Night Science

Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops with an entrepreneurial focus. In this episode, Tina emphasizes the importance of l iving in the problem space longer , taking time to challenge assumptions and reframe questions before rushing to solutions. We discuss how deliberately generati...

Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He runs a lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In this episode, Venki emphasizes the importance of enjoying the scientific process itself, not just aiming for major discoveries. He describes his creativity as a result of mulling over a problem and of talking wi...

Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is a professor working on the immune system at Harvard’s Medical School. In this episode, we discuss with her how she teaches creativity in her course for PhD students. We explore the emotional roller coaster ride of research projects, typically culminating in the point of creative frustration , where we get stuck and are tempted to either give up or take an easy, sub-par way...

Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His distinctive painting style blends modernist, abstract tendencies together with references to everyday life and popular culture . Coincidentally, Guy is also Itai’s brother. Together, we explore the many similarities and the i...

George Church , professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering . A pioneer in the fields of personalized genomics and synthetic biology, he has co-founded over 50 biotech companies. In 2017, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In this conversation, we discuss the impo...

Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s leading developmental biologists, who has been recognized by the 2023 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize and Science magazin's People's Vote for Scientific Breakthrough of the Year in 2016 . In this episode, we explore the relationship bet...

Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole argument for truth – was invented only in the 1700s, championed by the groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton. In the April 1st, 2024, episode of the Day Science Podcast, Sir Isaac looks back on his solitary life, revealing how he came up with...

Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in human evolution . In this out-of-the-ordinary episode, we talk about this specific science project: how did Bo, with Itai’s help , discover the mutation that let us lose our ta...

Prof. Todd Golub , the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he tells us about his artist-in-residence program at the Broad. As its director, he aims to hire researchers who look like they'll be changing fields in the future , co...

Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other people’s music, Sean attributes his own creativity to his insatiable habit of reading about other people’s science – that’s how he “fertilizes his garden”. To tell a good story, he urges...

Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form , and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a “jazz musician”, wh...

Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. By talking with other people, we not only pool the information or ideas that each of us individually lacks, but we are also able to improvise new thoughts t...

Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often the process that led to a particular result can be more interesting than the result itself – something that is true not only in science but also in fields such as art or...

Carolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry . In this episode we talk about how the process of science is unstructured , so you don’t know when and where the next idea is going to come – sometimes even at the supermarket checkout line. For Carolyn, science is a long game, where one person’s negative result might be picked up a decad...

Stephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA sequencing methods for non-invasive prenatal testing. In this episode, Steve tells us about his tricks for the creative scientific process, including the surprising usefulness of jetlag , the role of generosity – rather than a transactional approach –...

John Mattick is Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia . For decades, he has been on a mission to show that the large portions of the human genome that many scientists consider useless "junk" instead have important regulatory functions. In this episode, he tells us that his creative process involves always seeing things from different perspecti...

Peter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in London and Oxford. In this episode, he reveals the interplay between dissociation – daydreaming – and interaction with colleagues as a major source of his scientific creativity. He emphasizes that to make an important discovery, you must define...

Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among her many achievements is the conception of the “Big Bang Theory” of tumor biology . In this episode, she tells us how not being biased by assumptions of what we know has been very helpful in her research. We talk about how her background in st...

Daniel Dennett , Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher , tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousness, do we have free will, how does evolutionary adaptation occur? In this episode, Dan tells us about some of his ‘i ntuition pumps ’ - tools that are as indispensable for thinking as hammers and saws are for carpentry. We discuss how creativity r...

Howard Stone is a Professor of Engineering at Princeton. His research explores how fluid dynamics can help to understand diverse systems, from bacterial biofilms to the earth’s interior.  In this episode, Howard explains how a lot of important, low-hanging fruit are at the interface between disciplines . Howard is most creative when he debates phenomena at a blackboard together with a collaborator...

Prisca Liberali is a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland. In this episode, Prisca tells us how her creative thinking thrives on recursive thinking – going deeper and deeper into a problem from different angles. Prisca also deliberately uses carefully chosen conferences to discuss and to develop ongoing projects. As much as her lab’s creati...

Tom Mullaney is a Professor of History at Stanford University and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and Chris Rea is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. In 2022, Tom and Chris published the book ‘ Where Research Begins : Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)’. In this episode, we talk about self-centered...

Bonnie Bassler is the Chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton. In this episode, Bonnie talks about her passion for scientific inquiry, creativity, mentorship, and how the journey of discovery is about asking the right question s, distinguishing between what you can do and what you should do, and about embracing the unexpected . In our very lively and fun discussion, we explore the s...

Yukiko Yamashita is a biology professor at MIT and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Yukiko’s research is amazingly broad, perhaps because she often only realizes at the end of a project which question she was asking by what she had been doing, as she explains in this episode. She likens research to solving 5000-piece jigsaw puzzles – not one at a time, but with the pieces fr...

Can you think of another big company CEO that does basic science? Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research – the company that developed Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha – but most fundamentally he has a deep commitment to figuring out the nature of reality. Stephen wrote the landmark ‘A new kind of science’ in 2002 and in his current ‘physics project’, Steven is trying to show that the universe...