x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Conversations with scientists

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)

science

All Episodes

51:58

Long-read sequencing: Jonas Korlach, CSO of Pacific...

Conversations with scientists ·

2023/01/12

When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. There are quite a few companies that make sequencers. These instruments can give a read-out for example of a stretch of DNA or many stretches of DNA, even entire genomes and many genomes. The challenge has been that the instruments deliver--short reads—short readouts of sequence. What happens then is that scientists face the challenging computational task of stitching together short reads into

en

57:04

Invisible adversity

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/12/08

Dr Uri Manor is a researcher at the Salk Institute who studies the dynamics of cells and Aly Putnam is a PhD student at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. They work in different fields and they are at different career stages. What they have in common is that they both have faced and continue to face adversity. They face an adversity of, the more invisible kind, because it's about their life in science as people with disabilities. They face adversity head on with strength, creativity

en

34:29

Sneak-peek of SfN 2022

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/11/03

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 Communication Committee and Dr. Damien Fair from the University of Minnesota, incoming chair of SfN’s

en

16:34

Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19,...

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/10/11

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 Egwang talks about why he and his colleagues submitted a letter to Nature Immunology about this

en

22:36

Speaking for the ocean

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/08/03

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 planetary health. A massive research effort is underway to better understand the roles the ocean’s

en

32:49

A model is a model is a ...

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/07/15

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 to characterize the molecular and physiologic events that take place during early

en

31:44

Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19,...

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/05/28

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,

en

19:28

Ukraine and science, episode 2

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/05/04

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

en

30:10

Ukraine and science, episode 1

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/04/23

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.

en

41:52

Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19,...

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/04/12

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

en

61:58

The CRISPR Children, Episode 4

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/03/25

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

en

53:06

Predicting protein structure, episode 4

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/02/03

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.

en

42:32

Predicting protein structure, episode 3

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/02/03

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.

en

35:34

Predicting protein structure, episode 2

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/01/11

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

en

58:37

Predicting protein structure, episode 1

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/01/11

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

en

46:54

The CRISPR Children, Episode 3

Conversations with scientists ·

2022/01/06

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

en

22:36

The CRISPR Children, Episode 2

Conversations with scientists ·

2021/12/01

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

en

34:38

The CRISPR children, Episode 1

Conversations with scientists ·

2021/11/27

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

en

19:48

Ask the crab

Conversations with scientists ·

2021/10/30

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

en

41:26

Not lost in space Episode #2

Conversations with scientists ·

2021/09/24

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

en

52 results

Similar Podcasts

X Minus 1 - Old Time Radio Show

Inception Point Ai

Science, Spoken

WIRED

This Week in Space (Audio)

TWiT

DarshanTalks Podcast

Darshan Kulkarni

The Best of Coast to Coast AM

iHeartPodcasts and Coast to Coast AM