Skip to main content

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz - Four Way Interview

Photo by John Cairns
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz is Professor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology at the University of Cambridge, and Bren Professor in Biology and Bioengineering at Caltech. She has published over 150 papers and book chapters in top scientific journals and her work on embryos won the people’s vote for scientific breakthrough of the year in Science magazine. Her new book, co-authored with Roger Highfield, is The Dance of Life: symmetry, cells and how we become human.

 Why science?

 I fell in love with biology when I was a child because I loved doing experiments and seeing what happened. It was fascinating and enormous fun. I also fell in love with art at the same time. Art and science are both based on experiments and uncovering new paths to understand the world and ourselves. Why do we think the way we think? Where do our feelings come from? Is the 'right' answer always right? Where do we come from? How do parts of our body communicate with each other?  What is the nature of time? How do our cells measure time? Can I understand it?

 I was raised in a laboratory so everyone around me was doing an experiment and asking questions.  But my passion for art is more difficult to track. It might have something to do with how I was dyslexic and yet wanted to communicate with people around me and so I started to express myself intuitively through art – mainly through abstract art and design. 

 Science and art are both imaginative and creative. They allow me to find the miraculous in everyday life.

 Why this book?

 There are many excellent popular science books. Roger Highfield and I wanted The Dance of Life to be different and to cover not only the science of how our life starts and how we build ourselves but also to be a human story, my story.  We wanted our book to be an intimate and personal account of scientific discovery.  We wanted it to talk about conflicting thoughts – devotion but also sacrifice in pursuit of science; friendship but also competition, which both dominate scientific life.  We also wanted to show the joy of discovery. 

 It was a challenge to write this book as we wrote it together – a man and a woman with different life experiences, with different schedules, with our brains working differently but we both share a passion for science, life and truth.  We were talking about some of the most complex and deepest feelings in my life and, at the same time, the most profound topics in biology, from the life of an embryo to stem cell research and the nature of our own origins. We wanted to explore what we currently understand and the limits of that understanding. We wanted to be honest in showing the life of a woman in science and the life of an immigrant. I was both and it nearly broke me at times. 

 What’s next?

 Recently I restarted my life. I moved my scientific and personal family from Cambridge (UK) to California. This last year has already been an amazing new challenge and experience. I hope some enlightenment will come from this new chapter along with the pure joy of discovery. 

 I would consider writing a second book to expand on some of the ideas in The Dance of Life to show that we should be more open and prepared to contra polarizing views about science and woman especially in science. To me, science and art are about openness, creativity, a deep way of thinking and joy that brings happiness. 

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 My research on combining biology with engineering.  Creating embryo models from stem cells – building synthetic embryos one cell at a time - and learning answers to all of the questions that have puzzled me since I was a little girl.

 In LA, new collaborations allow me to bring new techniques in microscopy and imaging to let us see stem cells on their complex journey in embryo development, creating beautiful images that blend art with science.  Roger and I had always planned to bring even more art into The Dance of Life. 

 Every week brings a new discovery in science. If you look into the last issue of journal Nature, you can see an image from our latest paper, on an amazing mechanism that embryos develop in the second week of their life. To allow them to grow, they make holes in a membrane ‘corset‘ that originally holds them tight. How ingenious! It is great time to write about breaking boundaries, just as embryos do. 



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more