Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I have the delight of sitting in person with a good friend of mine. Jimmy Kim is a molecular biologist. She did her PhD at Rutgers studying diatoms and as I understand

it from you moments ago, the arrest of the cell cycle that would allow you to fatten them up before

taking them to market something like that? Yes they make oils and you can use

oils for all kinds of things like biodiesel. All right well if if I need to make any biodiesel, I will be sure to arrest the cell cycle of

the diatoms in question for that purpose.

Jimmy also has a wonderful sub-stack called Let's Be Clear. We have mentioned it on Dark Horse many times and what she does there is she does

deep dives on topics of relevance to the public using her background in biology and

elucidates things with wonderful clarity. So anyway I'm a big fan of the

substack I hope people will check it out and you happen to be

happen to be somehow in the San Juan Islands which affords us the ability to do this in person.

So Jimmy, welcome to the San Juan Islands and to the Dark Horse Podcast.

Thank you, very happy to be here.

All right, so I don't know where we should start.

There's a lot going on your most recent

substack article was of great interest to me it involves a discussion of the discovery that some of the processes,

techniques, models that we use in the study of biology are not what it says they are in the catalog.

They don't work the way they're supposed to and the implication for science is

potentially profound.

So do you want to start by describing what all that means and how it plays out?

Yeah, so what prompted this article was that recently there was a news article in Nature magazine, the journal, and I was talking

about broken plasmids.

So plasmids are circular pieces of DNA that is used in molecular

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