Lysanne Snijders

Lysanne Snijders
Postdoctoral researcher in animal behavior
Biography:

Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany

Learn more about Lysanne's work:
www.lysannesnijders.com
Connect with Lysanne:
facebook.com/lysanne.snijders linkedin.com/lysanne-snijders
Do birds have a personality?

Observing animal behaviour can tell us a lot about evolutional behaviour. It can also be an invaluable practical knowledge if you are working with farm animals. But, there is more to it than just raw data. Lysanne Snijders, from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, has discovered something much more interesting. She’s found, that not only do birds have personalities, but that there are whole social networks between these animals. They love, they hate, they cheat, and they take care of each other.

Find out more about Lysanne’s search for the personality of animals in our new video.

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Read the transcript of Lysanne Snijders's Video here ◂

Lysanne: My name is Lysanne Snijders. I’m an academic researcher interested in Animal behavior. I’m very interested in animal social behavior and animal spatial behavior. I’ve been studying migration in geese and I just did my Ph.D. on the social networks of Great Tits or small song birds.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about animal behavior?

Lysanne: Well, actually, I don’t really know. I’ve always been passionate about animal behavior. I really like observing animals. I think it broadens your world if you are aware of all the animals that always are around you and how they behave and why they behave the way they do. That’s why I also became a biologist because I was observing animals anyway, so I might as well make a profession out of it.

Nerina: Why is it relevant to know about animal behavior, in your opinion?

Lysanne: Well, there are several reasons. They can tell us more about the evolution of behavior in general, but also it can be very practical if you’re working with farm animals, to know what causes stress, what is the ideal social situation. It can be very relevant if you are working with threatened populations to know what are the risks, what is their behavior, how do they respond to stressors. But for me, it is relevant because I think we live with a lot of animals on this world and we’re often not even aware of them. And the  more you learn about them, themore you learn about their behavior, the more you realize that they’re actually not so different from us and that maybe in some cases, we should also treat them a bit different than we do now. That’s why for me, personally, studying animal behavior is very relevant.

Nerina: You work on birds, more specifically on Great Tits. How do you research them?

Lysanne: There are actually two main methods with Great Tits. For my Ph.D., I worked with captive Great Tits. We brought them in captivity and we keep them in aviaries so we can do behavioral experiments with them, but we also work with wild birds. We have a number of nest box populations. In the forest, we hang up a lot of nest boxes, like 200 of them. Great Tits really like to breed in nest boxes and also to sleep in nest boxes in the winter, so you can easily check on them. They put collar rings and aluminum rings on them so we can identify and we can keep track of the individuals. This way, we can study the behavior, spatial behavior and breeding behavior of these individuals in the wild also.

Nerina: This is also my question. Do birds have a personality?

Lysanne: Yes. Yeah, that has actually been a topic of my latest studies. A lot of animals, almost all species actually, has been discovered in recent years, that you really see differences between individuals of the same species. Individuals react differently to the same situation as other individuals do. If you put them in the same situation again, you will the same differences. For Great Tits, for instance, we use a number of environments tests. We place them in a new room, which is a bit of a stressful  situation and we study how they react to this stressful situation. We see that some individuals, will just go out and explore the whole room, being a bit adventurous, while others actually are quite a bit stressed and scared and they will just stay in one place and wait for the test to be over. That makes it very fascinating for me because you see these differences that you will also see with people if you put them in a stressful situation. Some are quite comfortable with stress and others just get sort of paralyzed by it.

Nerina: Your Ph.D. was about social networks of birds. Could you tell me more about it?

Lysanne: The interesting thing with looking at social networks, is that you’ll realize that a lot of these individuals, these birds, are connected to each other directly because they are just close to each other or indirectly because they’re singing to each other from far away. These Great Tits, for instance, they form monogamous pairs, so they form social pairs, that usually stay together for their life. It doesn’t mean that they don’t cheat… If you look at offspring, you will sometimes find that there are also some offsprings, some chicks that are not from the partner of the female. These are also interesting relationships going on. You don’t really see it.

Then with Great Tits, what’s also interesting is that in the spring and in the summer, they have these territories. They defend the territories also by singing. Both the male and the female defend it. They use this territory to raise their family. When the kids fledge, they will move around the territory and also further away exploring the area, but as soon as it gets cold, and it really gets really cold, they all go into flocks. Not only the Great Tits, also the Blue Tits will move in. They form one big group of birds and they will move around the forest and also in the gardens of people looking for food. They change their social behavior also depending on the time of the year.

Nerina: Why do birds sing?

Lysanne: That’s actually a very crucial question in animal behavior. There are two main answers that can both be true. One is to keep competitors at a distance. Especially in Great Tits it has been proven that if you remove the Great Tit from its territory but you keep playing the song of this Great Tits, it will take a long time before another bird takes over the territory. But if you do not do that, if you just keep silence, then really quickly, another bird will move in. They use the use to say, “Hey, I’m here. Keep away.” But also song is very important to attract females. There’s a lot of information in how birds sing. Sings that you can tell something about how the body condition of this bird is, how the quality is, how big the bird is and how much more energy it has, how much more vigorously it can sing, and females can use this information also to learn something about this potential partner and base their choice for mates also on this song.

Nerina: Can you recognize a bird from its personality?

Lysanne: Yes, for some you can really recognize from the behavior. For instance, in a nest box population with Great Tits, every year we do nest box checks to see how far they are with breeding, and then you will notice that for some birds, even if you’re just approaching the nest box, they cannot see you but they hear you, and you’ll already hear like a hissing sound and a lot of noise coming from the box, and then it’s a female trying to scare you away by… That was a different hypothesis, but maybe they’re pretending to be a snake, chasing away predators. Not all females do this. At some point, you’ll get to notice this box with this female again.

Nerina: What do we know about the relationship with each other?

Still a lot of research is being done. Until now, it has been very difficult to really track these bird every day or every minute of the day. Now we get new technology, really small little transmitters, and we can really track these birds and with whom they stay together. With Great Tits, it seems that they already, in their first winter – they get born at the end of spring – in the winter, they mate up so they don’t mate, but they get a partner in this winter flocks. They stay together and they try and raise their first broods. You will see, if it doesn’t work, then sometimes they will try and find a new partner, but if they succeed, they usually stay together. They will stay together throughout winter and throughout the summer. Just the whole year around.

Nerina: What does it mean that it doesn’t work? For people, I know what it means when it doesn’t work but what does it mean for two birds?

Lysanne: Colleagues of mine are really looking into that, like what is the value of compatibility, how important is that in birds. The problem is a bit when a male and a female are taking care of a nest, both individuals have an interest when the other would do more. If you can just do less and the other one does all the work, that’s good for you because you lose less energy and so your chicks will survive, but both individuals have this motivation for the other maybe to do less. At some point, if one of the individuals for instance really says, “Okay, you do all the work,” then at some point maybe the partner will say, “Okay, now I’ve had enough,” and goes away and tries to find a new partner. These kinds of mechanisms can cause that these birds just don’t work together. They cannot find a good balance in how much they both take care of the chicks. Then it can go wrong and they try to find a partner that matches better.

Nerina: Are we affecting their habitat?

Lysanne: Great Tits are a bit of an exception because they, until now, have been very well in adapting to the human environments. You see them a lot in your backyards, but a lot of studies also show that the birds breeding in the cities actually do worse than the birds in the forest. If you look at the long-term, it’s probably not a good thing. But then you also have that most birds, most animals, they cannot adapt or not so quickly as we are increasing our infrastructure in our cities. They are pushed more and more into little areas, especially if you look at the Meadow-Birds for instance. The smaller the areas, the more risks there will be because it will be much easier for predators to find them. They will not only have a reduced area to find food but also increased the likelihood of being caught, being killed. There’s this extra stress so you see for many animals, that their populations are declining. Especially what we build and what we consume is an important factor. For a lot of people who live in the cities, it feels so far away what is happening in the rain forest for instance, but everything you buy, all the ingredients that are in your products come from somewhere. It’s important to, even if you’re not living in the rain forest, that your behavior, your choices, have an important impact on the habitats of these animals.

