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In the tenth episode of the fourth season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Praveen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics, Director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics, and Chair of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at Cornell University. Sethupathy begins by offering distinctions between genetics and genomics, distinctions that are often confused but reside respectively with the focus on a single gene and the whole sequence of the genome. Sethupathy discusses when the work in those two areas needs to be done independent of one another and when it needs to be integrated. He then goes on to explain the distinction between fundamental science and translational science which, in reality, is more akin to existing on a spectrum than in two separate domains. While initially a computer science major, Sethupathy discusses how his initial interests came to intersect with his fascination with the human body in the form of computational biology. Sethupathy credits several mentors with the shape of his vocational commitments, including his own father, Richard Spielman at the University of Pennsylvania, and Francis Collins at the National Human Genome Institute. After Sethupathy discusses the reasons why he returned to serve at Cornell, he goes on to discuss the ways he seeks to organize a lab, honor a diversity of talents, leverage the experiences in the lab in the pursuit of truth, and leverage those experiences as ways of cultivating the potential of colleagues who learn from one another. One of the initiatives beyond his service as a scientist, teacher, and mentor that Sethupathy also mentions and that he greatly appreciates is serving on Cornell’s Committee on the Future of the American University. As he closes, Sethupathy notes that the relationship shared by curiosity and wonder, as different as they may be, share a relationship that is essential for one to flourish as a teacher, scholar, and public servant.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I serve as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also serve as university professor and the Executive Director of the Mann Institute for Christian Faith and Learning at Samford University.
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Our guest is Praveen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics, Director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics, and Chair of the Biomedical and Translational Sciences Department at Cornell University. Thank you for joining us.
Praveen Sethupathy: Thank you, Todd. I appreciate you having me.
Todd Ream: Would you please begin our conversation by offering some distinctions between genetics and genomics? And I have to admit at the outset, these distinctions are probably as much for me as they might be for anyone else, because I’m still trying to make sure I get the distinctions between the two correct.
Praveen Sethupathy: Yeah, Todd. You’re not alone. I’m pleased to say that this confusion rests with many people, even within the sciences, even in my own discipline. I think a lot of that is because these words get used in different ways by different communities. And so it ends up sort of muddying the waters and confusing things about what they really mean.
So sometimes they are used interchangeably and perhaps they shouldn’t be because that further confuses things. Strictly speaking, genetics is the study of how traits are inherited, right? So how do we pass on certain traits from one generation to the next? And so somewhat loosely, we might say this is the science of genetic mutations.
We know that there is genetic material, meaning DNA, that is actually the substance that is inherited as we pass on traits. Those traits are encoded in our DNA, and it is mutations that come about in the DNA that give rise to different kinds of traits that distinguish one human from another in terms of observable traits.
You could study genetics at the molecular level, meaning how do those mutations come about? What are the actual mechanisms that allow us to inherit those mutations from parents to offspring? And then you could study those mutations at the population level, right? When a mutation about, how do those mutations kind of change in frequency in a population over time? And what are the forces that sort of control that, right? So that’s genetics.
Genomics is highly related but a little bit different. That’s sort of thinking about the entire complement of our DNA, which we refer to as the genome, the sort of three billion nucleotides that that we have in, in most of the cells of our body. And it’s trying to understand how does all of that get compacted in a single cell, in a nucleus within a cell in our body?
Because if you were to take that entire DNA out and kind of stretched it out end to end, it would be about six feet. How does all of that get compacted? What’s the structure of the DNA? What are all the different parts of it? How do they all work together in order to actually help the cell that it’s within to function and do its job? How does the same DNA in a brain cell know how to tell a neuron to do its thing, but the same exact DNA instructions in a heart cell know how to tell that cell to do something totally different? It’s answering those kinds of questions. How is it structured, and how does it actually work? Which is very related, but a little bit different.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. When a scientist is beginning to define their interests and commitments that may then in turn animate their vocation, and they’re wrestling with either serving as a geneticist or a genomist, what are some of the questions that they should be asking that might help them refine their interest and then accelerate their commitments to one or the other?
Praveen Sethupathy: Yeah, that’s a great question. They’re not necessarily separate tracks. In my own career, I have found that I have gone back and forth between genetics and genomics in terms of the questions that I’ve been asking. So typically speaking, if you’re in this general space, you might find yourself asking questions or being motivated by the data that you’ve generated to ask a more genetics-oriented question or a more genomics-oriented question.
