All right, good morning, everyone. It is now my great honor and pleasure to introduce the next speaker, Dr. Robert Tysian, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology here at Cal, since 1979. I am beyond lucky and grateful to have worked as an undergraduate in his lab since summer of 2021. And though my interactions with him may be small snapshots in his greater and much longer career, witnessing the manner in which he drives home essential points in lab meetings, conversations about recent papers and publications, and sage advice for both college and life in general, is a testament to the knowledge, experience, and brilliant mind he has. Tysian, or Tij as everyone calls him, utilized his training as a biochemist at Cal and Harvard to make his way into our textbooks as he pioneered our understanding of the molecular machinery that reads DNA and operates to drive gene expression and normal human cells in disease. While conducting biomedical discovery research and simultaneously teaching thousands of undergrads, he not only served in leadership roles at Cal, such as director of the Berkeley STEM Cell Center, faculty director of the Lee Kaeshing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, and head of the Siebel STEM Initiative, but also received many scientific awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Alfred P. Sloan Prize, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, and California Scientist of the Year. Since 1987, he has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and from 2009 to 2016, he was president of ATHMI, the non-profit organization that supports basic biomedical research with an endowment of roughly $20 billion and an annual budget of $950 million. What further drew me to Tija's lab as a biochemistry slash business double major is the fact that Tija's also a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Telerik, Incorporated, and ICON Therapeutics, alongside launching several other biotech companies as a science partner of the column group, a venture capital firm. Currently, he holds the Lee Kaeshing Chancellor's Chair in Biology and serves as scientific advisor to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Biohub. Furthermore, Tija and his wife, Claudia, a retired corporate attorney, have raised two daughters who both live in the Bay Area. Now, before I finish, we will have a camera crew filming the talk as a thank you video for homecoming, so please raise your hands if you do not want to be in the video. All right, perfect. In that case, without further ado, please would everyone give a warm welcome to Dr. Robert Tija. Well, good morning and you just saw why I'm still here at Cal. I have students like that in the lab. It just is amazing. Every morning I can't wait to get in the lab, talk to students like Gloria. They're humbling to say the least. It's a great pleasure for me to be here. I'm only gonna talk for maybe 25, 30 minutes, give you a little bit of flavor of what's happening here at Cal, particularly in the biological sciences. Part of my goal here is not only to give you the parents a sense of what, perhaps your students are going to or your children are going to experience, here at Cal, which I experienced as an undergrad. But things are very exciting in the Bay Area, as you know. It's the place where biotech was born and has matured in very interesting ways and Cal has been a major player. And one of the misconceptions I think a lot of people have, even those that are in the Bay Area and should know better, is that even though Cal doesn't have a integrated medical school, we do a lot of medical research. And in fact, people were wondering why I was the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute if I'm a basic research scientist. And the reason is because if you don't understand how basic biology works, then when you walk into that doctor's office, he's not going to know how to treat you properly. And that's really the premise of my talk today. And I want to give you a sense of not only what students like Gloria and others, including my graduate students and postdocs are doing in the lab, but for you to actually see the pathway from a very fundamental discovery all the way to what's hopefully going to be your bedside as we understand more and more complex diseases. And the one that I'm going to tell you about today in a very brief interlude is one of the most difficult, which is neurodegeneration. So let me, as a scientist, I can't do without slides. So this is where I've been living for the last 40x plus years as a faculty member, but before that, in the late 60s, I was a student here. And it was a life-changing experience. I trained with Dr. Koshland and Dr. Barker. You'll see two buildings with their names on it. And it was a privilege working with them. And then I went back east and I actually worked with Jim Watson, which some of you will know, was the guy who figured out together with Francis Crick the structure of DNA. And those studies back then sort of catalyzed my career. And what I'm going to tell you about is almost a direct consequence of what I learned through my studies here at Cal first, and then at Harvard, Oxford, and then at Cold Spring Harbor with Jim. So I also have to tell you that a little story. Before I came to Cal as a student, I had never been west of Philadelphia. And when I flew in to San Francisco Airport in 1967, and a faculty member from Cal who happened to be sitting next to me in the airplane, Professor Noonan from the law school gave me a ride in very nicely.  And I've had the same feeling for the last 50 years. I still can't explain it. Maybe it's the food, I don't know. But I think it's the university. So let me tell you a little bit about the way science works. First, let me say, even though the slide shows you a lot of microscopes, including some ancient ones, I want to tell you something that's curious about science and about life in general. I was trained by Koshland and others to be a chemist and a biochemist, which usually means the way we study how things work is we tear it apart, isolate the components, try to put it back together and make it work. That's really powerful and that drove my career for almost 30 years. But there was something nagging in the back of my mind and that is I knew that as I tore the machinery of the cell apart and isolated its components to study it, I was also missing out on something because it was no longer in a living cell. And it really frustrated me for decades that I couldn't actually study the molecular events that are going on inside a cell in a living system rather than in an artificial, what we call in vitro system, which is in a test tube isolated from its normal environment. Now that's not to say we didn't learn a lot, but I knew that we were only learning sort of one level of understanding. Part of the reason for that is that it's really hard to look into a cell and see what's going on. It's hard enough to even look at a single cell moving around, as you know, your naked eye is not good enough to do that. So since the 17th century with Hook and Van Loon Hook with the microscopes, people began to see things below the resolution of your naked eye, so microbes. But what I wanted to do was much, much more ambitious. I wanted to see individual molecules. That's about 10,000 times the resolution that you can get from these microscopes. The other thing that was very frustrating to me was that the evolution of the microscope had kind of stalled for a long time. There wasn't much advancement in the quality of the resolution of these microscopes since the 18th century. I won't go into today why that is the case, but one reason is that there was a physical reality which is called the light diffraction limit. And that is that you cannot get down to resolution lower than one half the wavelength of light that you're using to look at your sample. Now you say, oh, wait a minute, don't you guys have electron microscopes and X-ray crystallography? Can't you go down to the atomic level? Absolutely, on dead cells. But what I wanted to do was look at live cells. If you hit a live cell with an X-ray, what do you think happens? You fry it instantly. Same thing with an electron. So we required a revolution of sorts to overcome this light diffraction limit which has essentially stalled out live cell imaging since the 18th, 19th century. So how did we do this? And it's often the case, it's never one solution. It starts with a bunch of advances some of you may be well familiar with. Computers, lasers, transistors, and really, really sophisticated molecular biology. And it took several decades for all these things which were not designed to come together. They came together largely because of universities like Berkeley where scientists are encouraged to follow their nose, develop unbelievable things, sometimes not knowing how they're going to apply it. And then somebody else comes along, in this case, Eric Betsick, who is now a colleague of ours here in Berkeley, who put it all together and came up with what we call super resolution microscopes that can actually measure the movement of individual protein molecules in living cells. Unheard of, when I first heard that, I thought impossible, can I be done? He did it. He did this while he was a colleague of mine while I was president of the Howard Hughes. We had a laboratory in Ashburn, Virginia and he developed these microscopes and then I began to collaborate with Eric to use those microscopes to attack the problem that I'd been mulling over for literally two decades. And so what Eric was able to do, and maybe there are some computer people in the audience, this could never have happened without really fast computing. And somebody wants to ask me more details about how he did this, can come and talk to me later, or you can just go listen to his Nobel Prize speech, because he developed this in 2005 and won the Nobel Prize in 2014. That's one of the fastest timelines I've ever seen. And the best part of this was when we hired Eric to come and do this completely out of the box crazy idea. At HHMI, he was literally an unemployed physicist trying to build a microscope in his living room. So suffice it to say super resolution microscopy is revolutionizing biology today. And so what I thought I'd do is first just show you what just for fun is I'm gonna take you into the microscope room in a sense and show you what the microscope actually is recording. So you see that little dot swinging around on the left side here. That's a light detector detecting a fluorescent protein zipping around in a living cell. Actually, this is a human stem cell. And the trace in the middle is what the computer's doing is keeping track of where this thing's going. It's keeping track of how fast it's going, how long it's going in a straight line before it turns, et cetera, et cetera. It's called single particle tracking. So in essence, it's kind of like what GPS is doing to you when you're driving around. It can figure out exactly where you're going, how fast you're going when you're turning around and when you stop, which is remarkable. And this was done in collaboration with a young scientist, brilliant young scientist that Berkeley managed to extract out of Paris, which is not an easy thing to do, Xavier Darzac from the École en la Male Supérieure in Paris whom I met on a sabbatical and convinced them ultimately to come to Berkeley and join me to do this. So what are we actually learning? Those of you a little bit more scientifically inclined, this will be obvious. Those who are not, bear with me. So what you're looking at is in a live cell and actually even in a whole organism or in a tissue, you're peering into the life of a molecule as it's zipping around doing its job. You can pick whatever molecule you want by making that molecule fluorescent using genetics. So you can figure out right away, what is the concentration of the molecule? How many molecules per cell there is? That's very difficult sometimes to do without this technique. Diffusion coefficient, that's just a fancy word for saying I can follow its movement and how fast. It's like the speedometer. Diffusion behavior is a little bit more subtle. It turns out even, maybe