Empowering Women in STEM: Dr. Marcia McNutt

In this episode, I chatted with Dr. Marcia McNutt. A decorated scientist who was the 15th Director (and 1st woman) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), a Professor of Marine Geophysics at Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz, and a Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was also the science adviser to the United States Secretary of the Interior, and the former Editor-In-Chief of Science Magazine. She is currently the 22nd President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Transcription

Transcribed by Bethany Lee (she/her)

JP Flores: Alright, Marcia! Well, I start these with a short autobiography, so can you please tell the listeners your name, educational journey, where you are now, and what you’ve been up to?

Marcia K. McNutt: Sure. My name is Marcia McNutt. I went to college in Colorado - a small liberal arts school, Colorado College, majored in physics. Then I went to graduate school in La Jolla, California at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Studied marine geophysics, got my PhD there and then went on with my career. Is that enough? Or do you want more.

JP Flores (he/him): You can give me more if you want. It could be like, what did you study in undergrad, what did you study in graduate school. And you know, why did you choose physics? And why did you choose to go into - why did you choose to study what you studied at Scripps?

Marcia K. McNutt: Sure. So the reason I studied physics as an undergraduate was because my physics teacher in high school was totally amazing. She was so passionate about physics, and I really liked the rigor of it. I really liked the fact that, you know, everything was being reduced to mathematical equations. You could use those equations to predict the natural world. It seemed to me that physics was the one science that the other sciences sort of built off of: chemistry, biology, geosciences. That physical understanding was sort of a prerequisite to be able to go on to some of these more complex sciences.

So that’s why I decided to study physics. I got no encouragement from my college advisor. His name was Wilbur Wright III and when I met him my first day at undergraduate school he said to me that he had seen women - no, he had seen girls come and go in the department, but there had not been one to graduate. So he clearly wasn’t giving me much encouragement.

Colorado College had just started a new program where you only take one course at a time for a month, the “block plan” they call it. So I had already signed up in the summer to take geology for September and October blocks - it was a 2 block sequence - because I thought, you know, why go to Colorado and not see the mountains, not get out in the field and that seemed great. So I did that. But then my advisor signed me up for a series of 3 physics courses, Structure of Matter 1, Structure of Matter 2, and Structure of Matter 3. That was the sequence for physics majors. But after you took Structure of Matter 1, he asked each of the students to come in his office to discuss performance in the class, and whether he would encourage you to go on to Structure of Matter 2. So when I went in for my conference, he goes, “Well, I’m running behind schedule. So this conversation can be mercifully brief.” And he goes, “A physicist has the right combination of arrogance and humility. You only have the arrogance.”

JP Flores (he/him): What?

Marcia K. McNutt: And I said, “Well, what does that mean? Can I go on to Structure of Matter 2? And he goes, “Yes.”

So I just left his office, went to the registrar’s office, changed my advisor that day.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, what?

Marcia K. McNutt: Cause I just thought that this guy was going to be of no help to me, and I got a wonderful advisor, Dick Hilt, who was fairly new to the department at that time. And he was just so inspiring and so encouraging. I just loved working with him.

And so then I was about to graduate. I was, you know, entering my last year, I actually graduated after 3 years so this was the beginning of my junior year. And went into his office and he said, “Well, we need to talk about your future,” he said, “You’re gonna graduate this year. What are you gonna do after you graduate?”

I said, “Oh, I’ve got a great plan,” I said. “My best friend and I are going to go be ski bums in Sun Valley. We’re going to bartend at night. We’re going to ski during the day, and it will be a wonderful year, and after that year I’ll figure out what I want to do next.”

And he goes, “No, no, no, no, you’re not going to do that,” he said. “You’ll find that you get used to having time being your own, you get used to having money in your pocket and being able to just have fun and kick back.” And he said, “It will be very difficult for you to go back to being a student.” So he said, “That’s not what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna go to graduate school next fall.”

And I said, “Well, my parents still - I still have 2 younger sisters who have to go through college. They don’t have money to continue to send me on to graduate school.”

And so he hands me this, you know, piece of paper, and he goes, “This is an application for a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. You will fill it out. You will turn it in. You will get the fellowship. Your graduate school will be paid for.”

And I said, “Well, I’m not even sure what I what I want to study in graduate school.” Most of the excitement at that time was in astrophysics and nuclear physics. And he said, “No, you’re not gonna study either of those, because,” he said, “the facilities have gotten so large and so expensive and it’s so competitive to get time on in those facilities that,” he said. “You’ll find yourself as one of 500 names on a paper that comes out, and you won’t get any credit for your work.”

