Podcasts about Whitehead Institute

Part 2 of 2: Our guest today is Parag Shah, CEO and Founding Managing Director of K2 HealthVentures. K2 HealthVentures is an alternative investment firm that provides flexible, long-term financing solutions to innovative private and public companies in the life sciences and healthcare industries. Committed to making a broader impact, K2 also donates a percentage of its profits to support underserved areas in healthcare. Before founding K2, Parag was Senior Managing Director & Group Head of the Life Sciences practice at Hercules Capital, where he led the fund's public offering and managed over $2 billion in investments. His deep expertise in life science and healthcare financing was further shaped through key leadership roles at Comerica, Imperial Bank, and BankBoston.Parag's academic background includes a Masters in Environmental Policy & Planning and a Bachelors in Molecular Biology from MIT, where he conducted research at the Whitehead Institute. With 25+ years of experience at the intersection of science and finance, Parag brings invaluable insights for first-time founders, investors, scientists, and industry leaders navigating the complexities of biotech funding.

Part 1 of 2: Our guest today is Parag Shah, CEO and Founding Managing Director of K2 HealthVentures. K2 HealthVentures is an alternative investment firm that provides flexible, long-term financing solutions to innovative private and public companies in the life sciences and healthcare industries. Committed to making a broader impact, K2 also donates a percentage of its profits to support underserved areas in healthcare. Before founding K2, Parag was Senior Managing Director & Group Head of the Life Sciences practice at Hercules Capital, where he led the fund's public offering and managed over $2 billion in investments. His deep expertise in life science and healthcare financing was further shaped through key leadership roles at Comerica, Imperial Bank, and BankBoston.Parag's academic background includes a Masters in Environmental Policy & Planning and a Bachelors in Molecular Biology from MIT, where he conducted research at the Whitehead Institute. With 25+ years of experience at the intersection of science and finance, Parag brings invaluable insights for first-time founders, investors, scientists, and industry leaders navigating the complexities of biotech funding.

* List of Discoveries Squeezing Evolution: Did you know that dinosaurs ate rice before rice evolved? That turtle shells existed forty million years before turtle shells began evolving? That insects evolved tongues for eating from flowers 70 million years before flowers evolved? And that birds appeared before birds evolved? The fossil record is a wonderful thing. And more recently, only a 40,000-year squeeze, Neanderthal had blood types A, B, and O, shocking evolutionists but expected to us here at Real Science Radio! Sit back and get ready to enjoy another instant classic, today's RSR "list show" on Evolution's Big Squeeze! Our other popular list shows include: - scientists doubting Darwin - evidence against whale evolution - problems with 'the river carved the canyon' - carbon 14 everywhere it shouldn't be - dinosaur still-soft biological tissue - solar system formation problems - evidence against the big bang - evidence for the global flood - genomes that just don't fit - and our list of not so old things! (See also rsr.org/sq2 and rsr.org/sq3!) * Evolution's Big Squeeze: Many discoveries squeeze the Darwinian theory's timeframe and of course without a workable timeframe there is no workable theory. Examples, with their alleged (and falsified) old-earth timeframes, include: - Complex skeletons existed 9 million years before they were thought to have evolved, before even the "Cambrian explosion".- Butterflies existed 10 million years before they were thought to have evolved. - Parrots existed "much earlier than had been thought", in fact, 25 million years before they were thought to have evolved. - Cephalopod fossils (squids, cuttlefish, etc.) appear 35 million years before they were able to propagate. - Turtle shells 40 million years before turtle shells began evolving - Trees began evolving 45 million years before they were thought to evolve - Spores appearing 50 million years before the plants that made them (not unlike footprints systematically appearing "millions of years before" the creatures that made them, as affirmed by Dr. Marcus Ross, associate professor of geology). - Sponges existed 60 million years before they were believed to have evolved. - Dinosaurs ate rice before it evolved Example - Insect proboscis (tongue) in moths and butterflies 70 million years before previously believed has them evolving before flowers. - Arthropod brains fully developed with central nervous system running to eyes and appendages just like modern arthropods 90 million years earlier than previously known (prior to 2021, now, allegedly 310mya) - 100 million years ago and already a bird - Fossil pollen pushes back plant evolution 100 million years. - Mammalian hair allegedly 100-million-years-old show that, "the morphology of hair cuticula may have remained unchanged throughout most of mammalian evolution", regarding the overlapping cells that lock the hair shaft into its follicle. - Piranha-like flesh-eating teeth (and bitten prey) found pushing back such fish 125 million years earlier than previously claimed   - Shocking organic molecules in "200 million-years-old leaves" from ginkgoes and conifers show unexpected stasis. - Plant genetic sophistication pushed back 200 million years. - Jellyfish fossils (Medusoid Problematica :) 200 million years earlier than expected; here from 500My ago. - Green seaweed 200 million years earlier than expected, pushed back now to a billion years ago!  - The acanthodii fish had color vision 300 million years ago, but then, and wait, Cheiracanthus fish allegedly 388 million years ago already had color vision. - Color vision (for which there is no Darwinian evolutionary small-step to be had, from monochromatic), existed "300 million years ago" in fish, and these allegedly "120-million-year-old" bird's rod and cone fossils stun researchers :) - 400-million-year-old Murrindalaspis placoderm fish "eye muscle attachment, the eyestalk attachment and openings for the optic nerve, and arteries and veins supplying the eyeball" The paper's author writes, "Of course, we would not expect the preservation of ancient structures made entirely of soft tissues (e.g. rods and cone cells in the retina...)." So, check this next item... :) - And... no vertebrates in the Cambrian? Well, from the journal Nature in 2014, a "Lower-Middle Cambrian... primitive fish displays unambiguous vertebrate features: a notochord, a pair of prominent camera-type eyes, paired nasal sacs, possible cranium and arcualia, W-shaped myomeres, and a post-anal tail" Primitive? - Fast-growing juvenile bone tissue, thought to appear in the Cretaceous, has been pushed back 100 million years: "This pushes the origin of fibrolamellar bone in Sauropterygia back from the Cretaceous to the early Middle Triassic..."- Trilobites "advanced" (not the predicted primitive) digestion "525 million" years ago - And there's this, a "530 million year old" fish, "50 million years before the current estimate of when fish evolved" - Mycobacterium tuberculosis 100,000 yr-old MRCA (most recent common ancestor) now 245 million- Fungus long claimed to originate 500M years ago, now found at allegedly 950 Mya (and still biological "the distant past... may have been much more 'modern' than we thought." :) - A rock contained pollen a billion years before plants evolved, according to a 2007 paper describing "remarkably preserved" fossil spores in the French Alps that had undergone high-grade metamorphism - 2.5 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils (made of organic material found in a stromatolite) appear about "200 million years before the [supposed] Great Oxidation Event". - 2.7 billion year old eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus) existed (allegedly) 1 billion years before expected - 3.5 billion year "cell division evidently identical to that of living filamentous prokaryotes." - And even older cyanobacteria! At 220 million years earlier than thought, per Nature's 3.7 billion year old dating of stromatolites! - The universe and life itself (in 2019 with the universe dated a billion, now, no, wait, two billion!, years younger than previously thought, that's not only squeezing biological but also astronomical evolution, with the overall story getting really tight) - Mantis shrimp, with its rudimentary color but advanced UV vision, is allegedly ancient. - Hadrosaur teeth, all 1400 of them, were "more complex than those of cows, horses, and other well-known modern grazers." Professor stunned by the find! (RSR predicts that, by 2030 just to put an end date on it, more fossils will be found from the geologic column that will be more "advanced" as compared to living organisms, just like this hadrosaur and like the allegedly 100M year old hagfish  fossil having more slime glands than living specimens.)  - Trace fossils "exquisitely preserved" of mobile organisms (motility) dated at 2.1 billion years ago, a full 1.5 billion earlier than previously believed - Various multicellular organisms allegedly 2.1 billion years old, show multicellularity 1.5 billion years sooner than long believed   - Pre-sauropod 26,000-pound dinosaur "shows us that even as far back as 200 million years ago, these animals had already become the largest vertebrates to ever walk the Earth." - The Evo-devo squeeze, i.e., evolutionary developmental biology, as with rsr.org/evo-devo-undermining-darwinism. - Extinct Siberian one-horned rhinos coexisted with mankind. - Whale "evolution" is being crushed in the industry-wide "big squeeze". First, geneticist claims whales evolved from hippos but paleontologists say hippos evolved tens of millions of years too late! And what's worse than that is that fossil finds continue to compress the time available for whale evolution. To not violate its own plot, the Darwinist story doesn't start animals evolving back into the sea until the cast includes land animals suitable to undertake the legendary journey. The recent excavation of whale fossils on an island of the Antarctic Peninsula further compresses the already absurdly fast 10 million years to allegedly evolve from the land back to the sea, down to as little as one million years. BioOne in 2016 reported a fossil that is "among the oldest occurrences of basilosaurids worldwide, indicating a rapid radiation and dispersal of this group since at least the early middle Eocene." By this assessment, various techniques produced various published dates. (See the evidence that falsifies the canonical whale evolution story at rsr.org/whales.) * Ancient Hierarchical Insect Society: "Thanks to some well-preserved remains, researchers now believe arthropod social structures have been around longer than anyone ever imagined. The encased specimens of ants and termites recently studied date back [allegedly] 100 million years." Also from the video about "the bubonic plague", the "disease is well known as a Middle Ages mass killer... Traces of very similar bacteria were found on [an allegedly] 20-million-year-old flea trapped in amber." And regarding "Caribbean lizards... Even though they are [allegedly] 20 million years old, the reptiles inside the golden stones were not found to differ from their contemporary counterparts in any significant way. Scientists attribute the rarity [Ha! A rarity or the rule? Check out rsr.org/stasis.] to stable ecological surroundings." * Squeezing and Rewriting Human History: Some squeezing simply makes aspects of the Darwinian story harder to maintain while other squeezing contradicts fundamental claims. So consider the following discoveries, most of which came from about a 12-month period beginning in 2017 which squeeze (and some even falsify) the Out-of-Africa model: - find two teeth and rewrite human history with allegedly 9.7 million-year-old teeth found in northern Europe (and they're like Lucy, but "three times older") - date blue eyes, when humans first sported them, to as recently as 6,000 years ago   - get mummy DNA and rewrite human history with a thousand years of ancient Egyptian mummy DNA contradicting Out-of-Africa and demonstrating Out-of-Babel - find a few footprints and rewrite human history with allegedly 5.7 million-year-old human footprints in Crete - re-date an old skull and rewrite human history with a very human skull dated at 325,000 years old and redated in the Journal of Physical Anthropology at about 260,000 years old and described in the UK's Independent, "A skull found in China [40 years ago] could re-write our entire understanding of human evolution." - date the oldest language in India, Dravidian, with 80 derivatives spoken by 214 million people, which appeared on the subcontinent only about 4,500 years ago, which means that there is no evidence for human language for nearly 99% of the time that humans were living in Asia. (Ha! See rsr.org/origin-of-language for the correct explanation.) - sequence a baby's genome and rewrite human history with a 6-week old girl buried in Alaska allegedly 11,500 years ago challenging the established history of the New World. (The family buried this baby girl just beneath their home like the practice in ancient Mesopotamia, the Hebrews who sojourned in Egypt, and in Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey, one of the world's most ancient settlements.) - or was that 130,000? years ago as the journal Nature rewrites human history with a wild date for New World site - and find a jawbone and rewrite human history with a modern looking yet allegedly 180,000-year-old jawbone from Israel which "may rewrite the early migration story of our species" by about 100,000 years, per the journal Science - re-date a primate and lose yet another "missing link" between "Lucy" and humans, as Homo naledi sheds a couple million years off its age and drops from supposedly two million years old to (still allegedly) about 250,000 years old, far too "young" to be the allegedly missing link - re-analysis of the "best candidate" for the most recent ancestor to human beings, Australopithecus sediba, turns out to be a juvenile Lucy-like ape, as Science magazine reports work presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists 2017 annual meeting - find skulls in Morocco and "rewrite human history" admits the journal Nature, falsifying also the "East Africa" part of the canonical story - and from the You Can't Make This Stuff Up file, NPR reports in April 2019, Ancient Bones And Teeth Found In A Philippine Cave May Rewrite Human History. :) - Meanwhile, whereas every new discovery requires the materialists to rewrite human history, no one has had to rewrite Genesis, not even once. Yet, "We're not claiming that the Bible is a science textbook. Not at all. For the textbooks have to be rewritten all the time!"  - And even this from Science: "humans mastered the art of training and controlling dogs thousands of years earlier than previously thought."- RSR's Enyart commented on the Smithsonian's 2019 article on ancient DNA possibly deconstructing old myths...  This Smithsonian article about an ancient DNA paper in Science Advances, or actually, about the misuse of such papers, was itself a misuse. The published research, Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines, confirmed Amos 9:7 by documenting the European origin of the biblical Philistines who came from the island of Caphtor/Crete. The mainstream media completely obscured this astounding aspect of the study but the Smithsonian actually stood the paper on its head. [See also rsr.org/archaeology.]* Also Squeezing Darwin's Theory: - Evolution happens so slowly that we can't see it, yet - it happens so fast that millions of mutations get fixed in a blink of geologic time AND: - Observing a million species annually should show us a million years of evolution, but it doesn't, yet - evolution happens so fast that the billions of "intermediary" fossils are missing AND: - Waiting for helpful random mutations to show up explains the slowness of evolution, yet - adaption to changing environments is often immediate, as with Darwin's finches Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. So Darwin's finches could diversify in just 17 years, and after 2.3 million more years, what had they evolved into? Finches! Hear this also at rsr.org/lee-spetner and see Jean Lightner's review of the Grants' 40 Years. AND: - Fossils of modern organisms are found "earlier" and "earlier" in the geologic column, and - the "oldest" organisms are increasingly found to have anatomical, proteinaceous, prokaryotic, and eukaryotic sophistication and similarity to "modern" organisms AND: - Small populations are in danger of extinction (yet they're needed to fix mutations), whereas - large populations make it impossible for a mutation to become standard AND: - Mutations that express changes too late in an organism's development can't effect its fundamental body plan, and - mutations expressed too early in an organism's development are fatal (hence among the Enyart sayings, "Like evolving a vital organ, most major hurdles for evolutionary theory are extinction-level events.") AND: - To evolve flight, you'd get bad legs - long before you'd get good wings AND: - Most major evolutionary hurdles appear to be extinction-level events- yet somehow even *vital* organs evolve (for many species, that includes reproductive organs, skin, brain, heart, circulatory system, kidney, liver, pancreas, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, lungs -- which are only a part of the complex respiration system) AND: - Natural selection of randomly taller, swifter, etc., fish, mammals, etc. explains evolution yet - development of microscopic molecular machines, feedback mechanisms, etc., which power biology would be oblivous to what's happening in Darwin's macro environment of the entire organism AND: - Neo-Darwinism suggests genetic mutation as the engine of evolution yet - the there is not even a hypothesis for modifying the vast non-genetic information in every living cell including the sugar code, electrical code, the spatial (geometric) code, and the epigenetic code AND: - Constant appeals to "convergent" evolution (repeatedly arising vision, echolocation, warm-bloodedness, etc.) - undermine most Darwinian anatomical classification especially those based on trivialities like odd or even-toed ungulates, etc. AND: - Claims that given a single species arising by abiogenesis, then - Darwinism can explain the diversification of life, ignores the science of ecology and the (often redundant) biological services that species rely upon AND: - humans' vastly superior intelligence indicates, as bragged about for decades by Darwinists, that ape hominids should have the greatest animal intelligence, except that - many so-called "primitive" creatures and those far distant on Darwin's tee of life, exhibit extraordinary rsr.org/animal-intelligence even to processing stimuli that some groups of apes cannot AND: - Claims that the tree of life emerges from a single (or a few) common ancestors - conflict with the discoveries of multiple genetic codes and of thousands of orphan genes that have no similarity (homology) to any other known genes AND (as in the New Scientist cover story, "Darwin Was Wrong about the tree of life", etc.): - DNA sequences have contradicted anatomy-based ancestry claims - Fossil-based ancestry claims have been contradicted by RNA claims - DNA-based ancestry claims have been contradicted by anatomy claims - Protein-based ancestry claims have been contradicted by fossil claims. - And the reverse problem compared to a squeeze. Like finding the largest mall in America built to house just a kid's lemonade stand, see rsr.org/200 for the astounding lack of genetic diversity in humans, plants, and animals, so much so that it could all be accounted for in just about 200 generations! - The multiplied things that evolved multiple times - Etc. * List of Ways Darwinists Invent their Tree of Life, aka Pop Goes the Weasle – Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Evolutionists change their selection of what evidence they use to show 'lineage', from DNA to fossils to genes to body plans to teeth to many specific anatomical features to proteins to behavior to developmental similarities to habitat to RNA, etc. and to a combination of such. Darwinism is an entire endeavor based on selection bias, a kind of logical fallacy. By anti-science they arbitrarily select evidence that best matches whichever evolutionary story is currently preferred." -Bob E. The methodology used to create the family tree edifice to show evolutionary relationships classifies the descent of organisms based on such attributes as odd-toed and even-toed ungulates. Really? If something as wildly sophisticated as vision allegedly evolved multiple times (a dozen or more), then for cryin' out loud, why couldn't something as relatively simple as odd or even toes repeatedly evolve? How about dinosaur's evolving eggs with hard shells? Turns out that "hard-shelled eggs evolved at least three times independently in dinosaurs" (Nature, 2020). However, whether a genus has an odd or even number of toes, and similar distinctions, form the basis for the 150-year-old Darwinist methodology. Yet its leading proponents still haven't acknowledged that their tree building is arbitrary and invalid. Darwin's tree recently fell anyway, and regardless, it has been known to be even theoretically invalid all these many decades. Consider also bipedalism? In their false paradigm, couldn't that evolve twice? How about vertebrate and non-vertebrates, for that matter, evolving multiple times? Etc., etc., etc. Darwinists determine evolutionary family-tree taxonomic relationships based on numbers of toes, when desired, or on hips (distinguishing, for example, dinosaur orders, until they didn't) or limb bones, or feathers, or genes, or fossil sequence, or neck bone, or..., or..., or... Etc. So the platypus, for example, can be described as evolving from pretty much whatever story would be in vogue at the moment...   * "Ancient" Protein as Advanced as Modern Protein: A book review in the journal Science states, "the major conclusion is reached that 'analyses made of the oldest fossils thus far studied do not suggest that their [allegedly 145-million year-old] proteins were chemically any simpler than those now being produced.'" 1972, Biochemistry of Animal Fossils, p. 125 * "Ancient" Lampreys Just Modern Lampreys with Decomposed Brain and Mouth Parts: Ha! Researches spent half-a-year documenting how fish decay. RSR is so glad they did! One of the lessons learned? "[C]ertain parts of the brain and the mouth that distinguish the animals from earlier relatives begin a rapid decay within 24 hours..." :) * 140-million Year Old Spider Web: The BBC and National Geographic report on a 140-million year old spider web in amber which, as young-earth creationists expect, shows threads that resemble silk spun by modern spiders. Evolutionary scientists on the otherhand express surprise "that spider webs have stayed the same for 140 million years." And see the BBC. * Highly-Credentialed Though Non-Paleontologist on Flowers: Dr. Harry Levin who spent the last 15 years of a brilliant career researching paleontology presents much evidence that flowering plants had to originate not 150 million years ago but more than 300 million years ago. (To convert that to an actual historical timeframe, the evidence indicates flowers must have existed prior to the time that the strata, which is popularly dated to 300 mya, actually formed.) * Rampant Convergence: Ubiquitous appeals to "convergent" evolution (vision, echolocation, warm-bloodedness, icthyosaur/dolphin anatomy, etc.), all allegedly evolving multiple times, undermines anatomical classification based on trivialities like odd or even-toed ungulates, etc. * Astronomy's Big Evolution Squeeze: - Universe a billion, wait, two billion, years younger than thought   (so now it has to evolve even more impossibly rapidly) - Sun's evolution squeezes biological evolution - Galaxies evolving too quickly - Dust evolving too quickly - Black holes evolving too quickly - Clusters of galaxies evolving too quickly. * The Sun's Evolution Squeezes Life's Evolution: The earlier evolutionists claim that life began on Earth, the more trouble they have with astrophysicists. Why? They claim that a few billion years ago the Sun would have been far more unstable and cooler. The journal Nature reports that the Faint young Sun paradox remains for the "Sun was fainter when the Earth was young, but the climate was generally at least as warm as today". Further, our star would shoot out radioactive waves many of which being violent enough to blow out Earth's atmosphere into space, leaving Earth dead and dry like Mars without an atmosphere. And ignoring the fact that powerful computer simulators cannot validate the nebula theory of star formation, if the Sun had formed from a condensing gas cloud, a billion years later it still would have been emitting far less energy, even 30% less, than it does today. Forget about the claimed one-degree increase in the planet's temperature from man-made global warming, back when Darwinists imagine life arose, by this just-so story of life spontaneously generating in a warm pond somewhere (which itself is impossible), the Earth would have been an ice ball, with an average temperature of four degrees Fahrenheit below freezing! See also CMI's video download The Young Sun. * Zircons Freeze in Molten Eon Squeezing Earth's Evolution? Zircons "dated" 4 to 4.4 billion years old would have had to freeze (form) when the Earth allegedly was in its Hadean (Hades) Eon and still molten. Geophysicist Frank Stacey (Cambridge fellow, etc.) has suggested they may have formed above ocean trenches where it would be coolest. One problem is that even further squeezes the theory of plate tectonics requiring it to operate two billion years before otherwise claimed. A second problem (for these zircons and the plate tectonics theory itself) is that ancient trenches (now filled with sediments; others raised up above sea level; etc.) have never been found. A third problem is that these zircons contain low isotope ratios of carbon-13 to carbon-12 which evolutionists may try to explain as evidence for life existing even a half-billion years before they otherwise claim. For more about this (and to understand how these zircons actually did form) just click and then search (ctrl-f) for: zircon character. * Evolution Squeezes Life to Evolve with Super Radioactivity: Radioactivity today breaks chromosomes and produces neutral, harmful, and fatal birth defects. Dr. Walt Brown reports that, "A 160-pound person experiences 2,500 carbon-14 disintegrations each second", with about 10 disintergrations per second in our DNA. Worse for evolutionists is that, "Potassium-40 is the most abundant radioactive substance in... every living thing." Yet the percentage of Potassium that was radioactive in the past would have been far in excess of its percent today. (All this is somewhat akin to screws in complex machines changing into nails.) So life would have had to arise from inanimate matter (an impossibility of course) when it would have been far more radioactive than today. * Evolution of Uranium Squeezed by Contrasting Constraints: Uranium's two most abundant isotopes have a highly predictable ratio with 235U/238U equaling 0.007257 with a standard deviation of only 0.000017. Big bang advocates claim that these isotopes formed in distant stellar cataclysms. Yet that these isotopes somehow collected in innumerable small ore bodies in a fixed ratio is absurd. The impossibility of the "big bang" explanation of the uniformity of the uranium ratio (rsr.org/bb#ratio) simultaneously contrasts in the most shocking way with its opposite impossibility of the missing uniform distribution of radioactivity (see rsr.org/bb#distribution) with 90% of Earth's radioactivity in the Earth's crust, actually, the continental crust, and even at that, preferentially near granite! A stellar-cataclysmic explanation within the big bang paradigm for the origin of uranium is severely squeezed into being falsified by these contrasting constraints. * Remarkable Sponges? Yes, But For What Reason? Study co-author Dr. Kenneth S. Kosik, the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara said, "Remarkably, the sponge genome now reveals that, along the way toward the emergence of animals, genes for an entire network of many specialized cells evolved and laid the basis for the core gene logic of organisms that no longer functioned as single cells." And then there's this: these simplest of creatures have manufacturing capabilities that far exceed our own, as Degnan says, "Sponges produce an amazing array of chemicals of direct interest to the pharmaceutical industry. They also biofabricate silica fibers directly from seawater in an environmentally benign manner, which is of great interest in communications [i.e., fiber optics]. With the genome in hand, we can decipher the methods used by these simple animals to produce materials that far exceed our current engineering and chemistry capabilities." Kangaroo Flashback: From our RSR Darwin's Other Shoe program: The director of Australia's Kangaroo Genomics Centre, Jenny Graves, that "There [are] great chunks of the human genome… sitting right there in the kangaroo genome." And the 20,000 genes in the kangaroo (roughly the same number as in humans) are "largely the same" as in people, and Graves adds, "a lot of them are in the same order!" CMI's Creation editors add that "unlike chimps, kangaroos are not supposed to be our 'close relatives.'" And "Organisms as diverse as leeches and lawyers are 'built' using the same developmental genes." So Darwinists were wrong to use that kind of genetic similarity as evidence of a developmental pathway from apes to humans. Hibernating Turtles: Question to the evolutionist: What happened to the first turtles that fell asleep hibernating underwater? SHOW UPDATE Of Mice and Men: Whereas evolutionists used a very superficial claim of chimpanzee and human genetic similarity as evidence of a close relationship, mice and men are pretty close also. From the Human Genome Project, How closely related are mice and humans?, "Mice and humans (indeed, most or all mammals including dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, and apes) have roughly the same number of nucleotides in their genomes -- about 3 billion base pairs. This comparable DNA content implies that all mammals [RSR: like roundworms :)] contain more or less the same number of genes, and indeed our work and the work of many others have provided evidence to confirm that notion. I know of only a few cases in which no mouse counterpart can be found for a particular human gene, and for the most part we see essentially a one-to-one correspondence between genes in the two species." * Related RSR Reports: See our reports on the fascinating DNA sequencing results from roundworms and the chimpanzee's Y chromosome! * Genetic Bottleneck, etc: Here's an excerpt from rsr.org/why-was-canaan-cursed... A prediction about the worldwide distribution of human genetic sequencing (see below) is an outgrowth of the Bible study at that same link (aka rsr.org/canaan), in that scientists will discover a genetic pattern resulting from not three but four sons of Noah's wife. Relevant information comes also from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is not part of any of our 46 chromosomes but resides outside of the nucleus. Consider first some genetic information about Jews and Arabs, Jewish priests, Eve, and Noah. Jews and Arabs Biblical Ancestry: Dr. Jonathan Sarfati quotes the director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Harry Ostrer, who in 2000 said: Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham … And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years. This familiar pattern, of the latest science corroborating biblical history, continues in Dr. Sarfati's article, Genesis correctly predicts Y-Chromosome pattern: Jews and Arabs shown to be descendants of one man. Jewish Priests Share Genetic Marker: The journal Nature in its scientific correspondence published, Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests, by scie

