Conversations with scientists

Recently, we had the chance to get a sneak-peek of the meeting with the Society for Neuroscience's current leadership and to play a nerdy game with them. They are: Dr. Gina Turrigiano, Brandeis University researcher and current President of the Society for Neuroscience,  Dr. Robbie Greene of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, current chair of SfN’s Public Education and Communicat...

This is a podcast series with some of the people I spoke with for a story about the creative grit scientists in The Global South apply in the fight against COVID-19. They collaborate, they network, they get creative to get what they need: supplies and strength for their research. In the haste to clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines some people were missed who need special attention. Thomas Eg...

A conversation with sailor-scientist Romain Troublé Tara Ocean Foundation. He is executive director of the foundation devoted to the ocean and ocean research. And there's a connection to the French fashion house agnès b.  You have perhaps heard of the gut microbiome, the many microbes in our gut that play a large role in maintaining our health. The ocean microbiome plays a similar role in our plan...

Models are important tools: they resemble, they mimic, they imitate something to a greater or lesser extent. How similar models are to the 'real thing' is usually a challenging  issue. And it's a big issue with stem-cell derived models of the human embryo. These embryo models, models of the embryo's 8-cell stage, of the blastocyst or of the gastrula are emerging and they are ones that labs can use...

I asked Dr. Leo Poon, who co-directs the Hong Kong University Pasteur Research Pole, if he has a fleet of private jets. He does not. But he wishes he did. He and his team have helped colleagues all over the world on COVID-19. He and his team developed a diagnostic assay quite soon after the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 became known. His is the lab that detected and...

How is the Russian invasion of Ukraine affecting scientists? Here is another episode on this with a conversation with Dr. Svitlana Dekina, a researcher at the A.V. Bogatsky Physico-Chemical Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Odessa, Ukraine. She has recently left Ukraine and is now at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. She is in Germany with...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is affecting scientists in many different ways. Here is a conversation with Dmytro Gospodaryov, a researcher in the department of biochemistry and biotechnology at  Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, West Ukraine. I spoke to him shortly after the Russian invasion in Ukraine began. And it feels like that was so very long ago. He is o...

Virologist Dr Marycelin Baba from the University of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria is passionate about her work on viruses, She runs a World Health Organization (WHO)-accredited and WHO-sponsored lab where the team has worked, for example, on polio. When COVID-19 emerged, she and her team were prepared and she was called upon to help build capacity in Nigeria to address COVID-19. When the gover...

Around three years ago, three children were born with genomes edited before their birth. They are supposedly doing ok, sources tell me. But it's hard to know for sure. Germline-genome editing is not permissible in most countries, but it might one day be performed to avoid heritable diseases that are incurable. But the technology needs to be much more precise than it is now. In this episode, I spea...

This episode is about AlphaFold and the impact it is having on junior scientists. I spoke with a group of them from different labs at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. I spoke with Dr Isabell Bludau, a postdoctoral fellow and computational biologist in the lab of Dr Matthias Mann, Dr. Bastian Bräuning, a postdoctoral fellow and project group leader in the Department of Brenda Schulman and...

Biology and AI for predicting protein structure. This is a chat with conversation with some members of the Rost lab  at the Technical University of Munich. Dr. Maria Littmann, postdoctoral fellow, and PhD students Konstantin Weissennow and Michael Heinzinger and Dr Burkhard Rost, principal investigator.  We talked about AlphaFold, a computational approach from DeepMind Technologies that has change...

Protein structure prediction is the Nature Methods Method of the Year for 2021.  Here is my feature on that. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01359-1    For the story, I chatted with Helen Berman, co-founder of the Protein Data Bank (PDB), which is home to experimentally determined structural data for over 180,000 proteins. What's next for the PDB. And of course this relates to the past....

Proteins are twirly, curly, dynamic structures. Crucial for life, complicated to study. Predicting protein structure has been tough but it's now easier as AlphaFold enters the scene. That doesn't mean that AlphaFold has solved all challenges, of course. AlphaFold was developed by DeepMind Technologies, a company that was bought by Google in 2014. Lots of protein puzzles remain. Dr. Janet Thornton...

To go along with my investigative story The CRISPR Children in Nature Biotechnology, I am producing a rolling series of podcasts. This episode is a chat with Dr. Eben Kirksey, an anthropologist at Deakin University, which has campuses in and near Melbourne, Australia.  He has written a book called The Mutant Project, Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans .  It's dedicated to Lulu and...

The CRISPR Children is a podcast series about the children whose genomes were edited before their birth in 2018. The podcasts accompany a story I did about these children in Nature Biotechnology by the same name. You can find the story here: https://rdcu.be/cB7Nx   The children were born somewhere in China. They came about due to experiments performed in the lab of He Jiankui at Southern Universit...

The CRISPR Children is a series of podcasts about the children whose genomes were edited before their birth in 2018. The podcasts accompany a story I did about these children in Nature Biotechnology by the same name. You can find the story here: https://rdcu.be/cB7Nx   The children were born somewhere in China and the result of experiments performed in the lab of He Jiankui at Southern University...

Neuroscientists use models of the brain to study the brain. One of those model types: organoids. One way to get a conversation with a neuroscientist started badly is to ask them about the 'mini-brains' in the dish on their lab bench. It’s not that the blob in the dish doesn’t somehow look like a piece of living tissue that could be a piece of brain.  Or that this blob isn’t relevant to studying th...

This podcast is with Dr. Hongkui Zeng who directs the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Dr. Bolisjka Tasic who directs Molecular Genetics at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. It’s about how spatially resolved transcriptomics, a Nature Methods Method of the Year, can help to understand the brain. I did a story about it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y . This is a po...

This podcast is about two scientists, Dr. Patrik Ståhl and Dr. Fredrik Salmén, who are joint first authors of a paper that kickstarted a field. It's about finding work they did with colleagues to enable finding out where in tissue gene expressions is happening. It's called spatially resolved transcriptomics. It is a Nature Methods Method of the Year and I did a story about it here: https://www.nat...

Marine echinoderms speak to developmental biologist Dr. Paola Oliveri at University College London for many reasons. Their evolution of a novel body plan is one of them. In a conversation she talks about teaching evolution, her training, her students and her love of science. 

COVID-19 has been bad. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 3 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. This episode is a conversation with Dr. Terina Martinez, a field application scientist at Taconic Biosciences, which develops an...

COVID-19 has been bad. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 1 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. You can also find my piece in Nature Methods on long-COVID here . Dr. Nadia Rosenthal, who directs science at the Jackson Labora...

Around the world, COVID-19 has been awful. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 2 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. This episode focuses on brain fog, one of the difficult symptoms of long-COVID. It's a conversation with neu...

She's driven by curiosity. Na Ji is a physicist and neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley. She develops ways to study the brain and she reads voraciously. She seeks to capture the signals that neurons pass to another with imaging and in multiple brain regions. She also teaches a class for people interested in physics. She calls it 'Physics for Modern Citizens. 

This episode of Conversations with ..Scientists--Bye-Bye Bunny-- is about research into diseases such as COVID-19 and neurological diseases, too. It's about the antibodies in our bodies. And it's about research antibodies. And it explores the possibility of perhaps generating and producing research antibodies without the use of animals.    It includes Dr. Alison Gray from Afability and the Univers...