New research explores how physical pushing and pulling between cells helps them differentiate into the myriad cell types in the body. Have you ever pondered how the cells in your hand knew to become a hand and not, say, a foot or a heart or an ear? Alex Dunn is a chemical engineer who thinks about such things a lot. He has always marveled at the way — from brain to blood to bone — the many cells that make up our bodies derive from just a single cell created when sperm meets egg. He says that pro...
Apr 03, 2020•28 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast A marine scientist travels the world to understand whether and how the ocean will respond to climate change, overfishing and other challenges. Fiorenza “Fio” Micheli grew up on the Mediterranean Sea, where she fell in love with the ocean and made it the object of her scientific career. Now a marine ecologist and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, her research spans the spectrum of marine science. She has studied the overfishing of sharks and how their absence affects coral ree...
Mar 17, 2020•27 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control. Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight – darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being – cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another. Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineerin...
Mar 06, 2020•28 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast How a revealing father-daughter conversation led to a career dedicated to studying and treating severe trauma and stress-related disorders. Shaili Jain first got interested in studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on an East Coast road trip listening to her father describe his experiences during the 1947 Partition of British India. As she listened to details of his trauma and losses, many revealed to her only for the first time, Jain realized she had a deep personal connection to trauma...
Feb 29, 2020•28 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast A rapidly shifting legal debate is raging in healthcare over patient data and privacy. One legal expert says that even though regulations have lagged, a reckoning is due. How much control should patients have over who sees their medical records? How readily should researchers share patient-level data from their clinical studies? In today’s world, should the answers to these questions depend on whether the data are “anonymized?” These are but a few of the ethical and legal conundrums that Michell...
Feb 24, 2020•28 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast An expert in infectious diseases says that vaccinations are more powerful than ever, but better communication by the medical community is needed to combat misinformation. Stanford professor Yvonne “Bonnie” Maldonado is a medical doctor and an expert in pediatric infectious diseases. She has been fighting and preventing disease her entire career. She says that vaccinations have made remarkable progress in recent years and yet, despite well-known programs that have virtually wiped out once-dreaded...
Feb 19, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The geostationary satellites used for communication and weather forecasting today are very large and very expensive — and most are still functioning perfectly when they must be disposed of because they run out of fuel. In their place, Stanford astronautics professor Simone D’Amico imagines an new era of smaller, less expensive, more efficient satellites that work in tandem to accomplish things their bigger brethren never imagined. He calls it distributed space systems — formations or “swarms” of...
Feb 13, 2020•28 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Photonics engineers are working toward a day when fast, energy efficient computers do their mathematics using photons — packets of light — instead of electrons. Experts estimate that computers gobble up as much as 10% of global electricity. They predict that that share will only grow as data centers expand and the internet of things brings scads of new computer-controlled devices to the world. Jelena Vuckovic is an electrical engineer who sees a light on the horizon — quite literally. She is bui...
Jan 24, 2020•28 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>> Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook...
Jan 21, 2020•28 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast Computer programs that purport to help humans learn have been around almost as long as there have been computer programs, but their track record for success has been less than impressive. Emma Brunskill, an expert on artificial intelligence and machine learning, thinks that less-than-stellar record is about to change and has dedicated her career to finding new and better ways to teach computers to teach humans. Her research creates innovative "reinforcement learning" algorithms in which computer...
Jan 10, 2020•28 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast A biomechanical engineer explains how new diagnostics and improved understanding of human movement are yielding great leaps forward in the treatment of motor dysfunction. Engineer Scott Delp first got interested in the details of human movement when he was injured in a skiing accident and spent five years trying to recover. Back then, today’s powerful diagnostic tools, like MRI, weren’t generally available, and Delp experienced many roadblocks and false starts in his recovery. Delp turned that c...
