Night Science
66 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 34 ratingsWhere do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
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Episodes
Bo Xia and a tale of tails
February 28, 2024 19:00 - 31 minutes - 21.7 MBBo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in human evolution. In this out-of-the-ordinary episode, we talk about this specific science project: how did Bo, with Itai’s help, discover the mutation that let us lose our tail? For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-...
Todd Golub and bottom-up creativity
February 26, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutes - 24.7 MBProf. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he tells us about his artist-in-residence program at the Broad. As its director, he aims to hire researchers who look like they'll be changing fields in the future, combining boldness with humility – the "blank slate" with which they enter the new field is the best reci...
Sean B. Carroll – he told some good stories
February 12, 2024 06:00 - 39 minutes - 26.8 MBSean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other people’s music, Sean attributes his own creativity to his insatiable habit of reading about other people’s science – that’s how he “fertilizes his garden”. To tell a good story, he urges us to seek the emotions. But storytelling is not just for communication: in a research project, ...
Nigel Goldenfeld and the jazz improvisations of science
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 40 minutes - 27.8 MBNigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a “jazz musician”, where collaborators have to develop the beauty of the composition – or here, the science – on the spot. ...
Nigel Goldenfeld and the jazz of impossible problems
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBNigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a “jazz musician”, where collaborators have to develop the beauty of the composition – or here, the science – on the spot. ...
It takes two to think
January 15, 2024 16:00 - 23 minutes - 16.2 MBDespite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. By talking with other people, we not only pool the information or ideas that each of us individually lacks, but we are also able to improvise new thoughts that are not accessible to us alone. In this episode, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher talk through ...
Rich White on living on the edge cases
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutes - 30.2 MBRich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often the process that led to a particular result can be more interesting than the result itself – something that is true not only in science but also in fields such as art or writing. He emphasizes that the best research strategy depends greatly on the researcher’s pers...
Carolyn Bertozzi and a long game called science
December 25, 2023 06:00 - 40 minutes - 28 MBCarolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In this episode we talk about how the process of science is unstructured, so you don’t know when and where the next idea is going to come – sometimes even at the supermarket checkout line. For Carolyn, science is a long game, where one person’s negative result might be picked up a decade or a century later, leading to a new breakthrough. When a field is just being born, its new memb...
Stephen Quake and the Creative Network
December 11, 2023 11:00 - 35 minutes - 24.2 MBStephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA sequencing methods for non-invasive prenatal testing. In this episode, Steve tells us about his tricks for the creative scientific process, including the surprising usefulness of jetlag, the role of generosity – rather than a transactional approach – in collaborations, and the art of making progress in fields that are new for you, including a hig...
John Mattick and doing what your mother taught you
November 27, 2023 10:00 - 30 minutes - 21.3 MBJohn Mattick is Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. For decades, he has been on a mission to show that the large portions of the human genome that many scientists consider useless "junk" instead have important regulatory functions. In this episode, he tells us that his creative process involves always seeing things from different perspectives – something he learned as a teenager listening to the debates of his mother and her sisters. He reveals...
Peter Ratcliffe on being the master of daydreams
November 13, 2023 10:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MBPeter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in London and Oxford. In this episode, he reveals the interplay between dissociation – daydreaming – and interaction with colleagues as a major source of his scientific creativity. He emphasizes that to make an important discovery, you must define your own question, even as everyone – from colleagues to editors and funders – will try to convi...
Peter Ratcliffe on being the Master of Daydreams
November 13, 2023 10:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MBPeter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in London and Oxford. In this episode, he reveals the interplay between dissociation – daydreaming – and interaction with colleagues as a major source of his scientific creativity. He emphasizes that to make an important discovery, you must define your own question, even as everyone – from colleagues to editors and funders – will try to convi...
Christina Curtis and keeping the faith in the process
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutes - 29 MBChristina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among her many achievements is the conception of the “Big Bang Theory” of tumor biology. In this episode, she tells us how not being biased by assumptions of what we know has been very helpful in her research. We talk about how her background in statistical genetics has shaped her cancer research. We also discuss how the despair of not underst...
