Darwin's Solution: The Companion Podcast | Podcast on RSS.com

Darwin's Solution: The Companion Podcast

Darwin's Solution: The Companion Podcast

by Animesh Ray

Season 1

Can we evolve wisdom?

This is the last podcast of this series on my book, Darwin's Solution: The Impact of Evolutionary Thinking on Medicine and Biotechnology.

Learning from bacteria how to cure genetic diseases

CRISPR evolved in bacteria to fight their viruses. Now we engage these evolved molecular devices to cure previously incurable genetic disorders.

Harnessing Evolution

Engage evolution to design novel biochemical reagents and drugs.

How evolution shaped protein folding

This is episode 17 of the companion podcast to my book, Darwin's Solution: The Impact of Evolutionary Thinking on Medicine and Biotechnology. AI learned how to fold proteins, only because proteins had evolved.

The Pub Paradox

Linus Pauling, Christian Anfinsen, and Cyrus Levinthal meet in a pub to debate the folding and function of proteins, and how Darwin's thinking provided a solution to an almost impossible problem. However, how do you make a protein with a completely novel function that nature has not yet invented? [There is an unfortunate historical error here: Anfinsen was an American biochemist, not Swedish. Mea culpa...I was unable to correct the error of his name and nationality in time for the production of the book.]

Solving the Pandemic: Darwin behind the mRNA vaccine

This episode examines how Darwinian evolutionary theories contributed to understanding the COVID-19 pandemic and, eventually to defeating it with mRNA vaccines.

The Evolving Pandemic

This episode explains how we had anticipated, using Darwinian logic, a pandemic, not in its exact form but in some form, at least 7 years before it actually came, but had failed to respond appropriately..

The Absurd Pandemic

Albert Camus, the Nobel-winning author of The Plague and a foremost proponent of existentialism, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, both inventors of polio vaccines, and Francis Crick, often called the smartest biologist of the century, are having a dinner party, discussing the pandemic and viral evolution.

How Do Flies Teach Us About Our Diseases?

Darwinian evolution posits that all living organisms are related by kinship. This allows a grand unification--a gene that influences a human disease might also do something important in flies, worms or baker's yeast. We therefore study these genes to discover their functions, then infer their possible functions in human diseases.

On Measures and Mismeasures of Kinship

This AI-generated podcast is taking place in a parallel universe. Here are three giants: T. H. Huxley, known as Darwin's Bulldog, J. B. S. Haldane, reputed to be the smartest biologist of the 20th century, and Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard Naturalist who became an evangelist for Darwinian Evolution in the late 20th century. They gossip about how to measure the likenesses of genes and proteins, and most of all, why care?

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