Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to today's episode of The Bench to Border and Podcast. I am your host, Cynthia Steele, and today's guest is a very dear friend of mine who I worked with for a few years.
We both got our first jobs out of our postdocs at the same company in the same position. In fact, I interviewed her for her position, and her name is Dr. Alice Weiss Jackson. Alice is originally from Ireland, and she did her undergraduate and her PhD work in Ireland and then did her postdoc at the University of Washington in neuroscience, where she met her husband and built her family. And she still lives now working as a medical science liaison. And I really wanted to have Alice on because a lot of trainees are very interested in the MSL position.
They don't necessarily know what it's all about, but they know it's something that they hear a lot about, and it sounds really intriguing. And so as you'll hear from Alice and I, we both did that job. There's some really good parts to it, and there's some parts that you eventually start to tire of, let's say. So without any further ado, my interview with Dr. Alice Weiss Jackson.
Dr. Alice Weissjack said. Welcome to the Bench to Boardroom podcast.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Hi. Thanks, Cynthia.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Good to see you.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: I know this is great.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: We haven't talked to each other in a couple of years, right? Except for through text.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Yes. COVID and babies.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Babies will do that.
We will get to the babies. But I know you have a four month old. And how old is Joyce?
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Joyce, she is two and a half ish.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Now two years between them. So two years. Four.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Okay. Wow. My last guest, Jacqueline Duvall, also had them two years apart, so they're like three and one now. And she said it's just chaos. Constantly, always chaos. And I asked her, is she like the dog in the burning room just going, this is fine. And she said.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: See, I'm still trying to maintain the air of my house is still tidy all the time, and I still, like, cleanliness. So I'm trying to teach the toddler to be a mini me. I don't know how well it's working. She tries.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: I think that's a more long term experiment. You're going to have to let us know how that one turns out.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen her with other kids and she's pretty bossy, but by herself.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Anyway, she's worth taking after her mother. I love it.
The girl who knows what she wants. I appreciate that.
So for our listeners who don't know you, please introduce yourself.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Okay.
I'm going to do what I normally do when I'm giving a presentation to physicians and say, I am Irish, which is the accent, and it saves people trying to figure out what's going on. I moved to Seattle seven years ago, so after I completed my PhD in Ireland, so I moved for my postdoc.
I guess where do you want me to start?
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Okay, let's start back in Ireland. So you obviously born and raised in Ireland, and you, I guess, talk about your education there and up to your.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Went to I did my schooling and undergrad. I went to a college called Trinity College, Dublin, for my undergraduate. I did a neuroscience degree, actually. I don't know if you have European listeners, but the college system there is a little bit different. I went straight into a science degree, and then I specialized my third and fourth year in neuroscience. So all of my four year degree was all science based, which makes you pretty specialized, which means that your PhD, as a result, is a little bit different after graduating.
Trinity is a good university, but it's very academic. And they say at the end of your year, everybody thinks they're like, basically no one thinks that they can get a job apart from if they have a Master's or further research or do a PhD. So I remember coming out of my undergraduate being like, I'm unemployable, of course, which is absolutely ridiculous, but I thought that so I was supposed to start a PhD. The funding fell through, and I ended up working as a waitress for ten years.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Oh, bummer. Maybe the funding for your project or your scholarship or your stipend.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: The stipend. So how it works in Ireland, UK, is that your supervisor has the money, and then they hire a person has the money for a project. Generally, that's how it works. Has the money for a project, and then they hire someone to do that project. So I had been offered a project with my undergraduate supervisor, and he was a Nevada researcher.
He was doing good research. I liked it, and he'd offered me a place. And I remember I was traveling for the summer, and I was going to come back and start my PhD, and it was great. And then I got this email while I was in Belize, of all places, being like, sorry, funding fell through. Good luck.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Were you like, I'm just going to stay here in Belize and teach surfing.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: I was working with monkeys and manatees at the time. I was volunteering, so it was pretty amazing. But I was like, I'm gonna, you know, let's have a few I had a few beers that night.
I went traveling, and like, I was like, Well, I guess I'll just go home and figure it out. I'll get a job and apply for other jobs.
It took a while to do it. I knew I wanted to do a PhD at that point.
And unfortunately, PhDs generally start on the academic timeline. So I was coming home in November. There weren't any jobs. There weren't any PhDs to be had that I could see. So I applied for everything and anything, and when it rains, it pours. Finally, when it came about May, I finally started getting kind of callbacks, and someone offered me this place, my PhD position that I subsequently he was great. I went and moved down to Cork, which is in the southwest corner of Ireland. And it was a project that he had. It was a three year PhD. Again, very different to yeah, you're looking.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: At oh, my God.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: I knew one woman in graduate school who got her PhD in four years, and she did it by basically sleeping in the residence quarters in the burn unit. She worked constantly, and I think she still got done in, like, four and a half or something.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: It's different.
I had some credits to take, but not a lot.
In fact, actual fact, I signed up to teach labs and to give demonstrations, and when my supervisor found out about it, he was really mad because he was like, this is taking time away from your project, which is what you are being paid to do. I signed up because I got extra money. Yeah, right. So I was on a PhD student, and I needed the money that they're.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Broke in Ireland as well as in the US.
Worldwide.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I was on 18,000 for my PhD, and that was actually one of the higher end life ends.
So funny. But I lived in a very cheap city.
I think at one point, I paid rent of, like, 300, so there were a lot of things going for me. You learn to budget, one thing the PhD does for you. So sorry, we're getting sidetracked.
I moved to Cork, started this PhD. Yeah, it was three year PhD, and I had to be in and out. Like, I had funding for three years.
As I say, European academia is different.
It was a lab. I was my supervisor's, 27th PhD student, I believe, and he retired shortly after I finished.
He had it dialed down. He knew exactly what he wanted in who he was looking for. He didn't care that I wasn't necessarily top of my class. I was just always, like, for instance, when I was giving my resume to him, I did fine in my end of year exams, but I always did really well at my project, for instance. Right. And he was like, that's what I care about. I want to know that you're good at projects and you can get through, and then you chat to someone, you can find out whether or not they're a good fit for your lab.
So it was in court, which I didn't necessarily want to be, but it was a small city. I was going to be there for three years. I was there to get my PhD done, and I did it.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: So I moved down, and it was in Ophthalmology, which I knew nothing about, absolutely nothing about, and I just fell in love with it. It was looking for.
I refer to Ophthalmology as, like, lazy science as a joke.
But I liked it because I could look at the eye in isolation. I didn't have to worry about the rest of the true you do something to the body, but all you care about is what's happening in the eye. And it's a pretty protected organ. So if you inject something into the eyeball, it's quite unlikely to go up unless it's specific things. Obviously, there's caveats.
You don't have to worry too much.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: That's true. Isn't it true that the eye is the only place where you can see essentially into the brain without making any sort of incision? Because the retina is technically part of the diencephalon, I think. Right. It's all from neurocrust cells. So as I understand it, the retina and the optic nerve the optic nerve sorry, we're going to get really geeky here. The optic nerve is technically myelined by oligodendrocytes and has all the surrounded by the three meninges. So technically, yeah, if you look into the eye, you're sort of kind of looking into the brain.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Well, your photoreceptors are all neurons.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, they're all neurons. Except for your Mueller cells are basically glia. But otherwise, yeah.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: That's awesome.
And what I've subsequently learned at conferences and such is that a lot of people who are working on the brain end up in ophthalmology as, like, a test subject, like, does it work here? And then maybe we can go into this.
So I loved it. I did a three year PhD.
My opinion is that there's two ways to do science in academia. You can do my supervisors, my PhD supervisor's way of publishing a lot in lower tier journals, and so, for example for example, I was first author on five papers throughout my PhD, and then lower tier authors on a couple of other ones as well. Or you can work your ass off and get maybe first author on a big name journal, which, realistically, if you're going for a Nobel Prize, I know which way you should go. I'm not that smart.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Which do you think is more beneficial, having lots of papers by the time you're done or having a nature paper?
[00:12:11] Speaker B: That's a good question. Probably if you're going. It depends what your end game is. Academia, the nature paper. But how many people are going to get a nature paper out of their PhD?
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Very few.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: So I know what I would rather have rather than going for even the impact factors of 8910, for instance, and one of those, I had five at three to six.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: It's an interesting way of looking at science. For me, it made my job hunt pretty easy. I knew that I was very employable because I had a track record of being published. It also made my transition to my postdoc lab incredibly difficult.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Oh, dear. Okay.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Because my postdoc supervisor did not work the way that my PhD supervisor did.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: So, for a second, before we move on to your postdoc, I do want to ask you because I ask all of my guests this question. While you were busting your butt over the course of three years in Cork on your PhD, when you had those days that you were just going to drop it all and throw it all away, what were you going to go off and do? What was your dream job?
[00:13:23] Speaker B: I have thought about this question so much since I heard you ask it to other guests. I don't know if I have.
I always wanted to go off traveling, and I think I had this alternate life of being a woman about town, living in New York City and being a business exec and wearing cute little heels and mini skirts or whatever, but it was just a different life. It wasn't the career path that I'd chosen. I did a science degree, and I'd worked as a waitress, and I knew, God, I didn't want to do that again.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: This might be interesting, though, because if you think about it, you told us that your time in university was all very science based, and so by the time you get to grad school, you're pretty committed at that point. Whereas in American PhD system, you do your four years, and a lot of that time is taken up by general credits. For some reason, you still have to take another English class, and you have to take a social science and a foreign language. At least I did in my school. I went to a Lutheran school, so we needed eight credits of religion courses, including Religion 101. So there was a whole lot of extra padding that went in there. And so by the time I got to grad school, we have the two years of just taking, again your fundamentals, like your biochemistry, your physiology, immunology, things like that. And then by the time you get to your comprehensive exam, that seems like that's when your PhD actually starts, because that's kind of when our PhD technically starts. Once you pass your comprehensive exam, now you're a PhD candidate, but leading up to that time has just been so much fluff and so much and how.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Long does it take you to take your comprehensive exam? How many years, PhD student, before you do that?
[00:15:26] Speaker A: So you do two years, and then you take your comps at the end of two years and yeah, that's how it goes.
My niece actually passed her comps just a couple of months ago, and we had a big celebration over text, because that's a huge hurdle. Once you pass your comps, then you're officially a PhD candidate, and that's kind of when the clock starts, so to speak, on your PhD time. So leading up to all that time, you have all this fluff, and you have all this time to think about kind of the things that you want to do. So I feel like maybe you bypassed all of that.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I did, which is probably where you get the thought of, I'm going to give this all up? Because you've been at it for four or five years and you're not getting paid, and you're in there every day and things don't work.
I had an end in sight the whole time. I was constantly being told my supervisor had a paper a year. He wanted everyone to have at least two papers, if not three, by the end of their PhD. And that was going to be your three chapters for your dissertation. And then, okay, so you, like, did not have a daydream.
No.
Okay. But that's how I work as well. So I liked it. I didn't want to be in the lab if I wasn't doing something.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: So while that's going on, are you feeling at that time that you definitely wanted to go into industry, or did you enjoy that?
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Not at all, really? No, because I loved it so much, and it was successful. Obviously, things didn't work. Of course things don't work, and you pivot. But because I liked it so much, I thought I was going academic. The whole hog.
I was like, this is what I want. I'm going to create my own lab. I'm going to find all these new medications, I'm going to do disease research, and I'm going to go as a European researcher. You should work in the States if you're going to go into academia, which you absolutely should. The science going on in the States and in American universities is world class. It's amazing. And that's why I moved. I was lucky. I had a green card. I could basically move anywhere in the States, so I didn't have to get a PhD that could also have a non resident person. So I was in a really nice position, but I thought I was going to academics, so I went and applied for postdocs.
