HDBI Podcast

Podcast transcript: Made the Same Way

Episode 1: What makes us human?

Oneda

You're listening to Made the Same Way, the podcast for those who are curious about how we humans are made. My name is Oneda. I'm a rapper, producer and songwriter from Manchester, and in this series we're discovering how we get from a fertilised egg to a fully functioning human being. To answer this I've teamed up with HDBI. That's the Human Developmental Biology Initiative to explore science in a brand new way. Each episode will bring together one emerging artist and one knowledgeable researcher to discuss science, life and music. And at the end of each episode, the pair will have a limited amount of time to collaborate on an original piece inspired by their conversation.

Karis Jade

Do you think that science can ever answer the question of what makes us human?

Emma

I'd love to say that it can because I love science but I suspect - I suspect we're pushing the limit here - no, we can't.

Oneda

In this episode, Emma, a senior researcher and lung specialist, meets carries a singer-songwriter from Bolton. Now, Emma actually invited us down to her lab in Cambridge to record this, so we are piled into our Citroen C1 and headed down the M6 from Manchester. Emma gave us a tour of her lab and showed us what her team were working on. You can watch all the behind the scenes footage of that day by following the link in the episode description.

Emma

Why don't you complete my? Office. Let's go. Are we good?

Oneda

After the touring the lab, Emma and Karis sat down to chat about the basics of human developmental biology. What is it? Why is it worth studying? And what will it be used for in the future? Now this episode may include some discussions of abortion, miscarriage, and infertility, so be cautious and decide if it's something that you'd like to listen to. We've also included some support resources in episode description.

Karis Jade

So I've just had the tour of your lab. Thank you so much for having us and welcoming us into your space. I would like to know a bit more about you, if that's OK. So, tell me about yourself I guess!

Emma

Thanks, Karis. Well, thank you for coming. Pleasure to show visitors around. So I'm Emma Rawlins and I'm a research scientist. My lab works on human lung development and how you build the lung in a baby.

Karis Jade

I don't know how your brain does it, and I've said that multiple times today, but I will never understand how people's brains are so powerful.

Emma

Please tell me about yourself too.

Karis Jade

I'm Karis. Hello! I'm 22. I have a four year old son. I'm a singer-songwriter. And got a C in science.

Emma

How are you feeling about what we're going to do today?

Karis Jade

I'm excited to kind of get an insight into something that I know so little about, but I'm so interested in in a sense, because obviously I have a child. So the development of children or just people in general, really intrigues me.

Emma

That's brilliant. I'm pretty excited too. It's always fun to share what we do and try and convince people it's interesting because we think it’s fascinating.

Karis Jade

It is. It really is.

Emma

We’re very lucky to do work what we love and I would love to know more about what you do. Because it's a closed world to me.

Karis Jade

Yeah, well I sing-songwrite, but for me personally I always talk about things that I really, really believe in and kind of write music to heal in a way.

Emma

How did you get into it?

Karis Jade

I find that I've I've always been into music. I've always been doing music. My dad funnily enough influenced me the most musically. I think he was always listening to the most amazing like reggae upbeat songs and my eldest brother Daniel, he's always listened to music and then passed that down to like my sister who's always listening to music, who passed it on to my brother, Superlative, that is has always been into music. But when I was around I think, young, must have been about when we moved to Bolton, so we moved in 2009 when I was nine. And I think in about 2011, 2012, I was like please can I make music with you? And he's just like, you're not ready yet. Yeah, I've always been into music. Just. Waiting for the time, really. And I guess the time is now.

Emma

It certainly sounds like it! Exciting.

Karis Jade

Thank you!

Emma

I'm really interested to see if you find anything at all inspiring about what we do and whether there's anywhere you can bring science into one of your songs in the future, hopefully today.

Karis Jade

Hopefully you can help me!

Emma

Hopefully I'd love to know just what you think as well, whether you think what we're doing is interesting and will be of use to people because that's also clearly what we want.

Karis Jade

Yeah, I think that is absolutely going to be abuse to people and is of use to people. I don't really think about like the facts that people are doing these very important jobs and people are using their brains to really, really, really make a difference in life itself before it's even life, so I'm definitely going to take inspiration from this a thousand percent. What is your knowledge of music?

