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A conversation with incoming NAS president Marcia McNutt

22 April 2016
As president of the National Academy of Sciences, McNutt hopes to help address climate change, food security, water availability, and other national and global challenges.

Marcia McNutt has rubbed shoulders with President Obama, Chinese premier Li Keqiang, and Pope Francis. She has also undergone explosives training with the US Navy SEALs, barrel raced on her Arabian horse, and raised three daughters. Currently editor-in-chief of Science, she will leave on 1 July to start a six-year term at the helm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

For many years McNutt followed a typical academic career. After earning her bachelor's degree at Colorado College in 1973 and her PhD at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography five years later, she settled into academic life. But in 1997 she left her tenured position at MIT to brave a new career. The move has paid off, as she has progressed from one prestigious science leadership role to the next.

Marcia McNutt. Image credit: Ian Young

Image credit: Ian Young

McNutt's first step off the academic track was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which she headed for 12 years. From there, she took the top job at the US Geological Survey. She was the first woman to head that organization, which was founded more than a century ago. During her USGS tenure, she was also science adviser to the secretary of the US Department of the Interior. Due to the seemingly nonstop occurrences of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, oil spills, and floods during that time, friends nicknamed her the "master of disaster." In 2013 she moved to Science.

"I think it's really good to take risks, do different things, recharge your batteries, get different colleagues, go to institutions that have different missions. I think that is what keeps you scientifically alive," she says.

At NAS, where McNutt will again break the glass ceiling, she hopes to address global challenges: "We need to be able to provide food security and energy security and everything else that an increasingly connected global population is asking for."

Was this the career she dreamed of? "Never," she says. "When I started out, I never made plans for anything. I just took one day at a time."

Physics Today’s Toni Feder spoke by phone with McNutt about her career, the catch-22 she sees women face in science, and her vision as a long-term leader.

PT: Why did you become a geophysicist?

MCNUTT: I went to college intending to major in physics, which I did. But in my freshman year I took geology. The philosophy of the professor was that we should view ourselves as the first geologists to ever try to figure out what was happening. We didn't use any books or research materials. We just rolled up our sleeping bags and backpacks and went into the Colorado mountains for two months. It was fabulous.

One of my physics professors convinced me that for graduate work I should go into geophysics rather than astronomy or nuclear physics or astrophysics—he said it was a chance to get in on the ground floor of a scientific revolution in plate tectonics. So that's what I decided to do. And because all the plate boundaries were under water, I thought I should go to an oceanographic institution.

PT: What was the revolution? Did you actually feel you were in on the ground floor?

MCNUTT: The previous paradigm had been that major geologic events such as mountain building and the formation of ocean basins were the result of vertical motions. The eureka insight in plate tectonics was that these vertical motions were minor afterthoughts of vast horizontal translations of the plates over the surface of the Earth.

And yes, I did feel I was in on the ground floor. On [my] first couple of expeditions, there was no one more senior on the ship than a graduate student. Many faculty members were having a difficult time changing their viewpoint, so all the best proposals were being written by students.

PT: Why did you switch from academia to science leadership roles?

MCNUTT: I was on the faculty of MIT for 15 years. I had a lab and graduate students and postdocs, and I certainly enjoyed it. But two things drove my decision: [First,] a recognition that what people valued most in me was what I thought about everyone else's science. And secondly, I recognized that I had produced enough good students who were doing interesting work, and I probably just needed to get out of their way.

And I saw a lot of senior people who spend 30 years or more at the same institution doing the same thing. I thought, “Is that what I want to do? No.”

PT: How did you actually make the transition?

MCNUTT: I was approached by someone on a search committee for the directorship of MBARI. I thought, “This would be so radically different.” And my kids were at the age where I needed to be home more. Going to a leadership job had a more regular schedule. Being an oceanographer, I was gone for a month or more at a time.

PT: Did you miss research?

MCNUTT: It was an adjustment to have to learn to vicariously get satisfaction out of the research accomplishments of the people in the institution. To say, “Well, in some small way, I helped to enable this.”

PT: Why did you move to the USGS? And then to Science?

MCNUTT: Leaving MBARI was hard. I loved the institution and the people there. To pick up and go to a government job which, well, government jobs are widely known to be pretty thankless, was a difficult decision. But once I left, I realized that again, I needed to recharge my batteries. I needed someplace with a new mission.

After four years, I felt I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. So I was excited to come here to Science.

PT: What have been some of your challenges and successes?

MCNUTT: USGS was an endless string of challenges—the Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Superstorm Sandy, the Chilean earthquake, the floods of 2011. The most extreme was probably Deepwater Horizon. In early May [2010] I went to Houston with the secretary of the Interior to do a tour of the Gulf Coast. The secretary left me at BP headquarters to oversee a government team working alongside BP to cap the well, measure the flow rate, et cetera, and I didn't go home for three months.

PT: What about successes?

MCNUTT: Lots of things! While I was at MBARI the institution came through with a string of firsts. It deployed the first in situ RNA analyzer in the ocean that is able to detect what microorganisms are blooming in the ocean by their genetic code. It developed the first deep-sea laser Raman spectrometer, which is the only available chemical point-and-shoot technology that requires no sample preparation to determine chemical composition. MBARI installed the first deep-sea cabled observatory in US waters. It brought AUV [autonomous underwater vehicle] technology to new levels.

