SciencePodcast_210806

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0:00:05.8 Sarah Crespi: Welcome to the Science Podcast for August 6th, 2021. I'm Sarah Crespi.
Each week, we feature the most interesting news and research published in Science and the sister
journals, first up this week, International News Editor, Martin Enserink talks about a moratorium on
prion research, after the fatal brain disease infected two lab researchers in France. Next, researcher
Abhay Goyal talks with intern Claire Hogan about his Science Advances paper on figuring out how
to reduce the massive carbon footprint of cement by looking at its molecular structure. Finally in a
sponsored segment, Director of Custom Publishing, Sean Sanders talks with researcher Ansuman
Satpathy about the benefits of supporting early career researchers.

0:00:53.0 SC: Now we have Martin Enserink, International News Editor for Science. We're gonna
talk about a moratorium on prion disease research in France. Hi, Martin.

0:01:02.0 Martin Enserink: Hey Sarah.

0:01:03.0 SC: And this is a story you actually edited, right?

0:01:06.0 ME: Correct. Yes, story by Barbara Casassus, freelancer in Paris, that I had the pleasure
of editing.

0:01:12.3 SC: Let's start with prion diseases. I think many people might be familiar with mad cow
disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is a fatal infectious brain disease in cows. In
humans, there is a prion disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and it also causes brain damage
and death, but prion diseases have some very unusual features, what's so unusual about prions,
Martin?

0:01:38.7 ME: Prions are really fascinating proteins that cause disease without there being any
virus or bacterium or anything else involved. They're proteins that misfold, that when they come
into contact with similar proteins can cause those proteins to misfold as well, so it is like an
infection, except there's no virus, but if prions enter your brain, they can cause proteins in your
brain to misfold and that destroys the brain tissue and causes slight holes in your brain, almost, and
eventually is always fatal.

0:02:12.2 SC: Prion disease hasn't been much in the news since about 2000 when the mad cow
outbreak finally ended in Europe, but now there's a moratorium on prion research in France, what's
happened?

0:02:25.8 ME: Yeah, it's really unusual, but the five French institutes that do this kind of research
decided to stop it for three months, but what happened is that two years ago, a lab worker in France
died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease, or BSE. And its
almost certain that she acquired this disease 10 years ago when she pricked herself in the lab with
forceps that was contaminated with prion tissue, so basically it was a lab accident, she died of a
horrible disease, and that was one case, but now there's a second case of a retired lab worker in
France. The new patient is still alive. The French don't know if she was also infected on the job, but

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they're erring on the side of caution and they've said let's stop this type of research for a while,
while we look into the case.

0:03:17.8 SC: How likely would it be for someone to catch a prion disease in the wild? Not in the
lab.

0:03:23.8 ME: Well, for variant CJD, that is the type that you get from contaminated beef, that's
virtually impossible now because there is no BSE anymore, or very very... It's very rare, so for
somebody of the age of the lab worker who died two years ago, that just would not happen, that's
why people think, she caught it in the lab, but there's also what's called classic CJD, that's the form
that's not related to mad cow disease, and for this new case, they don't know if it was variant CJD or
classic CJD. If it was classic, then it may not be related to her work in the lab, and sadly, there's no
real way to find out which type it is until after a patient dies and then they do a brain autopsy and
examine the brain and conclude which form it is. So we may not know for a while what type of
disease she has exactly.

0:04:16.0 SC: Yeah, this really points out how different it is if you get a stick with a potentially
prion-laden needle or sharp in the lab, it's different than say, you're working in a lab with a virus or
a bacteria.

0:04:29.5 ME: Yeah, it really is. Although, of course, there are other really dangerous diseases like
Ebola, and there have been accidents with Ebola, but even there your chance of dying is not 100% if
you become infected, and now there are also Ebola vaccines and with many other diseases you can
be treated, if you have a lab accident. But with prions, if you're exposed, you have a very long
period in which you don't know if you've become infected because the incubation period can be as
long as a decade or even longer, and if you are infected, there is no hope because the diseases are
always fatal.

0:05:03.9 SC: Right. Are the safety measures for working with prion similar to what's done with
other infectious diseases like Ebola?

0:05:11.8 ME: Yeah, the safety measures are already very strict, but the family of the patient who
died in France two years ago, they claimed they weren't strict enough, they've filed a lawsuit against
the institute where this woman worked, they say, it's basically manslaughter because she wasn't well
enough protected. But there are strict safety measures since then in France, they've become even
stricter, for instance, people can try to avoid the use of very sharp objects, they can use plastic
instead of metal knives, for instance. In the story that we have about this case, this week, there's a
researcher in Switzerland, who says he's gone even further, he doesn't really work with bovine
prions because they are so dangerous unless it's absolutely necessary, for instance, for medical
diagnostics, but not in research.

0:06:00.5 SC: So for the moratorium, is the idea to take another look at the safety procedures to see
what can be done?

0:06:06.0 ME: Yeah, what they want to do is examine this case, I think, and see what they can find

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out about an accident or if something happened that could have exposed this patient, and if
necessary, tighten the rules even further.

0:06:18.5 SC: One other unusual thing I saw in the story is that it's possible that prions can spread
through aerosols, now that probably wasn't known when a lot of these safety protocols were set up.

0:06:30.1 ME: This researcher in Switzerland that our story quotes, published an experiment back
in 2011 showing that with mouse prions, they can be aerosolized, and that's another way mice can
become infected. Of course, you can't do that kind of experiment with people, but this researcher
said he was really shocked when he found out because he realized that makes lab studies even more
dangerous, and he says he tightened the rules in his own lab at the time, but sadly he didn't attract
all that much attention. But it just shows that... Just how dangerous this field is and that researchers
internationally may have sort of to take another closer look.

0:07:09.6 SC: Yeah, there aren't that many people who do this kind of research. And as the story
says, one person has stopped working in this, maybe because of the dangers, but it's not a mass
exodus, not everybody is leaving.

0:07:20.1 ME: No, it's not. I think the researchers are all shocked when they hear a case like this,
it's really awful when somebody becomes infected on the job and dies, but it hasn't caused many
other people to leave the field, I think it may have caused them to work more cautiously.

0:07:34.9 SC: Yeah, I was really surprised by this number of accidents, 17 in the 100 or so
scientists working on this in France, and five of those accidents involved cutting or stabbing with
contaminated tools.

0:07:48.1 ME: Yeah, that's right. Other people said 17 of these accidents over a period of more
than 10 years isn't all that much, but when an accident can be this fatal, it does sound like like a
high number.

0:08:00.1 SC: The people who are staying in this, that are gonna keep working on prions, they must
think it's pretty important to keep learning more about these diseases.

0:08:06.6 ME: Yes, they do, because prion diseases still exist. Like I said, there's a natural form
that is not related to BSE, the cow disease, there's also a disease in deer called chronic wasting
disease. So there's a variety of this type of diseases and researchers think it's important to continue
this line of research, absolutely.

0:08:27.6 SC: Thanks, Martin. Martin Enserink is the International News Editor for Science. You
can find a link to the article we discussed at sciencemag.org/podcast. Stay tuned for a chat with
researcher Abhay Goyal about watching cement dry.

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0:08:50.0 Claire Hogan: We live in a world of concrete, from buildings to sidewalks, it's

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everywhere around us, but most of us don't stop to think about what goes into concrete or its
implications for the environment. This week in Science Advances, Abhay Goyal and colleagues
write about cement cohesion and how a deeper understanding of the physics of this process could
help reduce the carbon footprint of cement production, one of the biggest in the world. Abhay is
here to tell us about it. I'm Claire Hogan. Hi, Abhay.

0:09:16.8 Abhay Goyal: Hi.

0:09:17.5 CH: So we see concrete every day, but a lot of us probably don't know what it actually is,
so what is concrete and how is it different from cement?

0:09:26.8 AG: The actual building material you see in buildings, bridges, etcetera, is concrete, that
hardened material, and the cement is basically the glue of concrete, so when you make concrete,
you mix cement powder with water and you add in rocks, sand, gravel and other aggregates, and
then the cement reacts with the water and forms this really sticky substance that serves as the glue
for the hardened material.

0:09:51.0 CH: That is so interesting. You're right. Most people use them interchangeably. They
don't necessarily make that distinction.

0:09:56.8 AG: Yeah, I guess, it's really only an important distinction when you're involved in the
material, and a lot of people use them the same, 'cause they hear fact about one interchangeably
with the other.

0:10:06.5 CH: You mentioned in the paper that concrete isn't very sustainable because of the
carbon footprint of cement production, how big is that carbon footprint and how does the cement
making process create greenhouse gases?