Emma

It's quite limited. Obviously music's big.

Karis Jade

Of course.

Emma

So I used to play the flute a lot when I was younger. I stopped about 13 years ago when I had my first child and was just too busy.

Karis Jade

How long did you play the flute for?

Emma Rawlins

From when I was about 10 to about 32.

Karis Jade

That's insane! When's the last time you played it?

Emma

I actually played it about a year ago at my dad's 70th. I complained my dad's band on one song I was - my 70-year old dad has a band. It's amazing. It's quite a recent thing. Good for him!

Karis Jade

Ohh my goodness! Thing that is amazing.

So what is your area of specialty? Like what are you passionate?

Emma

About yeah, I'm a developmental biologist and development biologists study how animals and plants form. So from that fertilised egg to a whole organism. And my lab these days studies lung development. So how you build a lung? So historically we studied mice a lot and more recently, we're actually studying human cells and human developing lungs.

Karis Jade

How does the research of like rats lungs and humans lungs - how do they differ if you know what I mean?

Emma

No, that’s a great question. So mice are smaller than the size of your hand, so there's just the size difference apart from anything else, whereas our lungs fill our entire chest. Mouse lungs are tiny, but actually there's a lot of similarities as well. So some of the cells are different and in slightly different places. But overall, there's a lot of similarities, so that means we can study details of the cells in the dish now we have the human systems. But when you want to study how the human system is actually working in a person, that's actually really hard because we can't go in and mess up your lungs.

Karis Jade

Very true.

Emma

That would be a bad idea. We can manipulate a mouse lung and at least have a whole body context. That's what the mice can give us that is very hard to get from the human research.

Karis Jade

OK.

Emma

So we talked about mice and human. And for years, we could only study mice because we didn't have a way of studying human cells. And actually, it's quite recent – in the last 10,11,12 years, we've been able to grow human cells in the dish more easily and actually figure out what's different between mouse and human and how much is the same and what's really exciting about using the human tissue now is that we can get all these human specific details that will be important if we want to take them into therapies later. So what we're doing with HDBI, the Human Developmental Biology Initiative is to use actually human cells and human tissue to study human development. So it's a really exciting time to be a developmental biologist - we couldn't do this a few years ago.

Karis Jade

So one thing that really, really kind of shocked and amazed me about today is that the baby is inside the amniotic fluid, but then the amniotic fluid is also inside the baby's lungs.

Emma

That's exactly right.

Karis Jade

Can you tell me more about that please?

Emma

Yeah. So the baby is sort of swimming in it almost, and it protects the baby. So imagine if you had a bump while you're pregnant. You don't want the baby to go crashing into the side of the womb and maybe get damaged. So the amniotic fluid protects it, but also it’s produced by the lungs, partly so the lung is making it and it goes in and out of the lungs as the baby is actually in the womb already making inhalation, exhalation movements. Almost - we think it's almost practise breathing. But actually one hypothesis that we have in the lab is that those movements are also important for the normal development of the lung.

Karis Jade

So the baby is already in amniotic fluid. But it also produces it?

Emma

Yeah it does… so let's take a step back. So after fertilisation, when the egg implants, the fertilised egg and implants into the wall of the womb, then it starts to divide and it makes some very early cell- fate is what we call cell-fate decisions. Initially all the cells are the same. Then after a little bit some of the cells decide to be part of the placenta that will be, of course, what connects the baby to the mother so it can get oxygen and it can get nutrition during the pregnancy and the rest of it will decide to be the baby proper. And we love this as developmental biologists because it just happes, so we call it self-organising. So you've been pregnant, I've been pregnant. You don’t have to think about it or tells the baby what to do.

Karis Jade

Yeah, exactly.

Emma

It just naturally does it. At that point cells from the fertilised egg, they're going to become part of the of the support, so they make an amniotic sack, which sort of lines the uterus as well as connecting to the placenta and the mother’s cells. And that's when lots of fluids starts to be produced. So the fluid is produced by the embryo and by some of the supporting cells, as well as the whole baby develops.

