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Ep. 5 Melissa Moore On Why We Need Compelling Stories In Science Communication
107 Plays10 months ago
Melissa Moore is a pioneering scientist and an engaging storyteller. Join us as she discusses how compelling storytelling in science communication can drive scientific innovation to transformative change.
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Transcript
Introduction to Spark Time and Mission
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Spark Time. I'm Dani Stoltzfus. And I'm Will Riddle. Of Mighty Spark Communications. Our mission is to use scientific innovation to drive transformative change. We believe that compelling storytelling is the most effective tool we have in our arsenal to motivate and inspire audiences to invest themselves in audacious goals. We are scientists by training, storytellers by experience, and entrepreneurs by nature. Let's get started.
Favorite Episode Reflection
00:00:28
Speaker
I probably say this like every week, but I think this is my favorite episode yet. I had so much fun in this conversation. Melissa is so eloquent in the way that she speaks. I could totally listen to her for hours. Well, what did you enjoy about this conversation?
00:00:44
Speaker
I agree, Dani. She is so charming and I really enjoyed talking to her. I loved how she gave us a peek behind the curtain as to what was happening at Moderna during the pandemic and the development of the COVID vaccine. Obviously, there were so many heroes involved in that effort.
00:00:59
Speaker
Agreed. I can't even imagine the sheer exhaustion that that team was feeling during that time. It truly is inspirational. I also liked how Melissa referred to the Moderna Swarm. I now have this image in my mind of a team of bees buzzing around a hive, working in synergy for the benefit of all the hive. Well, I do love a good bee story, but let's save the honey for the interview.
Melissa Moore's Contributions to mRNA
00:01:25
Speaker
Today we're joined by Melissa Moore. Melissa is Chief Scientific Officer Emerita of Moderna. From 2016 to 2021, she led the early stage research teams developing Moderna's platform technologies and mRNA design and delivery. These technologies were foundational for Moderna's ability to rapidly create a highly effective vaccine against the causative agent of COVID-19. Her recent TED Talk is among the 10 most watched of 2022.
00:01:52
Speaker
Dr. Moore is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of the RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Melissa joined Moderna in 2016 from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she was a professor and a longtime investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or HHMI.
00:02:13
Speaker
Melissa holds a BS in chemistry and biology from William and Mary and a PhD in biological chemistry from MIT. Her passions include educating the public about the coming age of nucleic acid medicines and increasing diversity, equality, and inclusion efforts at all levels of the biotechnology workforce. Hey, Melissa. How are you today? It's so great to have you.
00:02:33
Speaker
I'm great, and I'm really happy to be here. So thank you for inviting me to be on Spark Time. Absolutely. So Melissa, we'd love to hear more about your journey.
From Enzymes to RNA: A Scientific Journey
00:02:43
Speaker
Could you tell us what it is about RNA that has you captivated throughout your career? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks. I am somebody who can get interested in a lot of different things. I was originally trained as a biochemist studying protein enzymes, but I started working on RNA as a postdoc in Phil Sharp's lab at MIT.
00:03:03
Speaker
And RNA, once you start working on it, it is captivating because like proteins, it can assume 3D structures, but it's more predictable because it has base pairings. There are some rules to how it might fold up. And it's just such an interesting molecule. And at the time I started working on it,
00:03:24
Speaker
We didn't realize how involved it was in so many different aspects of biology. But over the years, of course, many, many other things about RNA were discovered. And it's just gotten more and more exciting over time.
00:03:40
Speaker
Absolutely agree. And I have to say, my experience with RNA is probably less happy in doing a lot of RNA extractions for RNA-seq. And I think of it as a very fickle molecule. So I admire you a lot. So you were an HHMI investigator for such a long time. Now, what was it about Moderna, which at the time was still a private company, drew you out of academia and into biotech?
Moving from Academia to Moderna: A Career Shift
00:04:05
Speaker
Well, you know, in the late 2000s, there was a lot going on with women in science and especially senior women in science. I don't know if you remember the whole Nancy Hopkins issue with MIT not providing as good of.
00:04:27
Speaker
lab space or other resources to the female professors. And, you know, I had been an investigator, a HHMI investigator for a long time. And like many of my other female HHMI investigators, we were very frustrated that there were so many companies, biotech companies being formed, but very few of them ever reached out to us for a consulting agreements or to be on their SABs or anything.
00:04:56
Speaker
And, you know, after a while, you have to stop complaining about things and do something. So I talked to my friend Anastasia Hovorova, who had come back into academics out of industry. And she just couldn't believe that I didn't have any consulting contracts. So she took it upon herself to introduce me to a bunch of companies in the Boston area. And one of them was Moderna. And
00:05:23
Speaker
I reached out to them and introduced myself and went and gave a seminar and learned what they were doing. And it was, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid. And it just was a very exciting time realizing that, wow, mRNA could be a drug. And there were, you know, two things that just made the light go off. One was that they had and others had injected naked mRNA into the
00:05:53
Speaker
leg muscles of mice and gotten luciferase activity. So that's amazing. And then realizing that almost the most abundant viruses that infect humans are actually RNA viruses. And so if viruses have been able to figure out how to inject RNA into us, then we should be able to engineer that. And so those two realizations made me realize, oh, this is going to be a thing.
00:06:20
Speaker
And at the time, I was sort of mid-career, I was 54, and we might say I had a midlife crisis. But it was just when the opportunity to join Moderna as the CSO came up, I had already by that time gotten on the scientific advisory board.
00:06:42
Speaker
Um, it just was one of those chance of a lifetime things. And I felt like if I didn't do it, um, I would just regret it. And so I made the jump. Wow. That's a, that's a fascinating story. And I could spend a whole hour talking to you about my frustrations of being a woman in science, but we should say that for a different day, but
00:07:02
Speaker
Your time at Moderna was obviously such an exciting period and we obviously know what Moderna did during the COVID pandemic and we're going to touch on that a bit later.
Effective Scientific Communication Strategies
00:07:13
Speaker
But I want to now talk about your TED Talk from 2022. We know that it's had more than 2 million views and
00:07:21
Speaker
You clearly did a fantastic job of grabbing people's attention and keeping it, and it was truly a pleasure to listen to and to watch. I especially loved how you described our bodies as being capable of making their own medicines, which follows on from some of the things you just talked about, about what got you excited about Moderna in the first place.
00:07:42
Speaker
And that's a really powerful message. So I'd love to hear what communication strategies you used when thinking about crafting such a compelling presentation like that TED Talk.
00:07:53
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of my ability to communicate comes out of, I spent the first 13 years of my academic career teaching undergraduates. And so you've got to really keep their attention, you've got to keep them entertained. Yes. And so a lot of, and then another, some of the, one of the best pieces of advice I had about teaching and, you know, really engaging people is teaching them, is to engage people in questions. So if you get them engaged,
00:08:23
Speaker
early on and get them thinking about a question, and then you kind of answer that question, and then you ask the next question. But I think there's three key things that I often tell people who are trying to
00:08:40
Speaker
increase their ability to communicate with a broad audience. One is you really have to understand your audience, and you really have to understand their baseline knowledge. So the second that you start talking about something that they don't understand, you're going to lose them, and you've lost them for good.
00:08:59
Speaker
And so that's just the key thing. The second thing is stories are compelling. So figuring how to work them in to your presentation is important, but you have to do it without it seeming contrived. So you have to do it in a certain way that it just seems natural.
00:09:18
Speaker
And then the last thing is to just give the least amount of information possible because sometimes the people who are trying to explain something, they think they have to explain things from first principles. So they've got to teach people, oh, this is what DNA is and whatever. You'll notice in that TED talk, I never talked about DNA once.
00:09:40
Speaker
And so you only want to give people the information they need when they need it and not, you know, it's not like an intro to a paper and then results and discussion, right? So those are sort of the three things that I really thought about in crafting that presentation.
00:09:58
Speaker
Wow. It's a great recipe for success as evidenced by the number of people that have watched it. And I'm sure multiple people have watched it many times just because it's so fun to listen to. And you touched on so many key points that Will and I are so passionate about. And maybe if we think about the audience for a second and obviously the audience of that talk didn't have the same level of scientific literacy as someone such as yourself or Will and I who were trained as scientists. But
00:10:28
Speaker
We know that scientific literacy is something that's really important for people in the public to have. So that's one thought that I wanted to get out there. But a second thought around that is when Will and I think about scientific literacy, we always think about it as how it pertains to communications between management teams and investors. But now I want to hear about your thoughts on the importance of scientific literacy from the perspective of a drug development leader.
