The Science Pawdcast

Season 5 Episode 26: The Effects of Extreme Heat, Dog Pessimists, and Gene Editing with Dr. Jocelyn Pearl

• Jason Zackowski • Season 5 • Episode 26

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As we grapple with the scorching heat of July 2023, the hottest month in human history, we tackle the intense effects of extreme heat on the human body. From increased perspiration and blood circulation to overworked hearts, the dialogue gets heated. We examine the perilous role of dehydration and the hindrance high humidity plays on our cooling processes.  We also look at a fun test to determine if dog's see the glass half empty or half full!  Are dogs optimistic?

Jocelyn Pearl, a guiding force in the Decentralized Science Initiative (DSI), brings us into her world of gene editing. Discover how proteins can target DNA regions and message cells, and the potential future of cellular therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. It's a candid conversation, where Jocelyn shares her journey into biomedical research and her role with the DSI. Then we shift gears and welcome Vega Shaw and Madeline Odin to discuss animal communication and gene editing. Bridging software with biology and patient advocacy with research, our conversation extends into animals' understanding of higher-order thinking, sparked by a heartwarming pet story.

Dr. Arielle Johnson narrates the story of David Faganbaum, shedding light on diagnosing rare diseases and the importance of access to treatments. She speaks passionately about a nonprofit empowering families to find therapeutic solutions. We also explore the realm of repurposing FDA-approved drugs and the crucial need for funding further research. In a lighter vein, we delve into the democratisation of sailing offered by the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle. As we wrap up this enlightening episode, we share adventures and experiences and express our gratitude to our sponsor Bark and Beyond Supplycom. Don’t forget to use the coupon code Bunsen for a 10% discount.

Dr. Pearl's Links:

https://twitter.com/JocelynnPearl
https://twitter.com/LadyScientistP1

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Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zekowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold onto your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.

Speaker 2:

The podcast might be out a little late today, but that's because Chris and I just got back from a mountain getaway with the dogs. It rained the whole time so we had to alter some of our hikes and cut our paddleboarding kayaking short. But the good thing about hiking with a giant dog like Bunsen, who's very, very fuzzy, he doesn't mind the rain and it definitely keeps him really cool. We do worry about his health if we're hiking on a very, very hot day. So anyways, it was a great time good relaxation and recharge. And, hey, it's time to record the Science Podcast. In Science News we're going to be talking a little bit about the effect of the extreme heat on human bodies. That's our Science News this week. And in Pet Science we're going to be talking about if dogs are optimists or pessimists. I love this little study. It's a great one and our guest is Dr Jocelyn Pearl, who is a bit of a tinkerer with genetic code. She has her own podcast and such a cool, cool guest, so can't wait for you to listen to that interview. Here's the fun joke the optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says the glass is half empty and the opportunist just drinks the water. Okay, on with the show, because there's no time like Science Time.

Speaker 2:

This week in Science News we're going to talk about extreme heat again, but the effect on the human body. This is precipitated, I guess, by climate change and extreme weather being in the news. If you're listening to this, this is in the summer August of 2023, and devastating news out of Hawaii, with Maui and the wildfires that leveled Lahaina and actually there's a lot of death from it. So normally the Science Podcast is this chipper thing, but I mean we do have to talk about real world events and this one hits close to home because our family we're so fortunate to have gone to Maui and walk through the streets of Lahaina at night and Adam and Duncan played our two sons when they were little. This is when they were little. They played in the Banyan tree and it's just heartbreaking that that's all gone, but that pales into comparison to the folks that live on the island or who lost their lives.

Speaker 2:

So I think it's timely to talk about some heat and what it does to the body. So July 2023 has been the hottest month ever recorded and it could possibly be the hottest month in what we know of human history. There may not have been another month where humans as we know them, like not 30, 40,000 years ago, but like humans walked the earth. It was the hottest in human history. And the question is when it gets really hot, what happens to the body?

Speaker 2:

So there's two things that the body does to regulate temperature. The first one is sweating. So that means your I mean your skin sweat glands, releases water through the pores and as the water evaporates, it absorbs heat. That is an you know, that is an endothermic reaction. I like to tell kids when, when water turns from liquid to a gas, it needs energy and if you are very, very hot, that absorbs the energy and it cools you down. Also, when your blood circulates near the surface of your skin through the dilation of your blood vessels. That wicks away some of your internal heat, disperses it to the surrounding area. If the humidity of your area is really high, that impedes or slows or kind of like, doesn't make it as effective to sweat, as the air around you is already really full of water and that moisture laden air doesn't allow sweats to evaporate. In the same way, when it's so humid, the body must work really hard to compensate and that results in your heart rate going up, because, remember, you've only got two ways to cool down. We can't pant like dogs. So the blood will circulate more to the surface to wick away the heat. And how does the blood get to the surface or close to the surface of your skin? Your heart. So your heart will beat harder.

Speaker 2:

At night it's usually cooler, but as heat waves have affected the earth and temperatures have remained stubbornly hot at night, your body's cooling systems are under stress around the clock. So it would, you know, if it's a cool night, your body gets a break. All of the things it's been doing all day your increased heart rate, your, your sweating that can take a break. But the current heat waves have kept things hot until late into the night. So your body is under that stress for longer. Also, there are things that it can do can affect your sleep patterns.

Speaker 2:

Not everybody has air conditioning. I know in some places in the world air conditioning is quite common. Or you need it to survive, or, quote unquote, survive, like there's lots of places where these extreme heat waves have occurred and the populace is just not prepared. They traditionally haven't had to deal with it being this hot, and when it's not this hot you don't need air conditioning. I guess it would be kind of like I would be as flabbergasted going to different places in the world and finding out that their home didn't have a furnace, like what are you going to do in the winter? Well, maybe it never really gets cold enough to have a furnace. Right, these convergences of things like it's hotter, there's more humidity and the nights are super warm All of these strain your body's cooling mechanisms. All of these things can lead to severe health issues. If your heart's working way harder than normal, you can experience oxygen shortages because while the blood is pumping around faster, you're not bringing in more air and plus you need a lot of energy to run your heart.

Speaker 2:

Cardiovascular failure is responsible for a huge portion of heat related deaths. Among older individuals, heat exhaustion sets in around 38 degrees Celsius, that's just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and if you've ever got that hot, if your body can't keep your temperature under that, that's when you start to get headaches, you feel faint and dizzy and that heat exhaustion can escalate to deadly heat stroke, and that's when the body's temperature exceeds 40 degrees Celsius, and that's 104 degrees Fahrenheit. If you've taken first aid, you've probably learned the different symptoms for heat exhaustion and heat stroke. But heat stroke is deadly because that's damaging both your organs and cell functions. You start to get delirious and seizures could occur, and that's when some people can die.

Speaker 2:

Other things are affected as you sweat too, remember. If you're not increasing your fluid intake, you can get really, really dehydrated, and as you dehydrate, your blood thickens, your blood becomes more syrupy and guess what that puts strain on, yeah, your organs, specifically your heart. So not only does your heart working harder in extreme temperatures, if you're not keeping your fluid level up, your blood is making it harder for your heart to move that blood to the surface to cool you off. Now there are certain demographics that are much more affected by heat. I was talking to my father-in-law, who's in the older demographic and he said, like when he was, when he was younger, the heat didn't affect him the same way. And he said now that he's older, and especially when we've gone through some of the really hot times in the last couple of years, he says it's just like knocked him on his butt. So, yeah, people over 65 are more affected by the extreme heat, as well as those who are pregnant and on specific medications that may be thickening up your blood or helping out your heart to people that are, you know, do have heart, lung issues, and also small children and newborns are very susceptible to these extreme heats. I think it's important for our general podcast audience to know that extreme heat does have an effect on the body and maybe a little bit of both the science behind why it affects the body. So that's science news for this week.

Speaker 2:

This week in Pet Science, let's talk about if dogs could be optimistic or pessimistic. On our way back from the mountains, I was talking to Cress and the Vehicle and I didn't realize it, but I was being very negative. Now, I wasn't being negative about her or the dogs, I just said three kind of grouchy statements in the row and Cress said whoa, you are being so negative right now, and normally I'm a pretty optimistic person. Normally I'm excited about everything, and I had to check myself. I realized you know what I need to reframe what I say, so I can generally turn something pessimistic or a challenge into something that's exciting and an optimistic point of view. Maybe you know somebody who's the Debbie Downer that's a character from Saturday Night Live, of everything that, no matter what, they are pessimistic.

Speaker 2:

I feel, though, we do need the odd person in a group who has perhaps a more dour outlook, because they may bring up points that an eternal optimistic person like myself may miss. Because I'm like, oh, it's all roses and puppies at my department meetings, and somebody is always like, well, what about this? This is not great. And I'm like, oh, I didn't even think about that. Because I'm like a golden retriever Everything is great, everything is awesome. So the question is are dogs optimistic or pessimistic? Did they have those kind of viewpoints? Now this gets to the heart of something called judgment bias. Optimism and pessimism are from that whole viewpoint of judgment. If you judge things positively, then you're an optimistic person. If you judge things negatively, you're probably more pessimistic. You could be very fluid, depending on your day If you had a really bad day or some life events that occurred. An optimistic person can be transformed into a pessimistic person and vice versa.

