Aoife McLysaght recalls how she heard about her first job in genetics. It was the summer after second year in Trinity College Dublin, and she was working in her father’s wholesale nursery in Blackrock, Co Dublin. “Everybody worked there, including me”, starting with filling pots with soil from an early age. “I remember my sister running out into the nursery and going, ‘There’s some professor on the phone for you’.” McLysaght had apparently impressed genetics professor David McConnell in a problem-solving exam, and he offered her a summer research job.
Turned out this involved learning about, then designing, a bioinformatics course, using computers to analyse biological information, then a new field. “It became the thing I ended up really loving and working in, basically computational biology.” She’s now evolutionary genetics professor at Trinity.
But what tickles her, “the mental connection”, is that that day when her sister ran out, “I was sowing sweet pea”. Peas are critical to genetics. By crossing pea plants, the Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel “basically figured out what genes are, how things are inherited”. While “you can’t unmix paint”, red-flowered and white-flowered parent plants can beget pink, red or white flowers.
[ Summer of sweet peas: the struggle is worth itOpens in new window ]
This week, ahead of today’s International Women’s Day, An Post launched two new stamps to acknowledge the achievements of women in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) and the challenges they face. One features McLysaght; the other has astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
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In January, McLysaght started her new job as Government science adviser. New science advice structures, department-based – Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science – for the first time, will inform responses to complex and challenging policy issues. It’s a “60 per cent secondment” from Trinity, where she’ll pause teaching and administration but continue research. She’s led a research team there since 2003, managing €5.5m-plus budgets. As a student in 2001 she was part of the international consortium publishing the draft human genome sequence; she was first discovering novel human-specific genes in 2009, identified links between gene duplication patterns and human disease, and has significantly contributed to our understanding of genomes.
Based at the department three days a week, at assistant secretary general level, she’s assembling a new national science advice forum of experts to provide advice.
Continuing research is important (or “you lose momentum, you lose touch with the field”) and the 60/40 split is considered a good model for government science advisers, so “you retain your independence. You don’t become a civil servant who’s interested in promotion. You’re not in any way incentivised to please the people around you.”
Today we’re sitting by the fireplace of Trinity’s gracious Common Room. She gestures to ”Liz” looking down; a portrait of England’s Elizabeth I. This university is her turf since she was an undergrad (graduating in genetics in 1998, PhD in 2002), aside from a postdoc in University of California, Irvine.
She’s full of knowledge and enthusiasm, humorous, easy, insightful, likable. She laughs a lot. “I’m the one who never left college.” She grins. Arriving in Trinity, “I felt very quickly I’d found my place”. Genetics’ department culture was and is “very supportive and welcoming of students. We were just treated as people who were earlier in their career. You’d have these really good interactions and conversations with the professors. That’s very motivating.” She describes professors, undergrads, post-grads and post-docs mixing in the building’s atrium, eating lunch, chatting.
International science adviser counterparts tell her “the relationships are so important”. She observes “as a scientist or an academic, you might think you’re going to convince people because of this amazing data. You’ll just whip out a graph, and they’ll go, ‘wow, now I see it’. But actually, what’s more likely is you’ll convince them because they trust you”.
Having a foot in both civil service and academia is interesting for her. As an academic she’s hired for “the knowledge and discretion and insight to choose” what to teach or research. “In academia, the huge privilege we have is to follow your curiosity.” Civil service involves more procedures “for very, very good reasons”. In this new world, “I’m sitting in on management meetings, business planning meetings, and I’m constantly impressed by the amazing people around me” with vast knowledge, and “very good at knowing how to be effective in getting something done, at reading people, picking up on the slightest things, that I was in the room for but didn’t notice”.
The department’s new unit comprises McLysaght and a principal officer. “He’s like my subtitles in every conversation. He’s helping so much in figuring out how to structure things.
“I took on this job because I want to do something interesting and meaningful with it, not because I needed to fill my time. I had a full-time job, which I really enjoy. The first line of my application was: I love my job.”
A vaccine for cancer. That’s amazing. That some people try to undermine that is depressing
Her paternal grandfather, genealogist Edward MacLysaght, died aged 99 when she was 10. She recalls him sitting in the garden, “his beautiful books”, the photo of him with de Valera on the mantelpiece, and his trick holding a coin between his eyebrow and cheek (“we’d roar laughing”). Her grandparents lived in “a little house, basically up the back of the garden in Blackrock” and a relative, barrister Charles Lysaght, told them he’d died, then “rang The Irish Times and RTÉ. Minutes later I heard it on radio. I thought this was normal.”
