hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I am here in London with the great Jessica Wade she is a researcher at Imperial College London well known for her work in chiral materials and Raman spectroscopy she has written a children's book on
nanotechnology called Nano in the public eye she is best of all known for having written over 1900 Wikipedia entries as of February 2023 it will shortly be more and those tend to focus on the history of women in science Jessica welcome I'm
so excited to be here hello let's start with women in science we will get to you to your research but your writings why is it that women in history were so successful in astronomy so early on compared to other fields well that's such a hard question and a
fascinating one I think probably when you look back at who was allowed to be a science scientist in the past at which type of women were allowed to be a scientist you were probably quite wealthy and you either had a husband who was a scientist or a father who was a
scientist and you were probably allowed to interact with science at home potentially in things like polishing the lenses that you might use on a telescope or something like that Caroline Herschel was quite big on polishing the lenses
that Herschel used to be able to go out and look at and identify comets and was so successful in identifying these comets that she wanted to publish herself um really struggled as a woman to be allowed to do that at kind of the you know end of the 1800s beginning of the
1900s and I think actually it was just that possibility to be able to access and do that science from home to be able to set up in your you know beautiful dark sky environment without the bright lights of a city and and do it alongside
your quite successful husband or father so after astronomy women got quite big in crystallography so there were a few absolutely incredible women crystallographers throughout the 1900s Dorothy Hodgkin Kathleen Lonsdale Rosalind Franklin people who really made
that science possible and that was because they were provided entry into that and the way that they were taught at school facilitated doing that kind of research so I think I find it fascinating there aloud um but only if only we had had more you can imagine
what could have happened so household production you think is the key variable plus the ability to be helped or trained by a father or husband yeah house and and yeah that ability to be able to access it and do it and the way that
you're taught at school and what you're taught at school you know in the early 1900s I can speak for the UK but I'm sure it's common around the world women were taught science in a really big way a much bigger way than Network now in chemical sciences and physical sciences
because men were learning Latin in Greek because that was recognized as important and then Society realized women getting really good at these things that could potentially have huge implications push the women out and push the men back in
and you have this really big disconnect between what women wanted to do and could do and then what they were allowed to do by society's perspective as late as the 1990s one can read in quite serious science books the notion that maybe women were good at astronomy early
on because women more generally are good at making careful observations should we regard that as an offensive stereotype or just giving women credit for credit is due or that kind of generalization how do you look at it now from your
Vantage Point in 2023 I I think those kind of stereotypes aren't very useful I think it's looking at the way that Society has trained women to be you know the words that they're told the advice that they're given from a really young age the way that they're taught in
school the kind of support they get from their parents and teachers to pursue different subjects and that Associates particular personality traits with them that men probably have and do have just an equal measure but because of the way that society nurtures and kind of
cultures us we're pushed into these kind of fields so undoubtedly you might see more women in astronomy because of what society's done but it's not a biological reason for that it's just a societal one so yeah I find I find those I don't even
think you have to look back to the 90s I think you'd probably still find quite a few academics publishing on this now but if you design a scientific study destined that you want to be able to show that there's some biological difference between men and women's
abilities you'll be able to design the study in such a way that you show that because you also biased in the design of doing it and if you go out and ask people and look at a general population without taking into the account what Society is doing of course you're going
to see these quite vast results at the end and then you know you've already made your conclusion so I find those stereotypes not particularly useful um I'm very happy there are lots of women in astronomy I wish we used those stereotypes about men as well though are
there any such stereotypes we should be willing to accept or even embrace so one reads also well Jane Goodall did better with chimpanzees because she was a woman maybe chimpanzees are more trusting of women I I have no idea but
all the stereotypes go or just some uh another fantastic question I think probably the stereotypes about you know what it takes to be kind of a great scientist or a great athlete or something like that you know that hard work that commitment that Dedication
that enthusiasm that Curiosity that I'm fine with those kind of things I don't want people to be stereotyped by their gender or their ethnicity or their physical ability I want everyone to have the same opportunity and then to just be able to work out exactly what it is that
they love and how they're going to make the world better how would you distinguish between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science I would say unproductive ways to encourage women in science which happen a lot is constantly
telling women in science there aren't any women in science you know constantly we're told oh there's only eight percent women Engineers so come and be a woman engineer I don't think that's a particularly useful way I think the way to do it is to make sure everyone has
the same educational opportunities you know make sure we have fantastic physics and maths teachers in our high schools and all our high schools not just the expensive high schools make sure they're getting the same kind of career advice
and kind of research opportunity there's quite of a lot of evidence that shows that particularly people from historically excluded groups feel more like becoming a scientist if they're introduced to the world of research and see those chances that they could have
and then we're giving people the same support throughout their career you know the same access to lab space the same kind of access to Scientific funding mentorship thing like that that's really useful and productive telling women that
they're different or telling women that they have to kind of become more like a man you know here's 10 fantastic steps on how to give a great presentation like you know the power stance stuff that's not particularly helpful right but
actually giving people that opportunity that funding that space and that support that is really helpful so as you know science plays itself out in a lot of different venues there's non-profits there's for-profits there's universities there's governments on the whole where
where is discrimination against women been least bad and where has it been the worst okay across sectors I think probably um it's it's pretty bad across all sectors I would say access to education and opportunity opportunities in education is obviously massively varied
worldwide but very challenging for women in particular parts of the world to access even basic education it's like the West so yeah UK US I think probably oh I don't know it's it's such a it's such a big question I think that if you
