University of Cambridge

In the fourth episode of our series on science advice and government, we look back a few decades at what lessons were learnt following the BSE outbreak (Mad Cow Disease) in the 1980s and 1990s. Plus how it led to the establishment of the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Dame Julia Unwin, who was appointed Deputy Chair of the FSA in 2003. Dame Julia's role was to co-lead the agency and develop its relationship with the government and most importantly, the public. In today's episode, Rob is also joined by Erik Millstone, a Professor at the University of Sussex, who's research focuses on the use of science and evidence in the governance of food safety and risk.

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Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

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Resources relevant to this episode:

About the Food Standards Agency and their mission: https://bit.ly/FSAmission The Food Standards Agency: A Force for Change (White Paper proposing the Food Standards Agency). BSE: Risk, Science, and Governance by Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone

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What’s cancer got to do with crabs, artist Jackson Pollock, and artificial intelligence? It’s not a riddle; these are some of the things we’ll explore with surgeon Grant Stewart, computer scientist Mateja Jamnik and radiologist Evis Sala from the Mark Foundation Institute for Integrated Cancer Medicine.

In this episode, we’ll discover how artificial intelligence is making it easier for doctors to diagnose and treat cancer and we’ll share some cancer facts that are both amazing and disturbing. We also learn about the WIRE clinical trial for kidney cancer. WIRE evaluates the effectiveness of giving a short course of drug treatment to patients in the one-month “window of opportunity” between diagnosis and surgery. Patients on the WIRE trial also undergo a suite of new imaging techniques that have been brought together for the first time globally in this clinical trial.

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

In the third episode of our new podcast series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday discusses the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and how the government used science and evidence in helping to tackle it. He's joined by three people who were closely involved at the time:

-Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, who was Chief Medical Officer for England from 2010-2019 and co-chaired the SAGE process during the outbreak.

-Sir Oliver Letwin, an MP for over 20 years and was a Senior Minister in the Cabinet Office during the time.

-Professor Melissa Leach, Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She's also an Anthropologist who has worked in West Africa and played a crucial role in bringing evidence from the social sciences into the government's response to Ebola.

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Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

Is antimicrobial resistance (AMR) the greatest threat to human health? In this episode, we discuss how the misuse and overuse of antimicrobials in humans and agriculture have accelerated bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens’ ability to mutate and develop resistance against the treatments designed to curb and control them.

We talked with molecular biologist Stephen Baker, virologist Ian Goodfellow and infectious disease epidemiologist Caroline Trotter about the magnitude of the problem and how it is not a problem of the future, but of the now. Along the way, we discuss whether post COVID19, are we in a better position now to deal with the next pandemic? Can we predict when it might happen? And if it does happen, will we deal with it any differently?

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

Which scientific voices are heard in government? How one voice or many shapes information that is informing decision making? What structures and institutions have evolved over recent decades to try and make that process more open, more diverse and more robust? In the second episode in CSaP's series on science advice and government, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Dr Claire Craig, Provost at The Queen's College, Oxford and Jon Agar, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UCL.

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here.

Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

What causes dementia? And how do we diagnose and treat it? Is there anything we can do to stop ourselves from developing dementia? These are the crucial questions we’ll be exploring with clinical neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, sociologist Richard Milne, and neurologist James Rowe. In this episode, we’ll find out more about what dementia actually is, some surprising factors that increase a person’s risk of developing dementia, and computer games that can actually help detect and diagnose dementia.

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

In the first episode of our new series, we’re exploring how science advice, data and evidence are used by decision makers in government. Throughout today’s episode, host Dr Rob Doubleday is joined by Sir Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School. Season 5 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge.

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CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is also supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick.

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm.

Subscribe here: mind-over-chatter.captivate.fm/listen

COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of everyone, including children and young people, beyond recognition. So much so, that the proportion of children aged six to 16 with probable mental health disorders has increased from one in nine in 2017 to one in six in both 2020 and 2021. In this episode, we talked with Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Tamsin Ford, Professor of Health Neuroscience Paul Fletcher and behavioural epidemiologist Dr Esther van Sluijs about growing concern over the recent and widespread deterioration of adolescent mental health and what can be done about it.

We cover everything from the prevalence of mental health problems and eating disorders, sedentary behaviour and mentally passive activities, to how mental illness is represented in video games and how video games can be used to engage the public with mental illness in the right way. Along the way, we hear about mental health before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

Subscribe here: mind-over-chatter.captivate.fm/listen

What role do our genes play in influencing our body weight and what we like to eat? Why do some people gain weight more easily than others, and is it all down to genes or are there other factors at play? In this episode, we talked with a clinician and scientist Sadaf Farooqi, health psychologist Theresa Marteau, and geographer Thomas Burgoine about the multitude of factors that go into influencing our eating behaviours. Along the way, we hear about the crucial importance of the environment in influencing our eating behaviour, including “zoning” - the effort to keep fast food outlets no more than 400 yards from schools, and learn how our food has become more calorific over the past 20 to 30 years. Our guests discuss how ultimately, communicating information about obesity doesn’t necessarily change our behaviour towards food, as we are much more influenced by our genes and environment than what's inside our heads.

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

Season 3 is here, and we’re back discussing all things Health!

Subscribe here: https://mind-over-chatter.captivate.fm/listen

Welcome (or welcome back) to Mind Over Chatter, the Cambridge University Podcast. One series at a time, we break down complex issues into simple questions. In this third series, we’re talking all about Health. We’ll be exploring both physical and mental health, and we’ll discuss causes, treatments and preventions for issues like dementia, cancer, infectious diseases and obesity.

We’re going to be talking to interesting people from all over the University of Cambridge, including geographers, surgeons, computer scientists, molecular microbiologists, sociologists… and many more!

We’ll cover everything from infectious diseases and how we can use vaccines to prevent them, to Tinder for bacteria; from artificial intelligence helping us tackle cancer, to Grandpa JPEG and all the Little Pixels, from adolescent mental health and eating disorders to Senua, the Pict warrior hero of the blockbuster video game Hellblade; from obesity and the gene-environment debate, to how a room full of Twixes is like a room full of Borg (resistance is futile); and from dementia and new approaches to its diagnosis and treatment, to “Tau Tangles” - the new brand of Greek noodle.

Please take our survey!

How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.