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The Science Pawdcast
The Science Pawdcast breaks down the latest science happening in the human world AND the pet world.
Each episode will also bring you a guest to enthral you with their area of knowledge.
You'll learn, be captivated, and laugh along with host Jason Zackowski.
Pets and Science, it's the pawfect mix.
You'll also get episodes of SciChat and PetChat which are the live shows from social audio.
SciChat has an interview and Q+A with a scientist, while PetChat is a live community gathering for games and stories about pets!
For Science, Empathy, and Cuteness!
The Science Pawdcast
Season 6 Episode 36: The HPV Vaccine's Impact, Cat Intelligence, and Cheyenne Bair on Med School!
Experience a groundbreaking revelation in the world of health as we uncover the true power of the HPV vaccine in reducing cervical cancer mortality rates. Discover how a study from the Medical University of South Carolina showcases a striking 60% decrease in deaths amongst women under 25, thanks to this vital vaccine. The story doesn't end there—dive into the importance of maintaining vaccination rates, tackling misinformation, and expanding these life-saving benefits across broader age groups.
Ever wondered if your feline friend could outsmart you? Prepare to be amazed by the intelligence and agility of cats as we explore a Kyoto University study that reveals their ability to use causal reasoning based on sound cues. Through a series of playful experiments with cats like Ginger, we gain insight into their unique understanding of physics and its impact on their hunting prowess. This captivating exploration not only highlights their mental acuity but also brings a touch of humor and warmth to our discussion.
Join us as we share personal narratives about the powerful influence of parents on career paths and the deep bonds between humans and their pets. In this episode, hear from Cheyenne Bair as she opens up about her journey in the medical field, offering a glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of medical training.
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Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zukowski. 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 on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.
Speaker 2:Brr, some arctic weather has blown in early across the prairies, especially, you know, central alberta. It is minus 30 degrees tonight. That's a little early for november before december. So if you're listening to this someplace else in the world, that's a little warmer. Um, we're jealous. Um, at least the the winter dogs are enjoying it for the most part. Chris is not, and she might talk about that in the family section. But let's stay warm by talking about science and pet science.
Speaker 2:In science news, chris and I break down the exciting news that has come back about the HPV vaccine, and in pet science we look at an adorable article that seems to show cats can do simple physics, which may be more than the average person. I know physics can be tough. Our guest in Ask an Expert is student Dr Cheyenne Bear, who has a unique perspective, being that she's just on her path to being a doctor. Okay, a physics joke. A neutron walks into a bar and asks how much for a whiskey. The bartender smiles and says for you, no charge? Okay, on with the show, because there's no time like Science Time. We have some good news for everybody on the science front related to the HPV vaccine, and it's something I talked about before on the science podcast about a year ago.
Speaker 3:It's fantastic news, and HPV is the human papillomavirus and it's spread through intimate skin-to-skin contact.
Speaker 2:Ooh like getting jiggy with it, chris.
Speaker 3:Yes, because we are a PG podcast. I think that's an appropriate way to talk about it.
Speaker 2:High-risk HPV leads to cancers, particularly cervical cancer, but also cancers of the throat, anus, penis, vulva and vagina.
Speaker 3:But persistent infection with high-risk HPV can cause cellular changes that may develop into cancer over time.
Speaker 2:Now, one thing that's shocking is if you have cervical cancer. Nearly all cases of cervical cancer are related to HPV, so that's like a type of cancer that is caused by a type of virus, and that's why the vaccine is so important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the vaccine actually was introduced a year after Adam was born, so it was introduced in 2006, and it prevents up to six types of HPV-related cancers.
Speaker 2:And here's the good news. So the study was conducted by the Medical University of South Carolina. It analyzed US cervical cancer mortality data from 1992 to 2021 for women under 25. Mortality, of course, means very bad outcome to cervical cancer, and this was published just a few days ago in JAMA.
Speaker 3:What they found was a gradual decline of about 4% for the three-year period from 1992 to 2015, and a significant reduction of over 60% from 2016 to 2021. From 2016 to 2021. And these mortality rates deviated significantly from projected trends based on pre-2016 data and pattern.
Speaker 2:Now, that's just a number, Chris. The shocking thing is that if you look at the best possible reduction in mortality rate of cancer, it's 3% a year. So if a type of cancer is decreased by 3% mortality year on year, that is considered an incredible, huge, massive, massive cheering with streamers and hats breakthrough. So to get a 60% decrease in mortality over what is that? Five years? That's incredible. That's why this is making news everywhere.
Speaker 2:That is incredible and very exciting Now when there's huge treatments that come about, there are massive drops in mortality, like in the one. The type of childhood leukemia has dropped mortality rate by about 80 due to some breakthroughs in treatment. So this is on par with 60 drop in mortality. 80 drop in mortality, that's a whole bunch of people that would have died but are now alive. Now this coincides with the expected impact timeline of the HPV vaccine which was rolled out in most places in the United States. A separate this is wild, chris a separate study in June showed zero cervical cancer cases among women vaccinated at ages 12 to 13. Wow, yeah, so it's it. Possibly, and this is possible, if you got the vaccine for HPV and you're 12 to 13 and now you're older, you may be, you may not get the cancer and may be wiped out.
