Earth & Sky

"What does this have to do with my life?"

Carl Batt thinks science should be practical.

Carl Batt said, “I think that science should be practical, because 99.999 percent of the world are not scientists. You can spin all of these esoteric stories about basic research and how this generally contributes to the knowledge of mankind – but in the end, most people want to know what does this have to do with my life?” Earth and Sky’s Marc Airhart spoke with Carl Batt in the summer of 2005.

Airhart: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a scientist?

Batt: It’s kind of hard to say because it was sort of a gradual evolution. The first few years as an undergraduate I was more interested in becoming a veterinarian. And then, there were a number of incidences where I was exposed to the field and realized it was not inquisitive enough. It was like being more of a technician. So, I decided that I didn’t want that. And I was never very good at memorizing things. So, my great failure is the fact that I’ve never been disciplined enough to sit down and memorize a bunch of facts. And so as a consequence, I wound up not being interested in veterinary medicine.

A little vignette that might be interesting is that a friend of mine was in vet school when I was an undergraduate and he came back one day to the frat house with a box full of bones and he had to memorize all the little bumps on the bone. I said, well what are you doing? He said, oh, I have to memorize these bones. It sort of looked like leftovers from a chicken dinner. I thought, wow, what kind of animal is this? He said, I don’t really know. I said, well what’s the point in that?

So anyway, that’s how I ended up going into science because I decided I really wanted to discover stuff more than sit around and memorize stuff.

Airhart: So what is food science?

Batt: Food science is a really open field. The general public’s notion of what food science is all about is kind of like cooking or making chicken soup in a can or something like that, but it’s really a combination of different types of disciplines, so there’s chemistry, there’s physics, there’s microbiology. And so when I think about my graduate education in food science, it was really broad based and probably more broad based than I would have had in something like microbiology.

It’s really about studying how complex systems behave. It’s not just a spectator sport because you eventually want to be able to create things in the sense that it’s predictable and really improves the characteristics of the food. And that sounds like cooking – which, by the way, I really like to do – but it’s got nothing to do with my food science background.

We’ve done things like discovering how one particular protein in milk really behaves. The practical aspect of it is that when you heat up milk, you get things like yogurt. And there’s a very good biophysical explanation for that which I’ve helped to contribute to. So, there’s practical aspects in that it distills down to something I can tell my grandmother about. But then there’s also some very fundamentally interesting science that goes on. So really what food science is is understanding those complex behavior patterns, not simply for the scientific value but also for the practical value of it.

In the end, it’s a very practical thing. And I think that science should be practical. I think there should be some useful outcomes to whatever you’re trying to accomplish because you know 99.999 percent of the world are not scientists. You can spin all of these esoteric stories about basic research and how this generally contributes to the knowledge of mankind, but in the end, most people want to know what does this have to do with my life? And I think working in a practical field gives you that ability to tell people about, and I think that’s a good thing to do.

Airhart: After studying and working in food science for a while, your focus has shifted to cancer research and building “nano sensors.” So why the shift? And how do you balance all these different interests?

Batt: Part of it is a funding issue. The reality is that my lab runs on a budget of about a million to a million and a half dollars a year. And to generate those sorts of resources, you need to go after different areas. So, you can track any of my different forays into cancer research and sensors looking for opportunities to do good science, to do useful science and also to do science that can be financed.

That being said, also if I had to track where a lot of this stuff goes, it’s really developing technology and then making some use of it. So, the fact that it isn’t necessarily food at this point in time, the fundamentals are still there. We just work in systems that are food–like. So, for example, the work we’re doing on cancer research, it’s using a bacteria called salmonella. And that may trigger in your mind, oh salmonella, I know that, that makes you sick. Well it also turns out that salmonella can be used as a vaccine for potentially treating different kinds of diseases.

So, we’re actually working on a project now using salmonella, growing salmonella that will not make you sick but which will potentially cure disease. So, it’s one of those situations where yeah, it doesn’t have anything to do with food science, but in fact it does because most of my practical knowledge of salmonella comes from my interest in salmonella as a food pathogen and yet the same properties make it a potentially useful therapeutic agent.

Airhart: So, do you use the same tools in the different areas you work in?

Batt: That’s right. Some of the sensors we’re working on were and still tend to be focused on detecting food pathogens. So if you track back, my original interest in nanotechnology derived from the fact that we were making a different type of sensor for bacteria in food. So, we’ve moved somewhat away from that. And still, the origins are the same.

The tools of science tend to be very robust and tend to be applied to a lot of different types of areas. So, food science is an example of one and yet we’ve moved beyond it.

Airhart: So what kinds of research are you doing now?

Batt: I don’t really spend a whole lot of time in the laboratory doing stuff with my own two hands. I realized I wasn’t that good at it and it takes a lot of patience. You have to have a lot of patience to sit down there and watch an experiment happen.

Another thing is I’m fortunate to have a great bunch of people who do great science. So, my role there is part cheerleader, part fundraiser, part godfather at times. So, I spend time talking to the people who work in my laboratory, just trying to make sure they’re successful. It’s more being a cheerleader than anything.

My strengths are really trying to help people do what they’re good at. And so I have 30 people who work for me and they’re all very smart and what I do is just give them opportunities and encourage them to look at those opportunities and use their imagination and work hard.

It’s not that I’m not doing science, it’s just that I’m doing it voyeuristically.

People come to my lab now and it’s an amazing place. I mean there are molecular biologists, physicists, chemists, material scientists, people with BS degrees, largely technical people, there’s people with graduate degrees and you know it’s kind of a melting pot. And they’re all in this little place and it’s a little bit too crowded and there’s just so much energy being generated there and so many new ideas.

I know it’s my lab and I know that I’m probably prejudiced, but I’ve never seen a group like this. And this has only happened in the last three or four years. And it’s just really cool. It’s like you go in there and say we’ve got to solve this problem. And the chemists will sit there and say well, I can contribute this part of it, the molecular biologist will say I can contribute this part, and so on – and my role is to make sure that nobody gets siloed.

Airhart: So, you’re really into the people and the communication, rather than doing research?

Batt: In science, there are certain things that are classic – but 99 percent of the science is temporal. What was a great discovery in 1970 is now, awh, who cares? When I was a graduate student, I sequenced a gene. Then, it was, Wow! Now, it’s like, who cares? Now we sequence a genome and even that isn’t enough. So, I tend to remember more the people and the opportunities and what they discovered than the discovery itself.

The other part of it is, quite frankly, that a lot of science is serendipity. And if it’s serendipity, how do you process that and institutionalize that and try to think about how you’re going to be lucky again? It’s like winning the lottery, you discover this great thing. And then what are you going to do tomorrow? Well, you can run around and tell people for 10 years, I discovered that great thing. But, you know if it is serendipity, it’s not entirely true. It’s not like everything is pure luck. But luck has a lot to do with it. And so from my perspective, you know, I can’t always guarantee that luck but I can certainly figure out what is possible from the standpoint of setting up a process and to me that’s people and environment and opportunity.

My job is to try to get people to communicate. And I think it’s important because the problems of the world are not going to be solved by a single physicist or a group of physicists or a group of biologists. It’s going to be all of these people talking to each other.

Airhart: You’re the co–director of the Nanobiotechnology Center at Cornell. So can you tell me what goes on there?

Batt: That center was founded back in 2000. It was a group of people who got together, in part at Cornell, in part at other institutions and we wrote a big grant proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch what the field has come to be called, which is nanobiotechnology. And it was an interesting exercise because it really was a fairly diverse group of people getting together and writing this proposal.

What that center is about is basically trying to develop tools to study biology at the nanometer scale. So, it’s engineers and physicists trying to build things and biologists trying to articulate what their challenges are in the field.

So, my role in the field largely evolved to being primarily interested in the educational outreach because we had many people doing great research and I kind of really believe that it’s not good enough to do good research anymore, you have to kind of figure out what the next generation of scientist is going to be all about and how do you encourage them and how do you make sure that there are going to be enough people 20 years from now to do great science? And I think it’s a complicated issue and to me it was a challenge.

To me, it was, probably nobody else wants to take it because everybody else was focusing in on the research in their lab and their professional development as scientists and I could do all of that and I had this good group of people that became an even better group of people when I decided not to spend every day trying to tell them what to do. Which is a testament to the fact that you sit there and you do half as much management as you used to. So you say, well what happens if I don’t do any?

I’m still assured because every once in a while I’ll go in there and cold cure a particular problem. People say, wow, that’s really amazing. Well it’s a cyclic thing, so every five years the same problem comes up. I remember the answer and nobody else is around five years later. So it’s a new group that’s constantly amazed by my skills.

Airhart: Were there any big setbacks for you in your research?

Batt: Constantly. You know, back when genes were being discovered one at a time, you’d sit there and you’d open up a journal and you’d be interested in some gene from some bacteria and you’d open a journal – and this was before they were online – and you’d get this big fat book and you’d open it up and say, oops – someone’s discovered this gene and you’re out of business.

We’ve had that happen. I can’t remember exactly what the gene was but someone had discovered it. I opened up the journal and there it was and I went to go talk to the student and said, I’ve got some bad news for you, here’s the gene you’ve been trying to find for the last six months or a year. And you just close the door on that one because there’s no value in being the second one to do something.

Airhart: Did you have any role models – in science or in general – that influenced you as a young scientist?

Batt: My graduate advisor was a man named Mike Solberg at Rutgers. He was a very, very careful scientist. He would go through my lab notebooks and look at every single number and have me explain where every single number came from. He was a pain in the ass. And I never really emulated him, but I began to understand the value in that approach as well. You can’t do things sloppy, you have to be a good observer and you have to really understand what these numbers are that you’re generating. He was painful. But he was right.

We had this bet when I was finishing up my thesis – and he knew that I had the attention span of a flea. He goes, I bet you you could sit here for the next day and stare at the abstract of your thesis and still not find the mistake in it. And I said, no way. And I spent the whole day looking at this abstract, reading it and reading it and only he could find the mistake. I was floored. I lost something like 50 dollars on the bet. It was ridiculous and yet he taught me the value of really being diligent and really being careful and I don’t necessarily follow that to the letter, but there is some value to that.