Conjectures

Professor Masud Husain is a cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist at the University of Oxford. Masud has spent much of his career investigating one of the most fundamental questions in human behaviour: what makes us motivated? Why are some people driven to achieve their goals, while others struggle even to get started? And how can disease or brain damage cause some people to develop profound apathy? In this episode:

• How a stroke caused Masud's patient to lose almost all motivation, and how a drug originally developed for Parkinson's brought it back
• The role of dopamine, and why having too much dopamine can be just as bad as too little
• What the neuroscience of motivation means for how we think about willpower and agency
• Whether apathy could predict depression or dementia
• The future of treatments for dementia
• Why bureaucracy has become a serious threat to scientific progress

Masud's book, Our Brains, Our Selves, won the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. In it, he tells the stories of seven patients whose experiences reveal how the brain shapes our sense of identity, and how neurological disorders can transform it. It's a superb book, and well worth reading. https://www.waterstones.com/book/our-brains-our-selves/masud-husain/9781837261109

Dr Wes Robertson is a synthetic biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was recently part of a team that fundamentally rewrote the E. coli genome. While natural life is written in an 'alphabet' with 64 letters (known as codons), his team was able to compress this down to just 57. It's the most radically refactored genome ever built. He has since set up his own group, applying the same approach to engineer therapeutic bacteria for the human gut.

In this episode: why compressing the genetic code from 64 codons to 57 is a different kind of achievement to ordinary gene editing, and what new possibilities those freed-up codons give to synthetic biologists.

We also get into what's fundamental to life and what turns out to be historical accident, applications in industrial chemistry and drug discovery, the idea of a genetic firewall, and whether this changes what aliens might look like.

I hope you find this conversation with Wes, and the world of synthetic biology, as fascinating as I did.