So he said “Instead, read this,” and he hands me that month’s issue of Scientific American. And so this was like 1972. It had in it the first paper that had ever been written for a non-specialist audience on play tectonics.

JP Flores (he/him): Wow!

Marcia K. McNutt: He said, “I know you’ve taken some geology. I know you like to do science outside. Read this and come back to me.”

So I took the Scientific American back to my dorm room, read the paper. It was by a scientist named John Dewey. It changed my life.

I mean, I just, I - although I had taken geology, I never thought I would continue in it, because it seemed so “arm wavy” at the time. You know, there were – mountains would go up, and, you know, basins would go down, and no one could explain why any of this was happening, and they had all these terms for them: eugeosynclines, miogeosynclines, blah blah blah! And I just thought, there’s nothing rigorous about this. But when I read about play tectonics, I thought, this is so simple, this is so beautiful, it makes so much sense, it must be right.

And so most of the plate boundaries were underwater. So I figured I needed to go to an oceanographic institution so that I could study what’s going on. So I applied to oceanographic institutions and ended up at Scripps. And it was really a great time, because, you know, there’s nothing like getting in on the ground floor of a scientific revolution.

You know, if I had gone into nuclear physics or astrophysics, I’d have to be reading decades worth of papers of people who had gone before me. But in the geosciences, anything that was older than about 1968 was useless now, you know, and and so the first expeditions I went out on were led by fellow graduate students.

JP Flores (he/him): Wow.

Marcia K. McNutt: And so the opportunities were just amazing. So I always tell students, you know, if you can get in on the ground floor of a scientific revolution, do it, you know. Going into genetics right after Watson and Crick’s double helix, or going into relativity right after Einstein writes his paper on special relativity. You know, these were all opportunities that if you recognize them for what they were worth you could really, you could really have an impact.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, definitely. Well, did you ever get to reschedule your ski trip and your bartending gig?

Marcia K. McNutt: So, you know, so I did get a lot of skiing done in Colorado. My freshman roommate’s father was a shepherd, and as a shepherd he owned Snowmass Mountain.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh, wow!

Marcia K. McNutt: And he leased to the Aspen Corporation for 99 years to build the ski area. So you can bet we spent a lot of time at Snowmass.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, I spent time in Steamboat Springs, and I think I went through Breckenridge and Vale and all those places. Colorado is beautiful. Yeah.

So would you mind painting a picture of who you are outside of the scientist hat, right, like, how were you raised, what your upbringings - what were your upbringings like. You mentioned, you know, your experience, you know, being a woman in STEM, did you see - did you have a lot of women role models growing up? Or what was that -

Marcia K. McNutt: So, you know, my physics teacher, as I say, she was wonderful and she interested me in physics, but in terms of my own family, my mother, like most women of her generation, was a housewife, a homemaker. I had 3 sisters, and she took care of us. She had actually graduated from college because her father felt that educating women means that you educate the entire family. And so she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, was really really smart but really didn’t have a career. I remember after my dad retired she realized she couldn’t sit home with him all day. So she opened an antique shop. But that was, that was the only real career she had.

My father was a war hero. He was a freshman at Harvard when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So he lied about his age - he was only 17 - waived a heart murmur, and enlisted in the infantry. He landed at Omaha Beach.

I was just the other night at the French Embassy for celebration of the eightieth anniversary, a little bit early, but this is the 80 - this year will be the eightieth anniversary of the Allied invasion. And by the time he reached the gates of Berlin he had 2 purple hearts, a bronze star, a silver star, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the French Croix de Guerre. And because he had lied about his age it turns out he was the youngest officer in the US Army, and he realized that there weren’t going to be promotion opportunities for him, because, you know, he was at the senior rank, but no seniority.

So he went back to Minnesota. His father had a small family business, so he took that over with his brother. I don’t think he was ever very happy in that line of work at all. I think he would have been much happier doing something else, but that was something that was expected that he would do for the family.

My - I have lots of fond memories of doing things with my dad. But most of the time it was, you know, mom and my sisters and I.

JP Flores (he/him): Definitely.

So can you talk about your role with Science Magazine? I know you’re at the National Academy of Sciences. Can you talk about what you’ve been up to now, what you’ve been up to very recently, and then I have a couple of follow ups to those two.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah. So right before I came to the National Academy, I was Editor in Chief of Science. I loved that job. That was, you know it was, it was just really, you know, for a scientist you’re like a kid in a candy shop.

I remember every Tuesday morning, the editors - we’d all sit around a table - and the editors would give us little précis of the articles that they were pending for acceptance. And it was just fun to be spoon fed all these science discoveries. I just loved it.

