Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I am Naji your host, joined today by Giovanni Abbadessa is a Medical Oncologist and PhD with 23 years drug development experience across academia, small biotech, and pharma. He is a passionate, hands-on, and entrepreneurial leader specializing in oncology, hematology, and rare disease pre-clinical and clinical (Phase 1-3) development. Giovanni has worked on the development of nearly 30 clinical and as many preclinical experimental drugs across eight classes of agents. Currently, as Chief Medical Officer at ModeX Therapeutics, Giovanni guides strategy and execution of a variety of clinical programs in oncology and infectious diseases. Before that Giovanni held a series of senior leadership roles at Sanofi, ArQule, and Ziopharm Oncology. Giovanni serves on several for profit and non profit boards. He spent his post-doctoral fellowship at Temple Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and began his Oncology and Physician career in Italy.
Giovanni Abbadessa: Nice to be on your podcast, Naji. Thank you for having me.
Naji Gehchan: I’d love to start first with your personal story. What drove you to medicine, then shifting into biotech and pharma?
Giovanni Abbadessa: That’s a long story. So I grew up in Naples, south of Italy, and it’s an amazing place. If you live there, you have to learn how to survive a little bit, but on the other end, there’s beauty, natural beauty, architectural beauty, human beauty everywhere, and you learn a lot. From life there. So my father was a professor of hematology, oncohematology at the university, at one of the two universities in Naples, and then became chair of a hematology department. So I didn’t want to go into medicine. At the end of high school, there was a little bit of pressure in, at least to try and taking the test and see if I could access. And I actually passed with very good ranking and entered a school. There were, I think, 1,200 people who tried, and 250 spots. And so I said, okay. I was actually always interested in understanding mechanisms and solving problems and physiology of the human body. So I said, okay, I’ll give it a try. And the first, in Italy, you have six years of med school. The first year was chemistry, biochemistry, stats. It was hard. But then there was an English exam, which I passed very well, which motivated me. And then I became more passionate about the biology and about, especially when you go into clinical subjects. So in Italy, you do the first three years, it’s all basic sciences. And the next three years is clinical sciences. So once I finished the first three years, I didn’t want to be in the same university as my father was teaching. So I switched to the other university so that I would not be with his friends, professors. Now, something very important happened. I wanted to do interventional, be an interventional cardiologist. I like cardiology, the mechanisms and so on. But I wanted to try what it means. So I found through an introduction the way to go to spend a month in Milan in a new hospital where they were pretty much ahead in interventional cardiology. And if I remember correctly, I was booked to go there in August, to spend my August there. But I was volunteering, I volunteered for years with a nonprofit organization in Naples, which was founded by a missionary who’s also a priest, who’s also a theologist, who also writes books with famous Italian writers, who’s also friends with Mother Teresa and Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize for Peace, I believe. He invented the concept of the microcredit. And so together with him and Mother Teresa, he opened a number of missions in East India, West India, and then Africa, and then South America. So I took a trip with the organization that I was helping in Naples, and we spent a month in India touring and checking the projects in West India, South of Indore, and Tamil Nadu, and lepers changing their bandages, and then orphans. And that thing, that experience had a deep impact on me. We were not going there as tourists, we were going there to learn and do. And I remember still today when we arrived, another great human lesson, life lesson. We were like a dozen of us, with the founder of the nonprofit, we were on the bus entering for the first time a lepers village, which our organization was sustaining. But these lepers were encouraged to work because the concept was always, we provide funds, but the people who benefit of the funds have to work and have to do things and deserve to be helped and want to be helped. That was a very important piece. You have to want to be helped. And when we are entering the village, the founder told us very seriously, “Guys, you’re gonna see people that are clearly worth nothing. They cannot have a life outside of here because in India they’re segregated, discriminated. They lose their limbs, their face. It’s horrible. They’re poor. Probably what you pay in university fees is their entire years of life. You’re also gonna see people who are horrible monsters, who look like monsters and scary. Do not dare treating them as inferior. Do not dare showing them that you’re scared or disgusted.” That would be horrible of you to do. It would be shameful of you to do. So we arrived in the village and we get down the bus and 60 or so lepers come surrounding us. And it was like in a zombie movie, very scary. But we took very seriously the promise of being welcoming and try and smile. And well, within half hour we were dancing with them, hugging them. And they were showing us very proudly the work that they were doing. It was such a lesson. There were two villages. One with lepers were still sick and receiving drugs and they were taking care of animals and growing plants and food. And the other village, once they get cured, of course the limbs don’t grow back. So they stay in the village. Society will not accept them, but in the other village they were making saris. They were making cloths and sheets with machines that our