David Olson
speaker
61 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
David Olson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Humans face new problems today. And, you know, we live longer. We're polluting and heating up the planet. And it's reasonable to think that if with another million, more millions of years of evolution, that some of these problems would be solved. But we don't want to wait that long.
So the idea is that we can now create completely new proteins that solve these problems that weren't really relevant during evolution to make the world a better place.
I think really across medicine, sustainability, technology, I think there's huge opportunities to transform the current ways we do things with protein design.
On NPR's ThruLine. Witnesses were ending up dead.
Find NPR's ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts.
Because it's answering some of the questions we have about dogs. how to properly design universal antibodies.
I definitely come from the point of view that, you know, we literally have just one planet. And I cannot understand why anybody would want to do anything other than care for it.
So there are a number of confidentiality clauses that sit around kind of customers.
And then what we're doing is we're capturing that heat in a closed water loop. So it's a bit like a domestic central heating system at that point. And in huge parts of the planet, particularly the north, we can return that heat and do useful things with it in much more intelligent ways.
We are always that kid who does touch the very hot ring on the cooker when our mum said don't. We are always the people who touch the wet paint. We're not good at learning until bad things happen to us. The truth is with data, you know, this stuff has just grown up in the background. People just haven't known about it.
You could chop off the top of the car and create a convertible. You could add a spoiler. But you're fundamentally creating a new car. You are... changing the shape of the car. But what we did here is we took LSD and we essentially did a molecular tire rotation. We just moved two atoms. We swapped them.
He's a chemical neuroscientist at UC Davis, and he told me... Pretend that I've got a crystal ball and I can see into the future. And in the future, every insurance company will fully reimburse for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Even in that future, there are a lot of people who will still be left behind.
We just move things around a little bit here and there, tweak their structures just a little bit to make them better versions of themselves.
A lot of times people will describe synthetic organic chemists as molecular architects. And what we do is really not a whole lot different than what an architect does. The only difference is we can't see what we are building.
This is really calming for me. But in many neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions, it looks like wintertime. You know, all of the leaves have fallen off the trees. The arborist has come in and pruned back all the branches. And now there's not that physical connectivity between adjacent neurons.
moving us more towards a healing-based approach, where if you take a drug once or a few times, that could lead to long-lasting therapeutic benefit. So now you're not thinking about taking a drug every single day for the rest of your life. You can take the drug, have this healing effect, and then not have to take it continually.
We need to have something that is so safe that you can simply pick it up at your local pharmacy, bring it home, and put it in your medicine cabinet.
And if the drug needs to be administered in the clinic under the supervision of multiple healthcare professionals, we're just never going to be able to reach all those patients.
Fortunately, that's what medicinal chemists are very good at. They can take a chemical structure and tweak it just a little bit to improve its properties.
And as researchers started to study it more, they realized that ketamine produced very rapid antidepressant effects, effects that appeared within 24 hours as opposed to the couple of weeks that you would need for an SSRI. And this was really paradigm shifting for the field.
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