Of course, the 2% of the authors and papers that caused problems took up 90% of my time.

You know, particularly with fraudulent work, or author disputes, or whatever, you know, that just took up more of my time than anything else. But I really loved being Editor in Chief of Science.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, I just interviewed Dr. Holden Thorpe. And he said the same thing. It’s so fun.

Marcia K. McNutt: It is. Yeah. And I loved writing the editorials.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, it’s sort of like you’ve got your own little soapbox there. So it was fun.

JP Flores (he/him): And well, how long ago was that? That was in the…

Marcia K. McNutt: So I was editor in chief 2013 to 2016.

JP Flores (he/him): Okay, very recently.

Marcia K. McNutt: And then in 2016 I was elected President of the National Academy of Sciences.

JP Flores (he/him): How does that even happen? Like you were editor in chief and then…?

Marcia K. McNutt: So, you know, you’ll you’d have to ask people who are on the committee, tat comes up with candidates for election to the officer positions at the Academy. But but here’s my kind of guesstimate of how this happened:

So my predecessor was failing in health. He had - still had a few years left in his term, but he asked to step down early because he was was not in good shape, and I think that that was probably a smart move. In fact, he passed away within a month of me taking the job at the Academy..

JP Flores (he/him): Oh wow.

Marcia K. McNutt: But I think that, first of all, to be President of the Academy, you have to be a member, so that automatically, you know, narrows the focus of of who can be considered. And I had been a member of the Academy for I think, almost 10 years. By that time I had chaired some studies. I had been on many committees, etc, so I knew the Academy and I think what appealed to the search committee was that I had served in government. I had been director of the US Geological Survey for the first term of the Obama administration. So I kind of understood how government worked. I understood the limitations on what government leaders can do, that sort of thing. But I also had led institutions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and they felt that they really wanted someone also with management experience. Because really, when you’re president of the Academy, it’s not like I get to do a lot of science, but I’ve got a workforce of about 1,300 people or so that, you know, need to be paid and guided and kept out of trouble and all that kind of stuff. So I think the fact that I had been in charge of a government agency and in charge of a research institution, appealed to them. And then, I think finally, you know it’s important for the President of the Academy to appreciate all of the other sciences, and I think they felt that my experience.

[phone rings in background: I’m sorry we’ll let that go, it’s a telemarketer. Okay, let’s see if I can get rid of this. Okay.]

I think they felt that my experience at Science Magazine, you know, where where you publish everything from microbes to black holes. I think they felt that that that would give me some credibility across all of the sciences at the Academy. Yeah. Good.

JP Flores (he/him): So for listeners that don’t know, can you talk about what the National Academies are?

Marcia K. McNutt: Sure. So the way the story goes, National Academies were founded in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. And it was during the height of the Civil War: there was a battle in the Chesapeake Bay battle of Hampton Roads, between 2 ironclad warships. The first 2 ironclad warships, the Monitor and the Merrimack, and they battled to a draw because the cannonballs were just bouncing off the sides of either ship. And when word of that got back to Lincoln at the White House he figured that technological innovation was going to be the key to winning the battle space, and he wanted the scientists on his side.

So we got a bill through Congress, signed, you know, passed at midnight before Congress went into recess that established the National Academy as the official advisors to government. The National Academy is non-governmental. We don’t receive any direct appropriation from the Federal Government. We would pick our own members. So we would decide who are members of the Academy. But when asked, we would respond to the Government’s request for any evidence from science, engineering, whatever, that could make for better public decisions.

And when the Government asks us for that advice, they pay the cost of doing that study, convening those experts, that sort of thing. But everyone who advises us at the Academy on any topic - they’re all volunteers. They all work for free.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh wow. Gotcha.

So you’ve obviously had a very decorated career to work for Science Magazine. You led USGS, worked for one of my, you know, favorite aquariums being from California. Have you ever felt imposter syndrome? And if so, how did you overcome that? Cause imposter syndrome is a very ubiquitous thing amongst a lot of scientists nowadays. But from you, what’s your, what’s your story?

Marcia K. McNutt: So imposter syndrome came to me really late and it’s because I grew up in a family of all girls. Even the dog was girl. I went to an all-girls school from second grade through twelfth grade. So, and most of the teachers were women. Anyone who is doing anything in my life was female, so it never, ever occurred to me that I couldn’t do something because of my gender. And that’s why that comment from Wilbur Wright III seemed so jarring but because, you know, I was 18 years old at the time, and had built up my own self-confidence from having gone to a girls institution, rather than hearing that comment and thinking, Oh, wow, maybe I don’t belong here. My reaction was well, what’s wrong with you?

