SPEAKER_04

What does her team think these red dots are?

I didn't know black holes could have an atmosphere.

What does that mean exactly?

Okay, let's pivot from black holes to holes in information in the human brain.

What's the second story?

So what can researchers do with that information now that they've identified this like specific brain circuit?

Huh.

Okay.

Well, what do we get out of knowing that an octopus might use one arm to give a thumbs up and another to give a peace sign?

I love nerding out with you.

Thank you for enlightening me every week.

So my day job is in cancer research and cancer biology, mostly immunology and cancer.

Much of what my laboratory does is not so much the biology of cancer, but developing instruments that create the data that allow us to analyze the complexities of how the immune system interfaces with tumors and how tumors...

basically re-enable the immune system to help the cancer itself.

So the problem has been we don't have the ability to collect enough data, or not until recently, to collect and understand what all of that means.

So we've been kind of poking in the dark for decades.

And so probably for the last 20 years, I've developed a number of instruments and turned them into companies that allow everybody to access a level of information they couldn't get before.

So what happens is that there's sort of a dance between the mutations that initiate a tumor and then sort of an evolution of how the tumor eventually learns how to trick the immune system to not recognize it.

So we have all kinds of internal—I mean, literally every day, every person, you'll develop five cancer-like objects inside of your body.

But the immune system and your body has a way of shutting it down very quickly.