We Will Dream with Our Eyes Open

I will tell the story of how three pioneers of molecular biology made breathtaking insights into the nature of the genetic material based on simple experiments with a bacterial virus (phage) called T4. Using T4, Seymour Benzer brought the genetic material down to the level of nucleotides and defined the gene as a functional unit (cistron). Building on the work...

Key pieces of our understanding of how DNA encodes genes were established in the 1950's and 1960's using elegant genetic experiments on two genes called rIIA and rIIB in bacterial virus T4. The abstract and powerful logic of these experiments never required knowing what these genes actually do, and the molecular functions of rIIA and rIIB have remained unknown to...

Cilia are complex macromolecular machines that are built using long polymers of α-and β-tubulin and come in two forms, motile and non-motile. Motile cilia provide movement for unicellular organisms, and in multi-cellular organisms move surrounding fluids as well as receive and transmit signals from and to the environment and adjacent cells. It is an organelle that is only 250nm by...

About 100 years ago Paul Erlich used the term Horror Autoxicus to describe the idea that the immune system could attack, via antibodies, foreign materials, but not the content of its host. Although there was evidence that the idea was incorrect, the notion of autoimmunity didn’t reach full strength until about the 1950s, with experiments showing that animals, including...

The East Coast Seedkeepers, made up of members of the Nanticoke and Lumbee communities, will discuss how they are exercising their sovereignty, revitalizing Indigenous peoples' relationships with plant ancestors, and strengthening community food systems. The team envisions a regenerative food system where ancestral seeds support environmental resilience, strengthen local economies, and empower Indigenous people and communities. Their interdisciplinary work encompasses...

NativeBio is a global leader in creating safe data sharing tools for our multipolar future. The jostling for position in an ever competitive data and artificial intelligence market has the potential to become culturally, economically and physically violent. In this competition and race to elucidate or make practical new resources, Indigenous spaces and knowledge are now and long been low...

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the biomedical and health ecosystem, from drug discovery and translational research to public health analytics and clinical care delivery. Its expanding role across healthcare and the life sciences brings a juxtaposition of transformative potential and societal risk that remain closely intertwined. In this talk, I will explore case studies that highlight radical breakthroughs and emerging risks...

The realities of how Asian and certain EU countries are addressing the energy trilemma of climate change/adaptation, energy security and economic growth/affordability may not only prove to be resilient, but also may be permanently reshaping geopolitics. War driven volatility has accelerated energy security driven adoption of the energy transition, often in unexpected ways that runs counter to the conventional...

An organism’s genome encodes information about how to live in the world. This means information about the internal world, the organism itself, its structure, metabolism and its replication, but also information about the external world, how to sense and respond to it. The information that is coded in the genome is learned over evolutionary time as replication errors result in...

The last 40 years has seen a sea change in the field of circadian rhythms. This 24- hour timing system (circadian = circa dia = about a day) has gone from a mystical, barely credible phenomenon to a real scientific enterprise. The contemporary molecular era was preceded by a foundational genetic study in Drosophila (fruit flies) published in 1971 by...

The proper functioning of any cell depends on the regulated expression of its genes. In unicellular organisms, like bacteria and yeast, gene expression is dependent on the cellular environment. In multicellular organisms, like humans, each different cell type expresses the genes required for its specialized functions. One mechanism of gene regulation involves transcription factors, proteins that bind DNA and can...

Currently, the largest number of FDA approved drugs work by manipulating the activity of ion channels  at the plasma membrane. But the plasma membrane comprises 2–3% of the total cellular membrane, the  remaining 98% is present in organelles, and the latter harbor hundreds of transmembrane proteins that  can potentially transport ions. Organelles perform specific biochemistries within their lumens. This  biochemistry...

Public discourse has been dominated by sweeping proclamations about AI's transformative benefits, yet has confused the many different things that the term "AI" refers to. While attention has been focused on flashy generated videos and chatbots, there has been quiet, steady progress on a different kind of AI: The AI that can detect tumors, flag cardiac arrhythmias, monitor vaccine spoilage,...

Modern frontier LLMs are descendants of a single model architecture: the Transformer, first published in 2017. Transformers are data hungry. A state of the art LLM today is trained on text that would take an average reader on the order of 100,000 years to read. Internet data, digitized books, and more recently, expert annotation marketplaces have enabled this scale of...

AI is fundamentally changing healthcare delivery, yet we hear little about the patient experience amidst the transformation or examine how the promise of AI meets patient expectations. This presentation will describe patient expectations and experiences with Health AI, focusing on the specific case of Ambient Scribe technology. Integrating quantitative data from patient surveys with qualitative insights from physician interviews, we...

Breakthrough therapies dominate conversations about cancer medicine. Progress is often measured in trials, innovation, and outcomes. For families living inside illness, however, the story looks much different. Treatment unfolds across hospital hallways, kitchen tables, and long stretches of uncertainty that no protocol prepares you for.
Betsy Larrabee draws on seven years of writing about her family’s experience with pediatric leukemia,...