there are some chemists in the audience, even though we learned way back when, even in high school, that molecules an aqueous solution, which is a cell, diffuses by something called Brownian motion. It turns out in living cells, that's usually not what's happening, which is why we didn't understand what the heck was going on. The other thing we can tell you is when a molecule stops, that's called a fraction bound. So for a given population of molecules, certain population is bound because it's stuck to something and it's not moving and then the other parts are moving. So you have the bound and free. And then finally, resonance time just means it's a fancy way of saying how long did it stop for? You have to stop because you wanted to take a break or because you're carrying out some important function in the cell. So that's resonance time. All right, so those are all things that until this technology came along and Xavier and I and Eric got together to do this, nobody had ever measured such a thing. Here's just an example of a embryonic stem cell with two key proteins of which one, I have fluorescent label and I'm tracking the movement and I happen to know from other biochemical work that this protein is supposed to bind to DNA, your chromosomes. And when it does so, it stops and slows down a lot. And that's shown in this plot up here. That's short lived and long lived. And so this is the long lived guys that are bound. And I can make a mutation, just a single mutation that gets rid of the long lived which means it no longer binds DNA. This is an incredibly powerful two. If I could have a drug that did that, I could solve a lot of cancer, for example. Here's another one, this is Huntington's disease. I have on one side normal patient cells and on the other side a disease patient cells. Pretty obvious what's going on. You have aggregation of the Huntington protein. But the question was, are the aggregates actually doing something bad? Well, I can go a step further and ask when those aggregates around are in the cell, in those brains, what's happening to other molecules that are in that same cell? And when we ask that question, so the green big blob is the aggregate of a Huntington's patient. The purple fireflies zipping around is a really important molecule that reads DNA and keeps that cell healthy and see what's happening to that purple molecule. It's getting stuck on the surface of the green blob. That's one of the reasons Huntington's patients have problems. So this is already a dynamic view of something going on in a living cell that we never understood. I'm now gonna take you a little deeper into a problem which I hope none of you have experienced directly in family or friends, and that is a devastating disease of the young people called Rett syndrome. Rett syndrome is a mutation, usually a very single mutation in a protein called MECP2. Don't worry too much about names. It usually afflicts girls. Why? Because it's X-linked. It's on the X chromosome. Girls have two X chromosomes. Boys have an X and a Y. Now, the sad news is, the reason why you don't find too many in boys is because that mutation, which can still allow the girls to survive for a certain amount of time, is deadly for boys, because you only have one copy, and if that copy is messed up, you're out of luck. My collaborators at Baylor College figured out that there are some rare young boys who are alive and have Rett, and they really wanted to study that mutation. So they found a boy, actually his picture is shown here. I'm very sad to report that he unfortunately passed away this last year, but we sequenced his DNA, figured out what the mutation was, transferred it into an animal model so we could study it in detail, because the goal here is eventually to figure out what good is it if we know what's wrong, if we can't fix it? And the goal will be eventually, you'll see why the information I'm gonna give you will help us perhaps figure out a therapeutic strategy that will work for these patients. So here's the disease, those of you who are not familiar with Rett, it's the X-linked postnatal neurological disorder. The children, they seem normal for six to 18 months, and then things go really bad. You see all of the morbidities over here, it affects one in 10,000 births. It's the most common monogenic, meaning single gene mutation that affects intellectual disability among girls. The good news is this is not a terminal neurodegenerative disease. In other words, you're not losing the neurons, they're just not functioning properly. So if we could actually go in there and tweak the system so that it worked better, you would solve the problem. That's the good news. So how is this crazy technology I just showed you about tracking molecules gonna help us in any way? So a little bit of background here. This is just to remind you this is a collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine. Huda is an old friend of mine and we've known for decades and we worked together on this problem. MECP-2 is a gene that she discovered to be the causative agent of Rett. And she knows exactly what mutations are causing what effects. And this work is done by a postdoc in her lab together with a postdoc in my lab. And what happens even in the mice, so we took the mutation from this young boy and transferred it into the mouse. I know it sounds like fiction, but actually we can do this quite easily. And lo and behold, that mouse shows all the symptoms that you would see in the human. Now again, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time showing you how we can actually measure the intelligence of a mouse, but it actually works very well. But look at the other things that it affects. It affects body weight, brain weight, reduced lifespan, impaired motor coordination, hind lamp clasping, all the things that are correlated with the disease in humans. So this is a very, very good model. And using this model, a postdoc in my lab, Claudia Kotoglia from Milano originally, she just became an American citizen this week. She began to use this incredibly sophisticated ability to track individual molecules moving in these disease cells of the model and to directly measure what's going on. Why is protein not doing its job? It's only got one little point mutation. It's not like the protein isn't there. And this is just probably a little more detail than you want most of you, but it's actually pretty easy. This is why we do this experiment in a mouse. We can't do this in the human because we actually have to cross a female with a male so that we get a pure strain of males that have that mutation and nothing else. And then we sacrifice the animal, pull out the cells from the cortical neurons. This is from the brain, and then do our crazy experiments. So we'll go right back to doing what I said we could do, find its distribution, the diffusion spectrum, the fraction bound, the residence time, all those things that our assay is designed to do, but now in the context of a disease organism and a physiological state. First thing we know is that the protein is there. It's produced in somewhat lower amounts, but it's in the right place and it's in the right place at the right time in the right cells. So it's not like the protein's gone. That's important. But right away we notice a problem. If you look at, so remember who can track these proteins, right? So the block up here is the normal and here's the mutant. It's pretty obvious what's going on with the mutant. It's moving a lot more than the wild type or the normal. That tells me right away why this protein is having a problem in these patients because it's not able to do its job. It's like it's got a very short attention span. It can't stay on the job long enough to do the job. So that's one problem. And it gets more sophisticated. It turns out we can analyze why this thing is moving faster. No, I don't wanna get into the weeds here, but think about it this way. If something is spending more time running around, you can ask one of two things. You can say, okay, it's running around more because it's residence time is shorter. So it's in the unbound state more often. That's called the dissociation rate. But it could also be because it just has a hard time finding the place it's supposed to bind to. So it's just not as good at finding its location that it wants to be in. That's called the on rate, how fast something comes on. It's really important from a drug discovery standpoint which of these is going on or if both are going on because it'll completely change the way you're gonna deal with the problem. Does that make sense? So nobody up to this point has ever been able to measure either the on rate or the off rate of this protein in the normal disease state. This was huge and I think will lead to some kind of therapeutic strategy. And it turns out that it in fact is affecting both the on rate, how quickly and how fast it finds its target to do its job. And it's also remarkably and unexpectedly sticking around longer which in and itself could be a problem. So in biology very often too much of something or too little of something is equally bad.  Okay, so that was just a little vignette of really fundamental experiments that we did. Most people would say well that's very nice but how the heck is that gonna help anybody? And I'm now gonna transition to me something that Cal has been incredibly effective at doing and nobody knows it. And that is when we take a very fundamental idea that looks very esoteric abstract and we build a company. That company becomes very successful. The drug or the process or the materials or the computer chip gets used by millions of people. So I'm gonna give you the final set of my talk here is to take you through an experience that I've had since I first came to Berkeley because I arrived here as a faculty member in 1978, 79. Genentech was just starting. That was the first actually two. CEDIS and Genentech both in the Bay Area, first biotechs ever. And I was on their scientific advisory board as a young faculty member and really saw the revolution that was taking on in the pharmaceutical business. I'm now gonna take you decades forward into technology that uses this fast microscope imaging system that I just showed you and how that can be converted into a cutting edge biotech, ultimately a pharmaceutical technology.  But as I said, I was throwing away 90% of the stuff that's in the cell that I didn't understand. So this slide is just to remind you that the cell and particularly the nucleus of the cell is an incredibly crowded place with molecules bumping into each other constantly. And the whole point here is when you track the movement of individual molecules in the normal physiologically living context, their behavior is completely different than when they're in the test tube. And this company that I'm gonna tell you about really took advantage of this to try to industrialize the ability to do dynamic imaging in individual cells to study drug discovery processes. This was a collaboration, so there are four of us who are founders of this company, including Eric Betzig from Cal who won the Nobel Prize I told you about. Xavier, my young colleague from Paris and a colleague of mine from the Howard Hughes who actually designed all the chemical dyes that we need for this experiment. So again, it's a collaboration of many different technologies that all have to come together from different organizations, although three of us are here at Cal. In fact, we collaborate with many people all over the world to do this. The company is called Icon Therapeutics, those of you who are curious can go look it up. It's in a funny place, it's in Hayward. Most people haven't even heard of Hayward that were east of the Sierras. And it uses single particle tracking as the primary platform for discovering drugs. It uses single particle tracking as a way to test literally hundreds of thousands or millions of potential drugs in any number of diseases. We are completely agnostic as to the disease, although primarily Icon is currently focused on oncology, which is cancer, but we're also gonna probably do something in neurodegeneration. We'll probably do something in immunity. We can do something in infectious disease. It