look at the support women get throughout their careers in Academia the opportunities they get to build their own big research groups while simultaneously taking on caring responsibilities because women still disproportionately get that in society
it is really challenging to succeed and be a really successful Professor if you're trying to do all of that other stuff as well probably in financial sectors in private sectors you might get more flexible opportunities to return to work I know that the pandemic has had a
huge impact on the ability of women to come back to work because of the you know chance to work flexibly and things like that so I think probably the private sector has done an awful lot of the work that Academia and you know public civil service should be starting
to do and is kind of leading the way but I don't doubt that there's still huge discriminations and issues around sexism and racism within the private and the kind of corporate sector as well and then you know government is a completely
different issue because you don't even get you don't only have the internal politics of what's going on and who gets promoted and who gets to be the public face but also how the media is portraying those people and the impact that that has on the general Public's
perception of them and that's obviously also extraordinarily sexist and racist and biased so I think probably we should all be learning from what works well in the private sector and also what doesn't work and trying to emulate that if I
think of 20th century history from my naive distance standpoint it seems to me it was the commercial book Market where women make a big breakthrough you have Margaret Mead you have Rachel Carson you have Jane Goodall which is a 1971. and
the buyers of the book they don't seem to care if the book is good or interesting to them and then you have big advances for women in science that it's led by for-profit incentives basically that's really interesting I wonder if it's still the same today I wonder if
people still in that commercial book Market world would still celebrate and see the achievements of women scientists or the achievements of women and take them as seriously as the achievements of men I still get the feeling despite you
know you having a huge amount more writing and popular opinion around the need for more women scientists or the work of women scientists or the history of women scientists it's still a very specific type of person who'll go into a Bookshop and buy that you know not every
man who's quite biased or opinionated on these issues will go and buy that fantastic history of women's scientist book even if they exist so so I think book sellers and book marketers can do quite a lot of magic in that space But
we have to make sure it's being read and excited everyone exciting everyone now you're on Twitter but my anecdotal impression is that social media in general have swung some of the bias back toward men who for whatever reasons are more likely to be vocal on social media
in terms of celebrity and science do you agree disagree I think social media has been extraordinarily powerful for connecting people from groups where they are marginalized you know from people from historically exceeded backgrounds
coming together potentially they're the one black physicist in their institution but they can come on social media and find a whole bunch of other black physicists and get that confidence and that voice to be able to go out give that amazing presentation get that big
research funding and start doing their own thing so whilst I'm sure you've got the kind of cult of ego and these you know for professors with their super labs and their lack of actual basic support for PhD students and Twitter perpetuates that ego actually the
magical parts of it the magical parts of any of these social medias for me is uniting people who before didn't feel like they had a voice and saying there's actually this amazing neuroscientist there if you go to Canada you can meet and connect with them people changing
their research Fields they're changing their institutions where they work and they're really getting more opportunity you know after the unjust unjust murder of George Floyd there was a huge outcrying support from the black academic Community to come together and
to do more to support black researchers there was these movements set up which were kind of black in chemistry black in physics black and neuro and they've galvanized a complete different change and approach to funding scientific
research you know scholarships that have been made available and that's happened within the last few years just because people came together on social media so yeah there's the egomaniacs and but then there's also this kind of beautiful
stuff happening as well and you know I I I hope that that continues how will artificial intelligence affect gender participation gaps I suppose it could affect it well I guess it depends with all of these things the the the data that the artificial intelligence is going to be
trained on and you've seen it with with chat GPT I suppose and I'm sure that you've had a few conversations at University about how that's going to change the way we have to set exams and get a lot more creative because these these um AI tools can now pass exams
that you're right um I think if you give the data in the correct way potentially it could give relevant advice I've seen it kind of hilariously some American Scientific funding is now requiring uh EDI statement I don't know if you do yet an equity diversity and
inclusivity statement on a research proposal and you can sit down as someone like me who really cares about this a lot and and really Harrow for how to articulate yourself in the word limit right and really think about all of the
stuff that you've done and the stuff that you're super passionate about or you can just ask chat GPT to write you an EDI statement and actually you know if the person who's evaluating it at the other side can't really tell the difference between the two then someone
who doesn't care very much and can just run this through an AI in enabled language model um can get the position when I can't so I think in that sense it might make it really challenging um to differentiate who's actually passionate and who isn't but it could
you know I mean honestly right now I can't think of any useful way that it will help it potentially in but it could make it worse possibly it could make it worse you could use it in quite an effective way I suppose and and this is
entirely in my head at the moment so I don't know if it's what could be at all useful and but potentially in allocating scientific funding so that it's less biased because at the moment you have advice about nationality gender institution
um but if you ask an AI to learn from what has been a successful proposal before and what's gone on to actually impact the world and then use that and try to get it to assess science funding and who should get what maybe it could be useful and less biased there but
again it depends on the data that we're feeding it if chat GPT can just reproduce these Dei statements isn't that an indictment of those statements yeah it's a complete one but I think having them a tools an indictment of those statements right because it's
almost like those you know ridiculous entrance exams that you used to go to medical school here or graduate school in America and that it's if feel I'm privileged and surrounded by people who help you pass those exams you get in so
if you're surrounded by people in your institution who can write your EDI statement then it's it doesn't mean that you care remotely about it just means you've got someone else to write it for you in the United States more than half of the graduating majors in the
biological sciences are women so there's a lot of representation at lower levels they may or may not go on uh the percentage is much lower in a lot of the stem Fields how much of that difference should we think of as resulting from just preference of the women
