Conversations with scientists
Vivien Marx
1 Creator
1 Creator
What is Conversations with scientists about?
A podcast about people talking about their science hosted by science 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: J.Jackson)
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Top 10 Conversations with scientists Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Conversations with scientists episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Conversations with scientists for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Conversations with scientists episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Science and the arts
Conversations with scientists
05/07/23 • 85 min
Science and the arts have much to say to one another. This episode is a conversation between scientists and artists, between scientists who foster the arts through fellowships and residencies and artists active in science and people who live in both worlds: science and the arts. All this makes for interesting and sometimes challenging groups of identities. With: London-based artist Charlotte Jarvis, Designer, now medical student Mika Futz, Jean Mary Zarate, editor with Nature Neuroscience, musician and actor, Catherine Musselman and John Rinn, genetics researchers at University of Colorado, proteomics researcher Albert Heck. (Art: J. Jackson, Music: David Gives, Views from Palermo licensed from artlist.io)
Trees: A conversation with David Neale, University of California, Davis
Conversations with scientists
04/16/23 • 21 min
A conversation with David Neale, professor emeritus of the University of California Davis and director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. As a forester and scientist, he works on trees, also the genomics of trees to understand more about their longevity and adaptability to events such as climate change. And he wants to empower the next generation people interested in these questions. (Art: J. Jackson, Music: Break of Dawn / Anthony Vega licensed from artlist.io.)
Athlete-scientists Part 1
Conversations with scientists
03/17/23 • 21 min
University of California San Diego researcher Dr. Gene Yeo is an athlete-scientist. He has completed two Iron Man competitions, a number of half Iron Man competitions and both full and half marathons. He says: "On these long long runs and long bike rides, you know, you get the time to sort of zone out a little bit, right. And it helps you focus on, you know, answering some questions." This podcast is about his approach to his sport, how it influences his science, what his sport gives him. And it's about his science, too, which is all about RNA. (Art: J. Jackson, Music Smoothy Moody by Mac A DeMia licensed from Artlist.io)
The push-pull of cells
Conversations with scientists
02/19/23 • 39 min
Cells push things around and get pushed around, it's all in a day's work. Tracking this, such as by tracking actin and the cytoskeleton, takes microscopy and labels. Lifeact, for example, is a popular, widely used label. This conversation is with the Lifeact developers Dr. Michael Sixt from Institute of Science and Technology Austria and Dr. Roland Wedlich-Söldner from the University of Münster in Germany. Among other topics, they talk about how the label came to be, how to use it, what's next and whether or not cells practice bodyslamming. (Art: J. Jackson, Music: Funky Energetic Intro by Winnie the Mook licensed from film music.io and Rice Crackers from Aves, licensed from Artlist.io.)
Long-read sequencing: Steven Salzberg, Johns Hopkins University
Conversations with scientists
01/24/23 • 38 min
Dr. Steven Salzberg is a Johns Hopkins University researcher and director of the Center for Computational Biology at Hopkins. I spoke with him about genomics, about long-read sequencing, about human biology and human diversity, about funding, technology choice, about complete and incomplete genomes, about jobs in bioinformatics. He described his technology choices and about the choices one has to make in small labs. He shared his thoughts about the trend toward pangenomes and graph genomes. And he described how technology has changed and how happy that makes him. Teeny reminder, Steven Salzberg headed bioinformatics at TIGR, the Institute for Genomic Research run by J. Craig Venter. It was part of the venture to determine the sequence of the human genome. And yes, there were human genome assemblies based on teeny tiny read lengths.
Long-read sequencing: Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
Conversations with scientists
01/12/23 • 27 min
When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. Some of them can generate long-reads, which helps with analyzing genomes. The method of the year according to Nature Methods is: long read-sequencing. For a story I chatted with scientists at companies and in academia about long-read sequencing and did some podcasts, too. This episode is with Dr. Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. (Art: J. Jackson).The following music was used for this media project: Winnie The Moog, Funky Energetic Intro and Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeod Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpet License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Long-read sequencing: Jonas Korlach, CSO of Pacific Biosciences
Conversations with scientists
01/12/23 • 51 min
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 contiguous sequence. But long-read sequencing is a way to address this challenge.
The method of the year according to Nature Methods is: long read-sequencing. For a story I chatted with scientists at companies and in academia about long-read sequencing. This episode is with Dr. Jonas Korlach, chief scientific officer of Pacific Biosciences, which is one of the companies that offers instruments that can do long-read sequencing.
(Art: J. Jackson. The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Winnie the Moog, Funky Energetic Intro and Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeod Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpet License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license0
Invisible adversity
Conversations with scientists
12/08/22 • 57 min
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 and humor.
