(upbeat guitar music)
>> We are very fortunate today
to have an outstanding keynote speaker, Dr. Bonnie Bassler.
Dr. Bassler is Professor
and Chair of Molecular Biology at Princeton.
She's a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator,
and has been the recipient
of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
She received a PhD in Biochemistry here from Johns Hopkins.
Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms
that bacteria use for intercellular communication,
a process called quorum sensing.
This is a process involving chemical signals,
which enable populations of bacteria
to regulate their behavior on a large scale.
This process is widespread in the bacteria world,
and a clear understanding of quorum sensing
is fundamental to all of molecular biology.
Dr. Bassler currently chairs
Princeton University's Council
on Science and Technology which has revamped
the science curriculum for humanists.
She's a passionate advocate for diversity in the sciences.
She has received numerous awards for her research,
including the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences,
and the L'Oreal-UNESCO award.
She's a former president
of the American Society for Microbiology
and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
It's a pleasure to welcome our speaker today,
Dr. Bonnie Bassler.
>> Graduates, professors, Hopkins administration,
parents, family and friends, good afternoon.
Let's start with the blazingly obvious.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic,
none of us is where we thought we'd be right now.
I'm talking to you from my home office
in Princeton, New Jersey.
To retrieve the academic regalia that you see me wearing,
I had to get permission
from Princeton University Public Safety.
Who would have ever thought
that regalia needed to be so heavily protected?
Under this gown, I'm wearing a t-shirt
and sweatpants, I'm barefoot.
As you see and hear me right now,
I'm not even in real time, I'm taped.
For you, it's Wednesday, May 20th, at around 2:30p.m.
For me, it's Thursday, May 14th,
and it's 11:30 in the morning.
I'm trying really hard to pretend I'm looking at you
so that you'll feel
there's a personal connection between us.
In truth, I have my Microsoft Word document
with my speech on my computer screen.
The text is in 34-point type, and the words are huge.
I positioned the page as high as possible on the screen,
so I can only see one or two lines of text at a time.
And I'm moving the text up line by line with my mouse,
but you can't see that.
This way, and I practiced this,
I can read the text and still almost focus my eyes
on the little green LED at the top of my monitor.
My little scheme makes it less obvious that I'm reading.
I'm supposed to seem like I am talking to you, in person.
I worry that you're feeling
that this virtual experience is a disappointment.
How can this remote event be meaningful?
How can some pre-taped speech possibly move you,
stay with you, do justice to this capstone moment?
Your successful completion of your certificate,
master's thesis, doctoral thesis or medical studies.
I suspect the parents and loved ones who are watching this
are equally disappointed.
Leading up to today, they struggled to teach you to walk,
to ride a bike, to learn your times tables,
to behave civilly.
They were probably petrified when you learnt to drive,
their hearts broke when you had setbacks,
they reveled in your accomplishments
as you homed in on your passion for biomedicine,
and it became clear that their kid,
was destined to be a scholar.
And then the pinnacle,
the Hopkins Medical School commencement.
Their pride as they watch that kid,
now stride across the stage,
metamorphosed into a stunning creature
of talent, and achievement.
The parents especially deserve
the traditional commencement ceremony,
and most crucially, photographic evidence.
So they can properly mortify you by one-upping their friends
as they brag about your successes.
If you'll permit me, I'd like to take a moment
to vent about my own disappointment about how this is going.
Back in October of last year,
I was asked to give this address.
I was surprised and delighted
to be invited by you, the students, to be your speaker.
I got my PhD from Hopkins,
never could have imagined to be selected for such an honor.
It was not how I thought of myself back then,
it's not how I think of myself now, I was elated.
Plus, the convocation ceremony was to be held
in the Meyerhoff Hall.
30 some years ago when I was working
toward my own PhD at Hopkins,
I could only afford tickets for nosebleed seats
for two performances in the Meyerhoff.
For your convocation, I'd be center stage
and the Hopkins bigwigs promised
to treat me like a diva for two days.
But then, eight weeks ago,
I was informed that your convocation
would be conducted remotely via Zoom.
And so I'd be giving my speech
to the little green LED at the top of my monitor.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a reaction,
let alone applause from a little green LED.
After my initial disappointment,
what became terrifying to me
is that I'm still responsible for giving you a speech.
Somehow, under these abnormal circumstances,
and as a pre-taped, remote talking head,
I'm supposed to move you to some heightened emotion
by making remarks that eloquently capture the significance
of this rite of passage.
For six weeks, I was obsessed
with the impossibility of that duty.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I had an idea.
I thought, I know what I'll do,
I'll tell them about my own Hopkins graduation ceremony.
Through reliving my memories of that consequential ceremony,
my words will evoke deep emotion,
a true sense of understanding
of what this day signifies,
and I'll transfer to you the aspirational charge
to fill your lives with challenge and purpose
that was delivered to me on my graduation day,
so here it goes.
I graduated from Hopkins on a warm sunny May day in 1990.
My father flew out from California,
he absolutely wanted the photos for gloating purposes.
Hopkins outfitted me with appropriate regalia,
we all assembled on the lawn at the Homewood campus.
There was a stage and a podium,
we graduates were in rows of chairs
and there was a huge audience all around us.
I'm thinking there was some speeches and stuff.
That's about all I can recall.
Do any of you really think
that this won't be a uniquely memorable graduation
celebration for each and every one of us?
Of the nearly countless ritualized,
stereotypical graduation ceremonies
that have taken place since this peacock plumed,
velvet robe wearing, sweaty marching ritual
started sometime in the Middle Ages, today stands apart.
It's likely this is the most remarkable graduation ceremony,
Hopkins has ever held.
