Carry the One Radio

The fundamental task of our immune systems is to recognize foreign objects in our bodies and destroy them. But what happens when there’s an object inside you that’s half foreign and half you? What happens when you’re carrying a fetus? We were all once fetuses and we all made it past our mother’s immune systems and into this world. How that all works has puzzled scientists for decades. So much so t...

Science doesn't happen in a vacuum, and racism both in science and society contributes to disparities in the health outcomes of Black Americans. In this episode of The Spotlight, we talked to Dr. Debora Kamin Mukaz about her work studying how social factors and biology converge to affect risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Hear about her journey into epidemiology, and what doing this resear...

These days, homeopathy and some forms of alternative medicine fall soundly in the realm of pseudoscience. Not only that, but the wellness industry has capitalized on the popularity of these practices in predatory ways, selling promises of improved health with no evidence to back them up. In the United States, the marketing of these alternative ‘wellness’ products primarily targets women – evidence...

We’re proud to present the first episode in our brand new Young Scientist Spotlight Series, or “The Spotlight” for short. Each month, we’ll feature an informal, lightly-edited interview with a graduate student, postdoc, staff researcher, or other early-career scientist. Through these conversations, we’ll be bringing you a fun, down-to-earth look at not only even more of the awesome science content...

Dr. Liz Wayne got her start as a cancer hunter, searching for rogue cells running loose through the bloodstream. But she started to notice something strange – everywhere she found cancer cells, she found immune cells, too. Today, a big issue with cancer therapy is that some cancer sites are really hard to reach, but immune cells have no problem getting there. Dr. Wayne thought, why not hitchhike c...

Dr. David Gordon studies HIV. In Life/Science, a new mini-series produced in collaboration with the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute, we're giving you a peek behind the curtain. This isn't just a series about science, it's also about the process, about what it actually means to do this kind of research - including the confusion, failures, and triumphs David has faced along the way. Life/Sci...

If you could swallow a pill that would give you twenty extra years of healthy life, would you do it? In this episode of CTOR, we talk to Dr. Dena Dubal, a neurologist and neuroscientist at UCSF. Her research on a protein discovered completely by accident may hold the key to living longer, healthier lives more resilient to heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia. How is that possible? List...

Our ability to diagnose and treat disorders of the mind lags far behind other medical disciplines. For our latest episode, we talked to Dr. Matthew State about why this is the case, and discussed how his research into the genetics of autism is revealing promising paths to future treatments.

Ready to get blasted with science? We recorded five different PhD students as they summarized their entire thesis in 3 minutes or less. The challenge was to describe their research with as little jargon as possible, for a general audience. You’ll hear about everything from cancer, to the developing embryo, to how dieting might make you smarter. Music from today’s episode includes: Easy Jam and Eco...