to getting people down to assess what's needed and

And there's a whole well of goodwill out there, if that's the right word, scientists from the diaspora of both communities who are really ready to play their part. There are institutions who are ready to do more.

The bit of the optimist in me, it's difficult to be optimistic reporting these stories, but I think we need to maintain that. And the optimist in me says that if there is a window, it is now to have something much more permanent. And there is a huge amount of interest and goodwill outside, and it's a case of how that can be harnessed. That's all for this week. As always, you can keep in touch with us on email. We are podcast at nature.com.

I'm Benjamin Thompson. And I'm Nick Petrucciaro. Thanks for listening.