The Beagle Has Landed Podcast

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Natural Sciences Science & Medicine

What's The Beagle Has Landed Podcast about?

Hosted by renowned educator and genetic counselor, Laura Hercher, The Beagle Has Landed is the first independent podcast for the rapidly growing and dynamic community of genetic counselors. The show features interviews with leaders in the field of clinical genetics, exploring our complicated past and rapidly changing present. We look at the new roles genetic counselors are playing in industry as well as clinical settings, bringing in the voices of other stakeholders, including basic scientists and families affected by genetic disease.

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Kiran Musunuru Has Good New...

08.17.2021

A cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Kiran Musunuru is a clinician and a researcher whose important work has moved the ball forward on gene therapy. As co-founder and scientific advisor to ...

The Beagle Has Landed Podcast episodes:

08.17.2021 Kiran Musunuru Has Good News about Gene Therapy for Common Diseases A cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Kiran Musunuru is a clinician and a researcher whose important work has moved the ball forward on gene therapy. As co-founder and scientific advisor to ...
07.20.2021 Laura and Jordan Brown on New Challenges to Abortion Law and What they Mean for Prenatal Diagnostics The legal landscape for abortion is changing rapidly, and in ways that will inevitably affect genetic counseling practice in many states. Joining Laura to discuss the new laws and the role that NSGC can play – if the organization decides ...
05.13.2021 Jodie Ingles on Cardio Genetics Today we reach out across closed borders to Australia for a chat with Jodie Ingles, one of the first people anywhere in the world to focus on cardiogenetic counseling. Jodie talks to us about how the field has changed in ...
04.26.2021 Euan Ashley on The Genome Odyssey Euan Ashley has had a front row seat at the genomic revolution, and in his new book The Genome Odyssey he invites us to sit alongside him and watch the show. Even if you lived through it, you won’t believe ...
04.12.2021 Kyle Brothers and Mildred Cho: How to Talk about Race in Designing Genetic Research If you are a clinician, researcher, or editor working in genetics, you are probably aware of the toxic history of our field with regard to race. And (JAMA editors aside, apparently) you are probably aware that this is not just ...
03.14.2021 Walter Isaacson, "The Code Breaker" Walter Isaacson, who has written biographies that explore the birth of the atomic age (Einstein) and the digital age (Jobs), now turns his attention to the biotech revolution, as embodied by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna with his new book,
02.25.2021 Hank Greely: CRISPR People I can hardly believe I’ve been doing this podcast for more than 2 years and never had Hank Greely on before. Hank Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law at Stanford University, and Director of ...
01.12.2021 Eimear Kenny and Noura Abul-Husn: Translational Genomics Incarnate There’s no overstating how far we have come since 2000 in the fledgling science of genomics, but at times it has seemed that our ability to amass information has far outstripped our ability to make that information matter by improving ...
11.10.2020 Diana Bianchi on Prenatal Testing Diana Bianchi began her career in genetics so long ago that she needed to make one thing clear: “I’m not that old. I just started young.” And it’s true! Diana fell in love with the study of chromosomes back in ...
10.28.2020 Difference or Disability? with Rosemarie Garland Thomson Rosemarie Garland Thompson is a professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University. She has been called a “thought leader” in disability studies. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with ...
10.13.2020 Heather Hampel on the State of Cancer Testing Heather Hampel, one of the pioneer genetic counselors in the realm of cancer counseling, has been leading the charge on Lynch syndrome screening for over 20 years. Whatever your leadership metrics, Heather ticks them: multiple publications, past president of ABGC, ...
09.28.2020 Adam Rutherford on Science Communication Today’s podcast features Adam Rutherford, a geneticist trained at University College London who has spent much of his career as a science communicator: as an editor at Nature, as a radio and television commentator for the BBC, and as the ...
07.07.2020 Racism and Genetic Counseling with Aishwarya Arjunan and Carrie Haverty Aishwarya Arjunan of Myriad’s Women’s Health and Carrie Haverty of the biotech start-up Miroculus join Laura to discuss dialogues that have cropped up recently on Twitter and in other places against the backdrop of a moment of national reckoning on ...
06.25.2020 John Greally on Epigenomics Laura talks today with John Greally, a pediatrician and epigenomicist with appointments in Medicine, Pediatrics and Genetics at Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx. John is the founding director of Einstein’s Center for Epigenomics, and an innovator who has looked ...
05.07.2020 David Goldstein David Goldstein is a self-described “geneticist for hire.” It’s been five years since he arrived in New York as the inaugural director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and despite his California roots, the city ...
03.30.2020 Author Libby Copeland on the Impact of Ancestry Testing Libby Copeland is a prize-winning science journalist who has written for the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the NY Times Magazine and, the Atlantic, among others.
03.24.2020 Heidi Rehm Geneticist Heidi Rehm of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute has helped develop many of the tools that are fundamental to our ability to harness genomic variation for medical care: ClinGen, ClinVar, Matchmaker and others.
03.12.2020 Ethan Weiss and the Story of Ruthie Weiss Prenatal testing was a normal part of life for UCSF cardiologist Ethan Weiss and his wife when they were expecting their second child, something you did without a second thought. But thirteen years after the birth of Ruthie Weiss, Ethan ...