organization provides. And now those villages were profitable. They were actually selling food and cloths and tissues to the surrounding villages. So it was a great example of how social entrepreneurship can help. But the most moving moment was when they asked us to get on our knees and give us the Indian blessing. And picture yourself, I mean, this is all happened in a span of maybe four or five hours. You arrive with a mindset and you find yourself on your knees getting blessed by these people. We were crying, I couldn’t stop crying. And I went back with a different understanding of respect of people, of the impact you can actually have, how much you get when you give. It really had a profound impact. So when I came back to Italy, I went to this hospital. I went first afternoon, first day in this cardiology, interventional cardiology department, where they let me enter the surgery room. I saw a doctor who was playing with a joystick in the heart of a patient. The patient was awake, but nobody was talking with the patient. He was really looking at the screen and doing his thing and then get out. And that was it. And I thought, oh my God, this is, there’s no human interaction. I don’t know. The only human interaction is a little bit at the beginning and in the end. I felt I didn’t study so much and do all this for that. I wanted to be more involved with the patient with psychology. So I went, my contact there was in the oncology department and I asked them, look, I really cannot be another day in this place, but I booked a month, an apartment, everything. Can I stay in the oncology department? After all, you do internal medicine. You see everything with patients. I can help out and see what it is. And I really liked it. I really liked it because in oncology, well, at the time it was 2000 and, no, this was 99, 1999, very few drugs approved for oncology patients, chemo’s toxic, but the relation and the connection with the patient and their family was totally different than what I had seen at the cardiology department. Of course, we need cardiologists to survive and then do a very important job. But the connection with the family, with the patient, the concept that some patients will survive, many won’t. And that type of, it’s almost a spiritual connection with the patient and the family at the end of their life. And also how valuable is each month, each day that you can give to somebody and how they can spend those days, how well or bad, depending on what you can do. That was gratifying as being with a leper who will never have their limb grown back. And so I came back to Naples and I said, okay, I think this is what I want to do. So once I decided I wanted to be an oncologist, I could no longer stay in Naples because my father is one of the most well-known oncologist there. And I wanted to be on my own. And so I asked the hospital in Milan if they could take me back. I was still in med school at the time. So what I did is I did my exams in Naples and then every time I had a break, I would spend a month in Milan at the hospital, then come back to Naples to study, get exams. I think it was in my fourth year of med school. So then in 2001, I joined the hospital and I became an investigator on clinical trials while I was entering my fellowship. That was another really, really interesting experience. It’s a very modern hospital. At the time they had 600 beds, an ER. And I volunteered to do night shifts because I thought it was, well, after the second year, of course, because I thought it was a learning experience. And the night shift, it was only an internist, me, a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, and a cardiologist on the whole 600 beds. And then there were people in the ER, but every time they had to hospitalise a patient from the ER, it was the four of us. So you can imagine how intense it was. I was fortunate to be an investigator on four experimental drugs, phase one, phase two, phase three, the registration trial with cetoximab for colorectal cancer. I was the top enroller in the world in the phase two sorafinib trial in liver cancer, and actually the only one with partial responses in that study, which then led Bayer to decide to move forward with developing sorafinib in phase three. They asked me to come as an advisor. I was very fortunate. Well, because I cared of the patients, and so the results were probably better than in other places, and so they asked how to help understanding how to develop the drug. So then I wanted to learn basic science, and I used another one of my summer, 2004, to come to Philadelphia in a lab and see what the lab life was like, because in Italy I was just doing clinic, 8, 15 a.m. to 7, 30 p.m. every day with a 20-minute break for lunch. I think we were 25 oncologists. We were doing, at the time, 15,000 visits. It was absurd the amount of work we had. So I wanted to experience basic research. I came to Philadelphia, spent a month in a lab. I found it interesting, fascinating, and also oncology was becoming more and more targeted and biological. And 2001 is when Gleevec, the first targeted therapy, was approved, right? So we were, and now there were mouse models with human tumors transplanted, xenografts, and so on. So it became very interesting. So I applied for a project, for a grant. Actually, the Milan Hospital helped me with some support, and I was able to then come back in April 5, 2005. I came back to Philadelphia with the idea of staying there maybe six months and do some basic research project. What I proposed was to do multi-gene therapy in a human model of liver cancers transplanted in a mouse. Soon I realized that it would take much longer than six months. The lab where I ended up, they didn’t even have an animal facility. They didn’t have the rotors to centrifuge the cells and extract the virus. They had nothing. I said, “Why did you bring me here?” Because you’re a smart, Southern Italian physician, and I know you people are smart, so you’re gonna find a way to do it. (both laughing) So there was nothing. But what happened is I wanted to make use of my trip again. And also I met a girl that I really liked, who is now my wife. And so I wanted to stay. And so I’ve always been social, as a good Southern Italian should be. And so one night at the pizza restaurant, I meet an associate professor from Heidelberg, Germany, who was doing research gene therapy in cardiology at another university in Philadelphia. And so I asked him, “Hey, look, I don’t have, I cannot do much experiments in the lab where I am. Can I come and help you for free and learn how to do gene therapy?” So he said, “Yes, sure, come.” So that’s where I learned how to get mice, work with them, how to cultivate the cells, how to centrifuge, extract viruses and so on. And then we made an agree. Then at the lunch, I met, I think it was from Syria, another investigator at my same university who had an animal facility for neurology. So I asked him, “Hey, can we collaborate and I rent a room from your animal facility and I turn it into a BL2 room?” (laughing) – That’s amazing. – BL3? I can’t remember anymore. Basically, when you do gene therapy, what I had to do in this room, I had to set up a 24-hour life cycle. I had to order mice cages, which I just went online and ordered them on the Charles River website. Then I had to order a hood, a laminar flow hood, and I had to set up a laminar flow in the room so that whenever you use viruses under the hood, it aspirates out anything that can fly out. So I did that. I ordered the mice. I started my experiments. And thanks to the other university who helped me making the genes. And these experiments actually were working. We were injecting the mice with these genes and the tumors were disappearing. Then I set up a model of ovarian cancer. And at the same time, I was once a week going to Fox Chase to still stay in the clinic.
Giovanni Abbadessa: So there was a very learning, again, a very good learning. I enrolled in this PhD in genetics. But after two and a half years, I said, okay, I wanna go to patients. I wanna help patients, not mice. And I tried to go back to Italy. But getting a proper job as an oncologist in Italy revealed to be quite, not only, well, I had a couple of offers, but the salaries were, I should have, I would have had to share the apartment with someone. It was, at this point, I had already six years of med school, four years in the hospital as an oncologist, three years as a PhD. And also it was hard to bring my girlfriend, now wife, to Italy with me. ‘Cause she’s not European. And so I decided to look for a job here in the US. And I got a couple of offers. One that I like more because it was in Boston. I wanted to stay in a city. And so I came to Zio from oncology in Boston at the end of 2007. – And the rest is history. – You asked me, how did you became? – I love it. – That’s just the beginning. – Yeah, so thanks for this incredible story and sharing it. So let me go to another question, actually, for how the beginning continues, right? You’ve worked across academia and you started in this biotech, but you also worked in big pharma. So thinking about this, how has those movements between these different environments shaped your leadership and shaped who you are and how you think about science? – Well, I think you need to add a third sector, which is the nonprofit volunteering. Because if you’re talking about shaping behavior and leadership style, the volunteering work, I tell everyone, plays a big role there. Of course, with the nonprofit, after going to India, I also went to Albania and did a lot more work in Italy. But here, when I came in Boston, 2007, 2008, at that time, there were problems in Italy. There was trash in the streets. The prime minister was a very smart guy, but he liked girls. And so he was caught a few times with girls in different places. So the reputation was not super professional for Italians, right? And a few times people told me, Italy’s just good for pizza and why not to work with them? And I said, well, no, I actually know very, very good doctors and a lot of good professionals there. So I’ve started an organization here in Boston with the help of a few friends to promote Italian professionalism and bring Italian professionals together and organize cultural events in English for everyone in the Boston area. And convincing volunteers to do things, to get together, to spend time, especially if they’re professionals with busy lives, that takes a different angle than telling somebody at your workplace that they have to do something because they’re paid to do it. And so you learn a lot about bringing people together, understanding what everybody likes and what everybody knows how to do and try to leverage what everybody likes to do more while they also contribute in other ways. So that was very important. The other, so it was then what happened in 2011, I was fortunate to be accepted to the Harvard Business School Leadership Training. What they do is they offer the entire semester, leadership semester, the training that they do during the MBAs, they offer it for executive education in a full week. You have to sleep there. It’s, you start at eight, you finish at midnight. For a whole week, it’s groups of eight in the dorms. And that was another changing experience, right? ‘Cause a physician, a scientist, you’re not trained in leadership. I had some natural things that came from the experiences in Italy, in the nonprofit, but having them objectively demonstrated how useful these are and the behavior, how behavior impacts behavior, that was fundamental, but also understanding more the business and team building and so on. I had no idea of these things, not in an organic way. So that really changed. It’s like turning on a light in a dark place, it was for me. And then in 2014, as I was working on clinical trials at this point at RQ, right? What happened is I was working on phase one, two, and three at RQ, we had a phase three study, which in 2014, the phase three study, unfortunately, the second phase three study was negative. So RQ had to restructure. The same year, I started the school for Italian children in Boston, not because I wanted it, but because families asked, and I didn’t want really to do it. But, and so I tried to have somebody else do it and we were just helping. It was not at the quality that people wanted. So we had to become independent and rent a place. And today that school has 180 children every Saturday morning. We only teach Italian full immersion, no English spoken, and we have 180 children and a dozen adults. And that’s another, of course we reimbursed the teachers, we pay the rent, but a lot of this is volunteering. And we have a team of volunteers. The teachers themselves are partially volunteers. So that’s another, I’ve been doing this for now, I don’t know, 15 years with, or more, with the nonprofit. Nonprofit and volunteering really helps you shaping leadership traits and understanding people, groups, communities, behaviors. And the other aspects, things that happened in those years that really shaped was that the first biotech, Zyfram Oncology, 2007, you remember, there was a financial crisis. So the company, we had three drugs in the clinic, but we went from, I think $3 a share to less than a dollar a share, we were delisted by NASDAQ. Leadership was failing to guide the company. The company went from 50 people to 15 in no matter of a summer, but it was not just that. It was hard to see a guide. And that was a real teaching. The head of the fish determines how the rest of the fish smells. And even if you had three drugs, molecules in the clinic, which actually were given good data, I decided to leave the company because of the leadership. Then I went to Arq. And at Arq, we brought seven drugs to the clinic in 80 years. And at Arq, the phase three with the metinib failed in 2014. But the CEO was a very strong, well, strong, compassionate and human person. Yes, he became very nervous at that time. We did have to restructure and lose 70% of the people. And we, differently than at Zyfarm, we didn’t have at that point drugs that were giving good signals yet, but I stayed because of the leadership. The board made me head of the labs also. So I was already a head of clinical development, but the board made me, I was only in the older board meetings for the last few years. The board made me also head of basically basic research besides the medical affair, investigative response study and clinical development. And that was an important transition because once I took over the labs, I finally was able to bring together preclinical and clinical. Another learning is that even in small environments, small biotechs, silos happen and matter. Clinical didn’t know what preclinical was doing and preclinical wouldn’t care, wouldn’t want the clinical to know and vice versa. Once I had them all together, I had started to order pizza. And the impact that pizza can have on teams is actually taught at the Harvard Business School. At Harvard Business School, they taught us how sharing food brings people together because you’re putting your hands and you’re putting your mouth something from a common place, a common plate, a common. So I thought, okay, let’s do this. I’m Neapolitan, pizza, sharing, let’s do it. And I started having every other week, a team meeting with all the preclinical and clinical people, very few at that point, we were eight, with pizza. And going around the room and asking everyone, I knew what everybody was doing, but I asked them so that everybody else could know what they were doing. And this started connecting people on a totally different level. That allowed us to understand better the clinical assets, but also that we had in the lab something that actually my manager had trashed and the leadership decided not to advance, a BTK inhibitor. So we did experiments a little bit in secret, quite a lot in secret actually, to characterize better the molecule. And once we had the data, I said, look, I understand why you guys trashed it, but you didn’t see the real activity of this molecule and why it works this way. Allow me to do some animal study. So we didn’t have much money. So I called an Italian guy at Ohio State, Carlo Croce. I said, Carlo, we’d interact in Philadelphia, you had already left, but look, I’m cashless, we’re a small biotech and I have a molecule that I think could work. You have a beautiful model of chronic lymphatic leukemia in animals, can I please bring the drug and we try it? So we negotiated. I went to Columbus, Ohio, spent a nice time, very nice, he’s a very nice guy. And we did the experiment, it worked. We wiped out CLL from these mice with no significant toxicity. So then at that point, John Bird, who was the head of the leukemia program there, the same guy who was heading development of ibrutinib, baccalabrutinib, other BTK inhibitors for CLL, he said, you should bring this thing forward. So we did more animal experiments, more, oh, we published quite a bit. And finally I was able to bring this thing to the clinic in a phase one study, which then was, gave positive data and was the reason why Arcula was acquired by Merck. So a lot of learnings, resilience, bringing people together. It’s all because of the pizza. (laughing) – I love it. I have a section you will love when I say the words. But look, you’re a big believer. I know we discussed about this. And I relate to several things you’ve said. Like I’ve been a humanitarian, it shaped your leadership in a different way. Managing and leading folks who are volunteers in tough situations is certainly life lessons. But you’re also a big believer in collaboration and human connection. You talk about pizza here. What you’ve done also in the nonprofit world, whether it’s the school, the professional organization of Italians, what do you think really make collaboration effective? If you look at it from purely our industry, like drug development, what would make it effective? And where do you see the biggest gaps, for example, today?