Theirs was not a science family. “I never knew a scientist. I didn’t know you could be a scientist.” But it was her favourite school subject, fuelled by teacher Nick Frewin at Andrew’s in Booterstown. Looking back, she realises, within “the rather constrained Leaving Cert curriculum, he managed to emulate one of the joys of science, which is figuring things out.” She enjoyed genetics, because it involved “understanding principles and figuring things out, rather than remembering stuff. Labelling the parts of the eye. That’s just dull. Genetics was exciting, because it was about ideas and concepts.”
She worried about jobs. “My mum just said, do what you love and the job will follow. Which is very optimistic advice, isn’t it, and very brave advice.”
These days, talking to school groups, especially girls, “I’m not in the business of persuading anybody to do something they don’t want to do. Science worked for me. It doesn’t mean it’ll work for somebody else. All I want to do is let people know the door is open, if they care to walk through it. That’s all I needed.”
There’s a perception she was young to be appointed full professor in 2020. But she was 44, “older than many of my male colleagues”. She was, however, youngish becoming assistant professor at 27; she laughs about managing “to straddle that ambiguity of, is she a student or staff?”.
She spells out the startling drop-off of women before reaching academia’s higher levels. Biology doesn’t have the “systemic stereotyping” of maths, but even there, while women comprise 50 per cent of undergraduates right up to postdoctoral research, getting top grades, the percentage of women drops as soon as you get “steady conditions, no longer precarious employment”. She says “too many people thought it was a legacy problem that would fix itself over time. They were kind of passive about it.”
She married in her 20s, had her first child at 28, within a year of assistant-professorship, “when I should have been knuckling down and impressing everybody! I didn’t do the correct career thing.” She laughs. “I don’t know if I’d call it a gamble, but I decided, my life decisions and career decisions are separate.” It helped that academic careers are “judged in the round. Are you getting your job done? You organise your own time”.
As science adviser, “I don’t want to give the impression I think nobody uses evidence and I’m coming in to save the day.” But she foresees “smaller cultural shifts” in better integrating evidence into decision-making, making it “more habitual”.
Climate change has “the most urgency, and the longer we leave it untackled, the more urgent and bigger the challenge.” It’s cross-government: “it’s energy, agriculture, transport, skills and education. All infrastructure.”
McLysaght is fascinating company, knowledgeable beyond her speciality and about the bigger picture. She chats away, fired up. “I can keep you here for 10 hours, if you have the time!” We’ve moved and are looking out over Trinity’s Front Square. She talks about her “fortuitous” involvement in the genome project, how “we knew it was something momentous, we were part of the team that was analysing the human genome first”, and the significance of discovering genome duplication in human ancestors 500 million years ago, thus creating “this extra capacity for enormous diversity” and with implications for human health.
[ Gene editing opens door to new treatments for inherited retinal diseasesOpens in new window ]
McLysaght stresses “scientists are human beings. Of course we can make mistakes. People think scientists know everything. Of course we don’t. We just know a lot about a very narrow thing. People think science is fixed, never changes, but actually we’re always updating it”, what a friend calls “trying to be less wrong than yesterday”.
And while scientists can have “reasonable and plausible disagreement”, when there isn’t 100 per cent certainty on detail, “we know the extent of our uncertainty”, and there are “discussions and disagreements, constantly moving closer to the truth. You can categorically say, this is untrue, while not being 100 per cent certain of something else within that.” While this concept can be confusing, it’s important for trust in, and public understanding of, science, she says.
The false assertion that vaccines cause autism is a good example. “It’s been thoroughly investigated. It is absolutely not true, thoroughly debunked.” But it “created mistrust in vaccines, which have been extraordinarily powerful in eliminating and controlling very significant childhood diseases.” Australia has eradicated cervical cancer because of HPV uptake. “A vaccine for cancer. That’s amazing. That some people try to undermine that is depressing.”
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Talking about science is important, she says, “so people understand how we know things, and what you do when you’re trying to develop new scientific knowledge. You don’t just build something and hope it works. There’s steps and investigation along the way. We are our own first critics. When I’m trying to demonstrate something, the first thing I try to do is disprove it.
“What I’m interested in is that things work well, that science is valued as part of decision-making. What I’m not interested in is any kind of personal recognition. It’s more important to me that this thing is done and done well, than anybody getting credit for it. I don’t think I have a big ego. Maybe everybody does somewhat, but it’s not what motivates me.”
