Science Straight Up

There are millions of tiny machines at work in our bodies, keeping our genes repaired when they break. These machines--protein molecules--can be watched and monitored by science, thanks to imaging technology developed by Dr. T.J. Ha, who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in the 1990's. His research aims at understanding how exactly these proteins do their work and what happens when they break down, leading to diseases like cancer. This could have enormous implicatio...

"It takes a monster to kill a monster." So says Dr. Clodagh O'Shea of California's Salk Institute. In her talk, sponsored by Telluride Science, she details the work her lab does to reprogram viruses to attack cancer cells while leaving normal cells untouched. Now in early human trials, this sort of treatment could revolutionize the way medicine deals with cancer. O’Shea is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the Salk Institute, where she holds the Wicklow Chair. She is al...

Dr. Philip Bevilacqua from Penn State University traces RNA’s origins in outer space to the primordial soup of early Earth to its starring role in today’s medical breakthroughs, offering a plain-language look at how this once-overlooked molecule is now powering CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene editing, an improved flu vaccine and the fight against diseases like Ebola. He spoke at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center and veteran broadcas...

Tau, a protein, normally supports brain cells’ internal structure; Dr. Lukasz Joachimiak, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, is focused on what happens when it does not. His lab uses computational and experimental methods to determine how and why tau gets tangled and forms the toxic aggregates found with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The hope is to come up with ways of detecting Alzheimer's and treating it early, before the destruction of brain cells is ...

How did the atoms in the universe come together to form life? Dr. Daivd Lacy, of the University of Buffalo says that at the heart of this mystery is the conversion of small molecules into the building blocks of life, Metals, such as iorn, cobalt and manganese, play an important part in this process. Dr. Lacy also explores the possibility of life on other planets and we answer a question from a young man in our audience who asks, "Are there flies on the Moon?" Your hosts for Science Stra...