Daniel Dennett’s intuition pumps
October 16, 2023 06:00 - 41 minutes - 28.3 MBDaniel Dennett, Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher, tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousness, do we have free will, how does evolutionary adaptation occur? In this episode, Dan tells us about some of his ‘intuition pumps’ - tools that are as indispensable for thinking as hammers and saws are for carpentry. We discuss how creativity really is just a bag of tricks, what Descartes‘ biggest mistake was, and how to ‘jump out of the syst...
Howard Stone on how to tilt your head for discovery
September 25, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes - 27.5 MBHoward Stone is a Professor of Engineering at Princeton. His research explores how fluid dynamics can help to understand diverse systems, from bacterial biofilms to the earth’s interior. In this episode, Howard explains how a lot of important, low-hanging fruit are at the interface between disciplines. Howard is most creative when he debates phenomena at a blackboard together with a collaborator. A trick he likes to use is to identify related problems in isolated disciplines, helping him to...
Prisca Liberali and the junkies of discovery
September 10, 2023 23:00 - 32 minutes - 22.4 MBPrisca Liberali is a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland. In this episode, Prisca tells us how her creative thinking thrives on recursive thinking – going deeper and deeper into a problem from different angles. Prisca also deliberately uses carefully chosen conferences to discuss and to develop ongoing projects. As much as her lab’s creativity is an inextricable part of the process, she admits that at the core it’s a lonely job. What...
Tom Mullaney & Chris Rea on giving thanks to bias
August 28, 2023 10:00 - 43 minutes - 29.8 MBTom Mullaney is a Professor of History at Stanford University and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and Chris Rea is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. In 2022, Tom and Chris published the book ‘Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)’. In this episode, we talk about self-centered research (and about getting over yourself), how vulnerable self-confidence empowers your research,...
Bonnie Bassler and living on the edge in a nerdy kind of way
August 14, 2023 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.6 MBBonnie Bassler is the Chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton. In this episode, Bonnie talks about her passion for scientific inquiry, creativity, mentorship, and how the journey of discovery is about asking the right questions, distinguishing between what you can do and what you should do, and about embracing the unexpected. In our very lively and fun discussion, we explore the significance of asking "why" questions to fuel passion and curiosity – even if only the if/what/whe...
Yukiko Yamashita, the queen of analogies
July 03, 2023 07:00 - 26 minutes - 18.4 MBYukiko Yamashita is a biology professor at MIT and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Yukiko’s research is amazingly broad, perhaps because she often only realizes at the end of a project which question she was asking by what she had been doing, as she explains in this episode. She likens research to solving 5000-piece jigsaw puzzles – not one at a time, but with the pieces from hundreds of puzzles all dumped together. So that while we put the pieces together, we have to...
Stephen Wolfram is the Worldly Scientist
June 19, 2023 04:00 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBCan you think of another big company CEO that does basic science? Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research – the company that developed Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha – but most fundamentally he has a deep commitment to figuring out the nature of reality. Stephen wrote the landmark ‘A new kind of science’ in 2002 and in his current ‘physics project’, Steven is trying to show that the universe is at its core computation, and that its fundamental laws arise from simple computational progr...
Laurence Hurst and the slime mold model of discovery
June 05, 2023 06:00 - 41 minutes - 28.8 MBLaurence Hurst is a professor of Evolutionary Genetics and the founding Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at The University of Bath. Martin actually learned biology from Laurence as a postdoc, and he still likes to quote Laurence’s favorite question after the departmental seminars: “Why is this interesting?” In this episode, Laurence explains his Slime Mold Model of the scientific process, advises us to follow the data, and tells us that much of his research springs from him being ...
Edith Heard and the feeling for the system
May 22, 2023 07:00 - 37 minutes - 25.9 MBEdith Heard is a Professor at the Collège de France and the Director General of Europe’s “CERN for biologists”, the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL). In this episode, Edith explains how she gets ideas when she’s out of her comfort zone and being challenged, and how in her youth she would go to the piano whenever her brain needed time to solve a hard math problem. She emphasizes how much she profited from the “naive optimism” in science in the US – compared to the much more rigid, histor...
Ewan Birney and the battle scars of discovery
May 08, 2023 07:00 - 40 minutes - 27.7 MBEwan Birney is the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) and co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. In his research, Ewan combines his training in biochemistry with computer science, which made him one of the heroes of the human genome project. In this episode, he describes that an “emotional” understanding of science is often enough to have valuable discussions with experts in different fields, a concept that forms the basis of his diamonds-and...