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: But then, when I went off to graduate school. I get to graduate school, and here I’ve come from this small liberal arts College, you know, small class sizes, small numbers of students, and my fellow students in geophysics had come from MIT, Cal-tech, Berkeley, Stanford. I get there, and they’re - the level of competition that they had experienced in college was at a completely different level than what I had experienced.

I didn’t really feel in college I had to work all that hard to be the best in my class. But wow! When I get to graduate school, I realized, I’ve really gotta up my game. And so I remember specifically this one class I was in, in which - I forget what the question was - but we were supposed to figure something out that had to do, I think, with rotation of the planets or something like that. And so I figure, you know, I’ve just really got to put a lot of effort into this. I really need to figure this out. So I handed in my answer to the question, and the the Professor, when he gave it back to me, I had 4 pages of mathematical derivations to answer that one question and the professor told me I got the answer wrong and he circled on page 3, where I had used an arc-cosin when I needed an arc-sin in the equation and that was where I went wrong, and I can tell you it probably took him a lot of work to actually go through and find out where I had gone wrong, cause I got the wrong answer. And then he showed us all in class the 4-line solution that completely, you know, was so much simpler than my 4 pages of solution, and he wrote, at the end of mine he goes, this is the most backbreaking way I have ever seen.

So you know this, this definitely contributed to my sense that gosh, I am really out classed here. But this professor became my advisor, and he was wonderful. He was supportive. I learned what I needed to learn. I learned how to figure out that 4 line solution from the beginning, not after the fact. But that was that was the toughest time, I think.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, definitely, yeah. And you know, some things we talk a lot about in academia is finding the right mentors and the right communities, right? So this seemed to be the right mentor. Do you think there’s any way we can like make that bridge a little easier like, how can we make it so that graduate students have an easier path to finding the right mentor.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, so I guess I’d have to say this is one of my complaints about the - I’ll call it an apprenticeship system.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: And graduate school. In that what happens is you apply and based on your research interests and the research interests of the faculty, and who has funding for a student you get matched with someone. And it has nothing to do with your personality or the personality of the person who has the funding for you. And so when when I first got to Scripps, I was matched with a faculty member - I didn’t really have much knowledge about what I wanted to do - but I got matched with a faculty member who actually was sort of near the end of his career and had been moved into an administrative position, so wasn’t really doing all that much research. And after I think it was fall quarter or something, I realized, you know, working for this guy just isn’t going to work for me because I’m so naive, and I’ve come from an institution that didn’t need a lot - that didn’t do research, really, it was liberal arts, just like Occidental. I felt, wow, I really need an advisor who’s much more hands on.

So after I took the course from this other geophysicist I asked if I could could come work for him, and he agreed. And it wasn’t until like months later that my original supervisor shows up at my office and asked my office mates, “Where’s Marcia? I should probably check in with her.”

And they said, “Oh, don’t you know? She’s moved up to IGPP. She’s working with Bob Parker.”

And you know this was - this was a faux on my part in that he should have been the first to know that I was - not the last, but that just shows how little contact we had.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah. yeah, do you have any recommendations on what can make it better, though? Like, what do you think grad schools should adopt?

Marcia K. McNutt: So what a lot of the better graduate programs are doing, I think Cal-Tech is doing this and I think another number of other programs are trying to do this, is they’re trying to come up with enough fellowships that the first year class of graduate students for PhDs can be supported on a fellowship while they take courses, they get the background they need, they can - and and they have little seminars they can go to to find out what kind of projects the different faculty are working on. They get to know the faculty from taking classes from them, and then they can really make an informed decision about, where is the right intersection between my talents, what I’m interested in, and who’s a good match for me to work with in terms of personality types. And so I think that’s that’s really a great solution, but you know, it takes a lot of work in terms of fundraising from alums and corporations and other groups to support all the students on first year fellowships.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, definitely here at UNC, I came in through an umbrella program. So we were able to create community with 99 other, you know, cohort members. And then we siloed into our specific departments our second year. So the first year also had a bunch of rotations, so you could rotate in different labs and things like that. It’s awesome.

So what about access to science? I know you are very passionate about science communication, making sure that people can communicate science effectively and accurately. What types of things should, you know, be implemented so that all scientists in the next generation can be equipped with those skills.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, so first of all I think we need to raise the skill level and communications for everyone. But then there are some people who are just really gonna be good at it, anyway. And other people who won’t. That doesn’t mean that everyone can’t improve, but there’s some people that I just would never put in front of a lay audience. You know I just wouldn’t.