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution, published by Abhishaike Mahajan on August 30, 2024 on LessWrong. Note: this article is sponsored by and cross-posted to the Good Science Project. They also write a fair bit, and their articles were essential reading for writing this essay! Also, this article would not be possible without the hours of discussion/editing help I've had with several people from these institutions, and a few outside of them. Huge shout-out to all of them! Introduction Arcadia Science, Speculative Technologies, FutureHouse, Arc, and Convergent. All of these are a new form of scientific institute. Most are funded entirely by a few billionaires. Most are non-profits. Most of them focus on the life-sciences. Most of them have sprung up in just the last few years. They do all also have one common thread: a grand statement. We are an experiment in a new way to do science. And they are! Traditionally, research is conducted in academic or private industry labs - dependent on NIH grants in the former and markets in the latter. Given the (often singular) sources of no-strings-attached funding, these new institutions need not satisfy either the NIH or the markets, allowing them to conduct research in a unique fashion. In one sense, the experimental aspect of these institutions revolves around the focus of the research itself, addressing fields or using methods that the founders - correctly or not - view as underserved/underutilized. But, on a more subtle level, the experimental aspect could be more closely tied to the culture of these organizations. Institutions like Arcadia, FutureHouse, and the rest could be viewed as the production of auteurs - a term from filmmaking for films with such a heavy sense of the director's personal taste that the film is inseparable from the director. This is where the novelty within these institutions primarily lie, in how the founders of the institute wish science was conducted. And wielding billions of dollars, thousands of hours of work, and hundreds of scientists as a means to test whether their theories are correct. Of course, nothing under the sun is truly new. There is an age-old history of scientist dissatisfaction with how 'things are traditionally done', and confidently building new institutions to solve the problems they've seen. Many of these are now household names amongst researchers: Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, Max Planck Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and so on. Each of these were started with similar contrarian mentalities as the current era of institutions. Some of these were more experimental than others, most notably HHMI, which prized itself on its focus on interdisciplinary research above all else. But all were experiments, many of them extraordinarily successful. Yet, the current iteration of new research institutes is still arguably more experimental than its ancestors. While the last generation of institutes was typically tied directly to universities, the current era of ones (outside of Arc) are independent, allowing them a larger sense of opinionation on how science should be done. But, despite this experimentation, there is relatively little information out there on what's going on inside them. Not in terms of science, but more-so the vibes. While aspects of these organizations have been written about previously, such as in articles in The Atlantic and Endpoints, they aren't assessing vibes! These other articles are, first and foremost, news-pieces; valuable, but lack any opinionated observations on the inner-workings of the institutions. Nadia Asparouhova's essay on the subject comes closest to this regarding the history of these institutions, but still few details on how they practically function. This essay attempts to discuss that missing s...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution, published by Abhishaike Mahajan on August 30, 2024 on LessWrong. Note: this article is sponsored by and cross-posted to the Good Science Project. They also write a fair bit, and their articles were essential reading for writing this essay! Also, this article would not be possible without the hours of discussion/editing help I've had with several people from these institutions, and a few outside of them. Huge shout-out to all of them! Introduction Arcadia Science, Speculative Technologies, FutureHouse, Arc, and Convergent. All of these are a new form of scientific institute. Most are funded entirely by a few billionaires. Most are non-profits. Most of them focus on the life-sciences. Most of them have sprung up in just the last few years. They do all also have one common thread: a grand statement. We are an experiment in a new way to do science. And they are! Traditionally, research is conducted in academic or private industry labs - dependent on NIH grants in the former and markets in the latter. Given the (often singular) sources of no-strings-attached funding, these new institutions need not satisfy either the NIH or the markets, allowing them to conduct research in a unique fashion. In one sense, the experimental aspect of these institutions revolves around the focus of the research itself, addressing fields or using methods that the founders - correctly or not - view as underserved/underutilized. But, on a more subtle level, the experimental aspect could be more closely tied to the culture of these organizations. Institutions like Arcadia, FutureHouse, and the rest could be viewed as the production of auteurs - a term from filmmaking for films with such a heavy sense of the director's personal taste that the film is inseparable from the director. This is where the novelty within these institutions primarily lie, in how the founders of the institute wish science was conducted. And wielding billions of dollars, thousands of hours of work, and hundreds of scientists as a means to test whether their theories are correct. Of course, nothing under the sun is truly new. There is an age-old history of scientist dissatisfaction with how 'things are traditionally done', and confidently building new institutions to solve the problems they've seen. Many of these are now household names amongst researchers: Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, Max Planck Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and so on. Each of these were started with similar contrarian mentalities as the current era of institutions. Some of these were more experimental than others, most notably HHMI, which prized itself on its focus on interdisciplinary research above all else. But all were experiments, many of them extraordinarily successful. Yet, the current iteration of new research institutes is still arguably more experimental than its ancestors. While the last generation of institutes was typically tied directly to universities, the current era of ones (outside of Arc) are independent, allowing them a larger sense of opinionation on how science should be done. But, despite this experimentation, there is relatively little information out there on what's going on inside them. Not in terms of science, but more-so the vibes. While aspects of these organizations have been written about previously, such as in articles in The Atlantic and Endpoints, they aren't assessing vibes! These other articles are, first and foremost, news-pieces; valuable, but lack any opinionated observations on the inner-workings of the institutions. Nadia Asparouhova's essay on the subject comes closest to this regarding the history of these institutions, but still few details on how they practically function. This essay attempts to discuss that missing s...

Dr. Kipp Weiskopf is a Valhalla Fellow at the Whitehead Institute. His research focuses on unlocking the therapeutic potential of macrophages for the benefit of cancer patients. He talks about the role of macrophages in the tumor environment and how targeting the CD47/SIRPα axis can induce phagocytosis of cancer cells. He also discusses starting spin-off companies to advance cancer therapies.

In an era defined by rapid technological advancements and pressing global health challenges, leaders like Seema Kumar stand at the forefront of innovation, wielding their expertise to forge transformative paths in healthcare. As CEO of Cure and with a distinguished career spanning Johnson & Johnson, and more, Seema Kumar embodies a commitment to integrating cutting-edge innovation with compassionate healthcare solutions. Join us as we delve into her insights on bridging innovation and healthcare to drive meaningful global impact. [02:01] - About Seema Kumar Seema is the CEO at Cure.  She has spent 20 years at Johnson & Johnson and has a background spanning NIH, Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, and Hopkins. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tbcy/support

An injectable antiviral "PrEP" therapy that gives 100% protection against HIV infection. Trials among young women in South Africa and Uganda proved so effective, they were wound up early to accelerate its use. Linda-Gail Bekker of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation shares her excitement. A new kind of gene therapy that uses the cell's own “epigenetic” mechanisms to silence troublesome portions of our DNA, tested against the prion protein responsible for some brain diseases. Jonathan Weissman led the research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts. Accelerated evolution is being tested in Matthew Nitschke's labs in the Australian Institute for Marine Science to see if it can help protect natural corals against future global warming. The amazing 4.200 km transatlantic flight of some Painted Lady butterflies – and the extraordinary detective work ecologist Gerard Talavera and team needed to prove it. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth(Image: HIV Vaccine Efficacy Trial Conducted In Uganda. Credit: Luke Dray / Stringer via Getty Images.)

Rob Wheeler studies fungus from both sides: how the immune system responds to fungal infection AND the how the fungus itself works. In particular, Rob studies Candida albicans, and all the ways it impacts us. Rob has degrees from Harvard and Stanford University in 2000, and did post-doctoral work at the Whitehead Institute. Our conversation was recorded in December 2023. ~~~~~The Maine Science Podcast is a production of the Maine Discovery Museum. It was recorded at Discovery Studios, at the Maine Discovery Museum, in Bangor, ME. The Maine Science Podcast is hosted and executive produced by Kate Dickerson; edited and produced by Scott Loiselle.The Discover Maine theme was composed and performed by Nick Parker.To support the Maine Discovery Museum: https://www.mainediscoverymuseum.org/donate. Find us online:Maine Discovery MuseumMaine Science FestivalMaine Discovery Museum on social media: Facebook InstagramMaine Science Festival on social media: Facebook Twitter InstagramMaine Science Podcast on social media: Facebook Twitter Instagram © 2024 Maine Discovery Museum

Washington Post deputy newsletter editor Paige Winfield Cunningham speaks with Robert Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute, Xiling Shen the scientific founder of Xilis and Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.) about the state of cancer and how technological advancements are reshaping our relationship to the illness. Conversations recorded on Monday, Oct. 30, 2023.

Dr. Jay Vyas is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior to joining the faculty at MGH, Dr. Vyas completed his MD/PhD training at the Baylor College of Medicine, where he conducted his Immunology PhD research within the lab of Dr. Robert Rich. He then completed his internal medicine residency followed by infectious disease fellowship training at MGH. He also conducted postdoctoral research within the Whitehead Institute. In addition to his clinical and administrative responsibilities, Dr. Vyas maintains an active NIH-funded research program dedicated to the study of the innate immune response towards invasive fungal infections. In today's episode, Dr. Vyas shares his philosophy on MD/PhD and physician-scientist training and discusses the importance of team-based practices within research, medicine, and administration. Our thanks to Dr. Vyas for being on the podcast. Lab website: https://www.massgeneral.org/medicine/infectious-diseases/research-and- initiatives/vyas-laboratory Executive Producers: -       Bejan Saeedi -       Joe Behnke -       Michael Sayegh -       Carey Jansen -       Nielsen Weng Faculty Advisors  -       Brian Robinson -       Mary Horton -       Talia Swartz -       Chris Williams -       David Schwartz Twitter: @behindthescope_ Instagram: @behindthemicroscopepod Facebook: @behindthemicroscope1 Website: behindthemicroscope.com

Parasites are everywhere: in our bodies, in our water, even in our cats' litter boxes. Are they agents of chaos—or just misunderstood? This week, Dr. Sebastian Lourido joins Jonathan to discuss the epic world of parasites, from pinworms to toxoplasma gondii to, yes, humans. Parasites! They're everything, everywhere, all at once. Dr. Sebastian Lourido is an Associate Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Lourido grew up in Colombia before attending Tulane University, where he earned degrees in Art and Biology. He then worked with Arturo Zychlinsky, at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, before pursuing his Ph.D. at Washington University with L. David Sibley. In 2012, in lieu of traditional postdoctoral training, Lourido started his own lab as a Whitehead Fellow studying the molecular hallmarks of apicomplexan parasitism through proteomics and functional genomics. Lourido was recruited to his present position in 2017 where he continues his research and co-teaches courses in Microbial Pathogenesis and Cell Biology. You can follow Dr. Lourido and the Lourido Lab on Twitter @LouridoLab, @WhiteheadInst and @MITBiology. For more information, check out the websites for the Lourido Lab and Whitehead Institute. Curious for more? Check out these episodes from the archive: Are Mushrooms Truly Magic? How Does Dust Impact Earth's Climate? When Viruses Spread, Who's Most Vulnerable? Can You Say Cheese? Follow us on Instagram @CuriousWithJVN to join the conversation. Jonathan is on Instagram @JVN. Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com. Find books from Getting Curious guests at bookshop.org/shop/curiouswithjvn. Our executive producer is Erica Getto. Our producer is Chris McClure. Our associate producer is Allison Weiss. Our engineer is Nathanael McClure. Production support from Julie Carrillo. Our theme music is “Freak” by QUIÑ; for more, head to TheQuinCat.com. Curious about bringing your brand to life on the show? Email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Isaac Klein is the Chief Scientific Officer at Dewpoint Therapeutics. Dewpoint Therapeutics is leveraging condensate biology to impact a wide range of therapeutic targets across diverse disease areas. Armed with significant funding from venture capital and several big pharma partnerships, Dewpoint is poised to lead the generation of medicines targeting biomolecular condensates.Prior to joining Dewpoint, Isaac was on the faculty at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, as well as a scientist at the Whitehead Institute of MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in Biology from The Rockefeller University and an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College. He trained in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School and in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2022, Isaac was named one of Endpoints News 20 under 40 in Biopharma.Hosted by Joe Varriale.