Even now in my lab, we have active projects that are funded where based on the definitions I just gave, I might characterize some of those as more genetics-oriented and others as being very squarely within the kind of definition we usually provide for genomics.
One other thing I might say, though, is I tend to think of genomics at least in some aspects of genomics as being a really sophisticated sort of pattern detection, right? You know, when we’re kids, we grow up trying to recognize that, you know, the hexagon-shaped little toy has to fit in the hexagon-shaped hole, right? As we do sort of sorting and learning to identify patterns and what fits into what.
As in a lot of ways I think of genomics as sophisticated pattern detection. When we first started with the genome and the president at the time, President Bill Clinton, stood together with Francis Collins and Craig Venter in the White House, he described the sequencing of the first draft of the human genome as the most wondrous map ever created by humankind.
But I, I think what it really was, and Francis sort of spoke to this a little bit at that time it’s almost as though it was the, like we found an ancient parchment, written in an ancient text or language that no one really spoke today, but we knew that it said something really important about civilization, right? It was kind of like that about sequencing the genome. We had sequenced it, or at least most of it at that time, but we weren’t quite sure what it all meant. We had to get to work actually decoding it and figuring out what it really was, what it was saying and how it really worked.
And one of the methods that scientists used was to try to find patterns in the sequences of DNA, and if we found certain kinds of patterns that tended to occur in certain kinds of regions of the genome and they were overrepresented there, statistically speaking, it might signal to us that maybe that was a region that we had to pay attention to, or it had a particular kind of meaning that we had to set up experiments to probe more deeply.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned just a few minutes ago, one of the laboratory efforts that you’re leading there on campus, and that the questions are questions that may reflect those of geneticists, may reflect those of genomists.
Can you give us an example then of the ways maybe the, they interact ways in which geneticists might need to work best independent of genomists, but also in ways that, you know, maybe collaboration between the two, is the ideal and merits, you know, further effort?
Praveen Sethupathy: That’s a great question. I have an example actually from some of my own postdoctoral work that might speak to, and we do similar kinds of studies today. In the late 2000s, we were in the thick of what are called genome-wide association studies.
So these were studies led by human geneticists who were interested in trying to understand what are the genetic mutations found in human populations that predispose them or increase their risk for complex diseases like, let’s say, type 2 diabetes. We were interested in type 2 diabetes at the time, but other people were conducting similar studies in everything from schizophrenia to heart disease.
So the studies that we and others were engaged in with type 2 diabetes led to the discovery of more than 300 different mutations littered across the entire human genome that would increase your risk by a certain amount for a disease like type 2 diabetes.
One of the really interesting things we noted at that time is that the vast majority of those mutations were not landing in genes. So the word genome, which I used earlier, was used to describe our entire complement of DNA because at one point in the past, we thought that the bulk of our DNA might be composed of genes, or at least those might be the most important things that are held within the genome.
It’s not as though we thought there was nothing else but we really did sort of simplify it, sometimes thinking about it as a compendium of genes, and so we called it the genome, right? The library of genes. It turns out, depending on how you define a gene and how you count, no more than one to two percent of the genome is actually genes, right? That code for proteins. What is the rest of it, right?
For a long time, we sort of referred to it as the dark matter of the genome, right, trying to figure out what else is encoded there that might be of interest to us. And it turns out that a lot of that remainder of space are actually switches or maybe better referred to as dials or rheostats. They’re not genes themselves, but they can control the extent to which nearby genes are turned on or off.
And if they’re turned on, to what extent are they turned on? Hundred units? Ten units? One unit? So they’re kind of these rheostats that are regulating the level of activity of the nearby genes. And it turns out that the bulk of the mutations that geneticists had identified that were predisposing individuals to type 2 diabetes, they weren’t landing in the genes themselves, but they were landing in these rheostat regions, in these dial regions.
And so then it became a question of a very quantitative approach to disease. It’s not so much that you have the bad or the defective gene. Of course, that can happen, but it seemed as though the majority of cases it was actually, oh, you’re making too much of the product of this gene or making too little.