we should think of it as resulting from preference as a result of what societies nurtured them to think they are interested in right so because again some of it just be legitimate preference I don't think it's biological I think it's because of the way you were taught
and introduced at school or the passions and enthusiasms even of your parents right if you sit around your kitchen table every night and you're like oh mom I've got like physics and maths homework and your mum's like I've always hated
physics and maths then you as a young woman is like oh well my mum hates it so I'm gonna hate it um whereas boys because they're always taught that these are subjects that will give you huge opportunity and are really excited and do you know all these
successful men are going on to do them they just do them anyway so I think that you see it as being a preference because of the way that society and family has really centered around this fact that girls don't study subjects like physics
and Engineering whereas if you gave them all the same opportunity if we had amazing teachers in schools if parents were a little less biased about the subjects they do and don't find exciting thing I think you just see that go in
the UK we have mandatory high school studying of chemistry to get in for medicine so if you study if you want to go to medical school you've got to do chemistry you probably do biology as well and as a result chemistry undergraduate is gender balanced because
girls start studying chemistry at high school and they're like this is an awesome subject so I'll go and do it at University if you made physics a mandatory subject for studying medicine you'd have way more women studying physics undergraduate because they'd
realize this is an awesome subject to do so it's much more about the advice we're giving people rather than biological preference towards a particular subject so is it zero percent preference um I'm pretty sure it's zero percent preference but what what difference is
in preferences across men and women on average as groups would you allow for what difference is what I allow probably that um men are more likely to be physically aggressive more likely to be violent no and that in no way that's into professions they're larger and
taller and they can run faster okay I I don't think that I think that you know the size difference is probably the one I would like I you know I don't want to force anyone to study Physics and Engineering I don't want to force any
man to do psychology and drama if he doesn't want but I do want a world where we stop telling people that they are because of their gender they have some opportunity or some other opportunity and we just get to a point where we're actually giving people the training and
the support they need to go out and take on the challenges that the world is facing and we we get away from that kind of conversation and yeah I don't find it very useful at all Wikipedia by the time this episode is released you'll probably
have written significant parts of over 2000 Wikipedia pages how should we improve Wikipedia I think Wikipedia is a phenomenal project I think you know it started 20 more than 20 years ago at the beginning of the internet this democratized
platform for sharing information and knowledge it's kind of a beautiful idea now I can't imagine Wikipedia working if you started it on this form of the internet it requires a huge input of kind of public service from volunteers every single page on Wikipedia is
written by a volunteer and expert in a particular thing someone who's fascinated by a part of history or a topic and I really love it and and you know it enables and it helps so much of society you know teachers politicians um academics parents you know everyone
home assistant but we put you in charge how do you make it better or is it perfect it can be perfect right I think it's a perfect vision it's a perfect idea and it's you know from working in universities we have so much access to knowledge largely taxpayer-funded access
the knowledge that people don't have so we do have this responsibility to take that information and give it to them unfortunately um Wiki media does have huge gaps in its content because of the types of people who edit it so because you've got a
relatively small group of people who edit Wikipedia a lot do this huge Public Service in creating content the majority of them are men the majority of them are from the Northern Hemisphere they're mainly men from North America you have certain gaps in the
type of content that's on there particularly in biographies of women anything to do with kind of current Sciences quite badly written about on Wikipedia because lots of academics don't see it as a good time investment so if I was going to change Wikipedia
for the better not that I think it well I do think it could be a little bit better I would I would work on improving those content gaps I'd work on really saying we need more academic people to start contributing their time to editing this you know what it's like working in
a university getting people to want to teach and not just do their research all the time actually we need to focus on this public service act of giving people access to knowledge um but we really need to start rectifying some of these content backups
about the global South about emerging science fixing pages about climate so that we provide non-partisan information to lots of people but also on kind of detailing the contributions of women to all aspects of society you know I focus
on science and engineering but there are women doing awesome things and in casting in movies in in writing and and I think we need to start telling their stories too what if I said something like the following hypothesis autistic people very much enjoy organizing
information uh males are are much more likely to be autistic than women autistic people therefore really like Wikipedia so it's no surprise it's a matter of preference that there are so many male editors on Wikipedia and that's a kind of scientific claim right
it could be true maybe it's even likely to be true or not I think before we test that side we should probably get data I think that's probably a huge number of autistic women who would say that actually it's just very under-diagnosed in women because they socially
assimilate to take on the very virtues or the you know the stereotypes that you as a woman have to have as a young woman a young person in society and so they kind of and put a blanket over at issues of autism but I'm not going to go there
because I'm not not an expert but I think that's what they'd say but actually I think everyone gets excited about this kind of contribution to open knowledge I've done you know I've written a bunch of Wikipedia pages but I've also trained a lot of people in how
to edit Wikipedia you know from from young people in high schools to academics at universities to members of the general public and they kind of find it awesome this idea that you can research something pull together all of
these different sources maybe do some kind of History aspect and go through archives and then write something that's actually on the internet you know if you tell a high school kid who's used to writing papers that sit in a desk and
then eventually get shredded and you're going to write something that your the whole world will see everyone gets excited about that irrespective of their gender of their ethnicity so I think we um we should do the study we should get the data and try and find out how many
Wikipedia editors are autistic but but more just um kind of creating this ecosystem where people who get this opportunity to learn and and find out awesome facts also feel that social responsibility to give that back and give that access to everyone
else in the world because maybe Wikipedia isn't so important in North America or Europe where we have free and open access to a lot of literature or a lot of texts or we have Popular Science publishing but in other parts of the world where they don't have access to