Part 1 of 3. My guest for this week's episode is James Evans, Founder and CEO of PhenoVista Biosciences, a contract research organization that works with biopharma clients of all sizes, from start-ups to established global companies.

Synopsis: Detlev Biniszkiewicz is the Founder and CEO of NextPoint Therapeutics, a company advancing the field of immuno-oncology through its leading scientific work on the novel HHLA2 pathway. Detlev discusses the immuno-oncology landscape including its challenges and opportunities, and the work his team is pursuing at NextPoint to deliver new therapies to cancer patients. He talks about how he operates and leads as a CEO and how he approaches team building. He also shares his advice to others that are in an early stage company, and discusses the current macro environment across biotech. Biography: Dr. Detlev Biniszkiewicz is a Managing Director at MPM and Entrepreneur at BioImpact Capital, an affiliate manager of MPM. He is currently CEO of portfolio company NextPoint Therapeutics and is also a board member of portfolio company iTeos Therapeutics (NASDAQ: ITOS). Detlev is a serial entrepreneur and an experienced biopharma executive who brings deep knowledge of oncology and immuno-oncology to his role. At NextPoint Therapeutics, Detlev oversees the development of precision treatments for patients with currently intractable cancers. Leveraging the novel HHLA2 pathway characterized by scientific founders Dr. XingXing Zang and Dr. Gordon Freeman, NextPoint is advancing precision immuno-oncology therapeutics that activate the immune system to find and kill cancer cells. Prior to joining MPM and BioImpact Capital, Detlev was the President and CEO of Surface Oncology (NASDAQ: SURF), where he led its growth and transformation through to clinical-stage and its preparation for a public offering. Prior to Surface Oncology, he was Vice President of Strategy in AstraZeneca's Oncology Unit and was part of the oncology leadership that developed Lynparza® and Tagrisso®, two innovative medicines that help thousands of patients suffering from cancer. His group transformed AstraZeneca's Oncology pipeline through numerous licensing deals, clinical and academic collaborations, and external research. Detlev has also held multiple roles at Novartis including Global Head of Portfolio, where his group provided oversight of Novartis' research and early development portfolio. Detlev began his career at the Boston Consulting Group and performed his academic research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harvey Lodish is a Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is a Professor of Biology and a Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He serves as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and is an Associate (Foreign) Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.As a member of the Board of Trustees of Boston Children's Hospital, Professor Lodish chairs the Board of Trustees Research Committee. As the Founding Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center from 2008 to 2016, he oversaw the state's $1 billion investments in the life sciences.Starting in 1973, his laboratory concentrated on the biogenesis, structure, and function of several important secreted and plasma membrane glycoproteins. To date, his group has made key discoveries in the fields of red blood cell development and therapeutics, long non-coding RNAs, and adipocyte biology. Most recently, his laboratory developed culture systems for generating mature human red blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells.He co-founded Rubius Therapeutics, a company that uses gene- and enzyme-modified red blood cells as vehicles for the long- term introduction of many novel therapeutics, immunomodulatory agents, and diagnostic imaging probes into the human body.Lodish has extensive experience in the biotechnology industry. He was a founding member (1980) and Principal of the consulting company BIA. He was a founder and scientific advisory board member of Genzyme, Inc. He was also a scientific founder of Arris (now Axys) Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. In addition, he was formerly a scientific advisory board member of AstraZeneca, Genset SA, and Dyax Corporation.Alix Ventures, by way of BIOS Community, is providing this content for general information purposes only. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendation by Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, or its affiliates. The views & opinions expressed by guests are their own & their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them nor any entity they represent. Views & opinions expressed by Alix Ventures employees are those of the employees & do not necessarily reflect the view of Alix Ventures, BIOS Community, affiliates, nor its content sponsors.Thank you for listening!BIOS (@BIOS_Community) unites a community of Life Science innovators dedicated to driving patient impact. Alix Ventures (@AlixVentures) is a San Francisco based venture capital firm supporting early stage Life Science startups engineering biology to create radical advances in human health.Music: Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod (link & license)

Harvey Lodish, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for almost 50 years, explains the significance of biotechnology in the medical world's future scenario. Prof. Lodish also gives his perspective on creating a supportive and lucrative academic atmosphere and science entrepreneurship—based on his experience mentoring two Nobel Prize Winners and starting eight biotech companies, respectively. Prof. Lodish is the chair of the Board Research Committee: Boston Children's Hospital and the founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. His expertise includes biomechanics, biomolecular engineering, macromolecular biochemistry, metabolism, genetics, to genomics. Some of his well-known companies are Genzyme Inc., Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Rubius Therapeutics. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #HarveyLodish ----------------- Pre-Order the official Endgame merchandise: https://wa.me/628119182045 SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy March 2023 Intake: admissions.sgpp.ac.id admissions@sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode Playlist: https://endgame.id/season2 https://endgame.id/season1 https://endgame.id/thetake

Sam Brownell of CUCollaborate made this post on LinkedIn last week:I am thrilled to announce that CUCollaborate is incubating its first CUSO to pursue "the best idea I have ever had" and that I have successfully recruited Paul Matsui to lead it for us.The CUSO leverages credit unions' superior pricing to help patients more easily manage their healthcare expenses. Rather than financing medical debt itself, the CUSO uncovers alternative debt expense reduction opportunities that help patients pay off their medical bills successfully without increasing monthly cash outlays or making painful sacrifices. By establishing a meaningful partnership between credit unions and healthcare providers, we will foster healthier, wealthier, and more equitable communities.The CUSO is fundamentally a healthcare facing company, so I have been lucky enough to recruit Paul Matsui who has over 20 years of experience working with healthcare providers to lead the organization. Most recently, Paul served as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff at Socially Determined a software and analytics company focused on elevating health equity and outcomes through the quantification and stratification of social risk.Previously, Paul spent 19 years at the Advisory Board (with my wife Megan Brownell) serving as Executive Director of its data analytics research and technology business, where he was accountable for developing a software ecosystem aimed at the firm's 2,000+ hospital and health system clients.Earlier in his career, Paul spent six years as an equity research analyst, covering a wide range of companies in the biotechnology, medical device, and medical technology supply sectors on behalf of Smith Barney Citi, Goldman Sachs, and U.S. Bancorp Investments, Inc. Piper Jaffray.Beginning his career as a bench scientist, Paul worked in labs at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. He holds an AB degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University.If you are interested, we would like to schedule some time for Paul and I to present the opportunity to you and see if it something that your credit union would be interested in helping launch. What day and time would work best for you?

Dr. Yaniv Erlich is the co-founder and CEO of Eleven Therapeutics. Prior, he was the CSO of MyHeritage, a consumer genomics company (acquired by Francisco Partners), an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and a Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. We talked with Yaniv about his unique career that led him to leave academia and focus his efforts on building exciting biotech companies. Yaniv shared his insights into academic and non academic career development pathways for scientists, delved into the advantages of building a company in the UK as well as shed some light on how research is done at Eleven Therapeutics. Tune in and join the discussion in our 'mAcademia podcast' group on Facebook. Music Funkorama Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/macademia/message

Dr. Jacob Hanna, MD, Ph.D. ( https://hannalabweb.weizmann.ac.il/ ) is a Senior Scientist and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where his lab, and the interdisciplinary group of scientists within it, are focused on understanding the complexity of early embryonic stem cell biology and early developmental dynamics, as well as advancing human disease modeling. More specifically, Dr. Hanna's lab investigates the detailed process of cellular reprogramming, in which induced pluripotent stem cells are generated from somatic cells, and they investigate how pluripotency is maintained throughout development in mouse and human. In their studies they employ a diverse arsenal of biological experimentation methods, high throughput screening, advanced microscopy and genomic analyses seeking to combine biological experimentation with computational biology, theory and modeling, to elucidate various biological questions. Dr. Hanna completed both his MD and PhD at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his work was focused in the domain of immunology with his thesis focus on novel molecular and functional properties of human NK Subsets. He then went on to do postdoctoral studies at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT under the tutelage of Prof. Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch with a field of study of pluripotency and epigenetic reprogramming. Dr. Hanna is also Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor, of Renewal Bio ( https://www.renewal.bio/ ), a biotech company looking to leverage the power of these new stem cell technologies, potentially applying them to a wide variety of human ailments including infertility, genetic diseases, and longevity. 

"Mutations are the price that all animals must pay, starting with jellyfish all the way up to us humans" Today on The G Word, Parker Moss, our Chief Commercial Officer is joined by Professor Robert (Bob) Weinberg. Professor Weinberg is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and is a well-respected Professor in the MIT Department of Biology. He is the author of the legendary paper, the Hallmarks of Cancer, which was one of the most cited papers on life sciences of all time, and still provides us with much of the language of modern cancer biology.  They discuss why cancer occurs, why it spreads, the challenges and the hopes for early detection, and how research is contributing to improving survival for patients around the world.  

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Staying Split: Sabatini and Social Justice, published by Duncan Sabien on June 8, 2022 on LessWrong. Author's note: This is a contemporary post about an ongoing current event. It's not a timeless essay in the way that most of my essays are, though it does contain insight and thoughts on timeless topics. Background David Sabatini is a molecular biologist, previously employed as a tenured professor at MIT and a lead researcher at the Whitehead Institute. He was fired in August of 2021, after which most of his professional connections quickly dried up. He was almost restored to good standing in April of 2022 via a new position at NYU, but protests and external pressure caused NYU to withdraw their offer. I shared a one-sided piece about Sabatini on Facebook, asking for people to falsify it. I was given various links and documents in response. I spent about five hours following up on sources, looking for original information, and trying to piece together a coherent take. It proved to be impossible, and it proved to be impossible in a way that I think is interesting, and relevant to a lot of questions about how our culture functions (or doesn't). This essay is my attempt to digest and debrief, essentially writing to myself. Why was Sabatini fired and blacklisted? Option A: Because he engaged in romantic/sexual misconduct in conflict with the policies of his workplace, and created a hostile and sexualized environment that made work difficult or impossible for many of his subordinates. Option B: Because a vindictive former lover enacted a revenge plot, partially enabled by an ideologue in the org's power structure who was looking for any pretext to shake things up. Option C (for 'cynical'): Because scandal is costly regardless of whether it's grounded in fact, and there are a large number of highly-motivated people who have concentration of force against groups like MIT or NYU when it comes to highly charged questions like putative sexual misconduct. If you buy reports like that of Suzy Weiss, the timeline looks something like this: Sabatini runs a world-class, cutting-edge lab without any complaints or issues for two and a half decades. At a conference in Maryland in 2018, Sabatini hooks up with Kristin Knouse, a cancer researcher in her own right, 21 years his junior. They mutually establish some ground rules for their relationship, with Kristin in particular insisting that it remain open and low-key so she can carry on with other preexisting flings. They keep the romantic connection fairly quiet, and meet up a handful of times, ending by July of 2018 (mostly due to Sabatini drawing away). In August 2018, the Whitehead Institute adopts a no-tolerance policy for romantic relationships between lab heads (like Sabatini) and colleagues (like Knouse). Under previous policy, a relationship like theirs would have been in a grey area; now it would be straightforwardly forbidden. However, Sabatini considers the romantic phase of the relationship already over (and therefore believes there's no problem). Neither of them mention anything to HR. Sabatini and Knouse exchange occasional comms (a burst in late 2018 when Sabatini has a cancer scare, a burst in January 2020 where they have an argument about their relationship, a burst in April 2020 where things seem calmer and they commiserate about COVID isolation). In late 2020, feminist ideologue Ruth Lehmann takes over as the director of the Whitehead Institute with an explicit goal of cleaning house and breaking up boys' clubs; she takes complaints from Knouse and runs with them. Exerting pressure from the top, Lehmann elicits two more complaints, which is sufficient pretext to hire a law firm of prosecutorial lawyers who then relentlessly grill the lab staff until they have enough cherry-picked and out-of-context anecdotes to weave t...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Staying Split: Sabatini and Social Justice, published by Duncan Sabien on June 8, 2022 on LessWrong. Author's note: This is a contemporary post about an ongoing current event. It's not a timeless essay in the way that most of my essays are, though it does contain insight and thoughts on timeless topics. Background David Sabatini is a molecular biologist, previously employed as a tenured professor at MIT and a lead researcher at the Whitehead Institute. He was fired in August of 2021, after which most of his professional connections quickly dried up. He was almost restored to good standing in April of 2022 via a new position at NYU, but protests and external pressure caused NYU to withdraw their offer. I shared a one-sided piece about Sabatini on Facebook, asking for people to falsify it. I was given various links and documents in response. I spent about five hours following up on sources, looking for original information, and trying to piece together a coherent take. It proved to be impossible, and it proved to be impossible in a way that I think is interesting, and relevant to a lot of questions about how our culture functions (or doesn't). This essay is my attempt to digest and debrief, essentially writing to myself. Why was Sabatini fired and blacklisted? Option A: Because he engaged in romantic/sexual misconduct in conflict with the policies of his workplace, and created a hostile and sexualized environment that made work difficult or impossible for many of his subordinates. Option B: Because a vindictive former lover enacted a revenge plot, partially enabled by an ideologue in the org's power structure who was looking for any pretext to shake things up. Option C (for 'cynical'): Because scandal is costly regardless of whether it's grounded in fact, and there are a large number of highly-motivated people who have concentration of force against groups like MIT or NYU when it comes to highly charged questions like putative sexual misconduct. If you buy reports like that of Suzy Weiss, the timeline looks something like this: Sabatini runs a world-class, cutting-edge lab without any complaints or issues for two and a half decades. At a conference in Maryland in 2018, Sabatini hooks up with Kristin Knouse, a cancer researcher in her own right, 21 years his junior. They mutually establish some ground rules for their relationship, with Kristin in particular insisting that it remain open and low-key so she can carry on with other preexisting flings. They keep the romantic connection fairly quiet, and meet up a handful of times, ending by July of 2018 (mostly due to Sabatini drawing away). In August 2018, the Whitehead Institute adopts a no-tolerance policy for romantic relationships between lab heads (like Sabatini) and colleagues (like Knouse). Under previous policy, a relationship like theirs would have been in a grey area; now it would be straightforwardly forbidden. However, Sabatini considers the romantic phase of the relationship already over (and therefore believes there's no problem). Neither of them mention anything to HR. Sabatini and Knouse exchange occasional comms (a burst in late 2018 when Sabatini has a cancer scare, a burst in January 2020 where they have an argument about their relationship, a burst in April 2020 where things seem calmer and they commiserate about COVID isolation). In late 2020, feminist ideologue Ruth Lehmann takes over as the director of the Whitehead Institute with an explicit goal of cleaning house and breaking up boys' clubs; she takes complaints from Knouse and runs with them. Exerting pressure from the top, Lehmann elicits two more complaints, which is sufficient pretext to hire a law firm of prosecutorial lawyers who then relentlessly grill the lab staff until they have enough cherry-picked and out-of-context anecdotes to weave t...

Meat we buy at the grocery store in a few years from now may be very different from what many of us grew up with. You may have heard about cell cultivated fish and wondered what it is and how it is created. On this episode we will dive into the science of cell cultivated meat with our special guest Dr. Cohen. He is the R & D Director at Wanda Fish. He has over 15 years of extensive experience in stem cell, genomic engineering, and their applications for the Biomedical and AgTech fields. Prior to Wanda Fish, he led the research at eggXYt, focusing on stem cells and gene-editing technologies to promote livestock welfare and health. Dr. Cohen did his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Prof. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT, where he developed novel platforms to study human development and diseases using pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Cohen was awarded his PhD. from the Hebrew University, where he investigated the pluripotency and differentiation mechanisms of human stem cells. To learn more about innovations at Wanda Fish, visit here: https://wandafish.com/ The podcast is made possible by FoodNiche Inc., mission-driven company focused on creating a healthier food system through strategic partnerships and educative programming. To learn more about our conferences and other offerings visit: Foodnicher.com ------ For more Food + Health Talks Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/food-health-talks-with-dr-julia-olayanju/id1567321072 ------ To expand nutrition education in your school visit: foodniche-ed.com ------- To attend exceptional food industry conferences, discover and network with food industry change makers visit: foodnicher.com ------ Host To connect with Food + Health Talks host Dr. Julia Olayanju visit: juliaolayanju.com or connect with her on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter @juliaolayanju

How do world-class scientists make discoveries? “Observing and listening” says Professor Ruth Lehmann, the Director of MIT's Whitehead Institute. Ruth's pioneering research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis, and in this episode we were very fortunate to sit down with her to discuss her creative process, which she likens to the opening of a window. Most inspiringly, we discuss how Ruth created an environment that nurtures and empowers researchers to do their best work at the Skirball Institute at NYU and now at the Whitehead at MIT. For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

In today's episode, Prof Yukiko Yamashita, a group leader at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, is interviewed by PhD student Joshua Reeves. Yukiko talks about how her lab got interested in understanding the possible mechanism of non siter chromatid segregation in germline cells. She talks about how they started looking at the interesting mechanisms regulating the immortality of germlines cells in Drosophila. Yukiko also shares her opinion regarding Junk DNA and how it might not all be junk like noncoding RNAs. Lastly, she shares her advice to be learner for rest of life and get used to stepping outside comfort zone. And to become comfortable not being expert all the time. To find out more about Yukiko's research, check out the following link: https://yamashitalab.wi.mit.edu/

This week Harry is joined by Kevin Davies, author of the 2020 book Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—consists of DNA sequences that evolved to help bacteria recognize and defend against viral invaders, as a kind of primitive immune system. Thanks to its ability to precisely detect and cut other DNA sequences, CRISPR has spread to labs across the world in the nine years since Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published a groundbreaking 2012 Science paper describing how the process works. The Nobel Prize committee recognized the two scientists for the achievement in 2020, one day after Davies' book came out. The book explains how CRISPR was discovered, how it was turned into an easily programmable tool for cutting and pasting stretches of DNA, how most of the early pioneers in the field have now formed competing biotech companies, and how the technology is being used to help patients today—and in at least one famous case, misused. Today's interview covers all of that ground and more.Davies is a PhD geneticist who has spent most of his career in life sciences publishing. After his postdoc with Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute, Davies worked as an assistant editor at Nature, the founding editor of Nature Genetics (Nature's first spinoff journal), editor-in-chief at Cell Press, founding editor-in-chief of the Boston-based publication Bio-IT World, and publisher of Chemical & Engineering News. In 2018 he helped to launch The CRISPR Journal, where he is the executive editor. Davies' previous books include Breakthrough (1995) about the race to understand the BRCA1 breast cancer gene, Cracking the Genome (2001) about the Human Genome Project, The $1,000 Genome (2010) about next-generation sequencing companies, and DNA (2017), an updated version of James Watson's 2004 book, co-authored with Watson and Andrew Berry.Please rate and review MoneyBall Medicine on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 2. Navigate to the page of the MoneyBall Medicine podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.3.Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."4.Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."5.Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 6.Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.7.Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 8.If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out. 9.After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.Full TranscriptHarry Glorikian: I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.Harry Glorikian: We talk a lot on the show about how computation and data are changing the way we develop new medicines and the way we deliver healthcare. Some executives in the drug discovery business speak of the computing and software side of the business as the “dry lab” —to set it apart from the “wet labs” where scientists get their hands dirty working with actual cells, tissues, and reagents.But the thing is, recent progress on the wet lab side of biotech has been just as amazing as progress in areas like machine learning. And this week, my friend Kevin Davies is here to talk about the most powerful tool to come along in the last decade, namely, precise gene editing using CRISPR.Of course, CRISPR-based gene editing has been all over the news since Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published a groundbreaking Science paper in 2012 describing how the process works in the lab. That work earned them a Nobel Prize in medicine just eight years later, in 2020.But what's not as well-known is the story of how CRISPR was discovered, how it was turned into an easily programmable tool for cutting and pasting stretches of DNA, how most of the early pioneers in the field have now formed competing biotech companies, and how the technology is being used to help patients today—and in at least one famous case, misused.Kevin put that whole fascinating story together in his 2020 book Editing Humanity. And as the executive editor of The CRISPR Journal, the former editor-in-chief of Bio-IT World, the founding editor at Nature Genetics, and the author of several other important books about genomics, Kevin is one of the best-placed people in the world to tell that story. Here's our conversation.Harry Glorikian: Kevin, welcome to the show. Kevin Davies: Great to see you again, Harry. Thanks for having me on.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, no, I mean, I seem to be saying this a lot lately, it's been such a long time since, because of this whole pandemic, nobody's really seeing anybody on a regular basis. I want to give everybody a chance to hear about, you had written this book called Editing Humanity, which is, you know, beautifully placed behind you for, for product placement here. But I want to hear, can you give everybody sort of an overview of the book and why you feel that this fairly technical laboratory tool called CRISPR is so important that you needed to write a book about it?Kevin Davies: Thank you. Yes. As you may know, from some of my previous “bestsellers” or not, I've written about big stories in genetics because that's the only thing I'm remotely qualified to write about. I trained as a human geneticist in London and came over to do actually a pair of post-docs in the Boston area before realizing my talents, whatever they might be, certainly weren't as a bench researcher. So I had to find another way to stay in science but get away from the bench and hang up the lab coats.So moving into science publishing and getting a job with Nature and then launching Nature Genetics was the route for me. And over the last 30 years, I've written four or five books that have all been about, a) something big happening in genomics, b) something really big that will have both medical and societal significance, like the mapping and discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene in the mid-90s, the Human Genome Project at the turn of the century, and then the birth and the dawn of consumer genetics and personalized medicine with The $1,000 Genome. And the third ingredient I really look for if I'm trying to reach a moderately, significantly large audience is for the human elements. Who are they, the heroes and the anti heroes to propel the story? Where is the human drama? Because, you know, we all love a good juicy, gossipy piece of story and rating the good guys and the bad guys. And CRISPR, when it first really took off in 2012, 2013 as a gene editing tool a lot of scientists knew about this. I mean, these papers are being published in Science in particular, not exactly a specialized journal, but I was off doing other things and really missed the initial excitement, I'm embarrassed to say. It was only a couple of years later, working on a sequel to Jim Watson's DNA, where I was tasked with trying to find and summarize the big advances in genomic technology over the previous decade or whatever, that I thought, well, this CRISPR thing seems to be taking off and the Doudnas and the Charpentiers are, you know, winning Breakthrough Prizes and being feted by celebrities. And it's going on 60 Minutes. They're going to make a film with the Rock, Dwayne Johnson. What the heck is going on. And it took very little time after that, for me to think, you know, this is such an exciting, game-changing disruptive technology that I've got to do two things. I've gotta, a) write a book and b) launch a journal, and that's what I did. And started planning at any rate in sort of 2016 and 17. We launched the CRISPR Journal at the beginning of 2018. And the book Editing Humanity came out towards the end of 2020. So 2020, literally one day before the Nobel Prize—how about that for timing?—for Doudna and Charpentier for chemistry last year. Harry Glorikian: When I think about it, I remember working with different companies that had different types of gene editing technology you know, working with some particularly in the sort of agriculture space, cause it a little bit easier to run faster than in the human space. And you could see what was happening, but CRISPR now is still very new. But from the news and different advances that are happening, especially here in the Boston area, you know, it's having some real world impacts. If you had to point to the best or the most exciting example of CRISPR technology helping an actual patient, would you say, and I've heard you say it, Victoria Gray, I think, would be the person that comes to mind. I've even, I think in one of your last interviews, you said something about her being, you know, her name will go down in history. Can you explain the technology that is helping her and what some of the similar uses of CRISPR might be?Kevin Davies: So the first half of Editing Humanity is about the heroes of CRISPR, how we, how scientists turned it from this bizarre under-appreciated bacterial antiviral defense system and leveraged it and got to grips with it, and then figured out ways to turn it into a programmable gene editing technology. And within a year or two of that happening that the classic Doudna-Charpentier paper came out in the summer of 2012. Of course the first wave of biotech companies were launched by some of the big names, indeed most of the big names in CRISPR gene editing hierarchies. So Emmanuel Charpentier, Nobel Laureate, launched CRISPR Therapeutics, Jennifer Doudna co-founded Editas Medicine with several other luminaries. That didn't go well for, for reasons of intellectual property. So she withdrew from Editas and became a co-founder of Intellia Therapeutics as well as her own company, Caribou, which just went public, and Feng Zhang and others launched Editas Medicine. So we had this sort of three-way race, if you will, by three CRISPR empowered gene editing companies who all went public within the next two or three years and all set their sights on various different genetic Mendelian disorders with a view to trying to produce clinical success for this very powerful gene editing tool. And so, yes, Victoria Gray is the first patient, the first American patient with sickle cell anemia in a trial that is being run by CRISPR Therapeutics in close association with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. And that breakthrough paper, as I think many of your listeners will know, came out right at the end of 2020 published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Doesn't get much more prestigious than that. And in the first handful of patients that CRISPR Therapeutics have edited with a view to raising the levels of fetal hemoglobin, fetal globin, to compensate for the defective beta globin that these patients have inherited, the results were truly spectacular.And if we fast forward now to about two years after the initial administration, the initial procedures for Victoria Gray and some of her other volunteer patients, the results still look as spectacular. Earlier this year CRISPR Therapeutics put out of sort of an update where they are saying that the first 20 or 24 patients that they have dosed with sickle cell and beta thallasemia are all doing well. There've been little or no adverse events. And the idea of this being a once and done therapy appears very well founded. Now it's not a trivial therapy. This is ex-vivo gene editing as obviously rounds of chemotherapy to provide the room for the gene edited stem cells to be reimplanted into the patient. So this is not an easily scalable or affordable or ideal system, but when did we, when will we ever able to say we've pretty much got a cure for sickle cell disease? This is an absolutely spectacular moment, not just for CRISPR, but for medicine, I think, overall. And Victoria Gray, who's been brilliantly profiled in a long running series on National Public Radio, led by the science broadcaster Rob Stein, she is, you know, we, we can call her Queen Victoria, we can call it many things, but I really hope that ,it's not just my idea, that she will be one of those names like Louise Brown and other heroes of modern medicine, that we look and celebrate for decades to come.So the sickle cell results have been great, and then much more recently, also in the New England Journal, we have work led by Intellia Therapeutics, one of the other three companies that I named, where they've been also using CRISPR gene editing, but they've been looking at a rare liver disease, a form of amyloidosis where a toxic protein builds up and looking to find ways to knock out the production of that abnormal gene.And so they've been doing in vivo gene editing, really using CRISPR for the first time. It's been attempted using other gene editing platforms like zinc fingers, but this is the first time that I think we can really say and the New England Journal results prove it. In the first six patients that have been reported remarkable reductions in the level of this toxic protein far, not far better, but certainly better than any approved drugs that are currently on the market. So again, this is a very, very exciting proof of principle for in vivo gene editing, which is important, not just for patients with this rare liver disorder, but it really gives I think the whole field and the whole industry enormous confidence that CRISPR is safe and can be used for a growing list of Mendelian disorders, it's 6,000 or 7,000 diseases about which we know the root genetic cause, and we're not going to tackle all of them anytime soon, but there's a list of ones that now are within reach. And more and more companies are being launched all the time to try and get at some of these diseases.So as we stand here in the summer of 2021, it's a really exciting time. The future looks very bright, but there's so much more to be done. Harry Glorikian: No, we're just at the beginning. I mean, I remember when I first saw this, my first question was off target effects, right? How are we going to manage that? How are they going to get it to that place that they need to get it to, to have it to that cell at that time, in the right way to get it to do what it needs to do. And you know, all these sorts of technical questions, but at the same time, I remember I'm going to, trying to explain this to my friends. I'm like, “You don't understand, this can change everything.” And now a high school student, I say this to people and they look at me strangely, a high school student can order it and it shows up at your house.Kevin Davies: Yeah, well, this is why I think, and this is why one reason why CRISPR has become such an exciting story and receives the Nobel Prize eight years after the sort of launch publication or the first demonstration of it as a gene editing tool. It is so relatively easy to get to work. It's truly become a democratized or democratizing technology. You don't need a million-dollar Illumina sequencer or anything. And so labs literally all around the world can do basic CRISPR experiments. Not everyone is going to be able to launch a clinical trial. But the technology is so universally used, and that means that advances in our understanding of the mechanisms, new tools for the CRISPR toolbox new pathways, new targets, new oftware, new programs, they're all coming from all corners of the globe to help not just medicine, but many other applications of CRISPR as well.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I always joke about like, there, there are things going on in high school biology classes now that weren't, available, when I was in college and even when we were in industry and now what used to take an entire room, you can do on a corner of a lab bench.Kevin Davies: Yeah. Yeah. As far as the industry goes we mentioned three companies. But you know, today there's probably a dozen or more CRISPR based or gene editing based biotech companies. More undoubtedly are going to be launched before the end of this year. I'm sure we'll spend a bit of time talking about CRISPR 2.0, it seems too soon to be even thinking about a new and improved version of CRISPR, but I think there's a lot of excitement around also two other Boston-based companies, Beam Therapeutics in Cambridge and Verve Therapeutics both of which are launching or commercializing base editing. So base editing is a tool developed from the lab of David Lu of the Broad Institute [of MIT and Harvard]. And the early signs, again, this technology is only five or six years old, but the early signs of this are incredibly promising. David's team, academic team, had a paper in Nature earlier this year, really reporting successful base editing treatment of sickle cell disease in an animal model, not by raising the fetal globin levels, which was sort of a more indirect method that is working very well in the clinic, but by going right at the point mutation that results in sickle cell disease and using given the chemical repertoire of base editing.Base editing is able to make specific single base changes. It can't do the full repertoire of single base changes. So there are some limitations on researchers' flexibility. So they were unable to flip the sickle cell variant back to the quote unquote wild type variants, but the change they were able to make is one that they can live with, we can live with because it's a known benign variant, a very rare variant that has been observed in other, in rare people around the world. So that's completely fine. It's the next best thing. And so that looks very promising. Beam Therapeutics, which is the company that David founded or co-founded is trying a related approach, also going right at the sickle cell mutation. And there are other companies, including one that Matthew Porteus has recently founded and has gone public called Graphite Bio.So this is an exciting time for a disease sickle cell disease that has been woefully neglected, I think you would agree, both in terms of basic research, funding, medical prioritization, and medical education. Now we have many, many shots on goal and it doesn't really, it's not a matter of one's going to win and the others are going to fall by the wayside. Just like we have many COVID vaccines. We'll hopefully have many strategies for tackling sickle cell disease, but they are going to be expensive. And I think you know the economics better than I do. But I think that is the worry, that by analogy with gene therapies that have been recently approved, it's all, it's really exciting that we can now see the first quote, unquote cures in the clinic. That's amazingly exciting. But if the price tag is going to be $1 million or $2 million when these things are finally approved, if and when, that's going to be a rather deflating moment. But given the extraordinary research resources that the CRISPRs and Intellias and Beams and Graphites are pouring into this research, obviously they've got to get some return back on their investment so that they can plow it back into the company to develop the next wave of of gene editing therapies. So you know, it's a predicament Harry Glorikian: One of these days maybe I have to have a show based on the financial parts of it. Because there's a number of different ways to look at it. But just for the benefit of the listeners, right, who may not be experts, how would you explain CRISPR is different from say traditional gene therapies. And is CRISPR going to replace older methods of, of gene therapy or, or will they both have their place? Kevin Davies: No, I think they'll both have their place. CRISPR and, and these newer gene editing tools, base editing and another one called prime editing, which has a company behind it now called Prime Medicine, are able to affect specific DNA changes in the human genome.So if you can target CRISPR, which is an enzyme that cuts DNA together with a little program, the GPS signal is provided in the form of a short RNA molecule that tells the enzyme where to go, where to go in the genome. And then you have a couple of strategies. You can either cut the DNA at the appropriate target site, because you want to inactivate that gene, or you just want to scramble the sequence because you want to completely squash the expression of that gene. Or particularly using the newer forms of gene editing, like base editing, you can make a specific, a more nuanced, specific precision edit without, with one big potential advantage in the safety profile, which is, you're not completely cutting the DNA, you're just making a nick and then coaxing the cell's natural repair systems to make the change that you sort of you're able to prime.So there are many diseases where this is the way you want to go, but that does not in any way invalidate the great progress that we're making in traditional gene therapy. So for example today earlier today I was recording an interview or for one of my own programs with Laurence Reid, the CEO of Decibel Therapeutics, which is looking at therapies for hearing loss both genetic and other, other types of hearing disorders.And I pushed him on this. Aren't you actually joinomg with the gene editing wave? And he was very circumspect and said, no, we're very pleased, very happy with the results that we're getting using old fashioned gene replacement therapy. These are recessive loss of function disorders. And all we need to do is get the expression of some of the gene back. So you don't necessarily need the fancy gene editing tools. If you can just use a an AAV vector and put the healthy gene back into the key cells in the inner ear. So they're complimentary approaches which is great.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, in, in this podcast, I try to have a central theme when I'm talking to people. The relationships of big data, computation, advances in new drugs, and other ways to keep people healthy. So, you know, like question-wise, there's no question in my mind that the whole genomics revolution that started in the ‘90s, and I was happy to be at Applied Biosystems when we were doing that, would have been impossible in the absence of the advances in computing speed and storage in the last three decades. I think computing was the thing that held up the whole human genome, which gave us the book of life that CRISPR is now allowing us to really edit. But I wonder if you could bring us sort of up-to-date and talk about the way CRISPR and computation are intertwined. What happens when you combine precision of an editing tool like CRISPR with the power of machine learning and AI tools to find meaning and patterns in that huge genetic ball? Kevin Davies: Yeah. Well, yeah. I'm got to tread carefully here, but I think we are seeing papers from some really brilliant labs that are using some of the tools that you mentioned. AI and machine learning with a view to better understanding and characterizing some of the properties and selection criteria of some of these gene editing tools. So you mentioned earlier Harry, the need to look out for safety and minimize the concern of off-target effects. So I think by using some of these some algorithms and AI tools, researchers have made enormous strides in being able to design the programmable parts of the gene editing constructs in such a way that you increase the chances that they're going to go to the site that you want them to go to, and nnot get hung up latching onto a very similar sequence that's just randomly cropped up on the dark side of the genome, across the nucleus over there. You don't want that to happen. And I don't know that anybody would claim that they have a failsafe way to guarantee that that could never happen. But the you know, the clinical results that we've seen and all the preclinical results are showing in more and more diseases that we've got the tools and learned enough now to almost completely minimize these safety concerns. But I think everyone, I think while they're excited and they're moving as fast as they can, they're also doing this responsibly. I mean, they, they have to because no field, gene therapy or gene editing really wants to revisit the Jesse Gelsinger tragedy in 1999, when a teenage volunteer died in volunteering for a gene therapy trial at Penn of, with somebody with a rare liver disease. And of course that, that setback set back the, entire field of gene therapy for a decade. And it's really remarkable that you know, many of the sort of pioneers in the field refuse to throw in the towel, they realized that they had to kind of go back to the drawing board, look at the vectors again, and throw it out. Not completely but most, a lot of the work with adenoviruses has now gone by the wayside. AAV is the new virus that we hear about. It's got a much better safety profile. It's got a smaller cargo hold, so that's one drawback, but there are ways around that. And the, the explosion of gene therapy trials that we're seeing now largely on the back of AAV and now increasingly with, with non-viral delivery systems as well is, is very, very gratifying. And it's really delivery. I think that is now the pain point. Digressing from your question a little bit, but delivery, I think is now the big challenge. It's one thing to contemplate a gene therapy for the eye for rare hereditary form of blindness or the ear. Indeed those are very attractive sites and targets for some of these early trials because of the quantities that you need to produce. And the localization, the, the physical localization, those are good things. Those help you hit the target that you want to. But if you're contemplating trying something for Duchenne muscular dystrophy or spinal muscular atrophy, or some of the diseases of the brain, then you're going to need much higher quantities particularly for muscular disorders where, you run into now other challenges, including, production and manufacturing, challenges, and potentially safeguarding and making sure that there isn't an immune response as well. That's another, another issue that is always percolating in the background.But given where we were a few years ago and the clinical progress that we've talked about earlier on in the show it, I think you can safely assume that we've collectively made enormous progress in, in negating most, if not all of these potential safety issues.Harry Glorikian: No, you know, it's funny, I know that people will say like, you know, there was a problem in this and that. And I look at like, we're going into uncharted territories and it has to be expected that you just…you've got people that knew what they were doing. All of these people are new at what they are doing. And so you have to expect that along the way everything's not going to go perfectly. But I don't look at it as a negative. I look at it as, they're the new graduating class that's going to go on and understand what they did right. Or wrong, and then be able to modify it and make an improvement. And, you know, that's what we do in science. Kevin Davies: Well, and forget gene editing—in any area of drug development and, and pharmaceutical delivery, things don't always go according to plan. I'm sure many guests on Moneyball Medicine who have had to deal with clinical trial failures and withdrawing drugs that they had all kinds of high hopes for because we didn't understand the biology or there was some other reaction within, we didn't understand the dosing. You can't just extrapolate from an animal model to humans and on and on and on. And so gene editing, I don't think, necessarily, should be held to any higher standard. I think the CRISPR field has already in terms of the sort of market performance, some of the companies that we've mentioned, oh my God, it's been a real roller coaster surprisingly, because every time there's been a paper published in a prominent journal that says, oh my God, there's, there's a deletion pattern that we're seeing that we didn't anticipate, or we're seeing some immune responses or we're seeing unusual off target effects, or we're seeing P53 activation and you know, those are at least four off the top of my head. I'm sure there've been others. And all had big transient impact on the financial health of these companies. But I think that was to be expected. And the companies knew that this was just an overreaction. They've worked and demonstrated through peer review publications and preclinical and other reports that these challenges have been identified, when known about, pretty much completely have been overcome or are in the process of being overcome.So, you know, and we're still seeing in just traditional gene therapy technologies that have been around for 15, 20 years. We're still seeing reports of adverse events on some of those trials. So for gene editing to have come as far as it's common, to be able to look at these two big New England Journal success stories in sickle cell and ATTR amyloidosis, I don't think any very few, except the most ardent evangelists would have predicted we'd be where we are just a few years ago. [musical transition]Harry Glorikian: I want to pause the conversation for a minute to make a quick request. If you're a fan of MoneyBall Medicine, you know that we've published dozens of interviews with leading scientists and entrepreneurs exploring the boundaries of data-driven healthcare and research. And you can listen to all of those episodes for free at Apple Podcasts, or at my website glorikian.