And so that was a kind of paradigm shift in studying complex diseases, that you went from a qualitative understanding of disease, the defective gene, the bad gene, to a more quantitative understanding of it. Oh, I’m making too much of this, or it’s underactive, right? And the only way we could come to that discovery is geneticists working with genomicists.
The geneticists figured out what the mutations are that are predisposing to the disease. The genomicists figured out where all of these dials and rheostats are, right? By trying to study the function of the genome. By putting those together leads to a real paradigm shift in our understanding of the genetic basis of complex diseases.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Now, some of the efforts that you and your colleagues pursue there at Cornell are identified as basic science, while some of those efforts contribute to what is also identified as translational science, as is identified in the departmental name that you and your colleagues carry. Why do you and your colleagues believe in making investments in both forms of scientific discovery?
Praveen Sethupathy: Todd, that’s a great question, one that we are actually frequently asked because people want to understand what our commitments are and where they come from. To us, basic science, and we’ve started referring to it a little differently these days and referring to it as fundamental science, really trying to understand the underlying mechanisms by which our biology works.
Sometimes basic science seems to suggest that it’s really easy or basic, you know, in terms of understanding it. So we’ve shifted away from that a little bit to, to, to think about it as fundamental science versus translational science, which we envision as taking fundamental discoveries and bringing them closer to public impact.
That might be the development of therapeutics. It might be the development of a product or a, a wearable that allows for, you know, certain biodata. It might be information that allows us, that, that we can share with communities that allows them to make informed decisions about their health.
So it can come in a variety of different ways, this translation, but it’s basically taking scientific knowledge gained from fundamental work and applying it in ways that are going to benefit society and help with the flourishing of people and their ecosystems. So we think the whole spectrum is important.
A lot of times attention gets placed on the translational work, because that has immediate payoff, and people can understand it a little bit better. Sure, if you want to work on developing a therapeutic for a particular cancer that our loved one might have been afflicted with, it’s easier to make the case as to why an investment in that really matters and why it might help 5, 10, or 15 years down the road and have a little bit more of a, an immediate payoff.
But what we try to help people understand is that there’s no way to get to the translational work without the fundamental work. The translational work really builds on the knowledge gained from the fundamental work. So it’s really about laying a foundation upon which impactful and translational work can happen.
So we see it as a continuum. The fundamental or basic science work that is done today may have impacts 30, 40, 50 years down the road that might not necessarily impact our lives, but certainly our children’s lives. So it’s an investment in the future, if you will for future translational work that our next generation colleagues might take on to put in the foundational work today, right? So that’s sort of how we see it.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In addition to serving as a bench practicing scientist and educational leader, you’ve also served with efforts such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.
Why do you believe also investing in these efforts is important for science, important for your vocation, and the appreciation for the created order as you encounter it?
Praveen Sethupathy: That’s a very insightful question. I have many reasons why I have invested time and energy and effort in these kinds of activities. But I’ll share two here. One is I believe that however well-meaning and well-intentioned scientists are, and I’m happy to say that, you know, I’m surrounded by colleagues who are extraordinarily well-meaning, have pure and ideal intentions in their scientific pursuits it can often end up feeling quite insular.
Both we and the public can feel as though there isn’t as much access and availability to scientists and the work that they’re doing. So any organization or effort or mechanism to try to bridge different communities, scientific communities from those who may be skeptical or may be curious but don’t know how to access those individuals or that information I’m really committed and very interested in ensuring that we find effective ways to be able to build those bridges.
Fundamentally, a lot of the work that we do comes from federal money, and federal money is essentially taxpayer money. We have a responsibility as scientists engaged in the work that we do in institutions with grant money for, with federal dollars to be accountable to the public to at the very least be communicating the work that we’re doing and also soliciting their input, their ideas, their expertise, and their worldviews that we can bring back to the academy to help shape the kinds of questions we’re asking.
I really believe in a bidirectional exchange with the public, a kind of reciprocity that isn’t just lip service, but really genuine because that’s how you build trust, and that’s actually how you learn. The university is supposed to be a community of learning but we don’t only learn in the classroom, and we don’t only learn in the lab. I really believe we learn when we go out to the communities and hear about what people’s perspectives, ideas, questions, and concerns are. That also should really be shaping the scholarship that happens in the academy.
So efforts like the, the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion these are in part intended to create these bridges with other communities that may not feel as though they have as much access and are beginning to wonder whether there’s, what is the value proposition of the work that you are doing and have you really spoken with us to understand what it is that we care about and where we feel like the gaps are in our life that you could help us address? So that’s one major reason, Todd, why I really care about these kinds of efforts.
The other major reason that I care about it is that as a person of faith, as a Christian myself I have found that the scientific enterprise is one that draws me into worship. And yet I have realized that many of my brothers and sisters in faith in my own faith and in other faith traditions don’t necessarily experience that same invitation to worship from the scientific enterprise.
And I would really love to be able to share why that’s the case in my life and to invite others into this sense of awe and wonder and worship that I think science invites us to. So one is from the perspective of the scientific enterprise and the need to engage in a bidirectional way with the public, and the other is reclaiming a sense of awe and wonder from a Christian worldview about nature around us.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to transition now to asking you how these commitments came to be animating components of your vocation. As a scientist, you earned your bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and then a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
At what point did you discern science, and in particular the study of genetics and genomics, would prove central to how you exercised your vocation?
Praveen Sethupathy: This is a really intriguing question. You know, when I started off at Cornell as an undergraduate, I was a computer science major. My father was a mathematician and computer scientist. He had exposed me to that area. It was clear that at the time, in the ’90s, that this was really taking off and was going to be an extremely valuable set of skills, but certainly a discipline that would be worth investing in.
And as much value as I saw in it I was finding that I was not necessarily passionate about it. So I could see that there were a lot of really valuable skills that I was gaining, but the discipline itself was not one where I could really envision myself working long term.
So I started asking myself the question: Where are my passions? You know, are there areas where you know, I could have some self-awareness about ones, I’m really drawn to this particular space and these kinds of questions. I’ve always been very, very intellectually curious. The why and the how have always been of great interest to me, even since I was a kid.
So I always felt as though I was drawn to the discovery world, to the research world and that, combined with my commitment to teaching, because I grew up with a sensibility that you don’t know something well unless you can really teach it, right? And so the discovery aspect and the teaching aspect that I felt very drawn to made the university a compelling place for me to consider a future.
But what discipline was it going to be in? And it became apparent to me that maybe computer science wasn’t necessarily that discipline per se. And I started thinking about my experience in high school and remembered that biology was a real passion of mine in high school. My AP biology teacher had taken us to the local college and given us an opportunity to be able to see a human cadaver.
And it fascinated me because we had only ever been able to look at muscles and tendons and bones in textbook images, right? And here we were suddenly being able to poke around in a cadaver that had been donated for scientific purposes and to actually see the material.
We walk around with this amazing universe just hidden behind our skin. We can’t see it even though we are it, right? It’s a fascinating topic for me. Most of us are really enthralled by questions about the universe when we’re little kids. Wow, this expansive universe and look at the stars and the planets and everything beyond our solar system. I’ve always been that way about our bodies, right, looking inward.
How fascinating that we have this whole universe inside of us that we barely understand and yet we’re just walking around with, right? And then suddenly to have it exposed to me, not necessarily at the molecular and cellular level, but at least at the anatomical level, and to actually be able to visualize how these were all connected, that had been one of the most interesting things to me in all of high school.
And I realized as a you know, freshman, sophomore in college, maybe biology was a space where I could really come back to. And computational biology as a field was really taking off at the time. This idea that we could bring experimental science and feed the data into computational models that could be predictive, generate hypotheses, and then go back to experimental science to test those hypotheses. That allows us to gather more data, and that brings us back into more computational modeling, and on and on it goes.
And I thought, “Wow, what a beautiful way to think about science.” And that kind of science was really just taking off at the time. And I remember, Todd, I was a TA for a computer science course, and anytime there weren’t any students in the class, I would go to the NIH website. And at the time, the sequences that were being determined bit by bit for the human genome were getting printed.
And even websites were very nascent at that time. So these were very rudimentary sites, literally just a page with new letters of ACGTs, but it was like magic to me, and I would just watch in anticipation because it was a live update. And they would suddenly have another string of ACGTs, and it was thrilling to know, oh my gosh, another piece of the human DNA that has been discovered.
