— Mikhail Sergeyevich, you frequently deliver public lectures, collaborate with popular bloggers, and give numerous interviews. This is your third one for Life and Other Stories. What motivates you to do this?
— The answer is simple, I do it because I enjoy it. There are several topics that intrigue me, even though they are not directly related to my work. One effective way to stay updated is by delivering popular lectures, like those about Neanderthals. I have a deep interest in this topic and have done a bit of work on it myself, although it's not my primary focus. That was a brief "leave me alone" kind of answer.
On the other hand, it's part of the social contract between scientists and society. Society supports scientists. People often say that science is funded by government money, but that's not true. There is no such thing as government money. Government funds are the money that taxpayers have entrusted to the state for the benefit of all. Different governments manage this with varying degrees of success. But ultimately, we conduct scientific research using the money earned by those who directly produce material goods. We need to explain to these people how their money was spent, why it's interesting, and why it's beneficial.

— So, are educational activities a way of reporting to taxpayers?
— In a broad sense, yes. But it's not exactly a report. I don't just talk about what I've done. I don't report on my work. The task is broader. The scientific community should occasionally tell the public what it's doing in general. There are two reasons for this. The first is, once again, fulfilling our part of the social contract. The second is purely propagandistic — we do it for the benefit of science. Because if we don't do it, at some point some hardworking person who operates the machinery or cultivates land might ask, "Why should I support these freeloaders?"
There is a highly damaging statement attributed to one of the Soviet physicists that science is about satisfying one's curiosity at the expense of the state. Everything about that statement is incorrect. Firstly, there is no such thing as the state's expense, only public funds. Secondly, yes, people engage in it because they find it interesting, otherwise they would be bad scientists. However, science as a social institution is incredibly beneficial. There is a well-known urban legend about how the British Prime Minister asked Michael Faraday about the benefits of his electromagnetic waves, to which the latter replied, "One day you'll tax them." We never know in advance which discoveries made by fundamental science will become a success. But generally, it's clear that they yield significant results.

— If nothing is done, then...
— Then nothing will happen. There will be no medications, no gadgets people love so much — nothing at all.
But that's not an obvious thought. The concept of the common good is very difficult to explain, as is the idea that what we all pay for will probably be beneficial, even though no one can tell us in advance exactly what will be beneficial. That's why we invest in science in general, not specific research, and that's why lists of "breakthrough areas" are pointless. In my opinion, this needs to be addressed and explained.

— The need for education is clear. But you also fight against pseudoscience and various forms of obscurantism. Were you part of the commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences which dealt with the mentioned issue?
— I was a member of the Commission for Counteracting the Falsification of Scientific Research. I got low-key kicked out of there by the RAS leadership due to my strong character and excessive efforts and was transferred to the Commission for the Popularization of Science. So, the first one was against all the bad things, and the second one was for all the good things. There was also a Commission on Pseudoscience, but I was never a part of it. Are we discussing pseudoscience now?

— Yes. We are talking about anti-vaxxers, GMO opponents, and 5G-towers vandalism.
— Firstly, it's part of the same social contract. If you see someone being pushed towards a cliff, the right thing to do as a citizen is to explain the situation and try to prevent it from happening. These people cause harm in different ways. Opponents of GMOs hinder progress and the economy, while homeopaths encourage people not to seek treatment. As a result, people waste a lot of money on nonsense and die from lack of proper care. Anti-vaxxers exploit the social contract. Indeed, if everyone else is vaccinated, you don't need to be, as there is no one to get infected from. And there are indeed complications from vaccinations that people want to avoid. However, as soon as there are too many unvaccinated people, epidemics occur, like measles, for example. And people who genuinely can't be vaccinated for medical reasons are put at risk.
That's one aspect.
The second aspect has to do with clericalism. It's a kind of defensive reaction of science to the clerical pressure that is felt quite strongly in Russia. Recent cases include what's happening with Rublev's Trinity or with abortion rights. These are examples of direct and harsh clerical interference in public life. It is also happening in biology to some extent, but at least it's not yet forbidden to talk about evolution.
There are different types of priests. There are some with whom it's genuinely interesting to discuss biology. They agree with some things and disagree with others, but they don't spout obvious nonsense. And then there are the classic orthodox priests and non-classic creationists. Talking [to them] is pointless, but we can at least explain to society why these people are wrong. It's important to be very precise here because fighting clericalism is not the same as fighting religion. Everyone is free to practice any religion they choose. There are indeed remarkable biologists, including evolutionary biologists, who are in fact believers. However, it's important not to conflate the two. We shouldn't give lectures on evolution theory in church, just as we shouldn't discuss divine creation at universities. Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

— And what about Dissernet? What it tried to achieve?
— Dissernet's work is not about combating obscurantism per se but about fighting dishonesty. For instance, I wouldn't want a doctor who has been caught lying to treat me, nor would I want them to be considered a respected doctor. The doctor-patient relationship requires a significant level of trust, and if a person has been caught lying, they don't deserve that trust. I would want such a person to be disqualified and suffer reputational damage. I would want the public to know that they have been deprived of their degree, and everything they have written should automatically be subject to doubt.
In scientific texts, there is generally a presumption of trust. When I read an article, I understand that the author might make mistakes, but I don't suspect them of intentionally lying to me. However, this presumption of trust shouldn't be extended to certain individuals.

— With Dissernet, you not only deprive individuals of their academic degrees but also shut down entire councils.
— Yes. There are places where this has become widespread. My “favorite” example is the dissertation council of the Bakulev Scientific Center of Cardiovascular Surgery, chaired by Academician Leo Bokeria. That council has been churning out nonsense for years. Absolute nonsense. And now it has been shut down.

— Was it essentially a manufactory of lies?
— There were probably decent people defending their theses there too, and I genuinely feel sorry for those who defended respectable dissertations, because now they're tarnished by the same crap.
Councils like this are easy to catch red-handed. It's a low-hanging fruit. They systematically plagiarized dissertation texts there, usually with manipulated results. They put up quite a fight. Academician Bokeria was a member of the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC), and shutting down a dissertation council chaired by a Presidium member is a significant move.
And then... I've heard numerous stories about medical practices at this center that weren't in the best interest of patients. I'm not qualified enough as a medical professional to say if it's true, I'm just retelling what I've heard. But it appears that this is a clear symptom. If a medical institution has a dissertation council that produces fakes, then their treatment methods will also be... peculiar. Which isn't surprising, really. How could it be any different? Apple trees don't grow oranges, do they?
A dissertation on a medical topic is often seen as a formality, with the justification being "at least they’re a good surgeon". But even if a doctor provides decent treatment, this dismissive attitude towards scientific integrity and data falsification will inevitably affect clinical trials, interactions with pharmaceutical companies, and clinical guidelines.

— Apple trees certainly do not grow oranges. Where do you find the time to both conduct scientific research and fight these battles?
— Part of it is simply a form of procrastination. When I don't feel like doing anything substantial, I deprive people of their academic degrees. And it feels like I'm being productive.

— It's one thing to meticulously prove that dissertations are plagiarized and another to expose people using what I would call pranks. Take your prank with Drebyatina, for instance...
— That wasn't mine. Mine was the Rooter [Russian: Korchevatel – editor’s note]. It was a long time ago, back in 2007. I invested a lot of time into it, and I'm proud of that story. It became a meme and even made it to Wikipedia. Now, when people want to criticize a scientific article, they call it a Rooter. This is truly my contribution to the organization of science.
In that case, I believe I did quite a good journalistic job because I found traces of the person who organized that Journal of Scientific Publications of Doctoral and Postdoctoral Students on various university websites and figured out how that journal was promoted. It took me three days.

— Should scientists spend so much time on such exposé pranks?
— The case of Rooter and that journal was later discussed in detail for quite a long time. Should a scientist play such games at all? My main argument was that it's a powerful and interesting case. The alternative would be to write countless formal complaints about how terrible that journal is. Sure, it publishes complete nonsense, but so do many other journals. That journal had all the formal features of a proper scientific journal, and its editorial board, by the way, contained professors from the Higher School of Economics.

