Genetics and the Silver Screen

00:00:52
Sergeant: Byers? Byers? What’s going on?

00:00:54
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh, hey, Sergeant. Thought you went home.

00:00:57
Sergeant: Why are you in my office?

00:00:58
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Excellent question. I had a DNA emergency.

00:01:05
Sergeant: You were watching that trash again, weren’t you?

00:01:07
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Trash? I don’t know. In my defense, he did try to intubate someone’s brain.

00:01:12
Sergeant: Don’t you have more gum samples to log?

00:01:15
Dr. Kaylee Byers:  Well, I could do that, but actually, Sarge, I think I might have a new case for us to investigate. You’re listening to Nice Genes!, the podcast that’s screening for genetic drama, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers, your TV guide, RIP, to the world of genomics. For decades, medical dramas have given us a front row seat to the high stakes world of hospitals, scalpels, stethoscopes and impassioned melodrama. I don’t know about you, but I was totally Team McSteamy.

00:01:51
Clip: McYummy. No. McSteamy. Ah, there it is. Yes.

00:01:57
Dr. Kaylee Byers: The very first ones go way back. City Hospital in the 1950s, Dr. Kildare in the ’60s.

00:02:03
Clip: Oh, the elusive Dr. Kildare.

00:02:06
Dr. Kaylee Byers: And later, juggernauts like General Hospital, ER, House, and Grey’s Anatomy, and more recently, highly praised for capturing life in the emergency room, The Pit. They’re gripping. They’re glossy. They’ve made us laugh, cry, and maybe even Google symptoms of internal bleeding at 1:00 AM. But when it comes to the science, well, you can’t shock a flat line, CPR doesn’t bring people back in an instant, and not every shift ends with a medical breakthrough.

00:02:37
Clip: You’re actually talking about killing her.

00:02:38
Clip: Just for a little while. I’ll bring her right back.

00:02:41
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So today we’re asking how does what we see on TV shape the way we understand genomic science and how does the writer’s room impact the way we imagine the future of medicine? First up, to debunk some of the myths we see on TV is Dr. Krysta Coyle.

00:02:59
Dr. Krysta Coyle: And I’m a research associate at Simon Fraser University working on lymphoma genomics.

00:03:06
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Coyle is also a consultant on a popular medical TV show called Watson. But before we get into that, let’s dive into medical dramas in general and what makes them tick. Today we’re talking about medical dramas. What is your relationship to medical dramas? Are there any that you actually watch?

00:03:24
Dr. Krysta Coyle: Oh yeah, I love watching medical dramas. I think I grew up watching CSI, so more of a police procedural, but huge lab elements. And then Grey’s Anatomy is also part of my universe. And then now I watch Watson.

00:03:39
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So you watch them, a lot of us grow up watching them, but sometimes the science is a little iffy. And as a scientist I sometimes have a hard time watching those parts. So what are some of the biggest things that these shows tend to get wrong when they’re depicting science?

00:03:54
Dr. Krysta Coyle: They use the wrong tool for the job all the time in medical and scientific scenes, and it gets really frustrating. There’s a scene in CSI that sticks with me the most, and it’s they put something in a centrifuge.

00:04:06
Dr. Kaylee Byers: For folks who are listening, what’s a centrifuge for?

00:04:08
Dr. Krysta Coyle: A centrifuge is just used to spin something and either separate it or pull something through a filter. So we use it a lot in preparing DNA for downstream tests. So in CSI, it’s just spinning, and then a sequencing report prints out. The centrifuge doesn’t do that work. There’s no connection to a printer on a centrifuge.

00:04:31
Dr. Kaylee Byers: The idea that you would just print it out? I mean, okay, so for our listeners, DNA is made up of what we call base pairs, that’s As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, and they pair up on our genetic ladder in specific ways. So how many of these base pairs are we talking about looking at here on a single piece of paper?

00:04:50
Dr. Krysta Coyle: We’re looking at 3 billion base pairs. It’s a lot. There’s a scene where they print out a patient’s entire genomic sequence, and there’s so many things about that that are unrealistic. First, nobody’s going to read that. That’s a whole library of books.

