2017 Annual Report with John Burris

In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for an annual report in sound for the Fund for 2017. It was quite a significant year in many ways for the Fund, where John has been president since 2008.

Transcription of “2017 Annual Report with John Burris”

00;00;04;22 – 00;00;33;00
Ernie Hood
Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of Focus In Sound, we check in with Dr. John Burris, president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for an annual report in Sound for the Fund for 2017. It was quite a significant year in many ways for the fund where John has been president since 2008.

00;00;33;19 – 00;00;40;02
Ernie Hood
John hardly seems possible that a year has actually gone by since our last Focus In Sound conversation.

00;00;40;15 – 00;00;45;19
John Burris
It’s been a very eventful year and I’m looking forward to chatting with you again, Ernie.

00;00;46;03 – 00;01;02;06
Ernie Hood
Well, when we spoke last year, you cited the fund’s support for several researchers responding to the Zika crisis as perhaps the headline for 2016. What would you see as the lead story when it comes to the fund’s activities in 2017?

00;01;03;17 – 00;01;30;00
John Burris
I think the recognition and we are not uniquely in recognizing this, that there’s an enormous group of individuals who could be doing biomedical research but are not for a variety of reasons, and those are individuals who have only an M.D. degree. Turns out that less than one and a half percent of the MDs in the United States actually conduct research.

00;01;30;13 – 00;02;08;08
John Burris
And that means that certainly most of the rest are not in a position or interested in research. But if we can gather a few of those other 98 and a half percent, the individuals who are MDs to do research, we could greatly expand the number of individuals tackling the important questions that we see in biomedical research. So I think the board’s recognition of this and as I said, it’s not a new one, but the boards decision to try to do something about this, I guess I would say, is sort of our lead take home of things that we’re doing differently in 2017 and going into 2018.

00;02;08;19 – 00;02;14;25
Ernie Hood
I see. Now is that the support for the funding of career awards for medical scientists?

00;02;15;11 – 00;02;41;24
John Burris
No, this is actually going past that. The career words from medical scientists in the most part of those awardees, most of them are M.D. PhDs. In other words, they’re committed to a research career. They’ve specifically gotten a Ph.D., which has helped train them in research. We’re talking about the rest of the group, both in medical school and in practicing physicians, those who only have received an M.D..

00;02;42;12 – 00;03;31;02
John Burris
We’re approaching this also from a different perspective than the career awards in medical sciences, which go to individuals. We felt that the sort of point that would make the most sense to tackle this issue is at the institutional level. There are 115 plus medical schools in the United States, and we decided if we can fund a few of those medical schools specifically to do something with their curriculum, something with their training, something with residence, something with fellows, something with junior faculty members that would provide them with an environment that enables them to both learn more about research and then also to conduct research that that would be the best way.

00;03;31;02 – 00;03;54;20
John Burris
In other words, to be greater multiplier, to provide large grants to several medical schools, and then tell them, try your novel ideas, see if we can increase the number of MDs who are doing research that way. So that’s why the program is quite different than CAMHS, which is the career awards in medical science, as you alluded to, where we specifically say John Doe or Jane Doe.

00;03;55;26 – 00;04;11;21
John Burris
Here’s funding for you to continue research. We’re looking to somehow expand the numbers and we want then the sort of initiative and inventive spirits of selected medical schools to in fact, do that for us.

00;04;13;03 – 00;04;27;25
Ernie Hood
I see. Well, thank you for clarifying that. John, beyond that headline, one of the things that’s always so impressive about the fund is the diversity of its programs and pursuits. Would you elaborate on that concept?

00;04;28;14 – 00;05;21;23
John Burris
We have a rather straightforward vision to promote and support biomedical research and education. But the term biomedical is a pretty broad and overarching descriptor, and that’s enabled us to look at many different ways where biomedical research and education could be approached. I’ve just alluded to the one with the institutional program for physician scientists, but we saw many years ago a program that started in 1996 actually as an institutional program where we said a lot of the advances in biomedical research are not going to come exclusively from MDS or exclusively from biologists, but in fact from people who come from different disciplines computer scientists, engineers, physicists, chemists.

00;05;22;03 – 00;05;45;17
John Burris
And that gave rise to, first, an institutional program and now career awards at the scientific interface. Lots of times, people getting together and looking at a longstanding problem with a different perspective is extremely productive. And we’ve been excited over the years with the KC program, as I said, career awards at the scientific interface and then under the umbrella of biomedical research.

