Co-creation with nature, magic lanterns, and confused turtles

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp; This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art</a>and the&nbsp;<a href="https://art.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa School of Art and Art History</a>, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,&nbsp;<a href="http://verorosesmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Vero Rose Smith.</a> Today we welcome <a href="http://www.louisefisherart.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Louise Fisher</a>, MFA. Louise Fisher is an Iowa-based artist and holds an MFA in printmaking at Arizona State University. Louise grew up on a farm in her home state of Iowa, where she obtained her BFA degree with honors from the University of Northern Iowa. Since then, she has shown her work nationally and internationally. Fisher’s work is included in private and public collections, including Mid-America Print Council, Zuckerman Museum of Art and the University of North Florida. Her most recent accomplishments include an international residency with the Picker’s Hut in Tasmania and receiving the 2018 SGC International Graduate Fellowship Award. In her work, Louise explores ideas of ephemerality, energetic transformation and life cycles through time-based media as well as the layering and repetitive action of printmaking. Here are some of Louise's sources:“Waking Up the Dark” by Carl Strand“At Day's Close: Night in Times Past” by Roger A. Ekirch“The End of Night” by Paul Bogard“In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki Other links: <a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/5429288/china-chengdu-artificial-moon/%3famp=true" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/5429288/china-chengdu-artificial-moon/%3famp=true</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2019/04/satellites-ads-space-startrocket-sky-canvas-ale-elysium.amp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2019/04/satellites-ads-space-startrocket-sky-canvas-ale-elysium.amp</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://therevelator.org/cities-ranked-light-pollution/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://therevelator.org/cities-ranked-light-pollution/</a>&nbsp; <a href="http://www.publicspaceone.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.publicspaceone.com</a>&nbsp; <a href="https://resartis.org/listings/the-pickersea-hut-glaziers-bay/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://resartis.org/listings/the-pickersea-hut-glaziers-bay/</a>&nbsp;“Estrogen and testosterone production jumped upward when early humans brought firelight inside of their caves, convincing their bodies that the days were actually growing longer and that it was time to mate. Human females (who were then most fertile in late summer, when food was plentiful) gradually became capable of reproducing at any time of the year… Call it the birth of human ambition, if you will, or the birth of human culture, but with fire and increased fertility came the idea that a human being ought to be more. And with these came the idea that a human being was more. Humans were the big picture. Nature was only the backdrop for their story, because humans were the point.” - Carl Strand&nbsp; Music was written, performed, and produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gevanek" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabi Vanek</a>.

The End of Night with Louise Fisher, MFA

Randomness, symmetry, and the art of physics

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp; This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art</a>and the&nbsp;<a href="https://art.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa School of Art and Art History</a>, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,&nbsp;<a href="http://verorosesmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Vero Rose Smith.</a> Today we welcome physicist and artist <a href="https://physics.uiowa.edu/people/yannick-meurice" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Yannick Meurice</a>, PhD. Yannick teaches collaborative classes about the intersection of art and physics and works in nonlinear dynamics, mathematical physics, condensed matter and materials physics, and particle physics. Dr. Meurice is a specialist in lattice field theory. Music was written, performed, and produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gevanek" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabi Vanek</a>.

The End of Physics? with Yannick Meurice, PhD

Tactility of magazines, evolution of communication, and the constancy of community

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp; This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art</a>and the&nbsp;<a href="https://art.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa School of Art and Art History</a>, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,&nbsp;<a href="http://verorosesmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Vero Rose Smith.</a> Today we welcome Matthew Steele, artist, writer, and publisher of <a href="https://littlevillagemag.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Little Village Magazine</a> and Genevieve Trainor, editor of multiple comic book anthologies and arts editor of Little Village Magazine.Music was written, performed, and produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gevanek" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabi Vanek</a>.

The End of Print Media with Matthew Steele and Genevieve Trainor, Little Village Magazine

Conservation, fascist art, and artistic responses to fascism 

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp; This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art</a>and the&nbsp;<a href="https://art.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa School of Art and Art History</a>, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,&nbsp;<a href="http://verorosesmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Vero Rose Smith.</a> Today we welcome Joyce Tsai, PhD. Tsai is Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Art and Art History and Chief Curator at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, and Director of the Intermedia Research Initiative. Her curatorial, pedagogical, and scholarly work engage questions of technology, politics, philosophy in modern and contemporary art. Her book,&nbsp;László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography, is winner of the Phillips Collection Book Prize. Music was written, performed, and produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gevanek" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabi Vanek</a>.

