MEDICUS - the Podcast by Duke-NUS Medical School

In Episode 11 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we sit down with Devanand Anantham, who leads the new SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute, to take stock of how far medicine has come, the potential of AI and why it is high time we reframe our conversations about health.

Take for example Mrs Tan. The retiree likes nothing more than to spend hours tending to her garden, but recently her knee has been giving her a lot of pain, robbing her of the joy and serenity she enjoyed so much while gardening. To fix her knee pain, a knee replacement surgery is the best intervention. It will alleviate the pain. But will it give her the range of motion required to squat comfortably as she pulls out weeds and turns the soil?

To connect holistically with people about their wellbeing means to think about more than just their physical health, Anantham argues. And that's where our humanity comes in, where we draw on our shared understanding of the world and what is important to us. No multiple choice questionnaire analysed by AI can—at this point—divine what we truly want as most of the time what we want is pain and discomfort alleviated, but what we need is to be able to bend our knees fully and enjoy the time we have.
Show notes:

Music from: Jay Varton (via iStock.com Epidemic Sound library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior editor at Duke-NUS

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/2024-issue-2

To learn more about the science being driven out of Singapore and the people behind it, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 10 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we went on a search for a scientist who has woven fitness into his work and family life routine so well that it looks effortless to find out how he does it. With January over, we’re already one month into the New Year, so the pressure to maintain any new or continuing fitness commitment is steadily growing. So, we sat down with Sven Petersen, a principal research scientist with the Laboratory for Translational and Molecular Imaging at Duke-NUS, who talked about his relationship with exercise and how it saved him during one of his darkest times.

He also tells us how having a young family has helped him gain a more flexible view of his priorities—without foregoing his much-needed workout fix—and just before we let him go, we put this volunteer fitness coach on the spot with a few quick-fire questions to help inspire anyone along their fitness journey. Spoiler alert: running comes up more than once!

Show notes:

Music from: Bird Creek (via YouTube Studio Audio Library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior editor at Duke-NUS

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/2024-issue1

To learn more about the science being driven out of Singapore and the people behind it, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 9 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we’re talking to two scientists about what makes for a perfect collaboration. In modern translational science, new breakthroughs more often that are the product of a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration. And these collaborations are at their most successful when it is not just the expertise that is complementary but when the people within the team gel well. So, in this episode, two researchers who worked on a project that could make a significant impact on the lives of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia, tell us how in this project, everything—even a pandemic lockdown—helped turn this into the perfect collaboration.

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Sharing their story are:

· Dr Vaidehi Krishnan, a principal research scientist with Duke-NUS Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme and member of the Ong Sin Tiong laboratory focusing on understanding the basic pathophysiology of human malignancies in order to improve the management and treatment of patients with cancer; and

· Dr Florian Schmidt, then a bioinformatician and post-doctoral fellow with the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Data Analytics at the Genome Institute of Singapore, and now a senior computational biologist at ImmunoScape

Show notes:

Music from: Silent Partner (via YouTube Studio Audio Library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior Editor

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, and others, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

To learn more about the science being driven out of Singapore and the people behind it, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In the latest episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, three scientists talk about what art brings to their lives, how the two interplay for them, and whether they really are two sides of the same coin.

In the history of science, Leonardo da Vinci stands out as a giant who mastered both art and science. But there are many more scientists—past and present—who draw on the two, seemingly unrelated, disciplines to help them create something new or express their understanding of the world around us. Albert Einstein painted. Biochemist Linda Long translates protein structures into music. Rock band Queen's guitarist Brian May is a published astrophysicist, while astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi is best known for converting recordings of radio waves from distant galaxies into music.

Joining us for this jamming session on music, art and science are:

• Associate Professor Liu Nan from the Centre for Quantitative Medicine and the Health Services and Systems Research Programme, who gleans inspiration from scenes in Singapore, and his favourite painting is a bird’s eye view of the Singapore harbour
• Professor Thomas Coffman, Dean of Duke-NUS and Blast Crisis band member, who eventually chose a career in science over music but enjoys the very different dynamics of the two
• Ms Madeline Kwek, a research assistant from Professor Wang Linfa’s lab, who thrives on collaborating whether that’s with colleagues in the lab and fellow musicians in creating new rhythms and sounds

Show credits:

Music by:

· Madeline Kwek on the asalato

· Excerpts of Autocool written and performed by Blast Crisis // Studio recording – Durham, North Carolina

Produced by:

· Nicole Lim, Senior Editor

To learn more about the science being driven out of Singapore and the people behind it, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In this episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, we meet two scientists to go fishing. But instead of heading out to sea to cast their lines, their “ocean” is a small tube in which they fish for specific genetic sequences that mark the ends of our chromosomes. Much like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, the sequences they hunt for, called telomeres, make sure that our genetic assembly instructions don’t unravel as our cells replicate.

Today, we know that these caps not only hold us together at the genetic seams, but that they erode with time and therefore play a vital role in ageing—their length is an indication of how many times our cells have replicated, and by extension how old we are biologically. But even though we’ve known about these caps for forty years, using them to help us live longer or at least healthier for longer has been an elusive goal.

Joining us on the show to talk about telomeres and their own latest research are:

• Li Shang, an associate professor with the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme at Duke-NUS; and
• Javier Koh, a Duke-NUS PhD graduate and research fellow in Li’s lab

To learn more about the science being driven out of Singapore and the people behind it, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus