David Olson
Appearances
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Because it's answering some of the questions we have about dogs. how to properly design universal antibodies.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
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.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
How long have we had tunnels then? Oh, so the tunnels were dug in the 80s.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Yeah, this was designed to be a nuclear test location originally, and now we do only subcritical experiments in this location.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
We do this because it is secure, right, so we can control the environment. And we also are concerned about a potential breach of the vessel, and so we want to do it in an environment that's controlled and we don't lose any of the plutonium into the environment. If something goes wrong. If something goes wrong, yeah.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
So this is where the Scorpius machine is going to reside.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
And the reason is we need higher energy x-rays to be able to look through plutonium.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
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.
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What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
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.
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Can AI Crack The Biology Code?
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.
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Can AI Crack The Biology Code?
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.
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Can AI Crack The Biology Code?
I think really across medicine, sustainability, technology, I think there's huge opportunities to transform the current ways we do things with protein design.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Fermentation is the transformation of one food into another with the help of microbes.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
You, as the fermenter, take the role of the bouncer. You have a velvet rope at your disposal. You stand at the door. And a great ferment is the club inside where it's full of beautiful people making great conversations, sipping on champagne, and it's a fantastic party.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And it's your job at the door to turn away all the bad actors, all the people that are going to go inside and start a fight, you know, just ruin the vibe. You just want to let in the good microbes.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Yeah, so I was I was in grade school and I was like at home alone in the morning. I was just eating honey nut Cheerios like any other North American kid watching Transformers on Fox Kids. Yeah. And I don't finish my breakfast. I just throw the bowl up on the counter and then like jet off to school. And this is like end of the school year. It's summer.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
It's hot in our little cramped apartment in Toronto. And I come back to my mom, who's already like setting up for dinner. And she's like, clean up after yourself. Your breakfast is on the counter. And then I go like, sorry, mom, pick up the bowl. And the milk is set. It's like jelly. I'm like, mom, what has happened? She's like, you made yogurt. Now, please clean it up.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
We have we have stuff to do. And I was like, no. How can I make yogurt? That is something you buy. I can't just leave the house one day and make Lego when I come back. That's something you buy from a toy store. Yogurt is something you buy from the grocery store.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
But yeah, I was doing research and I was like, oh wait, all these microbes that live in your mouth are the same microbes that people have used for fermentation for thousands of years. Like the reason you have to brush your teeth is because lactic acid bacteria eat all the food that doesn't make it down your esophagus.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
When a coffee bean is harvested, you know, in the jungles of Costa Rica or Colombia or wherever it might be, those berries, which look like little tiny cherries or almost like crab apples, they get hauled into baskets or trucks and then like thrown onto the ground. And there's either like dry or wet fermentations.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And turn all those scraps into lactic acid, which then rots urine out and corrodes it.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Exactly. And if you're lucky, they're there in the right amounts to do what they do in yogurt. And acidify the milk, coagulate the milk proteins, and make this gel.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
You need food. You need food that you would want to eat that hopefully also the microbes will want to eat. So to start any fermentation process, you need the food you're looking to ferment. Then you need to find the microbes. There's a couple ways of going about that. One, they're everywhere. That's good. It's good that they are everywhere. They're on you. They're on our skin.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
They are high up in the troposphere, you know, floating on moats of dust. There are microbes that have been found in like gold mines in South Africa. And they're probably also on the food itself, whether that's flour, whether that's a cabbage on any given food.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
They are there as a minority population with a lot of other bacteria, soil bacteria, microbes, you know, microbes that might be found in feces or manure from the actual field itself.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And it's your job to suppress those microbes immediately by using things like oxygen or an absence of oxygen, more specifically, or salt to make sure that they are tamped down and you give center stage to those lactic acid bacteria.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
They will start to... release enzymes into their environment that will break up the carbohydrates in the plant cells themselves and allow them to digest these sugars. Carbohydrates and starch and lots of plant fibers are just stitched together chains of simple sugar molecules like glucose. And so...