02.18.2020 Gillian Hooker on HR3235 “It’s been a crazy time,” says Gillian Hooker, of the first 5 weeks of her year as President of the National Society of Genetic Counselors. NSGC is attempting to rally support around HR3235, a long-discussed and long-promised federal bill that ...
01.29.2020 Ambry Genetics on New RNA Testing Laura starts out the decade chatting with genetic counselor Holly LaDuca and Rachid Karam, Director of Ambry Translational Genomics Lab, about Ambry’s paired DNA/RNA cancer susceptibility test, which was introduced in 2019. What can RNA testing do to improve detection ...
12.05.2019 Alicia Zhou Color Genomics burst on the scene in 2015, offering breast cancer susceptibility testing at a fraction of the price of other laboratories.
11.13.2019 Louise Bier As we get underway with All of Us, the huge tax-payer funded project to assemble a database or genomic and medical information on 1 million Americans, there are people working hard to make sure it fulfills two founding principles. First, ...
11.01.2019 Rayna Rapp Rayna Rapp is Professor of anthropology and an affiliate at the center for disability studies at NYU. Laura welcomes Rayna Rapp, feminist, medical anthropologist and all-around sage, who has worked for decades in the study of the social impact of ...
10.17.2019 Jordan Smoller Families and individuals dealing with mental illness have lots of questions about genetic testing. Does it work? Can it help doctors choose the right course of treatment? Can it predict who is likely to get sick? Are the tests they ...
06.20.2019 Kif Augustine-Adams Kif Augustine-Adams is the Ivan Meitus Chair and a professor the Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark School of Law whose work has focused on protecting immigrant women and children. A feminist and advocate with an interest in history, Kif ...
06.04.2019 Kevin Mitchell Kevin Mitchell (AKA “Wiring the Brain”) joins us on The Beagle to discuss the use of so-called polygenic risk scores to select for “the smartest embryos,” as a recent Guardian article put it. Can we, and should we, do any ...
05.21.2019 Kiran Musunuru, Verve Therapeutics Kiran Musunuru, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, is back on The Beagle to talk about Verve Therapeutics, a company that announced its arrival earlier this month, with the modest goal of protecting the world ...
05.07.2019 Eric Topol As the Gary and Mary West Professor of Innovative Medicine and Founder/Director of the Scripps Translational Institute, Eric Topol is in the visionary business, trying to imagine what medicine will look like in the future. His current book, Deep Medicine, ...
04.11.2019 Elissa Levin Elissa Levin was one of the first genetic counselors to work in the direct-to-consumer sector, starting at DNA Direct (remember that?); she’s been at Illumina-spinoff Helix for about 3 years. Helix runs a DTC marketplace, offering an the all-purpose DNA ...
03.26.2019 Amy Sturm Amy Sturm is the head of cardiovascular genomic counseling at the Genomic Medicine Institute at Geisinger, that surprisingly cutting edge in the middle of nowhere (I’ve been there; trust me). Amy, a cardiogen pioneer for almost 20 year (cue Amy, ...
02.28.2019 Wendy Chung Wendy Chung (MD, PhD) is the Kennedy Family Professor of Pediatrics in Medicine at Columbia University… and the Director of the Pediatric Neuromuscular Network Molecular Core, the New York Obesity Center Molecular Genetics Core, Columbia’s Clinical Cancer Program and DISCOVER ...
02.20.2019 Ellen Matloff Ellen Matloff has one of the most unique stories in genetic counseling today. She worked at Yale to found the cancer counseling program in the early days of that discipline and was an early and highly visible voice in the ...
02.06.2019 Penny Wolfson and Ansel Lurio Penny Wolfson’s book, Moonrise, grew out of her experiences after the diagnosis of her oldest son Ansel Lurio with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Today Ansel is 34 and his biography far exceeds the limited expectations of the neurologists who counseled his ...
12.07.2018 Kiran Musunuru “Genome editing had to happen sometime,” says our guest Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, MPH, internationally recognized Crispr expert and Laura's colleague on the American Society of Human Genetics’ task force on human germline genome editing. Kiran was one of the ...
11.27.2018 MaryAnn Campion Everyone says we need more genetic counselors, but few people have put as much time and effort into creating them as MaryAnn Campion, current co-director of the Master’s Program in Human Genetics and Genetic Counseling at Stanford University. MaryAnn has ...
11.06.2018 Rachel Adams Rachel Adam’s life took an unexpected turn 11 years ago, when her son was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after birth. Her memoir, Raising Henry, is a deeply thoughtful and eloquent look at her own experience as a mother and ...
10.29.2018 Sek Kathiresan Polygenic risk scores have burst onto the scene in 2018, not because they are new (they are not) but because after years of discouraging and anemic results, it seemed that perhaps this sort of amorphous “risk in your genes” -- ...
10.23.2018 Brianne Kirkpatrick If you survey genetic counselors about direct-to-consumer genetic testing (and we did!) you will find that most of them think that DTC customers should receive genetic counseling. At the same time, most of them say that they wouldn’t feel comfortable ...
10.09.2018 Erica Ramos Ever since she was a small child, Erica Ramos dreamed of being president of NSGC … Okay no. Erica talks about her path to the presidency, her least favorite thing about the job, and why she has trouble staying on ...
09.25.2018 Matt Fender In December 2017, Matt Fender ran his 23andMe raw data through Promethease, a third party DNA search engine that provides an inexpensive personalized list of annotated SNP’s. At the top of Matt’s report was a box banded in red that ...
09.11.2018 Carl Zimmer Carl Zimmer is a master at describing the sort of shiny objects that obsess the sci-curious: children that leave neurons behind in their mother’s brain, mice that pass memories down in their sperm, his own Neanderthal DNA. But the heft ...
08.28.2018 Bob Resta Welcome to Episode #1. Bob Resta turns an anthropologist’s eye on genetic counseling, from the arrival of amniocentesis to current issues stemming from routinized testing and conflict of interest. He’s not the Founder of Genetic Counseling, but he may be ...