Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the most unconventional ideas in Alzheimer's research began with scientists asking a completely different question: Can the radio-frequency radiation from cell phones damage the brain? Instead of finding that it harmed cognition, researchers stumbled upon something they didn't expect - mice actually appeared to perform better on cognitive tests. That surpr...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could take 25 years of experience navigating the halls of Congress - and turn that knowledge into a toolkit that anyone could use? My guest today spent decades on the inside of government, including serving as Chief of Staff to Congressman Luis Gutiérrez. But after Hurricane Maria, she came to a very different realization: maybe ordinary citizens don't need to hav...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the answers to America's drug-shortage problem isn't another pharmaceutical factory - but a genetically engineered yeast cell? For centuries, we've gone to nature to get many of our most valuable medicines - growing poppies, harvesting plants, extracting molecules and building global supply chains around them. But what if we could take the biological...

Send us Fan Mail We like to think that modern healthcare gives patients more control than ever before. But what if having more choices doesn't actually mean having more control? And what if, at the end of life, the healthcare system can quietly steer you toward choices you never intended to make? Today we're going to tackle a subject that most of us would rather not think about — until w...

Send us Fan Mail CAR-T therapy can be extraordinarily powerful against cancer - but there's a catch. We currently have to take a patient's T cells out of their body, genetically engineer them in a laboratory, manufacture billions of cells, and then put them back. But what if we could skip the factory entirely - and genetically program the T cells inside the patient's body? Dr. Luke...

Send us Fan Mail What if the future of regenerative medicine isn't simply making the body grow more tissue - but teaching it exactly WHERE to grow it? That's the idea behind NELL-1, a naturally occurring protein being developed to promote controlled bone formation and potentially transform spinal fusion. Today we're exploring a fascinating area of regenerative medicine: can we make...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, we've thought about space as a place where we put satellites. But what happens when space itself becomes infrastructure - when we can move spacecraft around, refuel them, repair them, and even have robots build enormous structures in orbit? We're entering a very different era of space. Today we’re joined by someone who has spent more than three decades at th...

Send us Fan Mail The battlefield of the future may look almost nothing like the battlefield of today. AI could make decisions at machine speed. Autonomous drones could operate in enormous numbers. Electronic warfare could turn the electromagnetic spectrum into a battlefield. And quantum sensors could eventually allow military systems to navigate and operate even when GPS is completely denied. So w...

Send us Fan Mail David Gottfried ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gottfried ) helped create the modern green-building movement. LEED became a global phenomenon, green buildings went mainstream, and sustainability became part of corporate vocabulary. But David eventually came to a startling conclusion: maybe making individual buildings greener wasn't enough. Maybe the problem was the oper...

Send us Fan Mail For decades we've heard that our DNA determines our health, but scientists are increasingly realizing that's only part of the story. Every day, from before we're born until the day we die, we're exposed to thousands of chemicals, pollutants, particles, microbes, foods, medications, consumer products, building materials, and environmental factors that continuous...

Send us Fan Mail There aren't enough mental-health professionals to assess everyone who needs help - and the people who need help most may sometimes be the least willing to ask for it. Now an Israeli AI platform called LIV is trying to change both sides of that equation: using an empathetic AI conversation to identify PTSD and other mental-health risks, triage patients, and give clinicians a...

Send us Fan Mail The United States wants more nuclear power. AI companies want enormous amounts of electricity. And policymakers want greater energy independence. But there's a surprisingly basic question underneath all three ambitions: where are we going to get the uranium? Corey Dias is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Anfield Energy ( https://anfieldenergy.com/ ), a comp...

Send us Fan Mail The world produces and consumes roughly 374 million metric tons of meat every year. But what if we could produce the same thing people love about meat - without raising the animal? Today we're asking whether biotechnology could fundamentally reinvent one of humanity's oldest industries. Bruce Friedrich ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Friedrich ) is Founder and Pres...

Send us Fan Mail Every year, hundreds of thousands of people around the world receive life-saving organ transplants - new hearts, kidneys, lungs, and livers that offer patients a second chance at life. But transplantation is only the beginning of the journey. Because preventing organ rejection requires suppressing the immune system, transplant recipients become vulnerable to infections that most h...

Send us Fan Mail Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern medicine. A disease that once carried devastating consequences, particularly in its most severe forms, can now be treated with therapies designed to dramatically alter its course - especially when treatment begins early. But medical progress creates a fascinating new question. What hap...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest problems in cancer isn't that we don't have enough drugs to kill cancer cells - it's that the immune system sometimes can't see the cancer in the first place? There's a fascinating new strategy trying to change that: using a virus to make tumors more visible to the immune system. Today we're going to explore a fascinating an...

Send us Fan Mail In biotech, discovering a drug is only half the battle. You have to understand the science, raise the capital, design the right clinical trials and convince the world that your hypothesis is worth pursuing. Today I'm joined by someone who has spent more than three decades at the intersection of science, medicine, business, and capital markets. Dr. David Crean, Ph. D. is the C...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer doesn't just sit there while we attack it. It evolves. We give a patient a powerful drug. The tumor shrinks. It looks like we've won. But somewhere inside that tumor may be a small population of cells that figured out how to survive. Those cells can eventually multiply, the cancer returns, and the drug that once worked no longer works. So what if, instead of conti...

Send us Fan Mail What if your dog or cat could tell you how they're feeling? Today, artificial intelligence may be giving us a new way to listen. By continuously monitoring things like activity, eating, sleep, elimination and other behaviors, AI can begin to establish what's normal for an individual animal - and potentially detect subtle changes that humans would never notice. Dr. Ragen...

Send us Fan Mail What if the biggest threat to scientific integrity isn't bad science - but the system we use to decide what gets called science in the first place? Every year, millions of scientific papers enter the literature. But behind those papers is an increasingly complicated ecosystem of peer review, Open Access, publication fees, citation metrics, academic incentives, paper mills - a...

Send us Fan Mail What if we could take something as simple - and seemingly ordinary - as a urine sample, measure thousands of chemical signals within it, and use artificial intelligence to recognize the metabolic fingerprint of disease? And what if, instead of looking for one specific biomarker, we could train an algorithm to recognize the complex pattern created by an entire disease state? That i...

Send us Fan Mail We tend to think that a new medicine's journey begins in the laboratory and ends when the FDA approves it. But there's an enormous part of that journey that most people never see: Who decides which medicines a company should acquire? Which ones are worth billions of dollars? How do you turn an approved drug into a successful commercial product - and ultimately get it int...

Send us Fan Mail Most of us think of medicine as something we take every day - a statin, a blood pressure pill, or perhaps a monthly injection. But what if those lifelong treatments eventually become obsolete? What if one carefully targeted gene edit could dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease for decades?  Dr. Trevor Martin, Ph. D. is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mammoth...

Send us Fan Mail The same technologies that could transform medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing could also reshape global security. Understanding the future of biotechnology requires scientists who can bridge discovery, engineering, and responsibility. Today on Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, we’re joined by a true pioneer at the nexus of biotechnology and national security. Dr. Jessi...

Send us Fan Mail We spend billions of dollars each year funding scientific discovery - but what happens if the people making those discoveries can't communicate them? Today we're exploring why communication may be just as important as innovation itself, and why some of the world's brightest scientists never receive the recognition their work deserves. Nancy Ancowitz ( https://www.na...