Peter 0:00
What are your thoughts? What are you feeling right now?
Dr. Clevers
0:02
I’m on a tropical island. Sweet, sweet fruits. Very relaxed.
Enjoying the sun doing nothing.
Peter 0:12
So what it was, was a gummy worm. The reason why I picked
the gummy worm and I like your interpretation of it. The reason why I picked
the gummy worm is because it kind of looks like an intestine with its ridges
and I thought that was really interesting that they put the effort into making
these ridges into gummy worms. Why not just make a smooth surface …
Dr. Clevers
0:30
Can I have another one?
Peter 0:44
Hi, and welcome back to The Gastronauts Podcast. My name is
Peter and I’ll be your host. Here at Gastronauts we are committed to exploring
communication throughout the body, with a particular focus on the crosstalk
between gut and brain. We invite experts in this field to share both their
research and their incredible journeys. So come join me as we explore the steps
that go into shaping a scientist on the Gastronauts podcast.
Today, we have Dr. Hans Clevers, the director of research at
the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology and a professor of molecular
genetics at Utrecht University. For those of you who study the gut or use
organoids in your research, he needs no introduction. Dr. Clevers was the first
to discover stem cells in the intestine and that the disruption of a downstream
effector of the Wnt pathway, TCF4 abolishes stem cell crypts. He also showed
that activating Wnt mutations underlie the development of colon cancer. He developed
the first organoids through culturing living stem cells in the intestinal tract
and has been awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Breakthrough
Prize in Life Sciences, the Heineken Prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy
of the Arts and Sciences to name a few and has authored over 600 publications
with over 100,000 citations. We really appreciate you taking the time to be on
our podcast, Dr. Clevers.
I want to start by discussing your scientific journey. In
hindsight, it is always easier to explain a career decision as planned;
however, you have been very open about your initial thoughts on pursuing a
career in both medicine and science. Can you take us through a few different
big-decision moments in your career and what went through your head and what
helped you make those decisions?
Dr. Clevers
2:48
Yeah, so I’m actually 62 so I’m not the youngest anymore.
When I was a young kid, I already knew that I was going to be a scientist. I
was interested in biology. I read all the discovery stories of Africa and the bulls.
And so when I was 18, in Holland, you go to university at 18. I picked up
biology and was actually quite disappointed because it was still […] 19th
century science, very descriptive, lots of Latin names, taxonomy, very little [instruments
or] tools that you could do much with. Because this was [1975], this was just
before molecular biology, DNA technology was just being developed and spread
around the world. So I then also went to medical school. I completed two
studies in the course of my master’s in biology. I spent some time at NIH; I
spent a year in Nairobi, and that’s when I started learning about monoclonal
antibodies that had just been developed, and about the first gene cloning
experiments and I realized biology is probably going through a revolution now,
but I also liked socially the medical environment, […] the clinical environment
much more than the lab environment In labs, you’re locked up with a few people
that you have selected. It’s much more social- you see the entire population of
your city combined, all the young, poor, rich- you have nurses, you have the
doctors, you have the students, you have the patients. In a lab, it’s 10 – 15
people, always the same. But so I then got a training position, pediatrics in Utrecht.
They asked me, well, because of your double background, why don’t you start
some research and you can do a PhD, which we don’t leave University with a PhD,
we leave with a masters. So I started some research. And in that year, I
realized although socially, it’s not always the simplest environment, really
I’m a scientist. I’m not a doctor. And I then gave up that training position,
wrote four papers on a project that I designed myself entirely, and didn’t end
up in the biggest journals. Also, I was an immunologist. Essentially, I wrote
two pairs of papers: on T cells and I repeated the exact same thing on B cells.