doesn't matter. That's the power of the basic technology that Cal introduces to the world is that it is widely applicable. So it's to create drugs targeting the dynamic movement of protein. So to put it in a very simple minded way. Most drugs today are trying to, it's kind of like trying to hit the target with a sledgehammer. You're just trying to completely knock the function out or you're completely destroying the function. We decided that it's a lot better to tickle the system, tickle it up a little or tickle it down a little. That means either slowing the molecule up or speeding it up, okay? That's very difficult to do unless you can measure the movement and actually follow your GPS system and know whether you're slowing it up or speeding it up. This harnesses the power of another really important thing. This is a very quantitative assay. In other words, we're not taking guesses of, is it on or off? It's like, no, it's on and, but it's 5% better than the other. That's called quantitative biology. It's a new area. Cal is absolutely on the forefront of it because it requires computer science. It requires optical physics. It requires sophisticated molecular biology and brilliant students like Gloria. So this is just to summarize. Just to give you a sense of how much we're helping the California economy. In the meantime, as we're discovering amazing things, having a lot of fun doing it and hopefully ultimately benefiting patients. So this company was founded in September of 2019. Our timing wasn't very good. We shut down three months later. But we only shut down for a month because we had so much space and so few people, it didn't matter. We only started with like 15 people back in the middle of 2020 in 25,000 square feet in Hayward, right off of the bridge today, which is not that many years later. We're over 210 scientists. What's really great about this company that's different from any of the other ones that I've ever started is that half the people are engineers. They're software engineers, robotics engineers, optical physicists. It's amazing. And they have to work every day hand in hand with the molecular biologists, the geneticists and the biochemists, and of course the chemists. We manage to raise a lot of money and the screens are going incredibly well. And just to finish it, I'll show you how, why it is that sometimes you get a great idea in a university and you realize you cannot take the next step. So, when Xavier and I and Eric figured out how to do this, and I showed you the experiments, to do that imaging that I showed you, those little videos with the light jumping around, takes my graduate student or postdoc about a week to collect the data and about three weeks to analyze it for one cell, too slow. The company wants to speed this up by orders of magnitude. I really didn't know how fast this could happen. So we went from that scale that I just told you to what we're now, what Icon is capable of doing now with technology I don't have time to go into. They have completely different microscope platforms and everything is roboticized. The human is not touching that assay. They are doing 100,000 a day. That is so far beyond my own imagination that I had to go there to see it for myself. And the first thing I said to the CEO was, can I have one of your microscopes? So we were also very lucky and this again, I think is a testament to the traditions and the quality of people that Cal produces. We managed to recruit Roger Perlmutter who was president and head of research of Merck to be the CEO. He told me just last week after we had our board meeting that he knew the technology was good and that's why he came, but he didn't know how good it was and that the progress he's seeing is even beyond his expectations which was good for me to hear because I really didn't know how far this would go. We're not there yet. We're a long way from actually getting a novel drug, but I think the path forward is very interesting. And so with that, I think I'm done about on time. So I try to give you a sense of how a very fundamental scientist like myself, I'm motivated by answering deep fundamental questions of biology, but I'm not shy about then using that information to try to help the broader community in ways that go beyond my publications. And I think the several companies that I've been involved in and my activities as a venture capitalist actually all feed into that and some of you may have some comments about that later, but that's where we're at and I'm very happy to take many, many questions from you since we have plenty of time. Thank you. I have a question. But are there certain diseases that are not amenable to the SBT tracking? That's not a naive question at all. That was a very profound question. Almost certainly there are gonna be diseases where the causative agent will be more amenable to this type of analysis. So for example, you can imagine that could be a mutation that's causing a disease that's not even changing the mobility of the protein at all. That said, we've now looked at about a dozen and yet to find one that doesn't. Part of the reason is because our ability to measure small differences have allowed us to detect things we never could detect before. It's kind of like the web telescope. It's like, okay, I had the Hubble, that was great. And now, wow, the web is telling me stuff I never could measure, same problem here, or same solution. But that's a really, really good question. Yeah, there were lots of other questions. This fluorescent technology, is it only with proteins? And my interest is thinking about Alzheimer's dementia, the tau protein, and tracking, can you track something early and get it before it becomes the disease? That's a great, great point. It's not limited to proteins, although tau is already on our list. Tau's gonna be very, very interesting. You obviously already saw our interest in Huntington's, which is even more complicated than tau. I think we're so early, we're at the bleeding edge of this technology. The good news is we're the only company that has a microscope, and that's also the bad news, because what I really want is to have this microscope so everybody who's studying a disease can use it, but we're not there yet. But that's a really great question. Yes? When you're adding the, when you're adding the fluorescent protein, aren't you changing its weight, its 3D structure, and that ultimately changes its behavior? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, this is a really, really sophisticated question and something that Roger Promo, the CEO, and I worry a lot about. The good news is we can always test it. So there are proteins when we append that fluorescent tag onto it that behave completely inappropriately, but we can tell that right away. And so we either can't use that protein, or we have to put the tag in different places. So if you know anything about protein structure, the protein is folded up in a certain way. If you put that tag in the wrong place, it's kind of like putting a wedge into a door and you can't close the door anymore, and that's not gonna work. But the surface of the molecule is vast. So you can put it in many different places. We almost always can find a place to put it where we won't have that effect. That said, we always worry about that. So very often, once we have a signal that something's happening and we've detected it, we usually go back, chop off the fluorescent part and re-study it in its isolation, just to be sure. Weight doesn't matter. Turns out that the amount, many of the proteins we care about, compared to the dye, is so big, it's like having a little mouse grabbing onto a tail of the elephant. It really doesn't matter. Yes? Just curious if numerical models to basically go hand-in-hand with the research? Yeah, so the question was, is anybody using computing numerical modeling absolutely? And I could spend half an hour talking about all the modeling that goes on. I should say that because of the capacity of this microscope to do 100,000 assays a day, the amount of data we're creating, get ready, it's a petabyte a week. Petabyte, okay? You can't even use the cloud to store this. So we need a whole new strategy to go back and reanalyze the data and do the kind of analysis you're talking about, which is why half of our people are software engineers. Yeah, it's a huge problem, yes? Fabulous. I was just wondering, we've heard over the last couple of years a lot about RNA technology and how that targets and goes in and can manipulate proteins. So just if you could help me understand, so how does the work that you're doing in this area inform other platforms or how does it all work together? Because I think you made an opening comment about, once we understand, we need to figure out how to solve. And if you could help bridge that, that would be really helpful. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And to answer your question, so we can tag RNA molecules. We can tag DNA molecules. We can tag the membrane. We can tag any molecule that's genetically manipulatable. But your more profound question is, how does this technology help anti-sense modalities? I think what this technology will do is that it will tell the anti-sense people what target that should be going after and why. Because what this technology is really powerful for is understanding the underlying molecular defect. That's probably one place. But there are other things that are happening which I could talk more about. But the answer is yes, it will absolutely have both broad application and very specific application. Yeah, another question here. What is the physical limit of how small you can get with lattice light sheet microscopy? Oh, well, you know, you can have this hard discussion with my friend Eric. You know, we're down to the kind of microscope we're using actually is different from a lattice light sheet, it's higher resolution. Lattice light sheet is actually not that high resolution. We're down to maybe five nanometer resolution right now. The problem is not so much resolution because you can increase resolution just by hitting it with more light. You remember what happens when you hit things with light? Those cells are not gonna be happy. So one of the huge advantages which we didn't fully appreciate when we first started this work is that I can collect megabytes of information from tens of hundreds of thousands of molecules in about two seconds with this technology because our frame rates are so fast. That means that before the cell gets really unhappy, I've already figured out what's going on. That's key. I'm wondering if the issue of looking through water versus air was a factor for the microscope. Oh, big problem, big problem in our first iteration. You know how most high resolution microscopes light microscopes use oil to get over this light liquid air interface they use oil? Well, oil is a mess. So we had to design water immersion microscopes. That's what we're using now. But of course, Eric, the Nobel Laureate figured out an even better way where we don't have to do that anymore and his new microscope will increase our resolution by a factor of three and our speed by a factor of 10. And it's kind of a hybrid between our last light sheet and a high low microscope. It's really amazing. It's called a oblique line scanning microscope. I know it sounds like gibberish, but it's amazing stuff. Any other question? These great questions, by the way. Yes. What do you see as the biggest challenge in scaling up the number of microscopes that are able to do this work? Actually, I don't see much problem in scaling up the microscopes once we decide that that's what we want to do. I think right now, you can remember the company's less than three years old. And so we're literally been flying the plane and building it at the same time, which means that we keep changing the modules. And so we haven't settled on what our first real big prototype is going to be yet. Once we have that, producing it is not, these are not super expensive microscopes. Don't get me wrong, they're only cost, only cost about 300,000 each. Whereas an electron microscope might cost you five million. So we can produce a lot. And part of it is the engineering. So one of the things