May 15, 2023
The venom of the Brazilian pit viper Bothrops jararaca causes a sudden and catastrophic drop in blood pressure. Armed with this knowledge, David Cushman and Miguel Ondetti set out to isolate the active component. In this 1999 interview with Princeton University professor Leon Rosenberg, Cushman tells the story of their...
Apr 14, 2023
Oliver Smithies freely admits that he did not find a solution to the problem he set out to solve, but he was able to turn his initial failure into a success that forever changed biomedical research. The gene targeting method that Smithies developed made it possible to generate knockout mice as models for human disease....
Mar 10, 2023
After meeting a young man dying of renal failure, Willem Kolff could not shake the thought that there was a simple solution: remove urea from the blood. Using sausage skin and an enamel tub, Kolff made the rotating drum artificial kidney. This was the beginning of renal hemodialysis, now a widely used intervention...
Nov 11, 2022
In vitro fertilization has become fairly common, but have you ever stopped to think about the fundamental research that was required to make it possible? Just figuring out how to properly fertilize the eggs in a petri dish took five years. Listen in as 2001 Lasker Laureate Robert G. Edwards tells the story of how he met...
Oct 21, 2022
In this 2002 interview, Lasker Award and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel speaks with the then-newly minted Lasker Laureate James Darnell Jr. Darnell won the 2002 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Science for an exceptional career that opened two fields in biology—RNA processing and cytokine...