JP Flores (he/him): Right.

Marcia K. McNutt: So I think one program that really benefited me when I was a junior scientist was, I was invited to participate in a brand new program that the National Academy of Sciences was running, and it was called The Frontiers of Science, and these meetings you had to be under 45 to be involved. They had a, you know, an organizing committee that was all young scientists who would choose the topics and the speakers across all fields of science, and the idea would be to expose other scientists from different fields to what the frontiers are in your area.

JP Flores (he/him): That’s so cool.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah. And the reason why the Academy started this program was that they - this was at a time in the late 1980s, when all sorts of big projects were being proposed: super conducting super collider, new space telescopes, new observing systems, etc. And the president of the Academy at the time, Frank Press, realized that no scientist was able to talk to another scientist outside their field so that no one had the overview to be able to figure out which of these is the most important to do, which is most likely to leap through for breakthroughs and to really advance science. So he felt getting young people together to do this would be a good idea. And so, from speaking at these meetings - I ended up going to a whole series of them, to US-only ones, and then a German-American one and a Chinese-American one - you realize that if you wrote out your points you wanted to make in your talk on a word processor - and these were early versions of word processors that were, you know, mostly made for business and stuff like that - if there were words in there that the word processor flagged is being misspelled, but you knew it wasn’t misspelled, that was jargon. That was jargon in your field that other people didn’t understand. And you figure it out pretty quickly that you could assume that the other scientists there all knew the periodic table and they knew basic mathematics. Anything other than that was off the table. And you better explain things in a way that they could understand, and actually speaking to a scientist well outside of your field, is not that much different than speaking to the public.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: You gotta get rid of the jargon, you’ve got to use analogies, and you’ve got to tell stories.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: So that was, I think, a really good experience in communication and a number of other programs such as that have grown up. We’ve done a lot of work with Alan Alda, who’s just a champion in science communication. A real hero. And there’s a Eldolf Leopold program in science communication. So there are a bunch under there. I think that what as President of the Academy I’m trying to do right now is just change the reward system in academia. Because right now if you want to get involved in science communication, if you want to help the public understand science and help them support it. You don’t get any credit for doing that, and I think that has to change.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s also -

Marcia K. McNutt: You get credit for doing bad communication.

JP Flores (he/him): Right, right!

Marcia K. McNutt: But for people who do it well, that should be acknowledged.

JP Flores (he/him): I do think it should be incentivized to some degree, I don’t know how or or what. But yeah, another thing that I’m interested in is figuring out how to get the luck out of fellowships and grant processes, but that’s just like a colossal task that I would want to, you know, hammer on further in my career, but -

Marcia K. McNutt: No, I think that’s a worthy goal. But I’ll tell you, I don’t even know how we begin.

JP Flores (he/him): Exactly. Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: Because there is so much subjectiveness in these decisions and trying to make it all quantitative - once you make something quantitative, people game the system.

JP Flores (he/him): Yep.

Marcia K. McNutt: Once there’s a number, then people figure out how to game that number. And so I’m just worried that trying to make it less, you know, less subjective, would just lead to bad outcomes.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s just one thing that’s on my mind a lot, though, that it’s, you know, a lot of like NSF GRFP reviews keep coming out, and it’s almost like nightmares, right? Like seeing what some of these reviews are saying. So maybe it’s a process, and that needs to be changed a little bit.

So what is your day to day like at the National Academy Sciences? How many meetings do you think you have a week? How many do you find fun? And how many are not fun?

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah. So I would say the meetings I like most are probably the ones that involve people from outside the Academy, or that happen outside of the Academy. I do a lot of collaborating with other academies around the world. The British Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, German Leopoldina, the Italian Lincei, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Japanese Science Council. Those are all fascinating because you basically find out that the problems we’re dealing with in this country are pretty much the same everywhere else. And it’s helpful to learn what sort of solutions have taken hold in different cultures and things like that. Many of the meetings that are just internal to the Academy are necessary and help the institution move forward but aren’t necessarily as fun.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, that’s what I imagine. Yeah. yeah, cool. Well, can you walk us through your response to the BP oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico? Because I know you played a huge role in that and and I wanna know what your thought process was - were you kind of like, “Oh, man, we’re screwed! What did it - what do we need to do?” Can you walk us through that?

Marcia K. McNutt: So when we first heard word that this oil well had blown in the gulf -

JP Flores (he/him): And what position were you in? Were you..

Marcia K. McNutt: I was director of the US Geological Survey.