Dec 13, 2019•28 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast Russ Altman: Today on The Future of Everything, the future of detecting DNA in your blood. Now DNA is the building block of life. It is a relatively simple long molecule or polymer made out of four components or DNA bases which have one letter abbreviations, the famous ATCG, which stand for their chemical names. It’s like a string of beans, beads, beads, but it is long. A human genome is made of about three billion DNA bases, divided into 23 chromosomes. So if you add up the beads in each chromo...
Nov 22, 2019•28 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast They make a remarkable array of chemicals to survive the world around them. One engineer is using that knowledge to help people live better. When things aren’t going well for humans and other ambulatory creatures, they simply move on to a new location, a new life. For plants, it’s different, says chemical engineer Elizabeth Sattely, who studies the evolutionary adaptations plants make to survive. Unable to migrate, plants must make do with the hand that’s dealt them. And sometimes that hand is n...
Nov 15, 2019•28 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast In breast cancer pathology, a 2 percent chance of malignancy is the accepted threshold at which a radiologist refers the patient for further study. In reality, that threshold varies among doctors; some are more conservative, others less so. The result is either more false positives, in which a healthy patient worries unnecessarily they have cancer, or more-worrisome false negatives, in which a patient is told they are fine when they are not. One researcher working to reduce that gap is Stanford’...
Oct 25, 2019•28 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast In cancer detection, could a blood test replace a biopsy? Once, when a cancer was suspected, the next move often involved a biopsy – literally cutting out human tissue to ascertain malignancy. But that highly invasive model is now being overshadowed by the promise of “liquid biopsies.” In these non-invasive approaches, blood, spinal fluid and other bodily liquids are drawn and tested for the presence of cancer cells, bits of DNA or other molecules that are the unmistakable markers of serious dis...
Oct 18, 2019•28 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Women face many roadblocks to careers in data science and other STEM disciplines. One Stanford professor is out to change perceptions and realities for women in these fields. It was in 2015 when Margot Gerritsen was asked to speak at a data conference with not a single other woman on the program that she knew that something had to be done to get women into the field. As then-director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), Gerritsen knew more than a thing or two a...
Oct 11, 2019•28 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast How do new technologies and techniques for altering DNA get used? And who gets to use them? In recent years, the development of inexpensive genetic sequencing and easy gene editing technologies has given rise to a community of non-academic, amateur researchers who like to refer to themselves, only half-jokingly, as “biohackers.” But, says Mildred Cho, a research professor who has published frequently about bioethics, such communities are not bound by traditional “first-do-no-harm” ethical norms ...
Oct 04, 2019•28 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast An expert on air quality talks about the hidden dangers inside our homes and offers some helpful tips on what you can do to reduce your exposure. We all know about the decades-long battle to improve air quality outdoors, but Stanford environmental engineer Lynn Hildemann says that while much progress has been made in that regard, it may have caused us to look past the pollutants in our own homes. Hildemann, who studies air pollution and its effects inside and outside the home, says that chemical...
Sep 27, 2019•28 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast A mechanical engineer explains how more and better data is helping to create new prosthetics unlike any before. For years prosthetic limbs were merely functional devices, but recent advances in robotics and neuroscience are transforming the very meaning of the word "prosthetic." Steve Collins is a mechanical engineer who is helping to lead that transformation to the benefit of people who've had an amputation, stroke or battlefield injury. The field has come a long way since the days of strap-on ...
Sep 20, 2019•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything, the future of the microbiome. Now, the microbiome has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Now, what is a microbiome? I guess we will learn more, but for the purposes of this discussion, it’s the full set of microbial organisms, chiefly bacteria, but maybe others, that live in different niches within our body. Our mouth, nasal cavity, skin folds, everywhere that has contact with the outside world. The gut microbiome is one of those mic...
