New Approaches to Biology Headline our New Season

Aug 22, 2024

Hello, world of biology and biomedicine! This week, we are pleased to announce our 14th season of Mendelspod. Wow. We began podcasting when sequencing a genome still cost $100,000. And it was long before Amazon was selling out of microphones and pajamas.

We’ve been recording some great new content over the summer. Here’s a quick preview.

Earlier today, we published an interview with biologist Michael Levin, a professor at Tufts University. This is the first show in a series we are calling ‘The New Biology.’

Mike has questioned some of the basic assumptions in biology, the most important being that we need to unify biology with chemistry to conquer the field fully. Mike wants to remind everyone that this is an assumption. Biologists can pursue different directions non-reductionist directions.

"I want to get across one very simple idea from which bioelectricity and a million other things flow—and I’m not the only one saying this—and that is the idea that the need to go down to the level of chemistry for understanding and control is just an assumption. It is not necessarily the optimal level,” he says.

Also in this series, we’ll be talking with Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin, who is out with a new book, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.” An ambitious attempt to naturalize free will, the book turns into an outstanding history of biology and evolution, an absolute tour de force. Kevin, too, is a non-reductionist.

And what of the reductionist gene-centric approach that we’ve all known and loved? We’ll be featuring a couple of geneticists, including Mendelpod return champion Nathan Pearson, on the path forward for genomics.

More and more genomics researchers want to see protein data as well. This fall, we will continue our series on proteomics with Chris Whelan of Janssen R & D, the chair of the Pharma Proteomics Project. Chris says we are just beginning to see the breakthroughs in drug development that have come from the large-scale proteomics studies of the past couple of years.

So join us as we fire up the rockets to take off into the next frontier for biological research.

Thank you for being the best part of Mendelspod, our listening audience. A special thanks to our paid subscribers, who have helped guarantee our continued journey into another year. Special thanks also to our sponsors, who bring us great content and help keep us on the air.

If you’re interested in sponsorship, have a story to share, or represent anyone you think would make a great guest on the show, reach out to me at theraltimpson AT gmail DOT com. If you have been a free subscriber, please consider a paid membership for the price of a couple of coffees per month. Your support means everything to us!