Transcript

Darren Lipomi:
Perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a 4-year institution because the debt load is so high.

Brian Keating:
My guest today is my good friend Darren Lipomi, Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester, in a school he’s actively marketing to undergraduates. He’s one of the best mentors and educators I’ve ever met. I was devastated when he left UC San Diego, and he just told me that most people shouldn’t even be in this program. I wanted to know if he meant it.

Brian Keating:
Is academia like kind of an irredeemably clout-chasing, you know, kind of money-grubbing pursuit of attention, maybe significance when we have importance? What is academia? What has it become? And what— where do you think it can go?

Darren Lipomi:
This is a tough nut to crack because when we have promotion and tenure cases, we Want to be able to look at a metric that is reliable, that’s standardized across fields, which is impossible, but at least sort of within fields. So we look at H-index, we look at number of citations, we look at number of grant dollars brought in per square foot of lab space that the individual has. But at the end of the day, you want to know, what did that person do? What is the accomplishment? How have they made a deep and lasting impact in the field. And that accomplishment is quite difficult to judge. And oftentimes there’s a time component too. It’s a— impact is a lagging indicator. What if a paper gets 1 citation today, but then it gets 1,000 citations 10 years from now because it became so important? And so just like capitalism takes— leverages the human competitive instinct, We’re kind of stuck with these metrics in order to evaluate each other and to give each other raises and promotions. So it’s an imperfect system, but it’s what we have.

Darren Lipomi:
Only 1 out of every 20 PhDs becomes a tenure-track professor. The numbers are not very favorable for the median person who wants to go into the field. And it’s just, I don’t mean median in any pejorative sense, I just mean statistically, It’s a very difficult path. No one knows that a grad student did the work, that a grad student who made $35,000 a year and forewent retirement savings for their entire period of training and probably won’t recover it by the time they retire, that the financial burden is probably more so on them than it is on the taxpayer. So I was trying to tell the story of The people who, who had to go to grad school because they couldn’t do anything else. They went into research because they could not do anything else, like an artist or a musician or a chef. That’s what they had to do, knowing that the chances of getting an independent faculty position are, you know, 1 in 20 or lower. What I have studied— inorganic chemistry and space groups and oxidation potentials and the Schrödinger equation— if I was not forced to.

Darren Lipomi:
And I’m a highly motivated, really nerdy, really nerdy individual. Would I have done that for 4 years, 11 years after high school before I got my first job? I don’t think I would have. I was lucky in the sense that I had scholarships and my debt load was not high. If you look at the net present value of my decision by the time I retire, Was it a good decision? I don’t know. I probably would have done okay making $85,000 with a bachelor’s degree. There are people for whom it does not make sense to go to college. I would say that perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a 4-year institution because the debt load is so high, because the prevalence of high-paying jobs for for individuals who are willing to tolerate certain types of activities can be quite high. And I think that’s where we need to focus on as educators in the area of building physical items.

Darren Lipomi:
We need to re— we need to rematerialize work and encourage people to work with their hands, to encourage the building and craftsmanship and artisanship that’s informed by theory because those jobs are going to be the hardest to replace. Physical AI is going to require an enormous amount of energy and also material science and mechanical engineering innovation along with the enormous energy demands in server farms, for example. That’s quite a long way off in my opinion, laundry folding robots notwithstanding. And so there will, For the next several decades, there will be room for somebody who will be designing a telescope, for somebody who’s designing a satellite, somebody who’s designing and building a reactor that can strip perfluorinated alkyl substances from drinking water. And it’s the tolerance, it’s the grit to be Doing that with one’s hands, right?

Brian Keating:
I gave you some materials, some extremely interesting engineering, uh, that may or may not contain life on it. Can I touch it? You can touch it.

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, that is your gift, uh, for coming on the podcast. It’s a real live or dead meteorite depending on how you look at it, and you can have it too. Guaranteed I’ll send you one if you, like Darren and me, have a .edu email address, and like Darren and me, you live in the United States. So Go to briankeating.com/edu, and I love to send those out and connect to my beloved—

Darren Lipomi:
Am I going to get in trouble with TSA?

Brian Keating:
No, they might ask you what you do for a living, which you describe in the book as well. So this material was delivered by outer space. It has some interesting deformations, material science compositions and stuff, but it does have organic materials on it because I’ve touched it and, you know, sneezed on it and whatnot. But you originally, it seems like if I recall correctly, you wanted to study sort of origin of life or get involved with that. What was the kind of impetus for that? And how far have you strayed from that interest, or have you?

Darren Lipomi:
I’ve always been a bit of a humanist. I’ve read a lot of books. My mom had a lot of lefty novels, Aldous Huxley and Jane Goodall. And although my parents were quite conservative, actually, this was from her past. She had this box of dusty books. And I read quite a lot of them. And when I got to college at BU, I had a fantastic chemistry professor, John Straub, and I was working with him on an independent concentration. And when I started college, 9/11 had just happened the second week of school.

Darren Lipomi:
The second Tuesday of school was 9/11. And so I was originally biomedical engineering, and then I suddenly said I wanted to learn how people behaved, how they interact with each other, what their life circumstances led them to their behavior. So I changed my major to anthropology. And then, but then I veered back, regressing to the mean, and said, well, how can I combine my interest in people and psychology with chemistry? And it took 20 years of an independent career to finally sort of arrive at where I am right now. But at the time, John Straub introduced me to Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, who were scientific humanists, and they wrote about, you know, the selfish gene theory and how life were lumbering robots built on self-replicating genes that would co-opt things in their environment in order to replicate themselves, not because they wanted to, but because that’s what they did. That’s what they’d always done and what we’re going to continue to do. And so I became, you know, the first thing I saw when I saw these micrometeorites is I wonder if there are any chiral amino acids on them, because that is one, perhaps my favorite theory for the origin of biological— So explain it.

