The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on drug discovery. He’s been writing a renowned science blog called “In the Pipeline” since 2002.

Lowe tackles a mix of scientific updates, political perspectives, and critiques of scientific publishing, all in an extremely down-to-earth and readable manner. He’s also the author of a 2016 book, The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry.

In a recent post Lowe described himself as an “AI Realist,” while writing a great line about current LLMs:

They are extruding an optimized slurry of words into answer-shaped chunks. To my way of thinking, these are far more removed from actual human writing than a typical chicken nugget is from a chicken walking around a barnyard — but I have to admit that there are many situations where they’re good enough.

When it comes to AI, Lowe is a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, but as the interview shows, sacrificing science at the altar of technology is not a way forward.

Discovery science, the effects of cuts on academia, and why drug discovery is and likely will remain difficult terrain are all topics we discuss.

A serious amateur astronomer and — like any good chemist — a cook, Derek’s renowned chocolate pecan pie recipe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/holiday-organic-synthesis-chocolate-pecan-pie

It’s an entertaining and informative episode, with our “Discoveries of the Week” and our thanks for all the support you’ve given us and our nascent podcast efforts so far.

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Today, we’re talking with Roger McNamee, an entrepreneur, author, musician, and investor with a legacy in Silicon Valley that stretches from his days heading the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund through the social media era and now into the crypto and AI era.

In 2019, McNamee published a book — Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — where he outlined how his high hopes for his proteges Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg had been dashed.

More recently, he’s been reflecting on the mismatches between capital investments and revenues for large AI companies.

McNamee is a member of the band Moonalice, which performs and records regularly. He shares a fascinating story about the band, as well.

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Today, we’re talking with Jeremy Berg, a former editor of Science, former President of ASBMB, and former Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the NIH.

Earlier this year, Berg grew alarmed at the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the NIH, and began a correspondence with him after his confirmation. For a time, he documented this via his Bluesky account, which grew massively as a result.

Striking a calm, evidence-based tone, Berg often received no response from Bhattacharya. When he did, the responses seemed to bristle with political overtones. Berg published these correspondences in late Summer in PDF form under the title, “Fifty Shades of Jay.” He continues to update the document from time to time.

We wanted to talk with Jeremy about this, and given the recent spate of announcements about Director-level “hiring in a hurry” at the NIH — including a new Director of the NLM — we also wanted to discuss other aspects of MAHA-era science defunding, firings, and hirings as the US scientific establishment is turned upside-down. We also talk about diversity issues, with a particularly interesting angle coming to light.

It’s a fascinating interview throughout, which we close with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Today, we’re talking with Nick Evans, who was in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and who recently moved to the Department of Political Science, a move he explains in the interview.

Joy met Nick at this year’s Peer Review Congress in Chicago, where he talked about his research around preprints and public policy. With a background in physics, science policy, and philosophy, Nick has a rich lens through which to view various aspects of his research topics, which includes dual-use technologies and gain-of-function in the life sciences. His book called Gain of Function was published earlier this year with MIT Press.

It’s a fascinating and informative discussion, he shadow-quotes Neil Peart, and we also get into “Discoveries of the Week,” which include coffee, cars, and deer.

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Today, we’re talking with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of the book The AI Con, which came out earlier this year. 

Emily is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural Time 100 list of the most influential people in AI. 

Alex is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert. 

We discuss how AI hoodwinks people by exploiting their natural tendency to assign intelligence to things that produce language, how “science is squarely in the hype danger zone,” labor and structural issues related to AI exploitation and extraction, and so much more.

You can get a sense of their witty approach to tackling this by realizing that when they talk about “synthetic text extruding machines,” it reduces to “STEM.”

We also get their “Discoveries of the Week.”

Visit this page for information about contacting Emily.

Visit this page for information about contacting Alex.

For more information about their book, visit this page.

Our book — available for PRESALE — is here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Internet-Disrupted-Science/Kent-Anderson/9781493094400

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Today, we’re talking with Mike Olson, Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Mike published two guest posts on “The Scholarly Kitchen” earlier this year which caught our eye.

The first was in March, where he wrote about library catalogs as colonization systems with the power to make naming decisions appear neutral and inevitable by disguising bias behind what a former ALA president called “a facade of technical objectivity.”

His next post in August had to do with layoffs at OCLC justified by claims of advances in AI that could lead to efficiency. Mike noted that “the same technological advances celebrated for their efficiency are erasing the human expertise that creates the high-quality metadata these systems depend on to function.”  

As fans of human expertise, local and disciplinary control, and skepticism about tech claims, we wanted to bring him on for a conversation.

The interview does not disappoint, as it echoes concerns from earlier interviews about how academia is being appropriated for rents and extractive processes by tech companies without support for the kind of skepticism and support of human expertise we’d expect from universities.

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Today, we’re joined by Seth Leopold, an orthopaedic surgeon and Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, also known as CORR, a top journal in orthopaedic surgery. 

Seth and Kent got to know one another through some projects and mutual concerns about scientific publishing, and this year they published a piece with another editor in marine science outlining their concerns about unreviewed preprints. Today we talk about some of the challenges the editorial team at CORR wrestles with on a daily basis, some of the stances the orthopaedic journals have taken collectively, and some of the more recent challenges AI has posed for them.

Show Notes

Preprint paper by Leopold, Browman, and Anderson: https://journal.trialanderror.org/pub/preprinting-responsibility/release/1

Paper about CORR wrestling with AI LTEs: https://journals.lww.com/clinorthop/fulltext/2025/10000/editorial__ai_assisted_letters_to_the_editor_scope.1.aspx

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Acetamiophen is one of the most studied analgesics in the world, and was the centerpiece of a famous product recall when a murderer laced capsules with potassium cyanide. The company swept the shelves in the name of public safety, and restocked them only after establishing new tamper-proof packaging.

Today, Big Tech is releasing products that are leading to clear consumer harms, yet remain idolized and immunized. Why is this? Is there a quasi-religious aspect to technology and its offshoots we need to recognize? How does this dovetail with re-emerging religious fundamentalism in general? And where does it leave science?

We discuss these topics and share our ”Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/