Speaker 2:

To test if animals have judgment bias, including dogs, you have to test them with something that they would relate to in their world. A classic experiment that showed that animals do have some judgment bias was designed for rats, and the two rats were named Zelda and Zoe, and they were trained using tones, music tones and again, I'm not a big fan of the study, but I'll just talk about it. They associated a tone with treats and then another tone with shocks, and the researchers played a tone that was ambiguous, meaning that it didn't relate to a shock and it didn't relate to a treat. So when the rat pressed a lever, they got a treat if it was a positive tone, and if the rat pressed the lever and it was a negative tone, they got a shock. So that's how they got to know that the negative tone had a negative consequence. Zelda, one of the rats, just pressed the lever, hoping for a treat. She was optimistic. Well, zoe hesitated when the ambiguous sound was like I think I'm not going to press a lever, it could be a shock, and that showed that animals do have that judgment bias.

Speaker 2:

Now how could you adapt this for dogs without shocking them? Okay, so two dogs, rufus and Rainy, were trained to associate bowl locations with treats and emptiness. They also set up an ambiguous bowl placed between them. So the idea is there could be treats in the bowl. The dogs don't know. The one bowl over there always had treats, no matter what, and the bowl over there, no matter how many times they approached it, never had treats. But this randomly placed bowl could have treats, or maybe not.

Speaker 2:

So the idea is dogs may approach the bowl hoping that there's a treat, and the dogs may not approach the bowl because it's not in the right location. They're pessimistic about it having a treat. And they found that one of the dogs, rufus, approached the bowl quickly, well as Rainy didn't. Rainy hesitated and avoided it. So you have a little bit of an optimistic and pessimistic dog. You can apply this to training. We talked about this before on the Science Podcast that dogs train generally faster and they retain more skills, and also the bond with the handler is stronger when they are trained with an optimistic type of training, meaning they get treats, and they get treats when they do the thing correctly, as opposed to adding like punishment, you're adding something that's bad, like shock callers or something like that. So dogs and humans can be labeled optimistic and pessimistic based on their personality. Dogs have judgment bias and that's really cute. If your household has a bunch of dogs, it'd be cool to run that experiment to see which of your dogs is the most optimistic. We're going to try it with Bunsen and Beaker. We'll let you know how it goes. That's Pet Science for this week.

Speaker 2:

Hey everybody, before we get to the interview section, here's a couple ways you can help the Science Podcast out. Number one if you're on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating. Tell your friends and share it with people who love science and pets like teachers. Number two think about signing up as a member of the Paw Pack. It allows you to connect with people who love our show and it's a way to keep the show free. Number three check out our merch store. We have the Bunsen Stuffie 2.0. There's still some Beaker stuffies left that they're adorable as well Warm, cuddly clothes and adorable drinkware. The link is in the show notes. Now on to the interview. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast and I'm thrilled to have Dr Jocelyn Pearl, biotech scientist, with us today. Doc, how are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I'm good. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. It was quite a random chance that I met you on, I think, a space of some sort, and it was very cool that you agreed to come chat with us about what you do. But where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 3:

I am currently based in Seattle Washington and we're enjoying a beautiful summer here. It's our favorite months of the year and the mountain is out, as we like to say, so. Mount Rainier is visible from the window this morning.

Speaker 2:

Beautiful Seattle, the whole Pacific Northwest my favoriteest place on the planet Earth. I love that area.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's gorgeous here.

Speaker 2:

Have you lived there your whole life or have you had to hop around for work, jobs, education?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I actually grew up in Wisconsin in the Midwest and lived there for the first 18 years of my life and then went to UC Berkeley in California for my undergraduate degree and then moved up here to go to the University of Washington where I did my PhD in molecular and cellular biology.

Speaker 2:

What got you into science? Were? You was little Jocelyn, a little scientist like gathering frogs and getting on science shows for people. Or did it come to you a little bit later?

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, 100%. I was always really interested in nature, interested in wildlife, understanding the world around me. You know, did a lot of what I call outdoor science, where you're kind of investigating animals and the environment. And then in college actually, I became a little bit more interested in genetics and the biomedical side of the science world, what I call indoor science, and that's still what I do today.

Speaker 2:

Was it a class you took, did, you did. A Punnett Square hit you in the face.

Speaker 3:

A Punnett Square definitely hit me in the face. I did take a genetics class. That was very formative for me. But you know, my grandfather actually unfortunately had passed away from ALS or Leuigeric's disease and I knew that he was really passionate about biomedical research. And you know, around that time when I took the class in genetics started to realize that I really loved that field and wanted to know more and also became more interested in work that had a purpose and something that I could really see. The impact of Working on drugs, for instance, that could help people who are suffering from disease really became my focus at that point in time.

Speaker 2:

Right, and if I'm looking at some of the stuff you've done in the past, you worked with gene editing and T cells. Could you talk to us a little bit about that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so actually my first biotech job came out of that class. I started working for my professor at a biotech company in the Bay Area doing some early gene editing work. So gene editing, of course, is a system where we can deliver specific proteins to cells and they can induce a change to the genome and change the DNA. So in that first job I got to work with some of these proteins and start to engineer cells to have different functions. We worked on everything from plant genomes to cystic fibrosis to Huntington's disease, and then later on in my postdoc work I was engineering T cells so that they become less exhausted. So T cells, oh, go ahead.