And then second, when they print out a patient’s sequence, then they’d also have to print out something to compare it to, the reference genome, because otherwise we don’t know what’s different about this patient. And so now we’re talking a whole additional library and we have to read both of them at exactly the same time. And that’s why none of that makes sense.

00:05:23
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So we’re talking about genomics here. You work in cancer research. Is there anything that particularly bugs you about how cancer is shown on TV?

00:05:31
Dr. Krysta Coyle: So I think when we do see cancer on TV shows, it really seems to be a universal experience. Like the patient has cancer in this tissue, we know exactly how to treat it, and either it works or it doesn’t. But in modern medical treatment, we use a lot of genetics and genomics to understand why a specific patient might respond to a specific treatment or even to pick a particular treatment. And I don’t know if that’s something that the general public really understands to start with, and so it hasn’t really entered the media scene yet.

00:06:07
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay, so what’s the big deal if a show simply uses the wrong tool or oversimplifies a disease? Well, these shortcuts can have a ripple effect beyond the screen.

00:06:17
Dr. Krysta Coyle: There’s a lot of mistrust and misinformation about science and medicine, and it doesn’t necessarily help when the media shows a story where a patient with a rare disease goes to see a doctor and four hours later the doctor is like,  Aha! I know what’s wrong with you.  It’s a lot more complicated than that. Science and scientists sometimes get things wrong and the record is self-correcting.

And that’s I think one of the benefits of science for health that gets left out completely in media representations of science. So if I get something wrong today, someone tries to reproduce it tomorrow, and they might find out that I missed an important step or I forgot about something in the experiment, and that would explain things in a different way.

00:07:03
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So thinking of how the science process is portrayed, what about the people who do that science? So the scientists on the shows, the doctors who are doing that work, do you find that they’re portrayed in any way in particular?

00:07:13
Dr. Krysta Coyle: You never see a lab tech on any of these shows.

00:07:16
Dr. Kaylee Byers: It’s true, and they’re the people who do the work largely.

00:07:19
Dr. Krysta Coyle: It’s always the doctor or the interns, residents who are running the test and finding the answer, so something that the doctor hasn’t seen before or the scientists are unfamiliar with. Science is pretty much a team sport. It’s not just one person who’s going to find the answer. It’s bouncing ideas off colleagues and trying to read more about what might be known about a specific condition or a specific mutation that maybe someone saw in another country.

And I think the other thing that we don’t see a lot is that sometimes when it comes to rare diseases, patients and their families are doing a lot of that work. They’re doing a lot of outreach to folks in other countries and on the internet to try and find anyone with a similar experience because there’s a lot of power in numbers.

00:08:10
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Something that’s really, really cool, and I have to admit I’m a little jealous of, is that you have consulted on one of these shows. You mentioned Watson earlier and you’ve consulted on an episode. So can you tell us what that episode was about?

00:08:23
Dr. Krysta Coyle: In this episode, Watson is building a database of all known human variation. And I know it sounds wild, right?

00:08:30
Dr. Kaylee Byers: You would need so much money to do that, but go on.

00:08:32
Dr. Krysta Coyle: Well, he’s starting with his fellows, and so all the information for his fellows is contained in this database. And it turns out that his arch nemesis, Moriarty, has gotten access to the information in the database and designs something to start killing Watson’s fellows.

00:08:49
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh my!

00:08:50
Dr. Krysta Coyle: So he manipulates a virus that specifically takes advantage of a mutation that one of the fellows has to get into the brain. And then at the same time, one of the fellows has been kind of recruited/ blackmailed into messing with Watson’s work, and she disrupts the life-saving treatment that Watson happens to have growing in the lab.

So she kills the cells that are growing a viral vector that they could use to save the fellows. So the fellow that is sick actually is a twin. So both twins get sick because they have the same mutation and they spend a lot of time together, get the same virus, but they can only save one of them.

00:09:34
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay, that’s drama. What was it like as a scientist consulting on that episode or that show?

00:09:43
Dr. Krysta Coyle: It’s like nothing I have ever done before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. So when I walked in to work on this episode, Watson hadn’t aired yet, so I have no idea what the set looks like, what the lab looks like, and kind of just walking in and trying to make it look as accurate as possible. And then there are so many different people who are involved in all of those different aspects, so making sure that the props are appropriate for the scene.

In that case, we talked about how you might prepare a sample for sequencing. You wouldn’t just take spinal fluid and put it on the sequencer. So what can we have around in the shot that suggests something else has taken place? And then the playback folks who are working with the art department to design really great graphics that represent what’s going on.

And I think that I underestimated how complex all of these moving pieces were, because of course, you have to be able to cue the playback to go with what the actors are saying in the scene. So the story comes first and then the visual interest, and then the scientific accuracy is kind of a little bit after those things.

00:10:51
Dr. Kaylee Byers: And you’re there for that, right? What are the sorts of things they’re looking for your input on in terms of that scientific accuracy piece?

00:10:57
Dr. Krysta Coyle: I see the script ahead of the episode and I can flag anything that isn’t going to work as they expect. So someone might say,   Oh, the character looks at DNA under the microscope,  and my job is to say,   Nobody does that. And even if you did, it wouldn’t be interesting. Here’s my suggestion, you would’ve put it on the sequencer and we can make something more interesting play on the sequencer that’s actually going to give you the information you expect, right? We’re not going to find the single letter out of 3 billion that changed by looking at DNA under the microscope. It’s just not possible.

00:11:31
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Throughout that process, have you felt that you’ve had to make any compromises in terms of the accuracy to balance the story?

00:11:40
Dr. Krysta Coyle: I think the hill that I’m not going to die on is that sequencing is instantaneous, because a serial drama doesn’t have time for sequencing to take a day or two or three and then someone to analyze it. So yeah, we put the sample in the sequencer. We press start. And five or 10 minutes later, there’s data that someone can look at. Also, read a Reddit thread last night about all the mistakes people find in lab scenes, and I think we’re already winning when we have pipette tips on the pipettes.

00:12:09
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yes. Agree.

00:12:10
Dr. Krysta Coyle: So we don’t have to be really picky about what kind of tip is on that pipette.

00:12:14
Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love that we’re already winning because we have pipette tips on the actual pipettes. Okay, so not everything in these shows is textbook accurate. Accuracy is important, and there are folks like Krysta working hard behind the scenes to get it right. But sometimes for the sake of the story, things slip.

00:12:32
Ayden Eilmus: Even when it’s inaccurate and even when those representations are flawed, the value is really that it raises this ethical conversation.

00:12:40
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Coming up, we slip into the nuance of it all. Stick around because after the break, we are getting ethical, ethical. You’re listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers, and we want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that are shaping our world.

So if you like Nice Genes!, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. If you’ve got a flair for the dramatic and a love of science, don’t forget to share this episode with your favorite armchair MD. So we’ve dug into the stuff we love, hate, and love to hate about modern medical dramas. But let’s throw the script down, flip it and reverse it. Medical dramas and science on TV have been around forever.

And honestly, they’ve often gotten way more wrong than just mixing up the tubes. So let’s take a quick trip through the history of the genre and the ethics that came bundled with it.

00:13:49
Ayden Eilmus: I can talk about this for a long time. I’ll do my best to be somewhat succinct about it.

00:13:52
Dr. Kaylee Byers: That’s Ayden Eilmus.

00:13:54
Ayden Eilmus: I’m a head research assistant at the Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings at Vanderbilt University. We refer to it as GetPreCiSe because everyone in academia loves a really long complicated acronym. And I’m also the program coordinator for the working group on pediatric gene therapy and medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. PGTME is its catchy little acronym.

00:14:17
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Among that alphabet soup, Ayden’s got a job that’s basically what we’ve all dreamed of at least once.

00:14:23
Ayden Eilmus: Most of my work and research is in ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics and genomics. As part of my job, I guess I watch film and TV episodes.

00:14:32
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Jealous. But before we dive into the research, let’s meander down memory lane, shall we? I’m curious about the history of this space. How has the portrayal of genetics and genomics changed over time within say film or television?

00:14:49
Ayden Eilmus: First of all, just the amount that it features has really, really increased over the decades, and alongside these big developments in science in the real world, the completion of the Human Genome Project, the development of gene therapies, stuff like that. The earliest portrayals we see of genetics on screen appear back in the early 20th century.