(Art J. Jackson, Music: Funky energetic Intro by WinnieTheMoog. Another piece used in this media project: Paper Flakes by Rafael Krux. Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5695-paper-flakes License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://www.orchestralis.net/)
Sneak-peek of SfN 2022
Conversations with scientists
11/03/22 • 34 min
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 Public Education and Communication Committee. If you want to register for the meeting, you can do so here: https://www.sfn.org/meetings/neuroscience-2022/registration .
And we played a nerdy game with them. It's 'we' because this podcast episode is co-hosted by Dr. Jean Zarate, senior editor at Nature Neuroscience, who is also a musician and an actor. This podcast series expands on the things I hear and read and offers conversations with people I meet in the course of my science journalism adventures.
(Art J. Jackson, Music: Funky energetic Intro by WinnieTheMoog. Another piece used in this media project: Legend of One by Kevin MacLeod: Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/3973-legend-of-one License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Artist website: https://incompetech.com)
Not lost in space Episode #2
Conversations with scientists
09/24/21 • 41 min
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, actually.
Talking about the role of space and spatial analysis in biology is a chat about food. About smoothies, fruit salads and fruit tarts. Here’s Dr. Hongkui Zeng and Dr. Bosiljka Tasic from the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
[0:30] Bosiljka Tasic
Fruit salad and smoothie.
Fruit tart is spatial transcriptomics.
Smoothie is Bulk RNA-seq. Ok passé
Hongkui Zeng
Forget it.
Bosiljka Tasic
You have fruit salad, you have dissociated cells you are profiling, you have lost the context, you have a context in the piece of tissue you have dissected.
Then there is the fruit tart. You know exactly where each piece of fruit. Relationship to the other
Vivien
Ok so spatial analysis in genomics is understanding a fruit tart. Knowing which genes are expressed where and what the relationship is of the genes to one another. The two scientists will talk more about this shortly. There’s Dr. Bosiljka Tasic, she directs Molecular Genetics and her research is for example on cell types in the mouse brain. And Dr. Hongkui Zeng who is director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Before they explain more about this science, here they both are, kindly teaching me how to pronounce their names. As ever I will try to do this right. And likely fail.
[1:37] Bosiljka Tasic and Hongkui Zeng
I'm Bosiljka Tasic. Bosiljka Tasic. OK, got it
Hongkui Zeng. You don't pronounce the G at all, just, well, Zen, yeah, Zen G Zen. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very almost not there.
How would you how would you pronounce that if you emphasize the G . ZengG. So I think g you hear much more but it's not the correct way. I mean I've given you my Americanized way of saying my name. I see. Well I'm going to, I'm going to do it wrong anyway. But but at least for me, don’t worry.
Vivien
Next, before we get back to their thoughts and research, just a bit about this podcast series.
In my reporting I speak with scientists around the world and this podcast is a way to share more of what I find out.
This podcast takes you into the science and it’s about the people doing the science. You can find some of my work for example in Nature journals that are part of the Nature Portfolio.
That’s where you find studies by working scientists and those are about the latest aspects of their research. And a number of these journals offer science journalism. These are pieces by science journalists like me.
This podcast episode about space in biology harkens back to interviews I did months ago. Back then I asked scientists about their work and their thoughts about spatially resolved transcriptomics, which is a Nature Methods method of the year. In my slow pokey DIY podcast production this is episode 2 in a series about this field of study.
Spatially resolved transcriptomics helps with studying the brain, which is the giant puzzle that Hongkui Zeng and Bosiljka Tasic work on. Among their daily puzzles is: How many different cell types are there in the brains of mammals such as mice, primates or humans? There are lots of them.
And scientists want to be more precise than just saying there are lots of cells, of course. They want to know which ones there are and where they are.
In the brain, another puzzle is where are cell types when. Cells are born and then often move to other areas of the brain where they will tend to all sorts of tasks. It takes a number of techniques to address these questions, including spatial techniques.
The US National Institutes of Health—NIH--has many research projects, one of them is the Brain Initiative, NIH's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative.
Part of that is the NIH Brain Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN). One big BICCN project is to build a high quality atlas of cell types in...
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FAQ
How many episodes does Conversations with scientists have?
Conversations with scientists currently has 51 episodes available.
What topics does Conversations with scientists cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts, Technology, Education, Science and Mentoring.
What is the most popular episode on Conversations with scientists?
The episode title 'Trees: A conversation with David Neale, University of California, Davis' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Conversations with scientists?
The average episode length on Conversations with scientists is 35 minutes.
How often are episodes of Conversations with scientists released?
Episodes of Conversations with scientists are typically released every 27 days, 18 hours.
When was the first episode of Conversations with scientists?
The first episode of Conversations with scientists was released on May 3, 2020.
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