The End of Art with Joyce Tsai, PhD

Public health apocalypse, people-first language, and community care

The End of Public Health with Sarah Ziegenhorn

The importance of early science experiences, international collaboration and communication, and mice gone viral

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp; This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Art at the End of the World is a hybrid class and public program series supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art</a>and the&nbsp;<a href="https://art.uiowa.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Iowa School of Art and Art History</a>, and taught by Associate Curator of Special Projects,&nbsp;<a href="http://verorosesmith.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Vero Rose Smith.</a> Today’s guest is&nbsp;<a href="https://medicine.uiowa.edu/microbiology/profile/lilliana-radoshevich" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lilly Radoshevich, PhD</a>. Lilly is Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa, and runs a lab dedicated to exploring listeria. She also has a very cute dog Music was written, performed, and produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gevanek" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabi Vanek</a>. Transcript edited by Ellie Zupancic, University of Iowa Class of 2020 --FULL TRANSCRIPT-- THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists.&nbsp;This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. I’m Vero Rose Smith, your host, and this is Art at the End of the World.&nbsp; Today’s guest is Lilly Radoshevich, Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa. Lilly received her BA in biology and French at Grinnell College, also in Iowa, and her PhD in biology and biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco. Our conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020.&nbsp; S: I’m really excited for your answers, and I’m sorry we have to do it in this format, but I appreciate your being flexible. If you could introduce yourself and tell us about your current role— R: My name is Lilly Radoshevich and I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. I am a scientist and I have teaching duties with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but my primary role is to run a research laboratory. We work on the host—that means us—and cell response to bacteria; in particular, the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, which you’ve probably heard about in the context of food recalls. The idea behind our research is to try to learn more about cell stress pathways, including pathways that are normally antiviral, in order to see whether or not we can target them. But, right now in this unprecedented time, I've actually switched some of my work to working in collaboration with Stanley Perlman and Wendy Mauri on Coronavirus; so that's kind of exciting. S: Wow—I know you're really passionate about Listeria because you have a dog whose name is Lister; that’s lovely. R: Yeah, that is after Dr. Joseph Lister, so equally nerdy; but he was really important for our times currently because he figured out that doctors were giving their patients bacterial infections. He was one of the first to figure out how to sanitize operating rooms and to instill in doctors to wash their hands, which is a very relevant and timely topic. S: Is it ever. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are professionally? What is your background and your training? R: Yes; I actually went to college in Iowa, at Grinnell College, just an hour away. At that point, I was really interested in human health. Initially what I thought I wanted to be was a medical doctor, but then I realized I was really more fascinated by scientific questions associated with human health, and that I was better suited to being in a laboratory. So, at Grinnell, I was given the amazing opportunity to do a summer abroad where I worked in a lab at the Pasteur Institute—which is one of the birthplaces of microbiology—and that inspired me even further. After that, I went and did my PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Francisco, and after my PhD in which I was working on host cell stress responses that are altered in cancer biology, I switched back to working on host-pathogen interactions during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. So, because of that early exposure I had, I ended up applying and working for six years abroad at the Pasteur Institute. Then, after that, I applied for my own laboratory and the University of Iowa hired me—and that's how I found myself here. S: Thank you; and for anybody that might not know: where's the Pasteur Institute located? R: The Pasteur Institute is located in Paris, France, and it was initially established by Louis Pasteur himself. Right now, it's a very vibrant research campus in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, so there they currently work on lots of bacterial pathogens; they also work on the current Coronavirus and lots of emerging pathogens. The emerging pathogens are typically viral infections, so there's a laboratory currently working around the clock on Coronavirus there, too. S: To work and live in France did you need to also have fluency in the French language? R: Yeah; in general, science is very international, so many people do a postdoctoral fellowship abroad. We’re lucky, with English as our first language, that the language of science currently is English, so we publish and present in English. But, you don't just interact with your colleagues and labmates when you're living abroad. I actually was a French major at Grinnell as well, and that helped me a lot in my day-to-day interactions. You can imagine that some people work in a lab who might not have ever lived abroad—so interacting with my colleagues and labmates, speaking French, was really, really useful. But many of my American colleagues in that laboratory didn't speak French initially when they arrived—they took classes and developed the language during their postdoctoral fellowship. S: Amazing. Before college how did you get interested in this work? What originally drew you to this interest in the human body? R: I think at the most fundamental level, I'm something of a hypochondriac—and it is not a good time to be a hypochondriac right now—but very early on, in high school, I did the International Baccalaureate program. I had really excellent teachers in biology, and at that point, because we didn't we didn't have opportunities that people do today, a lot of it was looking at the world around us and at ecology. I also had great middle school teachers that inspired me to get into science early on—in terms of looking into native animals, for example. I'm from Colorado. There was a teacher at that time who got us involved in tracking bighorn sheep, and that was really exciting. But I was really always interested in this question about how viruses and bacteria make us sick; I've always been drawn to that kind of interaction, and I wanted to understand it at a molecular level. But I also wanted my work to give back in some way. So, my ultimate goal is that hopefully, down the line maybe thirty to forty years, some of the stuff that we're working on in my lab, and some of the questions that we’re working on, could be actually applied to human health—whether that is in the context of infection, or—one really cool thing is that you can learn things, using the bacteria or the virus as a tool, about our host cells that might be important in other human pathologies, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer; so one other thing is that fundamental research can, in host-pathogen interactions, actually help us learn about other really important human diseases.&nbsp; S: Could you give us a little bit more information about what exactly microbiology and immunology are?&nbsp; R: Yeah! Microbiology is the study of microorganisms; this is loosely determined by the size of the organisms that we work on—that could be bacteria, viruses. That could also be parasites. Immunology is the study of our immune system. So, broadly speaking, each one of our cells has the capacity to detect foreign intruders and that would be innate immunity. Then there's a number of cells that can come in and help protect our body from infection, and those are our innate immune cells that patrol all the time. These would be cells like neutrophils or macrophages that eat up pathogens and could be thought of as first responders to an infection. Then there's a branch of immunology that studies our adaptive immune response. I think, probably, you've been hearing a lot about the idea of seroconversion—that means when your body has started to make antibodies to a pathogen. Another test that we can use in the Coronavirus example is whether or not people have actually been infected, but didn't realize because they are asymptomatic—their adaptive immune system will make a response that can be detected through a blood test.&nbsp; S: Follow-up question: has studying immunology and microbiology helped you personally address your hypochondriac-isms? R: I am not sure. I would say that, especially during our stay-at-home, shelter-in-place mandate, every day I think seasonal allergies might be the Coronavirus. I'm sure I'm not the only one. S: You are definitely not. R: Even though I understand it, I would say the really difficult piece of this particular disorder is that you could be carrying the virus, infected for many days, before you show symptoms. For influenza, that period is a lot shorter, so you can know when you're infected—so I think Coronavirus is maybe worse for a hypochondriac.&nbsp; S: We've kind of touched on one way the world might end according to microbiology and immunology, because we're all living it right now, but can you either expand on our current potential world ending or tell us some other ways the world might end according to your expertise? R: Yeah. I just want to also highlight what a timely topic you picked with this podcast and this series preceding the current epidemic—or pandemic, rather. I would say that, generally, we are worried as a community about two specific things when we're talking about the world ending in our field. One is the emergence of viral pathogens, so you've all heard a lot about that—and I just, at this point, want to say that there's a lot of really great information coming out of the University of Iowa; so if you want to hear more, there are at least four labs working on SARS-2 currently, the virus that causes COVID-19. Those are the labs of Stanley Perlman, Wendy Maury, and Balaji Manicassamy, and a little bit of my lab in collaboration. They were on River to River and everything. If you want to hear more, we actually have a world expert on Coronavirus at the University of Iowa. So, the idea is that, with air travel, the emergence of a virus in a particular area wasn't necessarily confined to that area—that it was spread rapidly and that we would have a major pandemic as a result—and the other really scary scenario, which might be related, is about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. You've heard a lot about this in general and that's because not only do we overuse antibiotics in the clinical setting, but also a lot of our foods, when animals are in large processing plants, for example, are given antibiotics to grow faster in a bad situation. That leads to a lot of bacteria in the soil, contaminating the animals that become resistant. This can easily be transferred to humans that have bacteria on their microbiome (which is the term for the bacteria that colonize us and are helpful) with antibiotic-resistant properties, and then they can pass it to pathogens. So, one thing that might emerge is that, in this current pandemic like in 1918, some of the people that are the sickest, they might actually also have bacterial infections. That seems to be a large comorbidity. Sometimes these are hospital-acquired, and we might find out later that antibiotic-resistant bacteria contributed to this viral pandemic. I would just like to say that I would hope industry- and funding-sources for laboratories emphasize being ready for that, as opposed to reacting after the emergence of an outbreak. S: That's very scary. How are you working to avoid these world endings, or to address our current pandemic? You've talked a little bit about the collaborations your lab is currently undertaking, but I'd love to hear more. R: One of the pathways that we work on in our lab—and, just so everyone's on the same page, you all know about DNA: DNA can be transcribed into a message which is called mRNA, and that mRNA can be translated, just like a language, into a protein. So, one pathway that we work on is an antiviral pathway that's also, we say, upregulated or produced following a bacterial infection. There’s about three hundred of these proteins that are made in an initially-infected cell