Nerina: What was the most unexpected experience you have had, watching birds?

Lysanne: The most unexpected one and that was not so nice actually, was when we were doing the nest box checks. I was doing them for one of the first times. I came to a nest box and I opened it and there was a dead Blue Tits in there. Then I went to the next nest box and again, there was a dead Blue Tits in there. Then I learned that these nice Great Tits, my study species, can actually be quite mean, killing machines also. When they chose a nest box and then they find that another bird is inspecting this nest box, because a lot of birds are looking for a nesting place, I guess it turns red for their eyes and they just attack these birds in the nest box. Great Tits are quite strong. They are bigger and stronger than Blue Tits. These Blue Tits, they’ll lose and they will kill the birds. It’s not only that they’re really cute little social birds. They also have a little bit of a mean side.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that you have learned from your Ph.D.?

Lysanne: Of course, before I started with my Ph.D., I didn’t know so much about animal personality yet. I actually found it a bit of a difficult topic. It sounded very subjective. In biology, they use the term anthropomorphism. Attributing human characteristics to animals. I felt a bit critical about it, but them working with these birds, doing these personality tests and following these birds year round, I really also just saw and was convinced that they are very different. This personality thing is really something real. I think that was the most important thing, what I learned from my Ph.D., that you really have distinct individual animals.

Nerina: What is next? What would you like to work on?

I think bats are one of these creatures that they are so many of them. One fifth of all the mammal species is actually a bat, and we know almost nothing about them. Especially compared to birds. From birds, we’ve learned quite a lot about their migration strategies and their ecology, and bats, we know very little. I want to investigate their migration strategy. Some bats, they stay in one place the whole year, while others make this really long distance flight with all these risks. So why do they do this? Then I’ll look at do they differ in their personalities also, do they differ in their social behavior, to learn more about these animals we know so little about, and to also share this information so we can better protect them in the future.

Nerina: What is the question nobody ever asked you but you wish they would?

Lysanne: About how we, as people, can take better care of our animals. How can we take their behavior into account, to improve their well-being? Yeah. How can we make people aware that we are not the only important species on this planet? I think that, for me, is a very important question. I think in science, we know a lot. Especially if you now look at this climate change debates, there’s at least 97% of scientists that say that this is really happening, this is really a problem, and still, there are people that just seem to think that it’s still up for debate. That it might not be happening. For me, it’s important to know how can scientists communicate better to the general audience and make our research clear. Not that it’s just another opinion, but it’s objective measurements about how the world is very likely to work. I think that’s not only for me but for many scientists, that’s a very important topic and important question. How can we bring our knowledge across and how can we have people really trust our findings and our results? What do we need? What does research need in order to be able to communicate better?

Nerina: What do we need? What does research need in order to be able to communicate better?

Lysanne: I think there needs to be, also for scientists, more opportunities and more positive reinforcement of them communicating with the public. At the moment, especially academic scientists, are mostly valued for the scientific publications they make and the grants they bring in, but not so much about how they communicate their knowledge to the general public, which is a bit weird for me because, in the end, it’s all about impact. We tend to measure impact by where you published your research, in which journal and how much it gets cited, just because it’s easy to measure; it’s quantitative. But this is not the only impact and certainly not the only important impact we can make. I think there should be much more positive reinforcement for scientists to tell their story and to bring this knowledge across. More stimulation, more positive reinforcements from higher up, the people who distribute the money, I think would be very valuable.

Nerina: Do you have a dream or a wish for the future?

Lysanne: My wish for the future would be what we already talked about a bit also, is that people really start recognizing that all these animals have individual personalities, and especially also regarding production animals like the chickens and the pigs and the cows, to really realize that these are all individuals with feelings, with stress, with emotions, especially with pigs, which are also very intelligent animals. They are equal or even more intelligent than dogs. That we just should not turn away because it’s easier not to think about it, but that we should really realize how we are treating them.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Lysanne: Yeah. Very nice. Thank you for these interesting questions.

Biography:

Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany

Learn more about Lysanne's work:
www.lysannesnijders.com
Connect with Lysanne:
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Anindita Bhadra

Anindita Bhadra
Behavioral biologist
Biography:

Assistant Professor, Animal Behaviour and Ecology, Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Kolkata, India.

Learn more about Anindita's work:
thescientistpost.in/bhadraiiserk/ insaindia.org/inyas.php http://www.iiserkol.ac.in/~abhadra/ iiserkol.ac.in/Publications.html kathaykathay.wordpress.com
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facebook.com/anindita.bhadra.1 linkedin.com/anindita-bhadra google.com/site/abhadra7/
Researching street dogs, doing theater, and dreaming of changing the world

A dog is a man’s best friend. But 80% of all of the dogs in the world are not actually domesticated. What do we know about this large population of stray animals? In our interview, Anindita Bhadra tells us what she found in her 5-years study of stray dogs in India.

How dogs change people, how people change dogs, and how dogs can understand and socialize with humans.

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Read the transcript of Anindita Bhadra's Video here ◂

Anindita: I’m Anindita Bhadra, from India. I’m a behavioural biologist, working on street dogs.

Nerina: How did this topic get your attention?

Anindita: Well, I had already done my Ph.D. on animal behaviour, and at the end of my Ph.D. I was thinking of what to now start working on and wanted a very Indian model system. So, the dogs seemed to be the perfect model system because you have dogs everywhere, in every street in India, they are easy to work with. You don’t have to haggle for permissions with the forest officials and nobody has really extensively studied dogs in a natural habitat until now. There’s a lot of work on pet dogs and people work with wolves to try and understand dog evolution, but I felt that dogs which have been surviving in natural populations for centuries on our streets, are a very good model system for understanding dog evolution, and also for doing many other things which address basic questions in animal behaviour, ecology, and evolution.

Nerina: What are the biggest challenges?

Anindita: One of the main problems is that they’re all there and are completely mingled with people, so we have to do all of our work on the streets. Firstly, not every student is comfortable working in that way, and, while we are doing this, we have a lot of trouble keeping people away and stopping them from disturbing our experiments. There are too many inquisitive people asking questions, some actually saying “we will not let you work with the dogs in our neighbourhood” and “what are you doing?” and “we’ll call the police”. So, that is one problem that we have all of the time.

Another problem which is a very peculiar problem in my case is; because it’s dogs, there are some people who love dogs and some people who hate dogs. It’s very difficult to be neutral about dogs. I often get students who come to me because they are already interested in dogs; they have pets in the house and they really are in love with dogs. I’m very scared of taking up such students for a Ph.D. because they can actually bias the data through their love for dogs. They start interacting with the dogs they are working with so it is very difficult to tease out what is real data and what is biased data. So, this is a peculiar problem that I face; dog lovers are not really good people for me. Also, I cannot use people that are scared of dogs, or hate dogs. It’s very difficult to find that neutral population who are still interested in doing my kind of work.

Nerina: What did you find out, that surprised you? 

Anindita: One of the surprising results that we found was that- in the literature there was this notion that dogs don’t have stable family groups, unlike wolves. So even when they are in groups, these are random groups. But, we are seeing more and more that that’s not true. There are family groups, and we actually saw that there is a lot of cooperation between members of the groups, even in raising the pups. So, two females would have puppies at the same time, and often they’ll help each other in raising each other’s pups. There are also males which hang around with the females and take care of the pups; they play with the pups, they give them food, and protect them. These are probably the fathers- but we don’t know as we have not done any genetic analysis- as not every male does, only some do. I like saying this is like the typically Indian giant family system. It’s not like the wolf system, where only one dominant male mates and everybody else just has to help. Here, everybody is mating and all of them are having puppies, but then they are helping each other out just like in a large family; cousins, nieces, nephews and grandparents- they are all hanging around together in the vicinity. That’s a very interesting and surprising result.

Another result- which, of course, we were not very happy about- is from when we did a 5-year long study to understand growth rates and death rates in the population. We saw that nearly 81% of the pups born in the year don’t reach adulthood. By 7 months 81% of the pups are dead, and nearly 60% of the mortalities are actually caused by humans. Of course, there are some cases where there are accidents which are not in our control, but then there are also active killings. So, that was a result which we didn’t expect, and it was also not a very happy result.

Nerina: How is the situation of stray dogs worldwide?

Anindita: It’s very interesting because there have been studies to estimate the populations of street dogs across the world, and it seems that nearly 80% of all the dogs present in the world are strays. Street dogs are still the majority, but, of course, they are more common in the developing worlds, than in the developing nation, because of the way the laws are.

Here, in our country, on the one hand, there are the municipalities trying to cull dog populations but then they don’t have very extensive dog control programs, so there’s still a problem. You get reports of some dogs chasing or biting somebody, and this creates a lot of uproar. But then there is also a lot of dog loving people in the population; they put out food for the dogs regularly, and they care for the pups when they are around. So, there is a very mixed kind of feeling.

In the Indian culture, in particular, it’s very interesting because dogs are considered to be lowly animals. Look at Indian literature from 2,00 years or 3,000 years back, then you have literature which talks about dogs on streets, and these dogs are very similar to the dogs of today. They’re just like outcasts. But then, a good householder is expected to feed these creatures at the end of the day, after the meal- the leftovers are not supposed to be thrown away, they are supposed to be fed to the dogs. So, that makes a very interesting kind of ecosystem where the dogs are not part of our households but they are part of the community.

Nerina: You are also working on dog’s cognition, could you tell me more about this? 

Anindita: So, we are doing these experiments on dog cognition. People working with pet dogs have shown that the pets are very good at following human gestures, but wolves are not. Of course, there’s a problem, as pet dogs are brought up with humans, and there is intensive training. So, we are doing these experiments with stray dogs to find out what really innate dog ability is, and what comes by interactions with humans.

What we saw is that really small puppies that are still dependant on and suckling from their mothers, are not really interacting so much with humans in the streets, but those which are 4-6 weeks old are excellent at following human gestures. If you put a bowl down and point towards it, the pup will go towards the bowl. Then we tested the juvenile’s cognition, which is at around 4-5 months, when the maximum mortality due to humans occurs. They are weaned from their mothers and more-or-less independent; they have started forging, and are also a bit of a nuisance for humans because they are very active. At this stage, the dogs are very reluctant to follow human gestures- they do not follow pointing, they do not even respond to the task. However, when you don’t give the gesture and just put down the bowl, they respond. So, they are still eager for the food, but they are very reluctant to rely on humans.

What is surprising is that with puppies, we found an innate ability to understand humans and a tendency to socialise with humans. However, with negative experiences with humans, they probably learned quickly not to rely on them. What we are thinking could have happened in the past is that with this innate ability to socialise with humans, puppies who come to humans and get a positive response gradually become more and more friendly, and turn into pets. But, if they get a negative response from people they move away, and probably just remain as strays. This could have been the early stage when domestication was happening; some dogs became domesticated and some didn’t. So, this is a very interesting scenario that we have just found.

Nerina: Did dogs change humans, or did humans change dogs?

Anindita: That is a completely open question that everybody working with dogs is trying to answer, and frankly I don’t think we have an answer to it. I think the most optimum answer would be that it’s a bit of both. They changed us a bit, and we changed them a bit. From the current understanding, dog domestication probably happened around 20,000 years ago. At that time, humans were still hunting animals, and all other domestication events happened after that. Since we don’t really understand exactly what happened during the domestication of dogs, this is still an open question. We don’t really know.

Nerina: Is there something you would like people who have pets to know about dogs? 

Anindita: One thing is that pet dogs have been bred artificially for so many generations that I think they are inherently very different from dogs on the streets. But, a feeling that I have always had, and with my studies is becoming more and more relevant, is that dogs aren’t very social creatures. When we have pets we like to think that they are part of the family and that we are their group, but it’s not really so right. The interaction you have with another human is not really the same as the interaction you have with your dog. Of course, the dog can interact with you, but it cannot speak its own language with you. So, I think if you want to have a pet, the minimum you can do is give it another dog partner because they need to socialise. They have a lot of interesting interactions and communications with dogs, and are such social creatures that it’s probably not fair to have just one dog as a pet.

Nerina: What does it mean to be a woman, a scientist, and a mother in India? 

Anindita: It means that my days are pretty tough, to begin with. There are, of course, problems, because we have a lot of people with prejudices who think women should be taking care of children and the family. Even in Indian science, there are people who think like that, but I have been brought up in a very liberal-minded family. My grandparents always wanted me to study and become a teacher, and my parents let me do what I wanted to do, so I have never been used to this kind of social system where being a woman is different from being a man.

I haven’t faced too many hurdles, until I came to the professional world of actually competing for a job. There I realised that yes, there are problems; men and woman are not always treated at par when appearing for a job interview, and as my husband and I are in the same field and at the same institute, it often feels like we are treated as a unit and not always as individuals. But, in general, I think the majority of people in India respect woman scientists. There is a lot of understanding from the Indian government, which insists on having day-cares in the institutes. So, now there is a lot of understanding of the woman scientists needs; you need to have a school on the campus, and you need to have day-care so that you can be a mother and have a career at the same time. So, personally, I haven’t really faced too many issues being a woman. However, there is discrimination, there is sexual harassment, and often there is bias. No one will say it to our face but, when somebody says “oh you have done this, being a woman” I feel very bad. Why can’t you just say “you have done this, this is good”. That’s good enough, you don’t have to say it’s even better because I am a woman. I don’t think in those terms when I do my science, I just do my science. Whether it’s good or bad, it should be judged on an objective scale, not based on my gender.

Nerina: What do you like doing, when you are not working or researching?

Anindita:  Cooking, reading books, listening to music, and I do a bit of painting. My weekends are mostly taken up as my husband and I have a theater group so we often have rehearsals. If I’m not doing research, I’m doing theater. My free time is mostly for my kids now.

Nerina: You are a scientist and an artist. What has science to do with art?

Anindita: I firmly believe that if you are a good scientist, you need to be creative. You cannot say that science is science, and the arts are the arts. Whenever you have crossed between disciplines, you have more creative thinking. I have always had a creative kind of mind, I used to dance when I was 4 years old, and I haven’t stopped. But, when I trained to be a scientist I never felt the need to stop indulging in the arts. I actually think every student who is doing science should have some other interest outside science because you cannot just live within the small sphere of your science. Science is becoming more specialised day by day, if you are only doing your bit then you do not know anything about the world; you cannot have lateral thinking, you cannot have different ways of applying your knowledge. You need to have an understanding of literature, social science, and history, to be more creative in your science.

Nerina: Is there a project, or an idea, which you are really passionate about at the moment? 

Anindita: A lot of things, actually. Other than my research, I’m currently extremely actively involved in the Indian National Youth Academy of Science and this is in a way my baby as I helped in founding it. This is not just an Academy, it is almost like a new movement in which we are trying to start getting young people actively involved outside of their research, in taking science to young children, getting involved in science promotions, science diplomacy- something that Indian scientists rarely do now. Everybody thinks that the older scientists should do this, and the younger scientists should just do their research- including the young people themselves. But I am trying to tell them no, this is your social responsibility. You are doing your science, fantastic, but what are you doing for society? This is my way of telling people to come and join us, this is a platform to do something for the society which is giving you the funding for your research, to begin with, right?