And it dawned on me that maybe this genomics field was going to be an incredible place to discover new biology, but using the computational sciences because it became apparent to me, as I was alluding to earlier in our conversation, that genomics was really going to be about finding patterns. What kind of interesting sequence motifs and patterns could I detect in the human genome that might allow me to make hypotheses about certain areas of the genome that might be functioning or working in certain ways?
That excited me because I thought, what a cool way to take the skills that I’ve been learning in the computational world and apply them in a context that allows me to discover new things about biology, health, and, and maybe even disease. So that’s sort of how it all came about for me.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Any mentors in addition to your high school teacher that helped spark this interest and shape your sense of vocation?
Praveen Sethupathy: Some of the most important mentors for me I’ll name a couple. One is definitely my father at an earlier age. I’ve already alluded to how he instilled in me a sense for how to demonstrate to yourself that you’ve really understood something well requires you to be able to teach it to someone, right? You can’t fill in the gaps easily because they’re already an expert themselves and won’t demand that you explain every little detail.
But you’ve got to explain it to a student or to someone outside of your discipline who doesn’t actually know the details of what you’re working with, because it’s when you do that, that all kinds of gaps in your own knowledge will be uncovered, and you’ll know where to go and strengthen your understanding.
That was a great lesson for me that was really reiterated constantly as a youngster that I’ve taken with me today, and it’s something that I impart to my own students at every level in my own laboratory and department today. So that was really important to me.
As far as genetics and genomics, I had one mentor at the University of Pennsylvania when I moved on to do my PhD. His name was Richard Spielman. He’s unfortunately since passed away. He was a giant in the world of human genetics. But he offered all kinds of really important mentorship to me, including how to find the right mentors.
One of the things that he taught me is that, of course, you want to rub shoulders with mentors who are brilliant in their thinking, are extraordinarily creative and can teach you how to think creatively. But you want to also be around people who see the value in communicating their ideas to other people.
That might be funding agencies, that might be potential collaborators, that might be a next generation of students, and it might be the general public. There are going to be all different kinds of folks, and you as a scientist, he would say, have a great opportunity to be able to bring all those people on board to the vision that you have.
But it requires investing in communicating and articulating your ideas in ways that are accessible to those different communities. And he would, he would tell me, “It’s not a waste of your time. It’s actually a really good use of your time,” not only from the practical sense of bringing people on board to the vision, but actually related to that first point.
People often get frustrated that the public doesn’t understand science, but he would say, “How much time have you taken in really challenging yourself to think about effective ways to do that communication?” Right. So the problem sometimes might rest with us and not with others misunderstanding or whatever. So that was really great mentorship for me as well.
And then finally, I have to say Francis Collins, and this is during my postdoctoral years after I moved on from my PhD, and I studied with Francis. He provided extraordinary mentorship for me so many different ways in my science and, and expanding my creativity and my visionary thinking but also how to do science in a humane with the ethics and the social implications of that work at the front and center of my thought process, was great mentorship there as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Between the time you served as a doctoral student at Penn and then came back to Cornell as you just mentioned, you were a postdoc for a couple of those years with the National Human Genome Institute. But then also you had a faculty appointment after that at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then you returned to your alma mater at Cornell.
Can you talk us through the discernment process that led you to come back to Ithaca, and to serve again with the Cornell University community?
Praveen Sethupathy: Yeah. You know, there were personal reasons as well as professional reasons for this. It was initially largely driven by personal reasons, actually. I grew up in Western New York. My wife now of 24 years, grew up in Western New York. We went to the same high school together. We thought when we landed in North Carolina that we were there to stay.
But we quickly learned that maybe there was another kind of narrative for our family. We started to feel the tug on our heartstrings to come back to the New York area and Upstate New York. And that major reason for this was our family. My father who remains in Western New York and my wife’s parents were remaining in Western New York.
Her sister and their whole family, they had kids all the same age as our kids, and they were so close. And yet we could not see them very often given the distance between us physically. And I had other family members in New York City and New Jersey and elsewhere who we had difficulty seeing as well. Family’s always been really important to us and has been an important guiding factor in just about every decision we’ve made.
And there came a point where both my wife and I were independently feeling the tug to maybe get a little bit closer to home, maybe care for our parents a little bit more effectively and have our children grow up with their cousins and other family members and be able to see them on a more regular basis. So honestly, Todd, it was really personal things like that that drove our initial decision-making.