and by cells in the immune system; what my laboratory does is try to establish some kind of a repertoire of what this particular protein—called ISG15, and that means interferon-stimulated gene of fifteen kilodaltons which is just it's size, it's mass—is doing during both bacterial and viral infections. One thing we've done is we use a technology called mass spectrometry to identify other proteins that this protein is binding to. It's kind of like a molecular tag, and so our idea is that we don't understand what it's doing without figuring out what it's binding to. We've done this in the context of Listeria infection, and we recently published that paper. Now what we're doing is applying that to Coronavirus infection—first in a mouse model for Coronavirus, mirroring Coronavirus, and hopefully then we will be able to work with actual Coronavirus in collaboration with Stanley Perlman and Wendy Maury. S: Can you tell us more about the mouse modeling system? R: Yeah. In general, not all pathogens can actually infect mice readily so, some of the time, when we're looking at the immune response, we have to use a mouse model of infection, because we don't want to just look at tissue culture cells—let me take a step back. A lot of the things we can do can occur in vitro, so that could be cells that are grown in a dish, in the laboratory; but, unfortunately, that doesn't incorporate how an immune response can react to that infection. So, sometimes we look for coculture models or models in a mouse model of infection, but as is the case for this current virus, the human virus does not infect mice, unless they express a version of the receptor, which is ACE2, that is, quote – unquote, humanized. So, using genetic techniques to mimc DNA, some researchers, including Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, have made a mouse that expresses the human receptor for the disease, and then the mice would get sick with the Coronavirus. In my laboratory, we have other genetic models that we look at. We can delete the protein that we're working on, and we can use a model in which the protein and its activity are enhanced, but we would have to cross this mouse model to the humanized mouse model—so, what we're doing, at first, is using a Coronavirus that is called Mouse Hepatitis Virus, and this affects the liver and lungs of mice, and is a natural mouse pathogen that doesn't affect humans, as a model for what we will then do with the Coronavirus, the SARS2 virus. S: Thank you. Is anything giving you hope right now? R: Yeah, I actually wanted to tell people a little bit about the publishing process, and how science works.&nbsp; S: Please. R: Yeah, if we have some non-scientists in the audience. Like any field, typically what we do is work for years—and one misconception about science is that it's easy; well, it's not really easy to do this—so most of the time our experiments fail. Part of these long training processes is learning how to design the best experiments so we can move knowledge forward. The way we share our results is in the form of research papers that synthesize our data in the form of figures, and we talk about it and communicate it to the scientific community. Typically what happens is everything that I talked about, for example, would be put into a paper and that paper would be peer-reviewed. Then I would have to address the comments of my peers and make the paper better for it to then be accepted and published; however, one really interesting thing that gives me a lot of hope is this new system called bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”), which has been taken from the mass community in which peer review takes a really long time—because mathematicians have to do proofs themselves of the same data—and it's a way to publicly share your unpublished data as you submit it to a journal. One really cool thing about this was that scientists in China, where the pandemic started, were sharing their unpublished data about Coronavirus in real time—and that allowed scientists all over the world to share their data as well. The one caveat is that sometimes the studies haven't been seen by peer-review; there was an issue in which some people probably overstated the effect of chloroquine, for example—that paper came out of France. So, on the one hand, you don't get peer review, but on the other hand, scientists are literally sharing, very openly, all of their data. And it is a competitive field, so the fact that people share openly for the greater good of everyone in the community gives me a lot of hope. S: Thank you. Anything else I should have asked? R: That's a good question. I don't know—I would just say be sure to take a look at my colleagues’ interviews if you want to learn more about the Coronavirus work going on at the University of Iowa. And, I just want to say thanks to your students for adapting to remote learning. I'm sure it's not easy, and hopefully we'll all get through this together. S: I think we will. It's always nice to hear from experts who are producing new knowledge in the world. You have such a different perspective from both my students, myself, and our entire broader audience because of this new platform. Thanks so much for your time. R: Thank you for asking me. I had a great time.&nbsp; This has been Art at the End of the World with Vero Rose Smith. Tune in next week to learn about another way in the world may end. The music for this podcast was written, performed, and produced by Gabi Vanek; you can hear more of her work at her Soundcloud, which is linked in the show notes. Thanks, Gabi, and thanks, all of you, for listening.

The End of Microbiology and Immunology with Lilly Radoshevich, PhD

Turtles, Greek islands, pandemics, and the delicate balance of life on Earth

The End of Sustainability with Stratis Giannakouros

This podcast invites entrepreneurs, scientists, farmers, historians, lawyers, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise.

THE WORLD IS ENDING! Again. Doomsdayers and apocalyptic prophets have warned of coming calamity for millennia. Still, humanity persists. This conversation series invites entrepreneurs, scholars, community leaders, artists, and many others to envision the end of the world according to their expertise. Additionally, this series explores apocalyptic artworks housed in the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art's collections.

Art at the End of the World Class

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