Giovanni Abbadessa: I think it’s like the same thing that another learning came from, geez, I think in the ’70s and then in the ’90s, there were active negotiations which the US was involved with between Palestinians and Arabs and Israel. And they were able to move forward at the time because the concept was, okay, let’s look at what really everybody wants. What do you want? What does the other one want? And the point is not to try to, when you collaborate is not to try to ask for 100 so you can get 50. The point is to understand what does the other party want? It may not be 100, it may be something different. Oh, maybe that’s not a big deal. I can give that. And this is what I really want. So I think collaborations are proficus when people really put on the table, what is it they want? What is it they need? And then you find complementarity. If you want, if there’s no compatibility between what you want, then no money and no benefit will make a fruitful collaboration. You have to start from what you really need and want and of course trust. And the people, as I always say to my team, drugs do not develop drugs. People develop drugs. – I love it. I love this. (laughs) That’s so true. – It’s true. I’ve seen bad people ruining good drugs and I’ve seen decent drug moving forward because the people were really, really good. And today we’re no longer in the environment that was 50 years ago where a single person could really make a huge difference. Everything in research today requires teamwork. So it has to be the people. – It has to be the people. – You have to start from the people.
Naji Gehchan: Certainly. I’m gonna now give you a word, Giovanni, and I would love your first reaction to it. The first one is leadership.
Giovanni Abbadessa: Yeah. Well, you have to give the example. You have to give the example. You have to be compassionate. You have to be humble. You have to be hungry and you have to be a people person. I like a lot an author named Patrick Lencioni. He wrote the finest functions of a team, but especially the ideal team player. And I think it’s totally true. Good leader should be humble because otherwise you don’t see when you’re making a mistake. If you don’t, anyone could give you a good idea. And if you’re not humble, you’re gonna miss it. You need to be passionate. You need to be hungry. You need to have a drive. If you wanna be a leader, of course. If you feel that you have something else to contribute. And then you have to be a people person. That’s the third important point. – What about innovation?