Speaker 3:That's incredible. Now there there are some challenges and considerations that we do need to consider, and the researchers could not confirm whether the women in the study cohort were vaccinated. And also a steady decline before 2016 may result from improved prevention and screening methods. I know here in Canada we do screening lots of it to look at trends over time to decrease cervical cancer rates, and the other challenge was the impact across age groups. So mortality reduction was only observed in women under 25. And incidence of cervical cancer remains significantly higher in women aged 30 to 40. But current trends may preview broader future impacts if vaccination rates improve.
Speaker 2:Right, those women who are 25 are going to be 30 to 40 someday and they may still be protected. We'll just have to wait and see. But the age 30 to 40 women, they weren't part of the big rollout of that vaccine throughout school-aged children.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Now. It's very good news, chris. There is some bad news or something to think about is the HPV vaccination rate in the United States has stagnated after COVID-19. So they have about 77% of adolescents who are vaccinated in 2022, and they're aiming for 80% vaccination rate by 2030. There's a lot of misinformation out there about vaccines and the harm that they do. Of course, there are very rare circumstances where people have legitimate, serious reactions to vaccines. I don't want to discount that ever. But as misinformation spreads about the outsized risk to you of taking your child taking HPV vaccine, there is some concern that those rates of getting to 80% may be at risk. So this is just a moonshot I talked to. Do you remember when I was lucky enough to talk to Dr Jennifer Gunter on the podcast, chris?
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we actually talked about this and she a year ago. She said that this vaccine is a moonshot and she was pretty sure the data would bore out that it may effectively wipe out death from cervical cancer in women, but also other types of cancer that don't have the same kind of limelight on them, like penile cancer or throat cancer caused by HPV. A little bit of bad news with the rate stagnating and the misinformation's out there, but very good news that this is, as Dr Jennifer Gunter said, a moonshot for a type of cancer.
Speaker 3:The current results you're seeing serve as an indicator of what's going to come like an indicator of potential benefits over the next 20 to 30 years if higher vaccination rates continue.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, a drop of 60% in mortality is massive. Like you take a hundred people who have cervical cancer and a certain percentage of them would have died, you drop that by 60%, that's a whole lot of women that are living today that would have been dead without this vaccine.
Speaker 3:Awesome, and so what kind of steps moving forward should be considered, so reinforcing the importance of public health initiatives and educating the public about vaccination?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's tough. I never want to tell people what to do with vaccination, but I do want to suggest that it's good, and I'm not a doctor, you're not a doctor. That's a conversation to have with a medical doctor. They're going to know more than you or I. They'll be able to talk to you about risks. The medical institutes in the United States and Canada they're all for vaccinating the population, the younger population, with HPV so they're protected in the future and, as science communicators, chris and I are very pro vaccine. So we're just here to raw on the good news for something like this, and that's science news for this week. This week in pet science, we're going to talk about cats and how agile cats are, maybe because they can do physics. What the heck is going on with this study, chris?
Speaker 3:I know that Ginger loves being on the counter and knocking things off of the counter to the dogs, yeah. And they have a whole little game of it.
Speaker 2:I know, man, she is so agile, she walks on the banister where, like a fall to the side, like she would fall a long ways if she fell off the banister, and she walks on it like it's nothing.
Speaker 3:It's like it's nothing.
Speaker 2:I just I am because I didn't grow up with cats. I just sometimes watch her move around the house and it's just wild Like she can go from the floor and she can jump up onto our counters like it's nothing and we have relatively high counters. They're not low counters, they're higher counters.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because when we built our house, you said I'd like higher counters please, and I said okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that we have higher counters, by the way, Perfect.
Speaker 3:So back to this research. The objective was to explore the cat's ability to use causal reasoning to infer the presence of objects based on sound and physics. So they investigated whether cats expect an object to fall from a container based on prior sound cues.
Speaker 2:Oh fun, where is this? Yeah, where was this study published?
Speaker 3:It was conducted by researchers at Kyoto University and it was published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 3:And it builds actually on earlier research that showed cats can predict invisible objects' presence based on sound.
Speaker 2:What that's crazy.
Speaker 3:I've seen Ginger's ears like turn around like little satellite dishes oh, that's how she escapes.
Speaker 2:How does she know when she escapes every time adam comes in the house? How does she know when he's coming?
Speaker 3:like he, maybe she can tell time, but then also she's just lurking, because she's a ghoul, she can predict invisible adam appearing.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, all right, okay, I've looked into the study. I'm being a little silly. There were 30 domestic cats and they were observed in controlled experiments and the procedure is pretty fun. Chris, did you looked over this too? Hey, so there's a shaking phase. We're not shaking the cat, but we're shaking a container in two scenarios One has a rattling sound and one is without a sound, so there's no sound and one has a sound. Then there's an overturning phase. The container was turned over, with the outcome being an object falling out, no object falling out, and then they were looking at some conditions after that. Did the cat align with physical laws? With a rattling sound, the object falls, no sound, no object falls. Or did they violate the physical laws? Rattling sound, no object falls, no sound, object falls. So there are some really fun observations from this.