And that already I think people started looking at me, “how can you be
interested in T cells and be interested in B cells- you have to choose.” And
that [is] something I I’ve learned that you don’t have to confine yourself to,
to a discipline. But then I also realized I had to learn molecular biology from
scratch. And I got a postdoc position in Boston in a lab of a Dutch PI,
Terhorst. And I learned to clone TCL genes, and I was still a molecular
biologist. And that is when I although was a tough time: 4 years. In the end,
it worked out well and that’s when I realized this was the right decision for
me. I’m a scientist. I find hospitals fantastic places, […] also the patients
are better off if I’m in the lab and not with the patients.
Peter 5:47
Yeah, so you mentioned- I know this is a while back at this
point, but you mentioned that other people in the clinic and mentioned maybe
you should go into research. Was there any hesitation or reservation thinking
that, “oh, if I leave medicine now, I won’t ever come back to it at that time.”
I think now you certainly have established yourself as a scientist, but at the
time, did you have any concerns?
Dr. Clevers
6:06
It was a real decision point for many reasons, but one thing
is that the medical profession is a hard profession; it’s not easy. You have to
be able to work hard. You have to be social. You have to be smart. But what I
could see is that most doctors that would bring this with them, have a nice
life, they have a good career. They work hard, but everybody understands what
they do. There’s not this hierarchy, you have a few top doctors and then all
sorts of other levels of doctors. There’s not this constant competition that
you have in science. On the other hand, I knew that I am a scientist that says.
Im not really sure I’m going to be a successful scientist, but that’s where my
passion is. So I actually sat with my father for quite some time and asked him
for advice. He said, it’s your decision. That’s if you if that’s where your heart
is, go there. But it’s extremely risky because a career in science is very
unpredictable […] As a doctor, you know, by the end of your day, you know,
whether you have the skills to be a good doctor. As a scientist, even after a
PhD or a postdoc, you don’t know whether you have the skills and the luck and
persistence to be a PI and everything with it for many, many years because it’s
just very hard work.
Peter 7:17
So when do you know that you have the stuff to be a
scientist?
Dr. Clevers 7:20
Well when we first started discovering things [that were really
just] small but were important. I was probably eight years into being a PI when
I realized that we’re now doing things that […] people find interesting. And it
was luck. So we’ve apparently made a few choices of where to go with the with
the science, but it might also have not happened. And there’s also if you’re
too long without a significant new insight, that is the end of your career,
even if you’re as good as somebody else who did get an insight and got this
boost to the career.
Peter 7:57
But you mentioned earlier that people were telling you can
either be a T cell scientist or a B cell scientist and you saw this not true- you
can always pivot your research in the direction that you want it to go. Could
you elaborate or unpack a little bit more about that?
Dr. Clevers
8:08
Yeah, I can maybe describe the trajectory of my lab, which
is very abstract. It’s because almost everything we did failed, and I forgot
about it, but my [early] people actually know all this, because they went
through that. So we started as a lab that wanted to find transcription factors
in T cells. And knowing that these genes, although the genome was known in the
late 80s, at all was still a decade away. But we knew that transcription
factors are very important for cell decisions. And so we cloned a few amongst
them, [and one] was a gene called TCF1. And then it took about five to six
years until we realized that this was a crucial transcription factor, but not
so much for T cells, but for early development in any kind of animal. It’s part
of the Wnt pathway. So then I basically changed my lab from a molecular
immunology lab. We had fruit flies, we had frogs, all these in collaborations.
We have zebrafish, we did lots of mouse genetics. And then we finally hit on this
link with the gut. And then I again converted my lab from a developmental model
organism lab to a gut lab and we had to get to know somebody who knew histology
and paraffin sectioning.
Peter 9:19
Do you have any hesitation with making that switch?
