Transcription of Alan Lishness for the show Deep Blue Sea, #117
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Alan: It is absolutely essential that every industry reinvent itself and people are working really hard at that, be open to looking at examples and then understanding what parts of them fit and when parts of them don’t fit. Don’t do exactly what we do. Understand why what we do works for us so that you can understand what you need to do that will work for you. I think if I have any advice, that’s what it would be.
Graham: Scientists need to explain the work that they’re doing well. Funding shouldn’t just be about the end result being in a scientific paper. They should really also explain why it matters and how it might be used in applied opportunities as well.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Apothecary by Design; Premier Sports Health, a Division of Black Bear Medical; Sea Bags; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 117, Deep Blue Sea, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 8, 2013. Today’s guest include Alan Lishness, Chief Innovation Officer with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Dr. Graham Shimmield, Executive Director of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. There is much to be learned from the sea. Many of us here in Maine are aware of the obvious resources provided by the ocean. What we may not realize is that school children and scientists, the world over are benefitting from marine research and education being done right here in our great state.
Some of this research has a direct impact on human health. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Alan Lishness and Dr. Graham Shimmield about the deep blue sea. Thank you for joining us.
If you’ve driven down Commercial Street here in Portland lately, you will have noticed a large rather elegant building with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute lettering right across the front. It’s something that I’m sure that you’ve been a little curious about. We thought we’d bring in an individual who could tell us all about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here in Portland. That is Alan Lishness, who is the Chief Innovation Officer over there. This has been a hard guy to get in to talk with us so we are very blessed to have you here today.
Alan: I’m delighted to be here.
Lisa: I knew the Gulf of Maine Research Institute when I was much younger, as a student myself. You guys have grown just exponentially since then, granted it’s been a little while. You have a new building. You have new programs. You’re impacting children all over the State of Maine. You’re impacting adults and ecological programs really all over New England, maybe an even further reach. This has been an ambitious cycle that you’ve been working with.
Alan: It really has been. People are sometimes surprised to learn that we were actually incorporated in 1968 as the Research Institute of the Gulf of Maine. Shortly thereafter, we morphed into the Gulf of Maine Aquarium. It was very interesting time back then. There was kind of the pie is one size. This Group was very interested in doing rain research in the Gulf of Maine as was the University of Maine. There was this perspective at the time which was a long time ago, forty some years ago, that whatever work the Research Institute of the Gulf of Maine might have gotten was taking food from the mouths of the hungry children of the professors trying to do that work at the University of Maine.
Now, as an indicator of how much things have changed, we have a stunning relationship with the University of Maine School of Marine Science. Two of our 6 research scientists are joint appointments with the University. That’s how much things have changed over a 40-year period. There’s a very, very positive development in Maine.
Lisa: Why the shift from Gulf of Maine Aquarium to Gulf of Maine Research Institute? Tell me what the differences are between the two.
Alan: At the time, we’re interested in building an aquarium. I came on board 26 years ago and was hired for 1 year to raise $6 million to build an aquarium. It was at a time when some really interesting work was going on with public aquaria around the country. Some were large and very recognizable. Of course, the New England Aquarium in Boston was the first and then the National Aquarium in Baltimore. There were aquariums getting built in smaller cities, one much smaller than Portland, Newport Oregon.
We were looking at some of those models and saying it would be really interesting to engage people because before people can learn, you have to engage their attention and find out what they’re passionate about. As we embarked down that road, we noticed some missing elements in the landscape. Maine is clearly a place where a whole lot of people can’t be trying to do the same thing at once. There’s a ton of room for a collaboration but there isn’t a whole lot of room or there isn’t a whole lot of funding for a flat out competition.
We said, “Okay, we have some great colleges and universities in Maine. We’re blessed given our population size to have the sorts of schools that we do. What’s missing?” What we discovered was there wasn’t much going on in K-12 Science education. We were doing a few projects as the Gulf of Maine Aquarium. Teachers were saying, “More, more, more. Give us more. We want more.”
We also noticed that there wasn’t a focus on applied research around fisheries. There are terrific research institutions in the Gulf of Maine, one that jumps to mind is the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Bigelow works, of course in the Gulf of Maine, but also oceans around the world. We said, “I wonder if there could be a focus on Gulf of Maine Fisheries,” because it’s a really thorny area, this was remember 20 years ago.
Then, the third space that we were interested in had to do with biotechnological opportunities in the Gulf of Maine. For instance, there’s a lot more stuff in the ocean than there is in the rain forest. We know what’s coming out of the rain forest in terms of beneficial compounds for instance. We set out to focus on those 3 areas. We’ve frankly done a whole lot more on the K-12 education side and on the Applied Marine Fishery side. We’re constantly monitoring the biotech side. It’s not a space that we’ve gotten into heavily. That’s how we got from there to here, was a gap analysis to understand what wasn’t going on in Maine and in the Gulf of Maine.
Lisa: I heard you speak at a TEDx talk, I think, 2 or 3 years ago now. You said that you actually have had the ability to touch almost every student that goes through in this area. I think it was maybe around the middle school years. What do you do with students who come in and see the Gulf of Maine Research Institute? What is it that you’re trying to put out there?
Alan: What we’re trying to do as an education group at GMRI is over time to cultivate a scientifically literate public. We see that as happening over a series of related events. We don’t begin to think that we as GMRI can do all of that. There’s a ton of collaboration going on with other institutions in the State of Maine, one that immediately pops to mind is the Maine Math and Science Alliance.
Let me just back up a little bit to talk about what I mean when we say our goal is to cultivate a science literate public. Some people say you have 10,000 kids coming to the [Samuel Collin 00:08:33] Center every year. Your goal is 10,000 marine scientists, right? The answer is no, not exactly. Our goal is to engage kids around critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and communication, those 4 skillsets which are handy not only in a context of workforce development but also life in a very complex 21st Century. When we go to vote now, there are almost always technological and scientific issues that are not too far in the background. If we are afraid of them, then we’re probably going to vote against them. If we understand them, we’re more apt to come to a weighed decision because we do understand them.
Lisa: The ocean offers us so much more than I think most people realize, we for a long time, have known that there are fish there. We can eat the fish. We can float our boats in it. There’s industry but there are also plants growing in the ocean that we know are very good for humans to eat. We’re more and more eating what are called sea vegetables. It used to be called seaweed. The interesting thing for me is that this is something that our Irish great-grandmothers knew about somewhere way back when. Are you doing any work in the area of sustainability of food, fish, sea vegetables?
Alan: It’s so funny that you should ask this question because when I walked out the door this morning, I met a whole group of people who were at the lab because they had rented space in the lab. They are a kelp farming group. The guy I was talking with who ran the company said, “When you go back upstairs, can you tell people that those seeds we raised in your lab on the first floor at GMRI resulted in 100,000 pounds of kelp. Yes, we’re very, very interested.
One of the things I’ll emphasize in our conversation is collaboration. There’s, I don’t know, 65, 67 of us and there were 1 1/2 when I started. That’s a lot but it’s still not enough to fulfil our aspiration. We partner with a lot of organizations in the building. We have a company called FishVet, happens to be a Scottish company that has developed a lot of the work around keeping aquacultured populations healthy. We have a company in the building called Sgurr Energy, also completely coincidentally a Scottish company. They’re an ocean energy engineering firm. They’re doing the engineering for the Cape Wind Offshore Project in Massachusetts.
We have a company in the building called Image Works. They produce very sophisticated software and hardware platforms, in fact have driven all of our children learning experiences, the design of the platforms, the lab venture experience that we’ve described that happens in the building and then two other programs called … One is called Vital Signs, where kids are using their laptops in the 7th and 8th grade to look for the presence or absence of invasive species around the state.
Our newest program called Powerhouse also for 7th and 8th graders such that students can use their laptops to determine how they’re using electricity in their house and how they can better manage the use of that electricity.
Lisa: Isn’t this the sort of idea behind a lot of what you’re doing is personalizing it so that it becomes less of an abstract idea of the ecosystem and more about an individual’s interaction with it.
Alan: Absolutely. Think about a 12 or 13 year old, a 7th or 8th grader and all over the media, we see warnings about climate change. We see debate. Is it real? Isn’t it real? While we have our opinions about that, we’re not really interested in the debate, we’re interested in how we are going to respond to the obvious changes in the climate. It’s very hard for a 12 year old or a 13 year old to be responsive and so for instance, that’s one of the things that we’re getting at with Powerhouse. People often say to us, “Gulf of Maine Research Institute, electricity? What does that have to do with anything?”
