Who is Professor Magor? | What it's Like to Be

Read the Professor Bradley Magor section.Professor Bradley Magor#

Read the Zebrafish Anybody? section.Zebrafish Anybody?#

Professor Bradley Magor is a Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. He specializes in Immunology, and his lab “uses a variety of technologies from zebrafish transgenics & CRISPR genome editing to in vitro cell manipulations for a variety of projects.”

You can find out more about his research here: https://apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/bmagor

Check out his research publications here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=z4efXpkAAAAJ&hl=en

Here are some important tidbits from the interview:

Check out the dialogue at 5:51. Professor Magor discusses his research.

Read the Bradley Magor 5:51 section.Bradley Magor 5:51#

Okay. So that whole process that I told you about, you know, where the cells divide and mutate in us, if you do a histological section through a spleen or something like that, you see clear areas that are histologically distinct. All these cells are packed together, and they look different.

You don’t see that in things like cold blooded animals. So, the question was, do cold blooded animals have this ability? And so, 20 years ago, that was my question. And that was when I started my lab. And somebody had just identified the mutator. So now we had a mechanism and a target, something that we could look for.

And so, over the next 20 years, I’m okay, first of all, can we find the homologous gene in fish? Fish aren’t the earliest vertebrate, sharks are, but sharks are not terribly practical to work with, although I have. So, we’re focusing on fish as they are an indicator of early vertebrate evolution. The system only operates in vertebrates and not invertebrates. And we identified that the mutator—Okay, well, if you’ve got a mutator in there, that’s not something that you can let run willy-nilly you know, without having detrimental effects.

So, the hypothesis becomes, where do they do this organised mutation of certain cells. And really, the next 20 years has been sort of building evidence that, yes, we’re on the right road. And then waiting for technology to catch up to an experiment that I proposed 10/15 years ago, that finally got tested four or five years ago by one of my grad students.

And so because every cell starting B lymphocyte, has a genetic kaleidoscope, it’s got essentially a fingerprint, that’s unique to that cell. And that means that it is making copies of the cells and getting mutations. If you can amplify the part of the genetic kaleidoscope, they should all look related, but have unique mutations. And that’s what we found in what turned out to be a little cluster of cells that was distinct, but not like what we see mammals.

Check out the dialogue at 10:44. Professor Magor discusses cell lines.

Read the Bradley Magor 10:44 section.Bradley Magor 10:44#

So that evolved to when I was doing my PhD. Getting cell lines is tricky. So most of the ones that people use are from cancers, including the very first one HeLa, Henrietta Lacks, you’re familiar with that? Okay. So that’s tricky.

But some colleagues of ours tried with the commercially important fish in the deep south—which is where I was working, to just stimulate them with something that we know tickles immune cells.

And this is completely bizarre, because it’s never been shown in any other species. But for some reason, they developed what were like cell lines of immune cells from channel catfish. Really tasty. And so that was first, you know, it’s not that I wanted to study channel catfish, it’s that it’s the only thing I’ve got cell lines of.

But it means that I can get large numbers of cells with a certain type of B cells, T cells, macrophages, etc. So that becomes the starting point. Now, the developmental biologists had adopted zebrafish as something that was really easy to study. Because it’s got a transparent embryo, and so on and so forth. And they started to develop tools.

Other people said, wow, they’ve got all these tools for this species. And so they started to develop tools coming from different angles. And all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, this is a really small fish. It’s only yay big, but it’s got a lot of powerful tools.

So that becomes one of the choices, you know, now that we’re wanting to study what’s happening inside an animal.

These guys are really small. So we look on one of our phylogenetic charts. And who’s related to that? Well, goldfish, you know, koi that big?

Check out the dialogue at 16:48. Professor Magor discusses his education.

Read the Bradley Magor 16:48 section.Bradley Magor 16:48#

I took over for a guy—he would take tin foil and some glue, and just put tin foil in instead of a fuse. So like we had instances where people got injured or a big fire happened in the electrical panel, just a whole host of things where I saw people get really badly hurt.

And so I decided I don’t want to do this anymore. The economy sucked. And there’s this little bird in the back of my brain saying somebody thinks you should be doing research. It said not only research, but you should go into the field of immunology, whatever that is.