Speaker 2:

They don't get as tired.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, they don't get as tired.

Speaker 2:

They're more complicated than giving them Red Bull.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, pretty much. I mean that's the ideal outcome. We want to supercharge these cells so that we can use them to treat cancer and other types of diseases.

Speaker 2:

That's so cool. So this is a really broad question. But you said you in gene editing, you kind of like trick them into taking these proteins. Is that it? Do you have to confuse the cell a bit to start editing them that way?

Speaker 3:

It's more like you're trying to send them a message, and we have different ways of doing that. You can shock the cell, you can attach this message to something called a lipoprotein that can get taken up by the cell. So we have different ways of delivering that message. And then, once it's in there, it can go ahead and modify the genome. And I actually work on a different version of this that we call epigenetic editing, where instead of cutting the DNA, like we do in gene editing, you can actually modify gene expression in the cell, so you can turn genes up or down, and that can allow you to have even finer control of the kind of program of that cell.

Speaker 2:

So can I ask a few questions about the T cell stuff you did, Because T cells are their integral to the immune system. When you said they get exhaustive and I was kind of being tongue-in-cheek they need Red Bull, why do they get so tired? What's the mechanism there?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good question and there's a lot of people trying to find the answers to that question. At least in certain cancer types, like breast cancer for instance, what we see with these types of cell therapies is that the cells are getting into the tumors but eventually they stop proliferating or expanding and that means that their potential for killing more cells stops as well. So we want to overcome that so that these cells can kill even more of the cancer cells, and there's some really amazing work coming out just this past year for certain types of brain cancers. Actually, there's a group out of Stanford and another in Italy where they started to see some positive results of these cells being able to treat these pretty severe types of cancer, and it's exciting that people are finding ways to overcome the exhaustion of these cells.

Speaker 2:

So which now? I'm not an immunologist and I am very basic training in immunology. I'm a chemistry person. If I'm remembering right, there's like two types of C cells. There's like the psycho killer ones and then the helper ones. Is that, am I on the right track, or is this a different part of the series?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I'll caveat that with the fact that I'm not an immunologist by training either. I actually my training is more in the molecular and cellular biology space, where I need transcription factors and gene expression changes and disease and then work to engineer overcome some of those changes in disease. So that's really my expertise. I'm more of a tinkerer and a molecular engineer where I'm piecing together pieces of DNA to produce some kind of effect in cells or as a drug modality.

Speaker 2:

If you're a tinkerer and you have to, if I'm getting this right, you were in charge of somehow getting the message to the cell. You had a bill thing. How do you do that, Like I am imagining you're not just like swishing things around in a beaker.

Speaker 3:

And then you know, yeah, so we have a few different ways of doing that. You can deliver these messages as DNA, usually in the form of a circular plasmid. We also sometimes make RNA from the DNA and then put that into the cells, which is similar to how the COVID vaccines worked. Those delivered a message in the form of RNA. We can also deliver them as virus to the cells and in some cases those viruses will express that message for a longer period of time, so what we call stable expression versus transient, like in the case of the COVID vaccines.

Speaker 2:

The question I think some of our listeners will be wondering is there's been a lot of news about another gene editing thing called CRISPR. This doesn't sound like CRISPR to me what you're explaining.

Speaker 3:

It is in a similar vein. Yeah, crispr is one of the gene editing modalities. The first kind of way that we had of editing the genome in a specific location actually came from zinc finger proteins. That are human proteins that we figured out how to engineer to target specific regions. And then there was another protein that was found in a bacteria called xanthomonas, and this protein we refer to as a talon, so they all have kind of funny names. But yes, there's multiple systems or proteins that can target specific DNA base pairs and specific sequences, and this class of proteins we refer to as sequence specific DNA binding proteins.

Speaker 2:

Cool, so do you. Is it dependent on how you're trying to get the message? Like you open up your toolbox to pick the right tool, or is there one that's superior to all other tools?

Speaker 3:

I like to talk about them as each our different options. In our toolkit there's a hammer, there's a screwdriver, there's a nail, and we have these different options, but I think they have pros and cons to each, and so when we're talking about engineering a cell to put into a patient, you have to take into consideration how specific these proteins are and how effective they are, and those are all the things that you kind of have to check off before you have something that is high enough quality for patients.

Speaker 2:

I love it. This is so interesting. Before we move on past this area of the interview, I have a big picture question for you, as somebody who's a tinker and has been the one that's sent the messages to the cells to edit them. What do you see the future of this Like if you could look into a crystal ball 10 or 20 years from now? Are there some exciting things coming, or is it too wacky and wild to predict? Oh, I definitely think there's exciting things coming.