that actually having Wikipedia is completely critical so I wish we'd um get away from this kind of blame and and it's just like the women scientist thing you know a lot of people get angry that these kind of topics aren't on Wikipedia
um instead of getting angry I think you should just do something about it right so it takes nothing to contribute and to edit and to learn how to edit and everyone should sit there and and give everyone in the world this access to the knowledge that they have will GPT models
take significant significant market share from Wikipedia because if you type in the name of an obscure female or just obscure scientist into chat GPT or its successors it will give you a lot of information it's not perfect but actually the more
obscure the person the more likely it is to be accurate I think I I don't think it will take away from Wikipedia I think the kind of beautiful thing about Wikipedia um is you can interrogate it quite a lot you know you can see who who wrote what when they wrote it and when that
reference was added what that reference is you have that kind of talk dialogue behind a Wikipedia page so most people just land on the read aspect of Wikipedia But if you go to history or go to talk the tabs across the top
um then you see what was contributed to and when and you have a discussion around what is and isn't on the page I think things like chat GPT are very useful at giving you a kind of very quick answer or you know if you were looking up a person and said you know
make me a short PowerPoint on this it might give you that starting off point from which you go on and find out more things and but I think the ability to interrogate it and to look at again coming back to my earlier points really where it looked for that information you
know has it been Broad in where it's collected that from is it using actual appropriate citations and literature you you can't do that right so Wikipedia is still important um for showing people this person really did the homework on pulling this very
non-biased page together and and that's why you can trust it you can keep on interrogating GPT models but does it at all induce you to rethink what you're doing because obscurity per se is no longer the barrier like literally everything everyone is in chat GPT in
some sense so the kind of beautiful thing I think about Wikipedia is that um when when I land on Wikipedia I don't usually go on it to type in the name of a woman scientist I mean I do that a lot but but one doesn't go in it and type in
the name of woman scientist one goes on it and types in climate change or number Theory or some kind of thing that they're interested in and then some or you know the name of the high school or their University and then they look
through the alumni or they're just clicking around and they find their way to this page and I love that like the kind of sleuthy stealthy Parts you're saying these women are here or these black scientists are here or these scientists from Africa are here and
you've just not found out about them yet but they're learning about it because of the topic that they're interested in and I worry that if you have something like chat GPT and you go on and you ask it one of these questions like tell me
about number Theory and it will just give you the answer about that and potentially the few you know big men names in the field but you'd miss that chance to do that kind of beautiful um weaving that you do around Wikipedia that bouncing around things before you
land on that page about that women scientist so I don't think my work here is entirely futile just yet and actually you know part of what Wikipedia has has really shown me is women are just not getting enough awards for science so I spend a lot of my time not only
researching these people but also writing citations for people to become fellows or or get big Awards and medals and honors and and I think I can keep doing that even if chat GPT takes over my evening job of editing Wikipedia Pages if I think of my own work
typically I prefer not to know say how many people listen to a particular episode of the podcast or read a particular blog post it's better not to know so you write all these Wikipedia Pages there's no obvious means of feedback where you know how effective
you are do you like it that way or do you wish you had a way of measuring the efficacy of your output I think sometimes it's useful you can you can get page views so sometimes that's useful as a kind of motivator for white people so you can get paid views yeah
you can I mean I don't look at them because because you prefer not to know well I prefer not to know but also that's not why I'm doing it right like I just want these stories there but I think sometimes if I'm trying to get particularly academics get excited about
editing and I'm like well there's 15 million people who look at this every month and we did this Wikipedia editor edited on last time and a million people have already looked at the pages then they're like well I'm going to go on and
write about the science I do then but I do think that the thing I I find amazing um isn't the kind of Wikipedia data and the numbers that come back but seeing how these people are then celebrated in the public eye and there was a phenomenal is a phenomenal mathematician
that I wrote about called Gladys West who is 91 now born in Virginia went to a historically black college in University studied maths became a high school teacher for maths before working for the US government and doing the calculations
that enabled GPS so she worked out how far from a perfect sphere the surface of the Earth was so that they could put satellites around it and help us with navigation and when I wrote about Gladys West it was kind of the beginning of my Wiki editing world it was 2018 and
there's very little about her online you know she was 90 she'd done all these things in the 60s and 70s and she was is an extraordinary woman and but very little about her and really little honoring her and celebrating her now her Wikipedia page is up she's in
all of these lists of top women in the world she's been inducted to the U.S Air Force Hall of Fame she's won a medal from the Royal Academy of engineering every time I see people talking about GPS they're like yeah and doctor Dr
Gladys West the mathematician enabled this so I don't want the metric from Wikipedia that tells me how many times that's been viewed I want the kind of society to be like look at this cool awesome woman or the school or some scientists of color and and now we're
starting to celebrate them so I like that um kind of I guess it's it's it's enabled by Wikipedia that the world is starting to honor them a lot of the problems of science funding I think stem from the fact that bureaucracies ossify over time
and once Dynamic institutions become just very difficult to work with should we expect the same to happen with Wikipedia which of course is a non-profit I think it's interesting I think you've got kind of I don't know if you've I don't know if you've had Wikipedia
people on the podcast Jimmy Wales of course he was a great episode okay he's just cool he's so cool thank God massively but I I'm gonna listen to that also on the way home but I do think that you've got an extraordinary culture in the Wikimedia Foundation who are the
people who facilitate Wikipedia they're very Global you know there's only about 200 people who actually work for the Wikimedia Foundation they're very young they're very enthusiastic about open source they're very forward thinking and
what this encyclopedia should be and they're always pushing boundaries you know changing the interface changing the graphic design all of these different things to make the user experience better and the the editor experience better so I think that um from that
nature because you'll have this push from the actual employees we just need to do that part as the community that Wikipedia is serving to make sure that the editorship represents the kind of global Community who read Wikipedia so I think if we keep pushing for that then