And so I wrote two to three labs, there was nobody doing immunology in fish. I was still interested in aquaculture, and vaccines and stuff like that. So I wrote to three labs that were doing parasitology. And I said, I don’t want to do parasitology. I want to do immunology.

But I think that there’s an immunologic question to the system that you’re studying, the parasite system. And I didn’t know that at the time. But that would be a very unusual letter. I’ve never received one like that. All three labs said absolutely, come join us. And I just chose one.

And from there, it’s just, you know, I meet people and they say, Well, what are you doing next, you want to come to my lab. And, likewise, this guy across the hall, whose group is studying the goldfish, met him at a conference, have a beer, and he says, we’re going to have a job in two years. Why don’t you and your wife apply? So, my wife was studying influenza, she works over here and is off across the hall.

Check at the dialogue at 23:29. Professor Magor talks about what he wants from grad students.

Read the Bradley Magor 23:40 section.Bradley Magor 23:40#

That can be an interesting one. So I want them to be independent, thought independent, they’ve done their homework. In other words, you know, they’ve actually read about my stuff. And that’s indicated in an application. I was going to say, background, but I had one applicant from Nigeria, who I corresponded with.

And I eventually said, you know, I’m sorry, your background is too zoological. You don’t have enough molecular biology. And so I’m not going to take you. And two weeks later, he emailed me and just said, I would have succeeded. And so I wrote back and said, Okay, prove it.

So I brought him over, you know, and you’ve told me something that you’re going to achieve. You might not have the best background, but I didn’t have the best background going into community college. So he had to work hard, but he worked hard. And he succeeded.

And he now has, he did his masters with me then did his PhD with a colleague. And yeah, He’s doing well, I’ve seen him recently. But so, you know, I guess it sort of depends, that would be my answer.

Read the Full Interview: section.Full Interview:#

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 0:00 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 0:00#

Alright, I’ll start the recording. Yeah. I don’t like early morning classes, but I already had one today.

Read the Bradley Magor 0:08 section.Bradley Magor 0:08#

Yeah, I used to teach at 7am. But that was the Study Abroad programme in Africa. So, it meant that we go scuba diving afterwards.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

Where in Africa?

Read the Bradley Magor section.Bradley Magor#

In Mozambique.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 0:23 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 0:23#

Oh, Mozambique? I’m from Nigeria.

Read the Bradley Magor section.Bradley Magor#

That’s a long way.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

Yeah. Okay, so I saw a little bit about your research from the U of A website. And I was just really interested in it, from the get-go. I learned a little bit about some basic immunology in my first year, okay, not my first year, my second year, last year when everything was online. And it was just kind of crazy how it’s kind of like a game. That’s the way I saw it in my head, especially when I saw some antibodies for the first time. It’s like we have a game between pathogens and our immune system, and one side is going to come out on top. And just the way everything in the immune system was designed. It kind of didn’t make any sense. How can it be this specific? How can it be this shape? How can it exactly find bind in this conformation?

I don’t know, I haven’t had as much time to go deep into it as I would like, because I’ve been busy with courses. But I still wanted to have the chance to talk with you about your research. So, my first question is, the main goal of your research is to learn something about vaccines, that’s the idea?

Read the Bradley Magor 1:41 section.Bradley Magor 1:41#

It’s more really more about evolution. So that business with the antibodies, a developing B cell has effectively a genetic kaleidoscope, so all of the elements are always in the device, but every turn you get a different pattern. And that’s pretty much how our part of our immune recognition—the anti vaccine is based.

You just put up, you know, billions of different cells, each with their own unique genetic kaleidoscope. And that pattern is going to have a compliment, possibly somewhere in nature. So, you first check to make sure that it doesn’t have a compliment on your own body’s autoimmune diseases. And if you don’t, then you go out.

And if you if you’ve ever gotten like an infection in your mouth, you might have noticed swelling in your lymph nodes.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

I haven’t had that.

Read the Bradley Magor 2:32 section.Bradley Magor 2:32#

But okay, excellent. Well, you know, doctors often check around here to see whether or not it’s swollen, what it basically means if it’s swollen—it means that infection has been somewhere, it was transported to a lymph node, which are all through your body.

And then all of these immune cells come along and see whether or not their pattern matches something on the path. And if it does, then that cell gets pulled aside. And it starts to divide like crazy, making 1000s of daughter cells. And in each of those daughter cells, a mutator enzyme is turned on that intentionally mutates the genome. And what it’s mutating is the—essentially the genetic component of the kaleidoscope.

So, it’s saying that you know, you’re already good at binding to something on the pathogen, we’re going to try and randomly make that better. And so, all of the daughter cells get different mutations, some won’t be able to bind anymore, some will bind better. And so after all the mutations in the cell division, they compete for who can best bind that pathogen. And the winner gets to live and the rest die.

So, there’s a huge amount of waste, I guess, you could say in the immune system. But the upside is that you’ve got a much better antibody, which means it binds much faster. And not only that, but the survivor makes more copies of itself. And some of those just start secreting antibody, and some of them live in your body for life. So, in 1990, they tested survivors of the 1918 Flu to see if they still had immune memory to it.

70 years later, and they still had immunity. So, you know, that’s—that’s why we get vaccinated so, you know, if we survive an infection, we deal with it that much faster and better over time. And, in fact, they say that the immune system is the last physiological system to peak in your body, most things peak at about your age (Abdul is 19). But for the immune system, about age 45, you’ve probably been exposed to everything, you know what it is that you’re going to get exposed to. And you’ll develop that memory. And you’ll deal with it that much better the next time around.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 5:22 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 5:22#

And so, this is it’s super complicated. You have billions of cells in your body. Yeah. And they’re always adapting to whatever pathogens are coming in. This is going to make it extremely difficult to study your immune system because everything is constantly changing. And every single person is different. So how do you get like, good consistent results that will be informative to you, if you’ve got so many cells in your body?

Read the Bradley Magor 5:51 section.Bradley Magor 5:51#

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 8:37 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 8:37#

And to learn about the cells, you’re taking a sample from somebody, and then what are you doing? Because these things are so small, you don’t get to see exactly how the cell looks like. You got to mix it with some chemical. And then indirectly you learn about what’s going on in this cell, right?

Read the Bradley Magor 8:55 section.Bradley Magor 8:55#

Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of different approaches. It turns out, these clusters of cells have got other cells that are holding them together. So once we realised that, we said, “Can we tease these out of the tissues?” My students could.

And you know, they’re not very big, they’re maybe 100-200 micrometres in size. So once you can isolate them, this is something you can’t do in mammals, once you isolate them, you’ve got everybody who’s involved in that process all joined together.

And you can either try and physically break them apart or use enzymes to get individual cells. And then you can do whatever you want. You can do fats analysis and see who’s in that population just based on sort of size and other characteristics. You can do, but we haven’t done, single cell PCR, where you amplify, essentially the transcriptome, everything that’s transcribed from an individual cell.

Or you can just take all of them and do an analysis on that. And that’s basically what we’ve done.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 10:19 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 10:19#

And also, another thing is that this doesn’t happen overnight, when you have to have this idea about, okay, we want to learn about evolution through studying these antibodies, you have so many different animals that you can choose from, what makes you key into the idea that using fish is going to be a good idea?

Read the Bradley Magor 10:44 section.Bradley Magor 10:44#

But some colleagues of ours tried with the commercially important fish in the deep south—which is where I was working, to just stimulate them with something that we know tickles immune cells.

So that becomes one of the choices, you know, now that we’re wanting to study what’s happening inside an animal.

These guys are really small. So we look on one of our phylogenetic charts. And who’s related to that? Well, goldfish, you know, koi that big?

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 12:59 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 12:59#

Oh really? They get that big?

Read the Bradley Magor 13:00 section.Bradley Magor 13:00#

You go to an Asian aquatic garden, and you’ll see massive, I mean, honestly, they can get this big.

The goldfish from this pet store will be this big. And so we say, these guys are closely related, these are going to be my proxy for size because I can get lots of cells. So it happens that the guy across the hall, Dr. Milosevic, who’s just retired, is using them to study a certain cell type. And we’re interested in that cell type because it’s prominent in these clusters that we’ve identified.

