Night Science

George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A pioneer in the fields of personalized genomics and synthetic biology, he has co-founded over 50 biotech companies. In 2017, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In this conversation, we di

Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s leading developmental biologists, who has been recognized by the 2023 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize and Science magazin's People's Vote for Scientific Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. In this episode, we explore the

Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole argument for truth – was invented only in the 1700s, championed by the groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton. In the April 1st, 2024, episode of the Day Science Podcast, Sir Isaac looks back on his solitary life, reveal

Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in human evolution. In this out-of-the-ordinary episode, we talk about this specific science project: how did Bo, with Itai’s help, discover the mutation that le

Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he tells us about his artist-in-residence program at the Broad. As its director, he aims to hire researchers who look like they'll be changing fields in

Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other people’s music, Sean attributes his own creativity to his insatiable habit of reading about other people’s science – that’s how he “fertilizes his garden”. To

Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a

Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. By talking with other people, we not only pool the information or ideas that each of us individually lacks, but we are also able to improv

Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often the process that led to a particular result can be more interesting than the result itself – something that is true not only in science but also in fie

Carolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In this episode we talk about how the process of science is unstructured, so you don’t know when and where the next idea is going to come – sometimes even at the supermarket checkout line. For Carolyn, science is a long game, where one person’s negative result might