S02 E22 — Dr. Mikros
(Micro) Biologist | Eco Warrior | Change Agent
This is the un-edited auto-transcribed version of the episode. If you would like to listen to the episode as you read, check out the episode here —
Simran Aulakh 0:00
I’m glad we’re here and glad we finally found time.
Naga Subramanya B B 3:51
I wanted to get your take on what’s happening in the world currently with the with the corona virus and why it’s spreading. What’s a virus Why is it such like a big Enigma and what’s happening with the corona virus?
Simran Aulakh 4:04
So let’s see. So virus is like a really really tiny particle that is kind of at the edge of living. Because it cannot really replicate. You know, you will define life perhaps, like in textbooks, quite often defined as that which replicates itself right. The virus cannot really replicate itself outside of host that’s a complete parasite, it needs something else to, to grow into divide and so on. And the other thing is, it’s a very, very minimalist kind of form of life. The only thing it really has is some nucleic acids or some RNA or DNA. The Corona virus, for example, is an RNA virus. So it has a little piece of what is called ribonucleic acid, and then it has a bunch of proteins around it. And sometimes these viruses also have some limits around them. The ones that infect, like humans or other viruses infect everything, by the way, like there’s even viruses that attack bacteria. The fact that you can have like viruses infecting bacteria to have new type of antibacterial things as well. So yeah, the corona virus has jumped from, you know, other animals to us from a bat.
And so, yeah, I don’t know, I’m, let’s see what happens. Right now. There’s no known vaccine or any preventive drug or any drug once you got infected with the corona virus, which is why it’s so scary. And since it’s transmitted through people, to people to where as all the things that it can spread quite fast. And yeah, that that’s why everyone’s panicking a bit. But let’s hope ideally, someone would discover it right for very quickly.
Naga Subramanya B B 5:52
Yeah, I’ve always felt that viruses are more more mysterious than the other microorganisms. What sets them apart?
Simran Aulakh 6:01
I personally think you could die of bacteria or fungi or many other things. I suppose viruses can be spread quite rapidly. Some of them give you quite fast. I think the really big thing is that in terms of how many antiviral therapies, we have very few very hard to kill the virus and once it inside your body, you know, on the surface, you can sterilize like operation theatres, other things, you can sterilize pieces of equipment more easily, but once it’s in you, it’s very hard to kill it. And part of the reason is that viral I get it exists inside yourself. So when a virus has infected you, it means that it’s not just some bacteria or most bacteria or somewhere you know, either on the surface of your body or within your tissues in between some cells but viruses are, like always interesting. So they’ve gone through the membrane of your cell and gone inside. Either they’ve integrated their genome or their piece of DNA into your DNA. So it’s very hard to kind of kill them at this point.
They’re very much part of your body. The virus is basically just a piece of DNA surrounded by some proteins or others. And what it does is that when it attacks a host, it doesn’t have you know, it can’t generate energy on its own, it can’t do anything on its own. It has it needs a host cell that goes into the host cell. And then using this piece of DNA, it uses the host machinery, so everything that the cell that’s being attacked, uses to build proteins, DNA, to get energy that hijacks all of that machinery, and just makes more of itself rather than letting the horse so kind of do its own job.
Naga Subramanya B B 7:53
Good to know, this background of what’s happening, but you know, as we get on, get back to regular programming with the Passion People Podcast, Can you do like a quick introduction of yourself and what you do and what your passion is?
Simran Aulakh 8:07
Hi, I’m Simran a PhD student and I study Yeast and I try to understand what’s happening at the top level at the biochemical level inside he sells. So he studied yeast for two main reasons. The first is that we can use it for quite a lot of different wine or different things, we can use it as you all know, to make bread and pure and all the other types of alcohol these days. We’re also using it to make host of writing about The compound. And the second reason is that we use it as model organism to study human metabolism. So at the subsystem level at the level of reactions that happen inside our body to small molecules, such as glucose, or all the other things that we eat inside of Easter was quite similar to the inside of humans, or Mouser, or battle.
