Conversations with scientists
Vivien Marx
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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)
Available episodes
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May 28, 2022
Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19, Episode 2
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 identified SARS, the outbreak in 2003. And many other viruses. Like most science journalists, I report on COVID-19 and I had been wondering about researchers in the Global South and their COVID-19 related research. Here is the story I did for Nature Methods https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-022-01439-w. For that story, I spoke with Leo Poon about his work during the height of COVID-19 and now and his outlook for the future. This podcast is more from that conversation. (Art: J. Jackson)
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May 4, 2022
Ukraine and science, episode 2
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 her children; her husband is still in Ukraine. It's not easy to talk about staying and leaving but I am grateful Dr. Dekina took a moment to chat. And her colleague Dr. Theodore Alexandrov, an EMBL researcher did some translating--thank you! The passages in Ukrainian/Russian are also in the podcast. But Dr. Dekina speaks English just fine.
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Apr 23, 2022
Ukraine and science, episode 1
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 ok and safe and still in Ukraine with his family.
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Apr 12, 2022
Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19, Episode 1
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 government asked her to certify a lab not up to biosafety levels, she said no. "Even if I was to be killed, I don't mind," she says.
This is episode 1 of a series of podcasts about the grit and determination scientists in the Global South are putting to work against COVID-19. It's not, in my view, a downer of a story. It goes along with a feature I did for Nature Methods called 'Lessons from the Global South’s fight against COVID-19.' That story is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-022-01439-w
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Mar 25, 2022
The CRISPR Children, Episode 4
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 speak with Dr. Alison van Eenennaam of the University of California, David about her work in cattle and we also talk about germline-gene editing in people. She talks about Cosmo, the first bull with a gene added to his genome. And she talks about her thoughts on applying germline gene-editing in people and about the offering, by some companies, promising parents-to-be 'designer babies.'
Note: Some cautions for you. If you don’t like meat, you might not like this podcast. Although you might want to hear about projects related to livestock health and breeding in the tropics or about reviving and restoring endangered species. You might not like this podcast if you do not want to hear about animal experiments. Although we do also know that many things intended for use in people are tested in animals first. And that is indeed fraught. Even if you have aversions of this kind, I would like to invite you to tune in to hear more about Alison van Eenennaam’s work.
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Feb 2, 2022
Predicting protein structure, episode 4
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 Juan Restropo a PhD student in the lab of Dr Jürgen Cox.
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Feb 2, 2022
Predicting protein structure, episode 3
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 changed the way and the speed at which proteins can be predicted.
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Jan 11, 2022
Predicting protein structure, episode 2
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. She's a bit secretive about the future, but discloses some of the plans currently underway. She is co-architect of the PDB's next chapter.
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Jan 11, 2022
Predicting protein structure, episode 1
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 from the European Bioinformatics Institute and Dr David Jones of University College London talk about what AlphaFold can do and what it cannot yet do. They look forward, backward and all around on this subject. He says, laughing, he has "extreme cautious optimism" about the prospects of this field. You can also find my feature story about protein structure prediction, which is the Nature Methods method of the year for 2021, here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01359-1
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Jan 5, 2022
The CRISPR Children, Episode 3
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 Nana, two of the three children who are known to have had their genomes edited before their birth. Their birth in 2018 caused a global uproar. there is also a third child, whom I call Amy, who also has a gene-edited genome. Dr. Kirksey talks about the lab that brought them about and offers some background about the social, political, cultural aspects that made the experiments possible.
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Nov 30, 2021
The CRISPR Children, Episode 2
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 University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. These were unethical experiments. How are the children? And how could you assess their health and possible future risks? And why are they genetically mosaic? There is a lot of secrecy and rumor about these children. One has to maintain their privacy and dignity. They are celebrities and victims. They and their parents might be helped if the biomedical community tried to understand more about the experiments. But that is far from straightforward. Especially because many scientists declined to talk about them. But a number of them kindly did speak with me…
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Nov 26, 2021
The CRISPR children, Episode 1
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 of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. These were unethical experiments. But how are the children? And how could you assess their health and possible future risks? There is a lot of secrecy and rumor about these children. One has to maintain their privacy and dignity, of course. But they are also victims. They and their parents might be helped if the biomedical community tried to understand more about the experiments. But that is far from straightforward. Especially because many scientists declined to talk about them. But a number of them kindly did speak with me and I am grateful for that. Her…
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Oct 30, 2021
Ask the crab
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 the brain. It is. Organoids are grown from stem cells that were coaxed to become neurons. They differentiate and grow into a three dimensional object. And these objects are becoming more complex and more dynamic in labs around the world. Dr. Eve Marder from Brandeis University talks about what organoids can tell researchers about the brain and what they might be less suited for. And why they are biological theory.