JP Flores (he/him): You were with the USGS, gotcha.

Marcia K. McNutt: So the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, called us all into his office. I think it was a Saturday morning, or something. We all had to come in on Saturday morning to discuss what we were going to do. It was clear that this was not something minor that was going to be brought under control quickly. You know, 11 men had died, for - to all intensive purposes, you know, copious amounts of oil were pouring into the Gulf of Mexico and Department of Interior had under its jurisdiction at that time the Minerals Management Service, MMS, which is responsible for leasing in the Gulf, and it had also responsibility for safety. Safety and drilling. So this was definitely an issue that the Department of the Interior needed to take leadership on.

The Coast Guard was, of course, also involved, because Coast Guard is responsible for responding to oil spills in the marine environment. But much of the science was going to have to come out of interior. So when we met at - in Salisor’s office to discuss what we were gonna do, he told me that because I was the only one at Interior who had experience in deep sea intervention, and that’s because when I was the director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute we were on the front lines of developing new tools, manned - mostly unmanned for deep sea intervention, and this was a problem that would only be solved with remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles. So he said, “Go home, pack a suitcase. We’re gonna leave for the Gulf tonight.” And he said. “We’re gonna spend 3 days down there. We’re gonna tour Huma, where the port is, where the industry stages out of.” He said, “We’re going to go to BP headquarters in Houston and bunch of other places down there for this 3 day trip.” So I went home, packed a suitcase for a 3 day tour.

We get down there. Our last stop is BP. And the secretary says, “I’m going to leave you here. I want you to head up interior’s response to this,” and he said, you know, “Keep me up to date.” So a 3 day tour - this is sort of like, you know, Gilligan’s Island, or something. My 3 day tour turned into about 3 and a half months in Houston.

JP Flores (he/him): Do you get new clothes?

Marcia K. McNutt: People were, probably got pretty tired of seeing me in the same clothes every day. Yes, it was a very small suitcase. I stayed at a hotel, so fortunately they had laundry facilities, so, you know, I could, you know, get things cleaned and stuff like that. But I think I had - because when packing a suitcase, what really takes up the room is shoes, I just wore one pair of sandals down there.

JP Flores (he/him): What?!

Marcia K. McNutt: And didn’t bring any other shoes. So at the time when I finally, when we finally got the well plugged, I burned those shoes.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh my gosh!

Marcia K. McNutt: They were in such bad shape from wearing them every day. It was terrible.

But anyway, so that was - that was probably the most trying time of my life, because we we had to be at BP headquarters at 6 am every day when we got an overview from, you know, people in the boats out there in the ocean and from engineering and everyone else, we got an update of where things stand, what new knowledge had been acquired, what new data sets were available, blah blah blah. And then I generally got back to my hotel about 11 every night.

JP Flores (he/him): Wow. Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: Otherwise, I was working in this windowless office inside the BP Command Center. And what I was doing was basically marshaling the forces from the academic community to try to understand how we could fix this problem. I was put in charge of a group to estimate how much oil is actually coming out from this broken well, you know, what’s the flow rate of it? So I pulled together a bunch of people - no one had ever done this before. No one knew how to do it. So we just figured, we’ll get a whole bunch of smart people together, and we’ll try everything. We had one team working on what’s called PIV, or particle interferometric velocimetry. And we had one group that was basically using some other kind of fluid mechanics and everything.

What finally worked was I got a team from Woods Hole in that came in with a ADCP, which is a doppler current measurement device, and they had an imaging sonar, and they were able to get the flow as it came - the rate of the flow as it came out of the well, the size of the plume from the sonar, and then they got the ROV - they were down in our ROV doing this, and they got a small bottle to sample the fluid because they needed to know how much was gas and how much was oil, otherwise you get the wrong answer.

I remember it was Memorial Day weekend. So the well blew at the end of of April. Memorial Day weekend was when we finally figured out that we could measure the flow rate with the ROV. But the ROVs were, of course, owned by oceaneering, which was a contractor to BP. They had the pilots, they had the equipment, and so we had to ask their permission to mount this ADCP and the sonar imaging tool on their ROVs.

But here it is Memorial Day weekend, and the leadership at oceaneering says, “These devices have never been deployed from one of our ROVs. We don’t know if they’re going to be safe.”

JP Flores (he/him): What?!