Naga Subramanya B B 9:29
So it’s true. It’s true what they say that, you know, deep down inside, we’re all the same.
Simran Aulakh 9:33
Yeah, I mean, quite a lot of what happens inside ourselves and bacterial cells and these cells is quite similar. There’s quite a lot of biology we say that the level of genomes are quite conserved. So we measure genetic distance between two species by how the sequence the DNA sequence inside our cells is how similar it is. And yeah.
Naga Subramanya B B 10:04
Okay, so can you break break this down for us? Dino DNA sequence? what’s what’s the meaning of closeness and not close
Simran Aulakh 10:14
entirely to ourselves. There are some instructions that are passed on from generation to generation, from our parents and our grandparents, and so on. And these are written down, let’s say in a sequence of letters. And those four letters in in this, this full alphabet.
And this, these letters right up with the deoxyribonucleic acid, that’s the technical term, and the sequence of these letters from our genome to the entire sequence of these letters president and, you know, there’s different that short bits of the genome which we call genes that are passed on again, with with sequences these genes are instructions to make one specific, very tiny part of ourselves. And then those parts been built up basically make everything that’s inside of us.
Naga Subramanya B B 11:13
And then you also mentioned about the similarity or the difference.
Simran Aulakh 11:18
So basically, the sequence of these genes, between two individuals or, you know, two species are two different bacteria, or between a bacteria and a human will tell you how different or how, let’s say at one point in evolution are how far they are from each other in the tree of life. So let’s say my genome if you if you took some of my cells, and extracted some DNA and then sequence that DNA and you did the same for my brother, you would find that we have you know, 99.9999% of our genes are the same I don’t know exactly how much it would be, it would be something like 97 99%. And then if you went further away from me, my family tree or in the same kind of area where I live, where my family’s from, you would find that we’re our genomes are close together compared to, if you took somebody from the other side of the planet, and sequence their genome and then compare it to mine, the match would be with this.
And similarly, you could do this for any two species on the planet. And that would tell you how different they are at the genetic level. And this is a reflection of how far how long ago they had the last common ancestor. So at some point, we assume that all of life had one common ancestor. It’s called Luca, the last universal common ancestor. And then, you know, it was something like a bacterium and then the children of this bacterium kind of Slowly, slowly, slowly started becoming different from each other. And that’s where the tree of life started from. And now we have humans and, you know, tigers and, and yeah, things that grow in hydrothermal vent and they’re all quite diverged from each other genetically and physiologically and behaviorally so
Naga Subramanya B B 13:23
well, but I think that could be a little bit more creative and coming up with the name.
Simran Aulakh 13:29
Yeah, maybe what would you call it?
Naga Subramanya B B 13:32
I don’t know that you just caught me off guard there.
Simran Aulakh 13:38
Perhaps that’s because
Naga Subramanya B B 13:42
I’ve read somewhere that, you know, if you see someone and you’re attracted to them, it means that you both have like, different genetic profiles and that’s why you’re attracted to each other because together you have a more diverse genetic makeup so your offspring will be better is that is that a thing?
Simran Aulakh 14:00
Yeah, I mean, let’s say biologically speaking, it would make sense to mate with somebody of a very different genetic background background or a different DNA sequence because the likelihood that your offspring will have, and lots of healthy genes much higher. So it would make sense on a statistical or or, you know, if you say, what would confer fitness, the offspring to make sense? Now, the real world there’s lots of other factors, of course, that play a role if you can understand what the other person saying and where you would go from that. So I think in the real world, all these people do some experiments or they find some correlations, but they’re very hard to prove that that’s exactly what’s going on. Yes, sir. Studies have shown that different you’re more time People have different genetic background, you might be more attracted to people for different gut microbiota. So all the bacteria that live inside our gut are very different from us, you would be you would find that attractive. But it’s very hard to really scientifically kind of say this is what’s happening. Yeah, I don’t think the proof.