Giovanni Abbadessa: Innovation comes with failure. Come with failure and self-confidence and be confident enough that you can try things that don’t work. You’re never gonna innovate if you don’t fail. You have to fail and you have to accept failure and you have to accept failure and learn of course from failure. So you have to accept productive criticism and try. And you need to be resilient. – Yes. The third one that I wrote before we chatted was pizza. (both laughing) So what’s your reaction to pizza? – I love it. (both laughing) Well, first of all, let me tell you, pizza was not invented in New York. (both laughing)
Giovanni Abbadessa: Well, I went to this Neapolitan place where it says they invented margarita pizza. Is that like a myth or is it true? – Well, no, no. That’s a brandy in Naples. – In Naples, yeah. – They invented the margarita, not the pizza. So the pizza was, of course, before the Romans without tomatoes. Sorry, the Roman time without tomatoes was more focaccia. Not like the focaccia in general, which is thick but more flat. And then with the tomatoes, pizza with tomato became something. It was a, you know, pizza and pasta are relatively cheap. And so it became a privileged food in South of Italy, especially which was poorer after the so-called unification in 1860. And pizza margarita was invented by this pizza place, which is still open and still, as you know, active. When the queen of Italy came to visit Naples and the flag of Italy was green, white, and red. And so what he did is he did the pizza with the green is the basil, white is the mozzarella, and red is tomato. And the queen was named Margarita. It was Queen Margarita. So he says, “Queen, I made a pizza for you. We’re gonna call it Pizza Margarita.” Everybody loved it also because they were using tomatoes from the Vesuvius Mountain and mozzarella di bufala, which is… – Oh yeah, it’s very different. – So the ingredients were particularly good. They didn’t have them in Turin, where they were sadly coming from. And so the queen loved it and it became a thing. Yeah, there’s different ways of making pizza, of course, many different ways. And throughout Italy, you will find very different ways. In Rome, it’s harder. In Tuscany, it’s thin. For me, the pizza is the Neapolitan pizza, which is soft and thin in the middle with a thick crust. You need to use a different type of flour. You need to cook it very quickly, 60 seconds maximum. You have to be careful not to let it burn. It’s an art. There’s only a few places, for example, in Boston, where they make it well. – Giovanni, I’m anxious now about our pizza evening we’re having together and the pizza I promised to prepare. – Well, yeah. And then, you know, the other thing I learned over these years, that food really brings, I think food and medicine bring people together. I became very good friends with a Lebanese couple, Armenian Lebanese couple here in Boston. He’s an amazing pizza maker. I would have never thought. And so we have fun making pizza together. In fact, we took a trip to Italy and we went to Pepe & Grani, which has been voted for years as the best pizza place in the world. We spent a week in the Naples area and we booked three nights at this pizza place to have pizza three times. – I have to go now there. – Yes, you should. You should. – The fourth word, and last one, is spread love and organizations. – Spread love and organizations. – And organizations. – Oh, and organization. Well, we go back to the people component. Look, we spent, I always tell people, never hire somebody that you wouldn’t like to have dinner with. We spend 80% of our time at work. You have to have a nice and good reminder. I interviewed at so many places, a couple of times when I was looking for a move. When I found organizations where you could feel that they could stab you in the back anytime, that people were competing against each other, not with each other, I just stopped talking with them. I don’t wanna be in that environment. When I was in the hospital in Milan, in those particular years, the culture was that if I didn’t know that a paper came out, people would actually highlight, oh, you don’t know that you’re deaf. Oh, you don’t know that paper. Oh, oh, you don’t know this thing. And they would never tell you where to find the paper so that you could read it because they were competing against each other. I don’t like that. I’d rather have a place where we collaborate and grow together, where if my team members do well, that actually speaks well of me. I don’t have to try to control my team members so that I always look better than them. No, to lead is not to always show that you’re the best one in the room. You’re the one who can bring people together and get the best out of everyone. You need to help people to give their best. If you try to be the best one and suppress their ideas, you’re not leading, you’re doing things on your own. This is not golf, it’s soccer. – Giovanni, any final word of wisdom for healthcare leaders around the world? – Yeah, well, look, well, wisdom, I don’t know. What wisdom can I bring? Unfortunately, too young to have enough wisdom, but I can tell what I see. What I see is, you know, my colleague, Elias Zerouni, he wrote an interesting book, “Disease Knows No Politics.” I think that’s really important. As I was saying, medicine and food bring people together. We really need to, well, first of all, the society needs to try to understand each other and again, go and understand what does each other want and try to see how hard it is to give up something. But in science, it is particularly true. And the relation between science and medicine and the rest of the world, it is absolutely fundamental. Scientists don’t take leadership trainings and/or communication trainings, right? But today, communication is a lot, more than before. And so I think scientists, I believe they need to learn how to communicate in a modern way so that everyone can understand what they’re saying. Until, I believe until the ’60s, the Christian masses were saved in Latin until they changed the rules. The concept was, and also legal documents in Italy were, some legal documents were in Latin. The concept was people should not understand, people should just follow, but that doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. You need people to understand, to believe. And the same is for science. And if people, and if scientists say things in a way that people can’t understand them, well, people are the ones who vote. People are the ones who choose who decides what to do with our science in the end. And so I think scientists need to go back and become a little bit more humble and be able to spread messages in a way that people can understand so that people can understand what they’re voting for. – Well, thank you so much, Giovanni, for being with me today. We could spend hours. We’ll talk more over a pizza. – We will. – We will over a pizza. Thanks again for being with me today. It was a real pleasure. – Thank you. – Thanks for listening to the show. For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to spreadloveio.com or whatever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time. story at a time.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
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