Conversations with Giants in Medicine
In this final episode of the series, the Conversations with Giants in Medicine series comes to a close. The JCI is heading in a new direction with its video content, and Ushma Neill too will be heading in a different career direction that makes it hard to continue the series with the same care. As is often noted, “All good things must come to an end.” Please watch a supercut of the last question she asked each subject, “What other vocation could have kept you as motivated?”
In this episode, Editor at Large Ushma Neill interviews Dr. Zhijian (James) Chen. Zhijian (James) Chen (University of Texas Southwestern and HHMI) has had a storied research career focused on the molecular mechanisms of innate immunity, the body's immediate response to pathogens. His discovery of the cGAS enzyme that senses foreign and self-DNA brought him to New York to accept the 2024 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for a recent conversation.
In this episode, Ushma Neill speaks with the living Editors in Chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. They were asked to reflect on their time as editors and their favorite memories.
In this episode, Ushma Neill talks with Dr. Stanley Prusiner. The discovery that a protein alone could be infectious, proposed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California San Francisco, was considered heretical in 1982. Now considered orthodoxy, at that time scientists thought that the only infectious agents could be bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. We now know that these proteins, termed prions, which acquire an alternative shape and coax their neighboring proteins to do the same, undergird a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For his dogma-shattering work, Dr. Prusiner has been widely recognized, including with the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Ushma Neill with the Journal of Clinical Investigation Series, Conversations with Giants in Medicine met Dr. Elias Zerhouni at the Lasker Awards in September of 2023 and jumped at the opportunity to be able to spend an hour with him. Zerhouni, who is Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and Vice Chairman and President of OPKO Health, is a radiologist by training, who focused much of his research on CT and MRI-based imaging methods to diagnose cancer and cardiovascular diseases. He notably served as the director of the US National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008 and later as president of global research and development at Sanofi.
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ISSN: 0021-9738 (print), 1558-8238 (online)