Dr. Clevers
9:21
No, it’s part of the personality of me, but also you sense
that the lab around you starts to, I don’t know how that works, but has the
same personality as yourself. I don’t know whether the lab programs me or I
program the lab, so as long as the technologies around it doesn’t really matter
if you need DNA sequencing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a zebrafish, or yeast or
human cancer, sequencing is sequencing. So we’ve always been going in areas
where we at least knew that we have mastered the technology and then the
biological questions in the end [everything that] we’ve discovered is always
simple. So there’s a few things if I can, if I look back, because I’ve been
doing this now for 30 years, that have been very well for us. One is no fear [and]
an enormous amount of trust. And that’s what I learned from my PhD advisor. So
you can trust other scientists, you can share unpublished information you can,
and you always get more bang [for your buck], because if people trust you, they
are easy collaborators, they will help you when you need them. And it’s more
fun. So there’s a lot of paranoia in science, which I think is sort of self-fulfilling.
Because if you’re paranoid about your neighbor, bad things will happen. And if
you’re open to your neighbor, that’s one thing. So trust, and courage so you
can make a difference in somebody else’s discipline. If you bring in the right
technologies and a good way of thinking, you can actually make a discovery. You
have to have good collaborators to protect you from stupid mistakes, but also
introduce you into that community. We’ve done that a lot. So we’ve written on
fruit fly genetics on zebrafish genetics on the highest level journals, but
always with a collaborator in that field that had helped us. And then one thing
that I’ve often said is, I strongly discouraged my lab to formulate hypotheses.
Now this is not how science is supposed to work. So my strong sense is if you
enter a field where little there’s known and where you don’t really know the questions,
you can ask. So don’t ask strong questions that are looking for strong answers where
you already know the answer, because that’s your hypothesis. Just be open-minded,
go into experiments, build a robust experimental system, and just watch. Watch
and watch and watch. And then the human brain always immediately comes up with
solutions, which other hypotheses, but you can sit down with a number of smart
people and come up with 1000 solutions to your problems that could all be true.
And evolution has picked one randomly. So why would your brain- I think it’s
very arrogant to sit down and formulate a hypothesis in a field where you know
nothing. And the human brain also works in that way that once you have your
hypothesis, you will publish the hypothesis. You’ll find the evidence that it’s
true. And that’s I think, where many non-fraudulent but papers are produced that
turned out to be wrong, because in that process, you lose your open-mindedness.
That’s not how our brains are comfortable to work with. So that’s something
that I see a lot in my lab and somebody says, experiment fails, I say, “why? Did
you drop it on the ground?” No, no, no, because you know, this is the result I got,
and I should have gotten this. This is because you have your hypothesis. Get
rid of your hypothesis and look at the results with an open mind […] So I think
for discovery science, this is really the way to go. You cannot write grants,
you cannot write papers [in which] you refuse to work with hypotheses, but it’s
for me at least has been the most productive way of doing this. I guess a more applied
science like in clinical science where you have to have a strong question and
you have to have a hypothesis and there’s only a few answers: a drug will or
will not work. So there it works. But for this open end where, you have no clue
what you’re looking at and what the processes are, the hypotheses will blind
you rather than help you.
Peter 13:21
Yeah, one thing that you just said that really resonated
with me was the fact that our context really biases our hypotheses. Where we
are situated in a particular lab, or where we are in the world biases or
informs our decision on how we approach science. And this is why it’s important
to have collaborations with people who have different viewpoints than your own.
In an era where communication internationally is just a few clicks on your
computer away, what do you see the value in, in these large […] scientific
organizations or societies that bring people together for an international conference?
And if you were in charge of one of these conferences, how would you run it so
that you would have effective communication?