00;05;46;02 – 00;06;13;21
John Burris
We look for areas where we think they’re important but underfunded, and so we get diversity in the programs simply through tackling problems like problems in parasitology, where there’s not much research in the United States and preterm birth, which we’ve talked about in previous years. But again, this is an area of, say, 12% of births in the United States are preterm, and we don’t do much research in that area.

00;06;13;22 – 00;06;38;14
John Burris
So with a big umbrella, there are lots of diverse areas that one can tackle. And I haven’t even alluded to, you know, education from different perspectives and also the workforce issues, who becomes a biomedical researcher, who goes to teach and what do we teach young kids in terms of STEM? So there’s lots of space under that tent for diversity.

00;06;38;19 – 00;06;44;13
Ernie Hood
Are there any new programs or initiatives that were launched in 2017 that you’d like to discuss?

00;06;44;19 – 00;07;15;00
John Burris
Well, the main one is the one that we’ve already discussed. That’s the institutional program for physician scientists. And so I think our primary efforts in terms of new have been in that area and the request for proposals have gone out. And the preliminary round of review has occurred. And we hope to make our first awards in 2018. So that’s the one big new program.

00;07;15;09 – 00;07;39;15
John Burris
We remain committed to our existing programs. As you know, every five years we take a look at our entire portfolio and what we call terrain mapping. This is what’s not this past year, but we did, as I say, added that new program and then maintained status quo in terms of other programs which will run again this year and ran in 2017.

00;07;40;12 – 00;07;54;04
Ernie Hood
Well, John, one of the trends I’m seeing is that you and the Fund are increasing your support for the role of science communication. Would you expound on that for us?

00;07;54;24 – 00;08;19;07
John Burris
Well, one of the things that we’ve done that probably sets us apart from many foundations is that we’ve been very concerned not just in terms of educating the public, which seems to be what many people fall back on science education. In other words, they start with the assumption, well, people don’t know anything and we’re going to teach them not a very good perspective from whence to begin.

00;08;20;13 – 00;08;46;16
John Burris
And so we continue to support science education a variety of ways, both at K-through-12 level and also outside of K through 12, through things such as support of the Science Festival and a variety of what I call the more standard, both formal, which is in schools and the informal which is outside of schools and that’s certainly a very big part of communication.

00;08;47;00 – 00;09;21;02
John Burris
I think we’re a little bit different than most foundations in that we support and encourage communication among scientists and hope that we can improve the ability of scientists to talk to their peers and wallahs talk to people who may not be scientists. And so one of the things that we do is in our process, if you want to get one of our awards, in most cases you come to Research Triangle Park and are interviewed and communication is extraordinarily important there.

00;09;21;17 – 00;09;50;09
John Burris
If there are twice as many finalists as awards, certainly if you can’t say it in an articulate fashion, you’re at a disadvantage. The other thing that we’ve noticed more junior scientists as they come up, have very little training in speaking. As I’ve said, speech classes have pretty much disappeared from the curriculum. And so there’s not much opportunity for young people to get up and speak publicly.

00;09;50;28 – 00;10;32;03
John Burris
And the past graduate students and postdocs at meetings gave presentations. He would give a ten minute presentation and then be grilled by the audience in the interest of efficiency. We’ve now gone almost exclusively to posters or certainly primarily to posters that means that you put your material up in a written form and stand there and answer questions, etc. But that’s very different, as you know, than getting up in front of a group and communicating or communicating with people who may not start out knowing most of what you’re doing already.

00;10;32;03 – 00;10;57;27
John Burris
And they haven’t just read a poster, but in fact your responsibility is to sort of inform them. So we’re interested in that communication. Also, we have a really fine program that’s run by our senior communications officer, Russ Campbell, who is sort of our social media guru. And so he can tell you more how many Twitter followers he has and things of that sort.

00;10;57;27 – 00;11;28;09
John Burris
But we try also to harness social media as a way of communicating primarily to both our awardees and others who are interested in what the program is and encouraging communication of that sort among our awardees. So we’re working in the social media venue or the social media world, and also just the more traditional ways where people stand up in front of other people and answer questions.

00;11;28;19 – 00;11;49;00
Ernie Hood
John Another trend that has emerged in public remarks you made recently, in fact, was the foundation’s role in risk and enabling people to take risks in their scientific pursuits and not be trepidatious about failure. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

00;11;49;06 – 00;12;17;26
John Burris
One of the things, if you look at our awards for individuals from day one, we’re extremely flexible. We are picking people who we think have a talent and the potential to be leaders in the field, and we don’t quite give them a blank check. They have to provide us with annual progress reports and they’re expected to be working in the general area that they articulated when they received the award.

00;12;17;26 – 00;12;49;18
John Burris
But we’re a very flexible funder. We also are flexible with regards to timing. Now, a lot of places you get a grant in three years and if two years and 11 months you have money left over, you go out and buy $50,000 worth of pipettes because they want the money back. We’re more open ended with our funding. We let people carry money over, and I think that encourages flexibility if they don’t need it right now, why spend it?

00;12;50;07 – 00;13;18;12
John Burris
They’re working on another project, but then when they see something that they think is interesting and may be risky, so it’s not going to get funded by the National Institutes of Health, they’ll take that risk because of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund money. So we have always encouraged that and very much will continue to encourage it. One of the reasons we choose to fund primarily junior scientists, young people getting started is we want them to take those risks.

00;13;18;12 – 00;13;41;09
John Burris
We want them with our money to do things that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. And obviously when you’re young, you have the initiative of you have the ideas, but you’re also in many ways more constrained because you’re trying to establish your career, you’re trying to publish as much as you can. You need to get funding from the national funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health.

00;13;41;20 – 00;13;58;26
John Burris
And we say to these young people, listen, guys, here’s an opportunity. Here are some dollars for you to take some of those risks, to pursue some of those pathways that you might not otherwise do. So I think that’s very much part of our our culture and certainly what we encourage in our awardees.

00;13;59;22 – 00;14;10;28
Ernie Hood
John, The fund also has a binding interest in supporting diversity in the biomedical field. How has the fund acted on that in 2017?

00;14;11;16 – 00;14;54;18
John Burris
We recognize, as do many other funders and and many other individuals, that scientific number of scientists and the scientific workforce is not diverse with regards to underrepresented minorities, with regards to minorities in the United States. And there are lots of people that have tackled it in lots of different ways. The fund has always been strongly committed to trying to increase the number of underrepresented minorities that receive our awards and in turn look for them to encourage more underrepresented minorities to become scientists.

00;14;55;10 – 00;15;23;29
John Burris
The program that I think we’re most pleased and proud of is something called the Postdoctoral Enrichment program. This is a program where we give postdocs. Those are people, after they’ve gotten their Ph.D. funding to do some of the things that oftentimes it’s difficult to do because they don’t have the money. In other words, attend meetings or buy a small piece of equipment or do some of the things.

00;15;23;29 – 00;15;50;29
John Burris
Your postdocs are not an independent entity. They’re in someone else’s lab. And so we call this, to some extent sort of the freedom to try and do things that enhance their careers, perhaps increase the number of papers they write, perhaps increase their size of their networks if they go to meetings and get to meet other individuals who get to know them.

00;15;51;01 – 00;16;19;06
John Burris
And so this postdoctoral enrichment program has been, I think, extremely successful. We receive 80 or so applications each year and are able to fund between 15 and 20 of those applicants. And we’re very proud of them. And we’ve sort of track their careers and a large number of them are already in academic positions as assistant professors. So it’s a program that’s about five years old.

00;16;19;06 – 00;16;42;12
John Burris
And as we look back at the individuals that we funded, we’ve seen many of them already in the first stages of substantial success. So that’s just one program, but it’s one that that we’re particularly proud of. And it hasn’t been an extraordinarily expensive program, but we think the money that’s been spent has been spent wisely.

00;16;43;04 – 00;16;59;23
Ernie Hood
John, you mentioned the importance of networking for young scientists, and I understand that one of the highlights of 2017 was the fund hosting meeting for that very purpose here at the building. Could you tell us about that?

00;16;59;24 – 00;17;35;01
John Burris
Right. Each year we bring all of our awardees from our research programs together in October here at RTP and by that, as you mentioned, as we discussed earlier, it’s a pretty diverse group, scientifically diverse group ranging from physicists all the way through epidemiologists and molecular biologist. And we bring them all together here and in RTP and a lot of the time is set aside for social events where they have an opportunity to talk.

00;17;35;15 – 00;17;55;28
John Burris
We also have each of them bring a poster, so all 85 or so of the awardees have a chance to see what their peers are doing and they are introduced to people they might never meet in their traditional society meeting. In other words, they may go to a neurobiologist, so they’re never going to see an epidemiologist. But at this meeting they would.

00;17;56;11 – 00;18;27;13
John Burris
And then we also provide panels and speakers that we think will be helpful in their careers. These are, in general postdocs, young faculty assistant professor. So we talk to them about being an entrepreneur or an intern at interactions with the private sector and how to work with your dean and how to communicate with the public. And we get extremely positive feedback from them.