Nerina: What is the role of science in your opinion?

Anindita: Science helps you to think, reason, and analyse. Especially in the Indian context; we keep telling Indians that one of the things we would like to do is help people believe in science and practise it as a way of life, not just as a profession. When students are reading science they are normally reading it because they either want to become an engineer or a doctor, or a scientist, but beyond that I think the responsibility of the scientist is to come out of his or her own sphere, step out into the real world, and make science easy to understand for the common people, and for children, so that people get interested in science. So they don’t say that “I’m doing my science, and only I understand my science.  You are dumb, you do not understand” that is not the way we should do our science. We should do science, good science, and then break it down to the language of a child. I should be able to explain my science to a 5-year-old, to a 10-year-old, to a 50-year-old, who have not done science. I think that is a very big responsibility that scientists have because science is so important and you need to bring in the methods of science to solve the world’s problems. You need to bring in the methods of science to address basic questions. In India, we have so many superstitions, and this is very ingrained. People have fear, religious beliefs, and superstitions. There are these stupid class divisions, there are still people who practise very rigorous rituals which are completely based in superstitions, and completely baseless. But, you cannot tell them “you are doing this, this is dumb”, you need them to realise “this is dumb and so I should not do this”, and the only way they can realise this is if they start understanding logical reasoning, and start asking questions. This is, I think, the most important job for scientists; to help people ask questions and find an answer. You don’t just give them an answer; you help people to find the answer.

Nerina: What makes life meaningful?

Anindita: For me, it’s very important to put human beings first. I like to do things for people whenever I can. I really cannot say I will go and solve all the problems in the world, but in my capacity, I like to do my bit and since I like working with children and I’m interested in education, I like teaching. The way I want to solve some of the world’s problems is by engaging young children in discourses, in getting them fascinated about nature and science and helping them to ask why. Especially in our culture, you are always told to obey your elders, respect your elders, do what you’re told, and don’t ask questions. So, if I can motivate even a small part of the population to say “no, I will ask questions; at every step, I need to know why” then I think I have made a good contribution to the society of the future. For me, life is good if I think at the end of the day I have done something positive, that could be a very small thing or it could be a big thing. For me, my life is meaningful if I’m able to do something which is outside the small sphere of my family, or my set of students. So, if I have been able to contribute to society at large, even in a small portion- maybe I have made a student get interested in science and do science, or persuaded a family not to get their daughter married off when she is 15 and instead allow her to have an education and a life of her own, I think that is a contribution I have made to society.

Nerina: Thank you so much Anindita.

Anindita: My pleasure.

Probing into dog-human interactions on streets | #follow-up with Anindita Bhadra

Watch this follow-up conversation with Anindita about some new research results. She is working on dog-human interactions on streets.

Watch the video:
Biography:

Assistant Professor, Animal Behaviour and Ecology, Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Kolkata, India.

Learn more about Anindita's work:
thescientistpost.in/bhadraiiserk/ insaindia.org/inyas.php http://www.iiserkol.ac.in/~abhadra/ iiserkol.ac.in/Publications.html kathaykathay.wordpress.com
Connect with Anindita:
facebook.com/anindita.bhadra.1 linkedin.com/anindita-bhadra google.com/site/abhadra7/

Almas Taj Awan

Almas Taj Awan
Professor of Chemistry
Biography:

Researcher, ThoMSon Mass Spectrometry Lab, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Learn more about Almas's work:
globalyoungacademy.net/awanat/ Interview with Almas (CitGreen) Youtube Film: BIOVISION
Connect with Almas:
www.linkedin.com/almas-taj-awan
From Pakistan to Brazil, linking science and community

Everyday, we throw away tons of waste. But where does it all go? Can we turn waste into something usable and economically valuable? Can recycling be profitable? From extracting value-added products from oranges, to purifying water, Almas Taj Awan’s aim is to make our world a cleaner and better place for everybody.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Almas Taj Awan's Video here ◂

Almas: My name is Almas. I am based in Brazil. Originally I’m from Pakistan and I am postdoc researcher in Uni Camp, Brazil.

Nerina: What are your main research topics?

Almas: I am working with recycling technologies. In my Ph.D. I worked with recycling citrus industrial waste and we extracted some value added products from that. After that, I entered in a research area that was linked to recycling technologies that were used for water reclamation. We were studying how we can purify the waste water in the waste water treatment plants and currently I am working with mass spectrometric techniques and we are using these techniques for analysis of different kinds of substances.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about recycling?

Almas: Well, I am passionate about recycling because I think that our world needs this. We have lots and lots of problems linked with the waste generation and when the companies and the industry generate waste they actually don’t know what to do with that and normally. Let’s say if I talk about citrus industrial waste every year as Brazil is the largest orange producer, so millions of tons of oranges they are treated in the citrus industry and as a result, millions of tons of waste are incinerated. Because when you treat orange around 50% of that is left as a waste and that is normally dumped at some far place. So what we did, I mean me with my Ph.D. advisor and some other students as well, we tried to use that so called waste and tried to convert that into something really usable and something really economically viable.

Also if I talk about the water recycling technologies, I think that the next problem that the world is going to face is a water shortage problem and we really need to think about it. How we can reduce water consumption and what kind of technologies we can utilize to re-use the water? Like, let’s say for the toilet flushing or for the washing purposes, the house cleaning I think we can use reclaimed water for that purpose instead of using the drinking water for that purpose.

Nerina: What kind of results did you get from your dissertation?

Almas: Okay well, from the orange waste four main products that we extracted were first of all I would like to say pectin. Pectin is kind of a jelling agent and it can be used in the jams, jellies, marmalades or the juice industry for thickening purpose. Then the second one that we obtained was hesperidin that is an antioxidant, it’s an antidepressant as well. It’s a natural product and it can be used as a remedy. Next product that we obtained was nanocellulose and nanocellulose is nowadays a very active research area and it can be used for the – ah how can I say it – as the protective sheets on the cellphones or on the cars and they’re many other uses as well that are under research study and then it was bioethanol. Bioethanol is something that you can use for running the cars.

Brazil is a country that has made an example for the whole world because it’s the world largest producer of bioethanol but that bioethanol is actually the first generation bioethanol. But in our case, we are working from the bio waste and that is a second generation biofuel and that is the next technology that’s efficient technology because taking out bioethanol from the food products is something that has many challenges. Probably these food crops they could be used for providing food because the world has a lot of problems with food scarcity, food shortage. So probably we can use that for the other purposes as food items, but the waste that is left; the agricultural waste that is left, that waste can be converted into a biofuel.

So, here in Brazil, there are many laboratories that are doing research. Actually, there are many ways to convert that into biofuel but the only problem is that the economic viability of that process on the industrial level. But in our case when we tried to… when we were exploring this process we had this objective in mind that we need to reduce the waste. I mean we need to use the waste, but also we need to make a process that should be economically viable that could be applied on the industrial scale. So, when you work on the industrial scale you need to think about the money. The input and the output should be in balance or it should generate some revenue as well. So in our case, we tried different enzymes because right now the main problem that the industry is facing they are the high cost of enzymes. So we used Xac enzymes that are the lowest known in cost. So we think that the process is economically viable.

Nerina: The approach that you used was a new one?

Almas: Yes, it was a new approach in the sense that in Brazil ours was the first one. We tried to work with this and we were really successful and our approach was to extract as many products as we can.

Nerina: What are the possible real world applications of your results?

Almas: I think this product is marvelous and all the products that we extracted we can extract them on the industrial scale. Right now we are working with some companies to make some contract with us or with our lab and we’re trying to share the patent with them.

Nerina: What does it mean for you to be a scientist?