Promoting Scientific Literacy and Engagement
00:10:58
Speaker
What is it that we need to do as communicators to bridge the gap between the public and the scientists who are developing drugs?
00:11:07
Speaker
Well, I think the most important thing is we need to be visible. Scientists in general are not visible in our society. And a lot of that is because, you know, we've all had experience. You go to a party, somebody asks you what you do. You say, if I were to say, I'm a biochemist, they immediately get a blank look in their eye and they're looking around thinking, oh, how can I get away? Yes, Ron.
00:11:34
Speaker
Because I just assume that I'm not going to be interesting to talk to because I'm going to be this introverted scientist, right? And so you have to figure out ways not to immediately turn people off. And it's really sad that people aren't intrinsically interested in science because science is what makes our world tick.
00:11:54
Speaker
you know, gives us all these amazing technologies that we have. And it's too bad that somehow during their education process, so many people are just, you know, think that they won't be able to understand it or you're going to be, you're going to talk over their heads or whatever. And so you have to, again, get them engaged in a question before trying to communicate anything scientific. And one of the things that really impressed me a number of years ago
00:12:20
Speaker
Mary Woolley from Research America came to Howard Hughes, one of our conferences one time, and she was talking about how we as scientists need to be more visible. And she gave me a line that I use all the time now. And so if somebody asked me what I do for a living, I say, I work for you.
00:12:40
Speaker
And that immediately engages them because they're like, what do you mean? How do you work for me? And so when I was an academic scientist, I would say, well, I'm, you know, I have a big research lab, I get funding from the NIH, you're a taxpayer, and so therefore I work for you.
00:12:56
Speaker
And so then they start asking me questions as opposed to me telling them, you know, starting out saying what I do. But that's just so important that we need to be out there and be visible and to make people realize that we're real people who are in, you know, around them.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, and this is, again, another topic I could probably talk with you about for another good hour or so. But Will and I are constantly talking about how, as scientists, we're not trained to talk about ourselves and what we do in a positive light. And we're often quite introverted due to the nature of the people that are attracted to science. And so there's a real skill involved in knowing how to be visible and how to talk about what you do so that it is engaging.
00:13:46
Speaker
really fascinating topic. Yeah, and I think that one of the things to always be thinking about is you really need to be able to explain what you do to your mother or your grandmother, who are not scientists. It does not fair if they're scientists, too. And if you can figure out ways to do that in a short,
00:14:07
Speaker
way, it's sort of an elevator pitch, but is in plain language. And as I'll talk about a little later, using analogies that people can understand, then that's just so important. But you have to have thought of that ahead of time and sort of have that in your back pocket to use with people. Yeah.
00:14:29
Speaker
I love that concept and I'm such a big believer in using analogies. I remember at one point in my career during my PhD, I started using analogies to describe my work and suddenly my mother, my grandmother were totally on board with what I was doing and it was so powerful. So totally appreciate that.
00:14:47
Speaker
So Mighty Spark, so Danny and myself, our mission is to communicate the value of using scientific innovation to drive transformative change. And of course, your work at Moderna, I mean, there's no better example than what you did there. So if we can reflect on your time a little bit as a leader there at Moderna,
00:15:08
Speaker
within the management team, what do you believe the three biggest hurdles are today in translating scientific innovation from the bench to a patient?
Challenges in Bringing Innovation to Patient Care
00:15:20
Speaker
I think that one of the biggest hurdles is that we have a tendency to use words that people don't understand. And so my example is mRNA. I mean, until COVID, until the vaccines, most people had never heard of messenger RNA. And it was scary because what is this thing, this new thing that you're putting into my body?