Dr. Clevers
13:58
That is a very good question. So for me, personally, these
meetings [where] I’m a speaker, I have good access to the other speakers. So
that’s where I get my information from. That’s where I build my, my networks,
my collaborators. And that’s where I hear about the newest technologies about
who to trust, who not to trust, what works, what doesn’t work. I rarely read
papers. So I don’t read- I read Nature and Science but not the second or only
the first part about the political things. So because we review a lot of papers
so there’s a source of information so […] I would advise anybody you know, [when]
you get asked to review, review. Because it gives you connections with journals;
you learn a lot you learned before it’s appears half a year later in print. And
so that’s for me, and I guess for many people, the face to face is still very
important and Skype works well once you know people and you collaborate, so
it’s a very good way of collaborating long distance. I guess for young people,
it’s these larger meetings really, for me when I was young, you get a very good
sense of who’s who in the field, you know what’s happening? What’s the general
thinking, you know, what is the argumentation in this field? Or do people like or
don’t like? Where are the open questions? On whose toes will I step if I say
this? […] so I’m not really sure what I would do if we would organize meetings-
I spend lots of time in meetings. I would organize them very differently. I
would have more young people into podium. Shorter talks to basically get them
exposed to, to communicate to audiences. Yeah, I think they get-togethers like
large poster sessions with free beer work fantastically well. But the face to
face at least for me, I’m not from the millennial generation, is very
important. And many of the papers that that that we’ve written often result
from talking to someone, get a good idea together, work it out together and you
create a lot of friendships along the way as well.
Peter 16:15
You talked about […] not stepping on other people’s toes, but
the value of a lot of these conferences is to know who’s in the field. I saw
recently that you tweeted some classic images from Lieberkühn’s thesis
regarding the structure of the gut, and then some of Joseph Paneth’s pictures
of the Paneth cells. I was wondering what drew you to these pictures in
particular and what about these scientists encourage you to tweet about them?
Dr. Clevers
16:36
Yeah. Well, so of course, these two have written extensively
about guts and Lieberkuhn, who lived in the 1700s was German but worked in
Holland did a PhD, which my students were very happy to read that it was only
32 pages. But then I could point out this actually written in Latin, so… well
as a as a medical student, I had a very good memory, which isn’t so good
anymore. But there’s many structures and diseases and phenomena that have a
person’s name attached to it […] and nobody ever knows, you know, [for example],
who was Merkel? And so I’ve made it a bit of a hobby to try to figure out, you
know, who was this person? Why, and often they’re not the first discoverers,
but for some reason they were the most visible person. Actually between Europe
and the US, there are differences; like Kahler for us is multiple myeloma. Now
I don’t think the US uses Kahler’s disease for this, but it was discovered by a
German called Kahler. So I’d like to dig up these […] just a hobby, and to find something that’s 300
years old, and it would be sitting in a museum and nobody knew what it was. So
I found this thesis and then I realized this is really good.
Peter 17:50
Do you encourage your graduate students to go through and
the history of science as well?
Dr. Clevers
17:54
Not really. So what I do a lot with my graduate students is
discuss the process of science, and all the different decisions you take and
what information is true, everything published, and doubt what was published.
And so that I do a lot. I try to create a culture of interrogation and also try
to explain that when you argue with somebody or you criticize or you have
remarks about the work of somebody, you’re not criticizing the person, you’re
criticizing something that the person says because it feels very personal. When
you the paper gets reviewed, you see the review report, it hurts when it’s
negative. But the process intended not to hurt you, but actually say something about the same bit of work that
you have. So that’s something is that I do a lot with my students.
Peter 18:45
If you could travel back in time and have a conversation
with any scientist, who would it be in what would you talk about?
Dr. Clevers
18:51
Yeah, there’s a guy, Leblond, who is my personal hero, who
is I think, originally French [and] migrated, because his wife is Jewish, migrated
to Montreal in Canada, French Canada, and was still an active scientist at a
very high age when he was 94-95, actively engaged, and many of his original
discoveries [were] when he worked in the Curie University in Paris where
radioactivity was discovered. So he learned how to use radio labels and he
started applying them in biological systems. He saw the first label DNA, the
first to label protein, the first to label sugars. Essentially, I think, he discovered
stem cell hierarchies by showing how labels travel through the skin. For
instance, he was the first to show that all cells make protein- quite a quite a
spectacular finding because people believed that the liver makes all protein
and the rest just take it up from serum. He was the first to show the ER Golgi secretory
pathway. So he could have earned three, four Nobel prizes. Those papers are published
in journals and were repeated later and several people got Nobel Prizes [for
this work]. He’s always a bit a bit neglected. I don’t know why. But also
everything we published about the gut stem cells. After the fact I found out
that he had published sort of theoretical papers that predicted everything. So this
is like a string of maybe 10 Nature, Cell, Science papers, we can now safely
say after they have published that they were not original, because actually Leblond,
CP Leblond had already published the hypotheses.