Almas: For me to be a scientist is, you know, I feel it’s a really big responsibility. It’s a really, really a big responsibility because every new disease that the world is facing, the population is facing or any environmental problem or any real life problem that the world is facing I think that scientists they try their best to solve that problem at the research level, at the very basic level. Well, there are two types of researchers: one is a basic research, the other one is the applied research and I think both of them are really, really important. Because the basic research it gives us fundamentals of future concepts related to science. While the applied research it is something that deals with the current problems that the population is facing. So I think both of them are equally important and I’m really passionate about them.

Nerina: Why did you become a researcher?

Almas: Well, I became a researcher because I think that I’m quite ambitious and I want to solve certain problems faced by the society. If I talk about my childhood I never thought about this that I would be a researcher, I would be a future scientist. I belong to a village from Pakistan where I think I am the first one who came out of that village and my parents they sent me abroad to have a scientific career. Because when a child I never thought that I would be a scientist. I never thought because I was like I can be a doctor or I can be an engineer or any other thing but not a scientist. How can a woman be a scientist? I had never seen scientists around me. That was something I never even thought about.

But when I started my master’s I always tried to think about science and how it works. I was in Pakistan and at that time there was a lack of resources, but then I got to know about the fellowship that is offered by The World Academy of Science (TWAS). I applied for that and eventually, I started my research career in Brazil.

Nerina: What kind of challenges did you encounter on your way?

Almas: Well, I think that there were many challenges like I was coming from Pakistan a society from where we don’t have that much of female scientists and then, my family, they were really supportive: my father, my mother, my siblings but of course society they imposed a lot of things on you and then they’re like… I mean even there it’s not common for the girls to travel alone abroad and then working with science away from the family something it’s a bit scary not seeing them that much good situation. But the thing is that like in the beginning it was like a little bit difficult but with the passage of time when I started showing that yes I’m a girl but I can do anything and I can do work as a scientist just like the men in my country can do and I can be extraordinary as well and I can be independent as well. So it is something that now makes me feel really proud and not just me even my family and I think that I can probably be an example maybe for some girls who want to proceed with their dreams, who want to do whatever they want.

Nerina: What kind of advice would you give to another young woman who would like to become a researcher?

Almas: I would like to say that the doors are open for you. I mean the doors are open for you. You just need to have the courage to enter that door because all over the world what I see is that academic and scientific councils are really encouraging women. I mean wherever you would like to apply for higher studies research grants they really encourage women. We need more and more women so that the gender gap that exists between science and women it should be overcome and secondly, there are many issues that are linked in the underdeveloped countries. I think that women from the underdeveloped countries I would really, really encourage them not to have fear about anything, just be bold, take the practical steps, look forward and work hard. You can do it.

Nerina: What motivates you?

Almas: Well this is a really personal question. I think my motivation is my parents because I see they have struggled throughout their lives to make their children independent. So when I feel that or whenever I have some difficult times in my life I just think about them, they’re my motivation and I just try to make myself better and just try to make and have more and more achievements so that they can be more and more proud with me.

Nerina: Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years? What would you like to change?

Almas: Well, in the long term I would like to be part of the policy making bodies at the regional or the government or the global level. So what I would like to change is that I would like to make a bridge and I would like to reduce the gap that exists between the scientific community and the policymakers.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Almas: Well, I dream of a society that is peaceful because currently I think that the world… I mean the only thing the world needs currently right now, the first priority is peace and then on the second level I feel that there should be… I dream of a society where every individual knows about its responsibility not just on a local level but on the global level as a global citizen.

Nerina: Do you have a dream or a wish for the future?

Almas: Yes, my dream for the future is that our government officials and the policymakers start thinking on the global level or I should say glocally. It means they should consider their local interests as well but the global interest as well because at the end of the day all human beings are the ones who share this planet. So probably our one wrong policy can not only influence our local community but also the global one. I think I really wish that our politicians around the world start thinking about the planet earth, about all of us, they think about the global citizens not just their local citizens.

Nerina: Thank you Almas so much for this conversation.

Almas: Thanks to you for inviting me, for sharing my thoughts.

Biography:

Researcher, ThoMSon Mass Spectrometry Lab, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Learn more about Almas's work:
globalyoungacademy.net/awanat/ Interview with Almas (CitGreen) Youtube Film: BIOVISION
Connect with Almas:
www.linkedin.com/almas-taj-awan

Robert Harris

Robert Harris
Professor of Immunotherapy
Biography:

Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Robert's work:
cmm.ki.se/applied-immunology/ http://ki.se/people/robhar orpheus-med.org/index.php Article about how we spend our time
Fighting brain tumors and Alzheimers

Our immune system is designed to respond to danger, to things coming in from the outside. But this is not the case with autoimmune diseases, in which the body turns on itself. Robert Harris is studying inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system. He learns how these diseases arise, how they are perpetuated, and what he can do to stop the process.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Robert Harris's Video here ◂

Robert: My name is Bob Harris. I am a professor of immunotherapy within neurological diseases at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nerina: What is your main research topic?

Robert: My main research topic is really to understand inflammatory diseases, we do this in a variety of settings. Primarily it’s been or historically it’s been within the field of autoimmunity where we focus on multiple sclerosis but in recent years we’ve also expanded into Alzheimer disease and brain tumors. So, inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system and what we’re interested in doing is learning how the diseases arise, how they’re perpetuated and what can we do to stop those processes. So they’re designing novel types of therapy to try and reduce the disease burden or hopefully to even stop it.

Nerina: What are actually neuroimmunological diseases?

Robert: Immunological diseases …autoimmune diseases at least are diseases in which the body attacks itself. Usually, your immune system is designed to respond to danger, to things that are coming from outside like infections, but sometimes for reasons we don’t understand why then the body turns on itself and starts to destroy its own tissues and these are called autoimmune diseases.

What happens in chronic inflammatory diseases is that there is disregulation of the regulation and that means that the immune system starts to do things which it shouldn’t do. So, if you have something that goes wrong in your body, then your body should respond and take away whatever it is that is not right. And then that can be either something that happens to your own cells when they become abnormal in the form of cancer or it could be that you get infected by something, a bacteria that comes into your body that shouldn’t be either. So your immune system is there to protect you from these things but sometimes it loses the instructions not to respond to itself and so it starts to attack itself. There are many reasons for this occurring, but really your immune system becomes diseducated and starts behaving in a bad way. And then, when it starts to do that, it starts to attack itself and it can lead to dysfunction in your body and depending on where the damage is done then you can either then develop diseases of your brain, your liver, your pancreas or your joints.

Nerina: What is your approach to try to find a balance again?

Robert: The first thing to try to readjust the balances is to actually prove that there is an imbalance. That’s one of the things that we can do by studying our animal models and by studying our patients’ samples to actually try and work out what’s happening in the blood of these individuals who actually are sick and how do they differ from people who are not sick and that would give us some clues about the immunological processes which are occurring and that would then give us clues about how we can stop them.

Nerina: What is your special approach in your lab or what is your idea? 

Robert: We have a number of approaches to try affect immune therapy. The major focus in the last five years has been on novel cell therapy. One of the immune cells which are involved in these chronic inflammatory conditions is the cell called a Macrophage and these are very numerous, they are all over your body in all your tissues and you have a number of them immature called monocytes circulating in your blood ready for action in case something happens. So when you get an infection in your skin, then there will be a recruitment of these monocytes to repair that part of the skin, that go from the blood into the tissue, become macrophages and do what they are supposed to do to kill the infection.

The resident cells which are all over the body have another role and we think that that’s mostly to keep things in check, the homeostatic functions, to keep the balance. So, there’s an interplay between these two cell types.

Then the macrophages themselves can have different properties. They can be nasty ones that chew up the bacteria, these are pro-inflammatory, and then there are others which calm things down and they have anti-inflammatory function and there should be a balance between these two. It’s like Yin and Yang, so when you activate one side, then you should have the other side that comes and regulates it. So, in chronic inflammatory conditions like multiple sclerosis then you have an overactivity of these pro-inflammatory cells that rip your brain tissues apart and that’s why you get the disease. So, our hypothesis is that you have an imbalance in these two populations. People who get these chronic inflammatory conditions are a little bit trigger happy with the pro-inflammatory side and maybe they are actually insufficient in down-regulatorty side, the anti-inflammatory side.