it doesn't have to ossify and become backwards and okay we can we can keep progressing for something that's more um fair and equal and representative for everyone okay your own research you'll be able to explain all of it for us but
there's four Concepts I want to put on the table okay chiral materials chiral materials Ramen spectroscopy nanotech and Quantum Computing yeah and what you do relates to all of those four right I hope so I hope that I hope so on the quantum part it's quite exciting so
so let's start with chiral materials tell us what that is so chiral material because it underpins and we're going to go through all four and then you'll tie it all together very nicely very Suzuki um so I work on um functional molecular
materials so carbon-based materials that can be kind of semiconductors semiconductors obviously hugely useful for any kind of optical electronic device solar panels light emitting diodes the chirality part is that these molecules can exist in these beautiful
and weird and wonderful forms but they can also exist as non-superimposable mirror images of one another that's what chiral is so a great example is your left and your right hand if you put them together kind of palm to Palm their mirror images but if you put one on top
of the other that they're quite clearly not and we see that kind of non-superimposable mirror image nature across multiple different length scales in in the human made and the naturally occurring world so you see it in electrons and photons you'll remember
from chemistry you had spin up and spin down electrons you drew out a little up and down arrow you see it in left and right-handed light so light that twists clockwise and and counterclockwise we see it in molecules and we see chirality
in in things like shells in snail shells in Wisteria barks you see that twist that's clockwise or anti-clockwise and there's a reason for that right well it's endogenous to something well naturally occurring life all DNA in in human life or in plant life or anything
on planet Earth is right-handed or sugars are right-handed all amino acids are left-handed there's some reason that that happens that life selects for that we don't we still don't know the reason that that's the case and you have a
hypothesis fascination of a lot of scientists well there's one that kind of comes back to the quantum part at the end but these molecules that I work with are chiral molecules so they're molecules where well some of them that I work with are just helices that they're
kind of Twisted structures where you connect these Benzene rings together and because of the ways they're connected they can't lie flat in a plane so they twist up or twist down what I was trying to do with them particularly for kind of electronic
devices is use that chirality that shape to control the polarization of light that comes out so to say if I've got this emissive chiral molecule a molecule that will emit light and it's it's twisted clockwise or anti-clockwise can we make the light that comes out left or
right-handed exactly polarized and that's really useful for display Technologies because it means you can kind of double the brightness you get and reduce the power consumed so from a kind of technological advantage point that's very exciting just from a photon
side but what's emerging for the you know reason for homochirality of life on Earth is that not only do they emit Twisted lights but they also transport up or down electrons so depending on whether you have a left or a right-handed molecule you'll get a
preference for upper electrons passing through the system with ease or passing through the system difficultly so it's more efficient Transportation depending on the handiness of the the molecule and the spin of the electron which is quite kind of revolutionary
from uh trying to control not only charge transport but spin which would enable a whole bunch of new technologies involving in aspects of quantum but people are trying to push within the chirality community that this could also
explain the reason for homochirality of Life on planet Earth because electron transport is much more efficient if you only have these these electrons moving only in One Direction and they're pushed through by the shape of the structure
lots of things like chlorophyll or chiral lots of these kind of forms that you have proteins a chiral so is that shape that very structure to enable this efficient electron transport that makes things you know life on planet Earth happen more smoothly so there are
various theories of that I'm not sure how much I'm on board with them yet but part of the program here is to use these insights to build new semiconductors taking that term rather broadly which are based on different materials and they're more flexible
that's like the end that's the angle not not only not only giving you this new flexibility so that you know carbon based lightweight easy to process relatively low environmental impact much less so than the semiconductors we use at the moment but also that you get
these kind of new functionalities like generating really twisted lights or generating really highly spin polarized electrons that can enable you to go out and do things that are more useful for the kinds of Technologies we're creating so if you could create some kind of
chiral molecular thin film that at room temperature could spin filter electrons can that enable some kind of quantum Tech thing to happen much more efficiently without the huge infrastructure that we need at the moment to enable and to kind of enlarge
these Quantum properties so we don't have to do a cryogenic temperatures we don't have to have extraordinary pressurized Apartments to be able to do this we can just do it on a bench top with some kind of molecular material so
that's the end goal not only to take a technology that already exists and say hey we can do it more efficiently but give it new functionalities that we couldn't before by controlling the shape of the molecule so there's even a possibility maybe speculative there
could be biological semiconductors broadly construed even biological parts of quantum computers am I miss hearing you there's a part where we learn from biology and could use it in some kind of quantum realm so we'd learn from something like DNA would learn from the
topology of DNA this chiral shape and we'd use it to filter electron spin or to detect Photon Spin and then we'd use that to enable some kind of quantum sensor definitely that it wouldn't all have to be super cold that's no it works not it won't have to be super cool
that's a very exciting thing if if it works if we can kind of systematically produce these chiral structures in a really ordered and beautiful way if we do the science to get it exactly right and have the theory behind what's going
on at the moment there's huge excitement because people have these experimental results and they're like whoa let's go and change the world but they're kind of backup theory for why these processes are happening is still not there it's still not got a kind of universal
agreement so so I think I think molecules will provide us a whole bunch new opportunity in Quantum that we've never seen before so the spectroscopy part of what you do spectroscrops you can use them to judge like if food is rotten if the painting
is authentic if something is an explosive and what do you use them to do yeah spectroscopy is a huge encompassing and wonderful term as you've just illuminated in those examples basically normally spectroscopy is you shine a light on something and you see what
light is transmitted to or reflected from it and you work out what that thing is because you're looking at the electronic structure Raman spectroscopy which is the type that I'm particularly excited about and you can use it on paintings
um is a vibrational spectroscopy so instead of looking at electronic energy levels we're looking at vibrational energy levels but long story short you sign a laser on a molecule or on a material or in a painting you make all of the bonds the chemical bonds within