At USGS, we were able to get through Congress a major restructuring to align the organization's strategic plan with management, with the budget, and with the goals and metrics by which the organization is evaluated. And we deployed earthquake early warning in California.

And at Science, well, we have started three new journals. In its first year, Science Advances had three papers that made the altmetrics top 100 of all papers published in all journals. That's pretty amazing for a startup journal. The other two are in robotics and immunology, and are just getting started.

PT: As you know, there have recently been several high-profile sexual harassment cases in science disciplines. What can be done to reduce bullying and harassment? What insights do you have as to why science has been so slow to equalize in terms of visibility and salaries for men and women?

MCNUTT: I think that at some point it's become almost a catch-22. Many women have opted out of the system at an early stage because they just haven't found it very welcoming to women. And so we have an inefficient system that trains a lot of women at the undergraduate and sometimes even graduate level, but then loses them during the postdoc years. Women say, "This is not compatible with my view of a reasonable lifestyle." So then there aren't enough women that make it to upper levels to help lift other junior women up or to change the system.

Case in point: I wrote a recent editorial in Science in which I argued that the current system of tenure, which brings young academics through this incredibly difficult tenure hurdle right at the time that the clock is ticking for women—where they must make a decision on having children or not—is punitive to women. And therefore we should be rethinking the tenure system if we want to get more women into academia. I can't tell you how many letters I got, mostly from men, saying how evil I was to have said anything negative about the tenure system and that, if anything, I should be talking about strengthening it and making it more rigorous.

I said in the editorial that those who have benefited from [the tenure system] are not going to change it, and those who are outcasts from it have no power. So there you have it.

PT: During your tenure at Science, you have at times been at the center of controversy—the 11 July 2014 cover showing transgender sex workers in Indonesia, paper retractions, and your turnaround to favor the Keystone Pipeline are examples. How do you deal with these situations?

MCNUTT: All of the controversies you mention are very different, so there is no common solution to dealing with them.

The cover with the transgender workers in Indonesia was a bad choice. We dealt with the controversy by apologizing for that and taking a number of steps internally to ensure it would not happen again.

I recognized that part of the controversy about the Keystone pipeline editorial was the structure of the essay. It said, “I can support Keystone, if it is taxed to support renewable energy projects and the extraction process was improved.” Most people didn’t read beyond the first part of the sentence. So what I learned was to reverse the argument. To state instead: “I cannot support Keystone unless the pipeline is taxed and the extraction process is improved.”

The retractions did not involve lots of negative community reaction against the journal beyond the usual complaint that more prestigious journals have more retractions. That is certainly a fact. But I believe that several factors contribute to that. First, the community scrutinizes the papers published in the prestigious journals more thoroughly. Therefore, if they are flawed, those errors are more likely to be uncovered. Second, the prestigious journals have been pushing quite hard for more transparency in data and methods, making it easier to reproduce their results. Third, I recently encountered a situation with a lower-tier journal that needed to retract a paper that was blatantly plagiarized from Science. Rather than issuing a retraction, the journal just removed the paper as though it had never existed. Thus it is clear that journal had no formal mechanism for retractions and would thus skew the statistics.

PT: Do you lose sleep over being in the crossfire?

MCNUTT: No.

PT: What attracted you to NAS?

MCNUTT: "Attracted" is kind of the wrong word. I would say I felt a sense of obligation and duty. My view is that the academy is the place where we can hold science to the highest standards of quality, impartiality, currency, and timeliness for addressing national needs. And I can't think of a time in human history when we have needed that more.

So, [part of my decision to take] this job [is] perhaps [my] sense that the academy needs to be making a better case for the use of impartial, unbiased science in decision making, and it needs to work not just with government leaders but with all sectors of society to make people more aware of the value of science in all aspects of their daily lives.

PT: You said it's a time in history when science needs to be held to the highest standards. Could you elaborate?

MCNUTT: Look at the issues we are facing, both nationally and globally, in terms of challenges in climate change, water availability, habitat degradation. [We look] forward to our grandchildren and hope they will have our standard of life, [but we have] concerns about whether we are going to be able to provide the energy and raw materials to [provide it for them].

PT: How can NAS be influential in addressing such issues?

MCNUTT: Fortunately, you start out with the fact that the NAS was founded and chartered to give advice to the government. But it helps if someone is willing to act on the advice that they're given, and willing to pay for the advice they are given. Increasingly, the government is not asking for everything they need. More work needs to be done to make sure the right studies are suggested to the right people at the right time.

I think we also have to do a lot within the community to make sure we get the very best and brightest people to serve in office.

PT: How can you increase the impact of NAS studies?

MCNUTT: Unfortunately, the funding for a study usually ends once the study is produced. It's not as though the funding comes with a PR campaign. I think the academy is doing a much better job of tracking the impact of studies and trying to learn from past experiences as to what sorts of investment the academy could put into post-release activities that actually lead to high impact.

PT: What are your plans when you take the helm of NAS? And what do you see as the biggest challenges?

MCNUTT: It would be inappropriate for me to go into a lot of detail at this point about my plans. The biggest challenge of course is that the academy is a very large and complex organization. So the first thing you want to do is really get a handle on what are, and what the staff view as, the biggest pain points. You want to avoid shooting from the hip and coming in with a bunch of crazy ideas that have a low chance of working. You have to sit back and think, “What do we have a chance of actually pulling off?”

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