Annual Reviews Audio Presents An Interview with

Annual Reviews Audio. 2010 Mia Lobel: Hello and welcome to Annual Reviews Audio; a podcast

First published online on February 5, 2010 from Annual Reviews where insightful research begins. I’m your host Mia Lobel. Today, we’ll speak with Richard Zare, Co-Editor of the Annual Reviews Audio interviews are online at Annual Review of Analytical . Professor Zare is a pioneer www.annualreviews.org/page/audio in the field of chemistry and spectroscopy. He has taught at Copyright © 2010 by Annual Reviews. for more than 30 years and has been Chair of the All rights reserved Department of Chemistry there since 2005. The American Chemical

Host: Mia Lobel Society recently awarded Zare the for his many years of service in the field of chemistry. He was also just awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. Professor Zare, it’s a pleasure to have you.

Richard Zare: Well, it’s wonderful to be able to speak with you.

Mia Lobel: So you’ve had a long and prestigious career in the sciences with many years ahead of you still, but what is your first memory of science, the thing that first got you interested?

Richard Zare: Well, it’s hard to know where to start. There are

1 certain memories, whether they’re called science or not, but they certainly characterize me. I remember having a fight with my father and later on urinating into his aquarium that contained tropical fish, which killed them all.

Mia Lobel: This was a science experiment at the earliest stage?

Richard Zare: I think that was an early science experiment and a toxic one. Later on, my mother would enjoy sleeping late and maybe about age five, I was cooking for my younger brother. And I would make eggs primarily, but my eggs were always experiments. I tried to find out whether my brother liked eggs with ketchup, eggs with sugar, eggs with vinegar, and so on. I kept making up different creations and trying them on my brother; my poor brother.

Mia Lobel: This was the scientific method at it’s best for a young, young boy?

Richard Zare: Well, I’ll tell you it’s one of the better forms of chemistry because you can taste as you go along, and normally you can’t do that safely in most chemistry.

Mia Lobel: Let me ask you, what did you learn from peeing into the fish tank?

Richard Zare: That it doesn’t have a good effect on tropical fish.

Mia Lobel: I see, I see. So you went on to study at Harvard, but along the way you’ve become involved in many different sciences. Can you talk—

Richard Zare: Actually, what I did is I took a double major as an undergraduate at Harvard. It was a major in chemistry and a major in physics.

Mia Lobel: I see, so all along the way you’ve been very interdisciplinary in your science work. Can you talk about why that’s important to you?

Richard Zare: I think that problems do not come with the names of departments on them. I think that it’s very important that we have departments, because departments are the keepers of the truth for a particular field. And I urge everybody to be well grounded in some area, deeply grounded in some area and therefore to be involved in getting a—working with a department and getting a degree and so forth. But you have to have a spirit of not only knowing something well but willing to ask others and learn from others to solve problems. To me the really important thing about a PhD is that it trains you to become an independent problem solver. And you don’t have to know everything. Unfortunately, those days have passed, but you have to be able to be inquisitive and be bold enough to ask others for help.

Mia Lobel: Now let’s talk a little bit about your mentoring work. You recently received a Presidential Award for your mentoring. What does that award mean to you and what have you done?

Richard Zare: Well, it was very thrilling. Last week I had a chance to meet President Obama and shake his hand and to listen to his deep commitment to support and improve education in the . The United States has students now that are ranking something like 25th in the

2 Zare world in comparison to other students of similar age, like 15 year olds. We can’t afford to continue to do this and think that we’re going to be a leading nation. This is really important for the future of this country that we improve our education. Mentoring however is—that’s the big picture— the mentoring however, is generally one-on-one. One person at a time; though there can be—as opposed to teaching which is often one-to-many. But mentoring really involves one-on-one, and understanding people, and trying to work with them.

Mia Lobel: And what does an effective scientific mentor do?

Richard Zare: May I say that it’s very much related to what is effective teaching. The most important thing is not necessarily information but inspiration. You really try to inspire things. And you try to tell people and show people that they have a way to succeed about what they’re interested in doing. First of all, you want to encourage them to find that they love, something that they care passionately about, immerse themselves in it, and really work at it. And that type of immersion I think, a lot of happiness results.

Mia Lobel: Now you’ve done a lot of work in your own lab to help young women specifically pursue an academic career in the sciences. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done and why this is important to you?

Richard Zare: Well, it’s certain—important to me, not only women, under-represented groups— What’s really important is that we use the entire pool of human talent in the country, and if we say we’re not going to work with women then we’ve cut off about 50% of that talent. So that’s ridiculous. We’ve got to work with women and as Chair I’ve been very interested in making my department family friendly. To do this, as first year as Chair, I instituted a new policy for maternity in which women who were graduate students who were going to have children were given paid leave of 12 weeks, so that they could really take care of things and for the coming new child in their life. It’s been interesting because not only has this been very helpful to women in my department, but I’ve had a number of men thank me for this. Now you might say, “Why are they thanking me?”, unless they’re a man married to a female graduate student who’s about to give birth. And the answer is not that. What I’ve done is something else. I’ve actually helped break a taboo topic, which is to talk to your thesis advisor about the fact that you might be becoming a father, and that those entail extra responsibilities which will require you to change how much time and when you can be in the laboratory, for example.