0:10:18.8 AG: Cement production accounts for about 8% of global CO2 emissions.

0:10:23.4 CH: Wow.

0:10:24.0 AG: Yeah, and it's an incredibly high number when you think of it as just one industry. If
you put that in terms of countries, it would be the third highest polluting country after the US and
China. Where the emissions actually come from is the cement is made from limestone, which is a
calcium carbonate, and when you're making cement, you mix the limestone with clays and other
materials in these large kilns, and during that process, all of the carbon in the limestone ends up in
the air as CO2. So, the emissions are actually just from the actual chemistry of the material. If we
want to try and reduce those emissions, we can either reduce our use of cement or change the make-
up of the material.

0:11:05.9 CH: Concrete is so important to us. We see it everywhere, it's not very attractive, but it
has its upsides, it's extremely durable, so why is cement plus water such a powerful combination?

0:11:17.3 AG: So that is actually exactly the question we were trying to answer with our paper,

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because what it comes down to in terms of the physics, is that at a very small scale, at the
nanoscale, really, the cement and water reaction produces these particles called calcium silicate
hydrate, or C-S-H, for short. And these C-S-H particles are these really highly charged particles that
stick together, I guess electrostatics is really what underlies the cohesion of the material, but it's not
really quite so simple as that, because these C-S-H particles are negatively charged, and if you've
taken any level of physics you know that two negative particles are supposed to repel each other, so
then why do we have this phenomenon where not only do they stick together, they stick together so
strongly that they can support skyscrapers.

0:12:09.0 CH: One thing that really struck me while reading this paper is that cement is so
ubiquitous, but the physics of cement cohesion have been kind of a mystery until this point, why is
that?

0:12:18.4 AG: Honestly, it's... Because it's hard. There's a lot of things that are going on when
cement reacts with water, so there are a lot of different chemical reactions that produce different
hydration products, so there are a lot of different things happening and they're all changing over
time. So, as cement hardens, there's a lot of very quick changes because you go from something
that's essentially a liquid, so it's some powder in water, and then over the course of about a day, it
turns into a really strong solid. It's one of the strongest solids we have, it's something that can hold
up a building, right? And there's a lot of things going on at really small scales that control the
macroscopic material properties, which is why it's been so hard to study.

0:13:02.5 CH: So basically, it's complicated, is the answer.

0:13:05.5 AG: Yeah, basically.

0:13:07.3 CH: Now let's dive into your research, how did you go about modeling the physics of
cement?

0:13:12.0 AG: I come from a physics background, a statistical physics background, and what we
were trying to do was trying to understand what components were really the essential components
that led to the very strong attraction that we see. And this was a process because it's definitely not
true that we knew from the start where we were gonna end up with this because at first we thought
that we could model certain things in a simpler way, one really good example of this is the role of
water. So when we first started, we thought that... And this is actually kind of the standard approach
that's been used successfully for other materials, so this is why we approached it this way, but we
thought that the water wasn't gonna play a very large role in this material. In similar materials
where you have this situation of two like-charged particles attracting, what's really the key is the
ions... The counter-ions in the solution, but what we ended up finding out was that the water
actually interact with the ions in a way that makes it behave very differently from water when it's in
just like a glass on your table. So when you go down to the nano scale and you have these particles
that are confining ions and water at separations of nanometers, the water behaves very differently
and actually works with the ions to form solid like glue, I guess, that binds the C-S-H particles
together.

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0:14:37.1 CH: And what do your findings tell us about how cement works? What do we know
about cement that we didn't know before?

0:14:42.6 AG: The main finding is that the combined ions and water really worked together to form
this solid like glue, and the importance of this is that it's really a very different mechanism than the
previous theoretical approach where it was thought that just ion correlations alone could explain the
attraction. To give you a sense of the magnitude of the difference here, the prediction of cohesion
strength that we give with our new model in our new theory is 100 times stronger than what was
predicted before.

0:15:13.0 CH: Wow.

0:15:14.7 AG: And that really starts to bring things in line with what we know about the material
macroscopically and how much weight it can hold up.

0:15:21.7 CH: Going back to the beginning, talking about the carbon impact of cement, how does
knowing the physics of cement production help us reduce its carbon footprint?