Brian Keating:
Let’s go there.

Darren Lipomi:
Homochirality. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
So what is chirality?

Darren Lipomi:
Right, so every carbon atom has 4 bonds that point to the vertices of a tetrahedron, and there are 2 different ways that you can arrange those bonds: the right-handed version and the left-handed version. They’re non-superimposable mirror images.

Brian Keating:
So this graphite in this pencil has carbon in it, right?

Darren Lipomi:
That—

Brian Keating:
But it’s not bonded to itself. It’s not organic.

Darren Lipomi:
That graphite is a different allotrope of carbon. So it’s planar, right? It’s planar, yes. It’s all sp2 hybridized, so it has to be saturated.

Brian Keating:
My high school chemistry coming back. Thank you, Professor.

Darren Lipomi:
That’s why they called. That’s why they gave me the chair job.

Brian Keating:
Just got me back to 10th grade. Thanks, Darren.

Darren Lipomi:
Time traveling. Yeah, so the graphite in carbon is not chiral. Some of the carbon in coal is, some of it is not. Because you’re right, and you have a mixture of hybridization states. But most carbon atoms in DNA and proteins are going to be chiral. And so all helices of the same type, so all keratin helices in your, in your hair and fingernails, all DNA helices, they’re all made of— they all twist the same direction because of this.

Brian Keating:
Right-handed, right?

Darren Lipomi:
Yes, it depends on—

Brian Keating:
Okay, so I’m gonna have a mnemonic for remembering all these different things. Because in cosmology and particle physics, we only have left-handed neutrinos and right-handed antineutrinos. And I’m always like, How do I remember this? I just remember life may have originated from outer space, from neutrinos and cosmic rays and stuff, and those are left-handed, so they would only, you know, cause an interaction between something if that’s right-handed. And that’s how I remember that DNA. Also, you can remember from Jurassic Park, you know, life is right, life finds a way. It’s— life is— anyway, that’s how I remember it. But again, I got a 3 on the— no, 4 on the AP.

Darren Lipomi:
So there aren’t that many ways that you can create new chiral information from scratch, naproxen, so Aleve, homochiral. You only get one enantiomer, that’s one mirror image. Ibuprofen is sold as a mixture of both. One of them is useless, one of them is biologically active.

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm.

Darren Lipomi:
And so how do you, how do you create the homochirality to begin with? In the pharmaceutical industry, you have a chiral catalyst, which is often an enzyme, which is biological in origin, and it catalyzes some reaction which then, which then biases the formation of every other bond to form in the way you want it to. Sometimes you might use tartaric acid, which is enantiomerically pure. Louis Pasteur, who discovered an enantiomeric excess, literally used a polarized microscope and tweezers to pick out this— pick out the crystals by hand of tartaric acid. And so one of the ways in which homochirality is theorized to have arisen is because of polarized radiation in outer space. And so when you have meteorites that have— or, you know, we’re pretty sure were not contaminated by biologically homochiral species, That’s a good point. There is often an anti-meric excess, an excess of one mirror image over the other, and it’s conceivable— and there are people that know more about this than I do— that One enantiomer degrades more quickly in space because there is polarization.

Brian Keating:
An alien wakes you up at 3 in the morning, you know, who are you? Are you a scientist? Are you an engineer? Are you an academician? Are you a chair? You know, in your work life, I assume you’re a father, I know, and a husband and very devoted, but let’s leave that aside. What are you?

Darren Lipomi:
I’m an organic materials chemist. So materials that are grass-fed and pesticide-free, materials that are carbon-based, so polymers, you know, everything in this room, everything outside is covered in an organic medium or made of, composed of organic media. Anytime you look at something that’s nominally abiotic, like a piece of glass, a metal fork, it’s all covered in adventitiously adsorbed organic media. So all of our interaction with the everyday world is mediated by structures that are composed of carbon-carbon bonds. And so what I try to do is to understand and manipulate these materials so that we can make better products, so that we can understand how our senses gain information from the world. I think if I were ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering, I would want my citation to be for contributions in using human subjects to understand understand the physical world. And by that I mean we study the tactile sense quite often. We’re very interested in how the skin deforms when it touches a textile or a material, how the thermal conductivity draws heat away from it, how it interacts with the afferent nerve fibers in the skin and creates a sensation that’s perceived in the brain.

Darren Lipomi:
the brain. We didn’t have a relationship before our students met at Bird Rock Coffee. And so one of my students was a one— was a part-time barista, and another one was a frequent, you know, orderer. So low we pay our students, come on!

Brian Keating:
Throw us under the bus a little more, dude!

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah, well, you know, they’re unionized, so they’re fighting the good fight. And so they got together and they were talking in line at Bird Rock about what they work on, and one of them was interested in haptics and the other did biostatistics for for psychophysical experiments, primarily for vision.

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Darren Lipomi:
And so they got together and they started designing experiments on the way in which we perceived materials to be soft versus hard, sticky versus slimy, moist versus dry. There’s a multifactorial analysis that you can probe if you have access to material synthesis in a cleanroom, but also have access to a lab with the expertise of Ramachandran. And So you can analyze what characteristics of the surface and bulk of primarily organic media that allow it to be perceived in a certain way by touch. So 7 peer-reviewed publications later, we have a better understanding of that now than I think the field did.