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.There's one small thing you can do in return, and that's to leave a rating and a review of the show on Apple Podcasts. It's one of the best ways to help other listeners find and follow the show.If you've never posted a review or a rating, it's easy. All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for MoneyBall Medicine, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but it'll help us out immensely. Thank you! And now back to the show.[musical transition]Harry Glorikian:One of your previous books was called The $1,000 Genome. And when you published that back in 2010, it was still pretty much science fiction that it might be possible to sequence someone's entire genome for $1,000. But companies like Illumina blew past that barrier pretty quickly, and now people are talking about sequencing individual genome for just a few hundred dollars or less. My question is, how did computing contribute to the exponential trends here. And do you wish you'd called your book The $100 Genome?Kevin Davies: I've thought about putting out a sequel to the book, scratching out the 0's and hoping nobody would notice. Computing was yes, of course, a massive [deal] for the very first human genome. Remember the struggle to put that first assembly together. It's not just about the wet lab and pulling the DNA sequences off the machines, but then you know, the rapid growth of the data exposure and the ability to store and share and send across to collaborators and put the assemblies together has been critical, absolutely critical to the development of genomics.I remember people were expressing shock at the $1,000 genome. I called the book that because I heard Craig Venter use that phrase in public for the first time in 2002. And I had just recently published Cracking the Genome. And we were all still recoiling at the billions of dollars it took to put that first reference genome sequence together. And then here's Craig Venter, chairing a scientific conference in Boston saying what we need is the $1,000 genome. And I almost fell off my chair. “what are you? What are you must you're in, you're on Fantasy Island. This is, there's no way we're going to get, we're still doing automated Sanger sequencing. God bless Fred Sanger. But how on earth are you going to take that technology and go from billions of dollars to a couple of thousand dollars. This is insanity.” And that session we had in 2002 in Boston. He had a local, a little episode of America's Got Talent and he invited half a dozen scientists to come up and show what they had. And George Church was one of them. I think Applied Biosystems may have given some sort of talk during that session. And then a guy, a young British guy from a company we'd never heard of called Celexa showed up and showed a couple of pretty PowerPoint slides with colored beads, representing the budding DNA sequence on some sort of chip. I don't know that he showed any data. It was all very pretty and all very fanciful. Well guess what? They had the last laugh. Illumina bought that company in 2006. And as you said, Harry you know, I think when, when they first professed to have cracked the $1,000 dollar genome barrier, a few people felt they needed a pinch of salt to go along with that. But I think now, yeah, we're, we're, we're well past that. And there are definitely outfits like BGI, the Beijing Genomics Institute being one of them, that are touting new technologies that can get us down to a couple of hundred. And those were such fun times because for a while there Illumina had enormous competition from companies like 454 and Helicose and PacBio. And those were fun heady times with lots and lots of competition. And in a way, Illumina's had it a little easy, I think over the last few years, but with PacBio and Oxford Nanopore gaining maturity both, both in terms of the technology platforms and their business strategy and growth, I think Illumina' gonna start to feel a little bit more competition in the long read sequence space. And one is always hearing whispers of new companies that may potentially disrupt next-gen sequencing. And that would be exciting because then we'd have an excuse to write another book. Harry Glorikian: Well, Kevin, start writing because I actually think we're there. I think there are a number of things there and you're right, I think Illumina has not had to bring the price down as quickly because there hasn't been competition. And you know, when I think about the space is, if you could do a $60 genome, right, it starts to become a rounding error. Like what other business models and opportunities now come alive? And those are the things that excite me. All right. But so, but you have a unique position as editor of the journal of CRISPR and the former editor of a lot of prominent, you know, publications, Nature Genetics, Bio-IT World, Chemical & Engineering News. Do you think that there's adequate coverage of the biological versus the computing side of it? Because I, I have this feeling that the computing side still gets a little overlooked and underappreciated. Kevin Davies: I think you're right. I mean I think at my own company Genetic Engineering News, we still have such deep roots in the wet lab vision and version of biotechnology that it takes a conscious effort to look and say, you know, that's not where all the innovation is happening. Bio-IT World, which you mentioned is interesting because we launched that in 2002. It was launched by the publisher IDG, best-known from MacWorld and ComputerWorld and this, this whole family of high-tech publications.And we launched in 2002 was a very thick glossy print magazine. And ironically, you know, we just couldn't find the advertising to sustain that effort, at least in the way that we'd envisioned it. And in 2006 and 2007, your friend and mine Phillips Kuhl, the proprietor of Cambridge Healthtech Institute, kind of put us out of our misery and said, you know what I'll, take the franchise because IDG just didn't know what to do with it anymore. But what he really wanted was the trade show, the production. And even though at the magazine eventually we fell on our sword and eventually put it out of its misery, the trade show went from strength to strength and it'll be back in Boston very soon because he had the vision to realize there is a big need here as sort of supercomputing for life sciences.And it's not just about the raw high-performance computing, but it's about the software, the software tools and data sharing and management. And it's great to go back to that show and see the, you know, the Googles and Amazons and yeah, all the big household names. They're all looking at this because genome technology, as we've discussed earlier has been one of the big growth boom areas for, for their services and their products.Harry Glorikian: Right. I mean, well, if you look at companies like Tempus, right. When I talked to Joel Dudley over there on the show it's, they want to be the Amazon AWS piping for all things genomic analysis. Right. So instead of creating it on your own and building a, just use their platform, basically, so it's definitely a growth area. And at some point, if you have certain disease states, I don't see how you don't get you know, genomic sequencing done, how a physician even today in oncology, how anybody can truly prescribe with all the drugs that are being approved that have, you know, genomic biomarkers associated with them and not use that data.Kevin Davies: On a much lower, lo-fi scale, as I've been doing a lot of reading about sickle cell disease lately, it's clear that a lot of patients who are, of course, as you, as you know, as your listeners know, are mostly African-American because the disease arose in Africa and the carrier status gives carriers a huge health advantage in warding off malaria. So the gene continues to stay, stay high in in frequency. Many African-American patients would benefit from some generic drugs that are available in this country that provide some relief, but aren't aware of it and maybe their physicians aren't completely aware of it either. Which is very sad. And we've neglected the funding of this disease over many decades, whereas a disease like cystic fibrosis, which affects primarily white people of Northern European descent that receives far more funding per capita, per head, than than a disease like sickle cell does. But hopefully that will begin to change as we see the, the potential of some of these more advanced therapies.I think as far as your previous comment. I think one of the big challenges now is how we tackle common diseases. I think we're making so much progress in treating rare Mendelian diseases and we know thousands of them. But it's mental illness and asthma and diabetes you know, diseases that affect millions of people, which have a much more complicated genetic and in part environmental basis.And what can we learn, to your point about having a full genome sequence, what can we glean from that that will help the medical establishment diagnose and treat much more common diseases, not quite as simple as just treating a rare Mendelian version of those diseases? So that's, I think going to be an important frontier over the next decade.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. It's complicated. I think you're going to see as we get more real-world data that's organized and managed well, along with genomic data, I think you'll be able to make more sense of it. But some of these diseases are quite complicated. It's not going to be find one gene, and it's going to give you that answer.But I want to go back to, you can't really talk about CRISPR without talking about this specter of germline editing. And a big part of your book is about this firestorm of criticism and condemnation around, you know, the 2018 when the Chinese researcher He Jankui, I think I said it correctly.Yep.Kevin Davies: He Jankui is how I say it. Close. Harry Glorikian: He announced that he had created twin baby girls with edits to their genomes that were intended to make them immune to HIV, which sort of like—that already made me go, what? But the experiment was, it seems, unauthorized. It seems that, from what I remember, the edits were sloppy and the case spurred a huge global discussion about the ethics of using CRISPR to make edits that would be inherited by future generations. Now, where are we in that debate now? I mean, I know the National Academy of Sciences published a list of criteria, which said, don't do that. Kevin Davies: It was a little more nuanced than that. It wasn't don't do that. It was, there is a very small window through which we could move through if a whole raft of criteria are met. So they, they refuse to say hereditary genome editing should be banned or there should be a moratorium. But they said it should not proceed until we do many things. One was to make sure it is safe. We can't run before we can walk. And by that, I mean, we've got to first demonstrate—because shockingly, this hasn't been done yet—that genome editing can be done safely in human embryos. And in the last 18 months there've been at least three groups, arguably the three leading groups in terms of looking at genetic changes in early human embryos, Kathy Niakan in London, Shoukhrat Mitalipov in Oregon, and Dieter Egli in New York, who all at roughly the same time published and reports that said, or posted preprints at least that said, when we attempt to do CRISPR editing experiments in very early human embryos, we're seeing a mess. We're seeing a slew of off-target and even on-target undesirable edits.And I think that says to me, we don't completely understand the molecular biology of DNA repair in the early human embryo. It may be that there are other factors that are used in embryogenesis that are not used after we're born. That's speculation on my part. I may be wrong. But the point is we still have a lot to do to understand, even if we wanted to.And even if everybody said, “Here's a good case where we should pursue germline editing,” we've gotta be convinced that we can do it safely. And at the moment, I don't think anybody can say that. So that's a huge red flag.But let's assume, because I believe in the power of research, let's assume that we're going to figure out ways to do this safely, or maybe we say CRISPR isn't the right tool for human embryos, but other tools such as those that we've touched on earlier in the show base editing or prime editing, or maybe CRISPR 3.0 or whatever that is right now to be published somewhere. [Let's say ] those are more safe, more precise tools. Then we've got to figure out well, under what circumstances would we even want to go down this road? And the pushback was quite rightly that, well, we already have technologies that can safeguard against families having children with genetic diseases. It's called IVF and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. So we can select from a pool of IVF embryos. The embryos that we can see by biopsy are safe and can therefore be transplanted back into the mother, taken to term and you know, a healthy baby will emerge.So why talk about gene editing when we have that proven technology? And I think that's a very strong case, but there are a small number of circumstances in which pre-implantation genetic diagnosis will simply not work. And those are those rare instances where a couple who want to have a biological child, but have both of them have a serious recessive genetic disease. Sickle cell would be an obvious case in point. So two sickle cell patients who by definition carry two copies of the sickle cell gene, once I have a healthy biological child preimplantation genetic diagnosis, it's not going to help them because there are no healthy embryos from whatever pool that they produce that they can select. So gene editing would be their only hope in that circumstance. Now the National Academy's report that you cited, Harry, did say for serious diseases, such as sickle cell and maybe a few others they could down the road potentially see and condone the use of germline gene editing in those rare cases.But they're going to be very rare, I think. It's not impossible that in an authorized approved setting that we will see the return of genome editing, but that's okay. Of course you can can issue no end of blue ribbon reports from all the world's experts, and that's not going to necessarily prevent some entrepreneur whose ethical values don't align with yours or mine to say, “You know what, there's big money to be made here. I'm going offshore and I'm going to launch a CRISPR clinic and you know, who's going to stop me because I'll be out of the clutches of the authorities.” And I think a lot of people are potentially worried that that scenario might happen. Although if anyone did try to do that, the scientific establishment would come down on them like a ton of bricks. And there'll be a lot of pressure brought to bear, I think, to make sure that they didn't cause any harm.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. It's funny. I would like to not call them entrepreneurs. I like entrepreneurs. I'd like to call them a rogue scientist. Kevin Davies: So as you say, there's the third section of four in Editing Humanity was all about the He Jankui debacle or saga. I had flown to Hong Kong. It's a funny story. I had a little bit of money left in my travel budget and there were two conferences, one in Hong Kong and one in China coming up in the last quarter of 2018. So I thought, well, okay, I'll go to one of them. And I just narrowed, almost a flip of a coin, I think. Okay, let's go to the Hong Kong meeting.It's a bioethics conference since I don't expect it to be wildly exciting, but there are some big speakers and this is an important field for the CRISPR Journal to monitor. So I flew there literally, you know, trying to get some sleep on the long flights from New York and then on landing, turn on the phone, wait for the new wireless signal provider to kick in. And then Twitter just explode on my feed as this very, very astute journalists at MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado, had really got the scoop of the century by identifying a registration on a Chinese clinical trial website that he and only he had the foresight and intelligence to sort of see. He had met He Jankui in an off the record meeting, as I described in the book, about a month earlier. A spider sense was tingling. He knew something was up and this was the final clue. He didn't know at that time that the Lulu and Nana, the CRISPR babies that you mentioned, had actually been born, but he knew that there was a pregnancy, at least one pregnancy, from some of the records that he'd seen attached to this registration document. So it was a brilliant piece of sleuthing. And what he didn't know is that the Asociated Press chief medical writer Marilynm Marchion had confidentially been alerted to the potential upcoming birth of these twins by an American PR professional who was working with He Jankui in Shenzhen. So she had been working on an embargoed big feature story that He Jankui and his associates hoped would be the definitive story that would tell the world, we did this quote unquote, “responsibly and accurately, and this is the story that you can believe.” So that story was posted within hours.And of course the famous YouTube videos that He Jankui had recorded announcing with some paternal pride that he had ushered into the world these two gene edited, children, screaming and crying into the world as beautiful babies I think was [the phrase]. And he thought that he was going to become famous and celebrated and lauded by not just the Chinese scientific community, but by the world community for having the ability and the bravery to go ahead and do this work after Chinese researchers spent the previous few years editing human embryos. And he was persuaded that he had to present his work in Hong Kong, because he'd set off such a such an extraordinary firestorm. And I think you've all seen now you're the clips of the videos of him nervously walking onto stage the muffled, the silence, or the only sound in the front row, the only sound in the big auditorium at Hong Kong university—[which] was absolutely packed to the rim, one side of the auditorium was packed with press photographers, hundreds of journalists and cameras clicking—and the shutters clattering was the only, that was the applause that he got as he walked on stage.And to his credit, he tried to answer the questions directly in the face of great skepticism from the audience. The first question, which was posed by David Liu, who had traveled all the way there, who just asked him simply, “What was the unmet medical need that you are trying to solve with this reckless experiment? There are medical steps that you can do, even if the couple that you're trying to help has HIV and you're trying to prevent this from being passed on. There are techniques that you can use sperm washing being one of them. That is a key element of the IVF process to ensure that the no HIV is transmitted.”But he was unable to answer the question in terms of I'm trying to help a family. He'd already moved out and was thinking far, far bigger. Right? And his naiveté was shown in the manuscript that he'd written up and by that point submitted to Nature, excerpts of which were leaked out sometime later.So he went back to Shenzhen and he was put under house arrest after he gave that talk in Hong Kong. And about a year later was sentenced to three years in jail. And so he's, to the best of my knowledge that's where he is. But I often get asked what about the children? As far as we know, there was a third child born about six months later, also gene-edited. We don't even know a name for that child, let alone anything about their health. So one hopes that somebody in the Chinese medical establishment is looking after these kids and monitoring them and doing appropriate tests. The editing, as you said, was very shoddily performed. He knocked out the gene in question, but he did not mimic the natural 32-base deletion in this gene CCR5 that exists in many members of the population that confers, essentially, HIV resistance. So Lulu and Nana on the third child are walking human experiments, sad to say. This should never have been done. Never should have been attempted. And so we hope that he hasn't condemned them to a life of, you know, cancer checkups and that there were no off-target effects. They'll be able to live, hopefully, with this inactivated CCR5 gene, but it's been inactivated in a way that I don't think any, no other humans have ever been recorded with such modifications. So we, we really hope and pray that no other damage has been done. Harry Glorikian: So before we end, I'd love to give you the chance to speculate on the future of medicine in light of CRISPR. Easy, fast, inexpensive genome sequencing, give us access to everybody's genetic code, if they so choose. Machine learning and other forms of AI are helping understand the code and trace interactions between our 20,000 genes. And now CRISPR gives us a way to modify it. So, you know, it feels like [we have] almost everything we need to create, you know, precise, targeted, custom cures for people with genetic conditions. What might be possible soon, in your view? What remaining problems need to be solved to get to this new area of medicine? Kevin Davies: If you know the sequence that has been mutated to give rise to a particular disease then in principle, we can devise a, some sort of gene edit to repair that sequence. It may be flipping the actual base or bases directly, or maybe as we saw with the first sickle cell trial, it's because we understand the bigger genetic pathway. We don't have to necessarily go after the gene mutation directly, but there may be other ways that we can compensate boost the level of a compensating gene.But I think we, we should be careful not to get too carried away. As excited as I am—and hopefully my excitement comes through in Editing Humanity—but for every company that we've just mentioned, you know, you can go on their website and look at their pipeline. And so Editas might have maybe 10 diseases in its cross hairs. And CRISPR [Therapeutics] might have 12 diseases. And Intellia might have 14 diseases and Graphite has got maybe a couple. And Beam Therapeutics has got maybe 10 or 12. And Prime Medicine will hasn't listed any yet, but we'll hopefully have a few announced soon. And so I just reeled off 50, 60, less than a hundred. And some of these are gonna work really, really well. And some are going to be either proven, ineffective or unviable economically because the patient pool is too small. And we've got, how many did we say, 6,000 known genetic diseases. So one of the companies that is particularly interesting, although they would admit they're in very early days yet, is Verve Therapeutics. I touched on them earlier because they're looking at to modify a gene called PCSK9 that is relevant to heart disease and could be a gene modification that many people might undergo because the PCSK9 gene may be perfectly fine and the sequence could be perfectly normal, but we know that if we re remove this gene, levels of the bad cholesterol plummet, and that's usually a good thing as far as heart management goes. So that's an interesting, very interesting study case study, I think, to monitor over the coming years, because there's a company looking at a much larger patient pool potentially than just some of these rare syndromes with unpronounceable names. So the future of CRISPR and gene editing is very bright. I think one of the lessons I took away from CRISPR in Editing Humanity is, looking at the full story, is how this technology, this game-changing gene-editing technology, developed because 25 years ago, a handful of European microbiologists got really interested in why certain microbes were thriving in a salt lake in Southeastern Spain. This is not exactly high-profile, NIH-must-fund-this research. There was a biological question that they wanted to answer. And the CRISPR repeats and the function of those repeats fell out of that pure curiosity, just science for science's sake. And so it's the value of basic investigator-driven, hypothesis-driven research that led to CRISPR being described and then the function of the repeats.And then the story shifted to a yogurt company in Europe that was able to experimentally show how having the right sequence within the CRISPR array could safeguard their cultures against viral infection. And then five years of work people in various groups started to see, were drawn to this like moths to a flame. Jennifer Doudna was intrigued by this from a tip-off from a coffee morning discussion with a Berkeley faculty colleagues, Jill Banfield, a brilliant microbiologist in her own. And then she met meets Emmanuelle Charpentier in Puerto Rico at a conference, and they struck up a friendship and collaboration over the course of an afternoon. And that, why should that have worked? Well, it did, because a year later they're publishing in Science. So it's serendipity and basic research. And if that can work for CRISPR, then I know that there's another technology beginning to emerge from somewhere that may, yet trump CRISPR.And I think the beauty of CRISPR is its universal appeal. And the fact is, it's drawn in so many people, it could be in Japan or China or South Korea or parts of Europe or Canada or the U.S. or South America. Somebody is taking the elements of CRISPR and thinking well, how can we improve it? How can we tweak it?And so this CRISPR toolbox is being expanded and modified and updated all the time. So there's a hugely exciting future for genome medicine. And you know, whether it's a new form of sequencing or a new form of synthetic biology, you know, hopefully your show is going to be filled for many years to come with cool, talented, young energetic entrepreneurs who've developed more cool gadgets to work with our genome and other genomes as well. We haven't even had time to talk about what this could do for rescuing the wooly mammoth from extinction. So fun things, but maybe, maybe another time. Harry Glorikian: Excellent. Well, great to have you on the show. Really appreciate the time. I hope everybody got a flavor for the enormous impact this technology can have. Like you said, we talked about human genome, but there's so many other genomic applications of CRISPR that we didn't even touch. Kevin Davies: Yup. Yup. So you have to read the book. Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I will look forward to the next book. So, great. Thank you so much. Kevin Davies: Thanks for having me on the show, Harry. All the best.Harry Glorikian: Take care.Harry Glorikian: That's it for this week's show. You can find past episodes of MoneyBall Medicine at my website, glorikian.com, under the tab “Podcast.” And you can follow me on Twitter at hglorikian.  Thanks for listening, and we'll be back soon with our next interview.