Beyond that, though, I really started to get excited about the idea of coming back to my alma mater, a place where I felt, even though it was just four years, it was a transformative time for me. I grew up so much during that time. It was the period of time that I became a Christian. It was the period of time where I learned how to learn from other people, not, you know, necessarily in a classroom or in a lab, but how to rub shoulders with peers and mentors and staff and administrators and learn from them by entering into uncomfortable spaces.
By you know, learning to be challenged, learning to rethink my ideas about the world and my worldviews basically. That was a really transformative time for me. And the idea of being able to come back to that same community and give back and to help other students be able to experience that same kind of transformation that I think a university environment offers and that I believe Cornell in particular is really uniquely positioned to offer really started to excite me.
And so coming back here, it’s allowed me to see Cornell in a different light. As a student, there’s a certain way in which you engage with your alma mater, but now as a faculty member, as a chair, as an administrator in the university, I see it in a totally different way, but still with this underlying commitment of wanting to give everything I have for a really well-rounded and holistic educational experience that’s growth-inducing for students at a very formative period of their lives.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As you just echoed you wear multiple hats on any given day. You’re a faculty member, you’re a center director, you’re a chair. Can you walk us through, if at all possible, what, say, an average day might look like? And from what particular activities do you derive the greatest vocational satisfaction?
Praveen Sethupathy: Yeah. Right now, Todd, that’s right, I am still a lab head. We have a thriving lab working on all kinds of exciting projects right now. My lab is filled with undergraduate students, PhD students, technicians, senior scientists. It has always been important to me to have a full spread of career stages in my lab, but also a very eclectic mix of people from different backgrounds and training and educational areas of expertise, because I really enjoy the practice of flattening hierarchies and ensuring that everybody can learn from each other.
We have a senior scientist who’s been working in a lab for 25 years who provides extraordinary day-to-day guidance for our really junior undergraduate research assistants. But at the same time, they have extraordinary capabilities in AI in computational sciences that wasn’t really a part of his training when he was coming up, and so he can actually learn a lot from them.
So I love, you know, creating a lab environment where everybody is learning from each other. It really creates a lively and vibrant I think environment for learning. And so we spend a lot of time with the lab and in cultivating those projects and making the discoveries in a collaborative way with people that we work together with on campus, but well beyond our campus.
And then, of course, as you pointed out, I’m the chair of the department of biomedical and translational sciences, and my responsibilities here range everything from, you know, managing the you know, tenure and promotion processes for my faculty to ensuring that we are allocating resources and increasing resources for our community so that they’re well-equipped to do the work that they need and want to do, to ensuring that our curriculum is responsive to the needs of our students, that we are developing and implementing courses for students in the undergraduate, master’s, and graduate and veterinary programs that our department is affiliated with to casting a vision for how we can collaborate more effectively.
And you know, the pipeline that I talked to you about earlier of ensuring that our foundational work is really on this continuum to move toward more translational work that can have an impact in society and in creating a vision for how we put together the environment for more effective collaboration and synergistic work. So it’s, you know, on any given day, we might be event planning. I might be, you know, casting a vision and at building a team to really help execute that vision.
We might be planning a, a symposium or a retreat that really tries to kind of juice up some energy around a particular area of study that we’re trying to launch in our department, or I, you know, might be a lot of paperwork, really just trying to ensure that the day-to-day operations of the department, that things are running smoothly, that my staff are feeling valued, that you know, everybody has the resources and the capabilities to do the things that they need.
The thing I find most rewarding though, Todd, all of that is wonderful. The two things I find most rewarding. One is in creating environments that allow other people to succeed. I actually think that’s one of the most important traits of a good leader. You have to really find genuine satisfaction and joy in watching other people do well.
Your name’s not going to appear anywhere there. You are behind the scenes as a leader creating the environment, bringing all the right people on board, getting the resources in place, the philanthropy in place, the grants coming into the department and so on and so forth, all the right people hired. That is your responsibility, but ultimately, that’s going to lead to the success of someone else’s project, which is what’s going to get the headline, which is what’s going to get the news, and you have to revel in that.
You have to find joy and satisfaction in their success that you helped behind the scenes create. I love that. I love watching my faculty succeed, my trainees, my staff inviting them to contribute creatively and intellectually, and then watching their ideas really flourish and giving them the credit for it and, you know, recognizing them and elevating them. That is one of the most rewarding things of this job, right?