Brian Keating:
Another thing that our friend, just getting back to my childhood, you know, mentor from the dead, though he wasn’t dead at the time, Isaac Asimov, and your BU connections were the laws of robotics. And now we hear so much about robotics. Robotics and nano. We hear less about, you know, kind of the Eric Drexler nanobot than we did previously. We’re now hearing about macrobots, you know, that are gonna fold my laundry and, you know, probably grade papers in the future. They can never replace professors though. I mean, come on.

Darren Lipomi:
Never.

Brian Keating:
Our job security. I mean, if we survive COVID, AI, the point being these nanobots kind of, they were the hot thing. As I said, Eric Drexler’s thing, you know, Feynman, you know, one of my heroes, right? There’s plenty of room at the bottom. What’s, what’s happening in nanoscience right now? Besides the chemistry, I’m talking about actual mini robots going into your body and doing stuff or building stuff in the meat world. What’s the latest in that?

Darren Lipomi:
Sure. So the funny thing about Drexler and the nanobots, and he and Rick Smalley, who was the discoverer of C60 fullerene and various other carbon allotropes, they had this longstanding debate about sticky fingers and how van der Waals forces were going to prevent nanobots from actually working. But I think they ignored the whole field of chemical catalysis, which are nanomaterials and molecular materials that are literally forming bonds by the moleful and metric-tonful in the chemical manufacturing industry.

Brian Keating:
Bioreactors.

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah. So that’s been happening. And that is, you know, it’s never been called— well, it’s rarely called nanotechnology, but that is, to be honest, one of nanotechnology’s biggest accomplishments. In terms of inner space and The Magic School Bus and the Fantastic Voyage, I have a colleague, Joseph Wong, in the nanoengineering department here who has been doing work for decades on self-propelled micro and nanomotors that can swim around in the bloodstream. In the blood, yeah. And so that, I think it’s going to be a combination of active control of programmed chemical reactions in these nanobots that are actually able to accomplish something that looks like, you know, intelligent behavior. But the other big impact of nano has been in cancer therapeutics and drug delivery for vaccines, for evasion of the immune system, for targeting in tumor cells, and you don’t just inject Taxol or cisplatin in the bloodstream anymore. You know, those are all encapsulated in some kind of smart nanomaterial that has a specifically programmed degradation profile, some kinetics that have been influenced by the ligands that are on the outside sphere.

Darren Lipomi:
And who could forget microelectronics too? Although usually you try to avoid quantum effects and microprocessors, but they’re as nano as anything.

Brian Keating:
We met in 2018, maybe it was 2019, I can’t remember, for the Kyoto Prize, which was awarded to a University of Rochester kind of—

Darren Lipomi:
Ching-Tung.

Brian Keating:
Ching-Tung, who invented the organic LED. Now, to the extent that any of the public knows about organic chemistry and organic nanochemistry and nanotechnology, it’s through the OLED. What’s coming down the pipeline? Excite people about the future of organic, especially organic chemistry, as you’re, you know, one of your many fields of expertise. What are some of the next great breakthroughs? You know, you talked about sustainability, power, batteries, you know, what’s coming down the pipeline? What can we get excited about? What can we invest in through your hedge fund that you’re undoubtedly starting at Rochester right now?

Darren Lipomi:
The organic LED is a great example. It was invented by Ching-Tung at Kodak Research Labs about 4 miles from University of Rochester. He’s actually an Ameri— after he invented it, he was hired by my department. His office is down the hall from mine. There is a good chance—

Brian Keating:
He’s a mensch. This guy’s an incredible mensch. I love this guy.

Darren Lipomi:
There is a good chance that your audience is watching this video through an OLED display. So, if you have an iPhone or almost any screen, chances are it’s the It’s organic components that are creating the image, and it’s now a $70 billion a year industry. Kodak got almost none of the value from that invention, add it to the list. But anyway—

Brian Keating:
Watch, you have already.

Darren Lipomi:
So if you look at organics and carbonaceous material, carbon allotropes, they are ubiquitous and ubiquitously exciting. So the intercalation compounds, anodes in batteries, if you look at the next generation thin-film cheap solar panels. You have electron and hole blocking layers that are principally organic. The materials in perovskite solar cells. You have the entire history of microelectronics. While we think of it as an inorganic technology, as in silicon, gallium arsenide, other, other materials, the only way that those are manufactured is— have ever been manufactured is because we have these light-sensitive organic polymer films called photoresists that you etch an image in. So you’re looking now at materials in drug delivery, in electronics and energy technologies that really require organic materials engineering. We have another project right now that I’ve— we have a proposal under review by the Air Force and Space Force on the use of reconfigurable polymers to suck up space junk in low Earth orbit.

Darren Lipomi:
And so it’s—

Brian Keating:
Anti-micrometeorite.

Darren Lipomi:
Inspired by the space amoeba in the original Star Trek episode. And so there, the sky is the limit, because if you can, if you can put carbon atoms together in almost any combination, you can make almost any functionality.

Brian Keating:
We should acknowledge the mastodon in the room. He used to be my treasured colleague here at UC San Diego. And it was no joke, it was a big blow when he left. I mean, I was, you know, I was consolable, but, you know, losing a top-ranked, you know, faculty member to any university is a rival. I mean, it’s just— no, there’s no— you get a grad student or you get a top professor, it means we’re not going to get that student or that professor, right? So we’re in a zero-sum game. I always say academia and science are made up— are infinite games because you can’t win science, you can’t win engineering, but you I mean, you can get the Nobel Prize, you can get the NASE, and you can get all sorts of cool things. And that sometimes means, often means, you don’t get it from somewhere else, right? So one of the things that, you know, I most associate with Rochester, having a good friend, Charlie Freeman, who’s out there as a professor now at Geneseo and went there, was Kodak. And, you know, I used to love, and, you know, I still have, you know, Kodak printed out on film, you know, film, you know, photographs from my childhood, right? So, and this was this huge success story.