00;18;27;13 – 00;18;44;07
John Burris
I think this is an opportunity to treat them well and they rise to the occasion. They make friendships and hopefully some of those networks will continue throughout their careers. Some of those individuals they’ve gotten to know they will collaborate with.

00;18;45;20 – 00;18;50;20
Ernie Hood
John, Are there any new programs or initiatives on the horizon for the fund?

00;18;51;17 – 00;19;21;17
John Burris
I think the big thing is the one that we seem to have spent a lot of time talking about, which is the Institutional Physician Scientist Award. As I said, we started the first round of preliminary grants in 2017, and now we’ll have in April or May of 2018, we’ll review the 30 finalists that we chose. So that will be sort of the big expenditure of the programs that we select.

00;19;21;17 – 00;19;40;24
John Burris
Each will receive two and a half million dollar awards over five years. And so that’s a pretty substantial we’re projecting that we’ll probably fund five of those programs so that 12 and a half billion dollars will be a pretty substantial expenditure and it’ll be the sort of main new program that we do.

00;19;41;14 – 00;20;01;14
Ernie Hood
John, as we did last year, I’d like to kind of widen the discussion out and pick your brain a little bit about how things are going in in the scientific enterprise. What is your feeling overall about the state of the scientific enterprise in the U.S. at this point as we speak in early 2018?

00;20;02;02 – 00;20;30;21
John Burris
Well, if you recall, I was unwilling a year ago to make any predictions because it has been a somewhat unpredictable year. I will say that there remains grave disappointment that the president has still not named a science advisor. I think that sends a very strong message of how high a priority he places science in his decision making and his agenda.

00;20;30;21 – 00;21;04;20
John Burris
So I think for the most part, most most of us as scientists have been disappointed in that regard. I will say that for biomedical research, the Congress has picked up where the president has not. The President recommended a rather substantial decrease in funding for biomedical research and the Congress, in fact, and we certainly still don’t have a budget, but the Congress, in fact, increased funding by several billion dollars over the previous year.

00;21;05;04 – 00;21;43;21
John Burris
So overall, for biomedical research, if indeed the recommendations of the Congress end up in the final budget, we’ve done okay. I think, though, the scientific enterprise writ large in things such as energy and climate change and other areas have not fared well. The recommendations have been for substantial cuts. And so I, like many, I think are are disappointed by that because although we as biomedical scientists have done okay, we are part of a larger scientific enterprise.

00;21;43;21 – 00;22;12;29
John Burris
If you remember, I mentioned earlier that at our career awards, at the scientific interface depend on physicists and chemists and computer scientists and engineers. And so we don’t exist as an independent entity separate from science and separate from the general sort of respect that science receives and the general acceptance of of the scientific method and how it’s applied.

00;22;12;29 – 00;22;38;22
John Burris
So I would certainly say I was uncertain in 2017. I think that it’s been crystallized a bit more here in 2018 that perhaps we as biomedical scientists will do okay. But the scientific enterprise in general is not been doing as well in the United States.

00;22;40;17 – 00;22;48;12
Ernie Hood
Do you see any causes for optimism at this point?

00;22;49;10 – 00;23;40;27
John Burris
Oh, I’m always a glass half full person, so maybe industry will step up to the plate a little bit more. Maybe they’ll continue to promote science. Yeah, I’ll find a spot for optimism. Ernie, I’m always an optimist. We’re seeing a bit more from the private sector, some of the allocation of these great fortunes that are being created and have been created in the United States, in the tech world, you know, in these organizations ranging from Apple to Facebook to Google, we’re seeing some of those folks that are starting to think a little bit about providing more funding for science and hopefully a bit more funding for basic research in science, not just applied research, but

00;23;40;27 – 00;23;59;25
John Burris
basic research. So I’m going to be optimistic that we’ll see some of the reallocation of that great wealth that’s been accumulated into support for science. And I hope some of it certainly goes for support of basic research in science.

00;24;00;23 – 00;24;11;16
Ernie Hood
Well, John, obviously 2017 was a banner year for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and we appreciate you taking the time to go over some of the highlights with us. Thanks for joining us here on Focus In Sound.

00;24;11;25 – 00;24;15;14
John Burris
Again, as always, Ernie, a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you very much.

00;24;17;06 – 00;24;26;25
Ernie Hood
We hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of the Focus In Sound podcast. Until next time. This is Ernie Hood. Thanks for listening.