And at this point, this is where you start making those decisions, and this is where the dichotomy between the European and the US system really played out into my career path. My supervisor knew that I wanted to do academia, and he was supportive of it. He actually generally directed people towards industry.
Yeah, I know that's quite different to what a lot of people I've heard, but he knew I wanted to do academia. My track record was decent, and I loved the eye. So I was going to apply for Ophthalmology postdocs, and he, with the best of intentions, said, no, don't do that, because as soon as you go into a postdoc in Ophthalmology, that means you're only ever going to get grants in Ophthalmology.
And in Europe, that's a limited pool of resources. In the US. There's a lot of money in Ophthalmology. In Europe. There isn't. And at that time, I didn't know that my life was going to be in the US.
So I took note of that. It seemed like good advice to me. And in Europe, you do multiple postdocs. So you get training in a lot of different in the US. You go into your postdoc, and that's kind of where your career takes you, right?
So I applied for postdocs in areas that it was my lack of knowledge that I applied for postdocs in areas that I didn't necessarily care that much about. Okay, so it was a mistake. Right, but you live near learning. Yeah, and I'm subsequently grateful for that mistake because it made my transition out of academia much.
So I applied for postdocs.
Want me to continue on with the story? Okay, so what was happening was I was coming towards the end of my PhD. I was starting to write up. I was finishing up a few bits and pieces, and I went to a conference in Seattle and in ophthalmology the biggest conference in ophthalmology research, the biggest conference of the year, is a conference called Arbo. And that year it was in Seattle, and I just really wanted to go. Seattle, to someone living in West Coast Ireland is like a metropolitan hub. I loved it. I really wanted to go.
So I got some funding to go, and I flew there by myself. I presented my PhD research. No one else from my lab was there. So I just had the week to myself in this glorious city. The sun was shining. It was like 75, 80 every day. I was out having cocktails by myself. I was people watching. I was seeing all the different neighborhoods. No one needed me to do anything.
I was there by myself. I could enjoy the lectures and then go and do things by myself afterwards.
And I just fell in love with the city. So while I was there, I did actually fly down to San Francisco for a postdoc interview in UCSF and this lab. I think those papers are subsequently being published in Nature. I can't even remember what they were doing now, but they were doing something really cool with Mitochondria.
And I got offered that position, actually.
But I remember flying home, being like, god, I really liked Seattle, though. I didn't love San Francisco. I had a friend who heard the postdoc salary, and she said, you're going to have a hard time living in San Francisco on that salary a little bit, which is funny given Seattle is just not quite as expensive, but pretty expensive as told me. She told me this. So I started thinking and I started looking at postdocs in Seattle, and I found this one that was kind of a fit for me. It had Glia, and I worked on Glia in the eye.
So I applied. I flew back to Seattle for the interview, and then the rest is kind of history. I subsequently I basically told that supervisor, hey, I have a position that is going to go to somebody else. You need to offer me this job or otherwise I'm going to go down to san Francisco.
I could do that because I knew I had a strong CV.
The lab was not necessarily a good fit for me, but at the time, I didn't care. I wanted to be in Seattle, and I thought, this is what you did. You just got a couple of different postdocs. I was like, I can transition if I need to.
So then I moved to Seattle. I took that job, moved to Seattle, started a postdoc in an area of research that it's interesting to talk about for a little bit, but it wasn't my passion.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: I remember the few years, every time that Arva was in Seattle, the weather was glorious.
The sun was out, like you're saying, it was sunny. It was like, in the mean. It was phenomenal. And as two people who have both lived in the Pacific Northwest, at least for a time, that is, not everybody's willing to move.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Everybody wants to move to Seattle when.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: It'S like and it's not indicative. You do not see Mount Rainier all the time, unlike what you might believe based on your five days there when.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: It was gloriously sunny.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: You're in Portland. You do not see Mount Hood all the time.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: It's a miracle. No, but I like seasons. I'm Irish. I have no problem with cold rain. I like seasons like that. And then I enjoy the summers, of course.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Well, the summers in the Pacific Northwest are unsurpassed. They're glorious.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: The hiking, the food, the green. Oh, my gosh, I miss it. I truly miss it every day. It's just it was so expensive.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: There's something so magical about them because, you know, you have them for a short snippet of time, you need to make the most of them. And everybody wants to meet up in the evenings to have wine in the back garden and go hiking at the weekends because everyone then goes into hibernation for the winter.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: Although, again, when we lived there, my husband did get a little tired of just constant drizzle and wiping muddy dog paws and everything else. It just got to be a little too much.
That's why we live in Florida now, where we have the opposite problem.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: No, I don't mind it.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: So you're in your postdoc, and it was a neuroscience postdoc, or what were you researching there?
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I was looking at manipulation of the brain and how it affects diabetes and obesity management. I would say it's a really interesting topic to discuss for ten minutes. Unfortunately, the models that we have and where we are in terms of the science, it makes it really difficult to study that question.
So a lot of my time was spent on troubleshooting methods, on checking out new mouse models, and what I learned was it made me realize how much I didn't know. So I came out of my PhD unbelievably cocky, and like, I can get a job anywhere. And then I realized rapidly yeah, exactly.
Rapidly realized that you are not the smartest person in this room. And wow, you haven't thought this through.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: The same thing happened to me, Alice.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: No, it did.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: The same thing happened to me because when I did my defense, my parents were there, my sister was there, and one or two of my friends completely outside of grad school. And then people came and I gave this amazing presentation that I've rehearsed like dozens of times and brand new suit and brand new heels, and I was totally feeling it. And I gave this great presentation. And then afterwards, I felt like, yes.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: I can take on the world.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Behold.
But then I went into the closed defense, where it was just me and my committee, and they shot that down so fast. Just boom, right back down to Earth.
I still remember my mentor asked me the last question he asked me was to draw.
My PhD did involve statin drugs, so it didn't involve the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway. And so he did ask me to draw the structure of mevalonate, which is the first step after HMG and HMG coay reductase. No, sorry, HMG COA reductase is the enzyme acetyl acetyl COA and something this is going to bother me now, but anyway, the two components come together to form HMG COA and then form mevalonate. And that's when the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway gets kicked off. And he asked me, Draw mevalonate. And I got up to the board and I'm trying to draw it, and he just would go, no, and I erase it.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Do it again.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: No, erase it again. No. Sit down.
