Our Impact on the Earth

“Mother Nature is not happy right now and she’s trying to tell us, in many ways,” says Kimberly Prather, Professor of Climate, Atmospheric Science, and Physical Oceanography at UC San Diego.

New weather patterns and events are causing concern but how do we know these changes are caused by human activity? Climate scientists are looking at trends over time to determine our impact on the planet.

Prather discusses recent CAICE studies aimed at advancing our understanding of how the oceans influence human and planetary health including novel experiments being conducted in a unique ocean-atmosphere simulator.

Watch — How Do We Know Humans are Impacting the Health of Our Planet? – Exploring Ethics

Editing the Code of Life

You may not know what clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats means, but when you see or hear the word CRISPR it all takes on new meaning, thanks to the efforts of UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, who developed this revolutionary method of genomic editing.

Her work has literally changed the world with her research, with tremendous benefits for the future of humankind and the planet.

The discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering technology has changed human and agricultural genomics research forever. This genome-editing technology enables scientists to change or remove genes quickly and with extreme precision. Labs worldwide have changed the course of their research programs to incorporate this new tool, creating a CRISPR revolution with huge implications across biology and medicine.

This talk marks the occasion of Doudna receiving the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s 2019 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest.

Watch — Editing the Code of Life: Into the Future with CRISPR Technology with Jennifer Doudna – 2019 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest

Women in Leadership 2019

“Where on an imagined clock of equality do we now stand?” asks veteran journalist Lynn Sherr at the start of this year’s Women in Leadership panel.

Listen in as Sylvia Acevedo, Chelsea Clinton, Jedidah Isler answer that question and share their thoughts on the present and future of the role of women in America. Each panelist reflects on her road to leadership and details the support mechanisms and mindsets needed to get there when faced with adversity.

This is the second annual Women in Leadership panel – convened to celebrate and honor the legacy of Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space.

Watch — A Conversation with Sylvia Acevedo, Chelsea Clinton, Jedidah Isler, and Lynn Sherr

Eavesdropping on Whales

Since ancient seafarers first heard the strange calls of whales, humans have been fascinated by their meaning – from Flipper’s clicks and trills to the long serenades of Humpbacks. Inhabiting the dark ocean depths, whales use sound in many different ways – from feeding to navigating to finding friends and family.

Join postdoctoral scholar Goldie Phillips for a captivating look into how scientists use whale calls to study whale populations.

Watch — Eavesdropping on Whales: How Whale Calls Inform Science

A Personal Encounter with a Global Crisis

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with what appeared to be a routine (if severe) case of food poisoning. Tom’s condition quickly deteriorated, and upon transfer to a hospital in Germany blood work revealed that he had contracted one of the most dangerous superbugs in the world, a condition that rendered modern standards of treatment useless. Following an emergency medevac to the medical center at UC San Diego, where both Steffanie and Tom worked, Tom suffered several episodes of septic shock and spent months in a coma.

An increasingly frantic Steffanie used her scientific training to research alternative solutions and stumbled upon “the perfect predator” in an all-but-forgotten treatment: bacteriophage therapy. Bacteriophage, or phage, treatment had fallen out of favor almost 100 years ago, largely due to the invention of antibiotics. Phages are naturally-occurring viruses capable of destroying even the most lethal bacteria, but in order to be effective they must be precisely matched to their prey. With the clock running down on Tom, Steffanie appealed to phage researchers worldwide. Working with allies that included the FDA, top university researchers, and a clandestine Navy biomedical center, a match was found; Tom was treated and made a remarkable recovery. Since then others have also been saved by this resurrected treatment.

The hard-won knowledge gained during Steffanie and Tom’s trial, and the alliances formed, helped to establish the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) at UC San Diego, the first phage therapy center in North America.

Steffanie and Tom’s memoir of their ordeal, The Perfect Predator, is a love story as well as a propulsive medical thriller. Though often near despair as Tom’s condition progressively worsened, Steffanie refused to concede defeat. The book also serves as a warning and a call to action, as Steffanie points to the rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria as a direct result of our overuse of antibiotics, particularly in livestock. The superbug crisis has assumed global proportions, and Steffanie argues that while phage therapy has tremendous promise, we must also focus our collective attention on the source of the crisis in order to prevent more cases like her husband’s.

Watch The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug with Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson