Stephen Nachmanovitch is a musician celebrated for his free improvisations, and an educator whose books Free Play and The Art of Is have become classics on the creative process. With his training as an ecologist and his PhD in the history of consciousness, Stephen brings a unique philosophical view on art, science, and life to the podcast. In our discussion, Stephen reflects on how creativity is not a thing but a living process: the art of IS. He draws connections between artistic and scientific practice, emphasizing how both depend on careful attention to the world, openness to mistakes, and dialogue across perspectives. We discuss how fear of error inhibits creativity, and how improvisation can free us from perfectionism. We also touch upon the importance of chivalry in dialogue, the art of advancing each other’s ideas rather than blocking them.

The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor and Howard Hughes Investigator, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2024. Together, we reflect on how diverse backgrounds enrich research, allowing people to discover different things in the same data. Akiko explains how leading large collaborations requires managing expectations, not micromanaging the research. She compares her work of studying complex conditions to solving multilayered puzzles: each new piece of evidence must be placed in the right layer for the bigger picture to emerge. And she jokes about her own “terrible hairball analogy” and how, at the center of that mess, she searches for hidden gems.

The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, explores with us the differences between creativity in science and philosophy. While philosophers speculate unconstrainedly, scientists must balance creative thinking with the need for empirical testing and within our fields’ paradigms – if you mention the “Lamarck” word at a bar full of geneticists, don’t be surprised if the piano suddenly stops and everybody looks at you in disbelief. We also talk about Thomas Kuhn’s tension between normal and revolutionary science, the risks and rewards of disruptive ideas, and the importance of "middle-class science"—independent labs driving innovation. Peter ends by drawing a parallel between the night science / day science transition and Händel's aria "As Steals the Morn," which describes the transition from dream state to wakefulness.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

In this episode, Itai and Martin delve into the interplay between hypothesis-driven and exploratory research, drawing on insights from past guests of the Night Science Podcast. They discuss how being focused on a single hypothesis can prevent us from making discoveries, while emphasizing the value of open-ended exploratory analyses—often dismissed as “fishing expeditions.” The episode also examines the risks inherent to both approaches: hypothesis-driven Day Science may overlook key insights, while exploratory Night Science risks being misled by randomness.


This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). 
For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights include:

- Invest time in problem selection: Spend more time upfront selecting the right research problem.
- Date ideas: Before settling on an idea, explore multiple alternatives without emotional attachment.
- Fixed vs. floating parameters: Early on, clearly define what aspects of your research idea are fixed and which can be flexible.
- Manage risks: Embrace risk but systematically de-risk projects.
- Killer experiments: Identify early “go/no-go” experiments.
- Turn crises into opportunities: Use a project's crisis to find out what it's really about.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

James Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, discusses the psychological underpinnings of creative thinking with Itai & Martin. Together, we delve into the complex nature of creativity, exploring its roots as both a trait and a skill that can be nurtured. We examine the role of personality traits in creativity, the impact of interdisciplinary team dynamics, and how creative metacognition—the ability to recognize one’s own creative strengths and weaknesses—plays a vital role.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