0:15:30.4 AG: There are a lot of different ways that we can reduce that carbon footprint. I guess the
easiest way is just to try and make cement more efficient, so can we make a building and instead of
using X amount of cement, we use 10% less cement. That would be one way to reduce the carbon
footprint there, assuming we can make it stronger so that the overall building integrity is not
affected. Another way is to make it more durable, which means in terms of the lifetime of the
material. So, if we make a building and it can stand an extra 20 years compared to the older cement,
then we've really, again, reduced the need for new construction in the future. And then the third,
which is, I guess in some way is the hardest, but kind of what we're really trying to go for is to try
and develop new cement-like materials. So, if we can replace the calcium in the cement, if we can
maybe use something like magnesium, then we don't need limestone, and that's where a lot of the
carbon emissions come from, the de-carbonation of the limestones, if we can replace it with another
material that functions just as well, that would be another way to reduce emissions.

0:16:41.0 CH: Right, so by understanding how the different component parts work together, you
could hypothetically replace one of them to make it more eco-friendly.

0:16:49.1 AG: Exactly.

0:16:49.7 CH: Does this have implications beyond just cement? Could these models be useful in
other materials?

0:16:54.2 AG: I think so, yeah. And you kind of mentioned this before, but the phenomenon of
like-charged attraction is not limited to cement. If we look in biology, for example, there's
membranes in cells, there's DNA in cells, and those also exhibit this phenomenon where the
packing of DNA, for example, where it's this highly charged object, but it really curls together and
sticks together in a way because of presumably the like-charged attractions. So there's no... People
have studied DNA using some of the older models that I mentioned were not really sufficient for

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cement, and so it would be interesting to try and maybe apply this towards that front to see if we
can maybe make some prediction about DNA that would be different from what people have seen
previously.

0:17:38.7 CH: Going from cement to DNA. Wow.

0:17:41.0 AG: One of the very exciting things about this project was that it was a collaborative
effort. So, I come from a physics background, but we also worked with engineers who have a better
understanding of the actual material properties, and again, my side was computational physics, there
were people who worked on the analytical theory that went into all of this, and so the full impact of
the project comes from having been able to combine all of those aspects.

0:18:08.1 CH: A very interdisciplinary effort there.

0:18:10.6 AG: Right.

0:18:11.6 CH: Thanks, Abhay.

0:18:13.0 AG: Thank you.

0:18:13.1 CH: Abhay Goyal is a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University. You can find a
link to the Science Advances paper we discussed at sciencemag.org/podcast.

0:18:20.9 SC: Up next, we have a custom segment sponsored by The Michelson Philanthropies, in
which Custom Publishing Director Sean Sanders chats with researcher Ansuman Satpathy about the
importance of supporting early career research.

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0:18:43.0 Sean Sanders: Hello, everyone. And a warm welcome to the sponsored interview from
the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office. And brought you by Michelson Philanthropies. I'm
Sean Sanders, Director and Senior Editor for Custom Publishing at Science. And today, I am very
pleased to have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Ansuman Satpathy. Ansu is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a member of the
Stanford Cancer Institute and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. His research group
focuses on developing and applying genome-scale technologies to study fundamental properties of
the immune system in health, infection, and cancer, he is also the 2018 winner of the Michelson
Prize for in Human Immunology and Vaccine Research. I'm going to be talking to Ansu about a
number of important issues impacting science and scientists today, including the importance of
diversity in STEM, the role of innovation, and why we should be supporting early career scientists.
Ansu, welcome, and thanks so much for being on the line.

0:19:47.3 Dr. Ansuman Satpathy: Yeah, thanks, Sean, for having me. It's really a pleasure to be
here.

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0:19:51.1 SS: So Ansu, the first question I wanted to ask you is, as an early career scientist, what
type of support are you looking for to advance your research?

0:20:00.9 DS: It's a good question. I think the most important thing in many ways for early career
scientists is a scientific freedom and the time to explore the questions that interest you the most and
pursue those results and ideas wherever they may take you, not having a lot of extraneous
responsibilities, whether administration or teaching or I'm a physician scientist, clinical
responsibilities early on in the first two or three years of you starting your lab is really important.
The second thing is people, one is the community of scientists that you can collaborate with, that
you can discuss your ideas in an open and free way and have a scientific exchange, and the second
part is recruiting people to your lab, and I think that's sometimes an often overlooked area of
starting a successful laboratory. Sure, you're at the bench a little bit, but it's really the people that
you bring into your lab that are doing the work and driving the innovation that you're hopefully
seeding. And then the third is resources, space, funding, and hopefully that isn't the limiting factor,
that as you grow as a lab, those things grow with it and you can depend on them, and I think that's
part of providing a very supportive environment as a department or as a university for early career
scientists.

0:21:12.1 SS: In a previous interview our Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp spoke to Dr. Gary
Michelson of Michelson Philanthropies, and he pointed out research done on Nobel Prize winners
in the hard sciences that showed about 80% of them had done the work for which they won the
Noble Prize before the age of 35. What is your reaction to this, particularly as it pertains to
supporting early career researchers as you just described?

0:21:38.7 DS: It's a great point, and I do think that there is a period of creativity right after you
finish your formal training, graduate school and post-doctoral fellowship that's really exciting. It's
your first time going out and pursuing your own ideas and not really having any limitations on what
you can pursue, and I think that leads to this sort of a high level of creativity that often exists at this
time.

0:22:01.7 SS: I'd like to shift the conversation slightly to talk about diversity in STEM, in science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics. Broadly, how do you see the current status of diversity
in STEM, do you think we're moving in the right direction?

0:22:17.0 DS: It's a really important topic and question, and I think it's important to start with the
problem, which is that what is clear is that what's critical to science and the scientific method and
process is diversity of thought, and that is thinking about ideas in different ways from new
perspectives from perspectives that hadn't been thought of before, and that's what brings the
innovation and the new insights into scientific questions. And so bringing in people from different
backgrounds, different thought processes, different experiences is just part of the scientific method.
And it's important to say that historically, science has been un-welcoming to diverse communities
of people, including women, including people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, and as a
result, the current representation of that diversity of thought is really low and unacceptable, and so I
think that's the problem.

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0:23:05.6 DS: So do I think it's getting better? Yes, I do. I think the progress is slow and we are still
a long way from where we need to be, but I do think that as a community and as leaders in the
community, many of us recognize that this is a problem and we're trying to move in the right
direction. We also recognize that it has to be a community effort. It's not just something that people
that are leading institutes or universities can do, it has to be systemic and acted by everybody in the
community, faculty, trainees, everyone. I do think it's getting better, and I think there is a movement
to really focus on this.

0:23:38.6 SS: What do you see as some of the barriers to greater diversity in science?

0:23:44.4 DS: I think there are many barriers, but I think the first barrier is really setting clear
expectations for a culture or environment that is inclusive and diverse. That is what we're trying to
achieve, and just stating that and stating all of the expectations and rules and procedures and
policies around achieving that goal is important to say explicitly. I think the second thing is a
flexibility in the workplace, I think what we've learned in the COVID era is that science can be
quite flexible. Some people can work from home, some people can come in periodically, some
people can take some time off as there as they have personal issues or family issues that arise, and
that's okay. And that can still be very effective. The third, I think is around hiring and promotion.
We should make sure that we are actively seeking a diverse workforce and representation in every
hiring decision that we make and understand that some people may have intrinsic biases, and have
an open and transparent process that we can address those. And I think the last thing is around
barriers to collaboration. There have been some recent discussions at the US government level
around what restrictions there may be to work with external collaborations, international
collaborators and addressing that and making sure that we have research security. Of course, as the
United States, but also lowering the barriers to engage in those meaningful collaborations is also of
importance.

0:25:08.9 SS: Now, you touched on this earlier in an answer to a previous question, but perhaps
you could talk a little bit more about the connection between diversity and innovation.

0:25:19.2 DS: Yeah, I think it's critical. I think diversity is the central part of the scientific process;
diversity in thought, diversity in experience, and I think that's in the same way that if you are asking
a scientific question, you would want to access every possible answer, every possible hypothesis
and go down each road, in the same way, diversity of thought and experience and people feeds into
that process. You want to have every person's input and hypothesis in how you could answer this
potential question, and so I think it's critical, and I think that that is borne out in all of these studies
that show that diverse teams of scientists produce better science and more impactful science.

0:26:00.0 SS: Now, Ansu if you had unlimited resources; space, money, staff, what do you think
you would do?

0:26:06.8 DS: That is the dream, isn't it? So I think that it changes the way that you frame your
scientific questions. So the way that we often frame our scientific questions now is how can we
achieve a short-term goal that will allow a paper to be published, the lab to get us the next grant,
and for us to continue going down this path. In some ways it makes the whole process disjointed,

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you're trying to achieve the first result or discovery, and then you take a break and then you get
funding to do the second discovery, and then you go on. And so I think if you had unlimited
resources or less limited resources, we can say, then that would allow you to build... Have... Ask
bigger questions, ask questions that you think are not well understood that... There hasn't been a lot
of progress made in that and in some ways disregard what you think the first milestone will be in
achieving that goal, and so I think it allows you to ask bigger, more high-risk questions that
potentially have the ability to achieve real change, but also have a high likelihood of failing, but I
think that's what we need to support.

0:27:10.8 SS: So talking about funding from a broad perspective, what are your thoughts on the
funding situation in science, and do you feel that it's difficult to break in for younger researchers?

0:27:24.3 DS: Well, I should start by saying that the US is an incredible place to do science, and
there are many terrific organizations, government programs, institutional programs that support
young scientists. So overall, I think it is a wonderful place to do science, it's not all doom and
gloom in a way. But with that being said, I do think there are gaps, and I think the early-career
stage, meaning post-doctoral fellowship, transitioning to independent faculty and starting your own
group, I think there are a number of gaps that could be improved. So, I think that one gap is the
early career awards for junior faculty who have just started their groups. There are a lot of private
foundations that support that stage of research, so you have an idea, but not that much data to
support it. On the other hand, you have a track record of having asked similar questions and having
succeeded as a trainee, and that's what allowed you to get your laboratory, and now you're just
asking to do that again, that space, that time, there is a significant gap. There are select government
programs that will fund that, such as the New Innovator Award or similar things, but I think it...
From the NIH, those programs are exceptions rather than the rule, and so I think that stage of
investment could be focused on more.

0:28:39.6 DS: So I think that's the first area where I would focus on improvement. The second is
around supporting the postdoctoral fellowship, graduate students moving to postdoctoral fellows,
and then supporting the early post-doctoral fellows. And there are again, programs to support that at
the government level, but they often come with a lot of strings attached. So you have to do this in
year one, this in year two, this in year three, and then in year four you have to be an independent
investigator or you're out. And I think that what supports innovation is flexibility, not every person
who's doing something in every field will have exactly the same progression, and I think we should
adapt for that.

0:29:17.7 SS: Now, bringing the broad down to the personal, you have won a number of prizes, and
I was interested to know how you feel they have helped you as an early career scientist.

0:29:28.2 DS: Yeah, maybe there are two impacts. The major impact is that it introduces you to a
community of scientists that maybe would not have come across your science before, and now
you're in forums where you can present your science, present your ideas, and you can excite more
people to work together or to just bounce ideas off of, and I think that personally for me, has led to
a lot of collaboration that wouldn't have happened otherwise, and oftentimes that collaboration can
be years and years and many, many papers.

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0:29:58.6 DS: The second thing is around resources around funding to pursue your most
interesting, most high-risk ideas. If you only have a certain amount of resources, you can only
afford to take X amount of risk, knowing that a lot of things will fail and you need to have some
successes to continue as a scientist in this ecosystem, and the more resources you have, the riskier
ideas that you can pursue and the more ideas you can afford to have failed, and so I think that leads
to, again, a different brand of science that's being done in the lab, than if we didn't have that
support.

0:30:30.7 SS: Well, Ansu, it's been a real pleasure talking to you and this has been a fantastic
conversation, so I wanted to thank you so much for making the time.

0:30:39.2 DS: My pleasure, thank you for having me.

0:30:41.4 SS: Our thanks to Michelson Philanthropies for making this conversation as well as the
new Michelson Philanthropies & Science Prize for Immunology possible. And my thanks to the
Science podcast audience for your interest and attention. Until next time.

0:30:58.1 SC: And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or
suggestions for the show, write to us at sciencepodcast@aaas.org. You can listen to the show on the
Science website at sciencemag.org/podcast. On the site, you'll find links to the research and news
discussed in the episode. And of course, you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. This
show was edited and produced by Sarah Crespi, with production help from Podigy, Megan
Cantwell and Joel Goldberg. Special thanks to intern Claire Hogan. Transcripts are by Scribie and
Jeffrey Cook composed the music. On behalf of Science Magazine and its publisher, AAAS, thanks
for joining us.

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