— Besides, writing complaints is boring.
— Exactly! It's boring, and in this case, unproductive (whereas requests to revoke a degree are granted about ¾ of the time). Not only was that one journal shut down, but it became clear that there is a whole culture of such journals out there. It started a meaningful discussion on how we can distinguish good journals from bad ones.
When you're defending your dissertation, you have to publish two articles in a reputable journal. At Skoltech, that means two papers in journals with an impact factor above two, and you should be the main author of one of the papers. The Higher Attestation Committee has more lenient rules. In universities that can award degrees themselves, the criteria vary. But still, these journals shouldn't be a garbage dump, right? Anyway, the discussion about what the HAC list is, how it's formed, and why such journals get on it started around the time the Rooter was published. I don't know if it was the catalyst or just a coincidence.
By the way, that journal is still alive. I did a post scriptum looking at what happened to the journal a year later. Although it was no longer recognized and was removed from the HAC list, the flow of publications didn't decline. In other words, the number of people paying to be published there remains the same.

— So you engage in educational activities because you enjoy them, while scientific pranks and fighting obscurantism and liars are your forms of procrastination...
— Everything  I do I do because I enjoy it. I don't do what I don't like.

— But most of the time you pursue science, right?
— I also do administrative work, which I'm not particularly fond of, but... I don't have much choice in the matter. However, I believe that the main thing I do in life is still science.

— I was just about to ask about your recent scientific works. It seems to me that they challenge the established rules of biology outlined in all modern textbooks. But it feels like there are fewer and fewer of these laws now. Will anything remain of them in the future?
— Misha Moldovan very rightly said that biology is essentially a series of exceptions. It appears that many exceptions in evolution emerge and then persist, and if we were to study biology a billion years from now, there would be fewer fundamentals and more exceptions.
There is a fantastic book by Alexander Spirin on ribosomes and protein biosynthesis, which I used to prepare for my candidate exams at the time, it's a classic textbook. The book has two editions. The first was printed at the local press of the Pushchino Scientific Center, and the second was published by Vyshaya Shkola [Higher School – editor’s note] Publishing House. There was a section titled "Initiation of translation without initiation components". This section had an epigraph that I remember by heart: "Hyena. A predatory beast. It hunts only under the moonlight. And if there is no moonlight, it hunts without it."
In the edition published by Vyshaya Shkola, there is only the epigraph, unexplained. However, in the first edition by Pushchino, there is a note saying, "From the encyclopedia of one of the African countries, as quoted by Academician Aleksandrov" (Vyshaya Shkola must have deemed it politically incorrect). This also illustrates that most general assertions in biology have counterexamples.

— Is it like with your ciliate infusoria, which turned out to have a genetic code that doesn't align with textbook rules?
— Indeed, the genetic code is universal but not entirely.

— It's a triplet but not really a triplet.
— It's a triplet, but sometimes stop codons aren't stop codons, meaning they encode something else. A codon should only code for one amino acid, but it can code for both an amino acid and a stop. Or it can code for two different amino acids. It turns out there are many such exceptions.
There are suppressor tRNAs with anticodons four nucleotides long, if I remember my candidate exams correctly. They recognize the fours where mutations — nucleotide insertions — have occurred and suppress these mutations. But this is a rather unique and rare occurrence.
In our ciliates, the ribosome reaches the stop codon, shifts one nucleotide, ignores the stop codon, and continues to translate further. As a result, one amino acid is inserted for four nucleotides, not three, in a very specific context. It's an unconventional mechanism, but it operates like a quadruplet codon — three, three, three, and then four nucleotides. We insert an amino acid that corresponds to the last three, and the first one is essentially skipped due to the shift. Then we resume reading in sets of three. Formally speaking, as per the conversion table, it's a quadruplet codon because this always happens if such a stop is in the right context.