Brian Keating:
I mean, it built the town. Bausch and Lomb was there too, right?

Darren Lipomi:
The 2 drugs.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, 3 huge companies that all involved optics and imaging and printing, and at some level, at some point, lost ground market share from 99% to low digits. I mean, you could still buy— you can actually buy a Kodak digital camera for $99. It’s not the same quality as maybe it used to be, and it probably is licensed to somebody else for the name, right? But talk about the kind of parallel side, the academic you know, industrial complex, I call it. So what is that like? What is the landscape like that you see right now? Is it an exciting time? Is it, you know, AI is just dominating everything, the physical world is no more? I mean, you’re in the nanomechanical world. What do you see as the kind of future of academic-industrial partnerships? And try not to make Rochester too attractive. We still need students here, Darren.

Darren Lipomi:
Sure. University of Rochester is the largest largest private employer in New York State outside of New York City. And so how I describe it is a Hogwarts attached to a massive medical services company. And so we are in the $5-6 billion a year range, talking about academic-industrial complex. The undergraduate population is only, is only 6,000. We have 12,000 total students. and about $500 million in research expenditures per year. Most of that is in the medical school.

Darren Lipomi:
So there are a lot of medical device, medical optics companies in the region. A lot of that— the vein of optics has still persisted in Rochester, even though Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb have a much smaller presence than they did in the ’70s and ’80s in the heyday. So we have shifted in the economy from primarily imaging-based to primarily biomedical and biomedical services upstream of these consumer and patient-facing industries. We do a lot of things that are super important to the economy, but a lot of people would find boring. For example, making machines that make other machines. We have 60,000 engineers employed in Monroe County. And so, for example, Optimation Technologies, they’re a design-build firm that made all of the equipment that made all of the mRNA vaccine vials during the COVID pandemic. Javelin Process Systems makes all of the equipment, or the vast majority of equipment, that cooks and produces Tostitos salsa and fills Heinz ketchup bottles.

Darren Lipomi:
So these are, these are B2B companies, right? And so we have a very strong relationship with companies like that, with L3Harris, CooperVision, with Bausch and Lomb, which still manufactures contact lenses and refractive optics. We send a lot of students there, we have research contracts with them. So there’s still a strong industrial connection, but the flavor has changed over time. But indeed, if you walk around U of R, you’ve got Bausch and Lomb Hall, you have the Eastman as an Eastman Kodak quadrangle, and then the Eastman School of Music. Joseph C. Wilson, the founder of Xerox, is the main boulevard that runs through campus.

Brian Keating:
So going from BU and then going to study at Harvard with Weizsäcker, was he interested in kind of origin of life? you know, 1,000. What is it, agent x to the 400 now, or—

Darren Lipomi:
A few hundred.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. So I just want to have the logarithm of his mutation base e. So talk about George and working in the lab of one of the most famous academics in all of history, and how little time you got, but it does seem like you got enough quality time that he really influenced your philosophy as a mentor. So talk about George and just the many I mean, quite frankly, you had merit, but you had a lot of luck too. And to work with him is part of that, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Darren Lipomi:
When I was an undergraduate, I went— I was lucky enough to get the Beckman Scholars Program, which is an undergraduate research scholarship. And I went to the Beckman headquarters in Irvine, and George Whitesides was one of the speakers. And he talked about multivalency and protein-ligand or protein-drug interactions and how you much more, much stronger binding if you had cooperativity and binding. And I thought that sounded really cool and interesting. And he has such a—

Brian Keating:
It’s humanistic.

Darren Lipomi:
So humanistic, right. And he had such a presence, has such a presence about him. He speaks with a booming baritone voice. He’s 6’1 or 6’2. He looks a bit like Captain Picard. And he has a very powerful handshake, even though even at the time he was, quite senior. And I asked him, you know, what do you look for in mentees? He said, I look for somebody who’s— I look for somebody who’s very strong in thermodynamics and organic synthesis. And I thought—

Brian Keating:
That was very precise.

Darren Lipomi:
That was very precise. And so I said, I want to work with George Whitesides. And so I was at BU, and I did a lot of running around the Charles River, and I would pass by the Harvard chemistry building and look at it in awe. And when I applied and I got in, which was just out of the question for somebody who came from the beginnings that I did, and I got in. And, but what was ironic is that as famous as George was, is probably the most famous chemist who’s never won the Nobel Prize or who hasn’t yet, and more famous than most chemists who have won the Nobel Prize. is that once you got into Harvard, it wasn’t hard to get into his lab. And in part, that was because he trusted the system. In part, it was because he didn’t have time to interview all the candidates.

Darren Lipomi:
And in part, it’s because— and I don’t want to— I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense, although take it as you will— But he was pretty sure that people who couldn’t cut the mustard would drop out of the lab. And so there was a lot of attrition in the lab. He— most of the mentoring that I received from George came in the form of written comments on outlines. So he would write in, uh, in blue ink on the Pilot rollerball blue ink pen.

Brian Keating:
Oh, yeah.

