Ideas - The 2024 Killam Prize Honours Canada’s University Researchers (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Each year, a cohort of scholars with research careers of "sustained excellence" are honoured with the Killam Prize — seen by some as Canada's version of the Nobel. IDEAS hears from Engineering winner Clement Gosselin, who has developed an innovative robotic arm. Natural Sciences laureate Sylvain Moineau is making breakthroughs using basic science research, and Medical Sciences winner Gerard Wright fights the growing global threat posed by antibiotic resistance. (2 of 2)

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, and to the second part of our spotlight on the 2024 Killam Prize. I'm Nala Ayed. The Killam Prize is a big deal in the world of Canadian universities because it honors researchers with ongoing careers of excellence. And that might just matter to the rest of us.

Because that same research has the capacity to affect and improve our lives and societies in Canada and beyond. I met this year's cohort of Killam laureates when I hosted the 2024 Prize Ceremony in Toronto. And in this episode, I'll speak to three of them. All are researchers in the STEM disciplines, Killam Prize Laureates in the Natural Sciences, Engineering, and Medical Sciences. Each of them joined me in studio to talk about the nature of their research. Phages are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. They're important to control the bacterial populations in our ecosystems. And the big questions that research generates. This has been a concern for me to make sure that what we develop is for the good of humanity. First up. I am pleased to introduce the winner of the 2024 Killam Prize in Health Sciences, Gerard Wright of McMaster University.

Dr. Wright is internationally renowned for his research on antimicrobial resistance. research on antimicrobial resistance. Through more than 30 years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Wright has developed a body of work that has unequivocally informed the global response to drug-resistant infections. Congratulations, Dr. Gerard Wright. I'm Jerry Wright. I'm a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University.

And I'm a member of the Michael DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, where we're trying to find solutions to multiple infectious disease problems. Say that you meet a non-scientist and they ask you, so what do you do? How would you summarize it? So we work on antibiotics in my lab. And antibiotics, as I like to say, have changed the way that we die. So before antibiotics, the major cause of death was due to infection. And when antibiotics were discovered first in the 1930s and then with the rise of penicillin in the 40s and all these other mycins that people might be familiar with in the 1950s and 60s, we've completely changed modern medicine. completely changed modern medicine. So what I like to tell people is that what I work on is one of the foundations of medicine and why it's so important that we keep working in this area because of antibiotic resistance. So what's the backstory? What is it that got you interested in science in general when you were growing up? Oh, that's a lovely question. I grew up in sort of rural Northern Ontario. So my backyard, uh, was a forest. And, uh, so I was

surrounded by nature all the time. And I was just endlessly curious about, you know, ecology and the interplay of plants and animals and humans, and humans and just deeply curious about nature in general. And it just stuck with me the whole time, you know, since growing up and then, you know, learning about it in high school and then eventually university and now on to this. And what is it that was fascinating to you about this specific area of science in the 1990s? So when I did my graduate work in the late 1980s, it was the height of the HIV epidemic. And so on television and in the news everywhere, we were hearing about this disease that was killing people that were young people like me.

And I was deeply affected by that. And one of the things that happens with HIV, of course, is that your immune system gets depleted. And so the major cause of death for these young people was not the virus itself, but the actual, the effects that it had on the immune system. And so what that left the, these folks defenseless against bacteria and fungal pathogens. And that to me was something that I wanted to be involved with to try and help find some solutions. And so my graduate work at the University of Waterloo was focused on trying to find new drug candidates, not to treat HIV itself, but to treat the fungal infections that they were getting. able to join a team at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow who happened to be working on vancomycin resistance at the time, which had just emerged in hospitals as this massive problem. So vancomycin is one of these drugs of last resort that physicians had thought you could not get

resistance to. And that really just completely spun my head around because we were able to work with physicians who were treating patients who had this, these infectious organisms. And the work that I was doing in the lab was, I could see directly impacting the way that medicine was being practiced. So that to me was just something really wonderful to be able to leverage fundamental research in an application that could impact human health. Was that always kind of the attraction for you is being able to see the science you're engaged in being applied in practical ways? Or is it an intrinsic interest in science and the scientific process that attracted you no i think to me the application was really the the key i mean the being a scientist is the greatest thing in the world like you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before right uh

i always often tell my students like there's no more continents to discover or oceans to cross. The only unknown stuff is the sort of in the scientific world, if you want to be an explorer these days. And so that part of it is absolutely super cool, but that's very nerdy and fun and exciting scientific discoveries that might actually have an application in the real world, in particular as it impacts human health, I think to me is just an added bonus that really helps get me out of bed every morning. I love the idea of the pursuit of science actually being an explorer and maybe the only way of being an explorer. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's, there's,

there's so much unknown out, out there, you know, like we work in particular on microbes and, and how they interact with with humans and with animals and how they interact with each other and the environment and the fact that they can produce all these wonderful compounds and that you can produce all these wonderful compounds and that you can actually use these compounds for something useful downstream is just remarkable. But there's still so much unknown.

We can never be finished. It's really super exciting. To get to what you're doing today, super exciting. To get to what you're doing today, you mentioned that antibiotics change the way that we die. You refer to the current situation with infection as an antimicrobial resistance crisis. So what qualifies it as a crisis? Antibiotics and resistance go hand in hand. And I think that's one of the things, even Fleming, when he received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin in, I think it was 1945, in his Nobel speech, made the case that resistance is part of using antibiotics. So it's just evolution through natural selection. Microbes divide very, very quickly. Their generation time can be minutes compared to us, which is years. And they can swap genes. They can swap the genetic information that gives you resistance very, very simply. So resistance is just part of using antibiotics.

So that we've been able to keep one step ahead of this since the initial discovery of these amazing life-changing molecules in the middle of the 20th century by simply discovering new ones, or by tweaking the chemical structures of the existing ones so they could avoid resistance. But now what's happening is that we're not discovering new ones anymore, and we're not tweaking the old ones anymore. And so there's this tremendously significant and growing demand for new antibiotics as a result of resistance. And the supply chain is dry. So that's where the crisis element comes in. And how long has it been a crisis?

Well, I started working in this area 35 years ago. And it's been a challenge ever since then for sure. I think what's made it even more acute now is that the pharmaceutical industry, which used to be our source of new drugs, has basically walked away from this field. Walked away from this field. Yeah. And the reasons for it, there's two major reasons. One, the science is really hard. reasons. One, the science is really hard. So trying to find compounds, antibiotic candidates that are completely non-toxic to humans, can be used for all sorts of infectious diseases, but still make you money is hard. So the science part is hard, but the finance part of it is

really, really difficult. Because now, if I discover a new antibiotic tomorrow, because resistance is such a challenge in our hospitals and the medical system, the physicians don't want to use it unless they really need to, right? So in case of emergency, break glass. So they love to have this on the shelf, but they don't want to use it because they know that resistance is just going to follow. And of course, if you're the company that made this and the clock is ticking on your patent,

so you need people to buy it. And as a result, that's this tension of deciding not to use the antibiotics unless we absolutely need them, new antibiotics, and the need to be able to recoup the amount of investment that you put into it. I mean, it costs over a billion dollars to make a drug. Like whether it's an antibiotic or a new blood pressure medicine, it's still the same amount of money.

Right. And so you have this significant financial challenge that is tough to deal with, frankly. Let me just go back a few steps and ask you about something you said earlier, which is that antibiotics change the way that we die. People born in the last 80 years or so, we take them for granted. They're part of our life and they help us get over infectious disease. