Interview with Oxford University DNA expert Rafael Carrascosa Marzo by Chloe and MOOGZ.
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CC: Thanks for chatting to us, Rafa!
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RCM: No problem. Pleasure
00:00:35:03 - 00:01:05:08
CC: So the show is about, the oddities of life - that realm of reality where, for instance, you think of your friend and they text you, foreseeing events or appearing to have a sixth sense, strange phenomena like that. It's not regarded as science currently, but just as, modern scientific concepts used to be regarded as magic. Potentially this is a realm that could enter more of a scientific space. Do you find yourself coming across things that are difficult to explain with current scientific understanding?
RCM: I'm not a physicist by trade. I think biotechnology is more on the biology side of things. But I like to keep up with what's happening in the world of physics. More often than not there are articles on quantum, quantum physics, quantum mechanisms. And when things get that small it feels like, as you're saying, like things that doesn't make sense or are paradoxical in on themselves. Regular physics, classical physics, Newtonian physics do not work. But I like that you can draw the parallels in with what you said. There's this thing called quantum plumbing. It is like the behaviour of very small amounts, maybe small volumes of liquid through a very small, kind of tubes. Scientists saw things that they didn't expect would happen. Like they would think that the smaller it is, the less friction there is and therefore the liquid just goes through like a bullet, but they realized that the opposite happened. Like the smaller they went, the slower it went, which doesn't make any sense!
M: What would you say is the biggest area in your in your world where we don't have answers right now, we don't know where life came from. Are there any other big questions that maybe we haven't heard about?
RCM: There's in a sense when you work with biological systems, this is more than a great question is more of a great unfinished sentence to say, because we know how DNA works, we know how proteins work. We have animal models that we have studied very thoroughly, and they are used for producing drugs for, kind of understanding the mechanisms of disease. But, even in cell cultures as well. But there's a level of complexity that we don't yet understand. And that's why biology, it's a science and it's not, engineering a kind of discipline, because it's very hard to standardize, to create modules, to create like that perfect reproducibility that you would need or you to have in engineering. In systems that are purely human made when you're working with biology, we make allowances for parameters that are there, but you don't know what causes them. You have to take them into account, but you cannot define them. So it's kind of like a, a we can see many things, but this, blurry kind of corona around our focus. one thing, I mean, I don't know how it how much it has changed because it's been a long time since, I'd like to say biology and maybe my own was, but something that really surprised me when I was working on these things is like when you make a cell culture that there's different elements and it's really binary depending on where you're cultivating.
CC: Do you think it's your area of work has informed any of the ways that you live your life?
You know, philosophically? I never assume things, because, there's so many things one cannot learn about, within a lifespan. Very quickly, when you're in science, you learn that that you cannot do good science without collaboration, it needs many different people with many different backgrounds. I was listening to a book about 'the last polymath' and they were saying, why aren't there any more polymaths? Why is science not so individualistic anymore? I think is a good thing, a Nobel Prize is always shared between the three four people and it's because the endeavor of science, with the amount of knowledge that we have right now, is just too big for one single individual. It's deeply humbling.
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