And a lot of those films actually feature pro-eugenic content, a reflection of the attitude maybe of the world at the time prior to the discovery and revelation of the Nazi atrocities following World War II that really shifted. Eugenics kind of starts to disappear, and then in the more contemporary come back, but portrayed in a negative light. So we see this reflection of attitudes in the pop culture world writ large.

00:15:39
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Quick detour here. When Ayden talks about early films with pro-eugenic content, we’re talking about a deeply harmful idea, that humanity could be improved by controlling who gets to have children through actions like forced sterilization or deciding what children survived. Eugenics, which means good birth, has a history steeped in racism, ableism, and oppression.

Today we often think of eugenics as those most horrendous infractions on human life and choice. And nowadays, there are many important conversations about where that line of eugenics sits, if there’s a line at all. In medical dramas especially, shows are still tackling these issues. For example, a common narrative in these shows centers around genetic screening. That’s a medical tool used to evaluate how at risk a given person may be of developing a genetic condition.

And it can be used to inform healthcare decisions, like we talked about in season one, for determining which medications you might take. And it could also be used to inform parental choice about whether or not to carry a child. In season three, we talked about the potential issues with identifying something like a   gay gene  for how it might result in the birth of fewer queer kiddos.

And if you look at medical dramas, you’ll see these storylines pop up a lot. For example, there’s an episode of Private Practice where a couple has to decide whether to have children after learning one partner carries the Huntington’s disease gene, or on Grey’s Anatomy when two characters face an uncertain and potentially life-threatening prenatal diagnosis and debate whether to continue the pregnancy.

And there are many other examples that wrestle with these kinds of questions. And so over time, these storylines have moved away from simple bad gene narratives into something more complex, a little more complicated, and a little more human.

00:17:27
Ayden Eilmus: The genre has changed a lot since then. We used to really see a lot of doctor heroes, very paternalistic, almost always older white men as like the doctors who were solving all the cases. And now we have a much more messy, realistic, sometimes well-rounded portrayals of doctors and a lot more portrayals of doctor researchers, physician scientists. So that’s one of the major shifts I think just in the genre overall. Across all of the genres, I think genetics is portrayed really positively, at least compared to other types of media like science fiction or action movies.

00:17:59
Dr. Kaylee Byers: This area of research is really new to me, and I know you’ve just published a paper in this space. And when you’re asking a research question about genetics and genomics in film and TV, what does that question look like and how do you go about studying it?

00:18:13
Ayden Eilmus: So our research center is a foundation for a lot of the work we’ve been doing in this area. We built this really large database of 800 something film and television episodes featuring genetic content from that first portrayal of genetics on screen back in the early 20th century that I was mentioning up until 2020. So some of the shows are Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Marcus Welby, M. D., Doogie Howser, House, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med.

So every item in there was gathered from viewer generated plot synopsis. So we read these plot summaries and then those are coded for a number of attributes related to genetics, as well as some more just formal stuff, the year the movie came out, the genre. So from this massive database, there’s infinite possibilities kind of. I think of areas of exploration. And so I was really interested in medical dramas as a form and I was interested in this question of genetic screening.

I think in the world of bioethics in certain patient communities, there’s this underlying question about, if these developments in genetic screening technology, which have a lot of really positive benefit in the clinics now. And this isn’t the science fiction trick. These are things that are already operating in the world we live in. There’s this I think question about can that be a back door to eugenics? It hovers over a lot of those conversations. And so I was really curious about how, if at all, does that show up on television in medical dramas largely?

00:19:44
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, and that is really interesting to me because this is a conversation that doesn’t just pop up in research. People have this conversation in real time all the time. So based off your research, how do TV shows get at that distinction or overlap between what is genetic screening, where are we dabbling in eugenics?

00:20:05
Ayden Eilmus: Basically we found that medical dramas champion genetic screening for its ability to promote individual choice and reproductive freedom. Maybe that’s not super surprising. I think that we have those conversations as well in the real world. But interestingly, they also really portrayed eugenics as sort of this foil as a socially unjust infringement on people’s reproductive freedom.