Speaker 3:It showed that cats paid attention to sound, so if the container was rattling that obviously meant that something was inside of it, and cats looked longer at containers that were shaken with the rattling sound, and so that suggests that they use sound as a cue to infer the presence of an object.
Speaker 2:Now the next part is funny because this is where the cats can understand. Physics come into play.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. The cat stared longer at incongruent outcomes. When a rattling sound was followed by no object falling, so they're like it's rattling, why is no object falling. Or when there was no sound when the container was shaken and that was followed by an object falling, so the cats were like huh. That indicates an awareness of causal logic and a violation of their expectations.
Speaker 2:Yes, they're like what the hell? That's not right, that shouldn't happen. So they were. Yeah, they were. I guess it's very simple physics, but they were perplexed as to what was happening that did not conform to their reality. I love that. Perplexed as to what was happening that did not conform to their reality. I love that Some interpretations of the study was that cats do have a causal, logical reasoning to connect sounds with the existence of unseen objects. So you can't see the thing, but you can hear the thing, so the thing must exist. So they predict if an object will appear based on an auditory input. So I guess maybe Ginger can hear Adam clomping home and she's ready to go.
Speaker 3:But I think this has further implications for cats in their environment and they have a natural hunting ecology and that may favor their ability to infer information from sounds in low visibility conditions and that skill helps them locate prey by analyzing sound cues such as distance and movement, and I think Ginger can hear the mice if they're in the garage.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yes, that's why she always wants out there. Yeah, absolutely so. Some fun things in the future the researchers are looking at and, of course, we're waiting with bated breath to see how they test this. They want to investigate what a cat see in their mind when they hear specific noises. Can they determine the properties of the sound or like how many things there are based on the sound?
Speaker 3:um and you know for, like cats are so cool to study I I just love them. Um, and they're really tricky to study because cats usually will do the thing one time and then it's over. So to keep them interested and focused, I think is amazing.
Speaker 2:But further study could illuminate how cats hunting instincts translate into their cognitive processes processes which is still super cool looking into a cat's mind I feel like this is something we could try with ginger to see if she's just perplexed. If we rattle a thing and drop it and nothing comes out, she'd be. I think she would get that. She'd be like why is that's wrong?
Speaker 3:you guys just broke the laws of nature I think she would just stare at us with her eyes, because that's what she does she just looks at us in judgment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's a cutie though.
Speaker 3:She is a cutie.
Speaker 2:That's pet science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free. Number one in our show notes sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack Plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and Beaker content there and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger, the science cat has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen too. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have student doctor Cheyenne Baer with us today. Cheyenne, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:I'm doing fantastic. How are you?
Speaker 2:Good, good. Where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from I'm doing?
Speaker 5:fantastic. How are you Good? Good, when are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show?
Speaker 2:from, so I am in Denver, colorado, right now. Oh beautiful.
Speaker 5:I'm going to medical school here.
Speaker 2:Colorado is a really pretty state.
Speaker 5:It is. It is very beautiful. It's been a bit of a hot fall, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not necessarily super hot for us, just dry. Not a lot of rain up here. Have you pink? Are you from colorado? Is that your home state, or have you had to bounce around a bit?
Speaker 5:no, I'm actually from arizona, so I grew up in the peoria glendale area.
Speaker 2:It's near phoenix do you know eleanor shellstrop? I do not oh, okay, I'm always wondering that you know what I was referencing there. The good place TV show.
Speaker 5:Oh no, I actually haven't seen that, but I've heard a good show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, eleanor is from Arizona. So, long story short, she doesn't paint Arizona with a good brush. But this, the TV show, makes fun of every place in the world equally, including Canada, which is to our delight.
Speaker 5:Most of the time people ask me about Twilight because the main character is from Arizona.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, and my wife was big into Twilight. That was a phenomenon a good decade or so ago, so you're going to medical school. Were you interested in medicine and science when you were young?
Speaker 5:I was actually, so how I got into it was, my mother was a science teacher when I was growing up, so I know you're a science teacher. Big ups to the science teachers out there.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 5:She honestly was my inspiration for everything science and medicine based, and she's probably gonna cringe when she hears me talking about her, but I know secretly she'll enjoy it. She taught science and when I was young she would pull me out of school whenever they had like dissections and she would let me come into her class with her and dissect frogs and other things that were going on at that time and I just thought that was the coolest thing.
Speaker 5:I just fell in love with science from that point forward and I knew I wanted to do something with biology because of her. And then when I was around nine, she went back to school to become a physician assistant, which is like a nurse practitioner it's in between the level of a doctor and a nurse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Very important in the medical system actually.
Speaker 5:Yes, incredibly important, because they're able to take over a lot of stuff for doctors and they can prescribe medicine and work independently, which is super cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But she went back to school when I was nine and my brother was three. So I was very impressed with her and I read all of her textbooks, even though I didn't understand a word of it, because I just wanted to be like my mom. So that kind of set me on the path of where I'm at now.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's cute and inspirational. I love that story. Our younger son, adam Bobadum people know him on social media. Our younger son, adam Bobadum people know him on social media. He is in his second year of a biochemistry degree, which is what my degree in science was before I did an after degree to become a teacher. So even though I told him not to go into biochemistry, he's in biochemistry and he's rocking it.
