In this episode,  author,  speaker, campaigner and former palliative care doctor,  Kathryn Mannix, joins us to discuss a range of topics related to dying. We talk about the importance of a wider public conversation about dying, misconception,  the importance of good communication and more. 

Dr  Alain Vuylsteke,  consultant in intensive care and cardiothoracic anaesthesia,  Clinical Director of the Division of Surgery, Transplantation and Anaesthesia and the Director of the ECMO service at Royal Papworth Hospital  joins us for an episode on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.  We discuss the ECMO service at Papworth, the evidence base, decision-making with regards to initiation and discontinuation, ECMO in the COVID-19 pandemic, cost and more.  

Resources:
CESAR Trial: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61069-2/fulltext
EOLIA Trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800385
https://litfl.com/ecmo-extra-corporeal-membrane-oxygenation/

In this episode we speak with Dr Peter Hodkinson, the UK’s first ever consultant in Aviation and Space Medicine and the head of the division of Aerospace Medicine at King’s College. Topics include astronaut selection, adaptation to space flight and travel, managing medical conditions in space and more!

An overview of space medicine: https://academic.oup.com/bja/article/119/suppl_1/i143/4638468

In this episode, Dr Ritu Raman joins us to discuss how engineered skeletal muscle is being applied to both robotics and medicine. 

We discuss everything from the influences early in Ritu's life and education which drove an interest in engineering, to optogenetics and gene modification. Some themes throughout the conversation are the interesting challenges posed by: inducing repair in muscle, and the complexity of fine motor control.

Ritu is the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. She received her BS from Cornell University and her PhD as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed her postdoctoral research with Prof. Bob Langer at MIT, funded by a L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Professor Paul Glasziou discusses  a range of topics relating to evidence-based medicine, from  reducing research waste to publication bias;  translation of scientific findings; weighing up a body of evidence; incentivising high quality research and more. 

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Sharon Peacock,  professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Cambridge, and  director of the COVID-19  Genomics UK  consortium (COG-UK), discusses all things relating to the UK's sequencing efforts, from the logistics of establishing sequencing networks, to the benefits of sequencing and applications of data collected,. 

In this conversation, Dr Paola Bonfanti joins us to discuss recent work done by her group to reconstitute the human thymus outside of the human body, using cultured cells and a scaffold.

We also discuss how the thymus develops, educates T cells, and how single-cell sequencing and spatial information are changing our understanding of the organ.

Paola trained as a doctor in Milan, before training as a stem cell scientist at institutes in California and Switzerland. She now leads a research group at the Crick Institute in London that investigates tissues such as the thymus, and the pancreas in the context of their stem cell and epithelial cell biology.

In this episode,  Emily Jackson ,  professor of law at the London School of Economics, joins us to discuss a range of issues relating to medical law.  We talk about regulation  of the pharmaceutical industry, clinical negligence, assisted reproduction and more. 

Sam Gershman joins us for a discussion on both AI, and questions in Philosophy of Science. 
In the podcast we talk about:

1) Whether observation and interpretation can be 'theory neutral'.
2) How auxiliary hypotheses can 'buffer' our beliefs.
3) A Bayesian framework for evaluating our auxiliary hypotheses.

3) The aspects of human cognition that AI currently lacks.
4) Advancing AI, and the AI alignment problem.

Sam is a Professor within the Psychology department at Harvard, where his lab works on questions in learning, memory, and decision making from a computational cognitive neuroscience perspective.

Brain organoids are a new experimental model which will have broad implications for understanding and treating diseases of the brain. But as their sophistication continues to increase, could this ultimately lead to the develop of consciousness in vitro?

Dr Insoo Hyun joins us in this episode to discuss bioethics and brain organoids. In the episode we cover:

1) What brain organoids are, and the history of their development.
2) How new scientific paradigms force are forcing philosophers to reassess age-old philosophical questions.
3) How getting close to the actual research is important for ethics in the biomedical sciences.
4) What it would mean for an organoid to develop 'consciousness', and how we might consider the ethical and philosophical implications.

Dr Hyun is a bioethicist and the Director of Research Ethics at Harvard Medical School, as well as a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve Medical School. He's a prinicipal investigator a BRAIN initiative project to study bioethical questions surrounding human brain organoids, and he has also worked on various committees at the ISSCR.