In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses some of the life style interventions that affect our longevity and his personal regimen. This is the last episode of Dr. Sabatani Interview Series. Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism Some key references. Genome-wide CRISPR screens reveal multitiered mechanisms through which mTORC1 senses mitochondrial dysfunction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.22.351361v1.full.pdf Twenty-five years of mTOR: Uncovering the link from nutrients to growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5692607/ mTOR introduction YouTube Series with Dr. Sabatini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnIerDljc7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=defOfBEuw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGA9RALG66s

Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses how diet effects mTOR activation. He also talks about calorie restriction and intermittent fasting. Some key references. Genome-wide CRISPR screens reveal multitiered mechanisms through which mTORC1 senses mitochondrial dysfunction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.22.351361v1.full.pdf Twenty-five years of mTOR: Uncovering the link from nutrients to growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5692607/

On today's episode we are discussing the results and implications of a recent study that describes the creation of a new set of tools to turn off or on any region in the genome with high specificity. Host Lauren Richardson and a16z general partner Vijay Pande are joined by the senior author of the article, “Genome-wide programmable transcriptional memory by CRISPR-based epigenome editing”, Jonathan Weissman, Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. Jonathan talks about how they developed these tools using the CRISPR gene editor as a backbone, the advantages of modulating the epigenome as opposed to the genome, and the various applications — both in the lab and in the clinic — for these epigenome editors. 

In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses rapamycin, how it acts on mTORC1 and mTORC2 and the rapalogs, drugs which are similar to rapamycin but may be more clinically effective. Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism Some key references. Genome-wide CRISPR screens reveal multitiered mechanisms through which mTORC1 senses mitochondrial dysfunction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.22.351361v1.full.pdf Twenty-five years of mTOR: Uncovering the link from nutrients to growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5692607/ mTOR introduction YouTube Series with Dr. Sabatini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnIerDljc7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=defOfBEuw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGA9RALG66s

In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses his recent paper and in particular how the health of the mitochondria impact the activation of mTOR and how this is signaled. Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism Some key references. The paper discussed in the video. Genome-wide CRISPR screens reveal multitiered mechanisms through which mTORC1 senses mitochondrial dysfunction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.22.351361v1.full.pdf Twenty-five years of mTOR: Uncovering the link from nutrients to growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5692607/

Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses how mTOR impacts lifespan and whether its actions change with age Some key references. Twenty-five years of mTOR: Uncovering the link from nutrients to growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5692607/ mTOR introduction YouTube Series with Dr. Sabatini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnIerDljc7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=defOfBEuw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGA9RALG66s

In this video Dr. Sabatini discusses the role of mTOR as the master regulator of the cell and distinguishes between mTORC1 and mTORC2. Dr. David Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery of mTOR, more than 20 years ago. Since then Dr. Sabatini has continued to work on better understanding this complex regulator of our metabolism

Christine Heenan serves as Flagship's senior partner and chief communications officer, overseeing communications, external affairs, brand and marketing for Flagship and its enterprise companies. She also serves as an advisor to the dozens of Flagship-founded companies in its broader ecosystem. She is the founder and former president of Clarendon Group, a consulting firm focused on social impact, communications, advocacy, and leadership voice. While at Clarendon she advised clients including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Social Science Research Council, CARE USA, University of Miami, the Rockefeller Family Office, philanthropist Donald Sussman, and other notable organizations, leaders, and philanthropists. She served as Senior Vice President for Global Policy & Advocacy at The Rockefeller Foundation, where she led the Foundation's policy, program influence, partnerships, and communications teams, as well as its regional teams in Asia, Africa and Italy. She also oversaw the Bellagio and Fellows unit.  While at Rockefeller, she led the creation of #Solvable, a global platform for highlighting the UN Sustainable Development Goals featuring more than 45 mini-films, an acclaimed podcast, and an award-winning documentary film. She also helped conceive and launch the “Without Mom” campaign, a multi-country effort to raise awareness for preventable maternal mortality launched during Mom Congress on Capitol Hill in 2019. From 2008 to 2015, Heenan was Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications for Harvard University, overseeing its communications, government relations, and digital strategy teams in Cambridge, Boston, and Washington, DC. During the Clinton Administration she served in the White House as a Senior Policy Analyst and speechwriter, focused primarily on health care policy, women's issues, and other areas of domestic policy. Heenan was an adjunct assistant professor of public policy at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University and a Freshman Seminar instructor at Harvard College, teaching on communications in policy making. In 2010, Heenan was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard. She was previously a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, and now serves as Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, where she is part of the teaching team for a new and highly participatory class at HBS called “Conversations on Leadership.” Heenan began her career in business strategy consulting for Telesis and SJS – spinoffs of Boston Consulting Group – working on business process analysis, cost analysis, market strategy, and strategic planning for national and international corporations including Corning, Rubbermaid, Ahlstrom, and IKEA. She has served on a number of boards focused on child development, education, and economic policy, and now serves on the boards of the David Rockefeller Fund and the University of Rhode Island. She and her family live in New York and Rhode Island. Don't forget to check out my book that inspired this podcast series, The Caring Economy: How to Win With Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/toby-usnik/support

Whitehead Institute researchers Silvi Rouskin, Ankur Jain, and David Bartel discuss how their RNA research connects to health and disease, including viral infections and neurodegeneration. This podcast is part of a multimedia series on RNA.

What causes a primary tumor to form in the body? Metastatic dissemination explains how genetic damage in the cell can develop cancer and begin the spread. Press play to learn: The triggers for the spread of cancer cells How a stroma supports the primary tumor If excess mutations can revert tumors to stem cell-like tissue Robert Weinberg, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and professor of biology at MIT, discusses his research into the formation and spread of cancer. The tissue in tumors resembles very closely the tissue found in wounds. The inflammatory state which assists in healing all wounds may be responsible for the aggression and proliferation of cancer cells and tumor growth. As the tumor grows and continues to mutate, it begins to recruit several different types of cells to assist in growth and survival. Multiple mutations in a tumor may continue to increase the aggression and inflammatory nature of the tumor as it grows. For more information, search for Robert Weinberg's laboratory in association with the Whitehead Institute on your preferred engine. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/30PvU9C

Biology and culture collide! We discuss the intersection of sex, gender, and sports with Dr. Adrianna San Roman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge who studies sex chromosome aneuploidy. Adrianna first walks us through the biological basis of sex and explains why it is more complicated than just male and female. Definitions in place, we then talk about the cases of Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya, Olympic athletes who have been banned from competition due to elevated testosterone levels. You’ll be Sry if you miss this one!

Pint-Sized Science S2 E2 Interviewee: Iain Cheeseman, Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute and MIT. Interviewer: Melis Tekant, PhD student in Physics, MIT. During cell division, a cell creates an identical copy of itself, but how does this process happen? Specifically, how does a cell distribute its genetic material among the two daughter cells? Join us as Professor Iain Cheeseman of MIT and the Whitehead Institute explains how he and his team uncover the molecular basis of the protein complex called the kinetochore, the cellular machinery which is at the heart of this process. For more information on Prof. Cheeseman's lab and how starfish egg cells divide: https://medium.com/@WhiteheadInstitute/unusual-labmates-biology-all-stars-1937249398ab

Episode 16. In this episode of our Scientists at Home series, Professor Iain Cheeseman (Professor of Biology, MIT and Whitehead Institute) talks about how he adapted to the new normal and juggled his various responsibilities — his family, research group, and undergraduate class. He explains the importance of creating a sense of community while being physically distanced, and some positive changes that the pandemic brought about. You can learn more about Iain and his research group here: https://cheesemanlab.wi.mit.edu/. Featured: Melis Tekant, Dr. Iain Cheeseman Produced by: Melis Tekant, Delphine Tripp Recording date: December 2nd, 2020

Making our world more sustainable to preserve it for future generations will take not just one but many solutions. Researchers at Whitehead Institute are exploring how the natural world could teach us how to improve the sustainability of how we produce food, how we make medicines, how we make products more durable, and potentially how … Continue reading AudioHelicase Special: How researchers at Whitehead Institute are building a more sustainable future →

How do we sense if we have eaten or not and how is that linked to how long an organism lives? In today’s interesting episode David tells us about the mechanistic target of rapamycin, mTOR for short.   Professor David Sabatini is a member of the Whitehead Institute at MIT and perhaps more importantly the person who discovered mTOR.    Friends I really hope you will enjoy today's Episode.

In this episode of AudioHelicase Podcast, Whitehead Fellow Silvi Rouskin discusses her research on solving the structure of the novel coronavirus’s RNA genome, with the goal of revealing weak points in the virus’s gene regulation that new drugs could potentially target. Music: “Versailles” by Pierce Murphy (CC-BY 4.0). Produced by Conor Gearin.

In this episode, Matthew Ismail, editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals and Director of Collection Development at Central Michigan University, talks with Jessica Polka and Iratxe Puebla on the topic of preprints in the biological sciences. Jessica Polka is Executive Director of ASAPbio, a scientist-driven nonprofit preprint organization that is promoting innovation and transparency in life sciences communication. Before becoming a visiting scholar at the Whitehead Institute, Jessica performed postdoctoral research in the department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School (2013-2016) following a PhD in Biochemistry from UCSF (2012). Iratxe Puebla is Associate Director at ASAPbio. Following a background in biochemistry research, Iratxe moved into open access editorial roles, first at BMC and then PLOS. She was Deputy Editor-in-Chief at PLOS ONE and also serves as a Facilitation Officer at COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). Jessica and Iratxe are working with Oya Rieger on a Charleston Briefing on preprints in the biological sciences.  

It’s difficult to comprehend how busy and densely packed it is on the inside of a cell. But understanding cell structure and organization is critical to developing new cancer drugs. Isaac Klein, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Richard Young Laboratory at the Whitehead Institute, recently published findings that could have wide-ranging implications for the understanding of how cancer drugs work. Dr. Klein joined the podcast to explain why knowing how to get cancer drugs to exactly the right place in a cell—at a sufficient concentration—is critical to developing new and more effective cancer treatments. Isaac Klein, MD, PhD, is the American Cancer Society Layla Rohani Postdoctoral Fellow. His grant was specially funded by the Rohani Family and Friends. He is a physician and scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Whitehead Institute at MIT. 4:11 – What is it like inside of a cell? Is organization a challenge for cells? 8:30 – A great analogy to help us understand cell organization and “condensates,” and why it’s important for some sub-compartments in cells not to have membranes walling them off from other parts of the cell. 13:47 – With no membranes, or walls, how do the contents of a condensate stay together? 19:50 – How cancer drugs are pulled into different condensates 23:02 – How cancer drugs get to the right spot in a cell, at the right concentration 26:23 – How the cancer drug Cisplatin works 31:07 – How their research findings hint at ways to make cancer drugs more powerful 35:03 – The impact of ACS funding on his research 36:24 – A message he’d like to share with cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers

On this episode of AudioHelicase podcast, Whitehead Fellow Olivia Corradin talked about investigating the genetic underpinnings of diseases through a new technique she developed, the outside variant approach. Applying the method to study the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS), Corradin and colleagues identified a role for a cell type in the brain in MS, offering … Continue reading Whitehead Institute’s Olivia Corradin on a New Way to Probe Disease Genetics →

Até hoje não há tratamento medicamentoso que comprovadamente previna ou cure a covid-19 – apenas medidas e medicações de suporte. Mesmo assim, uma parcela da comunidade médica defende o que chama de tratamento precoce. Ele envolve um “kit” contendo drogas sem comprovação científica de eficácia, como vitaminas, antibiótico e vermífugo, além de uma droga usada contra a malária, a hidroxicloroquina, que já foi descartada para uso na covid-19 no mundo todo – com testes em milhares de pacientes mostrando que não traz melhora e pode causar efeitos colaterais sérios. Parte da população correu às farmácias atrás dos produtos, seja com receita médica, seja sem, se expondo aos riscos da automedicação. Além disso, o kit já foi distribuído por algumas Prefeituras, planos de saúde, e é defendido por membros do governo federal – o que é alvo de críticas entre cientistas. Nesta live, médicos e cientistas discutiram o que se sabe sobre as medicações incluídas no kit, os dilemas da prática médica durante a pandemia e as etapas da ciência que não podem ser puladas para trazer soluções para a saúde. Convidados Frederico Fernandes é doutor em Pneumologia e médico assistente no InCor do Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da USP (FMUSP). Também atua no Instituto do Câncer do Estado de São Paulo (Icesp) e preside a Sociedade Paulista de Pneumologia e Tisiologia (SPPT). Izabella Pena é bióloga e pesquisadora no Whitehead Institute do Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), em Boston, nos Estados Unidos. Atualmente, faz parte da luta pela educação científica  por meio de divulgações em seu canal no YouTube e do trabalho na organização (Contracovid). Luis Claudio Correia é doutor e livre-docente em Cardiologia. É professor adjunto e diretor do Centro de Medicina Baseada em Evidências da Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública (Bahiana) e editor-chefe do Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare. Apresentação e produção: Luiza Caires Produção audiovisual: Kleison Paiva Edição de vídeo: Thales Figueiredo Edição de áudio: Guilherme Fiorentini

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A huge impact has been wrought by a very small amount of stuff. The world of viruses is vast and complicated, and we’re still learning some of its basic features. Today’s guest David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that genetic information in viruses could flow from RNA to DNA, establishing an exception to the Central Dogma of Biology. He is the author of the Baltimore Classification scheme for viruses, and has done important research in the role of viruses in diseases from AIDS to cancer. We talk about what viruses are, how they work, and the status of the novel coronavirus we are currently battling. David also has some strong opinions about public health and how we should be preparing for future outbreaks.Support Mindscape on Patreon.David Baltimore received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Rockefeller Institute. He is currently the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech. At age 37 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco. He has served as the President of both Rockefeller University and Caltech, as well as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Founding Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Among his other awards are the National Medal of Science and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize.Caltech Web PageNobel Prize pageWikipediaAhead of the Curve: David Baltimore’s Life in Science, by Shane Crotty“Introduction to Viruses” video

Today's episode is with and about Hui Yang. Dr. Yang is a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  He has developed new base-editor variants. Base-editing is a kind of gene-editing. Overall the result led to base-editors with fewer off-targets, high on-target efficiency and a narrowed editing window, fewer indels and  fewer off-targets, he says. Yang sees a lot of promise for these base editors for both DNA and RNA base editing. Yang is a die-hard Manchester United. Among other aspects, he talks about how he organizes his lab for open communication. He is modeling the the culture of the Jaenisch lab at The Whitehead Institute. That's where Yang was a postdoctoral fellow. 

Fragile X syndrome is a genetic disorder and the leading cause of intellectual disability and autism. There is no treatment. In this episode, Kellen discusses recent gene therapy advances for treating Fragile X syndrome. The article highlighted in this episode was written by X. Shawn Liu and colleagues from Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute and is titled “Rescue of Fragile X Syndrome Neurons by DNA Methylation Editing of the FMR1 Gene”. Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375087/ Please take a few minutes to write us a review on iTunes -- it will help us spread science! And please send any questions and comments to inflammatory.content.w.kc@gmail.com or interact with him on Twitter @KellenCavagnero

* Jaw-dropping, head-banging, socks blown off, eye-popping, baffled, shocked & stunned: Really. :) Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams have fun providing so many examples of evolutionists (chemical, stellar, biological) being jaw-dropping surprised, shocked, even stunned and horrified, when their huge discoveries contradict some of the most fundamental predictions of their materialist theories. * Head-banging: As reported by LiveScience, cutting-edge researchers running a major National Science Foundation evolution experiment admitted that, "If Darwin was right", they would have documented the evidence for his claimed insight on competition and the (supposed) tree of life. Instead, their results falsified Darwin's claim. Of the 60 species of algae being studied for a five year period, Charles Darwin predicted how well and how poorly such organisms would compete for resources, based on their respective distances from each other on the (supposed) tree of life. But of the outcome, "It was completely unexpected. We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin's hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right? ... We should be able to look at the [supposed] Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can't be predicted from the Tree of Life." For more, see LiveScience and rsr.org/darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life. * 2015 Update: One of many discoveries that could be added to this list of shocked evolutionists is the black hole, at 12.8 billion light-years away, the mass of 12 billion Suns that "simply can't exist" by the big bang theory, but it does. * 2019 Update: Moon may be tectonically active, geologists shaken, is the headline in National Geographic. "A new look at Apollo-era seismic data revealed that the moon's insides might be warmer than scientists thought possible." See this also at rsr.org/tess#moon in our classic List of the Transient Events of the Solar System! * Stunned without the Foggiest Notion: So "astounding" are the "similarities" of Hox developmental regulatory genes across the animal kingdom that prominent evolutionist Sean Carroll wrote that, “no biologist had even the foggiest notion that such similarities could exist between genes of such different animals.” Because little in biology makes sense in the light of evolution, a world full of neo-Darwinist scientists never predicted this astounding consistency because, by their belief system, "The evolutionary lines that led to flies and mice diverged more than 500 million years ago..." So, this world famous biologist admits that, "Such sequence similarity was just stunning." Of course this falsified one of the most fundamental predictions of neo-Darwinism. [This item is a post-show update.] * Horrendous: Dr. David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., said in the journal Nature that the human and chimp Y chromosomes are "horrendously different from each other." Horrendously? Is that a scientific term? Why not just, "different?" Is Saturn horrendously different from Mars? Why horrendously so? Because for modern Darwinism to not lose face, chimps have to be shown to be our closest relatives. Yet 15% of the gorilla genome is closer to us, and the chimp's Y chromosome (that which makes us males... well, males...) is so massively different that we have yet more evidence on its face that the human genome is not 98.5% identical to the chim. For more, see rsr.rog/list-of-genomes-that-just-dont-fit. * Jaw-dropping: National Geographic quotes NASA's Messenger team member David Blewett saying, as RSR documents evolutionary scientists saying all the time regarding major observations that contradict predictions based on their most fundamental claims, "this jaw-dropping thing that nobody ever predicted," that Mercury has actively forming surface features, something judged impossible for a tiny, four-billion year old inert rock. :) * Socks Blown Off: Close-up photos showed the youthful appearance of Pluto as did the images of its largest moon: "We originally thought Charon would be an ancient terrain covered in craters," said New Horizons team member Cathy Olkin. "So when we saw the pictures this morning, it just blew our socks off." And panning upward from their feet, Discover Magazine reports on NASA's Pluto team including principal investigator Alan Stern's eyes popping out of his head. * Baffled by Asteroids that Look Like Comets: See phys.org, NASA, EarthSky, and AmazingSpace. * And the Beat Goes On: For more fun examples, just listen to today's program! And as an honorable mention, consider the response of the scientists who found the presence of modern bacteria, etc., in these allegedly 220 Mya microbes. (Nat'l Geographic removed that page from the web but we put it back up!) And likewise when others described 42 "oddball" blue stars in the Milky Way! * More Baffling Still: After 150 years of searching, evolutionists have found the best evidence ever discovered for Darwinism, caught on tape no less... Today's Resource: Please check out our newest science resource... The Global Flood and the Hydroplate Theory Blu-ray, 2-DVD Set or HD Download Real Science Radio co-host Bob Enyart presents the scientific evidence for Dr. Walt Brown’s model of the global flood, along with the relevant biblical material. Enyart also discusses Brown's opponents and contrasts both the vapor canopy and catastrophic plate tectonics with the hydroplate theory. DVD Vol. 1 1. Walt Brown, Creation Leaders, and Scripture 2. Hydroplate Theory & Scientific Evidence DVD Vol. 2 3. Hydroplates vs. Plate Tectonics Bonus: Origin of Earth's Radioactivity The Blu-ray disc contains all parts on one disc. And for now, save $10 with our special introductory pricing!

