Professor 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. She also allowed us to peek into her lab meetings: every time, in addition to the progress reports on ongoing projects, one person presents a bold, new idea on any topic.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

How 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 Institute at NYU and now at the Whitehead at MIT. 

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

How is science like art? In this episode, we talk about the similarities between the creative processes of science and art with Tom McLeish, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Dept. of Physics at the University of York in England. Tom has written a fascinating book entitled “The poetry and music of science”, where he discusses how we have everything to gain by better explaining  the creative scientific process. Tom also has an explanation of why the "a-ha" moment of discovery may occur particularly when stepping off of a bus. 

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org.

Ben Lehner is a Professor and Coordinator of the Systems Biology Programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. In this episode, Ben talks with us about how careerism is bad for science. He describes how he avoids being limited to the confines of individual fields and disciplines and his strategy for dealing with the unpredictability of science. He also discusses with us how to not get attached to any particular idea in order to really make progress. 

In his work, Ben explores how one can predict the biological differences among individuals from their genomes. His tools are experiments and computational analyses, mostly working on yeast and worms. Ben has been awarded many prestigious awards, including the Gold Medal from the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Yana Bromberg is a Professor at Rutgers, where she teaches computers to speak the functional language of biological sequences. In this episode, she talks with Itai and Martin about the amazing creativity of machine learning, the search for weirdness, and her superpower of translating things from one field to another. 

Her work is being recognized from virtually all sides, including NASA and NIH. She has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. Yana asks deep fundamental questions whose answers are very important for improving our health, preserving our environment, and, as she writes on her website, also to figure out if “Well… did we really start as green slime?!”

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org 

In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to New Zealander Michael Strevens, who – after studying mathematics and computer science – became professor of philosophy at New York University. Michael recently published an amazing book on the scientific method, which not only manages to reconcile crucial ideas by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, but is also immensely readable. In this episode, he discusses the main ideas of the book with your hosts, including the crucial difference between what scientists say in their official communications and in the privacy of their labs, what makes modern science such a powerful “knowledge machine”, and why it took humanity 2000 years after Aristotle to get there.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Harmit Malik, Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. Harmit’s main Night Science tool is to talk again and again about the same puzzling observation to different people, drawing variations of the same story on the blackboard. At some point, he says, you realize that something in your story never changes - that is  where the false assumptions are. Harmit thinks that in pretty much every important result he published, there was a point where he thought the project had failed – where a major result contradicted the original expectations. But that “failure” actually points to the dark alleys where the true discoveries hide. 

Harmit studied Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay. Today he studies the causes and consequences of genetic conflicts that take place between different genomes or even between components of the same genome. His main interest is in fast-evolving genes, trying to understand molecular “arms races" and how they drive genetic innovation. Harmit is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Sarah Teichman, Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Director of Research in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. In her creative research, Sarah’s thoughts constantly switch between her native languages – bioinformatics and genomics – and foreign languages, such as chemistry and physics. Sarah talks about storytelling vs. modeling when interpreting data, and discusses hard vs. soft hypotheses.

Sarah is interested in global principles of protein interactions and gene expression, focusing her research on genomics and immunity. She is an EMBO member and a fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences. Sarah received numerous prizes, including the Lister Prize, Biochemical Society Colworth Medal, Royal Society Crick Lecture, and EMBO Gold Medal.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Oded Rechavi, Professor of Radical Science at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Having watched Indiana Jones as a kid, Oded jumped on the opportunity to sequence the DNA of the skins on which the dead sea scrolls were written, figuring out how different fragments fit together. Inspired by Michael Crichton’s book Prey, he uses parasitic worms to deliver drugs into the brain. To add more creativity to a project, he always involves someone from a distant field. Listen to this episode to hear why he thinks PhD training is the best time to do night science! 

Oded’s lab challenges basic dogmas regarding inheritance and evolution, using simple powerful genetic model organisms. In particular, his lab has shown that when challenged, worms synthesize small RNAs that they give to their progeny to regulate genes, resulting in heritable changes several generations down the road. Oded’s lab is also developing useful parasites, investigating the neuronal basis of rational decision-making, and tries to do as many crazy experiments as possible.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org.

In this episode, Itai and Martin talk with Arjun Raj, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania. Arjun understands the functioning of biological cells using a bag of tricks that he carries from problem to problem; the art of science, he posits, lies in figuring out what tricks will tell you what answers to what problems. Arjun thinks that we are all born night scientists, and that it's day science that needs to be learned. The ultimate goal of life as a scientist, he believes, is not so much writing papers, but building people. Arjun has received many prizes, including the NIH Director's New Innovator Award. His lab pioneered tools for studying biological processes using state of the art imaging and sequencing technologies. 

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .