The Biotech Podcast

This week we talk to Alison Woollard, a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford,  about her life's work in Developmental Biology. She offers her thoughts on the new, mutated coronavirus strain, the history of evolution and what GM technology might offer in the future.

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Full synopsis below:

00:00 - Intro
1:25 - Nematode Worms
10:33 - Developmental biology 
15:54 - Meiosis, Differentiation and Pluripotency
22:47 - Cancers and Transcription factors
34:10 - Mutations and Coronavirus
42:17 - Heredity and Evolution
50:20 - Deepmind and Alphafold
55:03 - Genetic engineering
1:05:39 - Book recommendations
1:09:37 - Extro

This week we talk to Dr Peter Clark, Peter is the Senior Research Manager for AI2. His work focuses upon natural language processing, machine reasoning, and large knowledge bases, and the interplay between these three areas. He has received several awards including a AAAI Best Paper (1997), Boeing Associate Technical Fellowship (2004), and AAAI Senior Member (2014). Peter received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991, and has researched these topics for 30 years with more than 80 refereed publications. We talk to peter about what makes a good test for intelligence, the nature of intelligence and his work over the last 20 years on the aristo project, which last year featured in the New York times as well as other new outlets across the world as a breakthrough in AI.

From digitising chemistry to looking for inorganic aliens, Lee gives us his fascinating insight into new, revolutionary ideas in Chemistry. 

Full synopsis:

00:00 - Intro
01:00 - Defining life
13:20 - Testing life with Polyoxometalates
16:20 - The Markov model
19:48 - Inorganic life and space exploration
25:08 - Chemputers and using them to search for inorganic life
32:52 - The uses of Chemputers in the future
40:00 - Turning Chemistry into an information science
47:37 - Using past data in digital chemistry
51:09 - Extro

 

4 billion years ago the earth was bombarded with photons, a short while later a Tesla got launched into space. This week I'm speaking to Professor Keith Downing about emergent phenomena; which the above scenario is a prime example of, alongside the formation of a baby from a fertilised egg, economies from individual interactions and for good measure alcohol from respiring yeast! 

Full synopsis:

0:00 - Intro
1:20 - Emergence and emergent systems
13:20 - Evolution and its algorithms
23:40 - Theory of facilitated variation
31:30 - Neural Information vs Synthetic Information 
41:30 - Evolutionary computation vs Neural networks
48:25 - Re-enforcement learning
1:02:15 - Building intelligence - neural net architectures
1:07:00 - Advice and Book recommendations

 

Dr Leroy Hood is a world renowned biotechnologist, geneticist and author. From the future of medicine to the human genome project, Lee tells about his fascinating life and his views for the scientific future.

Full synopsis:

0:00 - Introduction
2:24 - P4 medicine - what it is and how it will play a role in the future
17:10 - Systems Biology - A new approach for biological research
25:15 - Thriving in the future of Biology
30:25 - Noise in biology
37:04 - Neuroplasticity and coronavirus
38:37 - The institute of systems biology
42:34 - Future novels
43:24 - Developing scientific tools - How they has affected Lee and how to go about developing them
01:05:10 - The human genome project 
01:12:24 - Book recommendations and advice



 

Harry and Professor Alison Woollard discuss the problems GM technology might face in the future. Remember to hit subscribe...

If you are interested in helping The Biotech Podcast please take 30 seconds to take the following survey: https://harry852843.typeform.com/to/caV6cMzG