Naga Subramanya B B 15:22
So this is on the attraction side. Right? And you said for fitness of the offspring, but is that conclusive evidence that says that there’s a lot of people who don’t a lot of communities that don’t encourage marriages between the family and they say that the offspring would not be fine and something more concrete,
Simran Aulakh 15:42
There is a very significant risk when you see in communities which don’t marry outside the community, that they have much higher than average and global average rates of genetically inherited diseases. So This is definitely,
Naga Subramanya B B 16:01
Yeah. So given, given this background, I guess it’s really surprising that a lot of people are still, at least in India, they’re still stuck with, you know, the caste or the religion where science is telling them to do the complete opposite.
Simran Aulakh 16:18
Yeah, I mean, as I said, like in the real, all our choices in town by many other factors that drive us. And from a biological point of view, this may not be the best idea. But in India specifically, there’s actually a recent paper that came out on this and what they did was they sequence the genomes of people living in the same place from different communities from different socio economic backgrounds, with living in the geographically the same region for thousands and thousands of years. And what they found is that within the same community, within the same kind of us differently This classification is so within the same religious socio economic group, people have been kind of meeting within it. And you could have someone living in the exact same geographical region from a richer or poorer class, or from different route and from different religion. And the genetic distance between these two groups is as big as the genetic distance between northern Europeans and southern Europeans. And this is really, really scary, because it’s telling you that, you know, there have been thousands and thousands of people living in the same place for thousands of years, and they have never got a chance to kind of marry or you know, be with somebody from a different socio economic background. And this is on average, like it’s a bad thing because it is kind of like inbreeding. These groups may be bigger on average than what we usually consider in bread may not be your cousin or something. But it may be bigger group, which is not mixed with another group learning the exact same spot
Naga Subramanya B B 18:05
Whenever I was growing up, I never really considered science I never really considered biology as as a subject that that I’m going to study. So I’m curious to know of forget my biology so what what pushed you towards what you do currently, which is microbiology and the that too for like one organism?
Simran Aulakh 18:24
Yeah. So for me microbiology, I was always very fascinated, because I don’t really remember when was it the first time that I found all these bacteria, me the kind of different things that microbes can do? So they, there’s microbes and bacteria, archaea, all these very kind of single celled organisms everywhere on this planet. You can dig down thousands of you know, like thousand meters into the earth and you would still find them live inside rock live in hydrothermal vents. So what they do due at the metabolic level, you know what they can. It’s just like a whole different universe. So all the, like humans, all the other animals, we need all these things we need to eat from the outside. And then we can do certain types of things, but bacteria and microbes, they can do a lot more than what we do. They’re quite special in terms of taking us you know, they live in mindful of mercury, they can live in surroundings of arsenic or at you know, hundred and 20 degrees. I always found that very fascinating. And for me, that was another also quite inspiring and motivating factors that I read, at some point when I was in high school, or bioremediation that about these microbes could be used to clean clean up the environment to clean up toxins from the environment or oil spills or you know, let’s say plastic haven’t solved most of those problems yet, but the fact that these microbes can take something that’s toxic, most of the of life and convert it into something that other living organisms can use. For me that was like, you know, that’s what I should study. And I had hoped that someday I would go on and learn to use these microbes to clean up. mainly for me, it was more plastic waste, because while I was growing up, I saw really beautiful hillsides in the valley.
So we used to go every summer very rapidly change into like, just giant garbage dumps, you know, and it for me that that bothered me quite a lot. And I don’t really know what the solution to that is. I don’t think anybody in the world right now has a definitive solution to how to get rid of all these different types of plastics that we create. We’re creating more and more of every day. It’s not like you know, the Western world or more advanced countries have a solution to this. You don’t see it on the street or the man managed the waist better, but they still don’t recycle it. It’s still there somewhere. hidden from sight, but the problems to kind of exists, you know, that’s my overall, I guess, long term ambition that someday we’ll come to a point where we can collaborate with all the different, you know, really gifted microbes on this planet, and use that to solve all of our problems and that we’ve created.