Karis Jade

We don't even tell it to do it.

Emma

We don’t even tell it to do it.

Karis Jade

Our bodies – amazing.

Emma

Yeah. Nature is totally amazing. It just happens.

Karis Jade

Yes, really, really. Is it really is.

Emma

So the self-organising process that a fertilised egg does, development biology, is really understanding how that works. So how you make these first few cell-fate decisions? But then as the embryo grows, how you build organs, how some cells get allocated to the brain, how some get allocated to the intestine or the hand? Or every other part of you which has to form. And studying how that all works together to produce a final organism at the end is what the study of development biology is all about.

Karis Jade

So how exactly do you study that?

Emma

So yeah, we have lots of different ways as development biologists, so you can study different animals as models for human development. But what we're doing as part of the HDI is actually studying human cells themselves. So we have human material that comes from two sources. So we can get fertilised embryos that cannot be used for IVF. So if a couple or an individual has more fertilised eggs than they can use, and they no longer want to store them, they can choose, if they want to, to donate them to research. And we can grow them in the lab for up to about, well, legally, for up to 14 days. Usually we go for less than that. To study how the different cell fate decisions are made in the very, very early embryo.

Karis Jade

OK, that's very interesting.

Emma

But so those are the first decisions like, am I gonna be part of the baby or am I gonna be part of the supporting material? That's of course also essential for the baby to be born. But if we want to study later fate decisions - so how do you build a limb? How do you build a brain or an eye or a lung? (Which is my favourite organ!) Then we can also get human cells, and we do that by using a tissue bank called the HDBR, the Human Developmental Biology Resource. So what that is, is people who are having abortions can choose, if they want to, to donate part of the fetus for research.

Karis Jade

OK.

Emma

So we can - or actually there's a tissue bank that organises all of this - so we don't go anywhere near the donating mothers. That's actually really, really important. The scientists themselves are at arm's length. So there’s a tissue bank that organises this and we have projects registered with the tissue bank for all of the different HDBI labs. And different labs can obtain, for example, a piece of brain, or a piece of lung when the donation has been made. And then we can grow those cells in the lab to study how they're talking to each other, how they are making these fate decisions, we can label them, we can change the DNA in them. But only for a few days in the lab in order to understand how those decisions happen.

Karis Jade

Very intricate sounds very, very, very intricate. I know you were talking before about how cells can get dirty in the lab..

Emma

Well, yeah. So when we grow in the lab, you've got to keep the cultures clean. Imagine you have a sneeze just as you're growing some precious cells - you could have lost a whole experiment, and actually that's tissue that somebody donated to us for us to try and learn something important about life.

Karis Jade

Very true.

Emma

So it's really important that we keep that clean. But that's why we have special hoods - in order to keep the air clean around the cells and work on them separately.

Karis Jade

So why is this research so important? And why do you choose to study it?

Emma

So we're really lucky: we choose study it because we love it and we think it's fascinating! But also we're funded to do medical research. So we think in the long term what we're learning will help other people and there's several different ways that might happen. So I talked a little bit about the leftover embryos in IVF that can't be used. So one thing that actually HDBI scientists are doing is trying to understand which of those embryos are more likely to implant successfully so that you can improve the success rate of IVF.

Karis Jade

OK.

Emma

So I don’t know if you have friends that have gone through this, it's a very difficult procedure and often doesn't work. So if we could improve that, that would be amazing. But sort of other thing we're interested in is just then how do you build the embryo normally? Then we can try and understand what sometimes goes wrong. So a pretty common what we call a birth defect is a hole in the heart. So during normal development, there is a hole in the heart and it has to close just before birth. And that sometimes that just doesn't happen. So we're trying to study how that closes, how does it normally close, and in the long term - could you make that closure happen without resorting to surgery, for example. Because I can't imagine what that must be like to give birth, and then have that tiny baby taken for surgery a couple of days later. That would be so traumatic.