In settings of cancer, for example in brain tumors, then it’s the opposite. The tumor is actually able to survive because it’s anti-inflammatory. So in this case, then it’s the other side that’s actually a little bit too active and you are lacking the pro-inflammatory side. So, in each case, in each scenario then our hypotheses is that if you give back cells of the right sort, so in autoimmune conditions – anti-inflammatory, in cancer setting – pro-inflammatory cells. So, we can take blood from a patient, we can purify these monocytes, make them into macrophages, stimulate them to be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory and inject them right back into the same patient. Hopefully, at the site of where the disease is and that would then restore the balance locally and then it should halt the disease process.

Nerina: What is the peculiarity of your research?

Robert: One of the peculiarities of our research is that not many people work with these cells, these macrophages that we are working with. They are sort of considered to be the garbage collectors in the rest of the body, when you have some damage or you need to get rid of something, you get infections, some bacteria in the skin they get taken care of, the macrophages are the garbage collectors. They come up and get rid of all the dead tissue and make things right again. This is why you have macrophages in every organ in your body as well as theses circulating ones that they can come in high numbers if you really, really need them. They are like soldiers that are pulled onto the battlefield as extra resources, but many people don’t think then that these cells are so smart, but they are very numerous.

So we actually think that they are a little bit underestimated and very few people have been working with macrophages until the last five years and then it’s been sort of a renaissance in the field and the abilities of these cells to be multifunctional more than just the garbage collectors have actually become a little bit more apparent. So now there’s a lot of interest actually in what they do, but people are still not really interested in these being able to use them in immunotherapy the way that we are. It stands to be tested. People have actually started to use our protocol, one of the papers we published where we could show that we could induce anti-inflammatory cells in human cells which we published in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology. It’s been the most downloaded paper in the last couple of years. So there’s a lot of interest and some people are actually starting to report using our protocol in their systems and in other disease models that we haven’t studied ourselves and it still works as well. So I think it’s coming and it’s not going to become so peculiar but they’re not so many people who think this is the first cell type to study and that’s why we are a little bit strange.

Nerina: Why do you think your approach is better than others?

Robert: It’s not a question whether it’s better, it’s a question of time and money and efficacy. One of the beauties of our theory is that the hypothesis that we will use patient’s own cells. So that there won’t be any problem with any rejection when we try to put these back into the same person. They are their own cells they are just not doing what they should do. So we’re giving them a little bit of help along the way to actually turn into the cells doing the things the right way they should do and put them back in and I think that’s a smart approach.

I think that what we have seen from other immune therapy approaches are that even if they are very successful and if we take an example of Rheumatoid Arthritis where one identified the molecule called TNF which is one of the sickening components which is very highly expressed in Rheumatoid Arthritis patients. So, they found ways to inhibit this molecule by using antibodies or soluble receptors which then can take it away

The immune system has been developed for hundreds of thousands years and suddenly you take a part of it away. It’s a bit like chopping your foot off you would be still able to walk, you would be able to hobble along, but you won’t be able to run and you won’t be able to climb stairs in a good way. It doesn’t really make sense to take something away. So I think that our approach is just giving back something that is really a little bit insufficient is a more natural way to actually reset the balance.

Nerina: What’s next? 

Robert: The next thing with this is really to go into patients. One of the challenges with trying to go from experimental systems to humans is me not being a medical doctor is that I’d then have to engage clinicians. So at the moment, I need to try and get funding to fund this and then try to find doctors that are willing to try and that’s really where I want to go. If I can make life better for just one patient then I will feel that I’ve done my job as a researcher.

Nerina: How much do we actually know about ourselves or about our body functions? 

Bob: We now know a lot about the body functions, we’ve known a tremendous amount about the immune system, but unfortunately one of the challenges that I see is that we have always been studying disease, we have studied people with allergy, we study people with autoimmune disease, we study people with cancer, but we don’t actually know too much about healthy people. We study aging even as well, but this is when things start to go wrong. But we actually have relatively little experience of healthy people, to actually know what’s going on in healthy people and how does their immune system actually look. Is it always non-activated or is it always on the go a little bit? How’s the regulation done there? So, I think that we need to actually study health in order to get a better handle on what goes wrong when you get a disease. But we know a lot and there are very many therapists that work very well and lots of new therapies being developed so the knowledge that we have it’s actually made tremendous progress.

Nerina: What do you look forward to now?

Robert: What do I look forward to? Summer holiday. No, what I look forward to in research is actually the research community as a global community and a lot of smarter people out there, lots of smarter people than I am and what’s nice is that we then share this knowledge and what I look forward is actually a major breakthrough. It’s been a long time since there has been a major breakthrough in medical research. Maybe the last really major significance was the small pox vaccination and that’s way back in the 60’s. So it’s about time that we actually came with something really revolutionary and we’ve had really good advances in sequencing the genome and so on, but most of the advances have been technological. But I think it would be nice if we actually could really nail one disease and eradicate it from the face of the earth.

Nerina: You got a prize as a great teacher. What is your role, how do you see yourself as a professor? 

Robert: You know that some people are good at doing research, some people are good at writing things, some people are good at talking. I seem to have a talent as a teacher. I realized this quite early on and I am heavily involved in all sorts of training and development of training. So it’s something I enjoy doing. It’s fun to be able to inspire other people to be better in what they are doing and that’s the point of a teacher. Whether it’s to students to inspire them in their quest for knowledge or whether I do a lot of leadership training, especially for our Ph.D. supervisors and to inspire them to actually be good in those roles.

Nerina: What is good research?

Robert: That’s a very interesting question. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so different people would tell it’s different things. I think good research should be based on sound ethical principles, good critical thinking and should be interesting. So that for me is what good research is all about. Research is all about searching again. That’s where the “re” comes in. So, often good research is nowadays is going over old research but using new methodologies in order to address these questions and that could be just as exciting as finding something completely new.

Nerina: And what is a good researcher?

Robert: Ah…good researcher I am not sure, you need to ask someone else. No, a good researcher should be somebody that is really interested in asking questions. “I need to know” – that’s what drives me. I am inquisitive and I like to be able to think, to be innovative in my thinking and a lot what we do doesn’t work. So a good researcher needs to actually have the stamina to face failure because 90% of the time we fail in what we are doing. We ask questions, we pose a hypothesis, we test them and they show not to be true, so we have to go back to drawing board and start again. So I think a good researcher is actually somebody that doesn’t give up, that actually sees the big picture and for me, it’s the patience. If you see people suffering or if you see people dying from the diseases or the diseases we are interested in studying, there are no cures for them and they are horrible diseases that really affect people. We could have picked up something that would be easier to fix but that’s not so interesting for me. I like the challenge of actually doing something that’s undoable at the moment and really to make efforts to do that and I think that’s also the essence of research, at least in a clinical setting, that want you to actually be trying to do something that’s going to be of use to the patients.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Bob.

Robert: Thank you.

#followup with Robert Harris

Robert Harris, Professor of Immunotherapy in Neurological Diseases at Karolinska Institutet sent us a short video with some interesting news. Have a watch.

Watch the video:
Biography:

Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Robert's work:
cmm.ki.se/applied-immunology/ http://ki.se/people/robhar orpheus-med.org/index.php Article about how we spend our time

Dolores Bueno López

Dolores Bueno López
PhD in chemistry
Biography:

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Dolores Bueno López works at Nanomol group which is part of ICMAB-CSIC and CIBER-BBN.
Using compressed fluids they work with nanocapsules made of lipids that can encapsulate proteins, trying to help in some rare diseases like Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome.
Both diseases are associated with a metabolic disorder, causing the storage of certain metabolites in the body. You can have a look at their last paper in the matter of Fabry disease HERE.

Learn more about Dolores's work:
Blog: worlderlenmeyer.blogspot.es
Connect with Dolores:
twitter.com/Ununcuadio
Nanotechnology, rare diseases, and dreams

Modern medicine saves millions of lives around the world every year. But not all diseases get the same attention from medical research. There are some rare diseases which are not investigated properly, and the reason for this is a lack of resources. Nevertheless, there are still researchers who are passionate about their work. Dolores Bueno Lopez is one of them.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Dolores Bueno López's Video here ◂

Dolores: My name is Dolores Bueno López; I am doing my PhD thesis in science material at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Nerina: What is the topic of your dissertation?

Dolores: The topic of my dissertation is: we’re studying capsules – liposomes, which are made of lipidic materials and we try to encapsulate different proteins or molecules in order to treat some diseases.

Nerina: What is the purpose of your dissertation?

Dolores: The purpose of my dissertation is to study the chemical and physical properties of our liposomes because we are changing little things like the composition of the ratio between the components. We are also changing the final properties of our Nano carriers and the nanomedicine. My topic is not nanomedicine but science material; in the end we want the application to be in nanomedicine but we are studying the properties at a very basic level.

We want to reduce the doses, to reduce the side effects of the treatment and to functionalize the superficiality of our Nano drug in order for it to go to the target specifically. We are studying the chemical and physical properties of these capsules but our aim is that it can be used in rare diseases for nanomedicine.

Nerina: What kind of diseases are we speaking about?

Dolores: They are rare diseases so they have a low incidence in the population. They don’t have a lot of resources to investigate such diseases so I am proud and happy that in my group we are dedicated to investigating that. Those diseases that I speak of, Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome are both about the lack of an enzyme, a protein inside our cells that is in charge of degrading some metabolites that are a waste of the cell. If this protein lacks, these residues and metabolites start accumulating in the cells causing several symptoms thus leading to these diseases.

Nerina: Why is it that difficult to find a treatment or to put this enzyme into the patient? What is the challenge?

Dolores: The challenge is to avoid the degradation of the enzyme and to really focus the treatment in the zones in the body that have to make the action.

Nerina: Why did you want to become a researcher?

Dolores: Well, I think that when I was little, when I was a teenager, I was impacted by some diseases like Alzheimer’s that existed in my home. My great grandmother had it, and also my grandmother now has this disease, so it impacts me how a person can lose all her memories and become a child, kind of. I feel that science can change that and science is the solution to improve the life of people that are suffering. So, I think that that influences my way of thinking.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about science? What is so fascinating for you?

Dolores: That it can really explain the world we live in and give us answers and also that with these answers we can change the world because we can apply these answers to create technology. I really hope that science will make us better humans.

Nerina: In what way?

Dolores: In a way that we are going to have more knowledge and I expect that this makes us really wise so that we can avoid wars and all this kind of things because we are at a higher level. This is a very long futuristic hope but I would like to see that science can really change our lives for better. Not only in curing illnesses but also in making us better people.

Nerina: What would you like to change in science? 

Dolores: Well, I have a kind of romantic way of thinking about science. I think that science is an accumulative knowledge that we all make so there should be an open source and free access for all the people in the world.

Nerina: What do you like doing when you are not working on research?

Dolores: I really like speaking about my research but speaking in a way that my mother or my grandmother can understand what I am talking about. Because I really like my job, I want people to understand the joy and the passion I have for what I am doing. So in my spare time I have a blog or I collaborate in different blogs or platforms.

Nerina: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Dolores: I would love to see myself in Africa working maybe in a small lab; but working in soil chemistry in order to improve agriculture in this zone, that’s my dream.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Dolores.

Dolores: Thank you. I liked this conversation a lot.

Biography:

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Dolores Bueno López works at Nanomol group which is part of ICMAB-CSIC and CIBER-BBN.
Using compressed fluids they work with nanocapsules made of lipids that can encapsulate proteins, trying to help in some rare diseases like Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome.
Both diseases are associated with a metabolic disorder, causing the storage of certain metabolites in the body. You can have a look at their last paper in the matter of Fabry disease HERE.

Learn more about Dolores's work:
Blog: worlderlenmeyer.blogspot.es
Connect with Dolores:
twitter.com/Ununcuadio

Hans Grönlund

Hans Grönlund
Associate professor of immunology
Biography:

Therapeutic immune design, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Hans's work:
medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik cmm.ki.se/en/group
Connect with Hans:
ki.se/hans-gronlunds-research-group
Allergies: therapeutic immune design

Allergy is a social disease, and we all know at least one person who has some kind of allergy. There is a medicine which can help us to reduce the symptoms, but what if we could cure it completely? Well, the good news is that thanks to researchers like Hans Grönlund, we already have the vaccine which can cure people of all kinds of allergies. But before it can be used, funding bodies and authorities have to realise that people need to be cured.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Hans Grönlund's Video here ◂

Hans: My name is Hans Grönlund; I work as a scientist at Karolinska Institutet at the department of Clinical Neuroscience.

Nerina: What is your main research topic?

Hans: My main research topic is allergy. I have been working with allergy for the last 35 years, lately mostly pet halogens; how to diagnose and how to treat patients with a pet allergy. My role is to be a group leader; I have about 10 people who are doing research in a translational way. My research group is called therapeutic immune design. So I design therapeutics, bio-molecular molecules that will play with the immune system in such a way that you can cure patients. Whether it’s cancer, or multiple sclerosis or allergy.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about allergies? What is so special?

Hans: The thing with pet allergy is that it’s a very social disease. You cannot just say that it is something that is out there in the society. It will affect your neighbors, it will affect your classmates, it will affect your mother and father and also who you meet.

Nerina: And what are the biggest issues you wanted to address in your research?

Hans: I want to cure the population. And I actually want to cure them from not getting allergies at all.

Nerina: Is this possible?

Hans: Yes.

Nerina: And how?

Hans: Well, this is what we have learned lately, that by introduction very early on in life, in a smart way, you can skew the immune system in such a way that you will not encounter or react to the allergy later on in life.

Nerina: How do you see the future of allergy treatments?

Hans: For me, the ideal would be to treat children very early on so that they would not get allergies at all. That would be the main topic. Otherwise, we have devised together with other groups, a way to introduce allergens in small amounts to induce tolerance. So that is in a way a better way that has been today but we’re refining that at the moment.

Nerina: What is new in this treatment?

Hans: We are trying to make a treatment with 3 to 4 injections; these 3 to 4 injections should not be felt by the patient but they should still be very effective. There is very great hope as we have shown that this is in principle possible.

Nerina: What do we need actually?

Hans: We need resources, we need funding. We know how to do it, we have the vaccine on the shelf, but we will also need someone to finance this. This first trip is about 4 million euros, and then all the way to the patient we need perhaps double of that sum. In Sweden, it is a very small amount per person actually.

Nerina: What would you change tomorrow?

Hans: I would like the funding bodies and the authorities to realize that the need of the people is to be cured. This is both for the sake of jobs and health where we try to struggle, as this death value march is something prohibitive for scientists. If you go there, you’re very likely to be dried out and not come back to research again. So you should help those scientists who really want to contribute to society.

Good research needs resources and it needs know-how. It depends on what you want to do with research. If you want to just add information about how biological body functions, then that is fine and we should know more about that. If you want, on the other hand, to make life better for health care in society, then you need a set of steps and rules that will help you create jobs, to make a better living quality of life, and that is a funding possibility. So in my mind, you should try to focus also resources into this translational research. That would make my life completely different.

Nerina: What does good research need?