Mia Lobel: Now that’s a pretty unusual stance to take when the sciences have typically been pretty rigid as far as how much work you have to put in, how many hours, how many, you know, how much lab time. Why is your perspective so different?

Richard Zare: I think if we want to have careers in this field, we have to be welcoming. And there’s no good time for a woman to have a child and have a career. Whenever a child comes it interferes with a career. And men do not give birth; women do. There’s an asymmetry here and you know, viva la asymmetry here, it’s not going to change. We have to recognize it and work with it. And I think we can. I don’t think that just the number of hours is what leads to success. It has to do with effective hours and creative hours and I think there’s a great confusion that goes on in the heads of some people that it should be equated just the number of hours. There’s a tradition of that sort, particularly in chemistry, and it needs to change.

www.annualreviews.org • An Interview with Richard Zare 3 Mia Lobel: What do you think is the most encouraging thing in science education, today?

Richard Zare: To me, the most encouraging thing truly, is the fact that starting with the study that Norm Augustine led in which I was a coauthor, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, there’s been a sense that I think is shared by both Republicans and Democrats that we have to do more in education. We must do more than we’ve been doing. We are failing as a country and we can’t afford to let this go on. Education is slow. We once were leading many other countries. Particularly because we believed in giving general education to everyone, whereas education at the time in Europe was only for the elite. Well, we’ve passed those days and we now have to come back to recapture them. And that actually, unfortunately, requires probably a culture change. I see in many Asian countries how parents are so worried about the quality of their teachers and how well their students—their sons or daughters are doing in school and I don’t see that happening to the same extent in the United States. Some groups, yes, but overall, no. We need a change in attitude. And as I say, what encourages me is this realization by our political leaders, and it’s very clear. And certainly, I had that sense in listening to President Obama last week.

Mia Lobel: Now let’s talk about the other award that you won, recently, the Priestley Medal, which looks at the breadth of your career in chemistry, so far. What does that award mean to you?

Richard Zare: Well, it’s a little scary because it’s said to be a lifetime award. You know, for a lifetime of work, and I was actually planning to go on. So this worries me a bit. There are many, many deserving people; more deserving people than can get such an award. So of course it’s humbling to be selected. I’m delighted to have been chosen and I will be receiving that award at the March national meeting in San Francisco of the American Chemical Society.

Mia Lobel: Congratulations, that’s a big honor. Let’s have a little bit about where the field is going. What is the future of chemistry?

Richard Zare: Oh, I wish I knew for sure. I can tell you this, in chemistry is ever increasingly important. More and more people use chemistry one way or another. Particularly if you think of chemistry being the definition of matter and how it undergoes different transformations. Chemistry is just what you get your hands on and what you see. It’s very much a part of your world. The difficulty is because, perhaps, it is so central and used by so many that it’s not at all clear that the discipline of chemistry will continue as such. It may be actually, one that is shrinking, if not going to be one that may even ultimately vanish. I hope not. Why do I say something so pessimistic like this? It’s because a lot of in the past have defined out—defined away different aspects, which really are chemistry. There was a time where chemists decided that polymers were not chemistry. Well that led to polymers going into material science, into chemical engineering, and other areas; when certainly, they’re part of chemistry, and so forth. And I think this is very important that the chemists need to look outward and be more encouraging rather than only look ever inward in a narrowing circle or spot of focus. And it worries me that way. We see that certain fields that were once very important now are only practiced by a few. Give you another example, mathematics is such a field. Everybody now uses mathematics, not everybody did before. And very few people are mathematicians.

Mia Lobel: What do you think has changed to make these certain fields sort of, fall out of

4 Zare interest? Is it a change in students? Is it a change in academia? Is it just a change in people?

Richard Zare: It’s a change in saying, “What are the major problems of a field?” So it’s important to be able to say that there are certain questions, which really, chemists are aiming to solve, that matter to people. And if they can’t do that then the field becomes less relevant. I think it can. I think if you ask generally, “What is it is that chemists do?” They really are working to make better lives for people one way or another. Whether that has to do with better materials, or with health, or with other things, from generating energy to protecting ourselves.

Mia Lobel: What is exciting in the field of right now? What’s hot? What are people talking about?

Richard Zare: Well, there are many— Many things are exciting as we push the frontiers of how we can measure things. I have some of my own interests that of course, excite me, but there are so many different things from how you take mixtures and separate them into their components to how fast we can determine something, how little there is of something that we can measure, and things of this sort and what we find it in. I don’t know even where to begin to tell you about the excitement in this field because it’s so broad.

Mia Lobel: Well tell me what something that’s particularly exciting to you, individually.

