Liz Neeley (00:01) Well, hello everybody and welcome to yet another delightful edition of The Talking Heads. As you know, this is your fun, friendly, and usually quite opinionated version of asking your friends, what should I be paying attention to this week? So this is for the Solving for Science community. And we know that you've got too many papers to read, too many YouTube videos, too many podcasts. So with all the world available to you, we wanted to make a friendly suggestion. So our format is...
I'm coming in cold. I have no idea what we're going to be talking about. And my co -conspirator, Gabe Murphy over here, is going to be introducing that and also a special guest, Betsy Crouch.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (00:40) Neither Liz nor Betsy Crouch know what we're going to talk about. I'm really excited about this one, I have to say. I think this is a resource that everybody in the Solving for Science community, everybody in the General Biomedical Sciences Research Committee should pay attention to. Okay.
Liz Neeley (01:02) Why did you drag Betsy into this, Gabe?
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (01:05) Because Betsy is a, so I help Betsy here at UCSF. Betsy is a fantastic communicator already, both in written form and in presentation form. Thank you. And she has a blog, which I partially wanted to push everybody towards breaking down biology, which is awesome and has renewed vigor here in the last six months. It's really great. Yeah. So in the interest of bringing cool people into a cool topic,
Liz Neeley (01:23) Yeah, check it out.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (01:35) Betsy was kind of near the top of my list for who I'd want to invite to join us. No pressure. Also just to plug, if you want to contribute to the Breaking Down Bio blog, let me know. There we go.
Liz Neeley (01:41) Yeah.
Yeah. All right, Gabe. So I'm going to give you your instructions very specifically because we all know you struggle.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (01:54) So I've been known to cheat. I've been known to cheat on this part. You?
Liz Neeley (01:59) Tell us what is the thing and who came up with it.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (02:07) The Thing is a website and a paid service.
Liz Neeley (02:14) Okay, all right. So Gabe is gonna have 30 seconds to try and convince me and Betsy and all of you why this website and paid service is worth our time. Gabe, are you ready?
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (02:27) I'm ready. See, I didn't cheat.
Liz Neeley (02:29) You did very well, congratulations. Your time starts now.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (02:31) Thank you.
I would encourage everybody listening to this to go to My Green Lab. This is a nonprofit organization that, as a paid service, comes into labs and evaluates their energy efficiency, their waste usage, and then afterwards comes up with real actionable suggestions on how to reduce the environmental impact of laboratory research.
It is a paid service, but I would argue it is well worth it. And because it's a nonprofit, it's money going to the right spot.
Liz Neeley (03:09) Look at you hitting your 30 seconds right on the mark, Gabe.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (03:13) And without any cheating, without, I would say I actually underutilized my intro. I could have provided more information and I didn't. So I give myself an A on that.
Liz Neeley (03:25) Well, here's your chance to provide more information.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (03:28) So, okay, so yeah, so My Green Lab. So what a cool thing. Liz and I actually learned about this together at this Immunoscomania conference that was a little over a month ago. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Immunoscomania? I'm in love, but tell me more. That's a separate thing, but with the notion of My Green Lab. Also in love. It turns out UCSF has its own, and I think other organizations have their own kind of internal version of My Green Lab that you don't have to pay for.
where there's a central resource that will come into individual labs and provide feedback on what they're spending a lot of energy on, where all their water is going, how much waste is being produced and what alternatives there might be. So I think this is something that got really reinforced to us during a talk at this Immunoskemania thing over the summer, like how resource intensive biological research is and what are the things that we can do as researchers
in my case, former researchers to reduce that impact. So can I jump in? Is that allowed in the rules? Do it. No, but this is so important because so to tell an anecdote, I had a technician who was a young woman, very smart, who unclear exactly what prompted her concern about our environmental waste. But she was making these super precious organoids and reusing like reusing 96 wall plates, which I totally appreciated the instinct. But of course, everything got
Liz Neeley (04:34) Please. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (04:59) horribly contaminated. And, you know, we debriefed about it afterwards and I said, tell me, like, tell me, tell me what? Why weren't you using a fresh, like, yeah, like, like, you know, I compost too, but like, you know, this is not the place. So, you know, I think it is something that folks are aware of, but are not not clued into like how to do this responsibly and also keeping in mind the other resources that we have.
Liz Neeley (05:10) Just imagine like your eyelid.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (05:28) to manage carefully. Yes. Yep.
Liz Neeley (05:30) Yeah, it makes me think about within open science practices, there's this fascinating debate, like instead of aiming for best practice or even better practice, there's like this concept of good enough practices of like, step one is to bring everybody up to sort of a minimum, like the floor. And I like the idea that you could phase your work towards becoming more sustainable and also make sure that you hit your priorities and that really well intentioned button.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (05:56) Mm -hmm.
Liz Neeley (05:58) less knowledgeable team members weren't inadvertently wasting more time and resources by going about it in that way.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (06:09) Well, let me give one example that Dan Musida, who gave this talk. you know Rockefeller. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he is way into this. one of the things, they have all partially as a result of him, they have a huge effort around Rockefeller wide. But one of the things he said is that the difference between running your minus 80 freezer at minus 80 versus minus 70 is about 20%. Wow.
Liz Neeley (06:15) Yeah.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (06:35) And they've done tests to determine whether they can determine any differences in the stuff that they've stored at minus 70 versus minus 80 in their context. They don't see any difference. So that's like a, like I was actually walking in the building here a couple of days ago. like, how many of these freezers are at, at minus 80? They're all at minus 80. There's not a single one below minus 80. And I just, thought of Dan's talk. thought, I wonder if a little pilot experiment could be done to just test in a low.
in a low consequence manner, what would happen if you stored your stuff at minus 70 or gasped minus 60? Yeah, with the samples that aren't the N of one human tissue. Yeah, these mice, genotype wasn't correct. So these were our controls, our like hats.
Liz Neeley (07:16) Yeah
Yeah, Betsy, I'm curious, like as a PI, if somebody came to you and was like, all right, we want to do this. What would you need to hear? Like, what's the rundown of like, what would make you say yes versus like, what would the considerations be for you in bringing in a nonprofit like this or reaching out to a group to help?
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (07:43) You know, I guess my first thought, honestly, is that I think it would bring an exciting energy about the lab, right? Because this is something that we do talk about, you know, with like this exciting group of young people that I have who are working with me, is that they're very much now thinking about their science in the context of society and thinking about other allies, right? And so for, you know, for thinking about the way that we take care of our planet, I think there's an exciting like allyship about this.
Liz Neeley (08:02) Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (08:11) So I think initially, there would be a lot of enthusiasm. And then, yeah, I I love the idea of doing kind of like a small incremental step that if you did it, that if we did the pilot and then enacted it university -wide, mean, that could be a big deal, for example, changing a lot of minus 80s to minus 70s. I think in regards to the other thing that would be.
Liz Neeley (08:22) Mm.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (08:37) not an easy target, is clearly top of mind is our plastics usage. Exactly. That I think about at home these days, whenever I buy a pre -made salad and there are three plastic bags within my pre -made salad that I'm just trying to make, you know, I'm just trying to have a quick healthy lunch as a working mom. Right. And yet, you know, I have to dispose of a lot of plastic, you know, when eating my lunch. There's so many similarities, you know, in in lab work. So those would be the top.
Liz Neeley (08:42) Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (09:07) priorities probably.
Liz Neeley (09:09) Gabe, I guess like for me as somebody who runs an organization, of course I'm always thinking about efficiency, like what's the return on investment? What's the project management and the administrative burden of bringing a group in? I'm assuming that that's kind of what My Green Lab is built to help take that off of the cognitive load of the PI. Do you have any sense of like what you said it's paid? Do you have ballpark figures?
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (09:34) I do not have off the top of my head those figures, but I bet they're readily available from the... Yeah. Well, part of me feels like this might be... Listen, I have talked about following up with something that we're really excited about and we really want to learn more about and having, in this case, an additional guest. I bet My Green Lab would love to join and talk about next level details about what does it cost? What do you get? What don't they provide?
Liz Neeley (09:38) We will follow up, folks.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (10:02) I think that would be cool both for them and to like kind of deepen the kind of of, you know, lean in on the topic. I can volunteer my lab as you know, as an example for them to walk through and cringe or maybe give us like a yeah.
Liz Neeley (10:13) There we go. There we go.
That would, I am so jazzed about this. All right, Betsy, I have another question for you. So the way that we wrap our episodes up is that those of us who came in cold, like you and I did, have to summarize in 15 seconds the pitch for why everybody in solving for science should pay attention to my green lab and check them out. Would you like to do a 15 second recap for us to bring us home?
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (10:47) Sure, theoretically. When do I? I'm just kidding. You guys could each do a 15 second. One, two, three. No? OK. I have the same feeling. I'll do it. OK. All right. So in fact, I won't even have to show it to the screen. I can just show it directly to Betsy. All right, here we go. Three, two, one, go. All right. Hey, y 'all, check out My Green Lab.
Liz Neeley (10:49) Hahaha!
We'll see, we'll see. I have a feeling that Betsy's gonna nail this. So Gabe, you wanna time it? Alright.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (11:12) which is a resource that comes into modern science laboratories and helps go from the microscopic to the macroscopic to the climate impact. Whoa, that was good. That might've been our shortest, most effective cold summary ever. That's very kind. Very much, very much. man, our guest has shown it how to do it.
Liz Neeley (11:25) You
Gabe, Gabe, you feel that? Did you just feel a new bar being set? I did. I did.
Amazing.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (11:43) Okay, so as the person who came in hot, I'm gonna wrap the show by thanking Betsy and saying, look, come back again before too long with the possibility of a follow -up episode, not only featuring Betsy in her lab, but also someone from my green lab. TBD. Until next time, we're the Talking Heads. We still need a new name. We'll see you next time.
Liz Neeley (12:04) Yeah.
and it's in the process of stopping.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (12:19) Excellent. I agree with the talking heads need for a new name because I Googled, like I Googled, I chat GPT, I like did all the things to try to find out more about this and.
Liz Neeley (12:32) no, there's nothing public.
Betsy Crouch + Gabe Murphy (12:33) There's nothing public. Correct. I can confirm that. And even if you tried to find it, you'd probably have to sift through a hundred websites devoted to the talking heads. But it's not meant to be discoverable. I know. know. Yay. But still needs a new name. Nicely done. That was fun. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. And Betsy, it great to meet you. You too, Liz. Yeah.
I'm hopefully in person soon. I'm based out in Oakland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when Gabe was intro, introing the idea, he was introducing you also. So you are more Googleable than the talking heads. And actually, actually Liz is over here, not irregularly or not irregularly. So we had dinner with Max last week. great. So yeah, she's she Liz and Max both as well as Vincent are heavily involved in this solving for science work. Yeah, we're co -founders. So yeah.
nice t -shirt by the way, Gabe. Look at that. This is from the launch meeting. That was not purposeful, believe it or not. I just grabbed the first. It was not. Yeah. I grabbed it first shirt out of my bag. So, all right. Well, we are successfully uploaded. It looks like you're at 99 % on your side. So I think we can go ahead and call it. Okay. So I can't, let's see. So should we just close it until it's done? Like just turn the camera and the speaker off? I think so. Yeah. Okay.
All right, rather than leave, because otherwise then we have to do the whole, separate upload thing. All right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Bye. you.