The second thing I would say that I find really rewarding is teaching and mentoring. Making scientific discoveries has been a thrill. The opportunity, the luxury of having a profession like this where I can explore my curiosities, I feel extraordinarily grateful and lucky. But it’s not the thing I love the most about my job.
The opportunity to be able to interact either in a classroom setting or in a very more intimate mentorship setting in my laboratory with PhD students being able to help cultivate students’ minds and not telling them what to think, but actually teaching them how to think so that I can launch them on their own careers of satisfaction and fulfillment and lives of meaning and purpose is very, very meaningful for me.
When I see the light bulb go off and students start asking the right questions, to me, those are some of the most beautiful moments in the academy. It’s never been for me about how much my students know. It’s about whether they are beginning to realize how much they don’t know, and that that is prompting them into a space of curiosity they had never imagined. And they start asking all kinds of questions and probing. That’s where I get really excited, and I feel like my job has been done and they can, can really launch from there.
But then there’s other aspects of my job as well. Right now, I’m the co-chair of an initiative that the provost at Cornell started in 2025 called “The Future of the American University.” This has been an extraordinary endeavor and helping lead it on behalf of the provost together with three other colleagues who serve as fellow co-chairs has been extraordinarily invigorating. A daunting exercise, to say the least, to come up with a plan for the future of the American university.
But one of the most stimulating things I’ve done in the academy it requires a kind of big-picture thinking that is very different from the scientific work in the lab, where sometimes I need to be really in the weeds and the details of a particular dataset that I’m just trying to make sense of and figure out how to interpret.
And so my life in the academy has been one of a yo-yo. I’ve got to go in the weeds, and then I’ve got to come out and think big picture. And then I’ve got to go back in the weeds. I deeply appreciate that my job still requires me to do both because it helps me to be able to do both better. When I’m, you know, in the weeds, I get a different perspective about all these folks who are doing the big-picture thinking.
And then when I’m doing the big picture thinking, doing that part of the job, it gives me a deeper kind of understanding and appreciation for the way in which I might try to communicate for those folks who are really deep in the weeds right now, right. Having both of those experiences be a part of any given week really allows me to do both better, I believe.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As our time begins to become short, I want to ask you about listening to you, I think of the laboratory and the seminar room and the classroom as spaces that not only are discoveries brought to bear, but they’re also means to cultivate certain gifts that people have.
And when you think about the latter, what intellectual and/or moral virtues do you believe genomicists and scientists need to cultivate in order to flourish in their vocation?
Praveen Sethupathy: Wow, what a beautiful question. Maybe I’ll highlight two. I feel like there are many more but in the interest of time one virtue, Todd, that I would like to start with is the one of curiosity and wonder. I think this is a shared virtue between science and faith. In fact Elaine Howard Ecklund, a good friend of mine and a sociologist at Rice University has written a book called “Why Do Science and Faith Need Each Other?”
And she actually articulates a number of different virtues that she believes are shared between science and faith, and that being engaged with both allows us to be able to pursue those virtues with great vigor. And I believe she mentions this as one of those, and that would be the virtue of curiosity. I have felt that both my faith and my work as a scientist have invited me into curiosity, right?
And they both have worked together to actually invite me into a sense of worship. Todd, I really think that this is one of the few things that really separates us from all of the rest of creation. Biologists and theologians, I think, have been racking their brains for centuries as to what exactly distinguishes us, what makes us uniquely human. How do we understand what the image of God means, right?
And scientists in particular have gone through all kinds of anatomical traits and behavioral traits and all kinds of other things that at one point in time thought distinguished human beings. And over time, as we do more work, we begin to realize, well, it’s sort of fuzzy. It’s not so much of a clear delineating line as we might like to think.
But one of the things that I think we get to do is not just to reflect and represent Him, which is a lot of the way that I think about, you know, imaging God. But I think we get a unique opportunity to sit in wonder and in awe of God in a way that no other species does. We get to actually, Johannes Kepler, my favorite scientist of all time, he said, “Discoveries for me are really just thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” And just how thrilling is it to realize that I have just hit upon something that, of course, God has known all along, right.
