Paul George, an assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University, taps into the bioelectrical language of the injured brain to reawaken the healing potential of neural stem cells. Inspired by his patients, he looks for innovative strategies that may one day help patients recover from neurodegenerative diseases such as stroke. In this episode, Iris Kulbatski from The Scientist’s Creative Services Team spoke with George to learn more about what being a scientist me...
Oct 31, 2022•2 min
As humans age, cells often acquire defects that lead to cancer. However, this fate may not be set in stone, as certain animals can circumvent the ravages of time and keep their cells healthy. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services Team spoke with Vera Gorbunova, professor of biology at the University of Rochester and co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center, to learn about her research on naked and blind mole-rat cancer resistance. The Scientist Speaks is ...
Oct 28, 2022•14 min
To regulate protein production, cells use sophisticated strategies to keep RNA levels in check. This balance is especially important for hormone production, particularly aldosterone—the master regulator of blood pressure. When this balance is disrupted, the risk for disorders including hypertension and cardiovascular disease increases. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services Team spoke with Neelanjan Mukherjee, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular geneti...
Sep 30, 2022•14 min
Welcome to Science Philosophy in a Flash, a mini podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. In this series, we highlight researchers’ unique outlooks on what it means to be a scientist. Andrew Pelling, a professor at the University of Ottawa with appointments in the Departments of Physics and Biology, has a fresh approach to practicing science. He uses fruits and vegetables to create biodegradable scaffolds for tissue regeneration. His lab is a cross-pollinating hive of d...
Sep 13, 2022•2 min
Sequencing the human genome in the early 2000s was an incredible feat, but the sequence was incomplete. Recently, a consortium of researchers published a telomere-to-telomere assembly of a complete human X chromosome. This accomplishment was made possible by advances in sequencing technology, allowing researchers to address the previous technical difficulties in analyzing challenging genomic regions. Filling in these gaps of the human genome represents a breakthrough in human genetics and opens ...
Aug 31, 2022•11 min
Welcome to Science Philosophy in a Flash, a mini podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. In this series, we highlight researchers’ unique outlooks on what it means to be a scientist. Aimée Parker, a research scientist at the Quadram Institute’s Gut Microbes and Health Research Programme, looks to the gut as the fountain of youth. She studies how rejuvenating the microbiome can subdue chronic inflammation and prevent age-related tissue and organ dysfunction. Motivated b...
Aug 08, 2022•2 min
Scientists have known for a long time that microbes can take up extracellular DNA fragments, and they have leveraged this transformation process to genetically modify bacteria in the lab. However, transformation is quite fickle and depends on creating the right balance of reagent concentrations and cellular conditions. How this process takes place outside of the petri dish, in more natural bacterial environments such as soil, has proven more difficult to determine. In this episode, Nele Haelterm...
Jul 31, 2022•14 min
Welcome to Science Philosophy in a Flash, a mini podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. In this series, we highlight researchers’ unique outlooks on what it means to be a scientist. Alysson Muotri, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and director of the Stem Cell program, pushes the boundaries of neuroscience research. He builds brains for a living, then sends them on missions to outer space. Motivated by curiosity and creativity, his work is advanc...
Jul 27, 2022•2 min
Welcome to Science Philosophy in a Flash, a mini podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. In this series, we highlight researchers’ unique outlooks on what it means to be a scientist. Beate Peter, a speech-language pathologist and associate professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions, practices science at the interface between genetics and speech-language pathology. She created a novel program for infants called Babble Boot Camp, which trains par...
Jul 11, 2022•2 min
Staphylococcus aureus is a versatile pathogen that infects many areas of the body and has a number of strategies for avoiding the immune response. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Anthony Richardson, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, to learn how the bacterium fine-tunes its metabolism to survive in the host and why Staph’s metabolism makes it especially dangerous for people with diab...
Jun 30, 2022•11 min
Viruses such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are constantly evolving to better infect their hosts. The appearance of new variants often diminishes the effectiveness of existing vaccines designed to induce immunity against pre-existing strains. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Patrick Wilson, a professor at the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine, to learn about strategies for making universal vaccines that...
May 25, 2022•14 min
To understand how the gut perceives and communicates information to the brain, scientists are taking a deeper look at the sensory cells lining the gut using cutting-edge techniques such as single-cell sequencing. While there are challenges and limitations to single-cell sequencing, researchers are becoming more adept at integrating the latest sequencing technology with complementary research techniques to answer complex research questions, advance our understanding of health and disease, and dev...
Apr 29, 2022•16 min
In search for strategies to curb pandemics, scientists strive to understand how pathogens slip past the immune system and wreak havoc on the body. To achieve this goal, researchers study viral infection in models that mimic how different cell types interact with each other, the immune system, or the environment. Organ-on-a-chip models combine tissue engineering with microfluidics to replicate an organ’s biological and biomechanical context. Lung chips have proven instrumental for studying viral ...
Mar 30, 2022•15 min
The cell is a fundamental unit of life that is capable of metabolism, synthesizing biological molecules, harnessing energy, and replicating. To understand how life works, researchers elucidate every detail related to cellular function and determine which processes are essential. With this information, scientists constructed the first synthetic minimal cell that encoded only the genes necessary for life in laboratory conditions. In this episode, narrated by Niki Spahich, Sejal Davla from The Scie...
Mar 01, 2022•18 min
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological conditions, affecting over 65 million individuals worldwide, and is characterized by recurrent, spontaneous, and uncontrollable seizures. Seizures commonly arise in the epileptic brain after a sudden burst in neurological activity. While many anti-epileptic drugs control seizures, one-third of patients with epilepsy fail to respond to them. Managing drug-resistant epilepsies poses a challenge to scientists and clinicians alike. In this episode, nar...
