Conversations with scientists

Part I of the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research was all virtual. There were 61,000 attendees, including some job-hunters. I wonder how this year’s conference that is about to get underway will affect job-hunting. This episode is with scientists talking about their hopes and allergic points as they job-hunt. It’s based on conversations with job-hunters last year and this year. The guests on this episode are: Dr. Antonio Ward of the University of South Alabama, Melat Gebru from Penn State University, Paul Tran from Augusta University and Dr. Sadr-ul Shaheed from the University of Bradford.

Today’s episode is with and about Hui Yang. Dr. Yang is a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience at Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has developed new base-editor variants. Base-editing is a kind of gene-editing. Overall the result led to base-editors with fewer off-targets, high on-target efficiency and a narrowed editing window, fewer indels and fewer off-targets, he says. Yang sees a lot of promise for these base editors for both DNA and RNA base editing. Yang is a die-hard Manchester United. Among other aspects, he talks about how he organizes his lab for open communication. He is modeling the the culture of the Jaenisch lab at The Whitehead Institute. That's where Yang was a postdoctoral fellow.

Proteins in a cell don't tend to practice social distancing. They have many associates but capturing all of the associates in one experiment is difficult. Dr. Carol Robinson and her team developed a way to be able to dissociate such complexes in a mass spectrometer and look at them in one experiment. It's a new kind of mass spectrometer and one she and her team co-developed with Thermo Fisher Scientific. Robinson is the first female professor of the University of Oxford, previously the first female professor of the University of Cambridge and she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. This is a story about her by Vivien Marx.