that structure start to vibrate so if there's a kind of carbon-carbon stretch that will start to vibrate and do these wood and wonderful stretches and then that as a result of that vibration scatters the light that goes back at a slightly different energy to the light
that you shown on it and you get this Ramen Spectrum we call it but you get a spectrum which is a kind kind of extraordinarily molecular fingerprint of all of the different chemical bonds within your structure and how they're arranged and ordered with respect to one
another so I can then take my molecule take my material put it under this laser find out exactly what's there but also how kind of ordered and arranged these things are if I'm trying to make something for a Quantum application I
want them to be super well ordered and super well oriented and I can't ask the molecules what they're doing you know they're way too small to see with an optical microscope but I can use this vibrational spectroscopy to work out exactly what's going on and I can do it
in situo I can find out what's happening when I apply charge to it or heat it up so you can work out a huge amount just from this interaction with light and Roman spectroscopy is just I love it um because it's so versatile you know I
can shine my friend does um did we did our phds together he did Raman spectroscopy for solar panels originally he's called Joby I should say um he then went to work for NASA on the Mars 2020 Mission during the Roman spectroscopy for for the Sherlock Sherlock instrument
which is on the Mars rover which is out there at the moment collecting data from Mars and looking at the organic signatures from their arm and Spectra he's now in the Natural History Museum looking at microplastics that are found in birds that are washed up on the beach
using spectroscopics in ramen signatures of their their kind of exact molecular packing and confirmation so it's just this technique that takes you to all of these wonderful places centered around this amazing vibrational effect which we
can't see so it just seems like magic to me which I just really love so this can could make nanotech more effective possibly it it so that it's actually a really fantastic and perfect point we use it at the moment to optimize the way
we process these materials so I've got amazing chemist who's made this beautiful molecule I want to turn it into a thin film to put into a device I'll work out exactly how to do that really efficiently by do some microscopy but doing a lot of this spectroscopy to
work out how do I how do I perfect the recipe to put it into that device if we could do that kind of inline in manufacturing processes which you know you do a bit for inorganic semiconductor industry then you'd have this really
efficient way of creating a technology where you know every single time this is what the molecules are doing and that's how we're going to put it in I'm sure they do it in display manufacturers already but that's kind of how it envisages so let's say this research
program goes fairly well not utopian well but say 90th percentile well 30 years from now what will we see or what will I use or what will I have that will be the result of this or is it 50 years or how do you think about the stuff I
think kind of five years from now or probably even less because display manufacturers are so extraordinarily quick at the way that they innovate you'll see chiral molecules being the active layer of your LED display so if you've got an uh Apple iPhone or I think
Nintendo switch has an OLED display or if you've got a massive OLED television at home you could kind of double the efficiency of those displays by just using something that emits cyclopolarized light we're working on that a bunch in academic research but
display manufacturers are on that too so kind of five years you'll have that and your power consumption you will only see it in that your battery won't be drained as quickly because you won't be pushing all of this power into um generating lights from a pixel which
isn't very efficient because you'll have increased that efficiency I think probably kind of 10 years from now you'll see Quantum technologies that are enabled by molecules and particularly by using the topology and the shape of those
molecules to make them more efficient that can do this room temperature operation and probably chirality will have some big role to play in that but like with all areas of Science and all areas of any academic aspect that we're studying and probably lots of
conversations you've had around these tables and there's a lot of jargon there's a lot of words chirality is important and useful word for me it means a lot of different things to people in the quantum world you know you can have chiral electrons you can have
chiral phonons and so probably it will be hugely important but what particular aspects of chirality I'm not entirely sure yet but in terms of a new item so we can make screens better we can make batteries last longer maybe it's too early to say but what new good or
service could we expect again assuming things go fairly well I think um a lot around Optical Communications and encrypting data transfer and things like that you know if you can harness circular polarizations of Lights um you can Multiplex the way you send
data you can make use of left and right-handed channels but you can also encrypt the signal that you're sending because only the sender and the receiver know what to expect based on the kind of um chirality of those patterns that are
produced and so I think probably in some kind of encrypted Optical Communications you'll see this but again not know entirely that that's what's happening um but making efficient and more efficient and more kind of um a more impactful Technologies like that
we will entirely have the particular aspect that I'm really exciting at the moment I'm excited about at the moment other than all the other work I do because I love everything I do and but it's trying to use chiral structures to be able to detect really weak magnetic
fields particularly kind of the magnetic fields associated with brain function so when neurons are sending signals around your brain they generate these tiny magnetic fields if you could use some kind of chiral structure to be able to
detect those magnetic fields optically you could generate some kind of Medical Imaging system that was much more flexible again could operate at room temperature so I think you'll see Innovations in things like Medical Imaging and also in in Optical Communications
now I can pick up popular science magazines and they will tell me sometimes we have Quantum Computing now how accurate is that well I think you've got some kind of systems with a very primitive number of cuvettes that can do some kind of calculations these Quantum
bits um and they can do some kind of mathematical calculations much more efficiently and quickly than their non-quantum counterparts I think getting enough and I'm really not an expert in this but getting enough of those qubits to work in harmony to actually do
anything that's computationally useful for URI um is way way off where people are currently at and at the moment still um I'm not sure if you've visited any labs that are doing this or any companies that are doing this but they have these kind of isolated molecules
trapped in in vacuum Chambers or they have these cryogenic Chambers where they've got you know 100 different qubits in a room the size of a football stadium each there trying to connect and interact with each other I think that's
a long way away from what we can imagine happening in our own personal homes or in our companies or in our lives so whilst people have demonstrated that Quantum computation is possible we're really really far away from it being societally relevant or useful and maybe
we don't need it right now for the types of things that we're going to need to do let's say we put you in charge of science funding in the UK thanks and you're a dictator in essence apart from the question of how much should be spent right because scientists
will always want more spent but put that aside for any given level of funding how would you change the system I would probably um try and shift The Narrative at the moment from judging people based on their resume or their previous track
record we have a huge amount of institutional bias in the UK if you work in a few universities you're much more likely to get science funding than if you work in others and if you are judging people based on their resume which we do you know we submit our CV we
call them and also our research proposal and people often look at the CV first check where you work check if you've had career gaps check all of these things that they're quite biased about and that impacts their likelihood to kind of fund
your science the DFG the German research Council quite progressively a few years ago flipped it so they no longer got people to check the resume and just evaluated based on the proposal of the research and it was much more democratic and fair and gender balance because you
didn't have that bias creeping in in that so I'd I'd change that but more fair more balanced does it give you better outcomes and people are just as Innovative just as kind of creative and just as wonderful at doing the science I think there was there was was a really
interesting paper recently that looked at the impact of kind of um institutional and privilege on generating number of science papers and it wasn't that people were making more breakthroughs it's just that they had more opportunities to make those
breakthroughs because you've given them so much money to be able to do it so I'd get people to judge based on the research that was being proposed and the infrastructural support that they'll get to be able to do it I'd also think we
probably need to have a kind of and and I think this is starting to happen we have a national Quantum Technologies program here there needs to be a really serious look about how we create materials and technologies that are actually going to benefit society and
not just be these things so we have to cryogenically cool or do it in extraordinary vacuum Chambers and and get a little bit more creative and forward-looking at looking at new molecular materials and thinking about these new challenges to make sure that
we make these Technologies so from a very um personal very um I'm not being very responsible for everyone else working on materials I'd say we need to invest more in molecular materials but I'd also say we need to get rid of these biases you know things like
making sure everyone has equal opportunity to prepare for interview making sure everyone has equal opportunity to put the time into writing a proposal I wrote a bunch of proposals last year um which completely exhausted me but would take you know a month to write
this this perfect sure but isn't that totally wrong shouldn't we make the proposals three pages we should make the proposals three pages and we should make sure everyone has the same support to be able to write those you know you can be
that will just up the requirement why not take away the support and just impose you know three-page maximum nothing else is considered you attach a PDF but it won't be read wouldn't that be better well again then we're just gonna favor the people who are in places
or have this prior history of writing these things and can write these Savvy three-page proposals right we need to give people the support to be able to write them and give something I've seen a lot not only on kind of trying to
improve things for celebrating women scientists but it's just this complete inequality and access in inequity in the way that we give people support and access this kind of hidden curriculum in Academia has a huge influence on the type of science that we fund so I think
sure um reduce the page count I had to write something recently for an American funder where they were just like just write 20 pages and I was like what do you mean just write to any pages so I think definitely reduce the page counts
um but I think beyond that we need to make sure everyone's getting the same opportunity to write those perfect three pages because at the moment we don't which is why we see biases in what's coming out in in who's being funded
Stuart Buck has argued we should fund basically people not projects in most areas The Arc Institute in California connected to Stanford has more or less that approach do you agree disagree um I I think it can be absolutely fantastic and transformative and and you
know especially in things that are kind of clinically relevant having these amazing institutes where you've got clinicians working with basic research scientists and computer scientists and analysts fantastic I would say you know we're still at risk there
um of creating these little Empires where certain people gets huge amounts of scientific funding and other people don't have that opportunity in that seat at the table so sure fund people but make sure that we're representing an equal and fair in the decisions of of
who we fund and it is unfairness overrated in the sense that there's meritocracy and there's fairness and there's some tension between the two and why Always side with fairness um because I don't think we're getting the most disruptive or exciting
scientific ideas at the moment from just funding the few big people who've always had science funding you know I can think of a few people in the UK who consistently get big research grants and I don't think their labs are producing massively Innovative or exciting stuff
they just consistently have this money thrown at them so I would say the pursuit of fairness is because we want science that is exciting and impactful and at the moment we're not seeing that we're just seeing the same people get huge multi-million pound grants what did
you learn writing a children's book about nanoscience that um children's Publishers don't want you to write a whole book for a six-year-old about vibrational spectroscopy um I I think that I was I mean it was just a huge opportunity to be able to
write it um it made me very proud to do what I do you know I I absolutely love being a scientist and I I think I know that and then you write it down and you're just like this is the coolest job in the world and but also that we don't do
enough to get young people and parents excited about material science and chemistry you know you go into a bookstore and all of the books for kids are about dinosaurs or about space or like gross things about the human body um but they're not like here's amazing
materials that you can use as a solar panel or potentially will become a quantum computer one day so I think that um it made me think a lot more about that like our responsibility is people who work in materials of going out and
talking about these things to to young people and you know the public response to it has been absolutely extraordinary I I thought you know non-fiction hardback kids so it's a really hard sell um luckily it was illustrated by a phenomenal woman Melissa castrill who's
just got this beautiful Whimsical approach to illustration it was her first non-fiction book and when she was asked to do it by the publisher all of her illustration friends were like don't do it nanotechnology will be so dry um but I'm very glad she did it because
it's completely beautiful and that's probably helped get it into people reading it and but it's been translated into all of these different languages it's got all these Stars these American literacy you know guilds these Library prizes
um which I never dreamed possible um but I think it's just because materials are really exciting and I had to do no work to make that book exciting she she did some to make it beautiful and but I think it's to show me people in the world want to read about this again to
our listeners the title is nano by Jessica Wade should Academia reward that kind of project more than it does right now which is either zero or negative as far as I can tell yeah zero negative is right probably negative a lot of people because she does this