I was deflated. And the worst part was, after I left the room, so they could deliberate, at one point, I heard them laughing, and all I could think of was like, they can't right? They can't fail me.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: How would they explain it to everybody?
[00:27:39] Speaker A: They can't fail me.
I just gave this incredible presentation. They can't fail me now. And oh, my God, I was having a full blown panic attack. And then they called me back in the room, and I did notice that they were passing around a form and they were signing. And then someone finally turned to me and said, Congratulations. And I just congratulations was so deflated at the end of that day. Oh, my God.
And then we had a party afterwards and everyone had champagne and they were like, Yay, congratulations. And I was like, I was not into it at that point. I was so tired. So I hear you. I think everyone has those moments where you just go from being like, I know my stuff. I'm good at what I do. Lemmy at it. I can help you. And then just, wow.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: I lived in a bubble where it was a complete bubble, and I came rapidly back down to Earth. And that's a good thing.
It needed to happen.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Is this what you meant when you said that your PhD mentor had a very different approach than your postdoc mentor.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yes, my postdoc mentor, like our lab meetings, I'm not kidding, could go on for 6 hours.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Was there at least food?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Not always, no. Actually, rarely.
It was just different, and that's not how I work. It wasn't a great fit. He's a great scientist. He's an excellent scientist doing a very difficult job. It wasn't a great fit for us. And ultimately what happened was when I finally got given my first grant, when you're postdoc, you spend your time applying for grants and writing research proposals. And again, I was writing research proposals on a topic that I was not passionate about at all, and that obviously came across.
I also didn't know what I was writing about. It was really difficult. It was difficult science.
Anyway, someone said, hey, I think she can do this. Let's give her some money to her own research. And when everyone else was more excited about it than I was, I was like this. I've got to get out that's a moment.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: And at that point.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: I was just ready to be done with earning so little money, working 60, 70, 80 hours, weeks. And look, you can spend a lot of time talking about the pros and cons of academia.
For me, it wasn't where I wanted to stay.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: All right, so where did you go to hunt for jobs, and how did you find ultimately where we met, which was your first job outside academia?
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we did. And I have such fond memories of meeting you in that interview and you being so excited about my geeking out about eyeballs.
Yeah. So I think I did the standard. I didn't really know many people who'd done industry in the US. Actually, very few, because I'd moved from a real pharmaceutical hub where most people who had PhDs were being employed on lines or various manufacturing or whatever it was.
And for me, I didn't want to go back onto a bench into a bench scientist position. So I think I was just done after those two years of my postdoc, I didn't want to do anything, so I started researching on I think it was just Google PhD. What do I do?
And the MSL position, medical science liaison kept coming up time and time again. And it was one of these, like, so you're a scientist who likes to talk to people, and you like the research, and you can explain it in layman's terms.
And it just seemed interesting. I love traveling. It was a high travel job, clearly. I like talking.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: We both do.
[00:31:28] Speaker B: We both do.
And I like having conversations. I'm a people person. So this seemed like a good fit for me, and it paid a hell of a lot better than a postdoc did.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: When I got my quote for my MSL salary, I think I actually wept because it was just, wait, I'm sorry. You. Think I'm worth how much? Because you spent so much time in academia feeling, like, so small, and you're fighting so hard and you're working so hard, and when someone finally says, this is what we think your expertise is worth, it just really strikes you in a very different way.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: I had that realization on, and you were there. The very first drinks reception I went to with B L, and it was A-B-L host executive reception. We were inviting our doctors along and sorry, I use B-L-I worked for a company called Bash Long. That's how I met Cynthia. I actually interviewed because it was a great interview.
It pretty much went along these lines.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: This is kind of how it went.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I was shocked. I think I got that job.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: I think I was shocked when the 30 minutes were up and I was like, no, we're not done talking.
But that's when you know it's a good interview.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: So I had this experience of going into Bashalam, hosted an executive reception and being handed a glass of wine, and all these people, all my colleagues kept coming up to me being like, Alice, you're the new hire. We're so excited that you're here. And I had been flown in, and I had been put up in this gorgeous hotel, and every single like, I got a taxi to the airport.
I just couldn't put into words how special that all made me feel. And I don't know if that's necessarily a good reflection on the obviously, it's a good reflection on the company. It was great that the company did that, but actually, it's a really poor reflection on academia and how you were made. I was made to feel like I needed to fight for my position there every single day, which I think you put it in a different podcast as.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Postdocs are cheap labor, unfortunately.
[00:33:47] Speaker B: Why are we made to feel that way when you're working your butt off day in, day out to progress both the Labs route and your own career?
So I looked for MSL positions is the conclusion of what happened.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: But no, I mean, I think I've covered this also in my podcast with Sarah. But when you transition out, it is kind of amazing when you start.
And I completely agree. It's a sign of a good company. I think the team that we are part of at Bauchalam was really wonderful, and the salespeople that we worked with and the marketing people we worked with were just all phenomenal. But it's different when you go into a job and you hand in a deliverable and they say, wow, this is great. Thank you so much, or you provide some insights, and they say, oh, wow, I never thought about that before. And you start getting this positive feedback. And this is where I won't necessarily use the word ego as a bad thing, but this is where your ego starts to build up a little bit. And that's a good thing because I think in academia we're so trained to be the good worker be and try not to make yourself too famous, try not to make yourself too visible. And in a lot of ways, you're not supposed to want some of these things. Like, you're saying you go to a reception at a beautiful hotel and someone hands you a glass of wine and they want to talk about science. I mean, that's not supposed to be part of your experience, but it can be. And when it does happen, it just is this feeling like, wow, I knew there was something better out here, and I knew I wasn't crazy for thinking that.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Well, what gets me is we had all these obviously everyone's trying to keep people in academia, and I understand that we need academics.