Sep 13, 2019•28 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast Once the core American curriculum meant reading, writing and arithmetic, but Stanford professor Mehran Sahami says we might soon have to add a fourth skill to that list, “coding.” Sahami thinks deeply about such matters. He’s the leading force behind recent changes in Stanford’s computer science curriculum. He notes that it may not be surprising that more students are choosing to major in computer science than ever before, but what might turn heads is the changing face and intellectual landscape...
Aug 23, 2019•28 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything the future of Silicon Valley. Periodically, in human history every now and then there is an unusual mix of opportunity, capital, talent, technology in a geographical region that concentrates this and creates perhaps an unusual period of creativity, invention and sometimes great impact on a global scale. Far beyond, what you might expect from that local geography. I like to think about the Italian Art Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century, focuse...
Aug 16, 2019•28 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Computers are everywhere and humans are engaging with them in nearly everything they do. Knowing this, the question becomes: How do we design a world around us so that technology makes life better, not worse? James Landay, an expert in human-computer interaction, says the key to thoughtfully integrating humans with digital technology is to put people first. This perspective draws on a philosophy known as human-centered or user-centered design. Within this approach, the first priority is to under...
Jul 19, 2019•28 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast Biomedical data scientist Sylvia Plevritis is an expert in computational modeling of cancer risk and treatment options hidden in the remarkable quantity of data available today. Rarely is a tumor made up of a single mutation, she says, but more commonly of a mix of different mutations. Such heterogenous tumors may require complex combinations of drugs to produce the most effective treatments. That’s where computers can help. Using mathematical simulations, Plevritis is helping patients and their...
Jul 19, 2019•28 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast Political scientist Jeremy Weinstein has worked at both the White House and the United Nations. In both jobs, he encountered the ethical and policy concerns that new technologies can present to policymakers. As one example, he points to the fierce debate between Apple and national security experts over end-to-end encryption and the challenges investigators faced in accessing data on the iPhones of the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino in 2015. He wants universities, like Stanf...
Jul 12, 2019•28 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast Once avoidance was the only answer, but a leading allergist says that advances in desensitizing allergies are challenging common convention. Food allergy expert Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, says that as many as one in ten adults in the U.S. has a food allergy, many without knowing it. With consequences that range from mild to serious (including lethal anaphylaxis), it is imperative that medical scientists become better adept at spotting food allergies and ultimately at helping patients cope with allerg...
Jun 28, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Can we reap the benefits of artificial intelligence while also protecting our personal information? From scheduling appointments to setting the thermostat to ordering pizza, virtual assistants are growing more commonplace by the day. Stanford professor Monica Lam says they will only become more entrenched as their capabilities grow and their voice-recognition skills become more accurate. Such developments are welcomed by many who rely upon Alexa and Siri and other virtual assistants. But it is a...
Jun 04, 2019•28 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast In-depth statistical analyses show time and again that subtle, unconscious bias is pervasive in the American justice system. The bigger question, however, is what to do about it? Sharad Goel is an expert in computational social science – that is, using computers and data to examine and address policy issues. He says unconscious bias is subtle but entrenched in American life, and nowhere are the consequences more concerning than in criminal justice. Goel has analyzed hundreds of millions of crime...
May 31, 2019•28 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast When Stanford’s Paul Yock was a young interventional cardiologist, he was frustrated by the complex, two-person process required to deliver life-saving stents. So, he invented a better way. His Rapid Exchange stenting and balloon angioplasty system, one of several inventions Yock is known for internationally, can be managed by just a single operator, making procedures like stent placement faster and safer. Yock is a man of many talents. He is a doctor, a professor of bioengineering and of mechan...
May 06, 2019•28 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Margaret Brandeau may carry a business card that reads Professor of Management Science and Engineering, but her expertise is in using complex systems models to solve challenges in public health policy. For instance, she recently created a sophisticated computer model of the national opioid crisis, which led her to the stark –and surprising – conclusion that it may take a short-term rise in deaths to ultimately reduce them. She didn’t come to that conclusion lightly, but made no less than 10 mode...
May 06, 2019•28 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast 