Speaker 2:So you know parents parents sometimes have a pretty big influence on kids, so that's cool. Along the way in your journey to where you are now, you talked to you presented on a bug bites. I would love to know more about this, like what's going on there?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so initially I always had a huge fear of spiders and I was terrified of them my whole life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then I went to undergrad and I saw this poster in the hallway for a research internship and I was like, oh, that sounds so cool, I'm going to do it.
Speaker 5:And then I read into more of what it was, and it was for an entomology lab, which is the study of bugs, which is not at all what I wanted to do in the future, but I was like you know what that sounds really cool and I could potentially get over my fear of bugs this way.
Speaker 5:I signed up to do it and they hired me on in the lab and I started working and we did some field work. And a lot of the field work is trying to catch the bugs in a way that you don't crush them, which usually you have to use forceps for that, which is like tweezers, and you saw a lot of bug bites out in the field. So I made note of that and when I got into medical school I worked with this one professor, Dr David Ross, who's an emergency physician here in Colorado, and I asked him if I could present on all of these bug bites that I saw in the field, because there wasn't necessarily a set standard for how to treat bug bites inpatient in the hospital or outpatient in the family care clinic. So he was like that sounds awesome, let's do that. So I did a ton of research in that and I got to present my research at a family medicine conference. So that was very cool.
Speaker 2:Cool, what sticks out for you? What was something that you that when you presented people were like whoa, what? Or just cool. I would love to know.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so something that I had no idea going into. It was a big recommendation. When someone comes in with either a spider bite or a centipede bite or any unknown bug bite that they're concerned about, they want to make sure that the patient is up to date on their Tdap vaccine, which is the one for tetanus. I didn't know that a bug bite could give you tetanus, but it can, because spiders and centipedes are crawling around in the soil and tetanus is a bacteria that lives in soil, so you can transfer it via the bug bite. So you want to make sure they're up to date on that, which was pretty interesting, I thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not something I would have thought.
Speaker 5:No, not at all.
Speaker 2:Was there one bug that like? Is this like North American bug bites or bug bites from all over the world?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I focused on North America because that was the it was the family physicians for North America sort of conference that I was presenting at. So I focused in on that just because if I had gone to other bug bites it would have been a really long, hours long presentation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just Australia alone would be seven days.
Speaker 5:Oh, my goodness, yes.
Speaker 2:What's some particularly bad bugs to get bit by.
Speaker 5:So the ones that I would be most concerned about, not necessarily because the bite itself is bad, but because they can spread a lot of diseases, would be just your simple mosquito and tick bites. Those ones are the ones that I red flags go up, because mosquitoes can spread a lot of stuff, like West Nile and that's a big one that we deal with here in Colorado and then ticks can spread a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:Lyme disease everything. Yeah, yeah, ticks are where we don't have a lot of ticks where we live, but I know they're a huge problem in the eastern Canada, eastern United States. I hear you go through tall grass. You'll come out with ticks all over you sometimes.
Speaker 5:Yes, I used to live in a pretty high tick zone and I had never had a tick bite. And then I came here and two hikes and I had a tick on my shoulder and one on my back.
Speaker 1:What.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so that was fun.
Speaker 2:Does it hurt to get bit by a tick, or is it like so painless? You don't know until you see it.
Speaker 5:So that's the whole crazy point of tick bites is that they have this antiseptic sort of that they put on your skin and their mouth and that numbs your skin so you don't feel it when they bite you that's the worst.
Speaker 2:That's the worst because yeah, and did you see it, or did somebody else point it out to you?
Speaker 5:the funny part was I was with my partner at the time and I was like, oh, my back kind of itches, can you scratch that? Yeah, and they were like there's a bug on your back. I was like pull it out. And the thing about ticks is you have to make sure that when you pull them out you get the head too, because sometimes you can pull it and you just get the body and the head still burrowed into your skin, gross and the saliva sacs, the salivary glands, are where all of the bad bacteria live, so that'll just keep getting put into your system if you don't pull out the head too.
Speaker 2:That's interesting and I'm sorry that happened to you. I guess I should say first, very creepy Tick bites are, I feel, like in Alberta, where I live if you go swimming in the wrong lake you'll come out with leeches. It's like the same thing they have antiseptic kind of. You don't really feel you could come out with 17 leeches all over you and you don't even notice it. What I was going to say is interesting. You brought up ticks and mosquitoes because people are probably thinking like crazy spider bites, like black widows or brown recluse, but the humble mosquito, I think, pound for pound or on death rate, kills the more people than any other creature on the entire earth. I thought I read.
Speaker 5:Yes, it is actually the deadliest animal if you include bugs as well on the planet is the mosquito.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wild. What was that guy's name in Lilo and Stitch that wanted to save the mosquito? Agent Blinky? Did you watch that blinkly? Yeah, wasn't that? The whole reason why they weren't going to vaporize the earth because stitch landed was that it was the mosquito lived here, or something like that yes, the mosquitoes were an endangered species oh, there we go and humans provided a feeding ground for mosquitoes I don't know. I wouldn't want to be vaporized by some interplanetary alien council, but mosquitoes do suck.