Peter 20:27
What would you like to ask him?
Dr. Clevers 20:28
What would have liked to ask him? I think, how his findings
relate to disease, the various diseases of the gut. He doesn’t say much about [his
views] in his papers. But it’s clear that he was a pathologist. He must have
been looking at all of these structures from a pathological point of view.
Peter 20:47
I think that’s fascinating. And personally, I like to get to
know the scientists behind the science and I know a lot of times for people who
are key figures in the field, they publish books, and we really like to know
what their frame of mind is or what their reference and viewpoints are, but oftentimes
when we’re judging the science currently in when we’re reviewing […] some
article during a journal club, we […] dissociate the scientists from the
science and I was wondering, at what point do you think we should look at the
context that the scientist is working in when we’re evaluating their work?
Dr. Clevers
21:20
I think always. So my thought when I started science was
this is this is an extremely rational activity that you know, you sit, you’re
smart, you design, you test, that’s how you define hypothesis, you design
experiments that would contradict what you’re thinking and you would re-formulate
your hypotheses. Over the years, I’ve learned that in experimental biological
sciences that’s not how it works. I think 80-90% of what happens leading up to
a discovery is random events between people. It’s characters of individuals,
and eventually when that turns into a potential discovery, then we go into this
mode that people think scientists always do. You become very rational you do
your experiments you do your controls and this and that and then you write your
paper as if you would always be looking for that particular phenomenon which
you basically stumbled across it and you interpreted it well. So I think that
first 80% that’s the biggest difference between people who constantly make
discoveries and people who are extremely smart and know everything but don’t
make discoveries that […] actually in this process of searching, stepping into
dark [and] changing opinions, talking to people, hooking up with people, that
that is where the discoveries really arise and then once use you see the light
then you switch to this mode and that is the second part is you can learn. For
a doctor there’s much more of the second part; so if you’re a clinician a lot
of what you do once you know, it is this disease then you do this and these are
the tests I do this how I follow up. For us is much less so, in basic
exploratory science. So the context of a person that contacts you know why this
person all of a sudden switch from this model system or that model system? What
happened in his life that he meets somebody? Did he do that? That is that is
crucial if you want to really, it would be good if you could make the discovery
process more efficient, because we waste most experiments, as everybody knows,
end up on the floor. And if you could make that process more efficient, that
would be fantastic. So I’ve been talking a lot to colleagues knows more senior
scientists who have made discoveries and they also don’t know exactly how this
works. And it would be great […] but a lot of it is in the social interactions
in the unexpected ideas that pop up because somebody says something, you make a
link with something you’re thinking and all of a sudden there is an answer.
Peter 23:49
I think that’s a nice way to paint it because a lot of
people who aren’t in the scientific field think it’s a very isolated process.
You’re working on a project you’re kind of hitting your head against the wall,
kind of racking your brains but you need to reach out to other people and
communicate with them to see if they have some other framework for you to think
about.
Dr. Clevers. 24:04
Exactly.
Peter 24:06
I also noticed on the other aspect of your Twitter, you
posted a couple of animations or videos. Could you tell me a little bit about
what got you into using videos or animations to explain science?
Dr. Clevers
24:18
Yeah, so I’ve always I used to draw a lot as a kid. I
collect art paintings. And so I’ve always been drawn by the visual. So stepping
back I learned how to write papers over the years and what I used to do for a
long time, so I spend endless amounts of time on the title and the summary. And
if the title and the summary don’t draw attention, build up some tension and
resolve. The storyline of a scientific paper is extremely important. And if you
cannot write up your story in 125 words, which some of these journals [require],
then there’s something wrong with the stories. There’s two stories or there’s
only three quarters of a story or the order is wrong. If you cannot produce a
100 character title that has the message and draws attention has all the
keywords, there’s something wrong with what you’re trying to communicate. So
that I knew that for a long time. Then I got into contact with this guy who
was, I think a physics PhD student, and he never graduated. He had this extreme
talent- I think he uses the Pixar software. And the way we started working
together is whenever I thought, we have a really nice discovery, I will do my
title, my summary and we then try to write a script, they have a one minute
audio, video animation video. And he would look at it, we talk he said, Well,
this doesn’t work, and then he would turn it into so he gave a lot of images.
Now what does this look like ? And he asked how many cells are there? How fast
the move? So really, a lot of this is really correct modeling in these as many 40
or 50 animations now. Then he makes a cartoon of how we think the animation should
go. And then we’ll go back and forth. And then I’ll say, well, that’s not what
I said. Then read your text. This is what you say. I said, well, I meant
something else. Yeah, so text is very ambiguous. And it’s clear that to listen
to people talk or to read, particularly to two people talk, you get tired and
lecture can last 45 minutes, but then it’s done. So and part of it, I think,
because it takes a lot of brainpower to interpret what the person is trying to
communicate. So once we figured out, okay, this is what I mean and okay, now I
understand it, then he would make this movie and then it will be back and
forth. And then when the movie is there, all of a sudden, everybody who watches
the movie is effortless. They just look at when I give talks- I have many but often
what I used to do is I would first show the experiments and summarize in the
video, but I didn’t realize what works much better is if I first showed a
video, people know the story and you see it and it’s the moment that it moves, people
sit up, and they watch and it’s effortless to enjoy. And it’s artistically well
done. And then I just showed the slides that show the evidence for what I just
said. So you can say show, much more in 45 minutes you could ever do if you’re
just talking and showing static slides. I also see when it’s playing- I speak a
lot for lay audience like politicians or an artist [or] journalists, and the
moment it moves, everybody pays attention. So the more I have movement on the
screen, the easier people find it to just stay with me and I can communicate
much, much more information through these visuals and they could ever do. Probably
the people who are in in animations probably know this, I just discovered this.
And the way they are made […] originally, they were made for scientific
audiences. But it turns out that it works [for] any lay person with some
education, know what the stomach looks like. You zoom in, they know what
they’re looking at. They know more or less what a cell looks like […] so they
understand immediately. The enjoy the aesthetics, they would not enjoy the aesthetics
of a table. So in papers, I have very few tables or blocks […] You want different
kinds of variables in the paper, and definitely colorful ones. You don’t want
just numbers or lines.
Peter 28:20
Do you feel like working on these animations has influenced
how you write your papers? And is there kind of now a different type of structure
or some principles that you follow when you’re writing?
Dr. Clevers
28:29
Yeah, so this is writing this script, but it’s a bit like
writing a summary but at the same time, you have to it’s not only the summary
where you have you know, 10 sentences or so of a paper but you also have all
the support that you would have that you use the entire paper for. So animation
essentially captures everything that’s in the paper in one minute. And so I
must say that I now find myself thinking, is this story ready to be submitted?
Is a complete? Is it exciting? Will people like this? What is the real message
here? When I think through the eyes of the animator, I get a much better sense
of you know, what we need [is] a single message, we don’t need three message. We
don’t need […] to prove five times what we know is true. We just show it once.
And then we have all the backup evidence if needed. So to make a sort of an
abstracted, clean, aesthetically pleasant representation of the work that I
think in these animations works best.