Naga Subramanya B B 21:22
Right. And where are we in terms of the progress for finding these microbes that could possibly break down plastic and what makes plastics such a such a big problem in the sense that by Why doesn’t it go away like everything else?
Simran Aulakh 21:36
So plastics, specifically the big problem? So the surprising thing is that it’s made mostly of carbon right? And even a non biologist in laypersons probably know that everything, the carbon based life form, so we’re very good all life on earth is very good at converting carbon from one form to another. Everything that we eat covenant everything around us like, you know, 6000 Darkseid. But solution for quite a lot of things. Fortunately, we’ve created type of carbon, or let’s say a specific structure with carbon that’s very, very difficult breakdown. So plastic is the chain, like the very basic type of plastic is a chain of carbon atoms with double bonds in them that’s very, very, very long. And these double bonds, such a chain is really stable. And these double bonds at the chemical level are quite difficult for living things to attack when they’re in such a long chain a very stable, but luckily, since we’ve been kind of dumping plastic all over the world in the ocean soil, there are bacteria that have used that have learned to even eat up these to break down these chains and use this carbon to make something else you could you know, theoretically you could you break down this carbon and use it to make glucose and every Everything else, how glucose you can make whatever other metabolite natural product you would like to make.
There are bacteria that have been shown to have activity in breaking down plastic. However, this is something that isn’t really well studied. So people have reported a few species that can do this. The few fungi and bacteria that can act together or, you know, on their own, and they’ve shown that certain soil samples, they see that the plastic is being broken down, but they don’t really know what is really doing this. And yeah, there’s even I think the best the most inspiring example is the electron micrographs. This is a very high resolution, like, you know, some microscopic picture of a film of plastic. I think it’s poly tiny, covered by bacteria that’s using it as its sole source of carbons is not getting any sugar, nothing from anywhere else except the sheet of poly. tiling, and it’s growing off of it and it’s slowly colonizers it over like 16 days or something. For me, that’s very inspiring. It means that there is biology has found some sort of solution to attack these very resistant carbon carbon chains, and to use them to make all the other things that life is more compatible with.
Naga Subramanya B B 24:20
Got it. You said no back to you has now learned to break down this carbon, right. But humans have evolved over millions of years is that evolution process much faster for these guys.
Simran Aulakh 24:35
Definitely x faster on bacteria. And that’s because they’re smaller, and they have children much quicker. So every 20 minutes, the most common bacterium are equally has a new generation. So if you’re growing it in a flask in the lab, every 20 minutes, the kind of number of cells in your flask is going to double. This means that if there’s an external pressure, that’s acting us That’s forcing natural selection to act on this population, you can act much quicker.
Naga Subramanya B B 25:06
That answers my question. What are you specifically working on with the East? Are you doing the kind of work that you thought you would be doing when you made this decision?
Simran Aulakh 25:14
Um, well, I would say I’m, I’m in the same kind of field. So what I’m doing now is very much basic science we try to understand how chemical reactions inside. So are what all is going on, how did how do they change. So it seems like you know, yeast or something or bacteria, something that we should have understood, we obviously understand very well by now. But actually, there’s still quite a lot to learn just at the basic level. So inside every cell network of reactions that’s happening, so that’s the glucose, then it will get you know, converted into something else that gives me energy so it needs to get converted into ATP, which is the main like energy currency officer. There’s many many many interconnected chains and cycles. These reactions of these chemical reactions happening inside. So if you put them all together, it looks like the underground maps of all the big cities of the world combined together. It’s a very complex problem. And what we try to do, specifically the group that I’m working in my PhD, we tried to study the entire system.