Of course, what it has to do with is the burning of carbon-based fuels and the deposit of that carbon in the ocean and ocean acidification. Anything with calcium in it, take for instance, lobster shell or clam shell or scallop shell, has a real problem with increased acidification. What we’re saying to young people is you really have a role. By you really understanding how electricity gets used in your home, you can better manage so that for instance we’re burning less coal and less oil and we’re using our electricity at times of day when we have natural gas available or hydro available or wind available.
It’s exactly that. It’s to personalize it and to say, hey you as an individual actually can make a difference and here’s how and by the way, you’ve learned some science and some math and some engineering along the way.
Lisa: You’re also trying to impact decision-making when it comes to consumers. You have a work that you’re doing with sustainably harvested fish. I was at Sea Glass Inn by the Sea and on the menu, it said this fish is certified sustainably harvested by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
Alan: We have 3 groups working at GMRI and probably the most obvious, easy this to understand is our science group. They’re trying to come to a deeper foundational understanding about how things are working in the Gulf of Maine and to your earlier point elsewhere. Then, we have this group called our community group. They’re hard to describe. What they’re doing is working with people in a context of neutrality. Now, neutrality is really, really important to GMRI. Take really any issue, take the issue of fishing and picture this long ark. On one end of the ark are perhaps people who would want to take every last fish out of the ocean, never met that person but let’s just say. On the other end of the ark are people who don’t want to ever see another fish caught. I frankly haven’t met those people either but they probably exist.
The point is that organizations tend to be able to be placed anywhere on that ark. Once you’re there, you’re defined and you’ve lost a lot of flexibility. We said, what would be really different will be if we provided a flat table, a neutral table where we invited all parties and it is amazing how it works. It’s difficult because as individuals, we all have positions but as an institution, we don’t. We generally know that we’re doing pretty well if every constituency is mad at us about something. It means that we’re not over-responding to anyone.
Our community group are masters at that neutrality, at welcoming all people. It’s a very informed style of facilitation. You couldn’t do it if you didn’t know the subject area. They, for instance, you described one of our programs, the sustainable seafood program. We have a bunch of restaurant partners like Inn by the Sea and like Five Fifty-Five, who are looking with us, at underutilized species and saying, “Hey, how could we make that more appealing and interesting?”
We had a big dinner for our national advisory group last week at Five Fifty-Five and had a very interesting redfish appetizer on the menu. People who’ve grown up in Maine remember redfish falling off bait trucks on the commercial saying, “Lobster bait, I’m not going to eat that.” It isn’t anymore but it’s hard to turn those perceptions. Our insight was in the seafood space to engage all across the market space so with fisherman, with processors, with buyers and with grocery stores. It’s really been magic. It’s hard. It would be really easy to publish this little card that says you should eat this. You shouldn’t eat that. By engaging deeply in the supply chain, it really embeds this thinking across all of the institutions who are making decisions.
That’s what our community group does and then our third group, education, I think is fairly easy to understand in conventional terms. It’s this business of trying to cultivate a science-literate public, trying to engage people in stuff that is personally relevant and place-based so that they really want to learn about it and it can inform evidence-based decision-making.
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Lisa: Why does the Gulf of Maine Research Institute need a Chief Innovation Officer?
Alan: It ties in to our neutrality. We, by a long shot, don’t think we know how to do things we don’t necessarily think we know how to marshal the forces to get things done. The first step in that is like the Finland thing is finding models. For me, I draw a really hard line between innovation and invention. Invention is a brand new idea. Nobody ever thought of doing it that way. My style of innovation is to look at something that was invented for one purpose and say if we just tweaked it that much, it could serve this purpose. For instance, in program design, we’re always looking for ways to engage young learners.
Another thing that I’m really interested in is car racing. To race cars cost a lot of money. We always had to find sponsors. What’s interesting is the sponsors of our car racing endeavors have tended to also be sponsors of programs at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. One of our sponsors was a guy named Kevin Eastman, who grew up in Maine and co-created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Ninja Turtles are everywhere. In this particular year, he has sold $1.5 billion worth of licensed Ninja Turtle products. I’m going, hmm, Ninja Turtles, obviously a big deal with young boys typically and real turtles I wonder if we could … I knew Kevin and I were talking one day. He was engaged with us around car racing but he said, “I love this thing that you’re doing over there for your work. Is there any way I could help? Could I sign posters?”
I said, “Well, I’ve sort of been thinking.” It was only the most random of thoughts that we could put this van on the road and we could develop a program where we took the Ninja Turtles and we took away their weapons and we replace them with the tools of scientific inquiry. If you want to understand turtles, this is a good way to do it. Kevin said, “That’s a great idea.” I said, “Would you like me to write a proposal? Because that’s what we always do.” He said, “Well …” and this was this conversation, he said, “What would something like that cost?” I’m kind of in my head in the conversation adding up the cost of a van and hiring somebody for a couple of years and developing some content. I said, “That would be about $150,000.” I said, “I would be happy to write your proposal.” “No, no, no, no,” he said, “This is a great idea,” took out his check book and wrote a check to us for it.
That’s the kind of thing that I really get a kick out of is repackaging something for an educational purpose when it wasn’t really intended to do that. It’s like our Powerhouse program, where engaging middle schoolers was probably not thought about in the design and installation of the hardware and software but it turns out to be a really engaging tool.
Lisa: You referred to Finland. I’ve referred to Finland a few times over the course of this conversation. What is it about Finland that fascinates you so much?
Alan: Every question you ask me, there’s always a story behind it. Finland … There was an ad on our local newspaper, The Cape Courier, 15 years ago. It said that the South Portland-Cape Elizabeth Rotary Club was looking to put together a group of people who were not Rotarians to send them to Finland for a month. I’ve always had this thing about Scandinavia. I don’t know why and as a family, we travel there. I just love the design and the ethos. They just can’t do ugly and even the paper napkins are beautiful.
My wife said, “Alan,” and this was when there were 1 1/2 people working at the Gulf of Maine Aquarium, she said, “Alan, you should apply for this.” I said, “Are you crazy? I can’t take a month off.” Then, she played her trump card which is, “If you don’t apply, I will.” I did and got selected as 1 of 4 people to go with this rotary leader to Finland for a month. Who knew that the purpose of the rotary foundation is world peace? They do 560 of these group study exchanges every year.
They sent 5 of us to Finland for a month. While we were there, we met 5 Finnish people who are coming back to Portland for a month. When I got there, one of the reasons I was interested was, believe it or not, this was so long ago that we didn’t all have cellphones. Maybe if you were a busy business executive, you had this crazy bag that sat on the transmission tunnel of your car. We don’t have transmission tunnels anymore either. It was really, really expensive. It cost $1,500 and a whole bunch of money every month but you could make telephone calls from your car.
When I landed in Stockholm on our way to Helsinki, everybody in the lounge is talking on cellphones, everybody. When I get to Finland, I started doing a survey because of course Nokia’s in Finland and Nokia had driven this incredible ramp up for cellphones. It turned out that about 75% of the calls that people were making on their cellphones were family-related. It’s raining. The football field’s too wet, we’re not going to have practice today. I’ll be home early. Honey, could you stop on the way home and pick up a loaf of bread?
I just found that culturally interesting because we’re always interested in how and whether technology platforms can inform learning. I came back with that and I was attentive to that and we got to tour Nokia factory. I was thinking about whether these platforms would become widely available, which of course, they did. Then, 8 or 9 years ago, something funny started to happen, I’d made a lot of contacts in Finland. I get back to Finland pretty much every year. All of a sudden, there’s this test called the PISA test, which test kids from 56 countries, 400,000 kids, 15 year olds, and Finland comes out at the top. I was like, “What the heck? This is a country of 5 million people. Why are they performing so well on this test which are very open-ended and are about reasoning and problem solving, all this stuff we want to accomplish?
The tests are given every 3 years. Every 3 years, Finland is either first or second and the US is 17th or 26th. The other interesting thing about Finland when we went there for a month, we had to give this talks at rotary clubs. We had to pay the piper somehow. We’d stand there and of course, once you’ve done the talk 6 or 7 times, it was on autopilot and I couldn’t help but notice as I would gaze out the windows, I would see trees, rocks and water. I said, “Wow, this is just like Maine.” It really was. It’s just 4 times the population on 4 times a very similar land area with 4 1/2 times the gross national product to our gross domestic product. It’s really a lot alike.