But the other big thing we think about is not just development. So, you might not know, but cancer is often reactivating a developmental process, but in the wrong place. So if we can understand how you get normal development, could we improve the cancer treatment? And similarly, if your heart was injured or your lungs were damaged by disease, then could we choose to reactivate a developmental process in order to repair them? So these are long term goals that we have. We're not gonna do it tomorrow, but this is what we’re working towards.

Karis Jade

Yeah, of course, and you've got to start somewhere.

So very big question that I have for you: what do you think makes us human?

Emma

I wish I could answer that question, but I can give you a bit of waffle…

Karis Jade

Yes please.

Emma

I think it's everything. So I think it's the obvious thing is how our brains are different to animals. But I think on top of that, it's how our brains are coupled to the rest of our body. I'm sure that walking upright is actually a big part of what makes us human. And how we can move our hands… And on top of that, I don't know about you, but I find my hormones control a lot of my emotions and my feelings. And that's another big part of what makes us human – how they act on our body and how they act on our brain. So I think it all comes together in a… yeah, something that probably we’re never gonna understand. Not fully.

Karis Jade

Yeah, I believe that. I believe that too.

Emma

Do you think makes us human?

Karis Jade

I believe that our consciousness, our level of consciousness, makes us human. Obviously, our cells and our stuff like that. But I believe that we have a level of consciousness that is unfathomable even to us, like our brains are so, so, so powerful, so much more powerful than a lot of things - which also makes us a lot weaker, I believe because we have so many more things to consider like other people's feelings and thoughts and yeah, and losses and stuff like that. Do you think that science can ever answer the question of what makes us human?

Emma

I'd love to say that it can because I love science, and I suspect I suspect we're pushing the limit here, no we can’t.

Karis Jade

Yeah.

Emma

I don't think we're even - I'm not neurobiologist - But I don't think we even close to understanding how we're conscious. So I’d be very surprised if in our lifetimes at least, we can answer that question.

Karis Jade

Very true. Think about the things that like 100 years ago, we didn't know or even like, 50 years ago, we didn't know or even ten years ago we didn't know. It's just insane! How do you make sure that people see this research as beneficial?

Emma

Yeah, that's a good question. Clearly, we want to keep doing this research because we think it's going to help people and in the long term, we think it's going to help cure disease. But obviously it's gonna take us a while to get there and I guess what we need to do is keep talking to people about it, like having conversations like this, engaging with people to say, are we asking the right question? If we could help cure your lung disease, would that be a good thing? Would it be worth trying to make IVF more efficient? Do the public, so anyone in society think that would be a good outcome? So I guess it's always going to be a two-way conversation.

Karis Jade

Yeah, of course.

Emma

So as we're having this discussion now, do you think the people, the public in general, should have a say in how we do science and what we do?

Karis Jade

Yes and no, because some people will just say stuff to say stuff. I guess as long as people have researched a little bit and aren't just guessing in a way if that makes sense? Then I think people should have input as long as it is considered safe by the scientists. Because I don't know what should be done or not.

Emma

But don't you think your opinion is important? I guess I'm gonna push back on that.

Karis Jade

Yeah, of course.

Emma

Don't you think that you have a valid opinion about whether we should be treating a disease or whether actually this is just too expensive, this is something society can't afford possibly. What if what we come up with is just so expensive that nobody can afford it except Elon Musk.

Karis Jade

No, that's very, very, very true. I guess I didn't think of being involved in that way in the sense of like having a say of whether we should or shouldn't do something, especially if it is like expensive like you say or there are I guess more urgent things I say that with air quotes because I don't know what’s considered more urgent.

Emma

So a lot of the time the lab was thinking about very serious diseases, but actually that's not always the case. So should the public be involved in deciding what is considered a disease and what's just the spectrum of normal humans? We don't want us all to be the same. I'd be distressed by a world like that.

Karis Jade

I think that if the public are affected, then they should be involved in decision making. I guess at least to a certain degree based on their level of knowledge about the subjects.

Emma

You don't want decisions about you just be made by a doctor.

Karis Jade

Of course, but also, if the doctor is educated and the doctor's saying don't eat lemons because you're allergic to lemons, I'm probably not gonna eat lemons.