Richard Zare: Well, I am very excited about something, which a company that I helped found is doing, to namely— That’s called now, Picarro, and it is interested in making measurements of isotope ratios. And first of all, I need to explain to you what an isotope is. We think that all the atoms of an element are the same, that’s the first idea, and we think they’re the same from a chemical viewpoint in that they have the same number of electrons on the outside of the atom, and they have therefore, the same number of protons inside the nucleus so that it’s a neutral atom. But the truth is that many of these atoms are more or less heavy. And what I mean by that is they have different amounts of neutrons in the nucleus, which change their weight. I think a famous example is that of carbon. Carbon comes in three forms that people recognize. The most stable form of carbon that people recognize right away is Carbon-12, six protons and six neutrons. There’s another form of carbon that’s also stable that’s called Carbon-13. It has six protons and seven neutrons. And about one percent of all carbon inside you and me and everywhere else on earth is Carbon-13. There’s yet another form of carbon called Carbon-14, which has six protons and eight neutrons and it’s not stable; it falls apart, it’s radioactive, it has a long lifetime, and it’s used for carbon dating. Now to return, these carbon atoms actually react at different rates because of their differences in mass. And the result of this is that as chemical reactions go on, you really have a different ratio in detail of how much Carbon-13 there is to how much Carbon-12. And by measuring this isotope ratio, you can really learn where things come from. And you can also use this as a diagnostic of potentially of disease. If I might, I’ll give you a simple example of that. Today, in affluent countries like the United States, people suffer from obesity and particularly people suffer from diabetes. Which leads to heart disease and it’s a killer, it’s very bad. There is a state called prediabetic or where you have insulin resistance. Your cells in your body get tired of using insulin to burn up glucose, which is what powers us. That’s glucose, being a sugar. I’d like to be able to test people as to whether or not they are developing insulin resistance; because if they were, then you might be able to intervene, and change their diet, and change the amount of exercise, and stop them from becoming diabetic. If you make these interventions, you’d like to

www.annualreviews.org • An Interview with Richard Zare 5 know, is that intervention having any success or not? Once again, you need to measure this. One easy way potentially to measure this is to feed somebody glucose, which is labeled with Carbon-13 and see what happens to it. If your body is able to metabolize it then you’ll get Carbon-13 distributed in various ways, such as it’ll come out in your breath as Carbon-13 CO2. If you’re not able to metabolize it well, then you won’t have this happen. So for example, doing something simple like measuring the ratio of Carbon-13 to Carbon-12 and breath before and after taking Carbon-13 labeled glucose could make a huge difference and become a medical diagnostic. This is a type of thing that I’m very interested in pushing.

Mia Lobel: You had told me that they found a very inexpensive way to do this; can you talk about that a little bit?

Richard Zare: Be glad to. This is using a technique called cavity ring-down spectroscopy, and you’ve perhaps sat in a beauty salon or a barber shop between two mirrors and you’ve seen the light bounce back and forth between the mirrors and you see nested images of yourself. Today, by using very good mirrors, you can make the light bounce back and forth hundreds of thousands to a million times. And the result of that is that two mirrors separated by the length of my arms can have an effective path length, which is kilometers in length, huge. This makes it very sensitive when you put some gas inside, between the two mirrors that can absorb the light, the radiation that’s bouncing back and forth. And by measuring the rate at which this stored radiation between the mirrors decreases or, in the parlance of electrical engineering “rings down”, you’re able to make a measurement of the absorption of the gas inside the cavity. Molecules, which have different isotopes have slightly different spectra—different sharp lines that absorb light. And that allows us to measure the ratio of isotopes by doing cavity ring-down spectroscopy.

Mia Lobel: And what kind of reach will this technology have?

Richard Zare: Well, it’s in its infancy. And you know, all newborns are so cute when they’re first born and you have such great hopes for them, and I do for this. And of course, I think it may have huge reach, but then you get to the terrible twos, and so come back in two years and ask me this question and I’ll tell you more, but I’m not sure.

Mia Lobel: Okay, very good. One last question. I’ve heard that you’re known for your deep sense of merriment. How do you maintain that?

Richard Zare: Because I think that life is a crazy, cock-eyed business, that’s why. And I think that’s the only thing—its part of me. I look at things and one crazy thing after another keeps happening, and in many ways, it’s a joke. Science is a flirt as to what’s really happening. All types of unexpected things happen in the lab, most of which are wrong and have explanations, which are very boring. But sometimes, some surprising things happen, and I just have that type of sense of humor about it.

Mia Lobel: Wonderful, Professor Zare, thank you so much for your time today.

Richard Zare: Thank you.

Mia Lobel: You’ve been listening to Annual Reviews Audio. For over 75 years, Annual Reviews

6 Zare has guided scientists to the essential research literature in the biomedical, life, physical, and social sciences. Learn more at AnnualReviews.org. I’m Mia Lobel. Thanks for listening.

www.annualreviews.org • An Interview with Richard Zare 7 8 Zare