Our articles we tried to study at the system level, traditionally, molecular biology or biochemistry sighs study each reaction at a time. We tried to say, Okay, this is protein catalyzes, a reaction that converts compound, compound P. That’s my PhD, I’m trying to grow yourself under different conditions. And then I tried to see how this network responds to the perturbation that I’ve caused.
Naga Subramanya B B 26:48
Got it. Does it also mean that you’re doing some kind of genetic modification for the east to get get it to do stuff that you want, but typically wouldn’t do?
Simran Aulakh 26:58
Yeah, so what I’m starting Right now just like is, again, it’s basic biology. So we have genetically modified you can say mutant collections of yeast, and I try to use them to understand what each nutrient does are. So we’ve either deleted or altered a specific sequence or a specific gene. And then we can try to study what this does. But the applied version of this would be that you try to say I want to make yeast make red color. And this red pigment, I know that some flour going somewhere makes, what I could do is I could try to put the protein so the pathway, which is a series of reactions catalyzed by all these proteins, I can kind of sequence it in this flower and then I could put the sequence inside the cell and then I can tweak it a little bit to make this red color and you can do this also now people do this for lippitt. They can do it for you know, different sugars, they can make fragrances like this A lot of what goes into your shampoos, and your perfumes and so on, is not actually extracted, nobody goes to the rain forest, you know, extracts all the flowers and puts it in, it’s quite often coming from a massive Bank of yeast, where the strain that’s inside this time that’s growing, has been genetically engineered to produce that particular fragrance compound of flavor compound. And this compound is 100% natural. It’s not a synthetic compound, even though you’re making it in a factory.
At the atomic level, at the chemical level, it’s exactly the same as what you would get if you plant a flower, plant a branch of a tree or whatever it is that you’re trying to mimic, and, and, and extracted it. So it’s, it’s, it’s the same thing. It’s created by biology with the same instructions that the original plant or whatever the gene comes from.
Naga Subramanya B B 28:54
I understand. So does that mean that we can use these East molecules to You know, act as a substitute for, you know, all of the lot of industries that are heavily dependent on maybe endangered species of plants or stuff like that.
Simran Aulakh 29:10
Yeah. So right now what I find really exciting is that this kind of a completely so the biotech industry has existed for quite a long time. Mostly, if you say biotech people think of pharmaceutical companies or drugs and things like that. The last decade or so there’s quite a lot of other types of biotech, so people producing things to sell in like you’re trying to replace chemicals and replace compounds that usually come either from chemical synthesis. So this is just putting lots of, you know, just chemistry like adding chemicals to each other and producing size in something that’s similar to what you what you want to extract from the environment. Or you go to a rain forest or some other plantation and grow a lot of certain plans that you want more often than you extracted There’s quite a lot of people trying to find kind of disrupt all the sectors with things that are produced in cells in breweries, basically. Yeah, I think there’s quite a lot going on I know that this is three companies made spider silk and East they took the genes from a spider, cloned them or copied them let’s say to yourself and then engineer the salad but more and now they have massive tanks which has a lot of yeast growing in it and it’s producing the same protein that the spider produces, which then is basically the spider silk protein. So there’s that there’s I saw a company trying to produce the constituents of farm oil in yeast.
They were looking for research and development team to able to you know, study how the farm while How about plant produces palm oil and then Put the same reactions in here so that we don’t have to cut down half the rain forest and good luck to foundries on it. It’s very exciting a lot of different things. pigments, as a fashion designer that’s created like a range of textiles, which are dyed with bacterial pigments that she basically takes them in a tank full of bacteria which produce pigments. So bacteria can make the entire rainbow of pigments with these compounds into the outside their body sometimes, and that can stain whatever fabric you have. So you can make whatever color you want, in principle, so she dipped them into these bacterial tanks and the bacteria grow and then they secrete the pigment and they stay in the fabric. And then she basically gets rid of the bacteria. And what you have is a very naturally organically colored piece of cloth. And quite often they have very nice formations on this court as well, because it’s wherever the bacteria was growing it. pigment. It looks like a very kind of future. steak, you know, organic dying process.