Speaker 5:They do literally.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thanks for talking to us a little bit about bug bites, Cheyenne. Lately you've been working with students on micro RNA and micro RNA was in the news two weeks ago. Wasn't there a Nobel prize for micro RNA, or am?
Speaker 5:I getting it wrong? Yeah, I actually have that pulled up. I was going to talk about that. Let's go, yeah.
Speaker 2:I have no idea what's going on there. I haven't had to. I've been sick and I don't know what it is, cause I'm a chemistry guy.
Speaker 5:So I'd love for you to tell us about it. Yeah, of course. I believe it was on October 7th was the press release that they gave out, but two people were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I have their names pulled up jointly to Victor Ambrose and Gary Rufkin apologize if I mispronounce their names for the discovery of micro RNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. So they just got the Nobel Prize, which I think is fascinating because we've known about microRNA for not a whole ton of time, but longer than I would have thought.
Speaker 2:Okay, so can you break down what is microRNA Like? I am not familiar with that, Do you mind?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so microRNA is. I call it like a buddy to messenger RNA. So if you're taking like a basic science class, I think in high school you go over it and then you go over it again if you take biology in undergrad. But basically messenger RNA is like your little postman. It takes the information from the nucleus, which is like main center of the cell, and takes it out to your ribosomes, which is the factory that cranks out your proteins, which is what your cells need to function. So microRNA is like a little helper to the postman that attaches to it and helps it get to the ribosome and transcribe it correctly.
Speaker 2:It's like Red Bull.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Coffee for the postman. Postwoman postperson.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it helps it out. It makes sure that it gets the right information to the right person, like a GPS. Yes.
Speaker 2:Or yeah, Okay, cool, and without microRNA things would be slower and more confusing for the messenger. Rna.
Speaker 5:Yes, so that was actually the focus of the research that I was doing was a lot of the students were working on Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, which is when your muscle cells don't make a protein called dystrophin correctly. So that causes your muscle cells in your skeletal muscles and your heart muscle cells to just start dying. So they don't, they're not able to regenerate or repair themselves. So it causes a lot of muscle weakness and it's not a good prognosis and there's really not a cure right now.
Speaker 2:So it's a fatal prognosis eventually.
Speaker 5:Eventually, yes, it weakens your heart muscles to the point where your heart has a hard time pumping and your diaphragm is a super important muscle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and eventually that'll get weak and then you can't breathe after that awful very and the whole idea is that this micro rna is I might have missed it. It's messed up in this disorder.
Speaker 5:So it's a it. Your cells aren't able to make a protein called dystrophin correctly.
Speaker 2:Oh okay.
Speaker 5:The basis of the research that I was assisting on was that you could potentially use micro RNA. You bathe the cells in a specific form of micro RNA that helps producing dystrophin, and it can help your body teach itself how to make dystrophin correctly. So then your cells are able to repair themselves and make the protein right, and so you don't get the muscle weakness that comes with it.
Speaker 2:So the postman in your analogy is confused.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:We're just trying to help them out with extra micro RNA, okay.
Speaker 5:Your postman was given a map or GPS coordinates that weren't right, and so we're giving it the RNA. Micro RNA goes in and is able to correct the map for it.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, he's Michael Scott driving right into the lake.
Speaker 5:Correct yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool, all right, that clears that up Now. This is this theoretical? Is this there's hope for the future? Is this in clinical trials?
Speaker 5:I'm just curious where this was left or where it is it's in animal models right now okay we were using mice so mice with the genetic defect that comes with dmd and then taking their muscle cells out and bathing the micro RNA in it and then putting it into these cell cultures so that the cells could grow more and proliferate. So right now the main concern is just how do we deliver the micro RNA to these cells? Because we know it works. We were able to pull the muscle cells out of the rat with the genetic disorder and then bathe it in the micro RNA and the muscle cells started reproducing again and fixing themselves. But we don't know how to deliver that to a living animal yet.
Speaker 2:Easy in a petri dish or very, where you can control the entire surroundings of some cells, as opposed to cells within tissue, within a living organism.
Speaker 5:Correct.
Speaker 2:And how many people suffer from this disorder. Dnd is the short of it.
Speaker 5:I'm actually not sure how many people. It is more prevalent in males than it is in females.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 5:Not really sure why that is, but most of the time when you find out that you have it, you're pretty young. So it unfortunately affects a lot of children and unfortunately they don't live long enough into adulthood. So it is mainly a disease of children and childhood.
Speaker 2:I'm glad there's always scientists and medical doctors and teams working on these disorders plaguing humanity and promising research hopefully will lead to something miraculous in the future, so that's very cool.
Speaker 5:Yes, and it was definitely exciting when the muscle cells started actually proliferating again. That was a big day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's amazing. It's amazing to see that the thing that you theorized worked.
Speaker 5:Yes, now we just got to figure out how to deliver it to a living organism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very cool. I appreciate that story. So, cheyenne, before we get to our standard questions, where are you at right now with your journey towards becoming a doctor? You're a student doctor. Where are you right now?