Darren Lipomi:
He would say things that no good human being should ever say to any, any other good human being, like, this is a pig’s breakfast, I saw on someone’s. He wrote, this is illiterate, on mine. He would say things that looked— that maybe even looked meaner than it actually was. Like one time, my colleague and I were sure that he had written, I know you want to fuck it, in blue ink. My colleague and I were looking at it and we’re like, it— there’s nothing else it could say! But obviously it didn’t say that.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Darren Lipomi:
But there was no— literally, there was nothing else it could say.

Brian Keating:
He was a doctor after all.

Darren Lipomi:
And so the in-person mentoring was sparse, but he had such a presence— he has such a presence in our lives, everybody who worked in his lab, that we have internalized his direction, his sense of scientific strategy, and how to choose an important problem. And that has followed me in my career since then.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, and even at one point comes across as somewhat tender, you know, as you’re graduating, he says, I’m going to be devastated when Darren leaves. I mean, that, that, you know, could bring tears to a, to a non-organic, to an actual organic physicist. That was a touching thing to read and then to hear. And it must have brought you great pride. You had the 1,000th publication from his lab or something like that, right?

Darren Lipomi:
I was in the lab at the time.

Brian Keating:
At the time, okay. When that came about, and soon thereafter you have a, you know, first author paper with him as your, you know, your co-author. It’s incredible. But, you know, a lot of us don’t have that benefit. And a lot of times you hear things— I often tell students in general, it’s more important who you work with than what you work on. And yet, you know, at the same time, you know, science is a game of credit and attribution and citation. I mean, literally, our currency is citations, right? And that’s why we get so kind of upset when people say things like, oh, peer review is the scam, and it’s kind of undermined, you know, science isn’t about peer review, and it’s just gatekeeping. And I’m like, I’m like, once I gave a podcast here with a couple of podcasters that I won’t name because I was very disappointed the way that they’ve kind of turned their podcast into.

Brian Keating:
But I said something like, we need gates, right? We need a gate. We have a gate around this campus and the gate keeps people out and it keeps things in. And people, they’re like, you wanna trap people here? I’m like, well, I’ve got a very expensive dilution refrigerator, costs about $500,000. I don’t want that walking off. Or a cup of liquid helium-3 is gonna set you back a quarter million dollars, right? So yeah, I quite frankly like to have a gate around things. In academia, I have a gate around my pool. You used to have a pool. I don’t think you have a pool.

Brian Keating:
Maybe you have an ice rink.

Darren Lipomi:
Sabres. Yeah. I have a creek.

Brian Keating:
You have a creek. Okay. Yeah. The Sabres are practicing nearby. But it’s, you know, we do need gates around certain things. So, and I think that’s why academics get so upset. You know, the joke is academics fight so much because the stakes are so low. As a chair, you know, you’re kind of in this position.

Brian Keating:
My colleague and friend and past guest, Inna Vishik at UC Davis, you know, said A department chair is not a boss of a professor, right? It’s kind of a negotiator that negotiates with hostage takers on behalf of the kidnapped, right? So how do you view being, you know, kind of at a top school and having, you know, a phenomenal reputation there? But, you know, you can’t please everybody all the time or you’re not a leader. So walk me through the navigatory, you know, kind of the shoals of being a chair, because it’s not a job I really want.

Darren Lipomi:
Sure. So my last job at UC San Diego was as Associate Dean for Students in Engineering. I had that role for 2 years. Prior to that, I was the director of the IDEA Engineering Student Center. And in the Associate Dean role, I was basically playing— running interference for the dean. So I would be doing town halls with students. There is a lot of work that I did that I’m still very proud of and still working on actually at UCSD. and garnering scholarship, you know, money with former colleagues and trying to enhance the student experience.

Darren Lipomi:
I’d really like to keep that as a legacy that I have here. The department chair role is completely different. Number one, it’s an executive role. You’re the one who has the final say on teaching and service assignments, also allocation of lab space. You and the dean, you know, have to agree on it, but the chair is the is the first responder there, and also the first person in line for promotion and tenure decisions. And so the number of incoming emails is lower, not just because U of R is a smaller school than UCSD, but also because my constituency is 14 faculty members instead of 10,000 students. And the dean’s office. My primary constituency being the faculty is I have to represent them at the dean’s leadership meetings.

Darren Lipomi:
I have to represent their interests when I’m talking to students who have an issue with grading policy, or I missed a final exam and the professor won’t give me a break and whatever. Every situation has to be dealt with like that.

Brian Keating:
You’re kind of giving an answer by way of the description of the duties and And not necessarily making it something that I’m now more appealing, you know, to me. But that’s fine because I need a new, you know, assignment. Like, I need a hole in the head, right?

Darren Lipomi:
I think what it allows you to do— so for instance, we changed the name of the department recently. It was Chemical Engineering for 110 years. And as of this fall, it became the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering. The reason being that the faculty portfolios, research portfolios, all had something to do with battery separation membranes, water purification, and environmental remediation. I do a lot of work in recyclable polymers for e-waste. I do a lot of work in solar cell manufacturing. And so in this period in which we’re facing a demographic cliff where there aren’t as many high school kids as there used to be, and universities are not quite, or the American immigration system is not quite as friendly to international students as it was a few years ago. We need to do something to differentiate the product we’re offering.

Brian Keating:
I wrote the other day, I did a poll on the most important scientific medium of all time, Twitter. And I did a poll, I said, which is older, Oxford University or the Aztec Empire? And it was like 50/50 split. It’s like, obviously Oxford’s older, right? But, you know, people have been scratching on piece of rock with another piece of rock, you know, for literally 1,000 years. So what is sort of the future of academia? Like, again, not like who wants to be department chair? Like, okay, fine. That’s a very select set at the apex predators of academia, right?