Naga Subramanya B B 32:03
But it seems like we can use these microorganisms for like a lot of problems that are being faced by humanity today. So to that extent looks like you’re headed in the right direction in terms of saving the rainforest or saving the mountainside from from plastic.
Simran Aulakh 32:21
Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely the hope. There’s always like practical problems, you’re in the real world. Even if you have a solution. Even if you can’t produce something that is otherwise coming from an endangered species or protected area, you have to compete with the market. So you have to make it cheaper than it is. Otherwise, you know, there’s a lot of other problems accounting but I think I find it quite exciting to work in an area where you could have a solution you know, you it’s not the only way is not to destroy a habitat, you have another option. So whenever it becomes a Economically more viable to produce it in a big tank. I think we’re on the right way, the whole world on a good path, I like to think of the future as something that could be much better than we imagine. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the end of life. As we know, at the end of the world or something, there are a lot of people working on very creative solutions, quite a lot of them based on what already exists in nature. So try to learn from nature because over millions of years, it’s evolved to come up with solutions that are compatible, that are not wasteful.
They’re not kind of polluting whatever is around it. And I think one of the key concepts in this area is that life for nature produces solutions that are that are like cyclical, so you have something that’s producing you know, a produces BB produces See, and then eventually the cycle has to close and come back to the And a lot of what humans do is a linear, linear path. So you end up with quite a lot of the end product. And if there’s no way of converting that back into what you started from is quite obvious. And at some point, you will run out of oil, you will, you know, have too much co2 in the atmosphere, too much plastic everywhere because you need something to convert it back into what was there before,
Naga Subramanya B B 34:26
right. And I guess all the efforts that are going into fighting climate change are reducing plastic is kind of closing those loops that were opened over thousands of years that we pursued this development without having a holistic perspective, right.
Simran Aulakh 34:42
Yeah. So I think like the big it’s mostly most of the massive changes that are in the global climate rather, or the pollution etc. since the Industrial Revolution, and this is not thousands of years, but only a few hundred others. Definitely. I think the This time and age, people are quite conscious about all these things. It’s, you know, there’s protests every weekend, and so on. And that’s great because it creates much more awareness. And that means that all of this research basically needs to get to find these solutions need to get funded from somewhere. And because of the increased awareness, funding bodies are much more likely to pay people to work on the solution and find the solutions.
Quite a lot of them already exist. But they’re still like, who knows what we might be able to make, you know, there might be buildings which are grown out of using biological systems, not necessarily brick and mortar. So I like to think of the future as something that’s going to be better than what we imagined or what we hear in the news, because I think there’s quite a lot that out there that we can, we can start working on start using live, healthier lives and also much more in harmony with the Around this
Naga Subramanya B B 36:01
dilemma, I’ve always thought of the future as a time where we’ll be encouraged with more and more technology. But after talking to you, I am now open to the idea that some of the technology could be other living creatures that, that are helping us solve some of these problems are that are helping us make our life easier.
Simran Aulakh 36:28
And technology doesn’t necessarily have to be all steel and glass and, and you know, concrete. It’s just a technology. We I see this this science that’s applied to our daily lives or in a way that, you know, changes them in some way, or make things easier for us to do that. This doesn’t have to be some wasteful, destructive process. It could be a very organic way of Yeah, it’s just about how much we understand. I think nature time. Over. Over So long to find solutions to everything, you know, we need for most of our food still comes from plants. We don’t make it in barter, you know, and you have shelter you have. Okay, this lets us
Naga Subramanya B B 37:15
know that this is the way you’re building up to a nice conclusion. So please continue.