So we say, okay, we’re going to do things side by side as much as we can, with these two species that are closely related. And for some things, we can only use the goldfish, and for some things, we can only use zebrafish. But, you know, they’re closely related. So you figure that things are going to be pretty much the same. So you know, sometimes there’s model species that have a habitat or lifestyle that is of interest to you. So that’s why you choose them. In our case, it was tools and prior experience across the hall with goldfish and this wealth of tools for zebrafish.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 14:29 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 14:29#

So when COVID happened, did it make it more difficult for you to get the cells that you wanted and get organised?

Read the Bradley Magor 14:38 section.Bradley Magor 14:38#

Yeah, of course, we had to shut down the lab for two months. I don’t want a grad student back and then another a little later. The work that one of them was doing was largely computational. So research has moved on much more from the bench, the wet lab, to computers, which is taken way beyond my understanding.

You know, I’m used to seeing a dead data point. You know, maybe I have 100 DNA sequences or something like that. My grad student comes back and says, okay, yeah, I got to something like 400 million reads last weekend. Whoa, I’m not looking through those. I just put it in, she modified some programs so that she could analyse it and gets all this feedback, which is weird for me, because I’m used to seeing individual data points. And now I’m just seeing big data take over.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 15:44 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 15:44#

Yeah, absolutely.

So what led you on this path to biology, from high school and university?

Read the Bradley Magor 16:02 section.Bradley Magor 16:02#

I didn’t go to high school. Oh, yeah, I snuck in the back door of a community college. Oh, I wanted to be an oyster farmer from the West Coast. And so I wanted to do a marine biology degree, because I’m never going to leave the coast. This is giving you some hints as to how wrong you can be.

And after the first couple of years in university, everybody said, well, you should be doing research. I wound up working in aquaculture and then skipping a fish boat. And I decided that was going to kill me.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 16:45 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 16:45#

Why?

Read the Bradley Magor 16:48 section.Bradley Magor 16:48#

Read the Bradley Magor 18:48 section.Bradley Magor 18:48#

And we both applied, we both got shortlisted, they swore that they couldn’t take both of us. They took both of us. So you know, it’s like, it’s luck. There’s, you know, being prepared to kind of take advantage of that a lot. And yeah, and I guess, just curiosity. I mean, there are labs that what I call empire builders that would have 30 postdocs, and I just want to play in my sandbox, and answer the same questions that I have had more or less since I was a kid. I’m just stuck as a nine-year-old.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 19:32 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 19:32#

Sometimes I feel like that too. Yeah.

Read the Bradley Magor 19:37 section.Bradley Magor 19:37#

That’s cool. You know, I’m that sort of person.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 19:41 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 19:41#

So when you were a kid growing up, was education just not a priority back then?

Read the Bradley Magor 19:50 section.Bradley Magor 19:50#

No, I, I didn’t like authority. And I was still curious. I mean, I hitchhiked coast to coast four times in my teens. I still read a lot. I would go to the Medical Library at UBC on the weekends for fun. I was just a very curious kid.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 20:15 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 20:15#

And the education at that time, was everyone expected to go to university or were you expected to get a job?

Read the Bradley Magor 20:22 section.Bradley Magor 20:22#

No, no. I mean, I had talked to some oyster farmers, I knew some oyster farmers, and they sort of said, you know, you’d do well to have an understanding of the biology of these critters. So that seemed perfectly reasonable. So, you know, how do I get into a college and they’ve got something called ensure student status.

So it’s just, instead of three hours, per course, per week, it’s four and a half hours, sort of like remedial. But an awful lot of what you learned in high school, if you’re aware of your surroundings, you’re going to kind of learn out there. Anyways, math sucked. But I always liked math when I was a kid. So, you know, I wasn’t intimidated by it. It was just calculus, derivatives. So, yeah, I mean, I had a rough first year of college. Yeah, but things worked out.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

So on the lighter side, where’s your favourite place to eat on campus?

Read the Bradley Magor section.Bradley Magor#

Probably Ho Ho Chinese food.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

Where is it?

Read the Bradley Magor 21:44 section.Bradley Magor 21:44#

That’s an in house. Oh, yeah, I live there. Ever noticed—right smack in the middle on the east side, okay, maybe it’s not hohos, I think it’s a Chinese place.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 21:59 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 21:59#

I’ll try it out. And what technological advances have happened over the years that have really helped out your research?

Read the Bradley Magor 22:11 section.Bradley Magor 22:11#

What they call next generation sequencing. Like I said, I’ve got a thing on the wall over there that I show my new grad students, which is, you know, this is a week’s worth of work, and I get, you know, 10 DNA sequences.

Nowadays, my student spends a week and gets 400 million DNA sequences. So, yeah, that.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 22:39 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 22:39#

How difficult was it to, you know, adjust yourself and learn how to use this new technology?

Read the Bradley Magor 22:47 section.Bradley Magor 22:47#

Well, first off, I didn’t, it was my grad student. And, you know that the basic premise of the sequencing, it advanced briefly, but it was really the data manipulation, and that’s, you know, where she came in and found software adapted to zebrafish, and then has spent two or three years doing all these different types of analyses.

So I would say that it’s bypassed me completely. And she’ll be well set for, you know, the future of science.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 23:29 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 23:29#

So when you get grad students to come work in your life, what are you looking for in them? Do you think there’ll be motivated to learn about what I do?

Read the Bradley Magor 23:40 section.Bradley Magor 23:40#

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 25:10 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 25:10#

You just need to get to know them and see what they’re like.

Read the Bradley Magor 25:13 section.Bradley Magor 25:13#

You know, I want to see motivation. Oddly enough that was the most daring thing that he had ever said to anybody. He was such a quiet, you know, such a reserved guy. But you know, it’s like an understatement. You know, I promised that I’m going to work hard enough that I can overcome my deficiencies. And he kept his promise.

So, you know, that’s just about anybody can, you know, ask for. To become a scientist, you need curiosity, you need a work ethic. And if you’ve got those two things, then you’re probably golden. You’re going to stub your toe a lot of times, but you know, you shake it off, and you keep walking.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 26:02 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 26:02#

So for new young kids who want to become scientists, do you think they should focus on the grades or focus more on that curiosity?

Read the Bradley Magor 26:20 section.Bradley Magor 26:20#

So it sounds almost hypocritical, because I definitely went through the back door. Yeah, but that’s not easy. And so you know, you want to get decent grades. But, you know, you’re not going to succeed if you’re not genuinely interested. And don’t pigeonhole yourself to one particular topic. I didn’t go that way.

But chemistry was just a breeze for me, for some reason. It just was really logical. And I could do everything logically. And I’ve never gotten grades, like I’ve gotten you know, second year organic chemistry, stuff like that. See what really turns your crank, or maybe what you’re good at. But if you’re not good at something, you know, you can overcome that.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 27:19 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 27:19#

So always just persevere, push through.

Read the Bradley Magor 27:23 section.Bradley Magor 27:23#

Follow your curiosity.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 27:25 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 27:25#

And when you say follow your curiosity, are you going to find that curiosity in your classes?

Read the Bradley Magor 27:43 section.Bradley Magor 27:43#

You know, I grew up in the north shore of Vancouver, 500 metres from the ocean, and 500 metres from the forest. And I spent a lot more time on the ocean. As young as I remember, you know, lifting up rocks, and oh cool, what’s that?

You know, I’ve always been fascinated by the sea, but also by the mountains. So I don’t know if that’s something that you can learn or if it’s just built into you.

I mean, I think it was Carl Sagan who said that every nine-year-old is a scientist, but us adults beat it out of them by the time they get to twenty. And I think there’s some truth to that. I don’t know why, but you know, everything from jealousies in high school where oh, you’re a nerd or this or that. You know, we’re the little kids. We’re smarter, curious.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 28:49 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 28:49#

I think this is good advice for anything you want to pursue in life. Just get a little bit of that curiosity. I want to, even though it’ll be hard, sometimes you won’t love it all the time. But you want to come back every day and like, learn a little bit of something about that thing you’re doing.

