8 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
Contributors
APRIL 2020Simone Schuerle was the kind of girl who built cars for her Barbies instead of brushing their hair.
“That was maybe an early indication that I was more interested in engineering,” she says. Focusing at
first on industrial engineering as an undergrad at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany,
Schuerle then gravitated toward the physics department after she happened to hear a lecture on micro-
systems technology. “I learned... how to fabricate very tiny systems, and I was just fascinated about
the huge space and rich engineering opportunities at the nanoscale,” she says. Schuerle is now an assis-
tant professor of biomedical systems engineering at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, where her research
combines “the intelligence of bacteria,” which are especially adept at finding nutrient-rich, low-oxygen
tumors, with magnetic fields to design microrobots to traverse the body and deliver drugs.
Synthetic biologist Ta l Danino still remembers his dad buying a 1989 Packard Bell computer with
a 40-megabyte hard drive and a “turbo button” that launched the machine into a processing speed of 12
megahertz. “I broke that computer so many times,” he says, “and had to fix it both by replacing parts inside
of it and learning how to do little programming things.” After studying math, chemistry, and physics as an
undergrad at the University of California, Los Angeles, Danino pursued a PhD in bioengineering from the
University of California, San Diego. There, he learned to engineer new kinds of systems, including genetic
circuits to “make up an entirely new function in a bacteria,” he says. Danino’s own lab at Columbia Uni-
versity is engineering microbes to express different kinds of drugs, with the ultimate goal of treating many
types of cancer. On page 30, Schuerle and Danino write about the latest advances in this field.Bente Klarlund Pedersen, a researcher and physician who completed residencies in infectious disease and
internal medicine, became interested in the immune system early on in her education, choosing to study the
effects of intense exercise on immune function. She conducted some of the original studies that identified
the first exercise-related myokine, a peptide that originates in the muscle and facilitates communication
between the muscles, liver, bones, fat, and the brain. Researchers have since found hundreds of myokines,
some of which they’ve shown to mobilize immune cells or to directly attack tumors.
Pedersen is currently a specialist in infectious diseases and internal medicine at Rigshospitalet and
directs the Centre of Inflammation and Metabolism and the Centre for Physical Activity Research, both at
the University of Copenhagen, where she continues to study how exercise improves health and fights disease.
Pedersen, who runs nearly every d ay, emphasizes that people don’t have to be athletic or engage in extreme
sports in order to reap the benefits of exercise. The most important thing, she says, is “avoiding physical inac-
tivity.” On page 38, Pedersen reviews the many ways in which exercise can help patients combat cancer.When otolaryngologist Peter Rhys-Evans started to look closely at the anatomy of human skulls and
those of other apes in the 1980s, he became intrigued. “I just couldn’t reconcile the differences,” he says.
After reading Elaine Morgan’s 1985 book, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, however, “everything fell into
place,” he recalls. That book, along with zoologist Desmond Morris’s 1967 classic The Naked Ape, explored
the idea that some uniquely human characteristics, including bipedalism, scant body hair, and an unusual
layer of subcutaneous fat, may have resulted from a period of hominin evolution when ancestors of Homo
sapiens spent much of their time in and around water. But the hypothesis lacked concrete evidence.
Rhys-Evans’s experience as an ear, nose, and throat doctor led him to consider exostoses, bony growths
that occur in the ears of divers and surfers who spend much of their time in water. He posited that if these
growths were found in the skulls of ancient hominins, it would provide strong support for a semi-aquatic
phase of human evolution. Sure enough, archaeologists eventually published evidence of exostoses in the
skulls of Neanderthals and other ancient hominin species, prompting Rhys-Evans to continue researching
this possible alterative story of human evolution and write his new book, The Waterside Ape. “We don’t know
all of the answers, but I just wanted to contribute to the debate,” he says. Read more about these controver-
sial ideas on page 58. LEN RUBENSTEIN; TA LDANINO, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; COURTESY OF MIKE DAINES