When UC Berkeley Professor Randy Schekman was 12, he scooped up a jar of pond scum and examined it under his toy microscope.

“I just could not believe the world that was revealed,” he said during a campus event earlier this month. “This complex set of creatures that you can't see with your naked eye, and yet are moving and somehow mechanically independent, and able to do amazing things. And this was so fascinating.”

Schekman went on to become a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley and win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 for his discovery of how yeast membranes work. His research has led to advances in food and fuel production, as well as life-saving drugs and vaccines. 

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Schekman explains the molecular building blocks that define who we are, the cellular processes that drive health and illness, and how curiosity-driven research leads to revolutionary insights into disease and opens doors to new possibilities for medicine and human health.

This lecture, which took place on Nov. 7, was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. 

Watch a video of Schekman’s talk.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova.

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