that we have to do with this, imagine if we're measuring something that's moving around in the micron resolution, this microscope cannot vibrate. There can't be Bart driving by. It has to be on a platform that cannot move more than angstroms. And that's what's costing money. It's figuring out how to isolate. It's called isolation, vibration-free isolation. And we've figured that out now. But to do that and to have a fully roboticized is quite a feat. But I don't see any technological barriers. What I see is biological barriers. Yes. Is the business model to sell the microscope or is it to discover the drugs? Yes. So the question is, are we gonna sell the microscope? This came up when I first started talking to investors of this company. Half the people really wanted us to sell the microscope. And the other half said, don't bother, just do drug discovery. I think we're gonna end up doing both. But it's a very difficult thing to do because it's two completely different businesses. So this is a business decision which I will have very little input into. My CEO will make that decision, which he should. I don't think we have an answer to that. But I also feel that if this microscope is as empowering as I think it is, we will not be doing the world any favor if we don't make it available. So one way or another, we have to make it available. But I think you can become a service provider by developing the cloud platform and having the computational functionality there and then just having people subscribe to your service. We're looking at all of those models. The trouble with being a CRO is it's distracting when you're trying to make drugs and drug making is ultimately what we really wanna do because we're probably three to five years ahead of anybody else. So we sort of feel like we owe it to the pharmaceutical industry to actually do it ourselves. So my sense is that the company will primarily be a drug discovery company and drug development company. But I'm not eliminating the possibility that there could be a spin out of some sort that will do what you're talking about. And I would like to invite you to American Canyon to set up your office. Yes, please. So it seems as though the focus of this technology is on defect situations. So what applications do you see for non-defect situations? Well, here's a really interesting thing. I don't know if something is in defect unless I know what is not defect. So most of the times we're studying what we call wild type situation. Now there's a normal situation. Which is actually not easy to figure out. One of the perplexing realities of biology is that we are organisms made up of billions of cells that have evolved over four billion years. And boy, do they have tricks. They had a long time to figure out tricks. And we're trying to peer into this black box to try to figure out how things work. So the answer to the question is we have to know what the normal situation is before we can even know how to fix something if we don't even know what fix means. So I spend most of my time just trying to understand what the normal process is, which is very complex. Yes. How often do you run into a situation where the problem is with the receptor rather than the protein? And how do you figure out which of the two is? Oh, yeah. So your question is fundamentally aimed at how do we know what target to go after. Well, it turns out most receptors are proteins anyway. It's just that they're proteins stuck in the membrane. That makes life really easy for us, actually. So we can actually not only look at the movement of the receptor but the things that bind to the receptor, the ligands. So we can make them both fluorescent in two different colors. And we can actually watch the ligand binding to the receptor, something no one's ever done before. I didn't even talk about that part. So key for atherosclerosis have been, right? I haven't worked on lipoproteins yet, but we will. This is work that was done by a very, very good old colleague of mine, Brown and Goldstein from Dallas, Texas. And I think this technology will be used broadly in every molecule you can imagine. Because there is not a single molecule in your cell that's not moving. I kind of think of it this way, life is movement. And until now, most of our understanding of biology came from fixed dead samples. It's not very satisfying. Question back. Is the company conducting independent research in areas that you believe are novel or interesting? Or are you sort of collaborating either with industry or other institutions who are in a particular therapeutic area already asking for sort of the advanced technology and the advanced data that you can bring to their research? This is exactly the stage where Roger and I and others are thinking about is how do we democratize this microscope? That's what you're really asking. And we believe, even though we have investors who want to make sure we're going to be a financially solvent company, we believe that when we get to the point where we can manufacture significant numbers of these microscopes, we should make it available by one mechanism or another, whether it's selling it, renting it, whatever. Because the amount of information that's out there that no single company can possibly ever collect, that's really what you're getting at. And of course, as a Cal person, as a public university, that's really what I want to see happen. So I think it's going to go in that direction, but it has to be a, it can't be mutually exclusive to the company's goals. But I think they can be actually complimentary. Yes. So the question is, are there applications outside of biology? Oh, absolutely. But I think we're so new at this that we haven't even tried yet, although my biophysical friends and engineer friends are very interested in it. You can attach that fluorescent tag onto some complex hydrocarbon or something. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, one of the limiting things right now, I'm sad to say, we can only do this in two colors. Because the technology isn't there, I would really like to do this in 20 colors. So I can watch 20 different molecules doing their dance together. We're not there yet. But I suspect we'll get there. You guys are better than my students. Can ask some questions, great. Are you able to apply this approach to the protein folding process by tagging the protein in multiple places and see it how it actually come to its structure? Yes, we can. But that only happened literally this last month when we figured out how to look at two molecules or two different regions of the same molecule talking to each other in real time. Turns out to be very difficult. It turns out that the folding problem is, if you know anything about alpha fold and deep mind, the folded parts of the molecules that run our bodies are pretty well figured out. But the sort of the black hole of biology or the dark matter of biology is that many proteins are intrinsically unfolded, which means that they're flopping around in the aqueous solution in ways that people used to think, oh, they're just flopping around so they can't be functionally important. So I'm just gonna chop it off and study the parts that are folded. So all of the data from alpha fold is based on folded proteins. Well, unfortunately it turns out that especially in humans, the vast majority of all of the most interesting disease causing proteins have major unfolded regions. Nobody solved that problem yet. That will be a computational problem. We have time for one last question. Last question. How are you gonna analyze all this data that's come out of each microscope? I'm not. My students and the team at ICON will, it's mind blowing, it's mind blowing. We're gonna need really fast computers. We're gonna have to figure out better ways that right now our only way to store the information is biologically. In other words, if we wanna do the experiment again, we have to go do the experiment again. We can't just look at the data again because the data is just overwhelming. It's both exhilarating the think that I can generate that much data. If you know anything about AI and machine learning, it's all about the amount of quality data. We're generating a lot of quality data. We haven't figured out how to fully mine it. We're mining it at, if it was a 10 mile deep storage of information, we're mining the top one inch right now. Thank you very much. Thank you.


The first book that really changed my life, when I was 19, I hired a mentor, which I paid more to have a mentor to talk to him once a week. I paid $500 a month, which was more than I paid in my rent to have somebody be my mentor and my coach. And the first book he recommended that I read was Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And that book is like, for me, it's almost 100 years old, but it's got pretty much everything that I think every personal growth book needs. It's got everything that you need. And so that book was the first one where it was just like the foundation of personal growth, the foundation of becoming successful and in making me realize that like anything else, being successful, happy, all of those things. There's having a successful marriage, having a successful business, financial success, being happy as a person, being a great parent, there's legitimate steps to every single one of them. It's not just like this weird obscure thing where hopefully you can figure it out. You can read this book and go, oh, this is the steps to getting to where I want to go. And so that made me realize when I read the book that, oh, I should probably read a lot more of these books because all of the knowledge that I need is already out there. So that's like my number one favorite book. My number two is called The One Thing, which is by Gary Keller and Jay Papazone. And the thing that I think most people have is they always have a plan B just in case plan A doesn't work out. And they'll put some time, most of their time into plan A, but then they'll put some of their time into plan B just in case plan A doesn't work out. And so the example that I always give is LeBron James, the basketball player, when he was coming up, he didn't play basketball and then also played volleyball in case basketball didn't work out, right? He put everything, 100% waking hours into just becoming the best that he could. And so greatness comes from putting everything into plan A and just forgetting about plan B. And Will Smith says there's no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A. And so if I have 100% of my energy every single day and I put 60% into plan A and 40% into plan B, I will never get to the point of greatness of whatever it is that I'm working for, whether I'm an artist, I'm a musician, I'm a speaker. But if I just cancel everything out because they say don't put all your eggs in one basket and then in the book they say put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket, and that's the way that I think of it. Or it's like put all of my eggs in one basket and I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to screw up. But eventually I'm just going to be able to move around and figure out what I need to do in order to get to the spot that I want to be. And so that was the second book. And the third book was called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And so I feel like I'm very much in the moment most of the time. But everything that I'd ever thought about being in the moment and mindfulness was finally put into a book. And so I was actually talking about this with my friends last night. I showed them my actual book that's on my Kindle. And every single page is almost completely highlighted because there's so many insightful things about just being present, about the fact that worries don't matter, about how to release yourself from fear and limiting beliefs and all of those things. And it was finally in a book where I could read it and consume it and go, okay, this is what it's all about. And I've read the book twice in the past two months and both to the second time when I went through I was like, I didn't even notice this. And so every time I read it I feel like I'm getting something new from it. So I would say those are my three favorite books.


