812: Studying the Evolutionary Diversity of Squishy Sea Creatures - Dr. Joseph Ryan
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the People Behind the Science podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Marie McNeely, and I'm excited to have you here for episode 812, where we'll be revisiting our interview with Dr. Joseph Ryan. Listeners, Joe studies DNA from squishy marine invertebrates, things like comb jellies, jellyfish, sea squirts, and sea cucumbers. The goal of his research is to understand how different types of animals are related, how

how animals adapt to extreme environments, and how animals have evolved the extraordinary diversity that we see today. In this episode, he shared some excellent stories about his life in science. So get ready to sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science.

Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the People Behind the Science podcast. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Joseph Ryan. Dr. Joseph Ryan

So Joe, welcome to our show today. How are you? Great. How are you? I'm doing quite well. Thanks for asking. And thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to join us to talk a little bit about yourself and your work. So before we jump into all the details though, I want to start with just a short introduction so our listeners have a little bit of a sense of your background. So listeners, Joe is an assistant professor of biology at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at the University of Florida.

He received his PhD in bioinformatics from Boston University. Afterwards, Joe was awarded a research fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. And he subsequently conducted postdoctoral research via a postdoctoral scholarship at SARS International Center for Marine Molecular Biology in Bergen, Norway. And in our conversation today, Joe, we're going to talk more about both your life and your science. And I'd love to talk about life outside science first. So

Can you tell us how you like to spend your time when you're not very busy doing work? Well, I have two kids and they're one and three. So they pretty much have all my time outside of work. And my favorite thing to do with them is to dance. So my daughter is one and she likes The Clash. So we like to dance to that. And my son is three and he likes Tiny Bubbles by Don Ho. So that's our go-to jams. So what's your favorite go-to jam?

I like both of those songs, but I like Slim Whitman, who's a classic country yodeler who actually lived down the street from this place about an hour away until he died a couple of years ago. Well, Joe, it sounds like music is an integral part of your family's life. Then if you're getting excited about different songs and dancing, do you play any instruments? I do. I play guitar and drums and keyboards. That's awesome. Not much these days, though. Yeah. I was going to say you got to be composing new music for them to dance to, right? Yeah.

Very cool. It's great to get a window into your life outside of science. It sounds like you've got quite a bit to keep you busy with family life, but I know it's so exciting to talk about your research as well. So we're excited to do that on the program. And what I like to ask people first is basically to describe what they do in a way that would be accessible to people who might not be familiar with your work. So how do you describe what you do, Joe, to someone who is not intimately familiar with your research field?

I tell them I study DNA from squishy animals to try to understand how animals evolved the extraordinary diversity that we see in the forms of animals today. I love that you describe them as squishy animals. And for our listeners out there, there's a lot of squishy animals out there to choose from. What are some of the animals you study? We work on ctenophores and cnidarians and sea cucumbers and tunicates.

Right now, that's our big four, but we've worked on lots of different ones. Anything that's in Invert is interesting to us usually. Absolutely. And listeners, if you go to Joseph's lab webpage, there's some beautiful pictures of jellyfish on there, which I was quite impressed by. Thanks. Absolutely. So we chatted a little bit about what you do when you're at work and what you do outside of science. But I'd love to talk next a little bit about what motivates you. I think

As a scientist, there's a lot on your plate. There's a lot that you've got to do every day. And at least for me, it's really helpful to have little motivational sayings and quotes and things to get me through when I'm struggling. So do you have a particular motivational quote or a saying that really resonates with you?

I'm not into the quotes that much, but my favorite quotes are by Chuck Thompson, who was the announcer for the Baltimore Orioles for a long time. And he used to say, ain't the beer cold and go to war, Miss Agnes, which I don't know if they motivate me or if I like them because they're kind of random. But everyone kind of knows what they mean when you say that. So when is an appropriate situation where one of these quotes popped into your mind?

Ain't the beer cold? It's like when great things happen, when you get a paper accepted and then when the paper is rejected, you might say, go to war, Miss Agnes. I like it. So has this caught on in your lab that the students say it now too? No. You got to work on that. A lot of things that I say, they understand, but they don't understand. Gotcha.

Well, fantastic quotes to pass on to our listeners today. And one of the things that I'd love to chat about also is some of the people who might have motivated or inspired you. And perhaps this Baltimore Orioles announcer is among them. But do you have maybe role models or people that you've looked up to in your life?