00:15:43
Speaker
And one of the things I try to communicate in that TED Talk is, well, gee, there's a lot of messenger RNA in your body already, and you're eating it all the time. And so just because you haven't heard of it before doesn't mean that it's something foreign and scary and stuff. So we need to do a better job first telling people that whatever that technology, especially these biotechnologies,
00:16:10
Speaker
are things that are, you know, around them constantly, that they're constantly taking them into their body anyway, and that we've just learned to manipulate them. But I think that the other thing is, again, going back to this analogy is, you know, putting
00:16:27
Speaker
things in context that the ordinary person can understand, and so drawing analogies from real life. One story that I like to tell is I worked at the Center for Cancer Research as a postdoc, and my mother would ask me, well, what cancer are you trying to cure? And I would tell her, well, mom, I'm not really working on cancer. I'm
00:16:47
Speaker
working on RNA splicing and that, you know, what is that? And she just couldn't, it was a very esoteric concept. But when I figured out a way to explain it to her, I said, you know, you drive a car and
00:17:03
Speaker
do you fix your car when it breaks?" And she said, no. And so you take it to the mechanic and how does the mechanic know how to fix it? And she said, well, the mechanic, you know, there's a parts manual and they know how to fix it. And I said, well, we weren't put here with the parts manual. And so somebody's got to figure out how all the parts, what all the parts are and how they work, even at the molecular level before we can learn how to fix it when it goes wrong. And so she understood that concept
00:17:29
Speaker
And so then it was like, oh, oh, so you are doing something important. And so that was, you know, eventually how I was able to get through to her. I resonate that message of, oh, you are doing something important. I feel like that's been most of the last 20 years of my life is trying to tell people that what I'm doing is actually worthwhile. So I will remember that analogy story next time. I might even steal that one for myself.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a friend of mine works on fruit flies and in fact, her grants were pointed out by some people in the administration as, why are we giving all this money to work on fruit flies? Well, we've learned an incredible amount from fruit flies that has helped us develop new medicines and so we need to be able to explain that to people. So true. We spent a lot of money on worms and fruit flies.
00:18:23
Speaker
The nice thing is nobody really cares too much about worms and fruit flies if you're doing experiments on them, which is a good thing. Yeah, that is very true. So I want to come back to being a scientific leader. And obviously, you had a very large team when you were working on the vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scaling Up COVID Vaccine Production
00:18:45
Speaker
So I'm curious about some of the biggest challenges that your team faced. And maybe you could give us a couple and help us understand as their leader, how did you use all of these tools to overcome those challenges?
00:19:00
Speaker
Sure. So, the part of Moderna that I oversaw on a daily basis was called platform research. And platform research was the part of the company that developed the technologies that enabled the making of the vaccine. So, for example, like how do you design a good mRNA sequence or how do you
00:19:21
Speaker
formulate it to get it into the right cells to then get a good response. And so a lot of the stuff that my team had done actually had been done years before and it was just ready to go. And so where we really needed help at the time that we decided to
00:19:42
Speaker
go after and make the COVID vaccine was Moderna had been in clinical trials with for several vaccines for several years, but had never made more than, say, a thousand clinical doses at a time. And all of a sudden, we need to make millions and millions of doses. And so the real challenge at that time was how do we scale that up? How do we develop all the quality control assays to ensure that the product that we're shipping out is good quality?
00:20:12
Speaker
And so it was really a part of the company called Technical Development that was desperate for people who understood the technology to come over there and help. And so the thing that we did is I lent a bunch of my people to Technical Development and they went and just helped that part of the company.
00:20:36
Speaker
And so I think in Moderna, we have this thing we used to call the Moderna Swarm. And then when there was a particular problem and we saw it as an existential problem, we would swarm onto that problem and everybody would work on it and solve it very quickly.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so I think the key to innovation under pressure is really a flexibility and a willingness to help out wherever is needed and not just be saying, oh, well, these are the goals that I set for this year. And I've got to make sure that my team does it. It's really about, OK, this is what the company needs right now. Let's move resources to do whatever it is that is really crucial for the company. So true.
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think that must really also speak volumes to the culture that was established at Moderna that, you know, swarms were possible. I mean, I can imagine work environments where people would be really resistant to that. So I hear that the culture of the company was also really valued and it sounds like you had a really amazing team.