I have a good friend who is now professor in Harvard. She is a killer scientist and she is made for this. But she works unbelievably hard and she is made to research those questions. And we need people like her and many others I just wasn't made for.
And that's and that is those I wish they made it easier to stay, though. So when in Seattle and I was with the University of Washington, we'd have all these talks about why to stay in academia. And a lot of it was like, the flexibility. And I can create my own questions. And I think in academia sorry, in industry you can do that to a point as well. Obviously you have a job to do, but you can mold your own career path and how you want to do a job. And everybody does a job slightly differently. Like, every MSL, for instance, does a job completely differently. And it's fine so long as you get the job done.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you and I worked with some real characters who did things very differently from how we did them.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Yeah, you and I worked very similarly.
[00:36:51] Speaker A: Let's pick up and talk about the Medical Science Liaison job because that is something that a lot of students hear about. It sounds phenomenal because, like, you say, you travel, you meet people, you talk about mechanism of action, of drugs, and you get paid really well to do.
Like, let me ask you, what has been your experience in the MSL position? And what did you really like and what did you come to not like so much?
What's fantastic about the position?
[00:37:28] Speaker B: It is a job for I think we've discussed it for ambitious people and lazy people.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: My husband says that exactly. Yes.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: It is so ambitious. What I loved is you learn the whole medical affairs organization. You learn clinical or not even medical, just medical affairs. You learn the whole organization as pharma as a whole. You learn to work with sales, marketing, R and D, clinical managed care. It depends on your job. It depends on your company that you work for, as to the responsibilities that you have and the drug that you're working for.
I work in rare disease these days, so I do a very different job to one that I did at Baushen Lam, but I loved that aspect of it. So you're working with a lot of different people, types into a lot of different you're pulled into a lot of different things at any one time. So you're not just learning an aspect of science and then repeating it time, time and and time again to various doctors. There's a lot more to it, which I liked.
The travel initially was great.
It can wear on you.
As we discussed, I now have two young ones at home. So for me, being on the road that much is not as feasible anymore. So at BNL, I had 13 states. I was traveling three nights a week, at least every week, and I just can't do that anymore. It's not fair.
I like being home. I like seeing my family.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: That's good. You still like your children.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: That's good, right?
Apparently I want to do bath time. Who knows?
It depends on there are some people, lifetime MSLs who like doing, and they like learning a new disease state and like learning a new drug every time. I'm not going to be one of those. I'll be put it out there. But it does have if you wanted to go that route, it has a lot of flexibility, and you can create a schedule and do the job how you want to do. So for some people, it's an excellent lifetime job.
The disadvantage I see to the MSL job is it's a hard transition out of the MSL role, especially if you take multiple MSL jobs. People suddenly see you as a medical scientist, and they don't want you outside of that because you don't have the nuts and bolts of all the other things that you're working with. So you might work for clinical development, for instance, but you don't know the day in, day out of that job.
It's not impossible. By no means is it impossible to get a job outside of the MSL role, but it is a harder route.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: I think for me, it was learning that if you want to advance within the MSL role or you want to advance within medical affairs in general. I mean, what our manager at the time told me during my performance review, you know, eventually you become senior MSL, and then maybe like an executive MSL or a medical director like you are now, and maybe eventually you lead your own team. And I remember thinking at the time, this seems a little limiting. I'm not sure if that's where I want to go, but I want to go back to what you and my husband say all the time, which is, this is a great job for ambitious people and for lazy people, because as you said, you could make your schedule. You can go visit your doctors and do your spiel and have nice dinners and stay away from home. And you can make perfectly good money doing that, or you can do what you and I have done, which is meet as many people as possible, make as many connections as possible, talk to people about the research, learn about new disease states, learn about new drugs, and then use that as a springboard into something else. And I'll be perfectly honest, the last two jobs that I've had have come as a result of connections that I made through my time at.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Is.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: But then again, if you're making the transition from academia to MSL, that's a really tough transition, big time.
And maybe we should discuss that, because there's so many people I get reached out to all the time about people in academia postdocs who are like, I want to be an MSL. How do I do this? And there's no easy answer. But I spoke to maybe ten different people who were MSLs at the time, just trying to get information on it. And it frustrated me when I was talking to recruiters, and they were like, well, nobody's going to hire you as an MSL. Maybe you should go do something different first, like a medical writer or whatever, which is nonsense. They just want of course you can do an MSL position. It might be harder to get, and you have to have a company who's willing to take a chance on someone who doesn't have experience. But both you and I did it.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: We went straight.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: So for anyone doing that transition, don't give up. You can do it. Don't sell yourself short either. It might take a while. It took me eight months maybe to land my role of really solid job hunting. But I also I don't know if you did this differently, Cynthia.
I applied for anything and everything which I shouldn't have done. It was a waste of my time. Like, I applied for cardiovascular MSLs. I know nothing about the heart. Why on earth was I doing that? No one would have hired me.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: I didn't do it that way.
I made a connection at Baushan Lam before I applied for the position, and so that's how I learned about the product that we were going to be discussing the mechanism of. And then from there, he put me in touch with some people who are now mutual friends of ours, and that's how I ended up getting the position. So for me, it came about because of an initial connection.
But certainly I've known a lot of people who have done what you say. They just blanket the this most recent interview that I did with Jacqueline Duvall, one of the things that she said was, look, if you think you might be a good fit for a position, just go for mean. The only thing that you're wasting is a little bit of know a little bit of your own time to revise your resume or revise your cover letter or whatever. Shift some things around. But if that doesn't bother you, then try it.
I would still encourage people if you think that this is something you might want to do, I would say, yeah, shoot out an application and see what happens, but don't apply for things that, you know, you wouldn't like. I could never be a cardiovascular MSL. I would not have nearly the expertise to do anything related to oncology. It might be interesting.
[00:44:29] Speaker B: I guess I hadn't realized. Like an MSL role is a big expense to a company.
