Dr. Lawrence David

speaker

102 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Dr. Lawrence David’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · What do people eat? Plant and animal DNA in sewage provide clues · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

You should have seen when our first kids were born and, you know, I'm getting in there with the diapers.

You would think I'd be better at it by now.

I had a wonderful graduate advisor who set me up for a project when I was a grad student.

And I, in a way, got my PhD in part by collecting, I think, what might be one of the world's largest personal collections of feces.

I ended up collecting my poop every day for a year as part of a science project.

And this kind of helped teach us how to do what we're doing today.

I was collecting my poop.

to look at my microbiome, so the collection of bacteria that live inside of our guts.

And as part of that, A, I had to collect a lot of poop, and B, I had to measure what I was eating and write it down because we thought that that would be impacting our microbiomes.

And

It took me 45 minutes a day to write down everything I was eating.

This kind of taught me about why it's challenging to measure what even just one person is eating.

And then the other thing that that study taught me was in our stool or feces is a lot of DNA.

And so at the time, we were targeting the DNA from bacteria.

But it turned out to actually be the same kind of technique to now target the DNA from plants and animals that we eat.

There was one other scientist out, I think, in Colorado who sort of got even more samples.

So hats off to him.

We had a code name for our project.

It was called Project Omega Gold because we didn't want to freak out the other scientists in the building who were studying, I guess, less gross things.

Yeah, so we could talk about it and not, you know, worry the other scientists.

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