Speaker 3:

It's a matter of when and how you know we have. Oh, go ahead. What are some of the wild things that you see coming.

Speaker 2:

What are some of them?

Speaker 3:

Well, as an example, people are already able to engineer cells to return to an induced pluripotent stem cell state or IPSC, and I think there's gonna be more versions of that, in the sense that we're able to engineer cells to become all other types of cells. That's kind of the dream, because what we want to be able to do is heal people with these cells. So if someone's suffering from a neurodegenerative brain disease, we want people to be able to receive cells that can heal them, and there's actually some early signals in clinical trials that some of these therapies are working. There was just a study from Blue Rock for cellular therapy for Parkinson's disease and it's looking like it's getting better and it's looking like it's safe and tolerated, which is kind of the first box we need to check for any new therapy. But yeah, hopefully in the future we have a number of options for patients to be able to recover from what they're suffering from.

Speaker 2:

So the idea, the low-hanging fruit potentially, is like being able to engineer nerve cells, for example in Parkinson's, and you give them these cells and they do loo-loo, they start to fix the disease itself. Oh, wow, that's cool. Hmm, okay, it's almost like science fiction. Yeah, it's so wild, okay. So my next question is what's your another thing that you have on the go right now? You're, you are the co-founder of LabDow. What is LabDow?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so LabDow is a decentralized science platform where we hope to enable scientists from all over the world and allow them to be able to do science in what we call the Web Lab. So traditionally, the science and even historically science has occurred in these kind of ivory towers, you know, at the upper echelons of society, in specific cities, for people who have the means to access the tools and be able to study science. And nowadays, with kind of the globalization and the internet, I think there's an even greater possibility for people outside of these kind of central hubs to be able to do science. So we're building tools online so that people from anywhere can run experiments. Right now that consists primarily of computational experiments, so using some of these new software tools to do things like drug discovery, and they've built a platform called Plex where anybody from their laptop can run some of these new programs. It's a pretty exciting time and hopefully enables even more scientists and tinkers out there to be able to do some of this cutting-edge work.

Speaker 2:

It's bringing everybody together. You don't have to be like in a major city to participate. Potentially, that's the goal. Am I on the right side? Exactly.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and actually the space that we met in um, the idea for the space, uh, came from. You know, when you're a graduate student, postdoc, or you're studying at a university, they often have beer hour at the end of the week or some version of a social hour, and that's when you get together and you talk about the science you're working on and you find collaborators. And so we started this uh Twitter space with the idea of allowing people from anywhere to have these types of conversations and connect and and form collaborations.

Speaker 2:

So very cool. I love it. Um, what how's it going? Are people signing up? Are people doing science together? Is this like still in the preliminary stages?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's, it's going good. Um, you know, the the DSI community is, I think, perhaps uh tied a little bit too much to crypto at the moment. Um, so, so decentralized autonomous organizations were originally defined as kind of a crypto version of an LLC, if you will. Um, there were ways of people uh forming groups and sharing equity um with with crypto. And so because and maybe this is getting into too much detail but because the crypto market has cooled considerably, um, I think the enthusiasm for DSI has also cooled down quite a bit. Um, but I think, from from the lab now perspective, uh, they've been really focused on building out this uh platform, plex that I mentioned, and really building software tools for scientists and um, to that end, I'm I'm really impressed by what the team's done and um, I only really, you know, serve as kind of an advisor and helped, helped found this organization. But, uh, there are many other people um who contribute a lot more than I do.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I love it. You know, I would uh 99 out of a hundred times rather get a uh DM from lab Dow than some crypto bro. So I'm, yeah, on Twitter, so that's great.

Speaker 3:

And I like to tell, like I've written about DSI and and talk about it, uh, quite a bit, and I I think one of the things that drew me in were the aspects of decentralization, democratization, um, and you know, the idea of more people being able to do science, uh was really appealing. And also, you know, just building out some of these cutting edge tools. But, um, you know, as the the rubber hits the road in any um movement or I don't know if you want to call it a fad um, you know, I think the challenges are always going to be there as far as uh running an organization with people and and all of that comes with that. So I think, um, we're going through that period of disillusionment a little bit, and you can feel free to edit any of this out, but that's just my candid view of of uh where DSI is today.

Speaker 2:

I love the education. Like, um, I, I did more background on what you did with, with science, rather than, uh, the lab Dow, so this is really interesting. Um, perfect, Now the. The next question I have for you is you have, uh, you have your own. You have a podcast. Ultra rare, what's, is that the name of it? Ultra rare, the pod.

Speaker 3:

So I have my main podcast is actually lady signed his podcast.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I read that wrong. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3:

And then I have a show I did a few episodes for called ultra rare. The podcast that was about this DSI space and, you know, interviewed some of the kind of leaders in that space as well. Um, but lady scientist podcast is my main, my main uh show right now.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so what's, what's lady scientist podcast about for people that maybe want to listen, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So lady scientist podcast is a show where I interview women scientists from all different fields, but especially the biotech space, and talk to them about their career journeys and how they got to where they are today, and also get into some of the the details of the work that they do.