Brian Keating:
The Hunger Games.

Darren Lipomi:
Right.

Brian Keating:
But, you know, the kind of the entry to the funnel, what kind of product are we delivering to our students nowadays? Just generally, not in your field, in my field, but generally speaking, academia as a whole, higher education.

Darren Lipomi:
It is the perfect time to be thinking about that question because academia has— the critics have never been louder. The societal, the external societal forces in economics have never been stronger. Headwinds have never been stronger. The traditional reason to get a bachelor’s degree is to be an important— to have something to contribute to civic society. To know the great works, to be familiar with music and art and literature, to know a little bit about— have some skills in numeracy, but then comes the more vocational professional certification, professionalization, and I would put the natural sciences in that category, but certainly engineering. And what kinds of— do we treat those groups of individuals differently? Should we? Should somebody who is sure they want to work in mechanical engineering, should they be reading Plato in a freshman or sophomore seminar? I would argue yes, they ought to be.

Brian Keating:
But to be fair, in other countries they don’t, right? In other countries, you’re going to be a physician, you know, you don’t take Plato. You don’t read Plato, right? You go straight from A-levels in your profession as early as, you know, the end of your undergraduate, so to speak, right? So other countries doing it worse than us because they have that model?

Darren Lipomi:
It may be that academia is not the right place to instill a love of wisdom, of past wisdom. It may be that the person in one of the countries of which you speak find that dusty old box of books, or maybe they’re already inclined to go to the, you know, go to the library. Or maybe you need somebody who’s probably not an engineer, you know, in the ethics department of the company, or someone who has a leadership role who is, you know, interested in humanism. That is a tough question. The other issue is what the students and the parents expect to get out of their tuition dollars and the debt that they’re going to be in.

Brian Keating:
They’ve got debt we can’t discharge in bankruptcy. It’s the only form of debt you can’t. Tuitions are rising faster than inflation, you know, in most private institutions like, like yours, right? So what kind of product are they getting? I mean, do we think of them as customers? And if so, to what level do you cater to the— I mean, Apple, you go down to the Apple Store, the Genius Bar, and you look at their nanoglass technology. I’m sure that’s what you do when you go to an Apple Store. But in all reality, they don’t say like, we’re gonna monitor you, we’re gonna make sure you’re not using certain tools, we’re gonna grade you, we’re gonna judge you, we’re gonna write these things that determine your future outcome. And oh, by the way, we’re gonna charge you, as I said, $250,000 or $500,000 if you’re at a private school, and it’s going up faster than inflation by a factor of 3 or something. something like that. So, and you can’t discharge the debt in bankruptcy, guys.

Brian Keating:
So, you know, take that on when you go to the Apple Store. You’d never do that, right? You’d never even set foot in there as much as you might like the product.

Darren Lipomi:
So do you buy into Ball’s cost disease theory of why—

Brian Keating:
I’m not familiar with it.

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah, so in sectors of the economy that don’t scale, so healthcare and education are the, are the 2 quintessential examples where we can— if you produce widgets and you get more efficient, you can produce 10 one year and a million a few years later. Right, but your class isn’t going to go from 10 students to a million students, but you need to survive in that economy where productivity is increasing elsewhere. And so there is an economist, Baumol, someone in the comments is going to correct me exactly the specifics of this, but it basically says that that’s responsible for the increase in healthcare and education costs because we don’t scale.

Brian Keating:
Just to push back on whoever this scholar is, Because in certain sectors of both academia, higher education, say, and in healthcare, costs don’t go up. Cosmetic surgery has gone down. LASIK has gone down. The very lasers that Bausch and Lomb makes contacts for, and part of their profits because people have LASIK surgery, so they don’t need the contacts. So that’s all gone down because it’s elective surgery. It’s not paid for by health insurance and covered by our lugubrious health sciences professionals. So how would this Balmoral or—

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
It sounds like a James Bond mansion or fortress somewhere, right? So how would they reverse? I mean, it’s not your theory, but how do they react to that? And there’s private educational institutions too that are providing services or even state, University of Florida is a very different model than University of California. So yeah, I mean, how do you react to that as a purveyor, as the supplier of some of the product and some of it is being commoditized?

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah, and I think it is, there are some who would argue that faculty, that one, there are too many faculty and staff, and two, that they get paid too much.

Brian Keating:
I think there’s way too few faculty. I think there’s way too many bureaucrats. bureaucracies, administrators, departments. No, I’m just kidding.

Darren Lipomi:
There aren’t too many department chairs. Everyone should be chair. That’s what everybody thinks they are.

Brian Keating:
That’s what everybody thinks they are, right? I watch your show, right? I learn a lot more about, you know, chemistry than I think I would do if I sat in on, you know, some of your other— So yeah, so where is this going? I mean, when you could go to AI, you can go to YouTube, you can watch Molecular Podcast, that you could do, you know, a whole university education in your pajamas for free. with no non-dischargeable student debt. Like, make the argument. I mean, I’m kind of like grasping for a lifeline here, Darren. Help me out here.

Darren Lipomi:
I mean, we’ve got to save our industry.

Brian Keating:
I think our industry is— I mean, COVID didn’t kill us. You know, nothing’s going to kill us. AI is not going to kill us.

Darren Lipomi:
Well, UCSD is still the 2nd most applied-to school in America and the country.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah. So there’s the human capital argument and there’s the sheepskin effect argument that If companies are outsourcing certification to UCSD and University of Rochester, could they have— could the students have learned the same thing? I would argue that in physics and engineering, because it would be very difficult to do that.