Paola Arlotta and science as a walk in the dark woods
April 24, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutes - 35.2 MBPaola Arlotta is a developmental neurobiologist and a professor at Harvard. She studies how the most complex organ in the human body (in the world? in the universe maybe?) comes to be: the brain (!). How does it develop from just a bunch of cells? Paola is also the Chair of her Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, where she takes particular care about the nurturing of the next generation of scientists in her field. In this episode, Paola describes the crucial role that happiness...
Marty Martin and Art Woods on science podcasting
April 10, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 42.3 MBIn this special, we talk about podcasting with the two hosts of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org), Marty Martin – professor of disease ecology at the University of South Florida – and Art Woods – professor of physiological ecology at the University of Montana. We had a great time discussing our respective podcast experiences, trading tips and reflecting on our passion for science communication and the ways that it has impacted our own research. In their podcast, Marty and ...
Alfred Russel Wallace and night science by candlelight
April 01, 2023 07:00 - 53 minutes - 36.5 MBWhat was the creative process of Alfred Russel Wallace? In this séance, we channel the legendary self-taught evolutionary biologist, founder of the field of biogeography, and co-discoverer of natural selection. Mr. Wallace (as he insists to be called) told us how he did night science by candlelight during long and lonely nights on his travels in the tropics, and how he prefers to ponder the big questions. He sees himself as an early data scientist, identifying patterns in data – in particula...
Zak Kohane and the abstraction of data
March 20, 2023 11:00 - 28 minutes - 19.6 MBIsaac (Zak) Kohane is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. In this episode, Zak talks with us about how medicine, at its core, is information processing. But in medical data science, one has to understand and to model the dynamics of two orthogonal systems: the patient’s physiology and the dynamics of the healthcare system, in particular the integrating intelligence of doctors who decide about a patient’s path through that system. Zak also tells us...
Jim Collins and the technology-free Friday
March 06, 2023 21:00 - 41 minutes - 28.8 MBJim Collins is Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. In this episode, he talks with us about his radical switch of fields in the early 2000’s, when he essentially founded the field of synthetic biology. Jim’s creative process includes ‘storing content’ about a particular problem; committing a portion of each day to reflect on it, even if this might often feel like wasting time; and then bouncing ideas around in open discussions with colleagues. Jim stresses the need for being disciplin...
Caroline Bartman and the flash(cards) of inspiration
February 13, 2023 18:00 - 28 minutes - 19.5 MBCaroline Bartman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Princeton’s Chemistry Department, and she is about to start her own lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Caroline’s research focuses on how our metabolism changes in response to cancer and to viral infections. In this episode, Caroline explains how she has developed to become a creative scientist. She also describes an unexpected trick: whenever she stumbles upon something interesting – such as an experimental observation or something she read –...
Albert-László Barabási is not afraid to break things
January 22, 2023 13:00 - 39 minutes - 26.9 MBAlbert-László Barabási is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In this episode, he tells us how he established the field of network science. He explains the expert’s fallacy and why it’s time to move to another field once you become afraid to break things. He tells about his strategies to select research projects with his students, and that the science only really starts after the first draft has been written. He also tells us how the crucial skill to make discover...
Stuart Firestein on artful ignorance, failure, and neglect
January 02, 2023 15:00 - 33 minutes - 23.3 MBDoing science reminds Stuart Firestein of an old saying: “It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.” Before studying biology and becoming a professor at Columbia University in New York, Stuart worked for many years in the theater. In this episode, he talks about how he doesn’t miss the creativity or the spirit of the theater, as he finds all of that in science. For Stuart, ignorance and creativity are two horses pulling the same wagon of science...
Galit Lahav and the Night Science Tuesday
December 10, 2022 10:00 - 38 minutes - 26.7 MBProfessor Galit Lahav is the Chair of the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School, where she creates an environment that is collaborative, stimulating, and interdisciplinary. In this episode, Galit tells us how her creative process consists of incubation and interaction. She stresses the importance of being vulnerable for creativity to emerge, and also how to use night science to make the tough decision to stop working on a particular project. Thinking about how to normalize inc...