Marcia K. McNutt: What if one of them blows up or something and and ruins the Rov. So I’m sitting there Memorial Day weekend - what am I going to do to change their mind? Because these scientists are here, they’ve got their equipment. This oil is ugly and polluting,

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: We need to to know this as soon as possible. So I remembered that my head of engineering - or my head of marine operations - when I was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute had been a pilot at oceaneering before he came to Inbari, and so I called him up on a weekend, got him at home, and I said, “Steve, you need to call your buddies at oceanearning and figure out how we’re gonna get this Woods Hle equipment on one of their ROVs.”

And it turns out that the Woods Hole equipment had all been deployed from the Alvin submersible, a manned submarine, and that was under certification by - the rules for sort of certifying equipment come from the oceanographic research labs. Whereas oceanearing, they used the ABS, which is a Coast Guard standard for safety.

So Steve walked the oceaneering people line by line through the 2 documents to show that in every single case the Oceanographic institution’s requirements for safety exceeded that of ABS, which is the American Bureau of Shipping. And they exceeded because they’re put on a manned submarine, you know, if you blow up an ROV it’s kinda like, Oh, you lost a lot of money. If you blow up a manned submarine, you lose people.

And so oceaneering agreed, we got the equipment on, they got the measurement. We got the flow rate, and that’s what led to the understanding that there were literally millions of barrels of oil that had been released in this disaster, and it led to the largest Clean Water Act penalties, I think, ever levied against an organization.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah. Well, when you got it plugged, was that like, do you feel like that was the most accomplished thing of your life? Like that’s that is a tall - like that is wild.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, that was amazing. So BP wanted to try what they felt were safer things first before actually trying to plug the well and the reason they were worried about plugging the well was that no one knew if in the original explosion that destroyed the rig, set the fire, killed the men - if the liner to the well had been damaged.

And the way I explain this is: Imagine you’ve got your garden hose out there, and water’s coming out the end. One way you can stop the water from coming out the end is to put your hand over the end of it. But then pressure builds up in the hose, and if you’ve got cracks in your hose, you change one flow to water shooting out everywhere through all the cracks in the hole.

So BP felt, rightly so, that unless they knew that the well had maintained integrity, they would create a worse problem by plugging the well than by trying these other interventions, all of which failed. And they all failed because the flow rate was much higher than BP was estimating. So when we went to plug the well we, you know, did all sorts of modeling, and what we determined was when the well is plugged, we’ll put a pressure sensor on the plug for the well and measure the rise in pressure - because the oil can’t come out of the well head anymore. If the pressure is really low then we know it’s leaking, and we’ve got to open the well up again, because otherwise we’re going to have a million oil spills rather than just one. If it’s really high, then we’re fine. The liner held, it’s got integrity, and we can close it in from the top. If it’s intermediate, all bets were off because it could mean that the pressure in the oil formation was just reduced after days of, you know, weeks of this oil flowing. Or it could mean that cracks were developing and oil was starting to to move out.

So we figured if the pressure was really high we would just leave it closed in. If it was really low, we’d open it right away. If it was in the intermediate zone, well, then, we would - then the scientists had 24 hours to decide what to do.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh my God.

Marcia K. McNutt: We plugged the well on July 15.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah.

Marcia K. McNutt: The pressure was in the no-man zone. It wasn’t so low we knew it was leaking. It wasn’t so high we could guarantee it was intact. We had 24 hours.

So BP had been very cautious about not wanting any data to come out of the control room. And I’m not sure why, but they just wanted to keep the data to themselves. So I remember, one of my USGS colleagues went in there with his cell phone and took a picture from the monitor of the rise in pressure to this intermediate level as we closed in the well.

So I took that picture, and I sent it to another colleague of ours at the USGS, who was a hydrologist. And he wasn’t there at the time, because I think he was getting married, or something like that. I mean, he had this big thing that was going on, so he wasn’t with us in Houston, but we sent him this picture. He had been with us in Houston, so he knew the whole deal. And being a hydrologist, you know, hydrologists look at pressure in reservoirs all the time, and whether it’s water or oil didn’t matter to him.

So he decided to do a model of this rise in pressure to determine whether the well was leaking or whether it had held. And he tells the story about how he stayed up all night to do this model, and he had this model already, but it all used scientific units, you know, meters, kilometers, Pascals for pressure. All of the data from BP was in English units. So it was in pounds per square inch and that kind of stuff. So he had this horrible thought that as he’s trying to convert all the BP measurements to metric units - what if he makes a mistake?

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah!

Marcia K. McNutt: This was, I think, literally weeks, or maybe a couple of months, after that probe that we sent to Mars missed the planet entirely because of a conversion error.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh, my God.