Speaker 3:

Um, and it's been really lovely just getting to know all of these amazing lady scientists. Um, you can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts and you know, when I started the show, I was a fan of podcasts, love podcasting and love it as a tool and a form of media to learn about other people. Um, but I didn't see a lot of representation of women, uh, in the podcasting space, and I knew from my work in biotech that I worked with all these great women, um, who I looked up to and learned so much from, and I wanted to share that with more people. So that was kind of the the inspiration for starting the show, and I think we're in our third year of it and, um, yeah, encourage you to check it out and I'm always open to new guests or people you think would be good on the show. Cool.

Speaker 2:

I'll have to give it a listen for sure. Are there a couple of guests that stick out lately that you've had a chance to talk to Like some people? Yeah, it's so cool what you do. That happens to me every time. I talk to people like you, oh my gosh.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I just did an interview the other day Um with a woman, vega Shaw. She works for this company called Benchling that I really admire Um so she builds a software for biologists and that's kind of an interesting uh sector right now because biologists need even more of these tools Um to help advance their work. So that was a fun one that'll be out soon Um. I also interviewed a um rare disease mom uh who has her own lab at Tufts, um Madeline Odin and um once she learned of her daughter's rare disease, she started studying epilepsy Um and she's done a lot of work at the intersection of neuroscience and cancer. Actually, uh, so we get into her research and um her work on on uh patient advocacy for her daughter. So, um, that was also a really interesting episode.

Speaker 2:

Oh, so cool. Well, awesome. Thanks for talking to us about your podcast. That's, that's great. We'll make sure there's a link to it in our show notes, everybody, so you're just one click away. Oh, as we mix science guests and animal stories and animal science on the show, one of our standard questions is we ask our guests to tell us a pet story from their life. Um, could you, could you do that? Do you have a pet?

Speaker 3:

story? Yeah, of course, um, as I mentioned, I'm a huge animal lover. Uh, we actually have two dogs, thomas and Betsy, and um. At the start of the pandemic, I saw a TikTok video of this dog named Bunny using these um buttons to communicate with his owner. Um, they're from this company called fluent pet Uh, and essentially they're just these push buttons that you can use to record your own voice saying different words, and your dog can use them to interact with you, um.

Speaker 3:

So for a long time, I trained Thomas, my older dog. He's pretty smart. Um. Trained him how to interact with me using these buttons, um, so he could say things like water or play.

Speaker 3:

That was his favorite button, uh, he would hit it when he wanted to start playing with me, um, with like a toy, uh, or outside, if you wanted to go outside, um, and it was really fascinating. We don't still use them, but it taught me a lot about language and like communication with your, your pet, and one of the coolest things that came out of it for me was the fact that I realized we didn't even really need to use the buttons, that I was adding this like extra layer of communication when I already knew, you know, when he needed to go outside, he stood by the door. Um, when he wanted to play, he obviously, you know, brought a toy over and wanted to interact. So to me, it taught me that I didn't even need language Like and, and also that he understood so much more of my vocabulary than we could even, uh, get into Like we were just scratching the surface of like the words that he understood, um, so it was really fun exercise for, for, for um, for us, and kind of interesting relationship differences.

Speaker 2:

That's adorable. Yeah, I've talked to some, um dog researchers, uh, and they like there's, there's, there's, definitely they're in agreement that you can, you can use those buttons for, um, you know many different words. Uh, the controversy is maybe like some higher level thinking that there's some talk videos of dogs questioning their existence and things like that, and I'm not so sure a dog has that capability. It definitely could tell you that it's hungry, thirsty, wants to play, it loves you. Potentially it could understand that. But questioning its existence in the world is, you know, like, are there other dogs in outer space? I'm not sure it knows it. Could, you, could, you could do that. So that's very cool that use those buttons. Um, the irony is I just about bought them today. I was at the pet store, uh, that we go to and they had those, those programmable buttons, so I might pick them up for beaker.

Speaker 3:

So oh, very cool. I think it's a fun exercise, you know, even if you have like one or two um, just to start to see your pet interact with them and um, yeah, it was fun, I enjoyed it. I agree, who knows? You know about the higher order thinking, but there are some pretty crazy videos of some animals that have like over 70 of these buttons and can kind of form form uh, you know longer questions and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, the jury's out on that. Uh, who knows that? You're right. The more we learn about dogs, they blow us away with what they can and can't, what they can and what they understand. Um, and what type of dogs are they?

Speaker 3:

Last question about that so Thomas is a Britney spaniel, he is kind of a orange and white color, and then Betsy is a King Charles Cavalier, so she's like his, his little mini me, um, and they're they're pretty funny pair.