What that does in me, he said, is not just bring me to a place of worship, bring me to my knees, but it makes me want to celebrate, rejoice that this opportunity we’ve been given to think His thoughts after Him. And so I immediately want to rush out and go tell people about it and join in a kind of communal celebration of this thrilling opportunity to think God’s thoughts after Him.
It’s just such a wonderful blending of the scientific enterprise, of the kind of thrill of discovery, but that fundamental invitation to stand in this childlike wonder of what God has done. And it’s just, if you, if you read Scripture through that lens, you all of a sudden see that idea popping up all over the place where you might have initially missed it, you know? So I think that sort of virtue of curiosity and wonder is a huge virtue, the shared virtue.
The other one, Todd, quickly that I might comment on is the one of humility. You know, I think certainly the Christian faith tradition calls us into humility in a powerful way. The very savior that I worship was naked and disfigured on a cross. And he did that not because he was powerless to stop it, right? He did that because his actions were governed solely for the benefit of others. A level of sacrifice I’ve never come across anywhere else. A kind of level of giving and humility that he considered equality with God, not something to be grasped.
One of my favorite verses in all of Scripture, because it points to the profound humility of Jesus Christ in a way that me as a human being, I can’t seem to muster, and I’m not God. So my faith draws me into a place of humility, if I’m honest with myself on a second-by-second basis. But I think science does too, because sophistication in science, I believe, is measured not by how much you know, but by how much you realize you don’t know.
And that is really an invitation to a kind of humility, not one that makes us feel silly and stupid, but one that actually says, “Wow we may think that we have discovered so much and that we are a paragon of knowledge but how little do we actually understand about how the world works?” It’s a pointer in some ways to an all-knowing God who gives us the grace to be able to uncover and just scratch at the surface of what there is to know. That’s incredibly inspiring, but it’s incredibly humbling at the same time. So I think those virtues of curiosity and humility go hand in hand.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways can genomicists be of greater service to the Church in the years to come? But in what ways also can the Church be of greater service to genomicists?
Praveen Sethupathy: This is a really good question, something I’m very passionate about. I, I think you know, the AAAS organization that I was a part of, the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion one of their goals was actually to try to create more conversation among church communities, among pastors, leaders of church communities, and scientists, scientists in their congregation and scientists in their communities elsewhere. I’d really love to see more of that happen.
I served on the board of directors for the BioLogos Foundation for a little while and am deeply committed to their mission. They too have been really, really interested in bringing the pastor community, the congregational leadership community together with scientists to intersect more and be a part of one another’s world.
I really think, Todd, that pastors are facing an enormous amount of pressure to be knowledgeable about all kinds of areas of science today, whether that’s genomics, whether that is you know, immunology and infectious disease, right. What, you know, and, and vaccines, or whether that’s artificial intelligence.
And people look to their pastors because a pastor is a trusted leader in their community. Not many people have scientists in their circles, but they have pastors in their circles, and so they look to their pastors for guidance on all kinds of questions in the scientific realm that may affect their lives. But I think that’s an unfair burden that pastors have to hold because they may not know, and they may themselves not know where to turn. So I think scientists like genomicists can step up say, “Here we are. We are available as a resource to talk with you about what we do, what the questions are, why these disciplines matter,” and create relationships and partnerships with leaders of congregations and with pastors.
Maybe even come, I, I have gone around the country giving talks in congregations actually, but this happened because the pastors in those communities started to reach out to anybody that they might know in their network who would be interested to come and speak to their congregations in ways that are accessible and in ways that really draw people in to understand why a life of faith can really intersect with the scientific understanding in harmonious ways.
And so I think becoming more and more a part of one another’s lives is really going to be absolutely critical to helping understand one another’s worlds. So I think that’s one of the biggest things that scientists and genomicists could do is to reach out. I think pastors can do the same. Find mechanisms for connecting with one another.
And putting more people like that in front of your congregations or inviting them to participate in the life of your congregation so they become a part of the, the everyday lives of the members of those communities and can speak to their, their concerns and their questions and things like that, rather than having it be something the pastors have to endure all on their own.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.
Praveen Sethupathy: Thank you, Todd.
Todd Ream: Our guest has been Praveen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics, Director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics, and Chair of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at Cornell University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Praveen Sethupathy: Thank you for having me, Todd. I really appreciate this time.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
