Can you provide a quick overview of your job and what your professional journey looked like?

I was the first in my family to go to college, so I wasn’t totally sure what scientific research looked like until I was in college and started working in a lab. The lab studied fish genetics and they needed people to chop up fish to extract enzymes from them. I thought it was pretty cool, and the head of the lab seemed to be having a great time, so I thought, if you can be old and have a great time, this might be a decent job! After undergraduate school, I went to graduate school, then did a postdoc. I came to the NIH when our institute, NHGRI, was just starting. I went through tenure, became a senior investigator, and for the first 15+years, that was my main job. Then in 1995 my lab discovered there were some BRCA1 mutations that were common in people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and the implications of that discovery were far beyond my lab. If I wanted to just study the gene, I could have stayed doing that, but the discovery had implications for what we might do to prevent breast cancer. That got me started working with people from other fields like epidemiologists, social scientists, and eventually economists. At some point, that work led to me being asked to take on new responsibilities. I think it started with being asked to run the NIH Center for Inherited Disease Research which is a high-throughput genotyping and sequencing lab that mostly provides services to other institutes. Then I was asked to look after the extramural program for our division—the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research Program—which aims to foster basic and applied research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetic and genomic research for individuals, families, and communities. Eventually, I was asked to be director of our division, and I took on overseeing the intramural programs as well which were the policy and program analysis branch and the education and community involvement branch. Those branches have recently been eliminated unfortunately.

How did you feel about being asked to take on these more policy-centric roles and how did you adapt?

You’re never prepared for new big responsibilities. Any new role that’s a bigger job is a lot more work, and it will take a while to figure it out. There are two aspects to roles like this: expertise and people management. In a brand new role you don’t usually have the expertise—I didn’t have policy experience, so I read a lot about policy. A key skill is being able to know where and how to get high-quality information because a number one task of almost all “policy shops” is to gather, analyze, condense, and present information on a specific topic. That is where I developed an appreciation for good and bad policy, and I don’t mean that in terms of right and wrong, but rather how policy is formulated. In terms of people management, luckily I had been managing a lab for years, so I felt relatively comfortable managing people and building a functional team. Good functioning teams are incredibly powerful, you can go much further with such a team than you can doing things solo, and I found that I really enjoyed working with people from different fields. I knew taking on these responsibilities was going to take time away from my independent research, but what I was being asked to do was important to the research enterprise as a whole.

What have you learned about science policy that you feel is important to know for scientists who want to go into the field?

One point I make continuously is that, if you want to be good at making policy, you want to bring in people who are going to be affected by said policy. For example, when making a data sharing policy, you should get input from people who have created and shared data and those who have used shared data. The same would be true for any policy. Also, don’t be afraid of conflicts of interest, because if you’re going to be good at making policy you need to listen to lots of different voices and then figure out which ones are valid and which ones aren’t. Obviously, a policy that said you’re going to ban chocolate would have many people saying, “No!” Some of those people might be working for a chocolate company, but you still want to hear those voices. Getting a variety of voices is critically important because otherwise sometimes we put out policies that are totally impractical.

I also think it’s really important to think about all of the elements of developing a good policy from the start of the policy-making process—a reason to have policy in the first place, a clear goal, analysis of current knowledge and policy, an implementation plan, and a robust evaluation plan. Those last two steps are often forgotten, because people get enamored with the front part, thinking “oh, I’ve got this really important policy, it’s going to change this,” and then they forget about the actual logistics. Without an evaluation plan up front, if you put out a policy that you really like, and three years later you want to evaluate it, you’re going to find evidence to say it’s a great policy. But if you put out criteria for success and failure ahead of time, then you can truly evaluate it properly. You really want to bring the scientific rigor you’ve learned as a scientist into policy evaluation. In general, as a scientist in policy, your goal really should be not to forsake the scientific process. Being a scientist teaches you how to structure a question, evaluate objectively, and differentiate between good data and bad data. Science should always inform policy because policy not backed with science is not good policy.

But, note that I am not a policymaker, and most people who are interested in policy will never actually make policy.

What do those people do then?

Well, a policy job is not the same everywhere, but a lot of people who have policy in their title really work toward supporting the infrastructure and the operation of an organization. They’re mostly answering questions, collecting information, and analyzing policy. There are times when there is some policymaking for the institute itself, but we don’t make policy for the country, even at NIH. One of the really important things policy offices do is collect information. So if we need to know more about, say, a specific germline, we would have a small group that would actually collect and collate the information and produce what we call briefing documents. Those are often quite short and designed to inform leadership about what the group has found while maintaining objectivity—this is not advocacy. This job requires a high degree of science literacy and an ability to translate science to others concisely in plain language without compromising the facts. As a scientist, you have the tools that the people you’re serving might not have to understand science, and you have a responsibility to communicate it well to people from a wide range of backgrounds. Those communication skills are critical. The facts speak for themselves, but you have to give them flesh and bones and a voice.

The other thing that policy offices do is keep an eye on what’s going on in the legislative process. If there’s a bill pending that might impact the field that you’re in, you’d want to know about it. At NIH, that’s the extent of it—we can’t interact with legislators because we are not supposed to lobby. However, at a university for example, a policy person might go to a meeting with legislators, along with their university president, or their provost, and provide them with background information and goals for what they’re trying to achieve. In these instances, you might want to be persuasive with the facts. 

A unique function of the policy staff at NIH is that we often respond to public queries regarding health research. Sometimes we even draft responses on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary.

What advice do you have for an early career scientist who is interested in science policy?

There are always policy people at your institution or at least policy-adjacent people. Make time to talk to them, do informational interviews. People are often happy to take the time to tell you what they do. Scientists usually get formal training in policy through fellowships like AAAS. There are quite a few of them. We used to have a fellowship program and those fellows have gone on to work on Capitol Hill, for state governments, or at universities and NGOs. But obviously fellowships are not the only way to do it. There are also a lot of good online resources. Assign yourself an issue, maybe one that you’re not an expert on and try writing a one-page neutral briefing document covering the issue for non-experts. Expect it to take a few days, but see if you like that. I think one of the most challenging parts of a science policy job is the vast range of topics that can get tossed your way, especially in a smaller group, where you have to be informed about everything. Also, be prepared for quick turnaround times or for ideas to get shot down. Even the best and most thoughtful policy work entails compromise. In the lab you keep doing experiments until you have all the answers you seek. In policy there will always be some unknowns and compromises to be made. 

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