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Sep 24, 2021
Not lost in space Episode #2
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 podcast series that shares more of what I found out in my reporting. The piece is about smoothies, fruit salads, fruit tarts, genomics and a big puzzle called: the brain.
Transcript of podcast
Note: These podcasts are produced to be heard. If you can, please tune in. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and there’s a human editor. But a transcript may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.
Not lost in space Episode 2
Hi and welcome to Conversations with scientists, I’m Vivien Marx. This podcast is about space--space in biology, actua…
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Aug 7, 2021
Not lost in space Episode #1
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.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y .
This is a podcast series that shares more of what I found out in my reporting. The piece is about patience, stamina, friendship, surfing the Baltic Sea, genomics and imaging.
[00:00:05.560] - Vivien Marx
Hi and welcome to Conversations with Scientists, I'm Vivien Marx. This podcast is with and about two scientists and about space space in biology. Actually, you'll meet Patrik Ståhl. He's on the faculty of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and Fredrik Salmén, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Hubrecht Institute in the Neth…
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Jun 30, 2021
Hello brittlestar
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.
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Apr 28, 2021
Long-COVID Part 3: A chat with Terina Martinez
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 and sells mouse models. She talks about the challenges and possibilities of modeling long-COVID. There is also an article in Nature Methods to go along with this podcast series.
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Apr 28, 2021
Long-COVID Part 1: A chat with Nadia Rosenthal
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 Laboratory, and her team are working on ways to model this diversity of symptoms, which can help figure out what is amiss in long-COVID and indicate how one might treat it.
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Apr 28, 2021
Long-COVID Part 2: A chat with Avi Nath
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 neuroimmunologist Dr. Avi Nath, who is intramural clinical director of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). There is a story in Nature Methods to go along with this podcast about long-COVID.
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Nov 12, 2020
A chat with with Na Ji
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.
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Aug 5, 2020
Bye-Bye Bunny
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 University of Nottingham, Dr. Katie Crosby from Cell Signaling Technology, Dr. Alejandra Solache from Abcam, Dr. Carl Ascoli from Rockland Immunochemicals, Dr Andrew Bradbury from Specifica, Dr. Achim Knappik from Bio-Rad, Dr Aled Edwards from the University of Toronto, Dr. Fridtjof Lund-Johansen from Oslo University Hospital, and Dr. Peter McPherson from McGill University.
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Jun 27, 2020
Computational pipelines: to build and maintain them
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 DNAnexus: John Ellithorpe who is DNAnexus executive vice president and chief product officer and George Asimenos chief technology officer at DNAnexus.
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Jun 22, 2020
Sneak peak of AACR II 2020
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.
Commenting on AACR II and about virtual conferences more generally:
Dr. Elaine Mardis: the current president of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is co-Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine.
And Dr. Antoni Ribas, the incoming AACR president. He is at the University of California Los Angeles. He directs the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and is director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Center at UCLA.
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Jun 21, 2020
Job-hunting at ‘ACCR.’
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 this year. The guests on this episode are: Dr. Antonio Ward of the University of South Alabama, Melat Gebru from Penn State University, Paul Tran from Augusta University and Dr. Sadr-ul Shaheed from the University of Bradford.
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Jun 7, 2020
A chat with Hui Yang
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 window, fewer indels and fewer off-targets, he says. Yang sees a lot of promise for these base editors for both DNA and RNA base editing.
Yang is a die-hard Manchester United. Among other aspects, he talks about how he organizes his lab for open communication. He is modeling the the culture of the Jaenisch lab at The Whitehead Institute. That's where Yang was a postdoctoral fellow.
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May 3, 2020
A chat with Carol Robinson
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 Scientific. Robinson is the first female professor of the University of Oxford, previously the first female professor of the University of Cambridge and she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. This is a story about her by Vivien Marx.
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