I try to copy the things that I admire about my mentors and friends. One guy that I went to grad school named Adam writes all at UNC Charlotte. And he's one of these very smart and very calm people. And I tend to get all fired up and in a frenzy about things. So I try to channel his restraint. Maybe it helps a little bit. Maybe I would be way off the rails if I didn't. Yeah.

Gotcha. I'm one of these type A people myself, so I have certain things I have to do to keep myself on track and calm and focused. So I totally understand. Yeah. I mean, it's fun to get all lathered up about stuff, but around the right people, it's good to keep things chill. Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, great to hear about someone who maybe helps you stay calm and centered and focused. And I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your work and maybe where your interest in science began, because I think hearing some of these stories about beginnings is really interesting to get an idea of where scientists came from and those experiences that led them to where they are today. So Joe, can you walk us through maybe starting all the way back at the very beginning and tell us what first sparked your interest in science?

I used to steam blue crabs at a bar restaurant in Baltimore in the early 90s. And I was doing this while I was going to college and I was studying things like English and history, whatever I liked when I got there. So I bounced around between five different colleges in Maryland and ended up with an associate's degree in general studies from a community college that technically no longer exists.

And then I talked to a friend of mine who was studying business at another school. And I went to that school and started learning computers as part of this. And then I started a web design company in the mid-90s with a friend of mine that I met in the school. And then I was doing these weird jobs, these weird websites for people doing limos. And these people never paid me really. And I was terrible at collecting money. And I realized I needed a job.

So I went on the internet, which was pretty young at that point, and went to a bulletin board and found this advertisement for a job that happened to be a contract position at NIH. But I had no idea what it was. I just saw computer programmer. So I went to that job and somehow got past the interview. And I got this contract position at NIH making web calendar applications type thing. And then...

I just was introduced with research at NIH and I fell in love with the research aspect. And I liked the computer aspect as well, but I was way more interested in what these people were doing. So that's how it all started. That's awesome. Well, Joe, I would say that's maybe not the typical story that you hear from someone who's found a career in science. So did you have any inkling when you were younger that science was interesting to you or was it not until you were able to work at the NIH that this really struck you as fascinating?

If I look back at my science teachers that I had in school, I don't think I ever really had a great one. I had some really great humanities teachers and some really great math teachers. And I always gravitated towards those because I really think it's the teacher that made the subject at that level. So it wasn't until actually getting this weird job out of nowhere that I thought about science. So once you discovered that this was something you were interested in at the NIH, what then was your next step?

So I was there and I got brought in on projects to process data. And I got an input and I was told what the output should look like. And I was doing these types of things. But people started asking me, build me a phylogenetic tree. And I was like, that sounds cool. I want to build it. And I would go to my supervisor and be like, hey, I want to build this phylogenetic tree. And they're like, you don't really have the background necessary to do these types of things. So you can't do that. And I was pretty bummed out about that.

And then I started looking into how I would get that background and then went to grad school. Awesome. So why Boston University for grad school?

They had a bioinformatics program that just started at the time. And the truth is, I kind of wanted to go somewhere where there were good mountains because I was really into snowboarding at the time. So I actually got accepted in British Columbia, where one of the greatest mountains in North America is there. So I was going to go there. And my parents were so bummed out. We're

We were having some problems with health and they didn't want me to go so far away. So I went to Boston, but it turned out great. I was able to go there and get the biology that I needed and live off of my computational skills that I had had. Absolutely. So then as you were finishing up graduate school, what was going through your mind thinking about next steps and how did you make the decision?

So in graduate school, I didn't really have funding after the first few years. And then I was teaching a lot. And I talked to my former NIH supervisor about possibly working with him to finish up working on the stuff that I was working on and finishing up in my degree and then continuing with him in a postdoc. And he was into that idea.

So I just finished up at NIH and started working with him for the next five years. Awesome. Sounds like that networking paid off then. Yeah, it was good. Very cool. And then you had a great opportunity to travel all the way to Norway for your next postdoctoral opportunity. So can you tell us a little bit about that experience? Well, I read a book. It's like a biography of my life and science type thing. And the person in the book had done a postdoc abroad.

So I started looking what kind of opportunities were abroad. And this is something that you don't really get a chance to do. So if you have the opportunity, you should do it. So I looked around and I found this lab that was very interested in the same questions, but in different animals. I had been working in cnidarians and ctenophores, and that was about it.