Feb 01, 2022•16 min
As neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease wreak havoc on the brain and on our aging society, scientists race to identify factors that trigger neuronal demise and figure out how to stop them. Because neurons can’t be replaced, it is important to detect signs of stress in the brain early, before brain cells pass the point of no return. Scientists recently combined lipidomics with genetics and discovered that lipids are an underestimated player in neurodegeneration....
Dec 15, 2021•17 min
As we know, far too well, infectious disease pandemics have the power to reshape the world. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are observing pathogen evolution in real time as more variants arise and spread in waves. Another infamous infectious disease pandemic, simply called “the plague,” has popped up multiple times in history. How it changed the ancient world has intrigued both historians and scientists. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Sim...
Nov 30, 2021•15 min
Plant biotechnology is becoming an accepted avenue for pharmaceutical development. Researchers have engineered plants to grow biomolecules that can be made into therapeutics, including vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. These new technologies hold the promise of more readily bringing treatments to low-to-middle-income countries and providing rapid responses to future pandemics. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Julian Ma, the director of the In...
Nov 17, 2021•18 min
Cancers are diverse and adaptable. That is why a staggering 97% of cancer drugs in clinical trials fail to receive FDA approval. Researchers try to stay one step ahead of cancer by studying the mechanisms that lead to drug resistance, finding new drug targets, and developing novel therapies, such as immunotherapeutics. In this episode narrated by Niki Spahich, Sejal Davla from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Jason Sheltzer, an assistant professor in the Department of Genomics, ...
Sep 30, 2021•18 min
An estimated 107,000 people in the United States are currently on the waiting list for organ transplantation. These patients face waiting times of 3-5 years or longer before receiving an organ. Even after receiving a donated organ, organ-transplant patients face a high risk of tissue rejection. Regenerative medicine promises the possibility of laboratory-grown organs, specially tailored to the biology and needs of individual patients, but how close is this technology to reality? In this month’s ...
Sep 01, 2021•17 min
Many secrets are locked inside the brain, including fundamental questions of how individuals perceive the world. Some researchers are seeking answers by mapping brain activity in response to stimuli. This work typically involves human subjects, but certain scientists are branching out to understand the minds of other animals. Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University who scans the brains of dogs trained to enter MRI ma...
Jul 23, 2021•16 min
Viral genomes are small, but their products have large consequences for their hosts. During infection, viruses reshape the host gene expression landscape through clever mechanisms that promote viral replication and survival. Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Britt Glaunsinger, a professor in the departments of plant microbial biology and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, to learn more. More on this topic Transforming Virology ...
Jun 01, 2021•19 min
The brain requires a lot of energy generated by mitochondria to function properly. Researchers suspect that mutations and deletions in the mitochondrial genome have a bigger effect than previously appreciated, with implications for neurological disorders, such as major depressive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and beyond. Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Brooke Hjelm, assistant professor of clinical translational genomics at the Keck school of medicine at the U...
Mar 31, 2021•17 min
Since the 1950s, there has been a rapid rise in the incidence of allergic diseases, particularly in western countries. Experts agree that the rapid increase in cases is not due to increased awareness, and the genetics behind allergies have not changed. But the environment has changed. Genetic predisposition affects the likelihood of developing allergies, but the environment acts on genetic background. In this month’s episode, we discuss the epigenetic origins of allergies and asthma and explore ...
Feb 26, 2021•23 min
Cell therapies treat and repair the body using stem cells or their derivatives. These cells possess great therapeutic potential, but their beneficial effects often fade away over time. In this episode, we explore strategies to improve the persistence of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes in the effort to remuscularize hearts after cardiac infarction. Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Sara Nunes Vasconcelos, an assistant professor at the Institute of Biomaterials &...
Jan 27, 2021•12 min
Odors bombard the human nose every day, whether the odors register consciously or not. The way the human brain processes these odors has the potential to characterize disease and shape everyday human interaction. In this month’s episode, we explore the world of odor and how scientists use the sense of smell to better understand the human brain, disease, and behavior. Tiffany Garbutt from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Noam Sobel, Sela Professor of Neurobiology and Director of ...
Dec 22, 2020•19 min
Welcome to The Scientist Speaks, a podcast produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. Our podcast is by scientists and for scientists. Once a month, we bring you the stories behind news-worthy molecular biology research. This episode is brought to you by 10x Genomics. 10x Genomics builds solutions to interrogate biological systems at a resolution and scale that matches the complexity of biology. Their rapidly expanding suite of products, which include instruments, consumables, and softw...
Dec 08, 2020•13 min
Most infectious disease research focuses on the battle between host and pathogen. While an individual’s abilities to resist infection and combat microbes are important, this process is only half of the story. Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with David Schneider, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, to learn why it is crucial to consider how organisms tolerate disease, and to explore how he maps the paths individuals take through infectio...
Nov 18, 2020•16 min
In this month’s episode, Repurposing Living Systems to Fight a Pandemic, we discuss how one synthetic biologist pivoted his research to join the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Tiffany Garbutt from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Michael Jewett, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University, to learn more. The Scientist Speaks is a podcast ...
Sep 30, 2020•19 min
The Scientist is bringing you a new podcast series of special edition episodes! Get a sneak peek here and subscribe to the The Scientist's LabTalk channel for access to additional science stories. The Scientist’s LabTalk podcast is produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. We explore topics at the leading edge of innovative research. This episode is brought to you by Keystone Symposia. Don’t miss their upcoming virtual eSymposium on myeloid cells and innate immunity in solid tumors on ...
Sep 16, 2020•13 min