MIT's Bob Weinberg is perhaps the world's most prominent cancer researcher. In this episode, Bob emphasizes that true innovation often comes from blending ideas from different fields – a synthesis that transcends the boundaries of one's primary area of research. We discuss the vital role of human interaction, with many scientific breakthroughs coming from informal collaborations between researchers, celebrating the collective "lab brain" as a powerful driver of creativity and discovery. And given that modern experimental methods could facilitate an essentially infinite variety of alternative projects, Bob recommends that we continually question the relevance of what we have chosen to work on.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, asking biological questions with insights from physics. His most widely known contribution is the FoldScope, a $1-microscope made from paper and a lens – 2 million copies of this have been distributed to would-be scientists around the world. In this episode, Manu emphasizes how science is a sense of wonder and a personal journey with no set roads. To get to new and deep questions, Manu feels he needs to “embed” himself in the world he's studying, e.g., by spending weeks on research vessels on the open sea when he’s interested in deep-sea biology. In his view, the most important consequence of a discovery is not how it impacts the world, but how it changes the scientist making the discovery.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Dianne Newman – a molecular microbiologist at CalTech – is a professor both in Biology and Geology. In this episode, she encourages young scientists to pursue questions to which they have a visceral connection, rather than following popular trends. In its search for fundamental truths guided by our inner biases and preferences, Dianne likens scientific curiosity to artistic expression. She emphasizes our control over how much we dwell on the difficult aspects of our research, helping us to find satisfaction in creatively working around whatever obstacles we meet. Dianne also reflects on the unpredictable nature of research, and stresses how a problem that somebody else gives you can very rapidly become yours if you take it upon yourself to become its creative driver.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops with an entrepreneurial focus. In this episode, Tina emphasizes the importance of living in the problem space longer, taking time to challenge assumptions and reframe questions before rushing to solutions. We discuss how deliberately generating bad ideas can lead to innovative solutions, as they allow for bigger conceptual leaps and often contain the seeds of brilliant ideas. Treating ideas as less precious allows for a continuous flow of creativity. But ideas aren’t cheap – they are free but incredibly valuable, like oxygen.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He runs a lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In this episode, Venki emphasizes the importance of enjoying the scientific process itself, not just aiming for major discoveries. He describes his creativity as a result of mulling over a problem and of talking with people. Venki also highlights the need for scientists to make daily judgment calls about their approach and the future of the project. And he encourages openness and collaboration, viewing the ability to seek help as a strength rather than a weakness.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is a professor working on the immune system at Harvard’s Medical School. In this episode, we discuss with her how she teaches creativity in her course for PhD students. We explore the emotional roller coaster ride of research projects, typically culminating in the point of creative frustration, where we get stuck and are tempted to either give up or take an easy, sub-par way out. We discuss how the creative process and its tools are really the same in science and in the arts, but that cultural and language differences still make creativity teaching by scientists themselves more relatable to young scientists. And the hosts realize the importance of personality in everyone’s own version of the creative process – with Itai needing a *CRISIS* in each project, while Martin’s projects evolve in much calmer waters.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist project. Beyond their work at Google, Alan is an honorary lecturer in vascular surgery at Imperial College London, and Vivek teaches at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, we discuss how their system has evolved to mirror parts of human hypothesis generation while also diverging in fascinating ways. We talk about its internal “tournaments” of ideas, its ability to be prompted to “think out of the box,” and whether it becomes too constrained by the need to align with every published “fact”. And we discuss how we still seem far away from a time when AI can not only answer our questions, but can ask new and exciting research questions itself.

The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute – for more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His distinctive painting style blends modernist, abstract tendencies together with references to everyday life and popular culture. Coincidentally, Guy is also Itai’s brother. Together, we explore the many similarities and the interesting differences between the creative processes in art and science. We talk about Guy's creative process of letting art projects simmer inside him for as long as possible – until he feels compelled to execute the result. And we find out that what makes good art may be the same principles that lead to good science, including a focus on becoming rather than being, on process rather than outcome.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A pioneer in the fields of personalized genomics and synthetic biology, he has co-founded over 50 biotech companies. In 2017, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of embracing outliers and taking calculated risks – it's not about never failing, it's about failing a million times a day. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  George argues that you can change the world as long as you don't care who gets the credit. He recommends shooting for the stars – maybe you'll hit the moon. 

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s leading developmental biologists, who has been recognized by the 2023 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize and Science magazin's People's Vote for Scientific Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. In this episode, we explore the relationship between art and science, and discuss how emotions act as a catalyst for creativity. Magdalena reveals that most of the work in her lab starts without a very detailed plan, which leaves everyone open to embrace unexpected observations. Knowing how to invoke lateral thinking helps to find creative ways out of a problem in a time of crisis. Magdalena also talks about her collaboration with John Gurdon, with its complementary sides of rigor and inspiration. 

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole argument for truth – was invented only in the 1700s, championed by the groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton. In the April 1st, 2024, episode of the Day Science Podcast, Sir Isaac looks back on his solitary life, revealing how he came up with science’s counterintuitive, narrow, and shallow concept of explanation. Sir Isaac touches on the infamous apple incident as a metaphor for inspiration, and he reflects on how his diverse interests ranging from mathematics to alchemy to theology, balanced and inspired each other.  He also expresses regret that he tried to unravel the mysteries of alchemy – or chemistry, as we would call it – through mystical and allegorical thinking, rather than through the new scientific method that proved so fruitful with his mathematical physics.

This episode could not have been recorded without Sir Isaac Newton speaking through the voice of a medium who knows his life and works in exquisite detail: Prof. Michael Strevens, from New York University.

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in human evolution. In this out-of-the-ordinary episode, we talk about this specific science project: how did Bo, with Itai’s help, discover the mutation that let us lose our tail?

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he tells us about his artist-in-residence program at the Broad. As its director, he aims to hire researchers who look like they'll be changing fields in the future, combining boldness with humility – the "blank slate" with which they enter the new field is the best recipe for creativity. We discuss how the best projects cannot be designed but instead evolve from the bottom up; and how the worst projects are those that succeed but are so incremental that no one cares.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other people’s music, Sean attributes his own creativity to his insatiable habit of reading about other people’s science – that’s how he “fertilizes his garden”. To tell a good story, he urges us to seek the emotions. But storytelling is not just for communication: in a research project, we also must develop a narrative, connecting the dots.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students make the transition from being a “classical musician”, where the goal is to faithfully reproduce every note supplied by the composer, to being a “jazz musician”, where collaborators have to develop the beauty of the composition – or here, the science – on the spot. Nigel emphasizes the importance of suspending disbelief in the resulting improvisations, and the need to feel free to say stupid things. He points out that if our work’s impact is measured by the ratio of what we contribute to what everyone else contributed, then the easiest way to make a big impact is by minimizing the denominator – to work on something that no one else is working on. And the three of us argue whether the optimal group size for improvisational scientific discussions is two or three people.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. By talking with other people, we not only pool the information or ideas that each of us individually lacks, but we are also able to improvise new thoughts that are not accessible to us alone. In this episode, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher talk through the ideas in two of their editorials (available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2 and https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-021-02575-w). 

Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often the process that led to a particular result can be more interesting than the result itself – something that is true not only in science but also in fields such as art or writing. He emphasizes that the best research strategy depends greatly on the researcher’s personality. He himself thrives on being on the edge of a field, ideally working on a common question with scientists from different disciplines or even philosophers and historians. Rich recounts how he identifies new questions by finding connections between the edge cases of several papers – observations the authors couldn’t make sense of, but still put in their manuscripts. And Rich and Itai reveal the true story behind one of their joint papers, where the breakthrough came in an open-ended creative meeting from staring at the data – after a first, much more boring draft had already been written!

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she describes how discovery often emerges from intuition, puzzlement, and the courage to follow unexpected observations. Eve highlights the central role of personal tolerance for ambiguity in shaping a scientist’s questions and methods. She discusses the fine line between idiosyncrasies and general principles, and how deep familiarity with the literature shaped her scientific intuition – something hard to replicate in today’s information-saturated world. We also discuss how reading is a prerequisite for clear writing, and how rigid publishing norms led to “recipe science”, suppressing creativity.

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Carolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In this episode we talk about how the process of science is unstructured, so you don’t know when and where the next idea is going to come – sometimes even at the supermarket checkout line. For Carolyn, science is a long game, where one person’s negative result might be picked up a decade or a century later, leading to a new breakthrough. When a field is just being born, its new members may have a difficult time finding positions in academia and industry, as they are not experts in any traditional field. And Carolyn tells us how being in a band with Tom Morello, the guitarist of Rage Against The Machine, taught her about the personal chemistry required for running a successful lab.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Stephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA sequencing methods for non-invasive prenatal testing. In this episode, Steve tells us about his tricks for the creative scientific process, including the surprising usefulness of jetlag, the role of generosity – rather than a transactional approach – in collaborations, and the art of making progress in fields that are new for you, including a high threshold for embarrassment. Throughout the research process, Steve encourages his team to keep the faith that something interesting will happen. Training for young scientists should include a place for students to make mistakes, Steve observes, as the need to always be correct is not conducive to research. 

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org) and the Independent Media Initiative (theimi.co). For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

John Mattick is Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. For decades, he has been on a mission to show that the large portions of the human genome that many scientists consider useless "junk" instead have important regulatory functions. In this episode, he tells us that his creative process involves always seeing things from different perspectives – something he learned as a teenager listening to the debates of his mother and her sisters. He reveals how publishing a manifesto can supercharge your research. We discuss how science lurches from paradigm to paradigm, and how the current best guess, if untestable at the time, can become accepted wisdom. And he tells us that he advises his graduate students that it's very hard to be creative when you're still in the fog of ignorance, but that they should always look for the things that don't make sense to them - sometimes that's a clue to something worth chasing.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Peter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in London and Oxford. In this episode, he reveals the interplay between dissociation – daydreaming – and interaction with colleagues as a major source of his scientific creativity. He emphasizes that to make an important discovery, you must define your own question, even as everyone – from colleagues to editors and funders – will try to convince you otherwise. We discuss how too much planning can make you unhappy, and how everyone overestimates the information transfer in lectures and presentations. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among her many achievements is the conception of the “Big Bang Theory” of tumor biology. In this episode, she tells us how not being biased by assumptions of what we know has been very helpful in her research. We talk about how her background in statistical genetics has shaped her cancer research. We also discuss how the despair of not understanding is a phase that occurs in almost any research project, and we discuss the use of generative AI in the creative scientific process. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Daniel Dennett, Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher, tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousness, do we have free will, how does evolutionary adaptation occur? In this episode, Dan tells us about some of his ‘intuition pumps’ - tools that are as indispensable for thinking as hammers and saws are for carpentry. We discuss how creativity really is just a bag of tricks, what Descartes‘ biggest mistake was, and how to ‘jump out of the system‘ to make creative leaps. Dan tells us about how magic tricks can teach us about thinking, and how an irrational fear of the intentional stance can slow us down. And Dan assures us that when we scientists wonder what is the right way to phrase a research question, we‘re really doing philosophy. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Howard Stone is a Professor of Engineering at Princeton. His research explores how fluid dynamics can help to understand diverse systems, from bacterial biofilms to the earth’s interior.  In this episode, Howard explains how a lot of important, low-hanging fruit are at the interface between disciplines. Howard is most creative when he debates phenomena at a blackboard together with a collaborator. A trick he likes to use is to identify related problems in isolated disciplines, helping him to unravel underlying mechanisms. And he warns against being too conservative – taking things in textbooks for granted. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Prisca Liberali is a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland. In this episode, Prisca tells us how her creative thinking thrives on recursive thinking – going deeper and deeper into a problem from different angles. Prisca also deliberately uses carefully chosen conferences to discuss and to develop ongoing projects. As much as her lab’s creativity is an inextricable part of the process, she admits that at the core it’s a lonely job. What eases leadership in the lab is learning who you are: which tasks you find easy and which tasks require excessive energy – and then sharing that information with your team members.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Tom Mullaney is a Professor of History at Stanford University and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and Chris Rea is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. In 2022, Tom and Chris published the book ‘Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)’. In this episode, we talk about self-centered research (and about getting over yourself), how vulnerable self-confidence empowers your research, and how your personal biases are necessary for you to notice anything interesting at all. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science  .

Bonnie Bassler is the Chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton. In this episode, Bonnie talks about her passion for scientific inquiry, creativity, mentorship, and how the journey of discovery is about asking the right questions, distinguishing between what you can do and what you should do, and about embracing the unexpected. In our very lively and fun discussion, we explore the significance of asking "why" questions to fuel passion and curiosity – even if only the if/what/when/how questions lead to clear answers – and we explore the balance between chaos and control in the scientific process. And so while the pay might be bad and the hours long, the joy of doing science and living on the edge in a “nerdy kind of way” makes it all worthwhile.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science  .

Martin Schwartz, a professor at Yale, is known for his work on integrins and his influential essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific research”. He emphasizes that while learning science makes you feel smart, true scientific discovery often involves feeling stupid, because it means venturing into the unknown. We discuss how the ego can obstruct creativity, and how resilience, self-discovery, and the cultivation of "passionate indifference" – being deeply engaged but unattached to outcomes – are key to sustaining a productive and fulfilling life in science.

Yukiko Yamashita is a biology professor at MIT and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Yukiko’s research is amazingly broad, perhaps because she often only realizes at the end of a project which question she was asking by what she had been doing, as she explains in this episode. She likens research to solving 5000-piece jigsaw puzzles – not one at a time, but with the pieces from hundreds of puzzles all dumped together. So that while we put the pieces together, we have to be always watching ourselves: does that come from the same picture? Yukiko sees her role in the lab like that of an old wise woman in a tribe, a kind of ancient memory that still remembers their conversation with former lab members – stimulating creativity by bridging projects and generations of researchers.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science  .

Can you think of another big company CEO that does basic science? Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research – the company that developed Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha – but most fundamentally he has a deep commitment to figuring out the nature of reality. Stephen wrote the landmark ‘A new kind of science’ in 2002 and in his current ‘physics project’, Steven is trying to show that the universe is at its core computation, and that its fundamental laws arise from simple computational programs. We talked with Stephen about how he drills down to get the simplest possible explanations to tackle the foundations of scientific fields. He also told us how he makes progress by coming in with new tools to the old problems, with his own brand of scientific creativity.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Laurence Hurst is a professor of Evolutionary Genetics and the founding Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at The University of Bath. Martin actually learned biology from Laurence as a postdoc, and he still likes to quote Laurence’s favorite question after the departmental seminars: “Why is this interesting?” In this episode, Laurence explains his Slime Mold Model of the scientific process, advises us to follow the data, and tells us that much of his research springs from him being a magpie for funny little observations that don’t fit into the current scientific worldview. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Edith Heard is a Professor at the Collège de France and the Director General of Europe’s “CERN for biologists”, the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL). In this episode, Edith explains how she gets ideas when she’s out of her comfort zone and being challenged, and how in her youth she would go to the piano whenever her brain needed time to solve a hard math problem. She emphasizes how much she profited from the “naive optimism” in science in the US – compared to the much more rigid, historical European approach. She discusses with us the importance of deep knowledge about your research subject, paired with the humbleness of feeling you don’t know enough. And then she tells us how she tucks away questions in a drawer until methods become available to answer them. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Ewan Birney is the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) and  co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. In his research, Ewan combines his training in biochemistry with computer science, which made him one of the heroes of the human genome project. In this episode, he describes that an “emotional” understanding of science is often enough to have valuable discussions with experts in different fields, a concept that forms the basis of his diamonds-and-whiskers model of successful scientific teams. Ewan also explains how for him, problems have personalities, and why thinking about science while driving is a bad idea. And he discusses with us how “humans are a complicated species” can be all the scientific hypothesis you need for a grant application, and how Mendel – but not Darwin! – was an early data scientist.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Paola Arlotta is a developmental neurobiologist and a professor at Harvard. She studies how the most complex organ in the human body (in the world? in the universe maybe?) comes to be: the brain (!). How does it develop from just a bunch of cells? Paola is also the Chair of her Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, where she takes particular care about the nurturing of the next generation of scientists in her field. In this episode, Paola describes the crucial role that happiness and passion play for her in doing research. But science for Paola is also a walk in the dark woods, requiring the courage to tackle seemingly quirky questions that get at the heart of the most fundamental biology. We also discussed the role of the mentor in helping to develop the brain for creativity, much the way an infant’s brain develops to understand the world around it.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

In this special, we talk about podcasting with the two hosts of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org), Marty Martin – professor of disease ecology at the University of South Florida – and Art Woods – professor of physiological ecology at the University of Montana. We had a great time discussing our respective podcast experiences, trading tips and reflecting on our passion for science communication and the ways that it has impacted our own research. In their podcast, Marty and Art tell the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology. While both of our podcasts focus on the people doing science, Big Biology discusses the results, while Night Science explores the creative process of science. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

What was the creative process of Alfred Russel Wallace? In this séance, we channel the legendary self-taught evolutionary biologist, founder of the field of biogeography, and co-discoverer of natural selection. Mr. Wallace (as he insists to be called) told us how he did night science by candlelight during long and lonely nights on his travels in the tropics, and how he prefers to ponder the big questions. He sees himself as an early data scientist, identifying patterns in data – in particular in the study of beetles, with both him and Darwin afflicted by beetlemania. He feels that he has an advantage over Darwin because of his less fancy and less structured education: while Mr. Darwin was force-fed the then-current world view, Mr. Wallace was free to read the books that excited him.

This episode could not have been recorded without Mr. Wallace speaking through the  voice of a medium who knows his life and works in exquisite detail: Dr. Andrew Berry, lecturer for evolutionary biology at Harvard.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Isaac (Zak) Kohane is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. In this episode, Zak talks with us about how medicine, at its core, is information processing. But in medical data science, one has to understand and to model the dynamics of two orthogonal systems: the patient’s physiology and the dynamics of the healthcare system, in particular the integrating intelligence of doctors who decide about a patient’s path through that system. Zak also tells us how his creative process is an engineering process, how important the right abstraction of the data is, and how reading science fiction gives him the courage to think beyond the technology that is currently feasible. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Jim Collins is Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. In this episode, he talks with us about his radical switch of fields in the early 2000’s, when he essentially founded the field of synthetic biology. Jim’s creative process includes ‘storing content’ about a particular problem; committing a portion of each day to reflect on it, even if this might often feel like wasting time; and then bouncing ideas around in open discussions with colleagues. Jim stresses the need for being disciplined in one's night science improvisations, anchoring oneself with the constraints provided by nature. He highlights the power of coming into a new field from a position of strength, where you introduce methodologies that you have expertise in.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance scientific creativity. Ethan emphasizes that AI excels at idea generation through sheer volume and recombination, outperforming most humans in many creativity tasks – though it does have odd obsessions with VR and crypto. However, AI is most effective when integrated into a collaborative human–machine workflow rather than used as a replacement. Ethan describes AI as your tireless science buddy that never gets bored or judgmental during brainstorming. We discuss how AI’s "hallucinations" can be used for creativity, how AI can bridge disciplines by revealing hidden connections across fields, and how prompting strategies – such as chain-of-thought or playful personas – can guide AI toward more original outputs. Ethan stresses the need for scientists to actively experiment with these tools, share their methods openly, and reconsider scientific workflows in light of rapid AI progress.

​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Caroline Bartman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Princeton’s Chemistry Department, and she is about to start her own lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Caroline’s research focuses on how our metabolism changes in response to cancer and to viral infections. In this episode, Caroline explains how she has developed to become a creative scientist. She also describes an unexpected trick: whenever she stumbles upon something interesting – such as an experimental observation or something she read – she adds it as a card to her electronic set, which she reviews on a daily basis for flashes of inspirations. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Albert-László Barabási is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In this episode, he tells us how he established the field of network science. He explains the expert’s fallacy and why it’s time to move to another field once you become afraid to break things. He tells about his strategies to select research projects with his students, and that the science only really starts after the first draft has been written. He also tells us how the crucial skill to make discoveries is to sense which idea’s time has come, and how to move into a field when you think that you can bring something all of your own to the table.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Doing science reminds Stuart Firestein of an old saying: “It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.” Before studying biology and becoming a professor at Columbia University in New York, Stuart worked for many years in the theater. In this episode, he talks about how he doesn’t miss the creativity or the spirit of the theater, as he finds all of that in science. For Stuart, ignorance and creativity are two horses pulling the same wagon of science, and lab meetings are center stage for both. To make progress, Stuart finds pluralism of enormous value – and crucial to pluralism is the ability to fail. 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Professor Galit Lahav is the Chair of the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School, where she creates an environment that is collaborative, stimulating, and interdisciplinary. In this episode, Galit tells us how her creative process consists of incubation and interaction. She stresses the importance of being vulnerable for creativity to emerge, and also how to use night science to make the tough decision to stop working on a particular project. Thinking about how to normalize incubation at the department level, Galit led us to conclude that Night Science Tuesday should be a part of every scientist’s work week! 

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .