‘Life and Other Stories’ media project has been joined by new partners. Recently, Biomolecula.ru and Kot.sh magazine began to publish interviews with the world’s leading biologists, and soon you will be able to read them on Naked Science and Stimul, as well. The media project was implemented by the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in partnership with the Russian Science Foundation.
Life and Other Stories constitutes a series of interviews with leading Russian and international life scientists that was launched in a variety of formats last fall. For instance, Echo of Moscow hosted radio interviews, other resources of the radio station featured podcasts and video recordings of the discussions, the website of the Kommersant newspaper and its supplement Kommersant Nauka released articles written on the basis of interviews with biologists, and other resources published unedited conversations between the famous bioinformatician, Vice President of Skoltech for Biomedical Research, academic advisor for the project Mikhail Gelfand and his colleagues.
In July, Biomolecula.ru, a media outlet about modern biology, joined the Life and Other Stories project and began to publish classic interviews with young scientists who had achieved outstanding professional success. The first interview in the series was conducted with Skoltech assistant professor Ekaterina Khrameeva and discussed such topics as avoiding job burnout, bioinformatics, and creative freedom. Maxim Vinarski, Head of the Laboratory of Macroecology and Biogeography of Invertebrates of St. Petersburg State University, talked about snails, modern systematics, and advanced approaches to biodiversity studies.
Soon, the project’s materials will also start to appear in Naked Science, Stimul, and the Kot.sh magazine. The first piece to be featured on Naked Science as part of the project will be a conversation between Mikhail Gelfand and the Russian-Japanese professor Oleg Gusev. That was a real heart-to-heart and, of course, scientific conversation that discussed the superpowers of animals and how mosquito research helped make PCR tests for COVID fast and affordable.
“I’m very pleased that Skoltech and the Russian Science Foundation invited our publication to take part in the Heart-to-Hearts project. Or at least to participate in the section dedicated to biology, considering that it’s a large, long-term project that delves into all branches of modern science,” says Yegor Bykovsky, Editor-in-Chief of Naked Science. “I’ve been working in science journalism for a quarter of a century now, and I treat all fields of science with great reverence – mathematics can offer any scientist a useful apparatus, physics explains what everything is made of and how, and chemistry explains how all of it is connected. However, it seems to me that in recent years biology has become the most important field of science, as it’s making incredibly rapid progress in all of its branches, from the evolution of humans and other organisms to the smallest but very important aspects of how cells and their components work. A project featuring a series of great interviews will give readers an idea not only of the scientists that we will be talking to and their specific fields of work, but also of biology as a whole, single entity – please forgive me for this unintentional pleonasm. These interviews will get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views on Naked Science, which is why I believe that everyone – from the readers to the organizers and the website – is lucky to have this project.”
The project is planned to feature more than 40 interviews with leading biologists, many of whom are conducting their research with the support of the Russian Science Foundation. All of the project’s materials are available on its website and will be published in two volumes upon its completion.
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