— I imagine a road where cars constantly stop just beyond the stop line... But the essence of this work is that this phenomenon was examined from an evolutionary perspective for the first time, correct?
— Yes. It's actually a very good piece of work done by some exceptional individuals. The idea was born from a conversation with Pavel Baranov, who has a lab in Ireland and already had the initial experimental data. The formulas were devised and the programs were written by my graduate student at Skoltech Misha Moldovan, who is now at Harvard, and a student at Moscow State University Sonia Gaidukova, who is now at Boston University. Due to various recent events, they have decided to relocate.
Pavel already knew about the existence of the quadruplet codon without us having told him — it's purely an experimental fact. And Sonia and Misha demonstrated computationally that this phenomenon is a result of neutral evolution. It's just an error that isn't detrimental enough for selection to notice.
It's enlightening because people usually try to rationalize why evolution would create such anomalies. Explanations are built on the premise that it's beneficial, and therefore positive selection reinforces it. But it seems that's not the case. It's just an error that doesn't interfere much because a slippage mechanism has already emerged to neutralize the error.
And there appear to be many such instances in biology. Our previous work with Misha on messenger  RNA editing in octopuses looks essentially at the same thing but in a different order: a beneficial mutation hasn't occurred yet, but the mechanism that mimics it is already functioning.

— So, this is a code that contains both bugs and algorithms to circumvent or fix these bugs?
— Yes. There are simple cases where a bug is fixed by simply reverting to the original state. But it seems that in evolution, it often happens as in bureaucratic systems. Suppose an official makes a mistake. What do you do? You hire another official to make sure the first one doesn't screw up and correct their mistakes. Once there are two of them, neither can be removed, and the situation becomes stagnant. It's not fatal for the organization because not many mistakes become noticed by the public. Instead of avoiding mistakes to begin with, you make them first and then correct them.
It seems there are more such occurrences than we like to think. Our work is interesting because we didn't just discuss it theoretically but also managed to calculate and demonstrate it arithmetically.

— So your recent works are about... the imperfection of the world and the principles that uphold that imperfection. Does that mean imperfections have existed since life began?
— You see, if we assume that the first replicators were perfect, we would have to assume that someone created them in such a way.

— Then they would remain unchanging. I mean, why would they change?
— Firstly, they would be unchanging because if you're perfect, why would you need to change? And secondly, it would mean that someone was sitting there tweaking the replicators with a screwdriver. No, any evolution implies imperfections. It's natural. This is, in fact, the mechanism of selection.
Also, conditions are constantly changing. Even if you manage to somehow reach the peak in the adaptive landscape, by the time you get there, the adaptive landscape will have changed. Now the peak is slightly elsewhere, so you need to keep running.
But that's not even the main point. The main point is that there are some absolute dead ends that selection quickly eliminates because they really hinder life. And then there are things that aren't very harmful. In fact, they're so harmless that they could have arisen and taken hold by accident. Yes, it's still a waste of resources, but getting rid of them is so costly that you just have to simply live with it.
Imagine that I am a bad programmer who writes code with bugs and immediately fixes them on the go. As a result, I wrote a program code that is absolutely terrible. It's ugly and meaningless, and it takes much longer to execute than it should. To rewrite it properly, you'd have to hire another person. In the human world, there are people who do this professionally. But in the world of evolution, there is no such supreme programmer. Evolution can only make do, it can't plan ahead for the better. 

— But there are still some trends in evolution, right?
— Misha explained it really well. Our paper suggests that a significant portion of what we consider outliers is not ideal, but it's not disastrously bad either. The trend of more and more exceptions to the rules over time is, in my opinion, a powerful philosophical concept.
Two excellent books on evolutionary trends are Koonin's The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution and Markov's Birth of Complexity. They touch on some quite profound topics. Specifically, they argue that the growing complexity of organisms is not actual progress but the outcome of neutral evolution locking in less than optimal variants.
It's generally accepted that humans inherently seek meaning in everything because life would seem pointless if we were to declare it meaningless. Evolutionary biology is enlightening because it teaches you to stop seeking meaning in everything.

— Are there examples in evolution where the meaning is evident?
— I don't know. An eye, maybe.

— Well, I find eyes to be quite repulsive organs. They're too twisted and unreliable. But their purpose, I suppose, is indeed quite clear.
— Yes, they're rather poorly designed. I believe it was Helmholtz who said, "God is a very poor optician."
Well, the purpose of the Krebs cycle is clear. I guess most things have a clear purpose. Otherwise, none of this would work. A state can't consist entirely of bureaucracy. There need to be people who cultivate grain and shoe horses. Here we are, having a conversation, while molecular biology is doing its thing within us. And yes, things could have been designed much more intelligently. But where would one find such intelligence?