Read the Bradley Magor 29:08 section.Bradley Magor 29:08#

Yeah, I mean, I don’t have kids. Or at least my grad students are my proxy children. But you know, my friends have their kids are in their 20s and stuff. And they said, Oh, you know, she found she tried such and such, just absolutely loved it. And it’s not what she was planning to do. She wanted to do environmental sciences. Now she’s doing production sets for the film industry in BC. But you know, she really likes it. She seems to be really good at it.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 29:40 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 29:40#

And yeah, sometimes there’s a little bit of that difficulty of finding your passion. I think, for me, I didn’t really know exactly what to do after high school. But I think science is just kind of what everyone was going into. So I also followed along, but as you spend so much time learning about it, a part of you just starts to just appreciate the amount of work that goes into it. So, yeah, the thing that I really want to learn about is how scientists actually think, not just the results you see in class, but like, you know, the scientific method that you have to go through. What’s your thinking when you’re about to start an experiment?

Read the Bradley Magor 30:28 section.Bradley Magor 30:28#

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is hypothesis testing, I tell people that I have been wrong about more of my hypotheses than I have been right about. That’s fine. You know, a hypothesis is just a way of asking a question. And you always have a couple of possibilities. And there’s some backdoor ones that you didn’t even think about.

But as long as you eliminate a couple, then you know, maybe I should look at it as a backdoor thing to this. And it advances. And, you know, I had a colleague once who made a prediction about how something evolved. And some other researcher went along and tested it and proved him wrong. And you know, we’re having beer and he said, I’m really embarrassed by that.

Martin, you put out a question that was good enough, that somebody decided to test it. And they discovered you were wrong. But all that means is that now, you ask the next question. If it’s not this, then what is it? And yeah, you know, it’s, don’t let ego get into it. Just, you know, follow your curiosity.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 31:44 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 31:44#

Yeah, I really didn’t realise how much ego can play a part in science till I started learning about some of these scientists, like some neuroscientists in the past, and some chemists, and they would always be fighting with each other about whose research was right.

And that’s when I started to see science, it’s not just the work, but it’s also the people and the community. And that’s going to lead to you know, what gets released. So how has that been like, the community of scientists that you work with?

Read the Bradley Magor 32:16 section.Bradley Magor 32:16#

My community is fairly small. But once, I’ve gotten into it with somebody I’ve collaborated with, he was the discoverer of that mutator. That was a really big deal. And, you know, he proposed a mechanism of how it operated. And everybody’s research started to suggest operators somewhere else, he wouldn’t let go of that. He didn’t want to lose face.

And, you know, I always thought, you would have gotten the Nobel prize if you had not stuck to your way of thinking, you know, been inflexible and afraid to lose face. If you shifted his lab to, you know, everybody’s suggesting it’s going this way. And you’re running into a brick wall over here.

But yeah, I mean, I use that example to a lot to students to say, you know, don’t let pride stop you, there’s no loss of face in being wrong. There’s one example that comes to mind, where I had two students and where I said, this is the hypothesis and they kept finding different data.

They said I was wrong. And they were afraid to tell me, no. You’re both setting up in different directions, and you’ve both proven me wrong. And so you see, it tends to be more with the empire builders. But oddly enough, my colleagues that I respect the most are those that tend to be humble. You know, they’re just like me, they’re just driven by curiosity, and they happen to be really bloody bright. But, you know, they ask really interesting questions in interesting ways. But, you know, some of the most successful labs out here, zero respect for their researchers, because they really aren’t interested in the science. You know, you can’t have a beer with them. You can’t connect with them.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 34:30 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 34:30#

Do you really like the path that science and academia is taking?

Read the Bradley Magor 34:43 section.Bradley Magor 34:43#

There’s a mixture. It’s like any population you’re, going to have, you know, a range of styles of people.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 34:53 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 34:53#

Yeah. That’s just the way it is. Yeah. That’s interesting. A lot of people don’t really break it down like that. They don’t go into detail about what the people are like, and the kind of thinking that you need.

Read the Bradley Magor 35:19 section.Bradley Magor 35:19#

But you know, it’s not like work. It’s not work. You know, like, I’ve got a squash match in an hour. I got a good workout. But to me, that’s not exercise. I’m having fun. And, you know, that’s the same thing with research, I’m having fun. And oh, yeah, it’s a job. Okay, well, I’ll take a paycheck, if you want to give me one, but I just want to play in the sandbox. So like I said, you know, I don’t have an empire. I’ve just got a few students and I’m content.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 35:54 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 35:54#

So the pressure and the work life balance, in your opinion, it’s pretty good?