Marcia K. McNutt: Going from one set of units to another. So he just sat there thinking. I don’t want to have another Mars thing. So in the morning we all met, and Thad Allen, who is the incident commander from the Coast Guard and Admiral, was going to make the decision about to open the well, and we got the result from this hydrologist that said, and he perfectly modeled the data, and he showed, this is a depleted reservoir.

It is not leaking. So the well stayed shut in, oil spill ended. And eventually relief wells, you know, cemented it from below, and everything was, you know, closed in permanently. But yeah, it was a long night.

JP Flores (he/him): What a story, man that is wild, that is wild man. And it’s a movie, right? Like that sounds like a movie.

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, it could be. It could be a movie.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah. Yeah. Did you have another meeting at the end?

Marcia K. McNutt: No, I’ve got one, though, at 11:30, so I will have to, you know, close down pretty soon.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah, yeah, I have 4 - I have 4 more questions, 3 of them are pretty short. The the next one really is just, you know, you talk about these acts of public service that scientists have done to to close this oil spill. What advice would you give an early career researcher that’s about to embark on their career? You know, cause I think it’s hard to remember that this is a public thing. We should be helping society. But what what words of wisdom do you have?

Marcia K. McNutt: So I think scientists much more these days are gravitating towards science that has social implications, that will actually improve people’s quality of lives, our national security, our environmental sustainability, you know, all of this. So you know, I think that - when I was a young scientist I got some really good advice from a department head who just said, “Look for big questions and go after them.”

I think too many scientists get sort of stuck in careers of doing just incremental things. And you really need to go after the really tough problems. And young people today are so good about collaborating with people outside their field. I do think it’s more difficult for young people. As I said, I had this Frontiers of Science experience. Through frontiers I met Steve Chu, who was a physicist. I was a geoscientist. I met Jane Lubchenco, who is a biologist. And when Deep Water Horizons blew, Steve Chu was Secretary of Energy. Jane Lubchenco was head of NOAA, and I was head of the USGS. We all found ourselves down in Houston, working together, but we already knew each other. We already knew how to talk to each other.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah

Marcia K. McNutt: We already trusted each other. So I think, for young people to look for opportunities to work with people outside their discipline. I remember as a young scientist, except for this Frontier’s experience, mostly I was kind of locked in my own department and didn’t really see much of people outside the department. Young people, I think, are much better about making acquaintances with people who know very different topics.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah definitely. Is that frontier science thing still going?

Marcia K. McNutt: Oh yeah. Yep, still going.

JP Flores (he/him): Cool. Well, are you ready to move into -

Marcia K. McNutt: We had a hard time with it during the pandemic. We tried to do it online. And then we realized, no, the entire benefit of this program is for people to be in person.

JP Flores (he/him): Exactly. Cool. Well, I have 3 more fun questions. So these are not science or life anymore. I guess they’re kind of life. And the first one is, you know, if you can go back and celebrate all your accomplishments, what song would you play to celebrate?

Marcia K. McNutt: Oh. To celebrate accomplishments…

JP Flores (he/him): Or just a favorite song in general.

Marcia K. McNutt: Maybe “We are the Champions”

JP Flores (he/him): Queen! Nice. Yeah. Okay. What is your favorite thing to do outside of science? We got a little hints -we got hints of that. But can you confirm that it is skiing?

Marcia K. McNutt: Yeah, I ski. But now I have four horses.

JP Flores (he/him): Oh! What?

Marcia K. McNutt: One of them up on the east coast. Three of them are on the West coast. So I used to do a lot of rodeo-type events. Cutting, team penning, barrel racing. Now, I mostly trail ride but my horse in Virginia is really really fast, and there are a lot of people who won’t ride with me because of that.

JP Flores (he/him): That’s badass, yeah. So I’m assuming you’re well traveled. What is your favorite cuisine, food to eat, place to eat and why?

Marcia K. McNutt: Okay, so first of all, I should qualify this by saying I’m not really a food motivated person. I mean, it’s true that that I probably don’t enjoy Great Britain as much, because the food isn’t very good. I was just in Morocco in January and the food there was outrageous.

JP Flores (he/him): Really?

Marcia K. McNutt: It was so good. Oh, my God, yeah. Talk about terrific cuisine. Morocco is amazing. So I guess I’d probably say Morocco, although I’ve never had a bad meal in Paris. I love Italian food, too. Russian food no. love Chinese food, but, you know, I realized I like American Chinese food.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah. It’s a mood. Definitely, cool.

Marcia K. McNutt: It’s sort of - I like American Japanese food more than I like Japanese-Japanese food.

JP Flores (he/him): Yeah. Great. Yeah. Cool.

Well, that’s all the questions [audio ends].