The weather in Helsinki, any day of the year, it’s probably within 2 degrees of the weather in Portland. They feel very, very similar and for all of a sudden, Finland to emerge as a leader in educating kids for life in the 21st Century was just interesting. I studied it a lot more and made some comparisons between Maine and Finland. That was the basis for the TEDx Talk. Of course, what’s really interesting about it is Finnish teachers don’t get paid quite as much as Maine teachers. They don’t work as many hours as Maine teachers. They don’t give the sort of standardized test that we do, yet year after year after year after year, they get this great results.
I’m just out looking all over the place. It’s not just that it’s Finland. It’s that Finland has proven perhaps to be the most transferrable. I’m always Singapore, in Japan, there’s a whole bunch of countries who are doing a good job with education. They may or may not be applicable to what we’re doing here in Maine but Finland really appears to be.
Lisa: Our conversation is very interesting to me because as a physician, of course, I’m involved in an institution. I’m calling it the … I guess it’s called the medical industrial complex by those who know. It’s having some growing pains. I think that we really can benefit from looking at other models. Sometimes it’s hard to convince people that looking at other models might be a good idea if you’re thinking about changing within your institution. What advice can you give to someone like me who’s looking to do this sort of thing?
Alan: Let me say first of all, that certainly the medical industry is facing massive change but every single institution is, every single one. That’s kind of the thing I learn as we get to talk to more and more people that it is absolutely essential, that every industry reinvent itself and people are really working hard at that. I don’t know that I have any great advice because I can’t necessarily speak from a position of fabulous success of getting everybody to agree to do the same thing and head in the same direction but I would just say it’s really the point you made, be open to looking at examples and then understanding what parts of them fit and when parts of them don’t fit.
There are aspects of the Finnish culture that are so dissimilar to culture here in Maine that that transition will never be made. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be attentive to perhaps the pieces that will fit. Let’s say be really open-minded and don’t presume that there’s a single solution and you can pick it up and re-pot it here. I’ve become friends with the guy who’s led the Finnish education revolution. He’s out giving talks and I was saying don’t do exactly what we do. Understand why what we do works for us so that you can understand what you need to do that will work for you. If I have any advice, that’s what it would be.
Lisa: I think that’s great advice. I’m very excited about the work that you’re doing at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. I’m now motivated to go down there myself having had 2 children go through your program and another one on her way through as a 7th grader. Thank you for what you’re doing and for spending time here in Maine the last, I guess, 26 years. How can people find out about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute?
Alan: We do a lot of different things. I’d say first of all, check our website and look at what’s going on. One of the … actually, there are 2 things you can do. On the first Thursday of every month, we have what we call a lunch and learn, where we invite people in for an hour and a half and I’ll talk about our education programs and our Chief Science Officer will talk about our research programs and our Chief Community Officer will talk about community. We’ll serve you lunch. There actually is a free lunch so first Thursday of every month. Just give us a call or send us an email to say, “Hey, I’d like to do that.”
Then, the other thing we do is we have these monthly lectures called the Sea State Lectures Series. We’re up to version 8.1 now. We’ve been doing it for several years. It happens that the topic right now is we’re digging really deep into education. We had a psychologist visiting with us a couple of months ago talking about how kids learn. For instance, if you wanted an adolescent to learn anything, you’d know better than to start school before 10:30 in the morning. There are just things that adolescents are brain-wise not able to do. Their peripheral cortex isn’t fully developed. It’s a great talk.
Last week, we had Glenn Cummings in talking about why charter schools work for some students and not for others. I’d say 2 things, the lunch and learn on the first Thursday and check our website for the Sea State Lecture Series because while they’re on education right now, they’ll be about lobstering or research or slimy eels or some crazy thing in the coming months. That’s two ways to learn about what we do, what’s going on down there.
Lisa: Your website is?
Alan: www.gmri.org
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Alan Lishness, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Thank you for continuing to serve the State of Maine. I’ll be down to check out your facility in the not-too-distant future.
Alan: Sounds great Dr. Lisa. Thanks so much for having us.
Lisa: As a physician and a small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: Fair winds and following seas, I think that phrase is most appropriate given today’s show theme of the deep blue sea. After all, who doesn’t want smooth sailing in their lives especially when it comes to business and finances. Too often though, we look at the business side of our lives, the financial part anyway, as an ocean that can toss us about with its rough waters. It doesn’t have to be that way. Just chart the proper course and you’ll enjoy smooth seas.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.