00:21:43
Speaker
I did. And just I can't say enough about my coworkers. I mean, then the people who really, really put in the time and worked hard were the manufacturing folks. I had one colleague who didn't take a day off for over a year. I mean, literally 365 days working around.
00:22:02
Speaker
the clock and really sacrificed himself and his family. But everybody within the company was just full force. What can we do? We've got to get this done. We just really felt that it was our obligation, too, because we knew the technology worked and we just felt we had to get it done. So it was an incredible time.
00:22:30
Speaker
Such a heroic effort. So amazing.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, I completely agree. It gives me chills just listening to you talk about it to, to have been a part of that. I could only imagine and maybe someday not in such dire circumstances.
Post-Retirement Plans and Future Endeavors
00:22:44
Speaker
I get to be part of such an amazing team. You know, I, at the moment, I only, I get to work with Will and we'll just leave it there perhaps. But in all seriousness, you know, I know your journey at Magena sounds like it was so fulfilling and so
00:23:02
Speaker
enjoyable in so many ways. And we know now that you've retired as a CSO there, so I'd love to hear what's next in your journey, Melissa. Sure. Well, I've had just a number of operational roles throughout my career, first running a big academic research lab and then running a large part of the research and development team at Moderna. And so I really, again, going
00:23:27
Speaker
Back to my original reason for joining Moderna, a part of it, which was to have more women involved at the advisory roles in board of directors and also founding companies. You know, I really believe that you need to put your foot in there and
00:23:47
Speaker
establish yourself and then help other people along. And so now I don't have an operational role. I have advisory roles. So I'm on the board of directors of a couple of private companies. I've actually been involved in founding a couple of companies.
00:24:03
Speaker
Two of them came out of work started by my lab at UMass. I'll just tell you about two of them. One is Comanche Biopharma, which is developing a treatment for preeclampsia. And that's a whole other story that we don't have time for today. But I had preeclampsia 20 years ago and ended up meeting the
00:24:23
Speaker
a doctor who had discovered what the cause is. And over time, we worked to develop a treatment. And so now it's now in clinical trials. So I'm very excited about that. And then the other is VIA Scientific, which is a company that's a software as a service company to help researchers integrate all kinds of different omics data and be able to analyze them and do artificial intelligence analyses and things.
00:24:52
Speaker
Those are sort of the two places that I'm really putting. And then finally, I'm also still working on educating the general public. So I'm putting the finishing touches on an online course that's destined for Coursera. It'll be free. And I've been working with folks at Moderna on how proteins and mRNAs are used as medicines. And so trying to, for people that are interested, get them to have a much deeper understanding than that TED Talk of how it all works.
00:25:22
Speaker
So, that's mostly what I'm doing. And then last thing is I'm a big poker player, so I end up playing a lot. Well, it certainly sounds like you're keeping busy and continuing to add a lot of value to the scientific community and the public at large. So, you know, it's really wonderful to hear all of your current endeavors and I'd love to catch up with you in the future and hear more about them because it sounds like you're continuing to do great things.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yes, thank you. And thank you for having me on. It has been a lot of fun. Yes. Thank you so much, Melissa. We've really loved having you. If I had to summarize the most important messages for our listeners, I think the most valuable advice that Melissa gave us was to engage your audience with a question. Reflecting on that, it's actually really hard as a listener to tune out when someone poses the question. You're inherently inclined to want to know more.
00:26:16
Speaker
Oh, I thought you were going to finish that sentence by engaging me with a question, so not interested anymore. Just kidding. I found that valuable as well, but also that you should do it right from the beginning of the conversation. And if you don't, you run the risk of losing people for good, especially if you couple that with speaking in a language that goes beyond the baseline understanding of your audience.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yes, meeting your audience where they are is so critical. And one of my pet peeves is when people use jargon that is super specific to their niche. It's like, come on, I get that you know the lingo, but throw me a bone already. Sorry, I was trying to think of a good joke, but unfortunately I don't have any good bone jokes today. Maybe if I did, I would be more visible as a scientist.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yes, I would totally pay you more attention if you had better jokes. Okay, enough teasing. Join us next time as we talk about powering scientific innovation with storytelling to drive transformative change so that we can solve our most demanding challenges.