Forum

Forum is the podcast of Nature Biotechnology, and what gives it a distinct character is who holds the microphone: the journal's own editors, talking shop with researchers. Two formats share the feed. The first is the roundtable, a field-level conversation named for its subject and its guests, as in 'Wearables Roundtable: Bao and Rogers' or 'Organoids Roundtable: Lancaster and Pasca'. In the 2025 roundtables, Senior Editor Michael Francisco begins with a brief primer, asking Chief Editor Barbara Cheifet to explain the technology and say why she chose her guests. That setup earns its place. A couple of sentences on how laser light absorbed by tissue warms it, expands it and gives off detectable ultrasound make the photoacoustic discussion much easier to follow. Then the guests take over. Zhenan Bao traces a path into wearables to electronic skin for people who have lost the sense of touch, while John Rogers dwells on something that sounds mundane, the adhesive bonding a device to the skin, which matters acutely for premature babies burdened by wires. The conversation also asks what becomes of single-use sensors and adhesives once discarded, and describes compostable materials for sweat-analysis devices. In the biomolecular ultrasound roundtable, Mikhail Shapiro and David Maresca explain gas vesicles that engineered cells can produce, so that chosen cells scatter sound and reveal gene expression deep in the body. The photoacoustics conversation with Vasilis Ntziachristos and Junjie Yao weighs why a technique around for a century has not moved as fast as ultrasound, then ranges from tumor acidity to how different organs age. With Brian Hie and Marie Lopez, the foundation models roundtable stays honest about limits: a compact model trained on carefully curated experimental data can still outperform a broad one on a single narrow task. Other roundtables, several led by Senior Editor Markus Elsner, carry titles on gene therapy, drug delivery, PROTACs and CRISPR screening, while Barbara Cheifet's sessions also take in xenotransplantation, the microbiome and the Human Cell Atlas. The second format, From Bench to Podcast, narrows the lens to one paper. Associate Editor Cláudia Vilhena interviews early-career first authors about the story behind their published work: how the idea took shape, who helped, and what comes next. Ali Shaib's conversation shows the appeal. He walks through how his team reached the point of seeing the shapes of individual protein molecules with ordinary light microscopes, jokes about giving a fifteen-minute answer to a two-minute question, and credits the network of colleagues who gave him courage. Other entries in the strand cover bacteria engineered to stain textiles, recombitrons for editing bacteriophage genes, lab tests of AI-generated enzymes and a computational toolbox pairing spatial transcriptomics with histology. One outlier sits in the feed too, an entry titled 'Hope Lies in Dreams Chapter 1', whose notes follow the early life of Stan Crooke. Across both formats the talk is technical and openly enthusiastic; one roundtable guest, asked about applications, admits to being excited about everything. What a listener gets is a window onto how practitioners think about their tools, including where those tools still fall short.