* Jaw-dropping, head-banging, socks blown off, eye-popping, baffled, shocked & stunned: Really. :) Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams have fun providing so many examples of evolutionists (chemical, stellar, biological) being jaw-dropping surprised, shocked, even stunned and horrified, when their huge discoveries contradict some of the most fundamental predictions of their materialist theories. * Head-banging: As reported by LiveScience, cutting-edge researchers running a major National Science Foundation evolution experiment admitted that, "If Darwin was right", they would have documented the evidence for his claimed insight on competition and the (supposed) tree of life. Instead, their results falsified Darwin's claim. Of the 60 species of algae being studied for a five year period, Charles Darwin predicted how well and how poorly such organisms would compete for resources, based on their respective distances from each other on the (supposed) tree of life. But of the outcome, "It was completely unexpected. We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin's hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right? ... We should be able to look at the [supposed] Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can't be predicted from the Tree of Life." For more, see LiveScience and rsr.org/darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life. * 2015 Update: One of many discoveries that could added to this list of shocked evolutionists is the black hole at 12.8 billion light years away the mass of 12 billion Suns that "simply can't exist" by the big bang theory, but does. * 2019 Update: Moon may be tectonically active, geologists shaken, is the headline in National Geographic. "A new look at Apollo-era seismic data revealed that the moon's insides might be warmer than scientists thought possible." See this also at rsr.org/tess#moon in our classic List of the Transient Events of the Solar System! * Stunned without the Foggiest Notion: So "astounding" are the "similarities" of Hox developmental regulatory genes across the animal kingdom that prominent evolutionist Sean Carroll wrote that, “no biologist had even the foggiest notion that such similarities could exist between genes of such different animals.” Because little in biology makes sense in the light of evolution, a world full of neo-Darwinist scientists never predicted this astounding consistency because, by their belief system, "The evolutionary lines that led to flies and mice diverged more than 500 million years ago..." So, this world famous biologist admits that, "Such sequence similarity was just stunning." Of course this falsified one of the most fundamental predictions of neo-Darwinism. [This item is a post-show update.] * Horrendous: Dr. David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., said in the journal Nature that the human and chimp Y chromosomes are "horrendously different from each other." Horrendously? Is that a scientific term? Why not just, "different?" Is Saturn horrendously different from Mars? Why horrendously so? Because for modern Darwinism to not lose face, chimps have to be shown to be our closest relatives. Yet 15% of the gorilla genome is closer to us, and the chimp's Y chromosome (that which makes us males... well, males...) is so massively different that we have yet more evidence on its face that the human genome is not 98.5% identical to the chim. For more, see rsr.rog/list-of-genomes-that-just-dont-fit. * Jaw-dropping: National Geographic quotes NASA's Messenger team member David Blewett saying, as RSR documents evolutionary scientists saying all the time regarding major observations that contradict predictions based on their most fundamental claims, "this jaw-dropping thing that nobody ever predicted," that Mercury has actively forming surface features, something judged impossible for a tiny, four-billion year old inert rock. :) * Socks Blown Off: Close-up photos showed the youthful appearance of Pluto as did the images of its largest moon: "We originally thought Charon would be an ancient terrain covered in craters," said New Horizons team member Cathy Olkin. "So when we saw the pictures this morning, it just blew our socks off." And panning upward from their feet, Discover Magazine reports on NASA's Pluto team including principal investigator Alan Stern's eyes popping out of his head. * Baffled by Asteroids that Look Like Comets: See phys.org, NASA, EarthSky, and AmazingSpace.  * And the Beat Goes On: For more really fun examples, just listen to today's program! And as an honorable mention, consider the response of the scientists who found the presence of modern bacteria, etc. in these allegedly 220 Mya microbes :) and the description of 42 "oddball" blue stars in the Milky Way! * More Baffling Still: After 150 years of searching, evolutionists have found the best evidence ever discovered for Darwinism, caught on tape no less...   Today's Resource: Please check out our newest science resource... The Global Flood and the Hydroplate Theory Blu-ray, 2-DVD Set or HD Download Real Science Radio co-host Bob Enyart presents the scientific evidence for Dr. Walt Brown’s model of the global flood, along with the relevant biblical material. Enyart also discusses Brown's opponents and contrasts both the vapor canopy and catastrophic plate tectonics with the hydroplate theory. DVD Vol. 1 1. Walt Brown, Creation Leaders, and Scripture 2. Hydroplate Theory & Scientific Evidence DVD Vol. 2 3. Hydroplates vs. Plate Tectonics Bonus: Origin of Earth's Radioactivity The Blu-ray disc contains all parts on one disc. And for now, save $10 with our special introductory pricing!

David Sabatini, MD, PhD, is an American Cancer Society Research Professor, a Member of the Whitehead Institute, and Professor of Biology at MIT. In 2020, he was co-recipient of the prestigious Sjöberg Prize—which promotes scientific research on cancer, health, and the environment—for discovering the mTOR protein and its role in controlling cell metabolism and growth. 1:55 – How his research lab has been impacted by the pandemic 3:04 – The history of how TOR was discovered, going back to a soil sample from Easter Island 5:25 – How mTOR is kind of like the general contractor for the cell (“Well, we need more proteins, we need more lipids, we need more mitochondria…”) 6:34 – If mTOR is the “general contractor,” then what is it building? And what are the signals that tell it to make things? 8:27 – “…80% of cancers have to find a way to turn on mTOR…” 14:34 – Why inhibiting mTOR to treat cancer isn’t such a straightforward proposition 18:50 – Research tools that he and his team have developed; for example, one of his students developed the first CRISPR libraries and some of the original CRISPR screening technologies 25:39 – On “molecular nutrition” and research into how diet affects you at the molecular level 27:24 – How ACS funding has impacted his work 30:12 – His message for cancer patients and caregivers

Phillip D. Zamore Bio: Phillip D. Zamore, Ph.D. has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2008. In 2016, he became the Chair of the RNA Therapeutics Institute, which was established at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2009. Dr. Zamore also is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, the department he joined in 1999, and he became the Gretchen Stone Cook Professor of Biomedical Sciences in 2005. Dr. Zamore received his A.B. (1986) and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University. He then pursued postdoctoral studies on the role of the RNA binding proteins in Drosophila development at The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Zamore's laboratory studies small RNA silencing pathways in eukaryotes and prokaryotes, including RNA interference (RNAi), microRNA, and PIWI-interacting RNA pathways. Dr. Zamore and his collaborators seek to use these insights to design therapies for human diseases, including Huntington's disease. Under Dr. Zamore's mentorship, the Zamore Lab has produced dozens of researchers working at top institutions both in the United States and abroad. In 2015, Dr. Zamore was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for Excellence in Scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. To date, Dr. Zamore has more than 150 publications and has been among the most highly cited researchers for more than a decade. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals and is in demand as a presenter at conferences and institutions worldwide. Dr. Zamore holds more than 20 patents, with other applications pending; he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. In 2002, Dr. Zamore co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA), a publicly traded biotech company which now has more than 1000 employees and multiple drugs in clinical trials. Alnylam's first drug, ONPATTRO, a first-of-its-kind RNAi therapeutic, for the treatment of the polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated (hATTR) amyloidosis in adults, was approved by the FDA in 2018. In 2014, he co-founded Voyager Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. Chair and Professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Phillip Zamore, joins the show to discuss a new method of gene silencing called RNA interference (RNAi). Tune in to learn the following: How the RNAi system is analogous to the basis of vaccination How specifically the method of RNAi prevents a protein from being made and what happens to the mRNA after it has been cut Why RNAi will never replace the knock-out method, and the benefit of combining both methods  Zamore states that the world's diseases can be divided into two broad categories: those with mutations in the genome that can be addressed by turning off the gene forever, and those with mutations in the genome that can be addressed by lowering the amount of a gene product, as opposed to turning off the gene completely. The gene knock-out method is used for the first kind of disease, and the effects of the knock-out are irreversible. This makes the method a good tool for studying model organisms in the lab, but rather risky as a therapeutic intervention for humans. This is where a new method called RNA interference comes into play and holds promise for the future of medicine and the treatment of diseases. RNA interference is a way of destroying messenger RNA (mRNA) in order to prevent the creation of a protein. Unlike other methods, RNA interference uses a natural cellular pathway, which makes it more effective than other mechanisms in turning off disease genes. And just like taking a drug, stopping this process means stopping any unwanted side effects, which means it's a lot safer and less risky than the knock-out method. There are currently two RNAi drugs on the market, both of which direct small RNA (sRNA) to the liver where the protein in question is made. By way of preventing the creation of that protein, the disease gene is turned down (almost off). Zamore explains why the liver is particularly amenable to these drugs, and the ongoing research and development taking place for drugs that target proteins made in other areas of the body. He also discusses the near-term goal of bringing to market an sRNA drug that blocks the production of a protein in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway. This drug would function as a replacement for statins, and comes with fewer side effects and would only need to be taken by a patient twice per year. Zamore brings an impressive amount of insight and information to the show, discussing a number of topics in depth but with enough clarity to follow along with ease. Learn more by visting his Google Scholar page at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xYLmV7YAAAAJ&hl=en.

Featured in Newslaundry on July 25th 2017 While Toxoplasma causes long-lasting infections that resist treatment, research on this neglected parasite promises to unveil new ways to treat malaria. But there is more to this microbe than meets the eye. Listen to our podcast to find out. References: 1. General introduction 2. TORCH member 3. CDC assigned category NPI 4. Early research and establishment as parasite: Ferguson, David JP. “Toxoplasma gondii: 1908-2008, homage to Nicolle, Manceaux and Splendore.” Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz 104.2 (2009): 133-148. 5. Use of the Sabin-Feldman test to find Toxoplasma infections worldwide 6. The life cycle of Toxoplasma 7. Toxoplasmosis as zoonosis 8. Studies in India to measure Toxoplasma infection 9. Concerns about sexual transmission of Toxoplasma (here and here) 10. Malaria in India (Searo, NCBI, NCBI, WHO) 11. Resistance of malaria to standard medication 12. Whitehead Institute’s use of CRISPR on Toxoplasma 13. Apicomplexans 14. Crippling host invasion protein CLAMP (here and here) 15. Aid to research on inflammation 16. No obvious symptoms of Toxoplasma infection in otherwise healthy people 17. Eye infections by Toxoplasma 18. Toxoplasma and neurological disorders (here and here) 19. Immunosuppression by HIV or by medical treatments, leading to reactivation of Toxoplasma (here and here ) 20. Toxoplasmosis in organ transplant recipients 21. Organ transplantation related diseases (here and here) 22. Anti-parasitic drugs to destroy active parasites 23. Infection in women passing to foetus 24. Spiramycin therapy 25. CDC recommendations (here and here) 26. Autophagy (here and here) 27. Interfering with autophagy damages and destroys parasites (here and here)

Season 2 features stories of converging paths. In our first episode, we meet Sophia Xu, a graduate student in Jing-Ke Weng’s lab at Whitehead Institute, who’s bringing together modern scientific methods and ancient Eastern herbal remedies to investigate how molecules from natural products interact with the human body—and maybe even find a cure for hangovers along the way. Produced by Raleigh McElvery and Conor Gearin. Music for this episode came from the Free Music Archive and Blue Dot Sessions at www.sessions.blue. In order of appearance: “Something Elated” — Broke for Free “Children of Lemuel” — Blue Dot Sessions “Rapids” — Blue Dot Sessions “Rafter” — Blue Dot Sessions “When in the West” — Blue Dot Sessions “Silver Lanyard” — Blue Dot Sessions “Falaal” — Blue Dot Sessions “Building the Sled” — Blue Dot Sessions “Thannoid” — Blue Dot Sessions

Melissa Withers is Founding Partner of RevUp Capital, a non-equity investment fund for B2B and B2C companies that are moving fast up a revenue-fueled growth curve. An experienced fund manager and biz builder with 100+ investments under management, With a background in customer experience and customer development, go-to-market strategy, and company storytelling, she began her career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, working the intersection of biological sciences and public policy, before starting her own entrepreneurial journey as a founder. She’s also worked in state economic development and youth advocacy and is a strong advocate for closing the diversity gap in technology and investment.

In this episode of AudioHelicase, Whitehead Institute Member Pulin Li talks about how her lab engineers cells in Petri dishes to communicate with each other and form patterns, recreating processes seen in embryo development—and how this work could eventually inform efforts to grow tissues in the lab.   Produced by Conor Gearin Music: Pierce Murphy, … Continue reading Whitehead Institute’s Pulin Li on creating multicellular patterns in a Petri dish →

Mansi received her A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College. During her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, she studied comparative genomics of early-diverging animal lineages including cnidarians, placozoans, and sponges. During her postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, she collected three banded panther worms from a marine pond in Bermuda and developed them as a new model system for studying regeneration. In 2015, She started her faculty position at Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where her research group studies many facets of the biology of panther worms.

Mansi received her A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College. During her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, she studied comparative genomics of early-diverging animal lineages including cnidarians, placozoans, and sponges. During her postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, she collected three banded panther worms from a marine pond in Bermuda and developed them as a new model system for studying regeneration. In 2015, She started her faculty position at Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where her research group studies many facets of the biology of panther worms.

"In the beginning, you don't want to waste your time trying to raise money of any kind from investors that are not inherently, organically interested in either you or your industry vertical. You are not going to convert those people to you. You want to go out and find the people that are already excited either about you or about the problem space that you're in. It's like starting with a warm audience." ~ Melissa Withers, Managing Partner, RevUp CapitalMelissa Withers is an experienced fund manager and business builder who has overseen investments in over 100 companies. She is currently a Founding Partner of RevUp Capital, a fund focused on B2B and B2C companies moving fast up a revenue-fueled growth curve. She’s a mentor in residence at TechStars Boston and she’s a strong advocate for closing the diversity gap in early stage investing. Hooray!Melissa's career began at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, where she worked at the intersection of basic research, communications and public policy. She was also co-founder and executive director of the Business Innovation Factory, an organization dedicated to the design and testing of new business models. I had my first Melissa Withers experience several years ago when she was a featured speaker at a Startup Grind Boston Firechat… I ate up every delicious morsel she served, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. Melissa has a unique ability to quickly cut through the startup BS and get down to the nitty gritty details of what’s really going on for a business.I love her fierce advocacy for startup founders everywhere… and she is a pioneer role model for women in tech and for female funders.Melissa shares candid stories from her early days as a woman in technology, advice for customer discovery, raising capital, and much more insights for the startup founder. Please connect with Melissa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwithers/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/MizWithers, and hop onto RevUp Capital to learn more about this innovative funding resource: https://www.revupfund.com/.Are you ready for startup mentoring or some delicious DIY advice for your new business? Then please visit my website, http://andelyons.com where you’ll find all the ways I can add value to your startup journey: strategy calls, pitch deck and one page business snapshot coaching, WBENC application support for women business owners - I’d be honored to mentor you through whatever you’re going through – so please don’t hesitate to reach out.If you’d like to receive an alert whenever I post a new episode, please follow me on Spreaker, Stitcher, iTunes, Spotify or Google Podcasts… and let’s connect on social media!Listeners - thank you so much for tuning in - I am genuinely grateful for your time and presence. Stay strong, stay focused – and please remember – you’ve got this – Cheers!Ande ♥

In this episode of AudioHelicase, Whitehead Institute Member Ankur Jain discusses how RNA can clump in cells and the diseases, such as Huntington’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that are associated with these aggregations.

