The Science of Decision Making - Gerd Gigerenzer - #27

The Science of Decision Making - Gerd Gigerenzer - #27

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he led the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition for over two decades. He is the author of numerous books including Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, and The Intelligence of Intuition, and has spent his career studying how people actually make decisions under uncertainty, as opposed to how theorists think they should. Before becoming an academic, he spent roughly a dozen years as a professional musician, an experience that directly shaped his thinking about heuristics and real-world choice. His long-running intellectual debate with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over the nature of human rationality is one of the defining controversies in modern behavioral science. Expect to learn how Gigerenzer chose an academic career over life as a professional musician using heuristic rather than calculated reasoning, how the gap between what is taught about rationality in universities and how people actually decide prompted his life's research agenda, what the crucial distinction between risk and uncertainty means and why standard probability tools fail in an uncertain world, how intuition works as a form of unconscious intelligence built on experience rather than arbitrary feeling, why corporate executives routinely hide gut decisions behind consulting reports and what Gigerenzer calls defensive decision making, how predictive AI systems used in US courts fail to outperform simple strategies despite being marketed as superior, what ecological rationality means and how it differs from the logical rationality assumed by most economists and behavioral scientists, why Gigerenzer disagreed with Daniel Kahneman about heuristics and what their decades-long debate was actually about, when ignoring information leads to better decisions than processing all of it, how the framing of medical statistics as relative rather than absolute risk caused thousands of unnecessary procedures in the UK, and what risk literacy means and why Gigerenzer believes it is a necessary condition for a functioning democracy. Gerd Gigerenzer online: Website: www.gerd-gigerenzer.com [http://www.gerd-gigerenzer.com] Books: Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, The Intelligence of Intuition, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (available wherever books are sold).

Ozempic, GLP-1s and the Future of Obesity - Prof. Carel Le Roux - #26

Carel le Roux is a Professor of Experimental Pathology at University College Dublin, Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group, and one of the world's leading researchers on how the gut communicates with the brain. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, where he conducted foundational research on gut hormones and appetite, and later co-founded My Best Weight, Ireland's leading obesity care clinic accredited by the European Association for the Study of Obesity. His clinical work and trials span GLP-1 receptor agonists, bariatric surgery outcomes, and the emerging class of multi-receptor drugs now transforming obesity medicine. He is currently leading the trial of survodutide, one of the most promising next-generation treatments in the field. Expect to learn how GLP-1 was discovered during PhD research into gut-brain communication and how it became one of the most consequential drug classes in medical history, what the Gila monster's saliva has to do with the development of Ozempic and drugs like it, why obesity is a disease of the brain rather than a failure of willpower or lifestyle, how these medications reset the brain's fat-mass setpoint so that weight loss happens without deliberate effort, what ultra-processed foods may be doing to brain inflammation and why reversing the obesity epidemic through diet advice alone has failed everywhere it has been tried, why the goal of treatment should be health gain rather than weight loss and what that distinction means in practice, how to manage and minimise side effects by titrating the dose slowly, what the long-term safety record of GLP-1 drugs actually shows and why not taking the medication is often the riskier choice, why muscle loss on these drugs is largely a misunderstood phenomenon and what protein intake and exercise do to address it, what the evidence says about non-obese people using GLP-1 drugs recreationally and why these treatments were designed as lifelong medications, how GLP-1-like drugs appear to reduce alcohol consumption and are now being studied for addiction and other conditions including heart and kidney disease, and what new triple-receptor drugs like retatrutide and survodutide offer over existing treatments. Carel le Roux online: Website: mybestweight.ie [http://mybestweight.ie] University profile: University College Dublin, Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research

The Science of Awe - Gloria Simoncini - #25

Gloria Simoncini is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and PhD student at eCampus University, Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, researching the emotion of awe. She trained clinically in cognitive rehabilitation with patients who had acquired brain injuries, an experience that drew her toward the scientific study of emotions and their role in human transformation. Her doctoral project sits at the intersection of affective neuroscience, virtual reality, and clinical neuropsychology, with a particular focus on using VR environments to screen for mild cognitive impairment in ecologically valid, real-life-like scenarios. She works within a research group on emotions and complex emotional experiences, including awe, positive psychology, and affect dynamics. Expect to learn how awe is formally defined through its two core ingredients of vastness and the need for accommodation, what makes awe distinct from related emotions like wonder, elevation, and fear, why awe is unusually difficult to study in laboratory conditions and how virtual reality helps solve that problem, what happens in the brain during awe including changes in the default mode network and the small self effect, how positive and negative awe recruit different neural structures, what physical responses in the body accompany an awe experience, why the evolutionary negativity bias makes cultivating positive emotions like awe require conscious effort, how awe may function as a therapeutic tool for depression by reducing rumination and loosening rigid mental frameworks, what Gloria's own PhD research on VR-based cognitive screening looks like in practice, and how awe can be trained as a perspective rather than simply waited for as a fleeting moment. Gloria Simoncini online: ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gloria-Simoncini [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gloria-Simoncini] Research group (Prof. Alice Chirico): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice-Chirico-2 [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice-Chirico-2]

The Future of Meat - Prof. Hanna Tuomisto - #24

Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, based in Finland, and one of the world's leading researchers on the environmental impacts of cultivated meat. She earned her PhD in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from the University of Oxford and has been researching cell-culturing technologies for food production since 2008, when she carried out one of the first environmental life cycle assessments of what was then called in vitro meat. She leads the Future Sustainable Food Systems research group at Helsinki and has published extensively on life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, and the sustainability of novel proteins. In this episode, she walks through the full picture of cultivated meat, from the biology of cell cultivation to the regulatory and economic barriers standing between lab prototypes and supermarket shelves. Expect to learn how the global livestock sector contributes roughly 20% of all human-caused climate impact, what role land use and deforestation play in biodiversity loss driven by animal agriculture, why antibiotic use in livestock poses a growing public health risk, how cultivated meat is produced from a small cell sample to a finished product, what fetal bovine serum is and why replacing it is one of the central technical challenges, how the culture medium feeds cells in the same way feed nourishes a living animal, why the texture of cultivated meat is harder to replicate than its flavor, what the current state of regulatory approval looks like in Europe, Singapore, and the United States, how startup investment outpaced fundamental research and slowed the field's progress, why a supermarket-scale product is likely still 15 to 20 years away, and whether cultivated meat could one day serve as a protein source for long-duration space missions. Hanna Tuomisto online: University of Helsinki: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/future-sustainable-food-systems/people [https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/future-sustainable-food-systems/people] ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanna-Tuomisto-2 [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanna-Tuomisto-2] Good Food Institute (cultivated meat research hub): https://gfi.org [https://gfi.org]

The Dark History of Gene Editing - Matthew Cobb - #23

Matthew Cobb is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Manchester and one of Britain's most prominent science communicators and historians of biology. He holds a PhD in psychology and genetics from the University of Sheffield and spent his research career studying olfaction, insect behaviour, and the effects of genes on behaviour. He has written eight books, including a major biography of Francis Crick that won the Hatchards First Biography Prize, and has made numerous programmes for BBC Radio 4 including the first BBC broadcast ever dedicated to CRISPR. His book on genetic engineering is published in the US as As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and in the UK as The Genetic Age. Expect to learn how CRISPR was discovered not as a gene editing tool but as an immune system in bacteria defending themselves against viruses, why it took only six years from that foundational discovery for scientists to realise the technology could be reprogrammed, how eugenics persisted in respectable scientific circles decades after the Holocaust and why even Francis Crick held deeply misguided views about class and genetics well into the 1970s, what the EU's blanket ban on GMOs actually means when CRISPR-edited crops are indistinguishable from conventionally bred ones, why China has a raging internal debate about GM rice despite its authoritarian image, what the scissor metaphor gets badly wrong about how CRISPR actually behaves inside primate embryos, what really happened when He Jiankui edited two human embryos and brought them to term in 2018, why somatic editing to cure sickle cell disease is ethically uncontroversial while germline editing of embryos is fundamentally different in kind, why embryo screening via IVF already solves the problem germline editing is supposed to fix for the vast majority of cases, why genetic screening companies selling designer baby services are largely selling a fantasy rooted in a misunderstanding of how complex traits work, and why Matthew considers the fusion of AI with gene synthesis to create bioweapons the most alarming frontier of this entire technology. Matthew Cobb online: Bluesky: @matthewcobb.bsky.social [http://matthewcobb.bsky.social] Substack: matthewcobb2 (Science and History) Books: As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and Crick: A Mind in Motion (available wherever books are sold)