Emma

That would be good advice I’m sure.. I think these are difficult questions and actually something we're thinking about a lot, a lot at the HDBI project. So how much should we be asking the public about what we want to do and how much should we be talking about what is normal? We definitely don't want to prescribe that scientist. We want our work to be relevant and useful society.

So bearing all this in mind, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Karis Jade

I feel like you can only be optimistic because if you're pessimistic, then what? Then everything's going to go downhill, isn't it? But no, I genuinely am optimistic for the future. Because of the research that's being done in places like this, which is amazing. What about you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future and where do you see the research going in the future?

Emma

I'm optimistic. I'm an optimistic person. I think possibly the same as you. We have to be. But I'm optimistic for many of the same reasons as you - that it's exciting time to be a developmental biologist, it’s an exciting time to do biology, but it's exciting time to be alive! To be open to a diversity of spectrum and opinions and just have open conversations about the biology and about consciousness and the future of the research. I see the future of research as moving gradually, gradually into the clinic, so of having groups of cells in a dish that can model different human conditions. And working our way towards treatments and hopefully personalised treatments. But on top of that you've been pregnant, so you know there's lots of medicines you’re just not allowed to take when you're pregnant, because we don't know what they'll do to the unborn baby. But if we could test that the dish, wouldn't that be better?

Karis Jade

Very true.

Emma

So I think inching our way towards that scenario where we know a lot more about normal development and can use that knowledge to just improve simple things like can you take your depression medicine while you're pregnant up to more complex things as can we cure or improve, if not cure, this horrible disease.

When I was a kid, you know, looking around the playground, if somebody's mum or somebody's auntie was diagnosed with breast cancer, we all knew that was a death sentence. We didn't know what to say. We all knew that that person would be dead, probably within the year. And now, 25 years later, that world has changed. And I can see the difference in my lifetime that many women who get breast cancer can be treated, and many, many will have a good outcome. And I'm optimistic that we can keep moving forward.

Karis Jade

You've touched on the fact that it is a good time to be a developmental scientist. Why is that?

Emma

Even in my research lifetime, we can do so much more than we used to. So we could never grow human cells in a dish. So our HDBI project would have been totally unimaginable, even probably 6-7 years ago. We were just scratching the surface of it. And on top of that, we now have, you may heard of gene editing technology - tools called CRISPR - that we can actually alter the genomes of the cells that we have growing in the dish and really figure out what things are trying to do. We have better microscopes than we ever imagined would be possible, again, when I was doing my PhD 20 years ago, we can now see within a cell and see the details of 1 molecule talking to another molecule.

So putting this together, we're very hopeful that we can get to the physiology and the medicine and the cures that we want, but it will take time, if I'm honest. The more we learn, the more we realise we have to know.

Karis Jade

Of course. Yeah, of course.

Emma

I really believe that in within a few years we could be drug testing on models of embryos to see what is dangerous to a developing embryo and what isn't. And I'm very hopeful that we can be moving towards regenerative medicine. So actually rather than trying to treat a disease, trying to get rid of it completely by just regenerating the tissue. So I'm very hopeful that we will get to that possibly the lifetime of my children.

Karis Jade

Amazing,

Emma

But it could be wrong! We may never get it to work. So that's my vision for the future - the future of my field. But do you think about the future when you're making music?

Karis Jade

I do. I think about the future from a perspective of me being there and looking back or listening back to the song and thinking like what mindset was I in? Where was I trying to be? What kind of person was I trying to be? Who did I want to be at this point? And yeah, it's very, very, very humbling and it's like having a diary. But also like everyone else can hear it. But it's nice, it's really nice.

So how has this conversation been for you?

Emma

I've really enjoyed it. It’s forced me to think about some different ways of thinking about the research and what we want to do, and I've really enjoyed learning about your world and music.

Karis Jade

Thank you. I feel the same. I feel very much the same and it's been nice to kind of share it because I guess I don't really speak to people about why I make music, because it's just like I don't. I just kind of do it. So it's nice - I'm very interested in what you do, so it's nice that you're so interested in what I do. I feel like we've swapped worlds for a little bit. It's been very nice. Thank you!

