Ep B What is Truth? With Dr. Wes Smith and Doc Ligot

Is truth relative? We begin our discussion with Dr. Wesley C. Smith (who jokingly goes by "The Neuralurgist") is a former biopharmaceutical neuroscientist and current invited Brain Pool Fellow at KIST in Seoul, Korea.

The son of an expat family from Iowa/Singapore and a Dutch immigrant, Wes somehow managed to have a "normal" Midwestern youth.

He earned his BS with Honors in Biology (Neurobiology focus) at the University of Iowa, where he also studied Japanese and wrote/produced/performed as part of a melodic death metal band, when he wasn't demonstrating that flies can experience noise-induced hearing loss in the lab of Dan Eberl.

After growing up a bit, he decided that instead of joining an extreme metal band in Los Angeles, he should stick with his original safe plan of continuing his studies UCLA, where he worked towards getting his PhD in Neuroscience.

Towards that end, he worked in the lab of Jin Hyung Lee and developed the first optogenetic fMRI model of seizure propagation in rats, prior to the lab's move to Stanford, all in less than a year and a half; it was during this time he took one of his favorite courses taught by Dr. David Hovda about research integrity and scientific ethics.

To stay in beautiful LA, he switched to the lab of Sotiris Masmanidis, where he helped set up the lab and worked on various electrophysiology-based projects that meandered through stages of failure, while trying to also balance teaching and mentoring responsibilities.

Eventually he came up with a project that worked and that became multiple papers, one of which is still being finalized right now; the general gist being that he's interested in studying how pharmaceuticals and drugs affect subjects differently, using novel behavior in mice to assess memory, and writing algorithms to deal with hundreds of channels of timeseries data.

After a brief postdoc in the Neurophysics Institute at UCLA, before COVID came and wrecked academics, Wes switched to industry research at Amgen, trying to uncover a deeper mechanism of action of the biological Aimovig.

During the last 2 years, Wes remained critical of unethical and strange practices in pharmaceutical research and scientific journals, guided by his deep generalist understanding of genetics, neuroscience, evolution, statistics, timeseries analysis, research conduct, and pharmacology/ the pharmaceutical biz.

This caused him to rekindle his desire to work on a project more in line with his dissertation research, move to a country with more accurate sensemaking policies, and openly discuss ethics and problems in scientific research and policy, despite the risks and costs incurred on his professional network.

Dr. Wesley C. Smith Ph.D.

Outstanding Invited NRF Brainpool Scientific Fellow
Korea Institute of Science and Technology
Brain Science Institute