Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Hi, listeners – Benjamin from the Nature Podcast here. I mentioned in last week’s show that we weren’t going to be having a regular edition of the podcast this week as we’re running a bit of a skeleton crew at the moment. But one person that is here is Nisha Gaind, Nature’s European Bureau Chief. Nisha, thank you so much for joining me today.

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Not at all. We’re going to have a little bit of an extended News Chat today and our first story is about earthquakes, but maybe not about the giant earthquakes that we cover on the show sometimes.

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

Yeah, this is a story about something that we don’t talk about very often which is very tiny, little earthquakes that some researchers in California have managed to measure, and it’s telling them lots more about these faults that cause huge earthquakes.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Right, and measuring huge earthquakes, I guess, is relatively easy – they cause a huge spike on the seismograph. How does one go about measuring these tiny earthquakes and maybe how tiny are they?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

These are earthquakes that can be as small as magnitude 0.3 which is really, really, tiny and the reason that it’s difficult to detect them is that an earthquake of that size doesn’t even stand out very much from the noise that is also picked up by seismographs. So, that’s been the challenge in trying to detect these tiny, little quakes.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And how have researchers gone about sort of looking for these signals then in the noise?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, what this team did was use a combination of machine learning and supercomputers to identify these really tiny quakes from a huge amount of historical data. They created a template of what real earthquakes look like in this data and they showed this to algorithms which then were applied to this massive dataset of seismic activity in southern California, and the algorithm was able to identify these elusive fingerprints of these small, little quakes.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And how many of these tiny earthquakes did the team identify?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, the incredible thing is that these researchers were able to identify 1.8 million previously undetected quakes in southern California that took place in this ten-year period. And it’s a really difficult thing to do because some of these earthquakes register at the same level as vibrations that come from aeroplanes or helicopters or even the shaking of an antenna on a building.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And what’s the hope then that this information about these tiny quakes will give us moving forwards?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, all of this information about these little tremors helps seismologists to work out what fault lines are doing, and fault lines criss-cross California and they’re moving all the time. Ultimately, these details tell researchers how all types of quakes come about – from the really small to the really powerful, destructive ones that cause a lot of damage – and they hope that the information will help them to figure out how to better prepare for these types of earthquakes because it tells them more about the physical processes behind them.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Well, let’s move on to our second story today then, Nisha, and it’s about height. Now, I’m a little bit taller than some of the other members of the team here at Nature and, well, for a while, researchers have struggled to work out why some people are taller than others.

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

Yeah, this is a really interesting question in research that geneticists have been probing for basically decades, and especially since the human genome was first sequenced 20 years ago because it held promise that it was going to answer lots of questions about how all sorts of things – including diseases and traits such as heights – were inherited. But it didn’t do that, so it’s been a lingering question in genetics and we’ve finally got a piece of research that seems to have made some progress on it.

Interviewer: Benjamin ThompsonAnd what progress has it made then?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, the deal with height is that you only need to look at families to see that it’s inherited, and studies of identical twins and families confirmed that. And in fact, these studies suggest that genetics make a certain contribution to the trait and they find that genes are largely behind the inheritance of height. But when researchers have gone searching for these particular genes – even though they have identified hundreds of common gene variants linked to height – each one of these variants had a very small effect and it didn’t add up to the contribution that was estimated by family studies. This phenomenon which occurs for lots of other complex diseases and traits was dubbed missing heritability, and it’s now this missing element that the researchers found.

Interviewer: Benjamin ThompsonWell, it seems like a pretty important thing to find. What are the specifics?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, what they’ve found is that height is influenced by some quite rare gene variants as well as quite common ones, and it’s these rare variants that hadn’t been identified in previous studies because previous studies of this kind, which are called genome-wide association studies, hadn’t necessarily sequenced the whole genomes of people because that’s a pretty expensive thing to do, but that’s exactly what this research has done. They have looked at the entire set of DNA of 20,000 people.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

So, these rare variants then are maybe an important piece of the puzzle for this missing heritability.

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

That’s exactly right. These rare variants are the missing heritability and it’s the influence of both common gene variants and rare gene variants that make up the genetic heritability of height.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Well, for our final story today then in this extended News Chat, we’re going to be looking at a special report we’ve done on how political tensions between the US and China are affecting science. Nisha, what’s the background to this story?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

This is a story that has been in and out of the headlines for quite a few months, and it’s this trade war between the US and China, which is increasing political tensions between the two countries and it’s now starting to affect research.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Right, and well, how is science sort of getting pulled in to the mix then?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, there are concerns from people in the US government that federally funded research – that is research that is funded by the US government – is being unfairly exploited by foreign entities, and it’s quite difficult to eke out details in this story, but a lot of it is to do with China and there are quite a few accusations flying around. But these tensions are also affecting things like visas for Chinese scientists wishing to come to America for conferences and so on, so there’s a lot going on here.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And things have been happening this week, Nisha?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

Yeah, that’s right. So, one of the things our story focuses on is the National Institutes of Health, which in America funds billions of dollars of research, and in the past few months, the NIH has been investigating whether foreign entities have been interfering with this funding and with the peer review of NIH-supported projects. And in fact, this week, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas has moved to terminate the employment of three scientists after an NIH investigation. That investigation found that these scientists committed serious violations of agency rules regarding confidentiality of peer review, conflicts of interest and the disclosure of foreign ties. And the reason that this is relevant to the US-China situation is that of five scientists initially investigated, at least three of those were reported to be ethnically Chinese.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

And what are these researchers believed to have done?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, this is what’s quite difficult to find out in these investigations. The details that we know are quite vague, but all of these investigations focus on whether trade secrets have been shared with foreign governments and especially what are termed sensitive governments, and in the eyes of the US, that seems to be China. So, what we know are that four of these researchers were accused of improperly sharing confidential information about grant applications and one of them is accused of sending a grant application that has proprietary information to a scientist in China.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Okay, I mean this report covers a bunch of other stuff as well that you’ve mentioned. What else is being affected?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, another thing that these political tensions seem to be affecting is visas for Chinese scientists. As we know, science is a really global enterprise – people travel all the time for conferences and so on – and we’ve heard reports of lots of Chinese scientists trying to come to the US for conferences have either been denied visas or it’s taken a much longer time than usual to get their visas and it’s actually affected one very prominent scientist called Jian-Wei Pan, who is one of the world’s star quantum physicists. He heads a world-leading programme that focuses on super-secure quantum communications, and he was unable to travel from China to the US to receive a prize at a conference.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Well, if he’s kind of a superstar researcher, what about kind of the broader research community at large?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

All of these developments are set against the background of US universities and institutions trying to investigate what might be foreign influence in academia, but a lot of the scrutiny seems to be focused very heavily on China, and that’s affecting the community. There is a large Chinese American community of scientists and they are worried that this political rhetoric is unfairly targeting them and in fact, three biomedical societies that represent Chinese American researchers sent a letter to Science – the magazine – in March and said that scientists of Chinese descent working in the US are in danger of being singled out for scapegoating, stereotyping and racial profiling.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

What about the other sort of side of this, Nisha – how are these tensions affecting science in China?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

Yeah, so that’s a really great question. Most of the information that we have is from the US and it’s quite difficult to tell what’s going on on the Chinese side because a lot of Chinese scientists don’t want to speak publicly about the situation. What we do know is that China has become a very strong country in research. It’s now much more independent and less reliant on research superpowers like the United States. So, it’s got a lot of its own resources, but we do hear that students and investors in China are already looking to other regions like the European Union because they’re seen as more attractive for career opportunities or business development because they might be more open or accepting of Chinese collaboration than the US, which is applying heavy scrutiny on China right now.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Well, finally then Nisha – what happens next in this situation?

Interviewee: Nisha Gaind

So, we really don’t know. This trade war is something that is going to keep hitting the headlines and we are going to keep following how it is affecting research because the US is a really important player in science, as is China, and their relationship is also really crucial because collaboration is such an integral part of research.

Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

Well, listeners, of course the best way to follow it is over at nature.com/news where you’ll find more about this story and the others we’ve covered in today’s News Chat extra. We’re back next week with a regular show. I’ve been Benjamin Thompson. See you next time.