Brian Keating:
I have a sad obligation. I have to point out an egregious typo, an error in your book, which I missed the first time, and I’m really ashamed and humiliated, quite frankly. And it’s hard for me to do this to someone who I like, quite frankly, but you got your H-index wrong in the book. It’s not 60, it’s 63. So Darren, you’re gonna have to issue, you know, second edition. We didn’t do the patented, uh, judging books by their cover segment, so we gotta do that now.

Darren Lipomi:
Hey book lovers, we’re judging books by the covers. We know we’re not supposed to do it, but it isn’t impossible. There’s nothing to it. Let’s take a look and judge some books.

Brian Keating:
So talk us through the title, the subtitle, cover art such as it is, and what was, you know, I always say you shouldn’t, and I think I told you this, don’t write a book unless you can’t not write a book. It’s kind of like going to grad school. Like, you shouldn’t go to grad school. That should be your first default option. Don’t go to grad school. But if you can’t not go to grad school, and we have a lot of non-traditional people that go back to grad school late, and I love it, but that was because they couldn’t not go there. Talk about the book. Why couldn’t you not write this book?

Darren Lipomi:
Science Nonfiction is— the subtitle is Behind the Scenes in University Research. I can’t tell you how often I heard an incorrect definition of indirect cost recovery, and that’s why— Thank God, Darren.

Brian Keating:
Oh my God, if you couldn’t write about IDC, who would? Who would? Think of the children.

Darren Lipomi:
Think of the children. That is a microcosm of the misunderstanding of how science is actually done. And so there are fantastic resources on PBS and YouTube about the wonderful things that science produces. I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and his book, his first book that made him famous, Kitchen Confidential. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if somebody wrote Kitchen Confidential but about labs instead of about kitchens?

Brian Keating:
That was a working title for my first book, which became Losing the Nobel Prize, but it was gonna be Cosmic Confidential. It was filling this lacuna in our kind of understanding in the public, but also So kind of a jeremiad, but also a warning, but also an invitation, because it is a great job. Look, I say, I joked before, it’s the hardest 3-hour-a-week job in the world. But I also say, who’s going to be a professor? Who’s going to pay me to be a professor? You grew up working class, maybe lower middle class. I grew up fairly poor, even though my father, late father, was an academician. He was a professor. He was the youngest full professor at Cornell.

Brian Keating:
Wow.

Brian Keating:
in the math department at age 26. He was a full professor. I mean, you can’t do that nowadays, but he was— I didn’t think you could be a professor. I’m like, who’s gonna pay me to taste ice cream and, you know, like ride the roller coaster at SeaWorld all day? No one’s gonna pay me to do that. Let’s take it back to where you got your start, at least in the scientific world, which is in Boston. And one of my kind of greatest heroes, in fact, was from Boston. I think he was at Boston College. You were at Boston University.

Brian Keating:
His name was Isaac Asimov. And he not only wrote some of the greatest works of fiction ever written, science fiction, but he wrote a lot of nonfiction science. And it actually got me my deepest interest as a teenager in science, his nonfiction, his books, particularly about chemistry, which, you know, was the worst possible field for me.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
Biology was bad for me. I took AP Bio and we had to dissect a frog, and I was fine with dissecting it, but I kind of heard it scream I might have brought it back to life just to cause it more— no, I’m just kidding, PETA folks out there. But I love chemistry, but I was horrible. I mean, I couldn’t remember all these different reactions and the memorization, and, and just, you know, it just seems so formulaic. It was like I could just go to law school and memorize a bunch of laws or something. I wanted to be a scientist. Asimov inspired me. What inspired you?

Darren Lipomi:
Who—

Brian Keating:
what were some of the influences before you kind of became who you are, you know, the famous professor that you are now, and, and your your, you know, just phenomenal career. What influenced you at a curiosity-based level?

Darren Lipomi:
Asimov. Was it BU? You were right the first time.

Brian Keating:
Oh, I was? Okay, okay, great.

Darren Lipomi:
And I have read his Brief History of Chemistry cover to cover. He has all these little nuggets of science, science non-nonfiction, or non-nonfiction. I was always of the belief that science and magic were synonymous. When I would watch 321 Contact and Nature on PBS, I would just— I just conflated the two. Science, that was the only legitimate route to magic. Maybe science even was magic. And when I didn’t know what I wanted to do in science, but I had a fantastic high school teacher. This is a very common story.

Darren Lipomi:
We have people who inspire us in the classroom, and I had— it was no different for me. I had a teacher in high school. I took the regular 10th grade chemistry and then AP chemistry from him the following year. And he had a way of imbuing atoms and molecules with human-like characteristics. And that is where somebody like me, who wasn’t maybe so great at thinking about equations and things that were very abstract, but also not somebody who wanted to memorize a biology textbook, because there’s a lot of memorization in biology. And so for me, chemistry was the center of the bullseye, But I can understand how other natural scientists gravitate toward physics or biology.

Brian Keating:
You had this really cool experience as a kid. I had a cool experience with a telescope as a kid that got me into the career that we have today, which, you know, as I often say, is the hardest 3-hour-a-week job in the world. You had an experience with a type of observational telescopic device or televistic device. Talk about your exposure, you know, this kind of chance exposure that got you into the important career that you have, but the most important thing that, you know, 2 white guys with a microphone can do— podcasting. So talk about this Fisher-Price, you know, video camera and how really what should parents do if they want to create a young Darren LaPomi, you know, a young Brian Keating, God forbid. Tell me, what are some of your pieces of advice as a parent who’s also a professor?