um I think that Academia should award reward anything that is um kind of taking the science or the outcomes of their research to a bigger audience right whether it's something like going out and giving public lectures whether it's something like
doing a kids book that's that's fantastic um is there a way to fix that without de-emphasizing peer review I think some people yeah right my peer review is the editors um but I think you know some Institute fusions are a lot better at that than
others some institutions in the UK a lot of institutions in the US will recognize that public service aspect of what you do in promotion and in Recruitment and they'll see it as something that's really positive I can think of a few absolutely phenomenal professors who
have really incredible research programs and some very public-facing aspect of their work or some people work on really huge Innovative parts of reforming education we have less of that in in the UK to what you have in America you could
shift it a little bit we've we're trying to at the moment um one of our big funding councils has made fellowships where 20 of your time can be on something like policy or like looking at Equity diverse and inclusion so it's starting to happen um but I still love all the other parts
of my job I love I love being in the lab and I absolutely love teaching undergraduates so I didn't I didn't write this book because I wanted Academia to be like oh children's books are really valuable but it is interesting because I've had so many
emails afterwards from academics who are just like I'm thinking of writing a kids booktube like can you can you give me some advice about this so obviously a lot of people are thinking about it and if you're a junior person there and
you're now the most famous person there in your field does that create an imbalance with your colleagues or do they just not know they're in too much of a fog um I'm not I'm definitely not the most famous you are the most famous person there are a lot of um very awesome
people there I think probably um I don't know I think probably people think of you it comes back to the earlier points about it being negative people think of you and judge you just for that and so you have to constantly
be doing like I love the science I do so you're constantly doing this awesome science as well and then like oh actually they are a serious scientists you've always got to to kind of um prove them wrong so you definitely have that whether they um whether they
dislike me because of it I'll I'll find out I'll find out soon enough I'm currently on one of those awful you know you know who had UK funding works and won a fellowship which is like a year and a half more funding and so let's see right if everyone's going to push me out
for writing this then then more power to another institution that gets me what did you learn in your year studying art in Florence I learned um an awful lot of of well I tried to learn a lot of Italian I was very lucky to have a landlady who was a
professor of history of art at a university in Florence and only spoke Italian and I spoke no Italian and was very Junior um but also you know you get this extraordinary perspective which you do whenever you're in Italy about how extraordinarily interdisciplinary and
kind of multi-talented these Renaissance Masters were obsessed with materials right obsessed with materials obsessed with Innovative new techniques for painting for architecture for building buildings that you can't feasibly imagine working without a computer or
without a huge you know infrastructure to be able to make it happen the Metallurgy of the doors the woodwork the kind of beautiful glass nanoparticles being used long before we're being able to study and call them nanoparticles you really learn that this idea that
everything has to be in silos that scientists are distinct from artists or Crafts People and was completely gone then you know in in Renaissance in Italy they just didn't have that you had to do everything and and then you go into high
schools now and it's like you have to choose whether you're going to do the Sciences or the Arts you have to choose whether you're going to study Physics or whether you're going to study art and so it taught me a lot more about that I obviously always knew creativity was
very important for being a good scientist because if I'm going to design an experiment no one's ever done or you know explain something in a way no one's ever explained it you have to be quite creative to do that um but but you get it so much reinforced
when you're in Italy and and particularly in Florence that before people could do this a lot and they didn't talk about it all the time they just did it similarly though they also didn't recognize the contributions of women and there's almost no you know artemisa
gentileschi is one of the only women Renaissance artists or women artists that's a bit later too so and that is a bit later than when all of this stuff was happening and she also had a really hard time to get to being where she was
so so you saw this this idea of the kind of polymath this idea that people could do Science and Arts and and perfectly well was celebrated but you know Society still didn't value women last two questions first what is your most unusual successful work habit unusual
successful work habits um I suppose it has to be the Wikipedia editing right like I you know I I go into the lab or teach or whatever research proposal I'm writing every day um and then I go home and after dinner I edit Wikipedia and part of it is this
advocacy in this you know I really want these people to be celebrated and to be honored but I also get this huge chance to learn new things every single night that are out of the kind of little bubble that I'm in of learning about
chirality and how that influences technology I learn about a cool new spectroscopy or to a cool new University I've never heard of or what people are doing for this particular type of technique and then that opens my ideas and perspectives for something else and
actually you know I as a scientist and as a material scientist and very interested in new materials and new ways to study them and so I'm always going around the world trying to do experiments with cool and interesting people and one of the best
ways to prepare for going to do that experiment is to write the Wikipedia page of who you're going to be with so it was last week at this High magnetic field lab in France getting this opportunity to do solid state NMR so to do nuclear magnetic resonance but of
thin films and materials and um it's completely fascinating another one of these weird and wonderful magical scientific techniques but just writing the biography of the person I was going to work with meant that I was really prepped for going and if I'm about to
see someone speak writing their biography before means I get this so so that's definitely my best work habit you know do write the Wikipedia page of what it is that you're working on and final question what will you do next what will
I do next well I really really want to um um to make it in Academia not just because of you know because I love the science but also because I really like this idea that you can you can try and do these little incremental changes to make it better for the next generation
of scientists you know whether that's making scientific funding more Equitable whether that's really shifting how we teach to make sure that we're teaching in a way that's preparing this for this this group of researchers to go out and
change the world not just teaching because it's what someone's curriculum was 10 years ago but saying this is really exciting and this is what we want you to learn about now and you're in the University you've you've connected you've checked in you want to be here
let's do it too so the transformative education the research and also this Progressive idea of making it more fair and equal I want to stick around in Academia to make that to make that happen Jessica Wade thank you very much thanks so much for having me