Read the Bradley Magor 36:02 section.Bradley Magor 36:02#

Well, there, again, kind of unique, you know, my wife is across the hall, I spend all day with her. At the end of the day, I go to the squash courts, you know, it’s kind of an inverted life balance, but it works beautifully.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 36:20 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 36:20#

And do you think that in research, you need to manage that work-life balance, you need to manage the pressure, or you think you should just work as hard as you can?

Read the Bradley Magor 36:32 section.Bradley Magor 36:32#

I think some people do. You know if you’re going to have kids, yeah, then that becomes much tougher. And a lot of stuff is sort of taken out of your hands. But for us, no issue. We’re both academics, you know, we understand deadlines, and, yeah, I’ll come to bed, you know, maybe before daylight and you know, just don’t talk to me for the next week, because I’ve got to get such and such. And because your partner is also experiencing that from time to time. They appreciate it. And it’s not an issue. I know, for some academics who have non-academic partners, becomes an issue. So, I just consider myself exceedingly lucky. Yes.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 37:29 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 37:29#

So when you’re thinking about funding, is that always something in the back of your head? Or does it just, you’ve never had problems with it?

Read the Bradley Magor 37:37 section.Bradley Magor 37:37#

No, I’ve definitely had problems. Not always in my hands. In other words, they get a non immunologist to review it, they may misunderstand it. And so I’ve had a couple of denials reversed, and a couple of years where I didn’t have funding. But you know, life as a grad student, you never have any money. But you learn how to still have fun. I don’t have a lot of money, but I can still find a way of doing this on the cheap, or I’ve had colleagues helped me out, you know, and stuff like that.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 38:22 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 38:22#

Yeah. And I just took a look at the lab. How do you keep everything in check? How do you know exactly where everything goes?

Read the Bradley Magor 38:35 section.Bradley Magor 38:35#

Well, most of it is set up by the students. So you know, I’ve got the five workstations, plus some common areas. So the students, you know, when one finishes up, they sort of clear out things. And then your student comes in and organises as they wish. And otherwise, you know, I just sort of hover, I check in every once in a while.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 39:06 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 39:06#

What I also wanted to learn about is what kind of things you are doing on a day to day basis, like what kind of techniques are using most often in your lab?

Read the Bradley Magor 39:23 section.Bradley Magor 39:23#

So DNA sequencing, then a little bit of protein work or transcriptome work. We’re about to make a recombinant protein and test to see whether or not it attracts another cell or tickles another cell to proliferate.

There’s kind of two types of labs. There’s one that finds a method and milks it to death and just uses the same method over and over because they know it works. They find other questions using that method. Me, I’ve got a question, how am I going to answer that? I’ll use whatever technique I need. And, you know, if we don’t know that, then we learn.

We’ve gone all over the place, different sorts of technologies like in situ hybridization, which is a way of seeing where a gene is expressed in the tissue. Right now, for the first time I’m reusing a technique, but with slightly different systems. So those clusters of cells, one of our controls, revealed that they were also very active in the intestine. And so my new student from Ghana is analysing that. That’s got its own obstacles, because you can’t isolate the clusters. They’re caught up in connective tissue. So in a way, that’s painful, because your students have obstacles to overcome, because that’s the process. It’s a learning process.

I always tell students that even bad data has information. And, you know, an experiment seems to fail, never throw out those results, because you used an awful lot of time. And I also tell my grad students, you’re effectively self employed. You know, you will get out of it what you put into it. So I’m not somebody standing there with a weapon saying, do this.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju 41:59 section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju 41:59#

Alright, I think I’ll just ask one more question. If you could go back, before you got into this line of work, what would be your best piece of advice to yourself?

Read the Bradley Magor 42:16 section.Bradley Magor 42:16#

I’m not certain. I tend not to be a person with a lot of regrets.

You know what, I have one thing. Pay more attention to communication. I can have a bit of a writer’s block. It’s important that you know how to articulate well. When you write grants, you want the reviewer to easily be able to understand what you’re trying to say. You should write in a way that allows people not in your same field to be able to understand what you are trying to say. Get your friends from different labs to give you constructive criticism.

Read the Abdul-Samad Olagunju section.Abdul-Samad Olagunju#

Thanks for all of this. I’m really appreciative of the time you took out of your day to do this.