Speaker 2:

I love it Adorable. Well, thanks for sharing a pet story with us. The other question that is standard is the super fact. It's something that you know that when you tell people it kind of blows their mind a bit. Do you have a super fact for us?

Speaker 3:

Oh gosh, super facts. I'll just say I still, whenever I encounter one in like my day to day, I just love it, like I love that feeling of just being mind blown at something and it changing my whole worldview. So you know, I didn't think of one specifically for myself. There's a number of these in biology that I find really fascinating, like one of them is the fact that snakes, their digestive systems, actually like shrink when they're not eating and then build back up in mass, which just the idea that, like a whole organ system could be shrinking and expanding based on demand, I don't know that was mind blowing to me when I learned that.

Speaker 2:

Boy, I would sure like it if my stomach shrank a little bit. Yeah Go snakes. Well, that's cool. I'd imagine in your line of work, like everything's right on the edge, sometimes you have super facts or super things that happen weekly. You're like, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, this is bananas.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I feel like working with cells. It's so interesting because I spend so much of my energy taking care of cells and we take care of them in these fancy incubators with these different types of media, and I'm always kind of taking care of my needy cells, as I call them, but they still are so mysterious, like I think that's what maybe people outside of the cellular world don't quite understand is that there are still so many mysteries, even for those who spend a lot of time thinking about them or studying them. And yeah, maybe that's a good metaphor for life in general.

Speaker 2:

They're like onions. They have many layers. No wait, that's ogres. I'm sorry, got to get a Shrek reference in there. Well, thanks for your super fact, doc. The last section is the important to you section, where we get to know our guest a little bit, maybe beyond what they do for their day job causes and hobbies that they're passionate about. You have done some work with rare diseases and helping families with that. What's going on there?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so one of the areas that I'm really passionate about is helping families that have rare diseases.

Speaker 3:

Within the drug development world, a lot of industry or biotech is focused on more common illnesses, where there's a larger patient population that you can treat with a given drug, and so a lot of people who have some of these what we call ultra rare disorders, where there might only be a handful of patients or I think the official cutoff is like less than 100,000 patients they often have to do their own drug development and form research foundations and get funding and start to study these illnesses so that they can find something that will work.

Speaker 3:

So I worked with an organization called Perlara for a little while helping some of these families try to find solutions and really guiding them through that process, and Perlara has actually published a number of these reports that they've developed for these families on their sub-stack. So all of that information is open to anybody who wants to read it and might benefit from learning from some of these other families' journeys. But I'm really passionate about making sure that anybody who is suffering from an illness can try to access the tools they need to find a therapy that will work for them.

Speaker 2:

I can't imagine how confusing and overwhelming it must be for families that get a diagnosis that is just like you've never heard of it yourself and the diagnosis is now your life. I just can't imagine being in that spot, so it's wonderful that you help out with that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I actually just read this amazing memoir called Chasing my Cure by David Faganbaum and he talks about that experience of getting diagnosed with Castleman's disease when he was actually training to become a doctor and that completely changed his perspective of the medical world, where he had this view that Santa Claus is out there, like Santa Claus or a given doctor would be able to understand your disease and give you the solution and know what to do.

Speaker 3:

And he had to basically start studying his own illness and seeking his own answers. And it's a really beautiful kind of guidebook for the process that these patients go through of having to start to set up these foundations and do the research and hopefully find something. And he ends up finding a drug that had already been FDA approved for another illness that is still working for him. So he's been in remission for five years and I think that's another important message within this space is that there's so many drugs that have been approved and are kind of sitting on shelves that might be able to be repurposed for some of these illnesses and that piece takes research and it takes a lot of funding. So there's a number of foundations people can support to help fund this research for these families and hopefully help them find an answer.

Speaker 2:

What a great message to give to our audience. Thanks, Doc. It's not something that I believe we've ever talked about in the history of our show. So just some awareness and some advocacy. Thank you for that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The other question I wanted to just briefly is you mentioned to me a hobby or a passion of yours is spaces that are democratized Hopefully I said that word right Like this boat building thing in Seattle. What's going on there?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so for a number of years I volunteered at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, which was started by this couple and they essentially lived on Lake Union, which is right in the middle of the city, and they were known as people who would fix up old wooden boats and a lot of these wooden boats at the time were being kind of discarded and forgotten and they created what they called a living museum where anyone could come and learn how to build boats and learn how to sail boats and it really democratized sailing for a lot of people, where families can come down on Sundays and do their free public sailing. They have sailing lessons and I think they were really passionate about sharing this kind of niche sport with more people and teaching people in real time how to use their hands and how to sail and take on a new hobby. So it's a really neat spot. If anyone's ever in Seattle, I highly recommend you check it out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's something that if I'm thinking about. Hey, did you go to your sailing lesson? That seems like you'd have to become from a pretty affluent family to be going to a sailing lesson or have the ability to, so that's very cool for people to go to that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, Doc, we're at the end of our chat. First off, thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the Science Podcast and talking to us with your through some of your expertise on being the tinker and the mess and getting the message to sells for some editing there. That was very fascinating.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on the show, jason. It's always great to talk about science and I love, love the science podcast and really appreciate you having me on the show.