Darren Lipomi:
In the late ’80s, Fisher-Price came out with this PXL-2000 camcorder. It was a black and white camcorder that would take high-fidelity audio tapes. tape, run it really fast, like as fast as a fast forward, to get all of the, you know, to get the data rate high enough, and it would record 10 minutes of black and white video on each side of an audio cassette. The images were terrible, it sucked up light like nobody’s business, you needed— So my dad had an early cartridge video camera, like film video camera, and we used halogen lamps that he had just to get enough so that it wasn’t a black screen.

Brian Keating:
So burnt.

Darren Lipomi:
Right. And so I had my stuffed animals act out scenes from Star Wars, and that was my, my earliest exposure to video and audio production. The other ancient piece of technology that I had was a 1980 desktop computer that a family friend absconded with from Kodak. So they used to dump their old equipment and— In the river. Right, in the river, in the Tennessee River. And so we ended up with this thing, and when you turned it on, it would go like that. It would sound like the Millennium Falcon taking off. You needed a 5¼-inch disc to boot it up.

Darren Lipomi:
So, you know, what do I do with my own, my own child? You know, she’s 7, and we, we are interested in in creativity and science. So we have a sewing machine, a 3D printer is on its way. We watch a lot of builder videos. She wants to make animatronics from Poppy Playtime and other things that I shouldn’t be letting her play. But that’s, I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but that’s what we’re doing as scientist parents.

Brian Keating:
One of the last organic chemists that I talked to was Tom Cech, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on RNA. and his book, The Catalyst, which is a phenomenal book, very much kind of Asimov spirit. But in the conversation we had on the podcast, he spoke about, you know, kind of his philosophy, at least as a scientist, was, you know, basically, if you’re gonna do one thing, do it extremely well, do it better than anyone can. What’s your one-sentence teaching philosophy?

Brian Keating:
And maybe one sentence on research too.

Brian Keating:
I’ll give you 2 sentences.

Darren Lipomi:
In teaching, one wants to get the students to, do their own work. When I was in school, I would go to the lecture, I would not have read the chapter ahead of time, and 60% of it would just straight over my head. Then when I would go home or back to my dorm room, I would do the problems in the back of the book, and I would transfer them to note cards, and I— and that’s when I would do the real learning, right? But I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t care. And maybe so the effective professors were the ones that I wanted to I wanted to— I viewed them as a role model. I wanted to please them. I didn’t want to get an embarrassing grade on an exam. I was excited by their passion for the material, and that made me want to do it myself. I’ve never been somebody who could just absorb something from a lecture and take a test on it.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Darren Lipomi:
Research. Find a skill at At the intersection of 3 or more interests that no one else is working on. And no one else is working on will come automatically. So I am a decent organic chemist. Let’s say out of physical scientists, I’m 1 in 10. Let’s say I know something about mechanics, but I’m not as good. Maybe I’m 1 in 5. So now I’m 1 in 50.

Darren Lipomi:
but I really am interested in neuroscience, and so I don’t even have to be that good at neuroscience. I just have to have read a couple textbooks and be willing to talk to neuroscientists, so maybe I’m 1 in 2. Now I’m 1 in 100 at the intersection of mechanics, organic chemistry, and neuroscience.

Brian Keating:
The Shohei Ohtani of this amalgam that you’ve made.

Darren Lipomi:
Yeah, and that’s exactly what my lab What my last 4 research grants have been on is perception of the mechanical— the organic media as mediated by mechanical forces.

Brian Keating:
I had a guest here sitting in that chair, Nikolai Kakhushkin at NYU, said in Russian, like, carbon, like, has a name or an analog. It’s like the aggressor, you know, and then oxygen is like the devastator. Or no, carbon’s the assembler and they’re like oxygen’s the devastator, and you put them together with a little hydrogen and you get the the, just the mellifluous world that we’re, you know, kind of, uh, just so privileged to be a part of. And we’re so privileged that you came back on the, on the show and came back to San Diego. And congratulations on all your success. It’s, uh, it’s just, it’s just wonderful to watch you, you know, develop and grow. And, you know, it’s kind of like you, you recruited, you know, Fernando Tatis from the White Sox and get to watch him play for the Padres, as I did last night. You know, he still hasn’t gotten a home run.

Brian Keating:
But Darren LaPoma, professor, chair, Love, homie. It’s so great to have you back. Congrats on all your success. I wish you continued success. And hopefully you’ll come and visit. Maybe I’ll come back to Rochester and get some beef on weck with you. Probably in the winter. I’d really like to go there in the winter.

Brian Keating:
That’s my dream.

Darren Lipomi:
Just eat snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

Brian Keating:
Ice skating.

Brian Keating:
Exactly.

Darren Lipomi:
All right.

Brian Keating:
We gotta get you on a flight. Thank you so much for coming out. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome back to San Diego and have a great trip back.

Darren Lipomi:
Thank you.

Brian Keating:
Thanks, Darren.

Brian Keating:
Darren just told us that most people shouldn’t even go to college. Well, he’s running the department that recruits them. If that changes how you see a degree, subscribe and turn on notifications and leave a comment. Would you tell your own kid to skip college? For the flip side, Nobel laureate Tom Cech told me why RNA might be more important than your diploma. It’s linked right here. Thanks for watching. See you next time. And please don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe.

Brian Keating:
It really does help me out with the algorithm that determines YouTube performance. See you next week on Into the Impossible.