This is structural biologist Karissa Sanbonmatsu. She works at Los Alamos National Laboratory...
SANBONMATSU: I knew I was a woman on the inside and I wore women's clothes on the outside. But everyone saw me as a man in a dress. I felt like no matter how many things I try, no one would ever really see me as a woman. In science, your credibility is everything. And people were snickering in the hallways, giving me stares, looks of disgust, afraid to be near me. I remember my first big talk after transition. It was in Italy. I'd given prestigious talks before, but this one - I was terrified. I looked out into the audience and the whispers started, the stares, the smirks, the chuckles...
But I felt, enough is enough. I'm a scientist. I have a doctorate in astrophysics. I've published in the top journals in wave-particle interaction, space physics, nucleic acid biochemistry. I've actually been trained to get to the bottom of things. So...
From there, I started delving into, you know, why am I transgender and so forth. And I think that if we can show people that it's something legitimate, then maybe people will take this a lot more seriously.
ZOMORODI: And so if I understand correctly, that is when you actually decided to research this as your career and you started to delve into what happens to our DNA, right? Like, epigenetics - that that could be the thing that makes us male or female or maybe cisgender or transgender.
SANBONMATSU: Yeah. And it turned out to be this really exciting field that was kind of exploding just as we were working on it. And it was right at the time I was going through the transition as well. And so basically in epigenetics, it's interesting in that, you know, a lot of things people wonder, is it nature or is it nurture? Were you born this way or is it a choice? And epigenetics is this new field that sort of sits in between where basically the environment reprograms genes, and those switches stay permanently. So it sort of sits right in between nature and nurture...
SANBONMATSU: To truly understand DNA decision-making, we need to see the process in atomic detail. Well, even the most powerful microscopes can't see this. What if we tried to simulate these on a computer? We'd need a million computers to do that. That's exactly what we have at Los Alamos Labs - a million computers connected in a giant warehouse. So here we're showing the DNA making up an entire gene folded into very specific shapes of knots. For the first time, my team has simulated an entire gene of DNA - the largest biomolecular simulation performed to date. For the first time, we're beginning to understand the unsolved problem of how hormones trigger the formation of these knots.
ZOMORODI: OK. So I want to make sure I understand this right. You are showing how the DNA folds and makes these knots, and those folds and knots are deciding the path of the DNA - like, basically showing epigenetics in real time.
SANBONMATSU: Yeah, that's right.
ZOMORODI: And again, like, this is just one piece. Like, you are one scientist among many scientists trying to connect the dots in this super vast and complicated field of biological sex and then how that connects to gender, and you're each just trying to figure out one step, right?
SANBONMATSU: Yeah. So we're down at the atomistic molecular cellular level. Everyone needs to work on this because it's so complex. And going from a piece of DNA to the brain to behavior to the concept of gender - I mean, it's miles and miles in between each of those steps, you know? So it's a long - it's a long way to go to understand any of this, but it means that, for us scientists, there's lots of work to do though.
ZOMORODI: Right, like, hundreds of steps.
SANBONMATSU: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, at least. So there's - I'd say that the definition of sex is really evolving. And what we're focusing on really is basically what's inside your brain. How is your brain structured? And so we're trying to understand how do these brain structures develop basically, but it's not well understood. So I would say, you can't even really define what gender and sex are right now, so it's really hard to even define what the relationship between the two are.