Speaker 2:

You bet you. And if you want some more of the Doc's links, make sure you check out the show notes. We'll have Dr Jocelyn Pearls Twitter account and some of some of the other links, like to Lady Scientist, the podcast. So once again, doc, thanks for being a guest today.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

We are proud to have Bark and beyond supplycom now as an official sponsor of the Science Podcast. Bark and beyond supplycom is a small family owned company that started off making joint supplements for dogs, but now they sell toys and treats and a whole bunch of other goodies. Skip the big box stores and check out the amazing deals and awesome stuff at Bark and beyond supplycom. You'll see a link in our show notes and use the coupon code Bunsen for 10% off at Bark and beyond supplycom. Click the link. Skip the big box stores. How about?

Speaker 4:

the little guy. Okay, it's time for story time with me, Adam. If you don't know what story time is, story time is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. Dad, do you have a story?

Speaker 2:

Yeah boy, a lot has happened since the last family section. Have we been to the mountains twice, chris? I think we have.

Speaker 1:

Hi, yes, hi, yes, we hello. Yes, actually, we have been to the mountains a couple of times since our last family section.

Speaker 2:

Right. So we had a bit of rain the last time we were there, but the first time we had great weather and we spent some time on goat pond. And the story I'd like to share is just how much joy Beaker had retrieving stuff from the mountain lake, seeing her little body like sprungy, sprungy, sprungy until it got too deep and she had to swim, and how happy she was and she just kept wanting to fetch stuff over and over again. She was just having so much fun and she had great big smiles and she was my little pirate on the paddle board. She tucks in real close to my feet and she just looks up at me and smiles the entire time, which is so cute. Sometimes she turns around and stands at the front of the paddle board, but it was really nice to get to the mountains and recharge a bit and spend some time with the dogs doing stuff like paddle boarding and hiking. So that's my story. Mom, do you have a story?

Speaker 1:

I sure do so. Jason spent some time talking about our trip to the mountains, which was an excellent time, but I'd like to continue talking about Beaker doing her dog diving. She has improved so much and we're hoping that she's going to be able to go off the dock very, very shortly, yeah. So we think that she's going to improve and we're really hopeful this week we're going to take her tomorrow that she maybe jumps off the dock. She's had a restful day today and tomorrow. We'll just wait and see. But if she doesn't, then that's okay. We still love her.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if she never jumps off the big dock, at least she's having lots of joy getting stuff from the water which is cute to see, and she does have fun.

Speaker 4:

Okay, it is time for my story, and my story isn't about Bunsen or Beaker or Ginger, it's about the cats at the farm at Papa's house. So there are four cats at Papa's house and one of them you folks have already heard about his name is Mouse, and you've probably heard from him, from Annalise, and we named him Mouse because he's a little rat, he's a scavenger. But one thing that we found recently is that his ear is getting eaten by the other cats, by Larry in particular. So like he fights with the other cats and he fights with Doc and like all of the cats kind of like play, fight together and Doc plays, fights with the cats, but Larry is chewing on Mouse's ear. So we have your profan on Mouse's ear and it's really bitter. And then Larry is no longer biting Mouse's ear because it's bitter.

Speaker 2:

That's hilarious.

Speaker 4:

It's really funny. Anyway, that's my story. I don't have many stories, even though I went to the mountains with Annalise. We saw a few dogs in the mountains. They were all really cute and all really nice and the mountains are actually a pretty dog commonplace, probably because people are going on hikes with their animals. That, and like Vancouver Island, is also very dog friendly for some reason. That's my story and a half. I think that's all of our stories. A bit of a shorter story time this week, but yeah, thank you all so much for listening to my section of the podcast and I hope to see y'all on the next one. Bye, bye.

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the Science Podcast. If you're listening to us on a podcast player and you haven't tried good pods, it's so cool. You can leave comments and ask questions on every single episode. A big thanks to our guest this week, dr Jocelyn Pearl, and, of course, as always, a shout out to the Top Dogs. That's our top tier of our community, the Pop-Ack. You could join to help out the Science Podcast. In a link in the show notes the names Chris.

Speaker 1:

Shelly Smith, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, tracy Linebaugh, courtney Proven Fun, lisa Breanne Haas, bianca Hyde, debbie Anderson, ann Yuchida, donna Craig, amy C, susan Wagner, kathy Zercher, liz Button and Ben Rathart.

Speaker 2:

For Science, Empathy and Cuteness.