THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Artand the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects, Vero Rose Smith. Today’s guest is Lilly Radoshevich, PhD. Lilly is Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa, and runs a lab dedicated to exploring listeria. She also has a very cute dog Music was written, performed, and produced by Gabi Vanek. Transcript edited by Ellie Zupancic, University of Iowa Class of 2020 --FULL TRANSCRIPT-- THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I’m Vero Rose Smith, your host, and this is Art at the End of the World. Today’s guest is Lilly Radoshevich, Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa. Lilly received her BA in biology and French at Grinnell College, also in Iowa, and her PhD in biology and biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020. S: I’m really excited for your answers, and I’m sorry we have to do it in this format, but I appreciate your being flexible. If you could introduce yourself and tell us about your current role— R: My name is Lilly Radoshevich and I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. I am a scientist and I have teaching duties with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but my primary role is to run a research laboratory. We work on the host—that means us—and cell response to bacteria; in particular, the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, which you’ve probably heard about in the context of food recalls. The idea behind our research is to try to learn more about cell stress pathways, including pathways that are normally antiviral, in order to see whether or not we can target them. But, right now in this unprecedented time, I've actually switched some of my work to working in collaboration with Stanley Perlman and Wendy Mauri on Coronavirus; so that's kind of exciting. S: Wow—I know you're really passionate about Listeria because you have a dog whose name is Lister; that’s lovely. R: Yeah, that is after Dr. Joseph Lister, so equally nerdy; but he was really important for our times currently because he figured out that doctors were giving their patients bacterial infections. He was one of the first to figure out how to sanitize operating rooms and to instill in doctors to wash their hands, which is a very relevant and timely topic. S: Is it ever. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are professionally? What is your background and your training? R: Yes; I actually went to college in Iowa, at Grinnell College, just an hour away. At that point, I was really interested in human health. Initially what I thought I wanted to be was a medical doctor, but then I realized I was really more fascinated by scientific questions associated with human health, and that I was better suited to being in a laboratory. So, at Grinnell, I was given the amazing opportunity to do a summer abroad where I worked in a lab at the Pasteur Institute—which is one of the birthplaces of microbiology—and that inspired me even further. After that, I went and did my PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco, and after my PhD in which I was working on host cell stress responses that are altered in cancer biology, I switched back to working on host-pathogen interactions during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. So, because of that early exposure I had, I ended up applying and working for six years abroad at the Pasteur Institute. Then, after that, I applied for my own laboratory and the University of Iowa hired me—and that's how I found myself here. S: Thank you; and for anybody that might not know: where's the Pasteur Institute located? R: The Pasteur Institute is located in Paris, France, and it was initially established by Louis Pasteur himself. Right now, it's a very vibrant research campus in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, so there they currently work on lots of bacterial pathogens; they also work on the current Coronavirus and lots of emerging pathogens. The emerging pathogens are typically viral infections, so there's a laboratory currently working around the clock on Coronavirus there, too. S: To work and live in France did you need to also have fluency in the French language? R: Yeah; in general, science is very international, so many people do a postdoctoral fellowship abroad. We’re lucky, with English as our first language, that the language of science currently is English, so we publish and present in English. But, you don't just interact with your colleagues and labmates when you're living abroad. I actually was a French major at Grinnell as well, and that helped me a lot in my day-to-day interactions. You can imagine that some people work in a lab who might not have ever lived abroad—so interacting with my colleagues and labmates, speaking French, was really, really useful. But many of my American colleagues in that laboratory didn't speak French initially when they arrived—they took classes and developed the language during their postdoctoral fellowship. S: Amazing. Before college how did you get interested in this work? What originally drew you to this interest in the human body? R: I think at the most fundamental level, I'm something of a hypochondriac—and it is not a good time to be a hypochondriac right now—but very early on, in high school, I did the International Baccalaureate program. I had really excellent teachers in biology, and at that point, because we didn't we didn't have opportunities that people do today, a lot of it was looking at the world around us and at ecology. I also had great middle school teachers that inspired me to get into science early on—in terms of looking into native animals, for example. I'm from Colorado. There was a teacher at that time who got us involved in tracking bighorn sheep, and that was really exciting. But I was really always interested in this question about how viruses and bacteria make us sick; I've always been drawn to that kind of interaction, and I wanted to understand it at a molecular level. But I also wanted my work to give back in some way. So, my ultimate goal is that hopefully, down the line maybe thirty to forty years, some of the stuff that we're working on in my lab, and some of the questions that we’re working on, could be actually applied to human health—whether that is in the context of infection, or—one really cool thing is that you can learn things, using the bacteria or the virus as a tool, about our host cells that might be important in other human pathologies, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer; so one other thing is that fundamental research can, in host-pathogen interactions, actually help us learn about other really important human diseases. S: Could you give us a little bit more information about what exactly microbiology and immunology are? R: Yeah! Microbiology is the study of microorganisms; this is loosely determined by the size of the organisms that we work on—that could be bacteria, viruses. That could also be parasites. Immunology is the study of our immune system. So, broadly speaking, each one of our cells has the capacity to detect foreign intruders and that would be innate immunity. Then there's a number of cells that can come in and help protect our body from infection, and those are our innate immune cells that patrol all the time. These would be cells like neutrophils or macrophages that eat up pathogens and could be thought of as first responders to an infection. Then there's a branch of immunology that studies our adaptive immune response. I think, probably, you've been hearing a lot about the idea of seroconversion—that means when your body has started to make antibodies to a pathogen. Another test that we can use in the Coronavirus example is whether or not people have actually been infected, but didn't realize because they are asymptomatic—their adaptive immune system will make a response that can be detected through a blood test. S: Follow-up question: has studying immunology and microbiology helped you personally address your hypochondriac-isms? R: I am not sure. I would say that, especially during our stay-at-home, shelter-in-place mandate, every day I think seasonal allergies might be the Coronavirus. I'm sure I'm not the only one. S: You are definitely not. R: Even though I understand it, I would say the really difficult piece of this particular disorder is that you could be carrying the virus, infected for many days, before you show symptoms. For influenza, that period is a lot shorter, so you can know when you're infected—so I think Coronavirus is maybe worse for a hypochondriac. S: We've kind of touched on one way the world might end according to microbiology and immunology, because we're all living it right now, but can you either expand on our current potential world ending or tell us some other ways the world might end according to your expertise? R: Yeah. I just want to also highlight what a timely topic you picked with this podcast and this ser
