TRAILER

Molecules Made Me Do It is a popular-science podcast about the awesome, ingenious and devious molecules behind life, the mind, sex, disease and the cures of the future.

It is presented by Jeremy Smith, a molecular biophysicist who has spent his career trying to understand how pesky little biological molecules work. It’s for literally anyone who is curious , irrespective of whether your last encounter with biology or chemistry was yesterday or an unpleasant middle school lesson several decades ago. No scientific knowledge is assumed! Atoms, molecules, proteins, genes  and all the other characters will be introduced as we meet them. The only prerequisite is that you don’t object to some wry humor thrown in with the serious stuff.

Everything we do is because molecules make us do it.

They make our cells work, allow us to see, think and remember, make us hungry, frightened, excited, sexy, and they make us ill. They poison us,  cure us and occasionally do both. What we do, think and feel is decided by villages of molecules working together, talking and scrapping with each other.

Molecules allow us to see, think, and feel. They make us hungry, frightened and sexy and they occasionally persuade us to do things that seemed an excellent idea at the time but considerably less so the following morning.

Evolution created these molecules and evolution is itself devious. It’s had billions of years to discover molecular tricks that no engineer would have thought of.

The results are molecules with distinct characters.

Some are elegant. Some are promiscuous. Some are ridiculously picky. Some are overly bureaucratic. Some are goon squads and vicious, pitiless destroyers and executioners. Others are comforters and peacemakers, and some are two-faced Gods. So  we’ll discover molecular personalities in the human body. 

Biological molecules are awesome, beautiful and dangerous. The elegant simplicity of DNA, amazing protein machines, pumps and channels – they’re structures of immense beauty and ingenuity.

But where did they all come from? Human beings have been wondering about that for a very long time. The ancient Mesopotamians had an explanation involving what might reasonably be described as aquasex.  We’ll start from aquasex and look at how the chemicals of the early Earth produced life,  and eventually  a little fellow named LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor - the organism from which every living thing on Earth descended

We follow a certain unnamed biophysics professor who is at a party and happens to notice an outrageously attractive female across the room. What happens? We follow everything, from her divine photons entering his eyes, the chemistry of his desire: dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline. We’ll spend quite a bit of time on pleasure molecules  – can’t imagine why - and see how a society of molecules can have such impressive consequences for professorial dignity.

Then we turn to medicine. We’ll look at entertainingly nasty poisons and how they actually became medicines. Then we’ll look at how drugs are discovered today — and we’ll grumble at why the process is spectacularly inefficient, costing billions of dollars per drug and taking over a decade.

We’ll talk about what to do about that. Drug discovery is rapidly changing – we’ll see the brilliant new innovations taking place as we speak.  Finally, we’ll meet Pharmastradamus  - he’s Jeremy’s imaginary computer of the future, and he’s able to quickly pinpoint the right drugs and vaccines for anybody with no side effects. How might he do it? This is the medicine of the future: able to reverse aging, cure Alzheimer’s and cancer, create therapies that will change our genes, personalized medicines designed just for you.

Molecules Made Me Do It is written and presented by Jeremy Smith. 

A popular-science podcast about the beautiful and devious molecules behind life, the mind, sex and the cures of the future. No scientific background required. 

Music written and performed by Jeremy Smith. 

Follow or subscribe to Molecules Made Me Do It wherever you get your podcasts.