Hello, everyone, and welcome to talk nerdy.

Today is Monday, December 1st, 2025.

And I'm the host of the show, Dr. Kara, Santa Maria. We are approaching the

holiday season. It's the last month of 2025. I don't know how you feel about that. Some people

are saying good riddance to this year. Other people are saying time is just moving much too

quickly. We've got two more shows for you after this

one, one next Monday on the 8th, another the following Monday on the 15th. And then we take two weeks

every year for hiatus. This year they're falling on the 22nd and the 29th of December. So that's

over the sort of holiday break for a lot of you.

I'm really excited about this week's episode. It's an interesting, I think the coming episodes

that are interesting, they're sort of ethically and morally complex. Hopefully they spark a lot of questions, a lot of conversations with you and your friends and

your loved ones.

This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Melanie D.G. Kaplan.

She wrote a book called Lab Dog, a beagle and his human investigate the surprising world of animal research.

So Melanie is an independent journalist.

She has covered travel and science writing, but also a lot of other general journalism for a lot of outlets that you read.

Washington Post, Wall Street Journal,

National Parks magazine. She went to Columbia J School and she was also an MIT night science

journalism fellow. And she's a dog person. We shared photos of our dogs. She wrote this

really fascinating book about her dog,

who named Tammy, great name, who also happened to have been bred and utilized for

biomedical research. And so it's a fascinating and really personal take on the

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