Peter 29:27
Really neat. How do you feel like how you frame a picture
has influenced how you think about questions in science, when you’re doing this
animation, you need to have this kind of viewpoint or this needs to be zoomed
in here. Does that affect how you think about when you’re conversing with other
people about their science? Like, oh, should we focus more on this part of the
scientific process?
Dr. Clevers
29:47
Yeah, sort of? Well, there are what you’re asking. There are
several questions that have arisen in the process of making these animations
because, like where cells come from where do they go and why? Why does this go
there. So when you visualize the process you’re looking at you actually, you
note the holes in your knowledge? Well, we’re not looking at this at all, but
it’s a big issue because we don’t know where the cell will go next, or why it
dies here and not there. So I guess it’s formalizes, in a way, a process of
asking questions or seeing where the openings still are, or where the research
can go, because literally you can see in these animations, we know this, we
know this, but we don’t know this. So we just keep it out of the current
animation [and it’s where] we should really be moving the [of] in the lab.
Peter 30:41
I want to ask one quick question about your lab work. I know
you have pioneered the field of organoids. And people are using organoids. And
they’re using kind of spheroids, tumoroids. They’re developing a lot of
different in vitro systems to model […] high throughput personalized screening
of therapeutics. Where do you see the field going? And what do you think the
current limitations of organoids are.
Dr. Clevers
31:03
There are two types of organoids. The type that we developed
is based on the stem cells or stem cell activities that are present in adults,
in born bodies. And so every organ will have its own stem cell function. And
then there’s the embryonic stem cell-based organoids that [built] brain that we
cannot do or built our kidney or heart. So we basically use stem cells that
maintain or repair tissues, [which is a] very different, very different
approach. So for our approach, and I won’t speak for the other field, but for
our approach, it is, like the best lab models, extremely reductionist, so it is
an abstraction of reality. The original mini guts grown from one stem cell was
aesthetically very nice because you start from one cell, it builds a gut. It’s very
surprising that’s possible at all, and we still don’t understand much of that
process. But is a complete gut, it has no immune cells, it has no muscle. It
has no nerves, no blood vessels. So I think the big challenge is now is to, and
this looks extremely promising, add additional layers. My approach would always
be start as reductionist, as simple as you can. Add one variable, figure out
how it works, add another variable and slowly build up the system. There’s a
strong tendency with many scientists to say well there’s not a real life this
is not how it works; it’s much more complex. And then they add everything
together, and reviewers will tell us, you have to add this and that, but then I
no longer know what I’m looking at. It’s too noisy. But that’s the style of
research. So I thought I see now people are adding the microbiome by injecting and
scientists many guts people adding organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, co-culturing
[…] You can you can have a piece of gut and a piece of brain and see how they
communicate so that I think the developments that are currently happening in
any place is just adding more complexity and getting closer to what a real
organ looks like. Having said that, I must say there have been a large number
of discoveries made by many labs in these extremely simplified systems that
could then be checked in mice or in humans and patients, and confirmed to be
true. So I think the power of modern science has been reductionism to a large
extent and these organoids are an ideal model for that approach.
Peter 33:25
Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Clevers.
Dr. Clevers
33:27
Okay, thank you.
Peter 33:39
Dr. Clevers shared a few of the things that went through his
mind over his extensive research career. And one of the things that really
stood out to me was the importance in trying to interpret your results without
any preconceived notions. Natural processes are incredible, and it is important
for scientists to really appreciate all the facets of the process. When you
think you have a handle of these biological phenomena try and portray it as a
movie. Use your imagination to piece together your observations and direct your
future scientific questions by filling in the missing parts. I want to thank
you all so much for listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode. For more
of our content, you can follow us on Twitter @gutbrains or visit our website at
thinkgastronauts.com. The Gastronauts Podcast would be impossible without the
incredible team that we have here. Meredith Schmehl is our producer and theme
music composer. And special thanks to the founders of Gastronauts, Dr. Diego
Bohórquez, and the Bohórquez laboratory.
