Mavericks of Science

Doctor who drank Bacteria, Cured Himself & Won Nobel

Imagine it is 1982, and a young physician is standing in a microbiology lab, staring at a Petri dish he nearly threw away. After more than 30 failed attempts to culture a mysterious bacterium, he is about to prove that a tiny microbe—not stress or spicy food—is the true cause of painful stomach ulcers. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we dive into the gut-wrenching story of Barry Marshall. Facing scoffing peers and billion-dollar drug companies that ignored his findings, Marshall did the unthinkable: he made his own body the laboratory by drinking a beaker full of infectious bacteria. It was a radical act of "personal science" that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize and save millions of lives.

Meet the Youngest & First Woman Dean of MIT

Imagine two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago, releasing more energy in a single second than 4,000 suns release in their entire lifetimes. In 2015, the impossibly faint tremors of that collision finally reached Earth—a vibration a thousand times smaller than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. Hearing that "silent music" required the most sensitive instruments ever created: the twin detectors of LIGO. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore the journey of Nergis Mavalvala, the physicist who spent decades wrestling with the "quantum storm" of the universe to create a quiet so profound that the whisper of a distant cosmic collision could finally be heard.

This Harvard Physicist is called next “Einstein”

In 2009, a sixteen-year-old girl flew solo in a single-engine plane she had built herself from 15,000 rivets and an engine she assembled outside her bedroom. Today, that same spirit of "audacious innocence" is directed toward the very foundations of reality. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a first-generation Cuban-American theorist, is now leading a global effort to answer one of the most demanding questions in science: Is our three-dimensional universe actually a hologram? In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we trace the journey of a "maker" who mastered the physical world before turning to the deep, mathematical laws that allow it to exist.

Fred Ramsdell: Winner of Nobel in Medicine 2025

In the late 1990s, inside a lab in Washington, a small tragedy unfolded daily in a strain of "scurfy" mice whose immune systems were waging a relentless, fatal campaign against their own bodies. While most scientists viewed this as a simple system failure, Fred Ramsdell and Mary Brunkow recognized it as a vital clue to a biological paradox. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we follow the genetic detective story that led to the discovery of the immune system’s "peacekeepers". From the dawn of the biotech revolution to the 2025 Nobel Prize, this is the story of the master switch that keeps our internal army from turning into a group of insurgents.

Meet World's Smartest Physicist Alive

In the quiet woods of Princeton, New Jersey, there is a sanctuary where the ordinary rules of the world seem suspended. Here, at the Institute for Advanced Study, a tall man with hazy eyes walks the same stone paths once trodden by Albert Einstein. His name is Edward Witten, and among the assembly of geniuses, he stands apart—a thinker often called a "high priest" of theoretical physics and the "Darth Vader of Physics" for his formidable intellectual power. Witten is the only physicist ever to be awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor. His influence is so vast that his intuition alone has steered the direction of entire fields for decades, with his scholarly impact ranking him among the most referenced scientists in history.