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
In the great tree of life, lots of organisms have devised enzymes that snip those daisy chains into their constituent molecules.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Then they can grab an easily handable portion of chemical energy in the form of sugar, eat it, and through the process of fermentation, which going back to the textbook microbiology definition, is the metabolism in the absence of oxygen of a sugar molecule into either ethanol or lactic acid.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Yeah. And then when it harvests the chemical energy, energy for its own purposes, what's left over is lact gas.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
That's the byproduct. That's like microbial poop, basically.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
But in both cases, just whatever endemic microbes are in the jungle, on the fruit, start to acidify and metabolize all of the fruit flesh. And all those metabolites, all the acids that are produced, all the organic molecules seep into the actual coffee bean itself and change its flavor.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
The good thing is that humans... seem to like the flavor of lactic acid. And even when a food source gets pretty acidic, and we're talking about below 4.5 on the pH scale, like we find it pretty palatable and it's something that we enjoy eating. So they're in the Venn diagram of foods that microbes like and foods that humans like. There's a lot of overlap there.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And when they get the party down in our food supply, we seem to like what they do. And so this is, in every way, shape, and form, a symbiotic relationship.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And how is it the same? It is, it is... It is different, but it is the same. We're going to go back down the phylogenetic tree of life to the origin of eukaryotes. So there's filamentous fungi floating in the ocean. And then... One of these multicellular organisms was like, I'm going to revert back to being a unicellular, just me and my kids floating as little dots in the sea, microbes.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
It's kind of like whales going back into the ocean. Wow. Fungi evolved from single-celled organisms and yeast, nothing truly devolves, but yeast went back from being multicellular organisms to adopting a single-celled lifestyle once again. Wow. Which is interesting.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Yeast are cool critters. They are eukaryotes like us, which means they have a cell nucleus. There are thousands of varieties. And all yeast really means is single-celled fungi. So we think of yeast as like, oh, yeast is the thing that is in bread. But there are like thousands and thousands of varieties of yeast. So many different types and clades. And so they do a lot of the same things.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
If we're baking sourdough bread, They use the action of some of those same lact gas bacteria that we just talked about. They'll take sugar and they will produce ethanol, yes, but they'll also produce carbon dioxide.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
And that carbon dioxide production is what helps to make these little pockets of gas formation inside of a bread dough.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Historically? You can't keep microbes out of your food if you try. This is something we can't forget, right?
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
Like, just the history of humanity. You want to talk, like, plagues and infestations and disease. Like, humans have had a rough go of trying to keep microbes out of ourselves, right? Our food was no exception. So...
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
the sorts of kind of culinary tricks that probably primarily many women working in kitchens, grandmothers and mothers and sisters and daughters tinkering, being like, oh, this worked and it worked really well. I should keep doing that because this is lasted or it tastes good or it keeps well.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
These kind of happy accidents have like accrued and accumulated over thousands of generations to be these entrenched kind of cultural bodies of knowledge that we understand as fermentation. It really is this like falling together. It really is this kind of, it is this kind of beautiful symbiosis. It's like, how does symbiosis arise in nature in any way, shape or form?
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
It's an accident that works so well that the two parties become bound to each other. whether those are like cleaning fish on a whale shark or, you know, ox peckers on a hippo. Like it works to the benefit of both parties. And that's exactly what has happened with humans and the microbes that we use in fermented foods.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
It's fun. And I love teaching other people about it.
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Eating Breakfast? You Can Thank Fermentation
If you took a fresh coffee bean and completely stripped it of the fruit and dried it immediately and went through the same roasting process, you would end up with the most like... flat, cardboardy, acrid coffee compared to what happens post-fermentation. So fermentation is an incredibly important step in coffee production.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
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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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
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.
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Could AI Go Green?
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.
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Could AI Go Green?
So there are a number of confidentiality clauses that sit around kind of customers.
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Could AI Go Green?
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.
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Could AI Go Green?
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.