Speaker 5:Yes, I am in my second year of medical schools. For those of you out there that aren't sure how medical school works, I know it works different in every country too, at least in the US. You get a four-year undergraduate degree and that can be in pretty much anything, and then you have to take some basic classes like science classes, human anatomy, organic chemistry, all that good stuff, and then you apply to medical school. You get in. The first two years are didactic, which is just sitting in a lecture hall and watching someone talk about things, and then the other two years are actually going out and going into clinics and working and you're doing what's called rotations, where you're practicing medicine.
Speaker 2:And do you have an eye on the future, Like you're in your second year? So that means you're going to be in the out in the doing rotation soon.
Speaker 5:Yes, I definitely have some ideas of some specialties that I would like to get into. I'm not sure a hundred percent yet. I'm waiting for rotations to show me what I enjoy and what I don't like.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but right now I really like emergency medicine. I like the fast-paced, high-stress type of environment. I also like internal medicine a lot. That's like family practice, but just for adults, so you don't see kids. And then in internal medicine you can go a couple of different pathways. You can either do cardiology, GI, you can stay unspecified and just do general internal medicine. So I like all the different pathways. That opens up.
Speaker 2:I talked to what was. He was a liver specialist. Is that internal medicine?
Speaker 5:I'm actually not sure. I would think that they would go down the internal medicine route potentially, and then further specialize in something related to, I would guess, probably GI, and then you can do what's called fellowships after residency, and fellowships help you specialize even further.
Speaker 2:Neat, yeah. So that's a whole world I know nothing about. I could easily explain to people how you become a teacher. It's actually similar to that you have a couple of years where you are learning about how to be a teacher and then you're out in the field teaching and I honestly think they should throw the first year teachers like straight into the classroom to get a feel for it, because usually that's when you know if it's for you or not.
Speaker 5:Yeah, they do a similar thing in medical school, where they have actors come in and pretend to be patients and you have to sit and be a doctor.
Speaker 2:That's fine.
Speaker 5:So it's high stakes in the sense of you have to be a doctor without having any of the knowledge of a doctor.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 5:God, but low stakes in the sense of you're not going to kill someone because no one's actually sick and you're not giving any medicine, so you have a chance to make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Oh boy, that's cool and best of luck in the future with that. Do you think you'll have? If you do wind up in ER, the irony of seeing an incoming like tick bite might be on the nose.
Speaker 5:Hey, coming full yes, yes, I've had quite a few friends come up to me with some strange lumps and bumps and ask me what kind of bug bit them chan, thanks for talking to us a little bit about your journey to being a uh student doctor.
Speaker 2:We have a couple standard questions we ask all our guests. They're fun ones and folks listening they love when we get here. One is for a pet story from your life. We'd like to hear a little bit about how our guests have interacted with animals or they've had a pet in their life or a current pet. Could you share a story with us?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I have two different stories that I could share. When I was really young I was about eight years old my Christmas present that year that was when the recession hit, so my parents didn't have a ton of money but they got a free puppy for me and I was so stoked to have that dog In hindsight I don't think they knew that was probably more money than getting me like a book would have been, but I was stoked out of my mind to have a puppy and I got to do agility training with him and he recently just passed away, unfortunately, but he lived to be 15.
Speaker 5:So he lived a pretty long dog life. But he was my best friend and at one point I was living in a trailer, actually during undergrad, and I don't know about trailer parks in Canada, but in the US they're not the most safe and secure places to live.
Speaker 2:So I have a very famous TV show, canadian trailer park.
Speaker 5:So yes, I was a single college student and I'm a small female, so I was definitely happy to have a dog with me. But at one point someone actually tried to get into my trailer while I was in there and that was a very frightening experience. But my dog Spot was the sweetest dog I have ever met and he got all big and burly and stood staring at the door and I've never seen him act like that before, but that definitely. He started barking and no one was trying to open the door after that.
Speaker 2:We've looked at the stats before on the show and it's something like you have your house being broken into. If you have a dog, you've got like a compared to somebody who doesn't have a dog. It's almost like a 1% chance, like it decreases the rate of break-ins 99% or something like that.
Speaker 5:I'm definitely happy to have a dog.
Speaker 2:Good job. And what's the dog's name? I'm sorry if I missed it.
Speaker 5:So that was Spot.
Speaker 2:Spot.
Speaker 5:Yes, and then the dog I have now, brimbo, which is apparently the name of an Italian break pad company. I had no idea that was his name when I got him from the shelter and I just never changed it.
Speaker 2:I like that Brimbo.
Speaker 5:Yes, I take him camping with me and there was one time when we were camping and I was sleeping in the bed of my truck I didn't have a tent or anything. So it was a beautiful night under the stars, was great and I woke up because he was growling and standing at the foot of the bed of my truck and he had his hair raised and was totally not happy. I turned on a light and it was just a deer froze. As soon as I turned my flashlight on and was looking at me, I was like, really, dude, that's what you're barking and growling at is just a deer that was just walking along trying to eat. But who knows, maybe something could have been hiding in the forest that I didn't see, that he was actually upset with. But I'm definitely happy to have the dogs that I've had over the lifetime to keep me safe out there in the woods and at home.