Eric Topol and thinking big about AI in medicine
November 21, 2022 11:00 - 39 minutes - 27.2 MBEric Topol is a cardiologist, scientist, and author. Many twitter users will know Eric from his voice-of-reason tweets related to the covid pandemic. While Eric’s exceptionally broad scientific work includes genetics and clinical trials, his main focus is on the ways in which artificial intelligence may change medicine as we know it. Creativity in this field, Eric explains, lies in exploring applications of AI that no one thought possible before, such as predicting the risk of heart disease ...
Eric Topol on thinking big about AI in medicine
November 21, 2022 11:00 - 39 minutes - 27.2 MBEric Topol is a cardiologist, scientist, and author. Many twitter users will know Eric from his voice-of-reason tweets related to the covid pandemic. While Eric’s exceptionally broad scientific work includes genetics and clinical trials, his main focus is on the ways in which artificial intelligence may change medicine as we know it. Creativity in this field, Eric explains, lies in exploring applications of AI that no one thought possible before, such as predicting the risk of heart disease ...
Aviv Regev and how to be generous with your ideas
October 31, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MBAviv Regev is what anyone would call a true science hero. She is not only a pioneer of single-cell genomics and systems biology, but also a great mentor. In 2020, she moved from her professorship at MIT and the Broad Institute to the biotech company Genentech, where she is Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Early Development. We talked with her about the advantages of setting ideas free and about how to be a generous collaborator. Aviv told us how creativity can arise from a d...
Aviv Regev on how to be generous with your ideas
October 31, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MBAviv Regev is what anyone would call a true science hero. She is not only a pioneer of single-cell genomics and systems biology, but also a great mentor. In 2020, she moved from her professorship at MIT and the Broad Institute to the biotech company Genentech, where she is Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Early Development. We talked with her about the advantages of setting ideas free and about how to be a generous collaborator. Aviv told us how creativity can arise from a d...
Cassandra Extavour and the Language of Creativity
October 10, 2022 15:00 - 23 minutes - 16.2 MBCassandra Extavour is a Professor of developmental and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and she is an Investigator at the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Cassandra’s pioneering research focuses on how germ cells – those immortal cells that form the next generation – are specified in different animals. Cassandra is a champion for diversity and inclusivity, helping to found the Pan-American Society of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Cassandra has a second, part-time...
Cassandra Extavour and the language of creativity
October 10, 2022 15:00 - 23 minutes - 16.2 MBCassandra Extavour is a Professor of developmental and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and she is an Investigator at the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Cassandra’s pioneering research focuses on how germ cells – those immortal cells that form the next generation – are specified in different animals. Cassandra is a champion for diversity and inclusivity, helping to found the Pan-American Society of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Cassandra has a second, part-time...
Daniel Kahneman and the sunk-cost fallacy
September 22, 2022 14:00 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBDaniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics – as a psychologist. His fundamental work in behavioral economics revealed our cognitive biases, such as loss aversion – the fact that we react much more strongly to losses than to gains. Danny’s popular science book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a highly influential bestseller; Itai and Martin consider it the operating manual for the human brain. In this conversation, Danny tells us how his creative process is driven by a lack of content with...
Peer Bork and the scientific candy shop
September 02, 2022 14:00 - 28 minutes - 19.6 MBPeer Bork is a legendary scientist, and these days he’s also the Director of Scientific Activities at the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Among his many accolades, Peer was recently honored by the International Society for Computational Biology for "Tremendous contributions to bioinformatics on a plethora of fronts within the field". As a highly interdisciplinary scientist, Peer tells us how his team moves into new fields, adapting tools and creating new ones, and trusti...
Edward Tufte and the Thinking Eye
August 23, 2022 16:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBEdward Tufte (ET) is widely-considered as the guru of data visualisation. He has taught the world about how data is to be communicated. He is best known for his 5 books on data visualisation, which have had an immeasurable influence on how to reveal the story told by data, combining layers of information into clear visual representations. In this episode, Itai and Martin talk with ET about his most recent book ‘Seeing with fresh eyes - meaning space data truth’, where he introduces the conce...
