A news story was circulating a few months ago—a woman in Australia came into the hospital with abdominal pain. She was increasingly forgetful and struggling with depression. Her doctors were stumped for over a year. What was causing her symptoms? Turns out she had a three-inch parasitic worm living in her brain. They took it out, and she recovered.
How do doctors crack cases like this? How do you even know to check for a brain worm? This is the specialty of Dr. Joe DeRisi. When doctors run into a diagnostic dead end they call him. In his world, brain worms aren’t even that rare. (Ask him about brain-eating amoebas.)
Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. DeRisi, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and president of the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub San Francisco, about his fascinating work solving some of the most vexing medical mysteries, and how it may even help detect the next pandemic-inducing pathogen.
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Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
770: Finding Purpose In A ‘Wild Life’
769: Archeopteryx Specimen Unveiled | Trees And Shrubs Burying Great Plains' Prairies
768: JWST Detects An Atmosphere Around A Rocky Exoplanet | Boeing Plans To Fly Humans To The ISS Next Week
767: Challenging The Gender Gap In Sports Science
766: What Martian Geology Can Teach Us About Earth
765: How Louisiana Is Coping With Flooding In Cemeteries
764: Inside Iowa State’s Herbarium | Science-Inspired Art From ‘Universe of Art’ Listeners
763: Science From Iowa’s Prairies | Planning To Go See Cicadas? Here’s What To Know
762: Maybe Bonobos Aren't Gentler Than Chimps | Art Meets Ecology In A Mile-Long Poem
761: When Products Collect Data From Your Brain, Where Does It Go?
760: Visualizing A Black Hole’s Flares In 3D
759: The 4,000-Year History of Humans and Silk
758: Flint’s Water Crisis, 10 Years Later | Underwater Cables Could Help Detect Tsunamis
757: Fighting Banana Blight | Do Birds Sing In Their Dreams?
756: Why Is Solving The Plastic Problem So Hard?
755: What Worsening Floods Mean For Superfund Sites
754: The Global Mental Health Toll Of Climate Change | Capturing DNA From 800 Lakes In One Day
753: Clean Energy Transition Progress | Avian Flu In Cattle And Humans Has Scientists Concerned
752: A Cheer For The Physics Of Baseball
752: Carbon Cost Of Urban Gardens And Commercial Farms | Why There's No Superbloom This Year
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