I'm Alan Alda, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I love sharks. I'm really interested in all the scientific questions you can ask about sharks.

I'm really interested in shark the scientific questions you can ask about sharks.

I'm really interested in shark conservation, especially as animals that people don't typically see as important to conserve because there is a lot of fear around them.

People are afraid of them or they think that they're bad or evil or man-eaters or whatever.

And so there's not as much effort to conserve them as there are other marine species.

And so I was really interested in how do we get people to care about sharks.

That's Jasmine Graham.

As a young black graduate student, she found herself uncomfortable in the tradition-bound world of academia.

And she almost quit science altogether.

But as she says in her memoir called Sharks Don't Sink,

her discovery that there were others like her convinced her to recommit to shark research on her own terms.

You know what I love about your story is that so often you hear on that day my life changed.

And yours really did.

It'll change by looking at a photograph.

Yeah.

I was scrolling on my phone and I saw a picture of another black woman doing shark research and I thought I was the

only person in my field that looked like me. And so I got really excited and reached out to her on Twitter

and said, oh my goodness, we should start a club. And then we had two other black

women that study sharks join in the conversation on Twitter. And so it went from me thinking

I was the only one to realizing that there are several of us out there, at least four. And what started out as a joke

of Let's Start a Club actually turned into us founding what then became the nonprofit, minorities

...