Vivien Marx

Conversations with scientists

Science EN ↓ 55 episodes

Scientists talk about what they do and why they do what they do. Their motivations, their trajectory, their setbacks, their achievements. They offer their personal take on science, mentoring and the many aspects that have shaped their work and their lives. Hosted by journalist Vivien Marx. Her work has appeared in Nature journals, Science, The Economist, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe and New Scientist among others. (Art: Justin Jackson)

Author

Vivien Marx

Episodes

Computational pipelines: to build and maintain them 27.06.2020 27:45

Pipelines are basically a series of steps. Algorithms are linked to one another, the output of one algorithm is the input to another. Pipelines can be simple and pretty complex. And maintenance of pipelines also ranges from simple to complex. They can run like a dream, they can get stuck, they can break. To talk about trends in this area, I sat down, virtually that is, with two scientists at DNAn...

Sneak peak of AACR 2020 22.06.2020 8:56

Part I of the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research—it was all virtual—had 61,000 attendees. Part II is about to start. Here’s a sneak peek about the meeting, its hundreds of talks and thousands of posters. Virtual conferences mean less of a carbon footprint, maybe a broader reach and a chance for attendees who cannot typically travel to AACR to attend virtually. Commen...

Job-hunting at ‘ACCR.’ 22.06.2020 14:24

Part I of the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research was all virtual. There were 61,000 attendees, including some job-hunters. I wonder how this year’s conference that is about to get underway will affect job-hunting. This episode is with scientists talking about their hopes and allergic points as they job-hunt. It’s based on conversations with job-hunters last year and...

A chat with Hui Yang 07.06.2020 9:31

Today’s episode is with and about Hui Yang. Dr. Yang is a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has developed new base-editor variants. Base-editing is a kind of gene-editing. Overall the result led to base-editors with fewer off-targets, high on-target efficiency and a narrowed editing wind...

A chat with Carol Robinson 03.05.2020 11:13

Proteins in a cell don't tend to practice social distancing. They have many associates but capturing all of the associates in one experiment is difficult. Dr. Carol Robinson and her team developed a way to be able to dissociate such complexes in a mass spectrometer and look at them in one experiment. It's a new kind of mass spectrometer and one she and her team co-developed with Thermo Fisher Scie...