Hans: I do not necessarily think that we need more ideas. What we need is ideas that are put into reality, they should be tried. And that is the problem; a good researcher needs the help to bring his research to the patient – to be translational. This is the really big difficulty. How do you take a curative treatment all the way through good manufacturing practise, toxicology, IMPD, ethical permissions, medical product agency; that is a very expensive trip and as a scientist, you cannot do that without help.

Nerina: What motivates you?

Hans: What motivates me is to leave a better world after me, this is my great motivation. Also, I enjoy this life tremendously! I come to work every day full of energy, I have so many good collaborators, they are all there and we work together, it is such a fun way of living.

Nerina: Is there a day in your research life that you remember in a special way?

Hans: In a special way, well yes when I get funding to do a new project that really made it. You know the thing is it is so incremental. It is always a little step ahead, so these huge moments are sort of like a continuum, each day is a huge moment.

Nerina: Great.

Hans: It is!

Nerina: What is the most important lesson you have learned from your research, or from being a researcher?

Hans: To be a researcher, is to be able to communicate with people from all over the world. And you realise that people are basically the same. There is no difference between people.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Hans: Honestly, I think that I dream of a society where money is not the driving force, but actually, love between people. You should be able to help other people, you should be able to be compassionate about other people, and see how they are as people. It is not a matter of how you are acting, but how you hug people, this is sort of a very passionate thing, people should enjoy each other.

Nerina:  Thank you very much, Hans.

Hans: Thank you!

#Follow-up with Hans Grönlund | Therapeutic immune design and new drugs

Hans is an Associate professor of immunology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. His research is promising in the fields of allergies, multiple sclerosis and cancer.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Biography:

Therapeutic immune design, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Hans's work:
medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik cmm.ki.se/en/group
Connect with Hans:
ki.se/hans-gronlunds-research-group

Karina Pombo-Garcia

Karina Pombo-Garcia
Researcher at Helmholtz-Zentrum
Biography:

Dresden-Rossendorf, (HZDR) Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research, Germany

Learn more about Karina's work:
How I became a Falling Walls Lab Finalist elsevier.com/storytellers New tools for detecting cancer FameLab 2014, Siegerin Karina Pombo-Garcia in Kassel FameLab 2014 - Karina Pombo-Garcia im Finale
Connect with Karina:
linkedin.com/karina-pombo-garcia twitter.com/kariamina
Nanotechnology and cancer diagnostics

The best cure for cancer we have today is to diagnose the disease in its early stages – but we don’t have such technology yet. The main problem with this kind of diagnostics is that the materials we use are attacked by our immune system. Karina Pombo-Garcia’s aim is to develop a new form of early cancer diagnostics which is compatible with the human body.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Karina Pombo-Garcia's Video here ◂

Karina: Hi, My name is Karina Pombo-Garcia and I’m doing my Ph.D. in the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and I think I’m a little bit of a dreamer.

Nerina: And your dream is to better detect cancer…

Karina: To detect cancer at an early stage is one of the best cures that we have at the moment. That means that if we detect it very soon, we have much more chances to cure cancer than if we detect it later on. That is why detection of cancer is so important and that is very challenging.

Nerina: Why is it that difficult to detect cancer nowadays?

Karina: So, at the moment we don’t have the technology to detect it at a very early stage, and we need more sophisticated techniques that increase insensitivity that medical doctors can use in the clinic. So that is the big challenge.

Nerina: What was the goal of your PhD?

Karina: So my research is based on small nano-particles that once injected into the patient, allow the doctors to visualize much more precisely and sensitivity to cancer. The goal of my Ph.D. has been to develop a new novel system, ultra-small particles, so we’re talking about particles smaller than 5 mm, that on the surface of these little balloons, we decorated with different things. So the challenge was to put those different things onto the surface and make the whole complex still something worth trying. So, on the surface, we had like a small light that allows us to follow the tumor. We also had another substance, like another molecule that carries what we need to detect cancer via PET imaging. It also has a small key, if we imagine it’s like a key that will open the door, so that door will be the cancer cells, and that key addresses the nano-particles where they have to go, and at the same time avoid that these nano-particles go somewhere else, to organs that we don’t want them to go. So it has been a big challenge because it has been a lot of mix of biology, chemistry, bio-chemistry, physiology, in one single thing.

Nerina: Why is it difficult to find a substance?

Karina: It is difficult to find a substance but it is more difficult to bring that substance into the human body. Because in our body we have like a “police” that is called the immune system, and what this immune system does is that it will degrade any kind of substance that it doesn’t like, let’s say. So if that happens, whatever we have created makes no sense because it will never reach the cancer. That is the challenge, to inject or create something that is still compatible with the human body.

Nerina: What was the biggest challenge during your Ph.D.?

Karina: The biggest challenge was to stick to what you think is the right thing to do. You will deal with many people that will say you know, this is just not possible or how are you going to prove this, or this is too much work, so I think the biggest challenge was to say I believe in this, and I will carry on with what I have done.

Nerina: What did you discover?

Karina: Where I have reached after these four years of Ph.D. is that we have developed a new system that we have tried in-vitro and in-vivo with promising results and from the basic knowledge in front of you. It was a huge step I think.

Nerina: Is there a day that stood out in a special way?

Karina: Yes, I think that the day that we tried, two days I would say. So one day was the day that we saw the first video of how these particles internalize into cells, so we kind of see which direction they’re taking, where, and opening to many more questions such as why are they going here and not somewhere else as we would have expected. And also the day that we tried in vivo, although there were many things to improve in the results, it was so exciting to see how this system works through this living organism. It was a funny story because I sent one of the videos to my mom and although she is not in this field, she was so excited, she said: “Oh look at that, look at that”. Ok, I think I showed it to many people but I think if you’re passionate about your work, you always want to spread it around.

Nerina: Who inspires you?

Karina: My inspiration always comes from my parents; because they give me the freedom to always do whatever I want to do without asking me why are you doing this now, or think of the next step, or think of what you’re going to do. I never had that pressure as I always had 100% support from their side, and that is very inspiring because it’s like they are pushing you to develop yourself.

Nerina: What makes Nano-particles so special to you?

Karina: Nano-particles is like playing with these little Legos that kids play with, so you change something, and Nano-particles become something different completely to what it was before, and you can keep on changing and keep on investigating what else you can do with them. At the same time, it’s very challenging because there’s no methodology to characterize them so precisely yet; and that makes it a very exciting topic to research on.

Nerina: How important is communication for research?

Karina: Communication is very important for the society because society wants to know what researchers are doing in their lives. It’s a way to pay off, that they support us with their taxes; most of us get paid by government institutions, so it’s good feedback. But at the same time, and it’s a point that not many people see is that researchers are experts in whatever they do. So it means that they are the ones who have to teach people about the big challenges of the society nowadays. So, I see researchers as educators somehow.

Nerina: Is there anything that you would like to change?

Karina: I would like to believe that the only limitation that a scientist has to have is the creativity that they have, and not something else. I know that we still have to deal with other things, but I feel that the main limitation should be with creativity, and not other random things.

Nerina: What is your wish for the future?

Karina: I think we need dreamers in life, not just in research, but in any field, we need people that do things passionately and that dream very big. Especially in research, we need dreamers because in most cases we work with things that we don’t know or we don’t know how they’re going to be experienced or react. So we need, in research, to leave our creativity and freedom very free, so we need to dream.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Karina.

Karina: You’re welcome Nerina, thank you very much for this interview.

Biography:

Dresden-Rossendorf, (HZDR) Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research, Germany

Learn more about Karina's work:
How I became a Falling Walls Lab Finalist elsevier.com/storytellers New tools for detecting cancer FameLab 2014, Siegerin Karina Pombo-Garcia in Kassel FameLab 2014 - Karina Pombo-Garcia im Finale
Connect with Karina:
linkedin.com/karina-pombo-garcia twitter.com/kariamina
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