So I went to this lab that was working on lots and lots of different invertebrate animals. And I learned a lot of zoology there. It was really an amazing experience to be over there as well. Awesome. And quite beautiful, I imagine, in Bergen, Norway as well. Yeah. And when it's sunny, which isn't that much, but when it's sunny, it's just like really incredible. Fantastic. And for our listeners out there, I know you mentioned you work with cnidarians and ctenophores. What are these organisms? Can you describe them a little bit so people can kind of get a visual?

So Cnidarians, most people are familiar with from corals, sea anemones, true jellyfish. And ctenophores are often mixed up with jellyfish, but they're not closely related to Cnidarians. They're jellies that have these eight rows of combs on them that they use for locomotion. A lot of times if you see them at the aquarium...

They'll have lights shining on these combs that make them look like little rainbows. They're pretty fantastic looking animals. Awesome. Well, it sounds like you've had a great career journey so far to get to this point today. And you've had a lot of different experiences along the way. So when you think back, do you feel like some of the early work that you did in computer programming and dabbling in a lot of different things has informed your science or maybe helped you in your current work?

Yeah, I think having a non-traditional path to science and thinking a lot about other things for a long time before I started thinking about the work that I do. I do feel like I think about things a little bit differently than other people might feel. I don't know if everyone feels that way or not, but there could be something there.

Absolutely. And I understand that you also, in addition to the research that you do, you do quite a bit of outreach and getting out there in the community and sharing your work. So can you talk about some of these experiences and some of these efforts that you have to get the community and maybe young people specifically engaged with science?

So every year during Darwin Week in February, we go out. And the idea was kind of twofold to do the outreach, but also to kind of have a lab bonding experience and a training experience where I pictured it as a rock and roll tour. So when a band goes on tour, they do their first show at home usually. And the show sometimes is kind of they're working out the kinks and it's like...

And you see him play and you're like, oh, this is pretty good. It's all right. Yeah. And then they go on the road and it's like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. They're playing the same songs over every night and they come back a month later or a week later or whatever, however long the tour is. And you see the band again and it's like, whoosh. And they just floor you because they just have it together.

And my idea was to get my lab in this mode of let's do the same talk every day for a week. So we go to high schools and middle schools and universities, colleges, whoever will have us. And we go there and just talk a little bit about Darwin. And then we talk about our research.

And I usually give a little intro about Darwin and then introduce my students and say, okay, this is the kind of things we're working on. And they really have this direct relationship to what Darwin or sometimes we'll feature different evolutionary biologists from the past. Very cool. So we mentioned in the introduction here that you played some instruments. Have you been in a band before? I have been, yes. Has this been inspired by your band experiences? Some of it is being in the audience when your friend's band, you go, we see them and you

You see this before and after thing and then doing a little bit of touring and seeing how that process goes on the road, being in a band, talking, da-da-da, how did that go? Let's try to tweak this, blah-blah-blah. And we try to work that into the system. And I'm also... I have non-musicians in my lab, but I have this thing where I want to make a song with them and give them very simple things to play. But...

This is one of the many crazy ideas that I have to find time to do. I love it. Well, we've hinted at some of the cool things that you're doing in your research lab, but I'd love to talk in a little bit more detail about some of your projects. So do you have a particular one right now, Joe, that you are just so excited about and want to tell us more about?

Sure. I'm really excited about these warts that comb jellies have, partly because they're called warts. And they're not a traditional wart. I had to look this up. Yeah. Yeah. These comb jellies have these bumps all over their body. So if you look at them, they look like these little white spots and no one really has spent that much time trying to figure out what these things are, including myself. I never really thought about these warts too much.

And then I started working with a neuroscientist in my lab the last few months. And I told him to check out this group of cells that in the 60s thought to be photoreceptors. And then when we did the genome, we did a study with Christine Schnitzler, where she focused in on these cells and showed that they also express opsins.

So what they were thought to be photoreceptors, they turned out probably are photoreceptors. Anyway, I said these would be a cool set of cells to kind of look at in more detail at the level of are there neurons in there and what are these neurons doing, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, okay, cool, and looked at them and said, those are not going to be very good to look at. But these warts are really cool. Oh, yeah.

So we've been looking at them and they are photosensitive. So if you shine a light on them, they'll wobble. And if you spray some fish guts at them, they will react to them as well. And if you tap the microscope and send a vibration through the water, they'll react to that. So they're very sensitive to different kinds of inputs. They're on the surface of the body. So we think that they're this kind of sensory system that's really hasn't been looked at at all.

And the other cool thing about the warts is that there's this question about the origin of the tenophor nervous system. Did it arise separately from the nervous system of other animals? And the warts are very nice because there's only about 500 cells there and they have neurons and they have muscles and we can really work out the circuitry, work out the genes that are there.

and then do a comparison with our own nervous system or the nervous system of a mouse or a fly or whatever and see what do they have in common, what do they not have in common. Would it make sense for them to be completely independent? So if they have all these genes that nobody else has and that's what they're used for the nervous system, then it would be independent. But we suspect that probably they're using the same sets of genes.

Very cool. Now I have to ask, within an organism, one of these ctenophores, does every wart have the same cells and the same functions or are they sort of specialized around the body?

They are slightly different sizes. We haven't looked at them that close, but I would say that they probably all have the same. If you take the biggest possible wart you can find on the animal, then you've probably captured every cell that's going to be in any of the other warts. But you may find a wart that's small that doesn't perhaps have everything yet. Gotcha. So is this structure specific to ctenophores? Is there anything else like it that you've seen in other organisms?

Well, it's funny you ask. Is this hot off the press? This is new to me and maybe the listeners, but sea cucumbers have warts, apparently. She sent me this picture. She's like, check out these warts. Our whole lab, even the people that don't study cinafores are getting a little wart crazy. Mm-hmm.

And we also compare it to, say, like the lateral line of a fish because the fish have these hair cells that are like our ear hair cells and they sense their environment this way. So they use that to study how a fish will react to, say, a predator coming. It sends signals when these hair cells get deflected and these types of things. So a lot of animals have these kinds of sensory systems on the surface of their bodies. Gotcha. So, Joe, what's up next then in the investigation of these fascinating warts?

I love that sentence. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to disassociate these warts and image them and do these recordings from them where you can actually record electrical signals going through them and then sequence individual cells. So we'll be able to say this cell looks like this because we have a picture of it. We know that it's sensitive to, say, a neurotransmitter like glutamate.

And we know that the genes expressed in that cell are blah, blah, blah, this channel or this receptor or this synaptic thing, blah, blah. So then we'll kind of build up an atlas and a map of how are the warts talking within the wart and how are the warts talking to other warts or if they are talking to the other warts. So it's basically like genes and circuits.

Very cool. Well, it sounds like you've got your work cut out for you then, both you and your students. Indeed.

And these can be massive challenges or failures, or they can be just kind of little bumps along the road. But I love talking about them on our show because I think it's so important to give our listeners a realistic picture of what it's like to do science and what it's like to become a scientist. So Joe, do you have a story of a challenge or a failure or just a difficult time that you've been through that you can walk us through and tell us how you got through it?

I don't really know of any one monumental failure or anything like that, but I have every month or two a grant proposal denied. We're constantly just putting them out and then they constantly come back denied. And once in a while...

or once they'll get funded. It's a constant struggle. No one ever gets everything funded and every paper accepted. So it's kind of a skill that you get pretty quickly, like thick skin type thing. Definitely. So for you, was there a particular proposal that maybe was especially near and dear to your heart that you were really excited about that hasn't been funded that you can tell us about?

Well, we have a proposal. It's out right now. Again, it's the fourth time we put it in. The first time we put it in, we got great reviews and just missed the cutoff. And the three successive ones or the two that I put in afterwards were completely shot down terribly. Gosh. So that was a little bit like, what happened? We were almost there. But I think the thing I learned there is I went back and read the reviews more closely, I think,

this fourth time and realized that we probably didn't address everything. We addressed certain things right away. We're like, we've already done this. You said that we couldn't do this and we've already done this. So we concentrated on those things. But I think we just needed to be more detailed in our response. So fingers crossed this time it goes.

Definitely. Me and our listeners are rooting for you. So Joe, can you tell us how do you handle one of these situations? Like you said, everybody has them where the papers are rejected or your grants are rejected. How do you bounce back or how do you deal with the bad news?

Luckily, there's always enough work for four of me. So I'm usually don't have that much time to dwell on it. That helps. Yeah. Yeah. But thinking about the way the system works, if everything that everybody put in got accepted, then it would just be crazy. Yeah. There would be no money to do it.