Simran Aulakh 37:20
Yeah, what I was saying is like most of what we need, you know, nature does provide already and also what basic needs are quite, quite same. We need food, we need shelter. And these days, we need quite a lot of things to entertain us and keep us busy. But there’s no reason that none all those things can come from something that already exists in nature. Like know if I want to wear shoes, which are super well cushion or something.
There has to be some organism out there that’s created a material that’s suitable for that. If I want to bring some benefits that most of us beverages anyway, come from some fun. We’re not that kind of separated from the group from the natural world, we actually depend on it very, very heavily. I think the more we accept that, that we may not have, we may not be able to sit in an office or lab and think of a really good solution, something might be easier to just go out there and look for some, some animal or some plan or something that has already solved that problem. We might be able to use things which are much more kind of eco friendly and and don’t have to destroy the world.
Naga Subramanya B B 38:37
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more on that. So for people who are considering a career path, doing what you do, but what would your inputs be for them
Simran Aulakh 38:47
these days is lots and lots of courses specifically on bioengineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, of exploded. I don’t think there was that much available than I am was an undergrad or and I was even looking for my masters. And there’s quite a few. There’s definitely certain areas which have much more many more opportunities in this specific field. So these would be so there’s quite a lot around London, in the UK. There’s in Sweden, Copenhagen, also Germany has quite a few courses. And then there’s the US, of course, all of the bay area around Boston, there’s a lot of very exciting companies and undergraduate and graduate programs that focus entirely on engineering biology, to create solutions for the future. So there’s a whole range of things you can study, you can study basic biology, you can study completely applied, only bioengineering and all of these things are kind of building up in the same direction that we will understand the living world better and better. And we will also understand how to apply it for what we need, in a way that is quite that lets us live in harmony with the rest of our planet. I think it’s a great time to be studying this. I’m obviously biased.
But I also think in many other fields, people are beginning to realize that learning from the living world might be very useful. And this ranges from, you know, material science, construction, architecture, to even computational algorithms that was that mimic biological networks to teach things, how to discriminate between, you know, different subgroups, there’s a lot of machine learning and neural nets are actually the mimicking structures that are already present in biology and how living organisms learn. So I think that the awareness of what is out there in the natural world is, is kind of affecting all fields. Yep,
Naga Subramanya B B 40:47
agreed. And I think it’s interesting that you say that because I’ve always believed that, you know, we are now transition to working at the intersection of things rather than being the Deep into one domain. And I think this is a great perspective to have, regardless of what domain we’re in because you can always learn from nature.
Simran Aulakh 41:06
Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s obviously I’m very biased. That is my perspective.
Where I work we have a we have people who did their first let’s say training in microbiology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, mathematics, there’s, yeah, it’s very hard to say where does a biology lab It doesn’t just have people study biology. What I do, that’s definitely not the case.
Naga Subramanya B B 41:39
Fantastic, and so as we as we wrap up this episode, to ask you how it felt to be on the podcast, and thank you so much for taking time
Simran Aulakh 41:51
Thanks a lot, I wanted to do it because obviously, very excited by all these new developments in the biotech area.
I was also feeling a bit overwhelmed because I know some people who’ve been on your podcast and they’re really exceptional and done amazing things. And I’m just, you know, one of thousands of PhD students working on this. But yeah, I hope people enjoy learning about all the possibilities that are out there and what they could do. And maybe I’ll see some of the listening to you, sometime in the future working on biochemistry or bioengineering or something.
Naga Subramanya B B 42:31
I’m sure that is going to happen and I hope you will also receive a couple of emails from the people are tuning in with a lot of questions Thank you so much.
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Podcast Information:-
Interview by: Naga Subramanya B B
Recorded on: AudioTechnica ATR 2100
Produced on: Hindenburg Journalist PRO for Windows 10
Jingle Credits: Shankar from Writer and Geek, Edited by Naga Subramanya
Recorded online: Zencastr
Photo and Logo Edited on: Canva
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