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Big Mood, Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery

Check Yourself, Mate

Big Mood, Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery

Slate Podcasts

Society & Culture, Relationships, Health & Fitness, Sexuality

4.41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Danny Lavery welcomes Daniel Cohen, a Ph.D. chemical biologist working at a small biotech startup that is developing a new generation of antibiotics and anticancer drugs. 

Lavery and Cohen take on three letters: First, from a letter writer whose laid-up roommate is barking demands. Another letter writer is wondering how to get started in getting involved in community issues. Plus, a check-in into the world of chemical biology. 

Slate Plus members get another episode of Big Mood, Little Mood every Friday: sign up now!

Need advice? Send Danny a question here.

Email: mood@slate.com

Production by Phil Surkis


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening ad-free on Amazon music.

0:03.4

Just a reminder that Big M. Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery happens twice a week.

0:08.0

Slate Plus members get an additional mini-episode or Little Big Mood every Friday.

0:12.8

Sign up now to listen atood, Little Mood. I am your host, Danny M. Lavery, and with me in the studio this week is Daniel Cohen, a PhD chemical biologist working at a small biotech startup that's developing a new generation of antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs. He's also an expected father and the owner of a very dumb but

0:55.1

lovable dog. Daniel, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

1:00.4

I am excited to have you here as well, and you are part of my ongoing outreach to STEM fields, I guess,

1:07.4

is what I'm going to officially call it. And my apologies, too, I saw the word

1:11.1

chem earlier, and I said, you're a chemist, and I see now you're a chemical biologist. And I bet those

1:16.8

two things are different, huh? Well, chemical biology is one of these fields where if you ask

1:21.4

100 chemical biologists, you'll get 101 definitions of what the field is. So some of us call

1:26.4

ourselves chemists, some of us call

1:27.5

ourselves biologists. We're pretty flexible. I appreciate that the sort of premise of chemical

1:32.9

biology is the same thing as like, what is Judaism? Right. It's just, it's entirely

1:37.9

dependent on who you ask. Yeah, just like everyone has their own answer and we'd love to tell you

1:42.1

about it. That's, That's a hundred percent true.

1:45.0

That is 100 percent true.

1:46.3

That is very exciting.

1:47.9

I know as little about chemical biology as I do about chemistry.

1:52.2

So again, I'm just excited to have, you know, the more scientists on the show, the better.

2:00.1

Listeners may remember that a while back I sort of realized that, you know, I had a lot of

2:04.6

professors and various, like, scholars from the humanities on the show, because that's a lot

2:09.4

of the people that I know, but I was like, I don't have enough chemists. I don't know anything

...

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