Welcome to Big Biology, the podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology today. Check out our episodes below, and be sure to follow and support us!

Ep 104: Sleeping Beauties: The mystery of dormant innovations in nature and culture (with Andreas Wagner)

Big BiologyJune 15, 2023metabolism, metaphors, genes, talk, enzymes, organism, grasses, latent potential, lineages, evolve, promiscuity, latent, produce, genomes, ability, idea, traits, evolution, book, studied

Ep 94: Synthesizing life on the planet (with John Glass)

Big BiologyDecember 15, 2022genes, cell, organism, mycoplasma, genome, protein, life, synthetic, called, bacteria, minimal, whittle, divides, coli, lab, build, function, biology, put, synthesize

Ep 90: Fabricated images threaten the integrity of Alzheimer’s research (with Charles Piller)

Big BiologyOctober 20, 2022genes, alzheimer, cassava, images, papers, people, amyloid, scientists, called, protein, hypothesis, journals, science, problem, field, manipulations, drug, nih, studies, western blot, western blots

Ep 89: How one gene determines the fate of a food web (with Matt Barbour)

Big BiologyOctober 6, 2022genes, keystone, plant, aphids, variation, allele, species, effects, insects, system, community, starting, thinking, genetic variation, influence, population, experiment, maintained, context, chemical compounds

Ep 87: Life in the lab, are model organisms an asset or impediment to biology? (with Sabina Leonelli and Rachel Ankeny)

Big BiologySeptember 8, 2022model organisms, organisms, biology, people, model, sabina, species, question, study, genes, human genome project, lab, important, genetic, mouse, scope, research, projects, elegans, work

Ep 79: How the genetic lottery affects complex human traits (with Kathryn Paige Harden)

Big BiologyMarch 3, 2022people, genes, genetics, phenotype, populations, book, polygenic, snps, plasticity, outcomes, study, human, thinking, terms, human behavior, psychologists, question, biology, norm, evolutionary biologists

Ep 24: Mental Smoke Detectors (Randy Nesse)

Big BiologySeptember 12, 2019people, evolutionary, emotions, anxiety, genes, depression, psychiatry, person, disorders, find, evolution, called, thinking, question, problem, life, evolutionary biology, medicine, kinds, natural selection