They put a lot of trust in us. You are handed a company credit card and told, go visit people and talk about our product.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Here are the rules that you need to follow. So it's not a blank check that you get.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: There are rules that you no, there's absolutely huge rules. But they're putting trust that you're going to do that and they're not going to get sued as a result of your action. Absolutely right. So there's a huge amount of trust that goes into that. And so you have to have coming from industry, you have to have either disease area expertise. So, for instance, Fashion Alum hired me because I had a PhD in the retina. So it worked. Right. I knew the eyeball. It's okay. I could discuss eyes. So I could go into an office and say, yes, I have a doctorate in Ophthalmology, and they would listen to me.
Or you have to have MSL experience and then so you don't have to learn how to do the job. You just learn how to learn the C state. You can't learn both things. No one's going to hire you if you don't have both one or the other. But I didn't realize that at the time, so I wasted a lot of time in.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: I mean, for me, I think a good MSL has exactly what you were just describing. This is a person who has social skills, a person who understands body language, a person who can speak about the science down in the weeds at the very molecular level. If you want to talk phosphorylation events, sure, we can do that. Or I can talk to you Mr, or really doctor, small town who sees everybody in 100 miles radius who just wants to know if it's affordable. So you could talk to all those people about how this drug or this device is worth their effort and worth trying to get for their patients.
And I think the other thing that both you and I had that really rings through to people is enthusiasm about what you're discussing. If you're genuinely excited about the science and what went into the creation of this new pharmaceutical product or this new device, I mean, I think it'll show. And that to me is something that you really pick up on, because doctors you've probably noticed this too, Alice doctors can smell BS from a mile away.
They can. And some of my doctors that I became really good friends with would quiz their sales reps on things that maybe weren't necessarily something that they always talked about because they wanted to make sure that the person they were talking to was legit.
And nothing makes you seem more legit than handing a business card over and saying, I have a PhD in the retina. I have a PhD in travicular meshwork cells. Then people kind of stop and say, so when you go back to trust, they need to trust your clients, your doctors, your optometrists, your ophthalmologists, whoever you're talking to. Need to trust that you know your stuff and you know what you're talking about. Because otherwise, you can't talk deep science to somebody who maybe doesn't have the same kind of deep research background that you and I had. So I think candidates for a good MSL would be someone who doesn't mind traveling, being away from home, someone who enjoys talking to people, who can explain things well, who enjoys being face to face or occasionally virtually with people. But what else do you think makes for a good MSL?
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you've nailed it. Also, the ability to I think the main one and you actually mentioned it is the main one for me is to be able to tailor to your audience.
Sometimes you have three minutes, sometimes you have an hour.
Sometimes someone wants to hear every single nitty gritty and every single little bit of conference, paper and publication that came out and be up to date all the time.
Sometimes they just don't care. They want to talk about side effects.
And actually, occasionally it's just if you're maintaining a relationship, say it's not just a business call at that point and you've done the business aspect of it, and then you're just having dinner and you want to have a chat. Sometimes they just need to know that you're a nice person and they can trust you and they can tell you things. So when they call you up for an answer, you're going to give them the correct answer and that they can trust your judgment on things and know that you're the person to call to make the connections. So one of the most important things I think I bring to my role is making sure my physicians know that if they call me, I will do everything in my power to make sure it gets done in as quick a time frame as possible.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: And that's a good reflection on the company as well. So I now work for a company where we have that reputation of anytime our physicians I work on a rare disease, our physicians all say, oh, that company is amazing, for they will get the job for maybe I should rephrase for I used to work for Horizon. We were acquired by Amgen recently. But anytime you talk to a physician, they're like all the Horizon individuals. Yeah, they're perfect. Leave it with them. They'll help me out.
[00:50:03] Speaker A: That puts a little extra impetus on you.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: Right?
[00:50:06] Speaker A: Like, Well, I better live up to those standards.
That's pretty lofty.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: I know. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't work as hard I shouldn't have worked as hard on some accounts because now they expected of me the whole time. But I know for every physician who contacts me, it's another patient that gets on therapy. Realistically, it helps get a patient on therapy who may not have gotten on therapy otherwise. So that's why for me, I really like working on a rare disease because it makes such a change to their life to get on therapy.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: Can I ask what is the rare disease that you work on?
[00:50:39] Speaker B: Oh, sorry. I work on a disease called thyroid eye disease. So it used to be called Graves orbitopathy or Graves Ophthalmopathy.
A lot of people have heard of Graves disease, but one of the manifestations of Graves disease is that the fat and muscle behind your eye expands and grows, and this causes the eyeballs to be pushed out. So there's a kind of bulged look to your eyes, which you used to have to go through surgery, which is a really invasive surgery. You'd cut into the skull to take out the fat. Right? Yeah.
And the outcomes weren't great. You might have to do that multiple times. Then you might have to have Lid surgery or Strabismus surgery to realign the eyeballs.
It was a nightmare.
These poor patients. I met one woman who'd had 70 OD surgeries on her eyes.
Yeah. And she's now legally blind as a result, my drug is an infused medication that basically shrinks the fat and muscle back there and brings the eye back into the head. It's amazing. I love it. I love working. Okay.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: So I see. I just want to point out that exactly what you just did, I could tell that you loved it because I could tell just from looking at you and from hearing your voice, I could hear that you empathize with these patients. You could feel how difficult that must be and how painful that must be. And so now you're providing information about an intervention that's probably very costly and could be challenging to get depending on whether you're on Medicare or you have different insurance providers. But you are there to provide the justification of why it's worth that doctor's time, why that patient deserves to have that treatment, no matter how many hurdles they have to go through. And it's nice to know that someone like you is there to provide the mechanism of action, to provide the literature, to provide any sort of other scientific backup that's necessary to help that doctor acquire that medication. And so, yeah, I'm feeling it.
[00:52:44] Speaker B: I love that they call it change champions. Something like that. Yeah, we're patient champions. I'm not I don't work with patients, but we have advocates who advocate for the patients.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: Wow. So that's awesome.