SCP-963 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures SCP-963-1 is to be given into the care of a current D-level operative, as well as personnel classified as Dr. Bright's assistant. This assistant is to be chosen by O5-██ for loyalty to the Foundation as well as psychological stability. SCP-963-1 is now hung by a chain from subject's neck. SCP-963-1 is not allowed to be hidden upon the subject's body. Any attempt to do so will be met with lethal force. By order of O5-██, any body SCP-963-1 is installed upon as given a stay of execution until it passes on of natural causes, or SCP-963-1 is transferred to a new host. All the information has been rescinded by O5-██, O5-██, O5-██, O5-██. Description SCP-963-1 is an ornate amulet approximately 15 cm in circumference, made from white gold, with 13 ██ carat brilliant-cut diamonds surrounding a ██ carat oval-cut ruby in a starburst pattern. It was discovered in the personal effects of ██, who have been found dead by apparent suicide, surrounded by a number of supernaturally related books. Our agent in the area, found that SCP-963-1 was incapable of being damaged and brought it in accordance to protocol XLR-8R-██. Dr. Jack Bright, a junior staff researcher of Good Standing, was assigned the responsibility of researching SCP-963-1's capabilities, and granted access to ██. Later that year, SCP-076-2 broke containment, C-Document-076-2-19A, leading to ██-██ deaths and ██ casualties. Dr. Bright was transporting SCP-963-1 by hand past SCP-076-2's containment unit, and was among the first K.I.B. killed in breach. Approximately ██ days later, D-1-11 discovered SCP-963-1 among the wreckage and picked it up, and an immediate noticeable change came over D-1-113. D-1-113 says, It's Jack Bright, you Tom Higley, working for us as part of your life's sentence. Honestly, B, SCP-963-1 is removed at this time from D-1-113's possession. A further MRI shows that D-1-113 ceases all higher brain functions. SCP-963-1 is returned upon which brain function returns. It has been discovered that when any living antheropoied comes into direct skin contact with SCP-963-1, the mind of the subject is wiped, and that of Dr. Bright is projected from SCP-963-1 onto the subject. It is known that memories native to Dr. Bright transfer from host to host. If a subject maintains contact with 30 days, their brain functions become a duplicate of the late Dr. Bright's. If 963-1 is removed at this time period, the subject retains an independent copy of the consciousness of Dr. Bright. Sanctions were put in place to prevent multiple instances of Dr. Bright from being created to prevent Dr. Bright from collaborating with himself. However, it was found that this was not necessary, as Dr. Bright has proven thoroughly dedicated to the Foundation and to its cause. Dr. Bright himself has performed extensive experimentation on SCP-963-1, which he expressed desire for release from it. Interviews with Dr. Bright indicate that ████████ killed himself in the process of empowering SCP-963-1 and was therefore never able to slave his own consciousness to the amulet. Dr. Bright hypothesizes that he accidentally activated 963-1's power by being killed instead of killing himself if the original creator had done. Entry regarding SCP-963-2 on ██████ orders were given by 05-9 to attempt to replicate SCP-963-1. All attempts were met with failure until SCP-963-2, at which point ████████ All information regarding SCP-963-2 is classified level 5. Anybody attempting to access further information about SCP-963-2 without level 5 clearance will be terminated.


At Purdue, we are all, and with life-or-death matters of racial justice, we know we have work to do. We know the work is complicated, heavy, uncomfortable, let's do it anyway. Black lives and those who receive less than the justice and equity that each human deserves are dependent on it. And now is the time to educate ourselves and examine our own beliefs and behaviors. It's time to hear each other and be heard. It's time to pursue racial justice together. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this concluding event in the Pursuing Racial Justice Together Learning Series. My name is John Gates and I serve as Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion here at Purdue. In August, we began planning for a learning series that would focus on one central goal – to have a conversation as a campus community about the themes of race and racial justice. Moreover, we set out to have a conversation that would respect the many angles of approach that are possible by inviting guest speakers from different academic disciplines, professional roles and political perspectives. Among those who joined us this year are historian Abram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Anti-Racist, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva, author of Racism Without Racists, and experimental psychologist Majoreen Bonaji, author of Blind Spot, as well as journalists and political commentators such as Michel Norse, Soledad O'Brien, Yamichi Alcindor, Charles Blow, Anna Navarro, Michael Steele, and Juan Williams, as well as cultural producers such as Rebecca Nagel and Brian Terrell-Clark. Taken together, the series has presented viewers with range and scope, and that will continue with our closing speaker this evening, who I have the honor of introducing to you now. Dr. Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action. Dr. Steele has written widely on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations. He has received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America, was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was recognized with an Emmy Award along with other accolades. Dr. Steele received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book The Content of Our Character, A New Vision of Race in America. Altogether, he has written more than a handful of books, written extensively for major publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Dr. Steele holds a PhD in English from the University of Utah, an MA degree in Sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a BA in Political Science from Coal College. Thank you so much, Dr. Steele, for joining us this evening. We're really delighted to have you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. If it's okay with you, I'd like to begin by just asking you your thoughts on the recently announced verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin. Well, it's hardly been a half an hour since we heard it, so I can't claim to have completely absorbed it. From what I've seen, it seems to be to show off the American judicial system in one of its finer moments. I think the final verdicts make sense from almost any point of view. It must have been a very difficult thing to go through if you were a jury member. My goodness, I think they did a remarkable job and are to be commended and make the point that the American justice system still can't be quite effective. Do you think African Americans should believe more in the justice system now than before? Absolutely. Yes, they should. This I think is a harbinger of where we want to go in the future. All I think African Americans are asking for in the long run is fairness, discipline. And this trial was a sterling example of fairness and discipline, sticking to the facts and marching through to a very, it seems to me, a well considered verdict. Thank you. Let's talk about your concept of white guilt. One strand that runs through much of your writing and filmmaking over the last two decades is an examination of the nature of white guilt, which you define as not a true feeling of guilt, but rather as an enduring loss of moral authority on the part of whites since the civil rights era. Can you unpack this a bit more for us? Sure. When we say to use the term white guilt, it's as though we expect people to be wringing their hands and anguished over something they've done, a mistake they've made or whatever. But what's interesting to me is I don't think many whites feel that kind of guilt. Some may. Certainly not anything we could depend on. But I think white guilt is really an anxiety, a terror, really, of being stigmatized as a racist and having to have that known in the world. And I think that whites often, because they are afraid in that way, I think they very often act guiltily, whether they feel guilt or not. And it's the acting that troubles me that I think really pertains to race. They may support things they don't believe in. They may sort of fish around for the right politics because they want to be able to say they are innocent of racism. So you look at many black organizations, I think, have learned to tap the power of white guilt. And there is real power there. I think it's maybe one of the most underrated social forces in American life because it has enormous power.  You see the hand of white guilt in a lot of it. As we speak, you see corporate America. So you see Coca-Cola saying they have to have 30% of the employees of many companies they work with have to be people of color. And that is about, from my point of view, that is not genuine guilt. That is acting guiltily. So that you forestall any real serious, you're just simply trying to buffer yourself.  And you put into place policies that really end up hurting the people that you claim to be helping. White guilt is that it leads to social policies that redeem whites, that give whites a way to feel better about our racial situation than anything else. It doesn't achieve these policies, don't achieve anything. They invariably fail. But whites get this innocence. They get this sense that their moral standing is returned to them by taking these sorts of positions.  I think we've sensed it. We've learned how to manipulate it very well. We've learned how to squeeze it out of whites and situations. Many of these situations like the current one, George Floyd, Michael Brown, so forth, we're sort of, you can see both races hovering around these events, trying to figure out who's going to get some moral authority out of it. And whites want, how do we get moral authority here? Blacks, well, what do we do? Is this, do we protest again? How do we handle this sort of dance? So I think white guilt is insidious. It never seems to go away because it's so easy to slip. I'll support affirmative action. I'm white. I'll support it.  Well, without ever looking at affirmative action.  But you support it anyway, because it serves you. It makes you look, it seemed to be innocent of racism. And so it's a corruption. It leads, it often leads to a corruption. And it's, I think really, it really gets in the way. Whites don't, you know, when they just sort of, again, they're just so anxious. It is to be born white in America is to be born under an accusation that you are guilty of racism. It's obviously untrue. You're just born. But that accusation is there. And it is a part of being white in America. I have a lot of sympathy for whites. When I think of blacks, though, you know, the false suit about us was that we were inferior with the moment we were born. And there was nothing we could do about that. We were trapped in that stereotype, that stigma. Whites are now trapped in this stereotype that they're guilty of racism until they can prove otherwise. And we're always facing that. And they're looking for the way out of a situation for themselves rather than whether the policy they're looking at does anything for minorities.  They have restored some moral authority to whites. But they've utterly, absolutely failed minorities, particularly blacks. This, of course, begs the question, Ben, a question, about black victimization. Can you expound on your thoughts about black victimization? Well, because black victimization is for black America, even to this very day, our primary source of power. This is one of the great tragedies, it seems to me, of black American life, is that we've come to the point where our power in the society in which we live is based not on our achievement of anything, but on the fact that we have been victimized by the society and make the society look bad. And so, right away in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement won its great victory, 64 Civil Rights Bill and so forth, right away the president comes in and there's a war on poverty. There's a great society. There's affirmative action. There's school busing. There's welfare payments. There's public housing. That's guilty whites. Those policies did restore moral authority to the American government. We moved on as a country. But they constituted in total a new oppression of blacks. And that's what I, again, we keep coming back to that. And we have made the terrible mistake as blacks of believing that our real power in broader America is our history of victimization. It gives us a kind of immunity, a kind of entitlement. And that we can wield that entitlement within American institutions. University is a great example. But then the corporate world is now. Education generally has sort of fallen to that idea and embraced that idea of black people as victims. It's the worst thing in the world that could happen to a people coming out of four centuries of real, of horrific oppression. And then to say, well, I'm gonna make it on the reputation of all that oppression. I'm gonna use it now to squeeze guilt, squeeze the guilt of whites in order to achieve whatever it is I may want. And so it makes for a very cynical, symbiotic connection between black and white Americans that keeps us behind. Because we wanna be victims. Maxine Waters rushes to Minneapolis, Minnesota the night before the verdict hoping and praying that she will find some racism. She'd just be ecstatic to run across some racism, to have somebody racially snub her in some way because racism she sees, she believes is our power. Not the absence of racism, the presence of racism. Actually, many groups, let's see that in Black Lives Matter and so forth, exist entirely on the basis of black victimization. So if you wanna make many blacks mad, tell them they're not a victim. You're not a victim and you'll get a fight. You will have a fight. Well, that's part of this sort of symbiotic relationship that I'm talking about. We have to grow beyond that. I hope today's verdict which convicted this man of obvious horror, horrific murder. I hope that verdict goes a long way in convincing blacks that we can get fairness in American life and the judicial system. And we should be proud to be Americans in that sense. This is a vote for America today. Dr. Steele, how do we resolve this dual conflict of white guilt and black victimization toward a better, more inclusive America?  And I think we will evolve. I think already you are beginning to see among whites some backlash. No, you're not a victim and we're trying, we're trying to be acting as though you were a victim.  And that's, believe me, that has not gone very far, but there are the beginnings of that sort of a sentiment, that kind of a backlash sentiment. And I think that what will happen and there's also on the other side, there are blacks who are becoming openly conservative.  No matter what your politics may be, you wanna be independent of that and not influenced by it. And that, well, I subscribe to that sentiment myself. I think obviously it's time we separate in a healthy way in a healthy way from that codependency that we now, that we so easily get seduced into. And whites are so unrelentingly guilty, so unrelentingly ashamed of America's history as much more than we are, that they're just an easy mark. And look at the way Black Lives Matter has taken over much of the American education system. Public education in the United States by a radical black group with a radical black ideology. That's white guilt. No one is black, blacks are dubious about most of the reports like that, have reasonable doubts about it. Whites just add thank you, anything that I can use to dissociate myself from American racism is what I want. And it's hard to pass that up. It's hard to black, I understand. It's hard to pass that up. You can get a job that way, a career that way, a life that way. And all the more believe in the victimization of your own people as their sacred truth. That's what bothers me. You believe in a twisted way. It induces, seduces blacks into believing and doing business on the basis of their own inferiority. Yes, we are inferior, we need your help. You mentioned university. So let me ask you, what role do you think educators, particularly in higher education, play in perpetuating or counteracting such feelings as white guilt or black victimization? How should educators be thinking about presenting these topics, race and racism in college courses and on college campuses?  They should mix it up, at least 50-50. Let's see some thoughtful people from the other side, there are not many. So that there is a debate. And the left has survived by becoming something of a cancel culture. They cancel what they don't wanna hear. What an opposing point of view. I haven't seen that on the right, but I see that all the time on the left. And so there is, particularly in universities, a preponderance of taking for granted the spurious ideas of liberal black liberal intellectuals have nothing against these people. Sometimes they make very good points, but my goodness, I bet you don't read much Stanley Crouch in the literature classes in universities today. Stanley Crouch is one of the greatest critics we ever, black America has ever produced. We don't read much Ralph Ellison. Ellison wrote the greatest American novel ever written. His criticism, his writing on black American culture is unparalleled, is unparalleled. So many, countless of his devoted students who like myself, who make it, who have learned to the meaning of life from people like that, Richard Wright and others, we don't get them. We just get people who do one thing and one thing only, reinforce our victimization, bemoan it, cry tears over it, weep. They're really embarrassing to indulge, to take pride in your weakness because it was caused by racist white people. And you can use that as sort of muscle. We're cutting ourselves off from our own strength. We don't believe in ourselves enough. That is the biggest problem black America has. We don't believe in ourselves. And so we play these games with white people. We out as we believe in ourselves, take a chance. Throw your hat in the ring. Compete with the best in any profession without regard to race. Let's talk about affirmative action. Over the years, you have offered several critiques of affirmative action programs, which you believe have largely prevented African-Americans from competing with their white peers. Can you share your thoughts on these programs? They are the horror of horrors. They are the very, they are the public policy that grows out of that dark, symbiotic bond that I'm talking about, black and white America. Now white America comes up, we're proud of our affirmative action, probably now they call it diversity and inclusiveness and unconscious bias and I can't remember all of it. But that's what we, well, I lost my train of thought there for me. What was the first part of what you said? Over the years, you've offered several critiques on affirmative action. How do you think affirmative action programs have helped or hurt black America? One of the things we notice from affirmative action, you can go into, let's say a medical school, good medical school that has, and they all have affirmative action programs. They all admit blacks and they all admit blacks who have trouble doing the work. There are many blacks who have no trouble doing the work and do fine, but if you go to those schools, you look at the distribution of grades from top to bottom, you see blacks at the bottom. And how could that, it couldn't be otherwise. Affirmative action takes you out of the level of accomplishment that you're actually at and puts you precisely into the level of accomplishment that you're not yet ready for. It engineers your failure. It makes you believe in your weakness rather than your strength. It corrupts you morally in terms of character and walks away and says, aren't we doing a wonderful thing? We have 8% more blacks here this year. We're ruining that we're breaking. We're making them make a Faustian bargain with the devil. We'll give you this racial preference. It's a horrible thing. It shows you how far we have to come yet in terms of developing our consciousness, our pride, our dignity, our self-esteem. We have to take possession of that. Whites can't give that to us. There's an affirmative action that's not gonna do it. It's just gonna put you in a situation where you experience humiliation and failure, mediocrity.  And so there we sit. We have got to begin to open ourselves to other points of view. Just this, we just really have to have to have to be, one of the reasons Western civilization is so undisputably great is because everybody had a voice. You have great thinkers in every community, every country, every age, take on a thinker from 200 years ago and learn something from them. We don't, universities today cancel out. People like myself. And think highly of, that's a good thing that they're doing. They're fighting the cause because they don't want white people to hear what I'm saying. They're utterly terrified that whites would feel a license then to believe that the blacks, that they're corrupting the people they're trying to help. But now, Doc, you know several scholars and commenters, commentators have pointed out the outsized benefits of affirmative action programs for white women when compared to advances made by African Americans and other groups. How does this asymmetry connect to your critique? Well, it's just part of a garbage public policy. Affirmative action is garbage. Women are gonna use it. You're throwing at them a chance to step ahead and get ahead in the line when they've gone to the same preparatory schools as their brothers. They haven't endured the level of deprivation that most blacks endure. And so it's an easy thing. They fill the quotient very quickly and that's been the case since the very beginning of affirmative action back in the 70s. So it's just another obvious corruption. But it's, you know, affirmative action is inherently, we're saying we will use a corruption to advance black people because if we don't, they'll never get anywhere. They can't compete, they're not competitive. We don't believe in them and they don't believe in their selves and they beg for affirmative action because they want that, they don't believe that they can do it themselves.   What's going on? You're stigmatizing blacks as inferior, as mediocre, as bottom of the class.  So, you know, many, many programs that are on college and university campuses to support black students and scholars are really geared around mitigating deficits, what are perceived to be deficits. Very few are focused on the excellence that our students and scholars bring. Should we maintain the posture of supporting blacks to come up to speed, as it were? Or should we lean in, perhaps, on their demonstrated excellence and expect high standards and excellent results? My answer to that is, suppose we were running a basketball camp and we're trying to get the most talented people to play basketball. And we say, here come a group of blacks. Are we gonna say that, well, they're black and they probably come from a single home and they probably went to poor schools and so we're gonna put them on our basketball team anyway as affirmative action. How is it that we came to dominate that sport? Was it through affirmative action? Was it through somebody taking responsibility for our development? No, we love basketball, we work at it demonically. We make an art form out of it. We transform the game. Now, if you look at all the players, they have all of the social abilities blacks everywhere have. They probably don't have a father around. They maybe have siblings with all different daddies, the whole scenario. When they come out on the basketball court, we do not make any excuses whatsoever.  