The TWiM team discusses eradicating racism in academia and STEM, and a peptide from commensal bacteria that protects skin from damage caused by MRSA.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Elio Schaechter, Michele Swanson and Michael Schmidt
Right click to download TWiM#219 (45 MB .mp3, 62 minutes)
Subscribe to TWiM (free) on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app.
Become a Patron of TWiM!
Links for this episode
- Responsibility in academic research
- Improving equity in faculty hiring (MBoC)
- #ShutDownSTEM
- Peptide protects skin from microbial damage (AAC)
- Agr phase variants in S. aureus (mBio)
- S. aureus quorum sensing system (BMC Res Notes)
- COVID-19 joins pandemic legion (mBio)
- Image credit
Music used on TWiM is composed and performed by Ronald Jenkees and used with permission.
Send your microbiology questions and comments to twim@microbe.tv
Dear TWIV,
I’m glad to see your support of Black Lives Matter, but I’m old enough to remember the sinking feeling I had in the years after the Chicago riots of 1968. Many fine words were spoken then, too, but in the meantime minorities in most places haven’t gotten much more than the right to benevolent neglect. The elephant in the room is the drastic measures and costs that real change would require. Schools, early childhood cognitive support, resettlement of slum dwellers, resocialization of gangs and criminals, universal health care: you might have to swap in the whole defense budget to do it right.
Where I now live, in Germany, nearly everyone has access to the same doctors and hospitals, regardless of income. The facilities are not as fancy nor as well-equipped as in well-heeled areas of the US, but I’ve seen considerably worse in the poorer areas of Boston.
I would hate to see TWIV get sidetracked from what it does best, but with the hard facts and numbers you people are so good at, some occasional but serious talk about these “pluralistic differences” in medical care just might, so to speak, go viral.