Anna Walker
speaker
274 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 2 Jul
Anna Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I'm a biologist and have spent many years of my life studying tiny fruit flies in the lab.
But recently, within the scientific community, there's been a lot of buzz about the social behaviours of much smaller creatures.
Bacteria.
Bacteria are everywhere.
They live among us and inside us, and although made up of a single cell, they behave in all sorts of surprising ways, from killing family members to blowing themselves up for the collective good.
Understanding the behaviour of these microbes helps scientists fight disease and later I'll be visiting a lab at the forefront of this battle.
Prepare yourself for a weird microscopic world and the social lives of bacteria.
Just like human beings, bacteria are capable of a whole range of unusual and often contradictory behaviours.
Unlike us, they split themselves in two to reproduce and have a lifespan ranging anywhere from 12 minutes to millions of years.
Professor Bonnie Bassler from Princeton University in the United States.
And if I was to shrink myself down to their scale, what would they look like?
I've heard them described as physically simple, but chemically complex.
Jo Fothergill is a professor of medical microbiology and director of the Microbiome Innovation Centre at the UK's University of Liverpool.
Now, not many people can say that they have a favourite bacterium.
Why is Pseudomonas aeruginosa your favourite?
In fact, many bacteria, like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, often have a very particular set of skills.
One of their more social ones was discovered only relatively recently.
Bonnie Bassler.
It's amazing to think that these bacteria not only have social lives, but that they can cooperate as well.
Do they only cooperate with their own species or do they ever talk and cooperate with different species?
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