So it really does not conflate the two. And even when we’re dealing with episodes and storylines about people’s reproductive choices that could be interpreted potentially or maybe have been discussed through the eugenic lens in an academic space, at the dinner table, what have you, on TV, the angle of these conversations is really so oriented around the narratives and experiences of individual characters.

And so I think the tone across this corpus of episodes that I looked at is that genetic screening is portrayed as a way, like I said, to champion and promote choices and reproductive freedom even when those might be choices that some of us would disagree with. So an example that comes to mind, there’s an episode of Chicago Hope where a couple is trying to use sperm and egg donors to have a baby through IVF even though they’re both fertile and capable of having their own child biologically because they want these idealized sperm and egg donors.

They asked their fertility doctor at this hospital actually to be their sperm donor. They take it to the hospital ethics board and they have this interesting conversation around should they be allowed to do this? And the conclusion that eventually gets arrived at is, well, can an institution really make that call without leaving itself liable? And if they’re not violating any laws, can we really stop them? Is that their right?

00:21:52
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So it sort of sits in this space of we’re actually not telling you that this is outright wrong or outright condoned, but what we’re saying is it’s uncomfortable and we’re going to let you sit with where you think that it falls. And in a way it just brings the conversation to people to have is to talk about how they feel about this particular fictional couple that almost certainly exists in real life.

00:22:15
Ayden Eilmus: I think you hit the nail on the head. Obviously they’re flawed. Obviously they’re fictionalized. Obviously they’re constrained by the television series production and the conventions of the genre. But as a viewer it puts you as a fly on the wall in these conversations that are happening in doctor’s office or iterations of them are happening in doctor’s offices in the world right now.

And that’s another I think takeaway from this project to me is that the way this is portrayed in medical dramas indicates that GenNX screening, at least as we currently use it, there’s a line that comes up all the time all over the place and definitely on TV is, is this a line we shouldn’t cross? Are there lines we shouldn’t cross?

00:22:54
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Medical dramas love a moral gray area. Maybe that’s why they call it Grey’s Anatomy. And even if we love to watch them, a lot of us preface our binge-watching with a sheepish guilty pleasure. But just because something’s a little melodramatic doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

00:23:12
Ayden Eilmus: Medical dramas are kind of seen as soap opera-y and lowbrow and maybe targeted to a female audience. And I think that all of those things in a way make it more important to pay attention to, maybe are more neglected. And I think it’s really important that we pay attention because that’s part of this conversation. These are shows that are so popular that who hasn’t seen an episode at least of Gray’s Anatomy or House.

It’s something that the vast majority of us are familiar with or come in contact with at one point or another. Our focus is not on the scientific accuracy which genetics is portrayed. And instead just if we take it as fact that there are going to be good and bad and everything in between portrayals, then what do we do with that information? How does that impact the public conversation? Even when it’s inaccurate and even when those representations are flawed, the value is really that it raises this ethical conversation.

00:24:05
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Ayden, thank you so much for coming on. You’ve given us lots to think about. So interesting.

00:24:09
Ayden Eilmus: Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.

00:24:11
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So some of that nuance that we might see in academic and social commentaries around eugenics versus genetic screening, well, it’s a little bit more polarized in medical dramas. One is good, the other’s bad, and that’s largely framed around who has choice and who doesn’t. These shows help us to raise these ethical questions and they can also shape how we think about them.

And going back to our fellow consultant, Dr. Coyle, there is more that these shows can do to help promote a positive view of science. Earlier we talked about the scientific inaccuracies when it comes to these shows, but they also get things right. So I’m curious, what are some of the things you think these shows do well and what’s the value of displaying that on the silver screen?

00:24:56
Dr. Krysta Coyle: I think one of the things they do well is bringing genetics and genomics into mainstream conversations. For a long time, the overarching representation of genetics in media was Jurassic Park.

00:25:10
Clip: Welcome to Jurassic Park.

00:25:14
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Best movie of all time. But yes, please, please continue.

00:25:16
Dr. Krysta Coyle: I love Jurassic Park, but that’s also just… It’s way out there. And there are so many other applications that are much closer to real life that are finally getting some screen time, which I really, really like. People are much more comfortable talking about genetics than they were even 10 years ago. And I think some of that has to do with how much we do see it in media now.