Right. So it's just like, okay, this is how it has to work. And then being on the other side, we're doing grant reviews, you have to set it up. So the really good ones appear really good and things that are great, but not as good as the best ones have to have things pointed out about them.

You've seen it from the other side of the table, so you can rationalize. I think that helps. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing some of your struggles and failures. I think, like we said, it's so important for people to realize that they're not alone. These failures aren't just happening to you. Everybody is experiencing them. So thank you for sharing your stories with us. But we don't just want to focus on the difficult times, Joe. I'd love you to tell us next about one of these successes you've had. And this can be a huge win or even just a small one that was particularly meaningful for you.

So there's a postdoc in my lab and we've been thinking a lot lately about stalemate in science. So one group will look at the same data as another group and come up with opposite results and conclusions. And how is this happening?

in science. And I feel like it shouldn't be. Yeah, there should be like one right answer. Right. There should be a right answer. We're all looking at the same data. So what's going on? And we think, especially in evolutionary biology or phylogenetics, where you're actually building trees from data

There's lots of ways to build trees and there's new methods all the time. So it becomes difficult. You can always justify like this tree is wrong because my method is wrong. I'm going to try this other method. And then it's like the result is back or whatever. So we came to the conclusion that we need something like they have with clinical trials. So clinical trials up until say the last decade, it would be like 50% of clinical trials turned out to be like, oh yeah, this totally worked.

And then people were like, wait a minute, everything can't work. So they came up with this plan and said, it's going to be really important to map out all the steps that you're going to do before you do them. What is going to be your statistics? What's going to be the criteria where you judge that this actually worked, blah, blah, blah. And then you submit it to a review board and then they would approve it. And then you go out and do the work and you do exactly what you said. And then they found that success rates went from 50% to say 5%.

If we did something similar with biogenetics, where we say exactly what we're going to do before we do the study, I think some of these stalemates will actually come out in the wash because some of these things are being driven by confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is not always this evil thing. It's just something that we all do to some degree. Right.

So we've implemented it in our lab for a year and it was working really great. And it was cool because it had all these other unforeseen advantages. Like it was a great training tool. So we named this system phylotocol. It's like a protocol for phylogenetics. We brought a summer undergraduate in and we sat down with her at the beginning of the summer and we mapped out a phylotocol. This is going to be your project and this is how we're going to do it. Walked her through all the steps.

and then gave her the phylotocol. And then she just really cranked through it. And I think that it was the way we worked it that the phylotocol really helped. So then we wrote it up as a manuscript and it got accepted into a journal where we wanted it to go so people would see it. And at the same time, the paper just came out the end of the year, December 31st. And the whole transparency issue in science is kind of now blowing up at the rate just at the same time. It

So it's kind of in the air. And in the past decade, reproducibility has really been a big thing. You did all these analysis. Tell us what are the command lines used to generate these data, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think the field has done a really good job of adopting that and making it a lot easier to repeat stuff. But I think this is kind of the next wave of that transparency, making it clear like what you're going to do before you're doing it, why you've made changes to your plan, blah, blah, blah.

Absolutely. It sounds like it was a very timely paper then. We'll see if people adopt it or at least think about it, even if they don't do anything formal, but are a little bit more cognizant of this problem. Definitely. Having come from the more clinical sciences background myself, I would say those protocols were so helpful just because you had to think everything out ahead of time. You sort of ran into fewer problems, I think, down the line. So I think taking that approach and applying it to your own research maybe will help you avoid pitfalls going forward.

Absolutely. We think of things that I don't think we would have thought of before. Because when you're planning it out, you're like, well, what if we did get a result that we thought was wrong? How would we deal with that at that point? And then you're forced to think about all these possibilities. But I think they're very helpful. And you really design a much better study. And you, I think, get a better feel for what you're studying.

Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the lab there on this fantastic paper. It sounds like that just came out and developing this phylotocol, I love the name, system to kind of help your research field and your research specifically coming out of your lab. And we've talked about some different aspects of your life, both in and outside of science. And one thing I would love to jump to outside of science for a moment is the fact that you're a scientist.

is what you're reading, Joseph. I love getting book recommendations from everybody that we have on our show. So do you have a favorite book that you've read at some point that you want to recommend to me and our listeners today, whether it's a science book or a non-science book?

