Dr. Tim Cernak

Thanks, Thora.

Yeah, can we use chemistry to improve ecosystem health?

I've had the luxury, I guess, of working in human health for so long.

And the science is so much fun, right?

You're looking at atoms and bonds, and you're buried inside the active site of a protein, imagining a chemical.

That's a chemist's idea of fun.

It was important to me to get quickly to atoms and bonds in this podcast, because...

Because for all my chemists out there, we just love to draw chemical structures.

I could be at the chalkboard drawing hexagons all day long.

I love it.

But just looking around at ecosystems and seeing what's going on in the planet right now, it was hard to just continually look away.

And then as soon as you start to learn about wildlife diseases,

And that the patient populations in some instances are like the last glimmer of their species.

Like there are animals that there are just a couple hundred of left on this planet.

And what's driving their extinction is disease.

Tasmanian devils are about to go out because of cancer.

It's crazy.

You know, I mean, Tasmanian devil, remember from like Looney Tunes, the guys like spinning around and that species is like on the brink of extinction right now because of cancer.

It's crazy.

Yeah, I hope so.