And I think having that additional exposure to genetics and genomics really lets people see that there are so many other applications and it’s not a scary monster. We make life better with genetics and genomics all the time, and we should know more about it, enough at least to not be scared of it.

00:25:57
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What role do you think pop culture plays in shaping how people think about science and scientists?

00:26:04
Dr. Krysta Coyle: Yeah. Well, sometimes scientists, people think they’re all introverted, working alone, maybe in the dark, maybe just staring at microscopes. And looking at media representation, so whether it’s a TV show or a movie, we really get to see scientists do a lot of other things. And we also get to see where science overlaps with healthcare and what the opportunities there are for science to improve people’s lives.

There’s also this really exciting thing where we generally have, again, this picture of a scientist perhaps being an old white man with crazy white gray hair. And most of the scientists they’re putting on TV don’t look like that. And I think that’s really great to have this representation of different people who could be scientists, even if they’re fake scientists on TV, because there are a lot of people who don’t think that they could be scientists.

A little bit of extra representation, even if it’s on a TV screen, it might change someone’s career path and they might be able to see themselves in science.

00:27:09
Dr. Kaylee Byers: That speaks to me of the responsibility a little bit of showing that diversity. And so I wonder what you think the responsibility is of the media to get some of these things right.

00:27:20
Dr. Krysta Coyle: Well, I think they have a huge responsibility, because for so many people, this is their only exposure to what scientists do on a daily basis. And if we get it wrong, then people’s mistrust in science and medicine can just keep growing unchecked. So if we get it right, we can build that trust and we can also show people how important science is. I mean, a lot of science and medicine is publicly funded and people need to be able to see and understand what we do with that money and why we do it. I want to help people with science and that’s really the only reason I am a scientist.

00:28:00
Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love that. So after everything we’ve unpacked, where does that leave us as viewers? How should we be thinking about these shows the next time we hit play?

00:28:10
Dr. Krysta Coyle: I think we have to watch all of the media we consume with a fairly critical eye. Someone always has a goal when you watch a TV show or a movie or an advertisement and understanding a little bit of what that goal is. So on a medical drama, it might be selling the story and science has to make compromises in order to sell that story to you in the time allotted. And so thinking critically about that would really mean understanding that time gets compressed on TV shows.

And so understanding that when we’re looking at science, there are always those breaks, even if they’re not explicitly called out. I think the other thing that’s important is that there are all of these other people involved in the process in real life, but bringing those people into a TV storyline doesn’t make sense because you need the characters to talk to each other to advance the non-scientific storyline.

And so you can just imagine that sometimes when they’re doing something themselves, they really would have asked someone with more experience doing that particular thing to do it for them, so a medical lab tech, a pathologist, all of these other great scientific and medical personnel who helped take care of us.

00:29:27
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, Dr. Krysta Coyle, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share a little bit about your work and about your experience.

00:29:35
Dr. Krysta Coyle: Thank you. This was really fun.

00:29:39
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So yeah, medical dramas might not always pass the peer-reviewed test, but they may give you some food for deep thought. The story comes first, the science gets streamlined, and sometimes a centrifuge magically prints out a genome. But when these shows take the time to reflect the real complexity of genetics, even just a little, they can do more than just entertain.

00:30:01
TV Doctor: We’re losing him.

00:30:02
TV Doctor: Why does this keep happening?

00:30:06
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Our guests for today were Dr. Krista Coyle, postdoc fellow at Simon Fraser University and consultant on the medical show Watson, and Ayden Eilmus, researcher at Vanderbilt Center for Genetic Privacy and Program Coordinator at NYU Langone’s Pediatric Gene Therapy Ethics Group. You’ve been listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia.

If you like this episode, be sure to check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from, share us with your friends, and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on social media by going to @GenomeBC. Medical dramas may thrive on fictional crises, but what happens when real medical emergencies hit the people you least expect? Next time, we uncover how hidden genetic risks can impact athletes on the field.

00:30:52
Dr. Prashant Rao: There are a whole host of genetic heart conditions that can predispose an individual to a sudden cardiac arrest.

00:30:59
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thanks for scrubbing in with us. Now back to my regularly scheduled programming.