Bonnie Bassler Gives a Great TED Lecture
Hi friends of women in science,
We mentioned Bonnie Bassler earlier, when we were trying to think of 5 women in science and looking at other people's lists of women in science. She is a professor at Princeton University who studies bacteroial "quorum sensing"--a topic that sounds more abstruse than it is.
In her recent TED lecture, which you can find here, she talks about how few of the cells in the body are yours, and how many are bacterial. She goes on to say that the bacteria communicate with words that mean "self" and "other", those words being small molecules that they make and secrete outside of their cell bodies. Thus, they can coordinate to all become virulent at once, or all create light at once, or whatever their genes enable them to do once they sense a quorum of bacteria like themselves. Since they also sense other bacteria, they can tell if they are surrounded by just their own species or a big mixture.
Bassler talks about all this in an engaging, jargon-free way, and even describes the new kind of therapy that is being developed to interfere with expression of virulence. I'm interested in how this talk strikes our community. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I think it is quite accessible. Are talks like that, dissminated via TED and other popular outlets, important for women in science to give? Important for the general public to hear? Or just for other scientists?
Cheers,
Laura Hoopes
I really enjoyed the talk on the video. She was clear without being condescending. I'm excited about the potential of what she is doing. It may bypass the need for the antibiotics, just when microbes have pretty much learned how to fight them.
Hi Laura,
I think it's probably time to rerun the "can you name 5" event again. We need to be reminded, from time to time, how invisible women scientists are. Did you know Bassler was the President of the American Society for Microbiology? I mentioned that to someone a few days ago and he said, "Oh, I thought it was Stuart Levy." He was president several years ago, but of course, he's a guy, so he's memorable. And he got a lot of publicity because he fought antibiotic overuse.
She is good at this, and I think she makes a good case that women can do science successfully. But, if I didn't visit this site, I would never have heard of her. We still have a visibility problem, and everything we do to make female scientists more visible is worthwhile. Of course, it all takes time away from research. FBP
I hope Bonnie Bassler does both. I mean I hope she also talks with junior high students, at Sally Ride's camps or elsewhere. I think she'd really get through to them! But I think this kind of TED lecture is also good. I liked that she went all the way from basic research to answer questions to how it could be used to develop new treatments. I think college students, not just the general public, could get a lot out of this.