We don't care if you name it. Can you, have you got any moves? Can you really, can you play this sport? If you can do it, the world opens to you. The point I'm making is that excellence beats all. Excellence resolves arguments. It wipes away stereotypes. I can remember when they said, in football, blacks can't be quarterbacks and baseball backs can't be pitchers. Well, what an excellence put that all that to rest. Nobody says that today. I don't see any difference between that and becoming a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman or whatever, get good at something, compete in the world, learn from that competition, get better and better, like everybody does. My thing is that if, I wouldn't tear me up if I saw him raise the standards for blacks higher than those for whites, then we get the kind of respect I think we deserve. You know, I wrote a few years ago, doc, a piece about I Dream America and in there, I said that, you know, I love being black, I wouldn't be any other race if I could, but I would exchange being black for being considered excellent any day of the week. How do we get America? How do we get white people and black people and all people to see blackness as excellence rather than inferiority? Well, boy, I guess I've struggled with that on my life and there are so many areas of life and where blacks are dominant. I mean, during the 20th century alone, we created one of the great literatures of the world. Some of the greatest writers of the 20th century were black Americans. You know, certainly we have transformed music from one end of the globe to the other. I was in had occasion to be in Poland some years ago and walking down the main street of Warsaw, Poland, and I saw a bus go by with Jay-Z's picture on the side of it in Warsaw. That's because there's something that people in Warsaw want that, whatever it is he's doing and selling. Well, boy, there's no question there. Excellence prevails. It prevails everywhere it appears. We have to value excellence as opposed to the idea that you help black people by being militant and looking out for racism around every corner. You wanna criticize me, to me, that school is racist and so forth, let me see your grade point average. How hard are you working in school? What are you, what a achievement, accomplishment? This is the way we live in a society free enough to allow us to do this. People are coming here by the hundreds of thousands as we speak to get an opportunity to have that kind of chance in life. We have it, we have it. Now it's time for us to stop wallowing in the past, using the past to shape down the society's guilt. That's where we're falling to pieces. That will, that is, when I think of the black community that I grew up in and I remember the families in that community, all of us were poor. It was segregated off the South side of Chicago. All those people wanted something better for their families. Everybody had a father in the home. Maybe he drank too much, but he was there. He performed his duties. There was honor in that. I remember they were talking about public housing. My father and his friend next door, they saw that as for losers. The government is never gonna give you anything or worth anything. This was in the 50s. Now we've had 60 years of government help and we're farther behind whites than we were back in my father's day. I'm very proud of him, by the way. I'm proud of all the people in that neighborhood. And there was some people, Melvin Van Peoples came out of that neighborhood. Mary Berry and Actress came out of that. Just nothing, nowhere. Black neighborhood off the South side of Chicago. But they had families. And a little community that wanted them to do well. That's how you do it. So, you know, a lot of people, Doc would argue that the conditioning, the current conditioning of black people in black America stems from slavery. And many people believe that slavery was 400 years ago, but as I look at my own lineage, my grandparents' grandparents were slaves, right? It wasn't that long ago. My grandfather was a slave. Wow, wow. So we're talking about a relatively contemporary time, right? Some people have made it through and excelled. Some people have not. Are we grappling with the remnants of a slave mentality with regard to black people's thinking? Is there still the infrastructure of slavery and Jim Crow, or have we really gone beyond all of that? Let me tell you a quick story by one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus, the French writer writes this story. It's set in Algeria. White man schoolteacher lives in the mountains and teaches Arab children in his school. They bring him a prisoner who was a revolutionary in Algeria, and they're transporting him to the city, to prison.  Next morning, he has to walk him to prison. And he says to himself, he's a native, he's an Arab. I'm not, we shouldn't, I don't even know if we have a right to be here as white Frenchmen, but I'm certainly not gonna walk him anywhere. I'm gonna set him free. So he gives the man a lot of money, maybe $10,000. He gives him food, and he points to the, he says, this road is to prison. This road, the opposite direction, is back to your people who will take you in. He then leaves them there. After about 100 yards or so, he looks back and he sees the man is in absolute anguish. He is pained, he doesn't know, he just doesn't know what to do. The white man grits his teeth and keeps walking away. Finally, he stops even further down the road, he looks back and he sees the Arab has taken the road to prison.  That's what oppression does to people. That's the psychology of oppression. Its mark is to breed into them a lack of faith in themselves, faithlessness in themselves. And then they don't need, you don't need to oppress them anymore. They oppress themselves. They go to prison. They walk to prison. Black America literally goes to prison rather than freedom. Freedom's difficult. You gotta work hard. You have to be responsible for yourself. You have to have ambitions and you have to work so forth and work hard. And we have been, that's been taken out of us by oppression. It seems to me today, that's where our real struggle is, is in self-belief. You can't raise children in a holy positive way if you don't pass self-belief onto them. This is why my favorite black leader of all time and all is Malcolm X. Malcolm said, it's self-help. Don't even ask the white man for something. Well, you know, I don't know that maybe that's extreme, but the point is absolutely on the money. Malcolm said, believe in yourself. And so I apply that framework. And I love to see, nothing makes me happy to see when blacks achieve excellence. That just warms my heart. Since the 1960s, there have been many organizations that have claimed to follow in the footsteps of the civil rights movement, including contemporary groups such as Black Lives Matter. What is your reading of these organizations and their political philosophies? Are they reflective of a contemporary civil rights movement? Yeah, they are. They're, they believe in the power of victimization and nothing else. They take us backwards. All they do is take the wound of oppression at you and just rub, massage it.  You'll get along fine. They are the enemy of black American advancement and development. They don't know it. They're innocent of it. Cause all around them, everybody's telling them that that's wonderful. But they end up being, they make excuses for black people. They don't help us develop it. Here's the big thing. I don't really care what your social policy is whether you're Democrat or Republican, none of this matters. None of this really matters, except that you take responsibility for yourself and make yourself into something, make an effort. And these organizations wait for situations like George Floyd to see if there's a little kernel of victimization in there that can rub in white people's face. And of course, that was one of the, again, one of the most horrific things that anybody's seen killing the man with the knee. So boy, if you put an overlay that with race, my God, it looked ugly. It exploded all over the world. Black Lives Matter was born in response to black suffering and victimization. They trade on black suffering. They're happy with it. When they don't have it, they're impotent. They have nothing to work with because they don't develop themselves. They squeeze black victimization for all his work. They're hustlers. And we need to stand up to that and we're gonna have to. There's gonna come a day because it's unavoidable. Where we start to say, what's wrong with you people? It's whatever, all the fighting that went before and this is what you come back to. Somebody needs to say what, tell them the truth, which almost nobody dares to do. We've received some important questions from students here at Purdue, but before we turn to them, I'd like to close this portion of our discussion by asking you to speak about your conviction that there must be a greater emphasis on citizenship as a common theme in the American experience. Can you talk about that a bit for us tonight? The one of the things that has made America a melting pot is its concept of citizenship, which I'm a strong believer. I am a citizen of the United States before I'm black. My citizenship is my collective, my group identity. I'm an American. I also happen to be black and that has led to a certain experience in America, in American life and so forth and I'm proud of much of it. But I am an American citizen. I have the same exact rights as people or other Americans, same responsibilities as other Americans and the beauty of America is that it removes people from their adivistic identity. Your color, your fate is not the color of your skin. It's the content of your character and that's why I love citizenship. It is the Martin Luther King content of your character all in a nutshell and it is the way forward. The way forward is not to isolate and sort of go off into cobbles of anger and resentment and so forth, it's to join the wider world, the broader world. That's where life is, that's where possibility is. That's where our future is.  That's not gonna work. I'm glad I found that out pretty early on. But we overrate race, we give it too much importance and then we ask people not to hold our race against us. Well, we hold it against ourselves. Here's our first student question for you. Okay. Hi, my name is John Righi. I'm originally from Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm a sophomore in economics at the Kranich School of Management. My question is regarding a lot of the diversity initiatives adopted by universities and other institutions. I do not believe that they were adopted after fully weighing the consequences. And so I'd like to know once everyone has been classified by their immutable characteristics and treated accordingly, do you believe that we've made the world more equal or are you concerned that we let the idea of equity lead us down a path towards a new form of segregation? I believe in the latter part of the last sentence that you're right on the money. When people are hit with freedom, it's so difficult, so it rocks them. That they very often go right back into denying, they deny that they're free. They reject freedom. And what you see in a lot of policies today re-segregate America because we're afraid of freedom. If I meet somebody white, boy, well, maybe they're racist. I don't know. And so I better keep my racial chops alive because I might have to deal with whites here and whites there. And so I'll make public policy like the one you're referring to that sort of re-segregates the world in a way that I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable being around my own kind. And I think you are absolutely right. The result of that is that we re-segregate, we recommit our own oppression because we're afraid to move beyond it. And yet that's the challenge. I just want to know who you are. If I meet you, I just want to know who you are and what you think about things and what you feel. If your race has informed you in some way and made you more interesting as an individual, then fine, let me know. Maybe I can use some, even though it comes from another race. I'm not against learning from anybody. Indeed, thank you. We'll move to the next question. Hi, my name is Taneel. I am a junior from Westport, Connecticut studying computer science and political science. Thank you for being with us here today. I'm grateful to be able to ask a question on behalf of the Political Discourse Club.  