Peter Attia, who was our very first guest on STEM-Talk, describes David Sabatini’s discovery of mTOR as one of his two favorite science stories. Today, Dr. David Sabatini joins us and gives us a first-hand account of how his research into rapamycin in 1994 as a graduate student led him to the discovery of mTOR, which we now know is a critical regulator of cellular growth. Our interview with David delves into his continuing research into mTOR, which has led to promising opportunities for the development of new treatments for debilitating diseases such as cancer, diabetes and neurological disorders. He also discusses mTOR’s role in healthspan and lifespan. David is a molecular cell biologist who, according to Reuters News Service, is on the short list for a Nobel Prize. David is on the faculty at MIT and heads up the Sabatini Lab at the Whitehead Institute. In today’s episode, we discuss: • Rapamycin, a macrolide antibiotic discovered in the soil of Easter Island • David’s discovery of mTOR while a grad student at Johns Hopkins • mTOR’s role as one of the major growth pathways in the body • mTOR’s role as a nutrient sensor • How mTOR inhibiton has become one of the hottest topics in longevity research • mTOR’s role in diseases, especially its connection to cancer • The role of RAG GTPases as key mTOR mediators • Protein intake and downstream mTOR activation • Research into ketogenic diets effect on longevity and healthspan • Whether David would take rapamycin as a means to enhance his longevity • And much, much more Show notes: [00:03:32] David talks about growing up in New York and having parents who immigrated to the United States from Argentina. [00:04:00] Dawn asks what David was like as a kid. [00:04:59] Dawn asks David about his decision to attend Brown University. [00:05:56] David talks about his decision to become a scientist and the time he spent in the lab of Al Dahlberg [00:06:53] Ken mentions that after his time at Brown, David headed off for Johns Hopkins to work in Sol Snyder’s lab, a professor known particularly for the work he and his colleagues did on the opioid receptor. Ken asks what drew David to Sol’s lab. [00:08:25] David talks about how as graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the M.D./Ph.D. program, he began trying to understand the molecular mechanism of rapamycin, a macrolide antibiotic discovered in the soil of Easter Island. Rapamycin was known as a potent antifungal, immunosuppressive with anti-tumorigenic properties. That research led David to the major discovery in 1994 of the protein to which rapamycin binds, now referred to as the mechanistic target of rapamycin, or mTOR. [00:11:46] Dawn asks David to give a high-level definition and overview of what mTOR does. [00:13:44] Dawn asks why the “m” in mTOR went from standing for “mammalian” to “mechanistic.” [00:14:11] Ken mentions that we now know mTOR is one of the major growth pathways in the body that is responsible for growth in both a positive sense and a pathologic sense. He goes on to mention that mTOR acts as a major switch between catabolism and anabolism, and asks David to explain why both of these processes are essential for survival. [00:16:10] Dawn asks how the two different mTOR protein complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, differ with regards to their activation and downstream function. [00:17:40] Dawn asks David about his decision to join the faculty atMIT and embark on a research-focused career there, starting his own lab at the Whitehead Institute rather than following the clinical path arising from his M.D. [00:20:50] Ken asks about how nutrients and other inputs are sensed and integrated by the mTOR complexes, given how one of the most fascinating aspects about mTORC1 is its role as a nutrient sensor. [00:23:46] Ken asks why both nutrients and growth factors are required to activate mTORC1. [00:25:54] Dawn mentions her interest in the connection of mTOR to aging,

In this episode, my good friend David Sabatini delves into his extensive work with the mechanistic target of rapamycin—better known as mTOR—and rapamycin. The compound rapamycin is the only known pharmacological agent to extend lifespan all the way from yeast to mammals—across a billion years of evolution. David, a professor of biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, shares his remarkable journey and discovery of mTOR in mammalian cells and its central role in nutrient sensing and longevity. Fasting, rapamycin, mTOR, autophagy, gedankenexperiments: having this conversation with David is like being the proverbial kid in the world’s greatest candy store. We discuss: mTOR and David’s student years [4:30]; Rapamycin and the discovery of mTOR [8:15]; The connection between rapamycin, mTOR, and longevity [30:30]; mTOR as the cell’s general contractor [34:45]; The effect of glucose, insulin, and amino acids on mTORC1 [42:50]; Methionine sensing and restriction [49:45]; An intermittent approach to rapamycin [54:30]; Rapamycin’s effects on cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegeneration [57:00]; Gedankenexperiment: couch potatoes on rapamycin vs perfectly behaved humans [1:03:15]; David’s dream experiment with no resource constraints [1:07:00]; and More. Learn more at www.PeterAttiaMD.com Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Welcome to another episode of Biotechnology Focus radio. This week we are discussing a recent investment, the engineering of a CAR molecule to combat cancer, a new surgical treatment and a study notifying us that viruses are literally falling to Earth. I am your host Michelle Currie, here to bring you the lowdown on the Canadian biotech scene. +++++ Ontario Genomics is investing $100,000 in one of Toronto’s newest start-up companies, Bright Angel Therapeutics to develop anti-fungal treatments. Fungal diseases are a growing global public health problem. Data compiled by the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections shows that “over 300 million people are afflicted with a serious fungal infection and 25 million are at high risk of dying or losing their sight.” Mortality due to fungal infections is primarily due to the development of resistance to the few available anti-fungal compounds. Ontario Genomics’ Pre-commercial Business Development Fund investment will help Bright Angel Therapeutics develop new compounds that are strategic to treating fungal infections. By targeting a stress response mechanism that enables fungi to become drug-resistant, this strategy will transform existing antifungals from ineffective to highly effective against all the leading fungal pathogens. Importantly, the stress response-targeting strategy being developed by Bright Angel enhances the efficacy of all three classes of current antifungal drugs. It is applicable to the leading causes of invasive fungal infection and prevents the emergence of drug-resistance. This strategy will allow the company to tap into the existing very large antifungal market. Bright Angel Therapeutics was erected by Drs. Leah Cowan and Luke Whitesell, now both at the University of Toronto, based on technology developed while they were at the Whitehead Institute in collaboration with the late Dr. Susan Lindquist. With the assistance of MaRS Innovation, the company has partnered with Schrödinger Inc. to take advantage of Schrödinger’s world class molecular modeling and drug design expertise and will continue to provide start-up guidance. +++++ The Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto is leading a research team spearheaded by senior scientist Dr. Naoto Hirano that may have engineered a molecule that has the potential to augment existing immunotherapies. This research is of relevance to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy – a therapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells (T-cells) identify and fight cancer cells. This study was published in the journal Nature Medicine. In layman’s terms, CAR T-cell therapies help the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells through a process that begins with the isolation of T-cells from patients. Next, these cells are genetically modified so that they produce the CAR molecule on their surface. The CAR molecule is a modified version of a T-cell receptor that is specifically engineered to recognize tumour cells. These genetically modified cells are then grown in a lab to increase their numbers before being infused back into patients. So far, CAR T-cell therapy has only been approved in the United States for blood cancers such as advanced lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. This is believed to be because existing CAR constructs don’t produce certain signals known to support the continued destruction of malignant cells, despite alerting the immune system of the presence of cancer. Dr. Hirano’s team has engineered a molecule that activates specific protein signalling pathways which are known to enhance the growth and function of T-cells. Hirano comments, “In our experimental models, the CAR molecule we engineered enabled T-cells to display more potent activity against different cancers, including solid tumours, which remain a challenge in the field. Current CAR T-cell therapies have shown limited success when treating solid tumours likely because of the harsh conditions faced by immune cells attempting to infiltrate the interior of the tumour. Furthermore, in these same models, we did not observe any worsening of potential side effects.” While these findings are preliminary, the performance of the engineered CAR T-cells created by Hirano’s team suggests that optimizing CAR molecules may help to broaden the effectiveness of CAR T-cell therapies against different cancers. Work in the future will entail translating these findings into clinical trials to explore the safety and efficacy of the engineered CAR molecule. +++++ The Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) is now offering a new surgical treatment for patients with lymphedema – swelling that is caused by the abnormal accumulation of lymph fluid in a body part, often the arms or legs. Lymphovenous bypass surgery consists of microsurgically connecting the affected lymphatic vessels to the venous system to facilitate lymph fluid flow, decrease the severity of the lymphedema, reduce the complications related to this chronic disease and improve the quality of life of lymphedema patients. The first lymphovenous bypass surgery to be performed at the CHUM took place on January 22, 2018, by Dr. Ali Izadpanah, on a 23-year-old man who developed secondary lymphedema following a motorcycle accident. For nearly three and a half years, Olivier Lagacé was limited in his movements because of the swelling in his left leg, which had nearly 35 per cent more volume than his right leg, despite continuous treatments (decongestive therapy and the wearing of compression socks). With the surgery performed at the CHUM, he will be able to hope for a reduction in not only the swelling in his leg, but in the number of treatments needed to control his illness. Lymphedema is a chronic disease for which there is currently no cure. Lymphovenous bypass surgery was developed in Japan a few years ago and, although it is now available at many centres in the U.S., it is still not easily accessible by Canadians with lymphedema. As a university hospital centre, the CHUM is presently working on developing a multidisciplinary clinical and research unit for lymphedema treatment that will make it possible not only to treat patients with this disease, but also to create a prospective database related to patients’ post-operative quality of life improvement. With its microsurgical simulation laboratory, which opened a year ago on the premises of the Direction de l’enseignement et de l’Académie CHUM, the hospital centre is also equipped and has set plans to contribute to lymphovenous surgery training and the development of new methods specific to this type of surgery. +++++ Although there are many things people would like to fall for – whether it be in love or for a joke – viruses are most likely not one of them. Researchers from Canada, Spain and the US have discovered that there are a phenomenal number of viruses circulating around the Earth’s atmosphere – and they’re falling back to the ground every day. This study marks the first-time scientists have quantified the viruses being swept up from the Earth’s surface into the free troposphere (layer of atmosphere beyond Earth’s weather systems but below the stratosphere where jet airplanes fly). The viruses can be carried thousands of kilometres there before descending back to the Earth’s surface. University of British Columbia virologist Curtis Suttle, one of the senior authors of a paper in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal that outlines the findings says, “Every day, more than 800 million viruses are deposited per square metre above the planetary boundary layer—that’s 25 viruses for each person in Canada.” This study brings to light how nearly identical viruses can traverse time and space and seemingly “pop up” around the globe. Suttle adds, “Roughly 20 years ago we began finding genetically similar viruses occurring in very different environments around the globe. This preponderance of long-residence viruses travelling the atmosphere likely explains why—it’s quite conceivable to have a virus swept up into the atmosphere on one continent and deposited on another.” Bacteria and viruses are swept up into the atmosphere mostly from natural methods like small particles in soil or dust and sea spray. Suttle and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, the University of Granada and San Diego State University wanted to know how much of that material is carried up above the atmospheric boundary layer above 2,500 to 3,000 metres. At that altitude, particles are subject to long-range transport unlike particles lower in the atmosphere. The researchers found that billions of viruses and millions of bacteria particles are falling to earth per square metre per day. They used the high altitude of Spain’s Sierra Nevada Mountains to calculate these findings with deposition rates for viruses being nine to 461 times greater than the rates of bacteria. Bacteria and viruses are typically deposited back to Earth via rain events and Saharan dust intrusions. However, the rain was less efficient removing viruses from the atmosphere. Hitching rides with smaller, lighter particles like sea spray, viruses have the ability to stay at loftier heights for longer and give themselves a farther reach. The findings are an eye-opener as to how pandemics and other viruses spread around the world. Now the problem remains – what will fall and when? +++++ Well that wraps up another episode of Biotechnology Focus radio. If you have any questions, comments or story ideas, please contact us at press@promotivemedia.ca, and don’t forget to follow us on our twitter handle @BiotechFocus. I also wanted to mention that The 2018 Clinical Trials Conference hosted by Clinical Trials Ontario are taking place March 27-28, 2018 at the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto. It is an interactive and collaborative 2-day event that brings together over 350 people from industry, research, ethics, healthcare, non-profit, government and academia to exchange ideas, build relationships, and develop new strategies with respect to improving clinical trials and bringing more clinical trials to Ontario. For information about speakers, session topics, and registration, visit www.ctoconference.ca. Hope you all have a great week! From my desk to yours – this is Michelle Currie.

This week, we present two stories of doubt in science, from a mysterious illness to imposter syndrome.  Part 1: A sudden illness casts doubt on whether Maia Pujara will be able to finish her neuroscience PhD. Maia Pujara received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she developed a passion for science outreach, science communication, and promoting women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. She's a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health to study the brain regions that are critical for helping us regulate our emotions, learn about rewards, and make flexible, adaptive choices. Though focused when it comes to academic matters, Maia has always had a “breadth-over-depth” philosophy with hobbies and has so far taken up playing the guitar, playing the ukulele, radio DJ-ing, baking, mixology, palmistry, watercoloring, knitting, crocheting, ice-skating, ultimate frisbee, improv, acting, and screenwriting. Follow her on Twitter @neuro_sigh Part 2: After growing up under humble circumstances in St. Lucia, Whitney Henry feels like an imposter in her PhD program at Harvard. Whitney Henry is originally from the beautiful Caribbean Island of St Lucia. She relocated to the US after receiving a full presidential academic scholarship from Grambling State University where she completed her BS in Biology with a minor in Chemistry. She earned a PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Dr. Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Her research focuses on identifying biological processes that drive tumor relapse following chemotherapy in ovarian cancer. When she is not engaged in lab, Whitney enjoys mentoring and traditional Caribbean dancing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Norris Cotton Cancer Center Grand Rounds - Diwakar R. Pattabiraman Ph.D. Senior Research Associate, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

This episode was a blast. It was a tropical exploration of biology, life extension, and all good things. This included a lot of Carmenere wine and good old-fashioned ball busting. I was joined by: Peter Attia, MD (@peterattiamd), who rejoins the show (catch his last appearance here). He is a former ultra-endurance athlete (e.g., swimming 25-mile races), compulsive self-experimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is one of my go-to doctors for anything performance- or longevity-related. Peter earned his MD from Stanford University and holds a BSc in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He did his residency in general surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and conducted research at the National Cancer Institute under Dr. Steven Rosenberg, where Peter focused on the role of regulatory T cells in cancer regression and other immune-based therapies for cancer. David M. Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D. (@DMSabatini) of MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. David is on a short list for the Nobel Prize for his work in elucidating the role of rapamycin and mTOR. Navdeep S. Chandel, Ph.D., the David W. Cugell Professor of Medicine and Cell Biology at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. Nav established his lab there to further the understanding of how mitochondria work as signaling organelles to regulate physiology and pathology. He is also the author of Navigating Metabolism. Perhaps you've heard of people in Silicon Valley taking metformin, rapamycin, and supplements for longevity. In this conversation, we dig into the real science, what current evidence supports (or doesn't), and other important matters like how to staple properly, which fonts reasonable people use, and why Borat is a genius. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement -- right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

David Form is a Biology Teacher at Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton Massachusetts. He has taught several levels Biology, including AP Biology and a variety of electives, several of which he created for his district. David is credited with bringing many biotechnology resources to his school through his implementation of the BioTeach grant. David has an expertise in bioinformatics and regularly presents at conferences and develops curriculum focussing on bioinformatics and evolution. These include at MABT conferences, several presentations as part of the Wolbachia Project, at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, presenting for the International Society for Computational Biology, and developing curriculum over several years for the Harvard University Life Sciences Outreach Program.

On 6 July, the spacecraft Soyuz MS-01 is scheduled to blast-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, headed for the International Space Station (ISS). On board, will be Dr Kate Rubins, who, along with Anatoli Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi, will be part of the 48th expedition to the ISS, due to return in November this year. Before training with NASA, Kate worked as a microbiologist, most recently at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where she worked on emerging viruses such as the Ebola and Lassa viruses. For this month's podcast, we caught up with Kate as she prepared for her mission, and chatted about the experiments she'll be undertaking in space, what it's like to train to be an astronaut, and whether a pipette works in microgravity... Image credit: NASA, public domain Music: Podington Bear – Bountiful Alex Fitch – Ronny

What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn. David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Dr. Hidde Ploegh is an immunologist at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. He uses alpaca DNA and cloned mice to try and tackle some of the most difficult diseases affecting humans today. This episode features panelists Wyatt Cenac, Jo Firestone, and Emmy Blotnick. Hosted by Chris Duffy. 

Irene is a research scientist and bioengineer at ETH Zürich, where she works on building new solutions to the acute threat of complete microbial resistance to currently available antibiotics. She graduated as a biotechnology engineer/MSc from the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie in Strasbourg. For her PhD studies she joined the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT. She is convinced that now, more than ever, a prosperous future for our planet hinges on pushing the boundaries of science further, and applying our skills and knowledge for the common good.

This Communications Forum special event will explore the differences and similarities in the kinds of knowledge available through inquiry in the sciences and humanities, and the ways that knowledge is obtained. The panelists will be historian, novelist, and columnist James Carroll; philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein; author and physicist Alan Lightman; and biologist Robert Weinberg. Seth Mnookin, Associate Director of the Forum, will moderate. Speakers James Carroll is a historian, novelist, and journalist. His works of nonfiction include An American Requiem, which won the National Book Award, and Constantine's Sword, now an acclaimed documentary. Writing frequently about Catholicism in the modern world, Carroll has a prize-winning column in The Boston Globe. He is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist and the author of ten books, including, most recently, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein is on the World Economic Forum's Global Council of Values and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 2011. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. In astrophysics, he has made fundamental contributions to gravitation theory, the behavior of black holes, and radiation processes in extreme environments. His 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller, and in 2000, his book The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and teaches in the Graduate Program in Science Writing. Robert A. Weinberg is one of the world’s leading molecular biologists and the discoverer of the first gene known to cause cancer. His work focuses on the molecular and genetic mechanisms that lead to the formation of human tumors, and his recent work has examined how human cancer cells metastasize. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. Weinberg is Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Seth Mnookin is Associate Director of the MIT Communications Forum and Acting Director of MIT's Gradute Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was published in 2011.

We make split second decisions about others – someone is male or female, black or white, us or them. But sometimes the degrees of separation are incredibly few. A mere handful of genes determine skin color, for example. Find out why race is almost non-existent from a biological perspective, and how the snippet of DNA that is the Y chromosome came to separate male from female. Plus, why we're wired to categorize. And, a groundbreaking court case proposes to erase the dividing line between species: lawyers argue to grant personhood status to our chimpanzee cousins. Guests: David Page – Biologist and geneticist, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stephen Stearns – Evolutionary biologist, Yale University John Dovidio – Social psychologist at Yale University Steven M. Wise – Lawyer, Nonhuman Rights Project Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We make split second decisions about others – someone is male or female, black or white, us or them. But sometimes the degrees of separation are incredibly few. A mere handful of genes determine skin color, for example. Find out why race is almost non-existent from a biological perspective, and how the snippet of DNA that is the Y chromosome came to separate male from female. Plus, why we’re wired to categorize. And, a groundbreaking court case proposes to erase the dividing line between species: lawyers argue to grant personhood status to our chimpanzee cousins. Guests: David Page – Biologist and geneticist, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stephen Stearns – Evolutionary biologist, Yale University John Dovidio – Social psychologist at Yale University Steven M. Wise – Lawyer, Nonhuman Rights Project Descripción en español

Dr. James Berger is a Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Biopysical Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He received his PhD in Biochemistry and Structural Biology from Harvard University in 1995. Afterwards he was an independent research fellow at the Whitehead Institute of MIT until 1998. James then joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he remained for 15 years until coming to Johns Hopkins University in 2013. James has received many awards and honors during his career, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the American Chemical Society Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Schering-Plough Scientific Achievement Award, a Packard Fellows award, and election to both the American Academy of Arts and sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Tuesday, March 15, 201111:45 a.m. - 3 p.m.National Press ClubWashington, DCWelcoming RemarksThe Honorable John Edward PorterChair, Research!America Panel 1(Pictured left to right)Moderator: Michael Riley, Managing Editor, Bloomberg GovernmentThe Honorable Mike CastleFormer Member, U.S. House of Representatives (1993-2011)Harry Johns, MBAPresident and CEO, Alzheimer’s AssociationThomas R. Frieden, MD, MPHDirector, Centers for Disease Control and PreventionVictor J. Dzau, MDChancellor of Health Affairs, Duke UniversityCarolyn M. Clancy, MDDirector, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Panel 2(Pictured left to right)Moderator: Clive Crook, Senior Editor, The AtlanticEllen V. Sigal, PhDFounder and President, Friends of Cancer ResearchDavid C. Page, MDDirector, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical ResearchMargaret A. Hamburg, MDCommissioner, Food and Drug AdministrationFrancis S. Collins, MD, PhDDirector, National Institutes of HealthJohn J. CastellaniPresident and CEO, PhRMA

Susan Lindquist, Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, delivers the 12th Annual Dorfman Memorial Lecture. (December 15, 2009)