Shafi Goldwasser and the good joke
July 18, 2022 14:00 - 24 minutes - 16.8 MBShafi Goldwasser received the Turing Award – the “Nobel Prize of Computing” – in 2012. She needs no introduction to anyone working in computer science or cryptology, a field she essentially founded as a theoretical discipline. Shafi is a professor at both MIT and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, as well as being the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley. In this episode, Shafi tells us how her favourite scientific ideas are akin to a good joke: they catch ...
Uri Alon and our internal tuning fork
May 31, 2022 11:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MBUri Alon, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is best known for his contributions to systems biology. But Uri is also famous for his very joyful and playful attitude to science, which is memorable for anyone who’s ever heard him speak (or sing). Uri’s research is exceptionally broad in terms of the fields he covers, which is one reason why he is one of today’s most cited researchers. We talked with Uri about a wide range of topics: about improvisation in science, abou...
Agnel Sfeir on science as an obsession
May 16, 2022 20:00 - 42 minutes - 28.9 MBAgnel Sfeir is a leading scientist in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who studies fundamental aspects of the biology of the cell. Agnel revels in asking seemingly simple questions that get to the heart of the unknown in biology. In this conversation, she told us how she immerses herself in the project together with her team, and learns how to mentor each person depending on how they like to think. She discusses the trick of ‘thinking selfishly’ for generating ideas: w...
Nikolaus Rajewsky on how to think like a bacterium
March 21, 2022 18:00 - 26 minutes - 17.9 MBNikolaus Rajewsky is the founding director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. After studying Physics, he moved into systems biology, studying the role of RNA in gene regulation. In this episode, Nikolaus talks about how his training as a physicist enlightens his approach to biological problems. He also studied piano at the Folkwang University of the Arts, which gives him a unique perspective on the relationship between creativity in the arts and in the sciences. We enjoyed ...
Bill Martin on paying attention
February 24, 2022 15:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MBProfessor Bill Martin from Düsseldorf University is a leading evolutionary biologist, who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the origins of eukaryotes, the cell nucleus, and life itself. In this episode, Bill reveals how he chooses a research question and boosts his creativity. He also discusses the pitfalls of exploratory data analysis and the perils of working in highly crowded fields. And he challenges us: whenever a visitor gives a talk at your institute – think o...
Steven Strogatz on ruthless simplification
February 07, 2022 13:00 - 47 minutes - 32.6 MBSteven Strogatz, one of the world’s foremost applied mathematicians, is a Professor at Cornell University. While biologists have evolution as a guiding principle, mathematicians have beauty, economy, and connectivity, as Steve tells us. He explains how he ruthlessly simplifies a problem to the point where - while it still seems impossible - it is down to its bare essentials. That’s when he attacks. We talk about how in science you must stick your neck out with bold assertions, even if you m...
Steven Strogatz on ruthless simplification
February 07, 2022 13:00 - 47 minutes - 32.6 MBSteven Strogatz, one of the world’s foremost applied mathematicians, is a Professor at Cornell University. While biologists have evolution as a guiding principle, mathematicians have beauty, economy, and connectivity, as Steve tells us. He explains how he ruthlessly simplifies a problem to the point where - while it still seems impossible - it is down to its bare essentials. That’s when he attacks. We talk about how in science you must stick your neck out with bold assertions, even if you m...
Samantha Morris on building your own creative lineage
January 08, 2022 19:00 - 54 minutes - 37.4 MBProfessor Sam Morris from Washington University in St. Louis is elucidating how cells make developmental decisions as they navigate the space of cell identity. She had a rocky start in science, but falling in love with her projects led her to stick it out. Luckily so: she now runs a highly successful and highly creative lab. Sam thoughtfully discusses how terminology - such as ‘dead end states’ versus ‘partially reprogrammed states’ - can influence the interpretation of results in a project...
Ruth Lehmann and the Saturday afternoon experiment
December 24, 2021 03:00 - 36 minutes - 25.2 MBHow do world-class scientists make discoveries? “Observing and listening” says Professor Ruth Lehmann, the Director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute. Ruth’s pioneering research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis, and in this episode we were very fortunate to sit down with her to discuss her creative process, which she likens to the opening of a window. Most inspiringly, we discuss how Ruth created an environment that nurtures and empowers researchers to do their best work at the Skirball In...