My guest this week is Dr. Emily Goldberg, a brand new faculty member at UCSF. She talks about growing up with academic parents and how she got into the rapidly growing field of immunometabolism, as well as the complex role of ketogenic diets and caloric restriction is shaping aging and susceptibility to infection.

My guest this week is Dr. Sarkis Mazmanian, a Professor at Cal Tech, and certified Genius by the MacArthur Foundation. Sarkis talks about how he got into microbiome research and his remarkable contributions to infectious disease, immunology, and neurology.

My first international guest, the renowned Irish microbiome researcher Fergus Shanahan, talks about his new book "The Language of Illness" and his eclectic research on the inflammatory bowel diseases (plural!), physical fitness (not exercise!), and Irish Travelers (popularized by the movie Snatch).

My guest this week is Dr. Garret Fitzgerald, the Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. We discuss his current work at Calico, a Google backed company that aims to combat aging, including Garret's fascination with circadian rhythms. He also explains his key role in revealing the dangerous side effects of selective inhibitors of COX-2, leading to removing Vioxx from the market in 2004 and a black box warning on its competitor Celebrex.

My guest this week is Dr. Matt Redinbo from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matt has had a remarkable career in both academia and industry. He discusses the challenges of translating basic research and the importance of doing the killer experiment as soon as possible. We talk about his evolution from focusing solely on human enzymes for drug metabolism to studying microbes, and the vast potential for the microbiome as a novel drug target.