And you are the graduates and the world is in a crisis.
And today, you the graduating class of 2020,
are leaving academia for that very real world.
I am a microbiologist,
since my first encounter with bacteria as an undergraduate,
I've been transfixed by the power and resilience
of microscopic life.
My research career has focused
on exactly how microbes coordinate their behaviors
to undertake great feats.
How they communicate among each other,
with their eukaryotic hosts,
and even with the viruses that infect them.
But still, after a lifetime spent
discovering cunning microbial capabilities,
I am awestruck by the destructive power of COVID-19.
A newly mutated virus that leapt from animals to humans.
Its genome, consists of only 14 genes,
30,000 bases of RNA, that's it.
30,000 As, Gs, Us and Cs,
encapsulated in a couple of proteins,
and about 1/1,000,000th of the size of a single human cell.
And this tiny bit of biological machinery,
has 7.8 billion of us on our knees,
and you are the graduates.
This day marks the culmination of your years of study,
research and practice.
You learnt from your mentors,
you learnt painfully from your mistakes,
you repeated and changed your experiments,
and you researched and confirmed your diagnosis.
Ultimately, all of that intense labor
of yours has contributed to your own growing prowess,
to discovery, to the restoration of health
and to the growth of the body of knowledge
of the natural world.
And then, right before you were about to graduate,
COVID descended and upended everything.
And then the disappointment set in for you,
for your loved ones and for me.
Disappointment or rather great, good luck.
How about fantastic as an alternative possibility?
How about the notion that you,
my new scientist and medical doctor colleagues,
have been selected through viral evolution
to be set apart for a unique destiny
that is being handed only to you,
but never to your predecessors?
When the President hosts,
his daily White House COVID-19 briefings,
who are the stars of that show?
Who does society look to,
as trusted voices addressing a fearful public?
Two MDs, a public health expert and a clinician scientist.
That could be you, actually, that is you.
Society is looking to you,
the medical doctors and the life scientists
to give it the straight answers.
We live in and you we're just trained by,
the most scientifically innovative nation in the world.
The US has 4% of the world's population,
yet we have 34% of the world's COVID-19 cases,
that's an outrage.
But it is also a pivotal opportunity
for life scientists and medical doctors.
Because of COVID, and those horrifying US statistics,
for the first time, at least in my lifetime,
American society overwhelmingly believes
that science and medicine hold the answer
to the greatest challenge facing humanity.
And we do hold the answer.
Well, not exactly the answer, not yet.
But scientists and medical doctors together,
will solve this epic crisis.
This is what we do, it's what we've always done.
Life scientists, medical doctors,
and public health experts
have a spectacularly successful long standing collaboration.
Public health workers and medical doctors
reveal the areas with urgent need for life saving therapies.
Life scientists probe the mechanisms
underlying those diseases.
The scientists discoveries,
drive the development of therapies.
The medical doctors apply those therapies,
the public health workers track progress,
and then together we iterate.
How about just a few examples from the past 150 years?
Anesthesia, penicillin and antibiotics, clean water,
insulin, organ transplants, the birth control pill,
smallpox eradicated, statins, the HIV triple cocktail,
MRIs, stem cell transplants, immuno-oncology, CRISPR.
We, the medical doctors, life scientists
and public health experts are going to solve COVID-19.
And I include it's lingering after effects.
Imposing challenges?
Yes, insurmountable tasks?
No, we will solve this disease
and the other important biomedical matters
that many of you will focus on,
because confronting grand biology challenges is our calling.
And because let's face it, we're ingenious.
It is not possible for us to solve today's crisis
in the timeframe the American public wants us to do it.
That is because much of American society does not understand
that this virus had 4 billion years
to perfect its cunning disease causing strategy,
and we've had so far about five months to figure it out.
Most Americans do not understand how discoveries are made,
nor the arduous process of translating discoveries
into safe and effective medicines and at scale.
And that brings me to my next point about you,
my fellow Hopkins graduates, and what makes this day,
your remote graduation, even more remarkable and unique.
COVID has handed us, the life scientists
and the medical doctors a moment.
COVID has made humanity intensely interested in science.
You must use your new expertise and your new positions
to capture this modest shift in mindset
and make a sea change in how decisions
that affect all of humanity get made.
You have the chance to make it
so that science is properly
and routinely embedded in decision making.
You can deliver a changed future by conquering this disease,
other diseases and by entrenching science in the mainstream.
You are not students, you are thought leaders.
So lead, lead with your discoveries, with your craft,
and with your rightfully earned positions of authority.
You won't have to do it alone.
There are already public health experts,
scientists and medical doctors,
the ones that got traditional
and wholly forgettable commencement ceremonies,
doing just this.
They've paved the way for you,
and they will work with you.
And there are tens of millions of Americans
who respect science and they want facts.
All of us will be your partners
and we welcome you to the fray.
Oh, and by the way, becoming a good leader
and changing the way the world works is fun.
Tackling hard problems is thrilling
because it demands that we bring so many parts of ourselves
to the endeavor.
Training, listening, empathy, logic, decisiveness.
It is electrifying to know that you are making a difference.
Plus, you get to be around interesting,
smart, creative people, and they energize you.
You are absolutely qualified to meet this great challenge.
The choice you made to come to Hopkins,
the grueling work you did to get to this day,
confirms that you wanted to enter the fray.
So come on, then, be bold.
What a day to do it, May 20th, 2020 in lockdown,
a great day to be a scientist, a medical doctor,
a public health worker
or a loved one of one of those people,
and a great day to graduate.
I am overjoyed to be your guest
and to share this unexpected
and utterly unforgettable graduation ceremony with you.
Congratulations.