As you mentioned, you don't travel as much right now, or you're trying not to travel as much right now because you have two children.
[00:53:09] Speaker B: I'll step that back a little bit. I do travel, but I changed role to a smaller territory.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: So now I have six states, so I can do a lot of day trips.
A lot of my days look like getting on an 08:00, a.m. Flight to Portland and then back on a 04:00, running to various meetings so I could get back in time.
It's just how I manage my territory. It doesn't have to be that way. You certainly don't have to do that. I will often get on a late night flight, so I stay the night, get an early morning meeting, and then I come back.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: I ask because a lot of the misconceptions that some people have about, or at least some women have about careers in industry is they feel like they won't have any personal time or any downtime, or there's this convention of, I'll never be able to have it all. I either have to choose a career or a family. I won't be able to have both, or they may not be able to have a career that's on an upward trajectory like yours is, and also have kids at home. And so I love meeting people who have managed to do that because I think it's really inspiring to people to see that it can be done.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: It's hard, and I don't know that anybody has it all true.
I'm not at home full time. I'm missing the day to day, to be honest. I don't want to be at home full time.
I don't want to do childcare full time.
I think it's nonsense that they think that's the place of a woman. Someone would think that's the place of a woman. I feel very strongly that women should get back into the workforce in order to not exponentiate the gender divide of women leaving the workforce to have yeah.
Did you ever read the Cheryl Sandberg?
[00:55:11] Speaker A: I did not read Lean In. No.
[00:55:14] Speaker B: Lean in. Thank you.
I know it's troublesome in some ways, and she's a little bit troublesome, but there was a talk on this about whether or not women should leave the workforce or whoever it is to leave the workforce so they can. Look after their kids so they don't have to pay for daycare, but they're putting themselves five years behind in terms of the career trajectory, for instance, which is huge. And it means you can never catch that up.
Yes. I think the dichotomy across the world, actually, it's not just the US thing. In Europe, women get great maternity leave, but it's maternity leave. It's not family leave.
Okay, so maybe it should be split six months men, six months women.
I'm getting off of my soapbox.
[00:56:01] Speaker A: Here important. Another thing that someone asked me recently was in terms of the gender divide, because certainly academia is very male dominated, and I feel like an industry depending on the department. I feel like that at least that divide is not as obvious, at least where I work and where I have worked, there's almost an equal amount of men and women who do these different positions. And I think that's so important because I like how you said that you feel that women should get back to work so as to not perpetuate the stereotype of she had her kids, now she's going to stay home.
[00:56:44] Speaker B: Don't get me wrong. If you want to stay at home.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: Absolutely no one's saying that's wrong.
That is what probably you were just home for four months on maternity leave. That's more than a full time job, right?
[00:56:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's hard work. No one's ever when I came back to work, I spoke to some of my colleagues, and I was like, God, this is so nice. I remembered how much I love doing this job.
[00:57:10] Speaker A: And someone told me once they actually like going back to work because they can speak to adults, and they can go take a shower, put their makeup on, get dressed, go out and feel like themselves again. That doesn't make you any less of a mom or any less of a spouse or a caring individual. It just means that this is just another hat that you wanted to put back on. And if you don't want to put that hat back on, obviously that's your prerogative. That's perfectly fine. But I'm thinking that most of the people who are listening are the ones who will want to go back to work, and they might just be a little concerned about whether or not that's something that's feasible. And overall, I'm hearing it's feasible, but yes, it is hard. You need to have a very understanding partner.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: One of my friends told me recently that she thinks my husband is a saint. I was like, okay, well, I do a lot too.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Don't tell him that. His ego will blow up.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: She's like, I just think it's so hard being at home alone with your kids. I'm like, yes, but they're your kids, and they're his kids, and we both can equally parent them.
I will say this is number two for me, so I have a lot less mom guilt about going back to work. Number one, I felt it was hard for me to get out of that feeling of, oh, my gosh, should I be at home being a parent to this person that I brought into the some I didn't read a lot of books, but it's called Crib Sheets. I believe Emily something or another, and she is an economist who put together all of this data on how kids should be brought up and how the outcomes it's great.
And I read that and she said something about the fact there was some paper done. I didn't read my own papers, I just read her summaries. It was great.
Some paper about the outcomes of kids who are raised by their parents or by a daycare or a nanny in the house, a well educated in childcare development, nanny in the house. And there was no difference in the outcomes so long as person looking after them was fully engaged and looking after their developmental needs. So that kid doesn't need a parent, they just need someone who is invested in them.
And I think personally, I'm a better parent for being able to go out and live my own life and do my job and then come home and be a parent for a shortened period of time rather than being a parent for 24 hours a day.
[00:59:56] Speaker A: I think that's really telling because I remember meeting a woman once who said that she felt like even though her job was incredibly difficult and it required her to work all kinds of hours and early mornings, late nights, and she was a doctor. So following up with patients and writing up your notes at the end of the day, et cetera. But when she got home, she was so energized and she was tired, but she was more present for the people in her life because she had this time to flex those muscles, so to speak, and use that part of her brain, which meant that by the time she got home, she was ready. She was ready to use that other part of her brain or use those other muscles.
[01:00:41] Speaker B: I look forward to daycare pickup. I look forward to the routine being initiated. We call it initiate the routine when we get home, which is essentially you have ten minutes of play, then we start dinner time, bath time, bedtime, and it's the same routine every day, but we know it, she knows it, he will know it when he gets older, and it's fun for everybody, and kids thrive in routine.
So I guess that's us trying to have it all.
But of course there's don't we don't have because we work.
[01:01:18] Speaker A: I can't remember the name of the comedian right now, but she's going to bother me. But I saw a clip of her doing stand up and she said something, it was essentially exactly this, about having it all. And she said, you don't want to have it all. And the joke was, have you ever met anyone who's left an all you can eat buffet saying, I feel good about my decisions.
[01:01:42] Speaker B: I think I've seen that.
[01:01:45] Speaker A: And I loved that. I absolutely love that because obviously it's really funny, but it brings up a really good point. I did absolutely everything I could and I pushed myself to the limit and I made myself so uncomfortable and man, that was good.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: It's.