As someone who studies the polarizing subjects of affirmative action, multiculturalism, and race relations, how do you engage in constructive conversation with those who disagree with your viewpoints? Well, you know, I just talk to people. I just, you meet people and my feeling is that, you know, as you go in unbiased, you check your biases at the door and you try to enjoy people. It's one of the things that's important to me. I feel honored to be able to talk to people and find out what they really think and push them a little bit and maybe they push me a little bit and we have an interesting conversation. I think it's pretty easy to do, actually. It's just that one is intimidated at the start, but if you hang in there, usually you connect as human beings rather than as representatives of a race or a politics or an ideology of some kind, you connect as human beings and that's always what I'm looking for. Hello, I am Sneha Jogi. I'm a senior studying agricultural communication at Purdue University and I'm from Fishers, Indiana. Today I'm representing the Purdue Foundation Student Board. Since George Floyd was murdered, it seems like the media has started to report on the injustices around black murders and shootings. The number of murders have seemed to increase during this time of COVID. As these murders have increased and injustices among the black and Asian community have increased, I've noticed the media and the general public becoming more desensitized and unfazed to these deaths. With the combination of burnout, emotional exhaustion and lack of empathy or society faces, how can we keep the momentum of providing justice, educating people and keeping others accountable going? Could you say the last part again? I'm not quite sure I heard that right. Or is she not? An unfazed to these deaths. With the combination of burnout, emotional exhaustion and lack of empathy or society faces, how can we keep the momentum of providing justice, educating people and keeping others accountable going? I think that the way to do that is to be a decent person, try to be a decent person, try to be fair-minded, try to be kind to people in whatever ways is possible. In other words, all I've got here is a string of cliches, but all of which I think are true. Treat people like you like to be treated. Be sincerely interested in what they have to say, why they say it. Is there, for example, an experience or a set of experiences that led you to this question, led you to think about this? And now we're here, our final question. Hi, Dr. Steele. I'm Claire Baney, an upcoming senior in agricultural economics and agricultural communications from the College of Agriculture. I'm from Fishers, Indiana, which is a suburb of Indianapolis. And tonight I'm representing Purdue Foundation Student Board. My question for you is based on an interview you did with Brett Baer in June of 2020. You shared that black Americans need to, quote, engineer themselves into equality and not rely on white Americans who initially, quote, took over black Americans' fate to do it for them. How do you balance that idea with the fact that white Americans manufactured systemic racism and we still feel its legacy today? And as a follow-up, what do you say to Americans who are predominantly white and conservative, who quote you to fuel their own confirmation bias and believe that systemic racism and white privilege don't exist and that anti-racism is a farce? Well, I'm glad they believe systemic racism does not exist because I certainly believe it does not exist. This is the freest country in the world. Black Americans are some of the freest people on this planet. If you're black in America, you can do anything you want. You can become the president of the United States. You can become the CEO of a major corporation. You can become a movie star. I'll be here all day outlining the enormous, the immense volume of possibilities that are open to you. And when you say systemic racism, I know one thing. You're afraid. That's your security blanket. Take away the systemic racism and you have to look at what? I'm free? You're like that era I was just talking about. You walk to prison. You say, no, no, I'm not free. There's systemic racism. It's out. Oh, it's after me, too.  And everywhere I go, there it is. Just, you know, a quarter inch underneath the surface. And I have to deal with it and so forth. And I'm a victim. You owe me entitlement.  It's a casual thing for them, but it's everything for us. And so when people tell me that the white people don't understand systemic racism, I'm happy because here's another unspoken reality. In since the 1960s, white America has accomplished a moral evolution far greater than anything ever in the world. Where else have you seen a people transform themselves? From that kind of racism, living off of it, to a place where they actually have goodwill toward blacks. There's a lot of goodwill in white America. There's a lot of people who want to see us do well. Who want to support us. Who would like nothing better than to see us thrive. So again, when you see people talking about systemic racism, they're just saying, and I fully understand them saying it. I felt it myself. They're just saying that they don't know how. They're a little nervous and insecure about the future. And they're going to keep alive the idea of white, of systemic racism as a case they have to have a crash landing. It'll be a little bit of a buffer. Well, it's because I'm black. Well, I'm here to say that's over. There isn't any systemic racism. You can do what you want. I remember when I grew up when there was real racism, real segregation, real discrimination in every single walk of life. So somebody to tell me today that there is systemic racism out there. Then you know that you're just dealing sadly with people. And this is where I take responsibility as a black American. We need to stop each other from telling those kinds of lies. We need to stop that because we are the ones who get hurt. We're the ones who pay by disbelieving in ourselves. We need to stop that. There's no systemic racism. If systemic racism is going to stop you, then you are going to stop anyway. Dr. Shelby Steele, this has been a really important conversation. On behalf of Purdue, I want to thank you once again for joining us for your insightful and instructive commentary this evening. And thank you to all of our students who submitted questions for Dr. Steele. Thank you also to everyone watching from home and all who registered to attend the events in pursuing racial justice together this year. I hope that you have found this series to be informative in terms of content, provocative of further thought and engaging in his virtual delivery. As we close, I send my heartfelt thanks to all of our faculty moderators, collaborating units and divisional staff for their contributions, as well as to Purdue Convocations and the Hall of Music productions for their efforts throughout the series. Be well, take care and have a wonderful evening.


Alright guys, what's up? Welcome back to the channel. Some of you guys may not know, but I actually rolled my ankle two weeks ago. No, a week ago. I rolled my ankle about a week ago now. So I'm chilling off the board right now. I can't skate for a few weeks. So I thought it'd be a good idea to do some graph content. So I'm out at this yard, this local yard that I found up in the mountains. And yeah, I'm going to get a piece done for you guys today. So if you enjoy this video and enjoy the graph content, let me know in the comment section below. If you're new here, make sure you subscribe. Let's get to painting. I managed to get pretty much all the way through the piece. This bit's a bit sketchy, but whatever. I'm going to have to subtract those two little doodads here. But yeah, I bought the wrong color buff. Like the tin that the buff came in, it was red. And then I opened it and it was white. And I was like, okay, well, I got to do a different color outline now because I was going to do a black and white piece on a red background. But have a look at the buff tin. Like honestly, you would think that would be like a red or a pink, but it's actually white. I'm not going to bother driving all the way back down to Home Depot. So I might just go ahead with the rest of the piece or whatever. I still got some buff on deck, so I'll show you what I'm going to do right now. A little bit of a hack. You don't need outline, but you don't have enough paint for a couple of things. You just go like that. Like it was never even there. This is actually harder than I thought trying to buff on my left hand because I'm holding the phone to my right. But yeah, there we go. All gone. Even this little piece is here. Oh, delicately, delicately. Come on. We're good. So my can controls kind of off. My color theory is off. I'll probably get better at painting because I'm going to be painting more because I can't skate. So yeah, let me know if you guys enjoyed this content. Well, I guess this is it.  I don't know why I keep bringing it out of paint, but I'm going to just try it in a second. Alright guys, I'm going to get out of here. Had a fun time painting, which is great. I already want to do another piece because I want to do a better one. Yeah, I'm getting hungry, so I'm going to go find some food right now, I think. I forgot to shoot my outro, so here's my outro right here. It's starting to get really, really hot out here. So during the day, it's going to be hard to skate, so maybe I can mix things up a bit, throw in a graffiti video every now and then. Graph Edie. I went to say graph and I said Edie, so graffiti. So yeah, let me know what you guys think. But anyway, if you've made it this far in the video, cheers for watching. And if you're new here, make sure you subscribe. That's about it guys. Thank you for watching and yeah, I'll see you guys in the next video.


Symbiodiniaceae is a diverse group of dinoflagellates that live in close association with various marine organisms, including corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. Genomic studies have revealed considerable genetic diversity within these groups, but there is still much to be learned about how this diversity affects the evolutionary trajectories of these organisms. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current state of understanding of symbiodiniaceae genetics, identifying key challenges, and suggesting potential solutions. The authors suggest that further collaboration between researchers and the development of new technologies could help to advance our understanding of symbiodiniaceae diversity and its implications for the evolution of these organisms. This article was authored by Sarah W. Davies, Matthew H. Gommash, Lauren I. Halker, and others.


Baltic operations 2014 is underway in the Baltic Sea. 13 nations have come together to participate in a multinational maritime exercise conducted in the spirit of partnership for peace. The exercise aims to improve maritime safety, security and stability among partnership nations in the Baltic region. This month, the DOD recognizes the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or LGBT personnel serving within the DOD. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work recently spoke at an LGBT Pride Month ceremony at the Pentagon and talked about the importance of their service to our nation. Before December 2010, service members were required to follow the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy requiring military members to not openly acknowledge their sexual orientation. Read more about these stories at Navy.mil. From all hands, update, thanks for watching.


Alright so after the quarter finals completing today for the Rome Open for 2023 and a big, big result with Rebecca and her getting through against Shfiontek with a retirement. Let's have a chat about the Shfiontek injury because it was not looking good. In the tie break she kind of hurt herself. Shfiontek then was crying after the tie break when it could get a medical time out. Let's go have a look at what the injury was and get a little bit more of info into what might be happening in the future. So having a look at this photo here you can see once you got out of the medical time out after the second set tie break she had heavy strapping on her thigh and was really struggling to get back the returns and also moving around on the court in the early parts of the third set. So we haven't heard official word yet from Shfiontek but looking at this photo here you can see there the thigh was definitely compromised and really affected her movement. There it is the thigh looks like the problem. It could be front of the thigh, could be back of the thigh we're not sure yet. We'll wait until Shfiontek gives us some more details on that one but it's not good for the French Open champion of last year to have to defend a title now with an injury and of course she was the Rome champion the last two years as well so having to retire a tournament that she's won twice already in the last couple of seasons is not good. Let me know down in the comments below. How do you think Shfiontek's going to go? Do you think maybe the retirement was a precautionary one because she wants to play the French Open and get ready for that and not risk getting hurt more or do you think she is in jeopardy of not playing the French Open? I mean that would be such a shame but Shfiontek has to retire against Rebecca in the Rome Open.