Okay. I like the classics. And I was talking about my favorite books with a student in my lab and she recommended that I check out The Count of Monte Cristo. So I'm reading that now or I'm listening. I don't, I listen to a lot of books and I'm on like chapter 110 or something.

It's super long, but it's great. It is a commitment. Yeah. It's all about revenge, which I don't know if I'm particularly vengeful or whatever, but it's pretty great. Awesome. We will put that out on our book list for our listeners. You're the first one to recommend it. Actually, we don't get a lot of classics recommendations. So that's awesome. And then I have to ask, do your one and three-year-olds have favorite books now?

I'd say my oldest is into superheroes. So we got this collection of superhero books and I just changed the words to be instead of about villains and stuff, we talk about smoothies and he gets mad at me. I tell him like the Flash sat on Batman's sandwich. He's like, that's not what it says, Dad.

And then my youngest is into like Pete the Cat books. Great recommendations. I like it. They've got good taste. Well, wonderful to hear what you're reading. We'll put your recommendation, The Count of Monte Cristo on our website for our listeners there. And we've touched on it a little bit throughout our conversation, some of these opportunities that you've had, Joe, to travel for your work. And I think this is one of the great aspects of careers in science that people may not realize as part of the career. So do you have a favorite place that you've been able to go for science?

In 2010, I went to Harvard for the International Congress on Invertebrate Morphology. We were at the time about two years into the TINA4 genome project that we were doing. And my collaborator, Christy Schnitzler, we were both postdocs at NIH. And we were at this meeting and one of her friends said, you're working on TINA4 bioluminescence. And there's a guy at Harvard, Woody Hastings, who

was one of the first people to study bioluminescence in tenofors and he's one of the pioneers in the field so you should go talk to him so she wrote to him and then we went and talked to him about the genome and he just was really into everything we were doing genome wise and wanted to hear about all these things and we had this really great like two three hour chat with them and i

after the conversation, he took us into this walk-in incubator and then turned out the lights. And we just sat in a dark incubator with this 85-year-old man for a while. It was really kind of weird. And then he started tapping on the shelves and everything starts flickering and lighting up. Oh, wow. And then he starts swirling the flasks and everything's like...

Yeah, yeah. So we just left that meeting and we were like, wow, that was... What just happened? That's the coolest thing ever. And we need to do this. First off, tenofor biologists are the coolest, right? So we need to find them all. And we happened to be going to Woods Hole after the meeting to meet up with our collaborator. And we thought it would be cool to look up other tenofor biologists that were out there. So we met up with Larry Maiden and Rich Harbison at HUI and Sid Tam at MBL and

And just heard all these really cool stories about ctenophores. And it was just the best thing. So we had these great, inspiring conversations and went back and started shredding. And then also, while we were there, our collaborator, Mark Martindale, was this pioneering embryologist in ctenophores. So then we hung out with him and we collected animals and we looked at animals and it was great. And that just inspired us to really start cranking.

That is awesome. And I love that this story really highlights that these connections or these bonds that you have with other scientists in your field who you've never met. I don't think in a million years, the average complete stranger would be like, hey, come into my lab. We'll sit in the dark. I think that's something that's really special within the scientific community. Yeah, I think reaching out to the senior group of pioneers and if you're doing stuff that's kind of in their field, they're interested. And I

I remember specific things that pop into my mind that I'm like, oh yeah, we got that from talking to Harbison. He mentioned this thing. So those conversations can be super valuable. Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing this memorable travel experience of yours. And throughout our conversation, we've talked about some of the quirky things that go on in your own research laboratory. And I love...

sharing stories about this human side of science, because I think some people have in their minds still this image of science from the media or from wherever. And I think the reality is usually not in accordance with these stereotypes that people have. So scientists are funny. They're fun. They have interests outside of the lab. And I think that's something that really needs to be emphasized and for people to really appreciate science.

So I love sharing the human side of science, whether it's quirky traditions or just funny memories or fond things that you've done with colleagues. So do you have a story of yours, Joe, that really follows this human side of science?

We have a thing called the FOMOM meter in my lab, which is like how famous this discovery is going to make us. We're not really aiming to be all that famous, but we joke about how famous we're going to be a lot. So if someone is like, hey, check out this result and it's really great, then somebody will say the FOMOM meter is really shaking. Right.

That's kind of our thing. I like it. So do you have an actual like diagram of a phomomenator that you can chart things on? We need one.

