Centivax is developing universal flu vaccines designed to protect against all strains of influenza—past, present, and future. In this interview, we speak with Jacob Glanville, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

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Produced and edited by Chris Gates, crgstudio.co

00:49 Why flu vaccines need constant updating
03:07 How influenza infects a cell
06:39 Why our immune system doesn’t generate broadly-neutralizing antibodies
16:07 Mutations and animals
23:42 What is vaccine efficacy?
28:55 Designing a universal flu vaccine
37:40 The idea behind Centivax
44:16 Clinical trials
57:33 The business case for eradication
1:03:26 How to eradicate the flu
1:07:26 Could we make broad vaccines for the common cold?
1:09:07 Building a universal snake antivenom
1:23:09 Antivenom cocktails

Nick Desnoyer, a plant biologist in Norwich, England, is designing and creating flowers that don’t exist anywhere in nature. In this interview, he reveals his next project: Paintunia, a petunia that acts as a living canvas. These petunias have an inducible gene; when you lightly touch a bud (before it opens) with a clear molecule, called dexamethasone, that molecules seeps into cells, switches on the gene, and causes them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules are literally used to control which colors show up in which places. For a prior project, Nick turned Arabidopsis, a small (and quite ugly) plant widely used in research, into little pink “micro-roses.”

We filmed this episode surrounded by flowers, with Nick walking me through how each one gets its shape and pigmentation. He explained how he combines breeding and genetic engineering to make flowers, and how he searches scientific papers for mutations to figure out which plant crosses to make next. His ultimate dream is to build a botanical garden filled with weird and wonderful flowers that exist nowhere else. Thanks to Plasmidsaurus for sponsoring this episode.

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Timestamps:

1:28 Paintunia

7:46 Tools for flower design

18:47 Petunia patterns

33:16 Engineering new traits

40:38 Turning Arabidopsis into pink micro-roses

54:26 Getting genes into plants

1:06:02 Mutant botanical gardens

1:14:24 Beauty is sufficient

1:20:30 Flower design studio

Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit research group, has engineered a microbe that eats Martian dirt and excretes bioplastic. It is the first step of their "five organism" plan to terraform Mars and make the planet habitable. This interview is with Erika DeBenedictis, the co-founder and CEO of Pioneer Labs.

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0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars
5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry
8:27 The five "pioneer species"
17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen
26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements
35:49 Starship
41:05 Why create a second biosphere?