[01:02:02] Speaker A: Perfectly fine to leave some potential things off the table and know what your limits are. And it's also perfectly fine.
But I wanted to ask you about that as someone who's recently postpartum. I wanted to ask about coming back to work after having kids because again, I think that's just a consideration for young women who are thinking about transitioning to a career in industry and just making sure that they have the right support system in place to make that happen if that's something that they want to do.
[01:02:32] Speaker B: And I didn't grow up like that. My mother worked part time so that she could be there when we came in. And that for me, was probably the hardest decision, knowing that I'm not going to be there when she gets in, when my kids get in from school every day, for instance.
But because I'm having a career, there'll be other aspects to it that they'll be able to see and hopefully be proud of.
And also, from a working perspective, if you're earning the money, you can pay people to do things and hopefully paid good people to do good things. True for you.
I saw a conversation, it was one of these women conferences, and it was an executive talking, and she said, I pay people these days so that I have more time.
And when you get to a position where you can if you can pay people to clean your house or pay to have your groceries delivered or something, just to get time back so that you can focus on things that you really want. And that for me, it was a huge change shift when I moved to industry, suddenly I could afford these things so I could pay to have my time back.
[01:03:43] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:03:44] Speaker B: As a post officer, I certainly couldn't.
[01:03:46] Speaker A: Absolutely. In fact, my friend Julie Tatsloff, who runs her own CRO with her husband, she says something very they they stick to their routine, and she is willing to pay for certain conveniences because it allows her more time to spend with her kids and with her spouse and doing the things, like you say, doing the things that she genuinely loves to do. And so that's just a side benefit of working in an industry where you are paid what you're worth.
[01:04:20] Speaker B: It's annoying because you know, you can do these things and you know, it's a waste of money.
Like, I should be able to clean my house every week, but please, I.
[01:04:29] Speaker A: Don'T I don't even have kids and I just have nearly your cleaner is.
[01:04:35] Speaker B: My favorite person in the world. What can I right.
And it was adjustment learning that actually we have to pay for these conveniences. Yes.
[01:04:43] Speaker A: So is there anything else that you want our listeners to know or any other advice that you would want to give a young neuroscience major who's thinking.
[01:04:53] Speaker B: About who wants me an MSL?
You know what's funny?
When I was talking to people trying to become an MSL. And I was learning how people did interviews. A woman gave me what I thought was the best advice in the world, and she said, everybody listen and then don't do this. So what she told me was she was like, sometimes they don't want to talk to you about science. They just want to talk about their dog.
So you just have to learn, like, you'll chat about their dog for a bit, and then you say, okay, but next time we're going to cover XYZ. And I thought this was so insightful and brilliant as an MSL, of course, it's all about making the people connection. And so the next interview I had, it wasn't with the hiring manager. It was before I got there. It's just recruiter. And I gave her this as an example, and she said of like, how would you do the role? And I said, oh, well, actually, I think it's all about the people connection, and maybe they just want to talk about their job. And then next time you'll get to the science well, obviously I did not get a call back because that's absolute nonsense. People are a company is hiring you to do a job. They are not hiring you to talk to a physician about their pets. They want to get to the point. And obviously, on a day to day, that might be what you do, but in an interview, you want to give the perfect answer of you go in, you pinpoint what their need is, you immediately get there, and then you delve deeper into what are other aspects you could be helpful with.
[01:06:25] Speaker A: Right, absolutely.
I think that's a good approach to Mslling, because the point being let me give a better example, because even though I will talk about my dogs all day, any day pictures of your dogs, I'll show you pictures of my dogs. I mean, we'll have a great conversation, but I think there is some knowledge there to be gleaned, because if you know that you have a doctor who maybe is between patients and they're running like 2 hours behind, and they're like, Alice, you've got 30 seconds. What do you need from me? I think it's perfectly fine to say, you know what, maybe I'll catch you next time and we'll do coffee. I think that's perfectly acceptable because what you're showing them is you are respectful of their know, you're not trying to push yourself in front of somebody. And this is what Sarah Sarki and I talked about with regards to body language. If they are just not into it right now, they're literally being dragged from one place to another. Sometimes the best thing that you can do to show that you respect them as a person, you can say, you know what, let's do this next time. It's okay.
And then you go on and visit some other people who have more time for you. And I think that's perfectly fine.
[01:07:36] Speaker B: And then also, hopefully, they're respectful of your time and they won't schedule you again when they're in the middle of everything.
[01:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's true. And if a doctor is not respectful.
[01:07:46] Speaker B: Of your time, your time is valuable as well. You're taking time away from your family. You've got other places you could be.
And learning that, I think as you get more seasoned as an MSL, you realize that actually you don't have to put up with some of the things that you think you have to put up with.
And if someone consistently does that to you, don't go back to them. You don't need them. That's fine.
[01:08:06] Speaker A: It's like any relationship, you can tell if they're just not that into you.
If they keep blowing you off, that's a pretty good sign that they're just not that into you and it's time to move on. Maybe they can knock down a notch or two on your list, and that's fine too. There's other people who are lovely and interested in research and more than happy to talk to you.
[01:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And there's no point in flogging a dead horse when you can make impact in other ways with different people.
[01:08:37] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So, Dr. Alice Weissjackson, thank you so much for joining us today and letting us reminisce a little bit about the good old days at Baushalam. It was so much fun to see you.
[01:08:50] Speaker B: I think everybody says they have a good old days, don't they? It was nice. It was a good was.
[01:08:54] Speaker A: And, you know, I was just at the Academy of Ophthalmology and I did see some of the old crew and oh, yeah, a lot of hugs, lot of, oh, we missed you. It's so good to see was a it was a really good you for thank you for joining me today, and it was good to see you.
[01:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.
[01:09:13] Speaker A: Bye bye.
Thank you again to Dr. Alice Weiss Jackson for joining me today and for sharing some of those insights. And thank you all for listening.
