Scientists retrace their discoveries, one plain question at a time.
Science is Fun! gives one researcher at a time room to explain how they got into science and how their discoveries came together, while a curious interviewer asks the plain follow-up questions. Guests have included Jay Levy on isolating HIV, synthetic biologist Cole Roybal on engineered immune cells, and Ron Kraus on cholesterol and diet.
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Science is Fun! is a conversation show about biomedical research, told through the people who did it. Episodes are built around a single guest. The interviewer, whom guests address as Peter, likes to start at the beginning and ask how someone broke into science before getting anywhere near the results. Those origin stories come with concrete detail. Bill DeGrado trained in organic chemistry, drifted away from proteins in graduate school, and found them again because he had to take a biochemistry course. Basim Elsaidi starts with growing up in Nuremberg. Then the conversation goes looking for mechanism. Elsaidi, a UCSF floor mate of the interviewer, lays out a model in which the machinery that silences genes reaches from one nucleosome to grab the next. Ron Kraus describes how an artery plaque starts as cholesterol buildup and, by the time it leads to a heart attack, has filled with inflammatory cells, fibroblasts and muscle cells. Cole Roybal, who works on controlling immune cells to treat cancer, explains how swapping about a hundred natural versions of one receptor segment changed both how much of the receptor reaches the cell surface and how efficiently it is cleaved. The questions in between are the ones a newcomer would ask. Is a plaque just cholesterol, or a mix? Did a model come from simulations, or from experiments? That habit keeps dense material easy to follow without watering it down. History gets its turn too. Jay Levy, one of the first people to isolate HIV, recalls doing it right after the French, then talks about a factor called CAF that he has known about since 1986 and that is now the target of CRISPR screens. He is frank about why it has taken so long: funders, he says, decided the work should go to a company. Stephen Houser, a physician-scientist and author of The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries, remembers three years of transferring T-cell clones between marmosets while still sure the disease worked the way it did in mice. His career went on to uncover a key role for B-cells in multiple sclerosis and led to drugs now available for the disease. He also talks about what a pleasant campus tells a patient on the worst day of their life. Beyond the bench, the talk turns to how science is run: Elsaidi's teaching work and ideas for improving graduate education, Levy's funding troubles, and Roybal's description of his academic lab as an innovation engine in a career that also reaches into industry. Episode titles lean toward plain hooks, such as 'Can we eat saturated fat again?' and 'How to design a drug in an afternoon'. The tone throughout is friendly and curious. A listener drawn to medical history could start with 'Finding the AIDS virus', and one curious about how cells get engineered could start with 'Synbio meets immunotherapy'.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes to hear how a scientist got started before hearing the results, and who is happy to follow a conversation into nucleosomes, T-cell clones and receptor sequences to understand work on HIV, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and cancer.
What sets it apart: Science is Fun! connects career backstory to real mechanism: the interviewer asks the questions a newcomer would ask, and guests answer at the level of plaque composition or protein sequence. Some guests work alongside the interviewer at UCSF, which gives some conversations the ease of colleagues catching up.
"Science is fun!" is a podcast about the trials and tribulations of famous scientists and rising stars. We dig deep into the backstories behind the science, explain how the big discoveries were made, and discuss how you too can participate in the next big step forward.
Sticky ends become a yeast experiment; you get to watch a gene-silencing idea earn its keep.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A gene-silencing model is tested in yeast, then opens into a broader look at training scientists.
Gene silencing comes through as a story of model-building: scientists notice a pattern, test what it predicts, and then revise what the model can explain.
Failed T-cell experiments lead Stephen Houser toward B-cell research in multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Stephen Houser's long-held T-cell theory of multiple sclerosis begins to give way when the experiments refuse to work. The episode is strongest when it lingers on that discomfort: a postdoc's suggestion that B cells and antibody may matter, the later replication of an…
A clear cholesterol discussion that links artery-wall biology to the limits of dietary certainty.
The episode begins with Dr. Ron Kraus's route into cardiovascular disease, then opens into a larger question: why nutrition rarely fits clean rules, and what it would take to make dietary guidance more predictive.
A focused look at tuning immune-cell receptors around the clinical demands of cancer treatment.
Cell therapy comes across here as a design problem, with synthetic biologist Cole Roybal linking academic research to the development of immune-cell tools that could eventually inform cancer treatment.
A firsthand HIV research history, grounded in patients and the long search for a factor that could help control infection.
Jay Levy's account of isolating HIV in the United States starts with a patient at San Francisco General who had once been his classmate at Wesleyan.
Mushroom culture from soil to society.
Clear neuroscience for curious minds.
Plant papers, jokes, and useful uncertainty.
Weed science, from genomes to paddocks.
Biomedical careers, described from the inside.
Human stakes behind biomedical progress.
Basim Elsaidi says a dark-grown seedling can change 10% to 15% of its genome within an hour of first light, and he uses that example to explain how plants read red and far-red signals.
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["Cole Roybal says he works across academia and industry because he wants synthetic biology ideas to become therapies that can be tested in people, not just grant proposals.", "He traces that path back to a UCSF PhD in basic immunology, where he studied T cells, immune synapses, and hundreds of signaling molecules with live-cell imaging.", "Roybal says T cells can detect peptide-MHC with switch-like sensitivity, sometimes close to one peptide molecule on a target, and he explains why disengagement matters after killing.", "The conversation then turns to synthetic Notch-like receptors, cleavage tuning, and Arsenal's ovarian-cancer trials, where Roybal says engineered cells can act like local drug producers."]
Jay Levy says his UCSF lab isolated the first U.S.
Lewis Lanier explains that Rolf Keisley named natural killer cells in 1975 after an unimmunized mouse spleen killed tumor cells in a dish, and Eva Clyde struck "leukemia" from the name because "it's broader than this." Lanier traces how his 1981 BD lab work led to CD16, the Fc receptor that drives ADCC, and to Rituxan's mechanism of depleting B cells.
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Sherry Mukurjee, UCSF cell biologist nicknamed the "Bacteria Whisperer," traces her path from a Calcutta chemistry undergrad (10 places, 2,000+ applicants) to a 2001 arrival at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Interview with chemist Bill DeGrado about his pioneering work in de novo protein design and his journey into the field.
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An interview with Dr.
An interview with immunologist Richard Loxley discussing his work and COVID-19.