At Meet the Scientist, we want to reveal more about scientists, the work they do, and what makes them tick. We will ask them what they are are up to now and what is next. How is the science moving forward to solve some of the intractable problems of our times? What keeps them going in a tough, competitive field? What do they see for the future of research, education, and training? We hope to show you a glimpse of what scientists are really like and what is going on in cutting-edge research today.
It never occurred to me that the human body and a coral reef have a lot in common--until I spoke to Forest Rohwer for this podcast.
Rohwer is a microbiologist at San Diego State University, and he studies how microbes make coral reefs both healthy and sick. Just as we are home to a vast number of microbes, coral reefs depend on their own invisible menagerie of algae and bacteria to get food, recycle waste, and fend off invaders. But as Rohwer writes in his new book, Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas, we humans have thrown this delicate balance out of kilter, driving the spread of coral-killing microbes instead.
We talked about Golden's research into time--in particular, how living things know what time it is. While you may have heard of our own "body clock" that tracks the 24-hour cycle of the day, it turns out that some bacteria can tell time, too. Golden has discovered how evolution has produced a molecular clock inside microbes far more elegant than any manmade timepiece.
How many genes can a species lose and still stay alive? It turns out, bacteria can lose just about all of them!
In this podcast, I talk to Nancy Moran of Yale University about her fascinating work on the microbes that live inside insects such as aphids and cicadas. After millions of years, they have become stripped down creatures that are revealing some profound lessons about how superfluous most genes are--at least if you live inside a host.
In this podcast I talk to Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington about the mathematics of microbes.
Bergstrom is a mathematical biologist who probes the abstract nature of life itself. We talk about how life uses information, and how information can evolve. But in Bergstrom's hands, these abstractions shed light on very real concerns in medicine, from the way that viruses jam our immune system's communication systems to to the best ways to fight antibiotic resistance.
In this podcast I talk to Bonnie Bassler, a professor at Princeton and the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology.
Bassler studies the conversations that bacteria have, using chemicals instead of words, Her research is not only helping to reveal how bacteria work together to make us sick, but also how we might interrupt their dialogue in order to cure infections.
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