Antisense RNA therapy, Fossils vs Trump, Printing mini-kidneys, Electric eel power
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Promising results from a small clinical trial of Huntingdon's disease patients have led to RNA-directed therapy such as antisense RNA being hailed as possibly a turning point in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Adam Rutherford discusses this class of drugs with Heidi Ledford of Nature News.
At the beginning of the month, Donald Trump decreed that two national monument landscapes be drastically down-sized. Strict protections against exploitation were removed from vast tracts of land bearing some of the world's most important fossil bearing strata. President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists, Professor David Polly explains why his organisation is now suing Trump.
At Harvard University, bioengineers are growing parts of functioning kidneys in small chips using a form of 3D printing. Jennifer Lewis' lab is doing this to learn how kidneys function and explore the possible therapeutic applications of the mini-kidneys-in-a-chip. Roland Pease visits the team at work.
The electric eel can deliver a 600 volt shock, from a stack of electrically charged cells along the length of its body. Inspired by the eel's biology, Michael Mayer and his colleagues at the Universities of Fribourg and Michigan have now created their own version of its electric organ with the help of jelly babies and clever origami. In the future, it could power devices in the human body.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello you, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 21st of December 2017. |
| 0:11.0 | So happy Christmas if you celebrate that and happy short wintery break if you don't. |
| 0:14.6 | I'm Adam Rutherford and here are some urgent public service messages before the meet of the show. |
| 0:19.8 | First, next week's Inside Science is our end of year special, all dedicated to the story of human evolution, |
| 0:26.4 | fully updated with all the crazy shenanigans that have been published in the last furious year. |
| 0:31.8 | It really is a doozy. Second, the new series of |
| 0:35.2 | the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry has dropped podcast first but broadcast in |
| 0:39.4 | January. It is typically bonkers and features excellent listener questions such as why don't bats get confused in caves and why doesn't anything go faster than the speed of light and the usual level of Dr Fry and myself generally |
| 0:54.2 | sciencing the hell out of everything. Meanwhile if you wouldn't mind could you |
| 0:58.5 | rate inside science on whatever pod software you use because it really helps other like-minded science |
| 1:04.0 | souls to find us. But this week first we've got jelly babies electric eels and |
| 1:09.7 | origami all in one story combine them all together and biophysicists have come up with a shocking |
| 1:15.2 | new way to generate electricity. And if that's not magical enough, we're looking at the 3D |
| 1:20.3 | printing of kidney cells to form a functional and incredibly beautiful test organ. |
| 1:27.0 | First of all, I'm just going to say what you've got up on your screen there from a microscope |
| 1:30.6 | is unbelievably beautiful. It's like, this is like, it's like a galaxy. |
| 1:34.4 | I could stare at this all day. |
| 1:36.2 | I call it my science porn. |
| 1:39.7 | And we'll be talking to paleontologists who are suing President Trump for revoking protection of areas of |
| 1:45.1 | Utah that are bursting with dinosaurs and other fossils. But first, are we on the verge of |
| 1:51.0 | a major breakthrough in treating neurodegenerative diseases? |
... |
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