Emma

Thank you! I think it's helpful just to be reminded of what people are interested in. And that we just because we love it, because we think it's important - that actually, it is important to other people too, especially a bad day, when experiments aren't working and we're feeling fed up in the lab. But the big picture, which we forget day-to-day - and the big picture of where this is going and where we want it to go for society is what's actually important. And I think it's beneficial just to think as well, maybe critically about what we do. And is it helpful if we can cure these diseases?

Karis Jade

Time for the creative part.

Emma

OK, let's go for it. What do you want to do?

Karis Jade

You want to do so my thoughts are I would love to get some keywords from you. Some like key topics, maybe like sentences about those things. And then I would like to - I'd like to kind of piece in development in general, so the development of ourselves and the, I think the base line of this, like the moral of the story of development in general is that we have to put in the work to be able to do it, and it's not just a thing that happens overnight like it's not just the thing that happens straight away. We have to put in work and maybe fail and get back up and stuff like that.

Emma

I think that's exciting. Your also make me think of the time and the effort of being pregnant. You're pregnant for nine months! And your body is working so hard in that time to support the new life that’s getting on on it’s own without you in some ways, but also needs you.

Karis Jade

But yeah, yeah, we could do. I guess we could do like different verses for different things that we've learned or discussed today. This is gonna be so stunning. So what would you like to include about developmental biology?

Emma

It's a definite idea of – that it just happens - that nature does it and nature, most of the time, amazingly gets it right - whatever we discover, we discuss is right is… I guess the whole spectrum would be right. As we've discussed.

Karis Jade

Very true. Everything is spectrum.

Emma

But on top of that? I think the intricacy of it, how tiny all these things are, but how fast they're growing, and how the cells are talking to each other within the developing… let's say baby. But how they're talking to the mother to tell the mother to supply what they need.

Karis Jade

I think that that also could – that is also beautiful because communication is so important for growth in general.

Emma

And that is part of what you try and do in your work! That's what I got from you.

Karis Jade

I love that! – Communication is key to growth in almost anything.

Emma

You type so fast, I'm impressed.

Karis Jade

Thank you so much!

Emma

Does that bring us back to that question of what makes us human that we touched on as well?

Karis Jade

Well, I mean it does now! Yeah, I guess, yeah. I guess we could start the song being like, what are we? Like what is any of this?

Emma

Then it's a constant development.

Karis Jade

Yeah, maybe I'm thinking just a little bit, if you wanted to play the flute in the track? Don't feel pressured, but feel a little tiny bit pressured… just a healthy amount.

Emma

That that's really kind. And yeah, something very simple, very happy to contribute.

Karis Jade

Yes, that's amazing. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Musical piece (Karis Jade)

I think we need to take it back to the start, take it back to the start

I think we need to focus on what really tells us all apart.

Tell me what that means to be human, think of who we are.

Tell me how you feel being human, tell me who you are.

The development is constant. Nature flourishes with us.

Not everything we do is chosen, but everything we do tends to take part together.

Leave it up to her for she will grow in strength.

Our mother, our land.

Leave it up to them, for they will do just like mother, our bodies, ourselves, combined.

The intricacy it all, the intricacy of it.

Like our cells, we are holy, we are small.

Let’s help our bodies to live on it.

Our bodies, our beings, our minds, our souls, our hobbies, our pleasures are grind it shows through the beauty of it.

Her nature, her leaves, her mountains, her beings, her seas, she wallows and leaves and grows with us, be astonished.

We carry our own selves, communicating alone, multiplying, we’ve no control of the beauty of it.

Listen to your mind and your soul. What can we do to make us whole?

Listen to your mind and your soul. What can we do to make us whole?

Oneda

You've been listening to Made the Same Way. Thank you for listening, and thanks to Emma for dropping some flute on that track – that was sick! Next time we're looking at the history of human developmental biology: how was the science done before? How did they perform experiments, and who did they do them on? How is it different today? And is it really possible to rap about it? It you'll find out next time! Subscribe to Made the Same Way so that you never miss an episode. And please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts to help others find us. Made the Same Way is a Reform Radio production for HDBI, which is funded by Wellcome. It was produced by Olivia Swift with help from Jamie Green.

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