The EMBO podcast

EMBO

5.0 (1)
LIFE SCIENCES

The EMBO podcast

A podcast about the life sciences and science policy produced by EMBO.

12/01/2023

The band and the rhythm

1 December 2023 - Cells use a transcriptional-translational regulatory loop to maintain circadian rhythms. But John O’Neill and collaborators have shown that a cell can lose its nucleus and still keep time. O’Neill and his postdoc Andrew Beale talked to us about how investigating a mysterious band on a western blot led to a new understanding of the red blood cell’s clockwork mechanism. Their preprint was reviewed through Review Commons and published this year in The EMBO Journal. We also speak with Karin Dumstrei, who handled the manuscript at Review Commons, about the editor’s role in managing the peer review process. It is the story of a weird band on a western blot, pandemic disruptions, and the importance of tone in peer review.

48 min
10/30/2023

It’s viruses all the way down: a conversation with Hsiao-Han Chang, Gytis Dudas, and Hedvig Tamman

30 October 2023 - As COVID-19 and flu season descends on the northern hemisphere, we talk with three new research group leaders who work, among other topics, on host-virus interactions: Hsiao Han Chang at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, Gytis Dudas at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and Hedvig Tamman at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Their work ranges from the population genetics of viral spread in vertebrate hosts, to the biology of spillover events, to the tiny arms-races between bacteria and phage. Chang is a part of the EMBO Global Investigator Network; both Dudas and Tamman were awarded EMBO Installation Grants this year to help establish and grow their laboratories.

57 min
07/14/2023

Who reviews the reviewers?

14 July 2023 - EMBO Member Pavel Tomancak is a senior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. His lab investigates the evolution of gene regulatory networks and tissue morphogenesis. He recently became the Director of the Central European Institute of Technology in Brno, in the Czech Republic. He is active on social media, where he discusses his research – and science policy, preprints, peer review and Open Science. He and Oded Rechavi recently wrote a commentary that sparked an online debate on the thorny topic of recognizing author contributions. Together with EMBO Press’ Thomas Lemberger, we discussed his career, preprints, peer review, artificial intelligence, and more (including a Czech science fiction reading list).

1h 1m
03/15/2023

"A steppingstone to an Open Science future": EMBO Press moves to full Open Access

EMBO announced that from 2024 on, all papers published in The EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports will be published Open Access and that freely accessible source data will be included in all EMBO Press journals. In this episode of the EMBO podcast, we discuss the new Open Access policy with Bernd Pulverer, Head of Scientific Publishing at EMBO. He also talks about the role of journals in a preprint and Open Science world. Thomas Lemberger, Open Science implementation at EMBO, speaks about the past and future of Open Access and Open Science at EMBO Press. University of São Paulo biochemist Alicia Kowaltowski talks about some of the consequences of Open Access and how to tackle them.

51 min
01/27/2023

“Our special feature as humans is communication”

27 January 2023 - “I really think our special feature (as humans) is communication and shared knowledge,” neuroscientist Cori Bargmann told the EMBO podcast. Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York, where her group studies neurobiology using C. elegans as their main model. Cori Bargmann has been an Associate EMBO Member since 2011. On this episode of the EMBO podcast we discussed the evolution of behavior, open science, a worm’s sense of smell, the Human Brain Initiative, mentorship, and much more.

55 min
01/05/2023

“The biologists were pretty darn good with their microscopes”

5 January 2023 - “Nobody is doubling the number of cell types,” says Steve Quake, “but what we have now is the full molecular portrait of those cell types”. Quake, who led a decade-long effort to create full organism molecular cell atlases, served for six years as co-President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. He succeeded neuroscientist Cori Bargmann as Head of Science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Quake came to biology after undergraduate and graduate work in physics and mathematics, and his research group at Stanford has maintained a strong technological and quantitative focus. On this episode of the EMBO podcast, we discussed what a cell type is, Open Science and preprints (Quake and student Michael Swift are currently experimenting with Review Commons – “the jury’s still out,” he says), the role of funders, how to start a company, and much more.

40 min
12/23/2022

ALTernative immortality

23 December 2022 - “It would be very surprising if you ever had a mechanism in nature that would be 100%. Biology never seems to be so clear cut.” That was Roger Reddel’s reaction to his then Ph.D. student Tracy Bryan’s discovery that many cancer cell lines do not express the enzyme telomerase, but still maintain long telomeres throughout the immortalization process. Their 1995 paper “Telomere elongation in immortal human cells without detectable telomerase activity” has been cited over seventeen hundred times. It is included in The EMBO Journal’s 40th-anniversary collection of ground-breaking articles, all free to read. On this episode, Reddel and Bryan discuss how the project began, the key experiments, and the consequences of Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres (ALT) for cancer research. Miguel Godinho Ferreira discusses the paper’s impact in the broader setting of genome instability and DNA repair.

49 min
12/21/2022

Peer review, preprints, and the pressures of clinical research

21 December 2022 - BMJ Open is an open-access medical journal with an open peer review process, which includes asking referees to sign their reviews. The journal is unusual in that it not only publishes peer-reviewed research, but it also runs its own experiments on new publication and review practices, complete with control groups and publication in (other) scientific journals. Adrian Aldcroftfor this episode of the EMBO podcast joins Review Commons project leader Thomas Lemberger for a conversation about peer review, preprints, open science, and the role of editors in basic and clinical research.

42 min

A podcast about the life sciences and science policy produced by EMBO.

Creator

EMBO
Years Active

2021 - 2023
Episodes

25
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2022 EMBO
Show Website

The EMBO podcast

Science

Science

Updated Weekly
Language Learning

Language Learning

Updated Biweekly