You probably do. Yeah, I really need to make one and I've threatened to make it a few times, but... You got to delegate that to somebody, right? That's true. All it is is some cardboard. A little marker, you're good to go. Yeah. This sounds like an afternoon lab activity, perhaps. Indeed. So what has been the highest thing to top off the thermometer that you've encountered? Oh, I don't know. Everything that we think is going to make us famous does not make us famous. Yet, right? Yeah.

It doesn't get us into the 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 range, but sometimes we peek into the 2 range, I guess. Is this a scale of 10? Yeah. Okay, fair. Were there any other stories or traditions or anything else you wanted to share with us? You would think there would be more weird things that we do in my lab, but... They're just secret weird things and that's okay.

Well, thanks for sharing one of these stories of a fun lab tradition or sort of a running lab joke that you guys have going on. And I think you do need to sort of have a physical manifestation of this thermometer. So send me a picture when you get it. Yeah. Okay. Well, Joe, it's been great to chat about the work that you do and you've got some really cool stuff going on in the lab and it sounds like a great group of people there. But I think there's always something standing in the way between you and being able to do the amazing big things that you want to do in your lab and answer those big questions.

So I love having researchers dream with me on the program here. So Joe, if I gave you all of the things you could possibly ask for in science, whether it's funding or staff or technology or feasibility, if I gave you everything, what is the one question you would want to answer or the one problem you would want to solve?

This is a toughie. So I'm interested in how chromosomal sex determination happens. And I feel like we'll know that at some point, but right now we don't have very many genomes. And even if we do, a lot of times we don't even know from the genome whether there's an XY system like you see in humans or other systems that you see in other animals.

But one thing we could do is sequence males and females across the animal kingdom, even if we sequenced it at a low rate of sequencing, and then just do kind of subtractive stuff. So line everything up to everything and say, oh, in this species, the male has some extra DNA.

And here are the genes on that extra DNA. And in this species, the females have extra DNA. And here's the sequences that are on those chromosomes. And then if you take all this data and you put it on a tree, I think really interesting patterns would pop out. So it's feasible to do without unlimited funds, but it would take some money and people to get that data together. Yeah. Time too, which is a valuable resource. You can't underestimate. Yes. So is this something that you're actually working on to some extent in the lab right now?

I have some male-female genomes, so I did a little bit of it. But you also need someone who can do the work on the cells to look at the chromosomes as well. And that's kind of where that project is standing. And I did this work four years ago, and I don't see any chance of getting to it anytime soon unless I had a student come. Listeners, this is where you come in.

I love it. Well, thank you for introducing some interesting things for me and our listeners to think about today. And you shared so much with us, Joe, but I'd love to ask you for one more thing. And that is a piece of advice. Is there something that someone told you at some point during your life that really helped you that you can pass on to me and our listeners to use in our own lives?

I asked my PhD supervisor, we were going to a meeting and I was like, I got this idea about blah, blah, blah. Is it okay to talk about this with people at the meeting? And he told me that ideas are cheap and that I should just tell everybody everything, which is maybe hard to do if you're in a field where there's a lot of people working on the same question. But when you're working with weird animals on weird questions, there's usually just a small group and there's so much work to do that there's not enough people.

So it's great to just be like, hey, I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking about that. And you end up people telling you that's a terrible idea. You should never do that. Or this is a great idea. You know, it would be really great if you did this as well. But you can still sense that some people don't have that outlook and they keep their ideas pretty close. And that's fine. But it seems like it would be less fun. Every once in a while, somebody will steal an idea, but whatever.

Well, and I think science can progress so much faster if you have all these people talking to each other, sharing ideas, because this group might have solved one part of the problem, whereas this group solved a different part of the problem. If they only could talk to each other about it, you'd get the solution faster.

Yeah. And a lot of times it's like, I'm never going to be able to do this because I just have too many things going on. So if somebody did this, I would be really excited. Well, Joe, fantastic advice to give our listeners about being open and sharing their work in science. I think that is so important today. So if our listeners want to get in touch with you to share some of their ideas or to learn more about what you're doing, where should they go or how can they learn more?

They could give me a call if they want. My number is 904-461-4046. Excellent. Well, listeners, definitely get in touch if you have any questions. And Joe, thank you so much for joining us today on the program and sharing a piece of your story. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Well, it was great to chat with you as well. And listeners, wonderful to have you here with us. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.