Speaker 2:What a cool kind of double story there. That's neat. Yeah, bunsen, our Burning Mountain dog or a big guy he is, uh, he's definitely. He definitely protects us all from things in the dark, whether it be something really dangerous or something like a blowing piece of uh bag or something like that. So, yes, equal threats.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and sometimes Brimbo gets scared when he farts at night. That wakes him up and he loses his mind. And I'm like buddy, that was you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They can be very brave and very silly within minutes of each other. Yeah, thanks for sharing your pet story. Sorry, as we wrap, I challenge all of our guests to share a super fact with us at something that they know. That kind of blows people's minds when they tell them uh, do you have any super facts for us?
Speaker 5:yes, I have one related to bugs and then one related to medicine yay uh, the one related to bugs is I'm pretty sure this is applicable in canada, because you have wolf spiders up there as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh yes.
Speaker 5:Big boys. Something cool about them is that the mothers carry their young on their back. So if you ever find a wolf spider in your house, you never want to crush them or step on them, because if you do the babies will jump ship and then you'll have a bunch of wolf spider babies released into your house. So you never want to squish them, catch them under a cup and put them outside, because then the babies will be out in the woods and doing what they should be doing. Plus, wolf spiders kill the bugs that you don't like, so you want to keep those around, at least outside yeah, they don't.
Speaker 2:They catch a lot of mosquitoes they're hunters, yeah, so they.
Speaker 5:They actually don't spin webs. They go out and catch their prey with their fangs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have lots of wolf spiders in the spring out in the grass where we live. So, yeah, the grass just teems with them, and that makes sense. They're like scurrying around catching insects down in there.
Speaker 5:Yeah, they're pretty cool spiders too. They're very docile, so as long as you don't try to squish them, they won't try to mess with you.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, that's a cool spider fact.
Speaker 5:And then the cool medicine fact that I have apparent you had the liver expert on, so maybe they already said this cool fact because it is about the liver, but the liver is essentially the only organ in the human body that can regenerate itself, which I think is pretty awesome, pretty stellar, because you can give living liver transplants, donate your liver, a piece of it, to someone else, and you still keep yours and it'll grow itself back, which I think is just so cool.
Speaker 2:That is wild. That's wild. Why can't all our other organs step up and do that too? Come on, other organs, get with the program.
Speaker 5:I don't know, because some amphibians can do that too. I'm pretty sure they can grow back arms, and lizards can grow their tails back, so why can't we do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly why Dr John Connors became the lizard when he was fighting Spider-Man.
Speaker 5:Yeah, grow your limbs back.
Speaker 2:That's a cool super fact yeah grow your limbs back. That's a cool super fact, cheyenne, thank you so much for being a guest today on the Science Podcast. Can people find you on social media anywhere? Do you have a website? Do you have anything people could check out?
Speaker 5:I do have an Instagram. It is Cheyenne underscore bear. So two underscores, because apparently the one was taken.
Speaker 2:Cheyenne underscore bear.
Speaker 5:Yes, correct, Okay perfect.
Speaker 2:We'll have a link to your Instagram in the show notes.
Speaker 5:Oh, cool, thank you.
Speaker 2:This has been a treat talking to you. Thanks for giving up some of your busy schedule to chat with us. I think people are going to be really interested in the micro RNA and not many people, I think, have ever heard of it. I was actually talking to some of my colleagues and like they have a peripheral knowledge of it but no, not in there All. They all have science degrees, like myself. I found that that talk really interesting, so thanks for sharing that with that with us.
Speaker 5:Of course, I thought it was super interesting when I didn't know much about it before I started doing the research and I had to learn up on it before I started helping, and that was it was so interesting to research into, especially because we know it exists and we know what it does, but we don't really know its full potential yet of stuff that we could use it for.
Speaker 2:Unlock the potential of the micro RNA.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:Again, thanks for being our guest today. Have a nice night and best wishes in your upcoming future career as a doctor.
Speaker 5:Of course Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:Welcome to Storytime with me, adam. If you don't know what Storytime is, storytime is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. I have a bit of a story. I'm scared because there's people behind me and I'm scared that the people behind me are going to scare me. I have a story. My story is about Bernoulli I haven't told a story about I don't think I've told a story about Bernoulli yet but my story is about Bernoulli and how much of a cuddly guy he is.
Speaker 4:He is such a cuddly guy. He's the most cuddly out of the dogs, I think, like beaker, bunsen, and beaker are, bunsen, super cuddly. Beaker is sometimes cuddly she doesn't really like hugs, but bernoulli is is the most cuddly out of all of them. Um, he's got a brain made of shrimp, um, and he's a cuddly guy. I I like. I like how cuddly he is because you can just hug him and then he hugs you and then he'll lay on you. But I think he's going to get to a point where he doesn't realize how big he is and he tries to cuddle anyway Because Bunsen, I don't think he realizes how big of a guy he is. He takes up so much space.
Speaker 4:Oh, that's something Bernoulli does, things that Bunsen does. Bunsen likes to get the most in the way possible. When you need to go somewhere, like if you're cooking in the kitchen, he'll stand in the worst spot he can possibly stand in and just stand there. Bernoulli does the same thing now, where he stands in a spot that's just as bad as where Bunsen's standing and he just sits there and Beaker, just like, waits for crumbs because Bunsen and Bernoulli are slower than Beaker, but Beaker usually gets the crumbs because she likes crumbs. But yeah, that's my story. Dad, do you have a story? She likes crumbs. But yeah, that's my story. Dad, do you have?
Speaker 2:a story. Yeah, it's been a pretty busy week for us, so when we've gotten home it's been dark, so I've been enjoying taking the dogs for a walk in the in the dark, because it's weird time change, obviously. But one thing that maybe nobody's really enjoying right now and Chris might touch on it is how cold it's been. Uh, I think it's supposed to get down to minus 30 tonight, and that's without the wind chill. Um, so that's too cold for Beaker. The last night we went for a walk. It's too cold for Beaker, and Bunsen's paws were even getting cold. He got a trim for being on TV. Um, I think they trimmed away a lot of, like, the protective hair around his feet, so his feet were really cold in the snow. So he's just going to wait for his little hair snowshoes to grow back to get a little bit more protection. Bernoulli was impervious. He was the one out of the three that didn't even care how cold it was and he was just plowing through the snow with abandon. So that was cute to see and that's my story.
Speaker 4:Okay, mom do you have a story?
Speaker 3:I sure do. Every day this week, except for Monday, I've been taking Bernoulli to Waggles and then picking him up at the end of the day and doing a debrief session to see how he's doing, and he is doing remarkably well in all of the categories. Tonight we practiced swish and we practiced drop and we practiced well. The one skill that he's not doing stellar at is called take it, and what the dog is supposed to do is take the ball, take the toy, um, and carry it and put it into a container. So the cool thing that if you've seen on uh dog training videos like you could tell the the dog clean up this room, um, but really it's like the take it and he's supposed to clean up but he doesn't. He, he's not even interested in playing with any of the, the balls or anything, or he'll do it one time or two times and then he's like ginger, I'm all done with this. So that was, that was a bit of a challenge. Tonight we're trying to think of ways that we can entice him to uh just be more interested in that skill.
Speaker 3:But having said that, bunsen didn't really do it either. The only thing Bunsen cleaned up was garbage. So if there was. If there was, uh, we used paper towel rolls and he would pick those up, no problem, but any of the toys he just about didn't pass his test because of that, and also it's been very cold and I'm not enjoying the weather. It's supposed to be minus 29 in the morning. I am not looking forward to that, that freezing temperature. We went to Waggles last week and it was minus 16 and there was a little um shelter and I saw the shelter and I'm like, ooh, if I go in that shelter I'm not coming out. And then there was a fire going, which was which was even more of a challenge for me to leave. So I, against my better judgment, I went in just inside the shelter and then I went further, further, further, closer to the fire, like, once I was in there there was no coming out.
Speaker 2:Every time I checked on you, you were closer to the fire and I knew exactly what you were doing. You were like outside the shelter, talking to everybody. Then you were closer to the fire and I knew exactly what you were doing. You were like outside the shelter, talking to everybody. Then you were under the shelter and then you were close to the fire, closer to the fire, then you were right next to the fire until it was time to go. Yeah, you were getting closer to the wood burning stove yeah, I was, and that's my story.
Speaker 4:Okay, we have a special guest on the podcast, special guest on Storytime. It's Annalise. Annalise is a special guest again. What's your story, annalise?
Speaker 1:Anyway, hello, I'm Annalise and I have a pretty cute story about Beaker and Ginger. So today I had quite the day. I was at school for a while and I had talked to more people than I'm used to, so my battery was pretty low. So I was like, oh, I'll go over to Adam's house and go have a nap with the dog and the cats, or dogs and cat and the cats, or dogs and cat. So I had some lunch and then had some tea, and then I went over and then I sat down.
Speaker 1:I had a nice cozy blanket, I had my computer out and watching a little video, and then Ginger came and slept on me for like two hours and then same with Beaker, where she just stayed with me and we all just had a cute little nap together and it was wonderful and they're just the cutest. Ginger was all curled up in a little ball and she was just being her cute little self and Beaker kept getting jealous of her and like growling at the cat, which was kind of funny. So I had to kind of separate them a bit. But Beaker was beside me and then Ginger was on on my lap and it was so cute. But yeah, that's my story.
Speaker 4:Okay, thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast. Thank you for sticking around to the end and I hope to see you on the next podcast episode.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye. That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the science podcast. Special thanks to our guest and also, again, a big shout out to the top tiers of our paid community, the pop pack plus. If you want to hear your name, check the link in our show notes to support us.
Speaker 3:Take it away chris bianca hyde mary writer, tracy domingu, susan wagner, andrew lynn Kahide, mary Ryder, tracy Domingue, susan Wagner, andrew Lin, helen Chin, tracy Halberg, amy C, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, holly Birch, brenda Clark, anne Uchida, peggy McKeel, terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer, tracy Leinbaugh, marianne McNally, fun Lisa, shelley Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, brianne Haas, linda Sherry, carol MacDonald, catherine Jordan, courtney Proven, donna Craig, wendy, diane Mason and Luke, Liz Button, kathy Zerker and Ben Rathart.
Speaker 2:For science, empathy and cuteness.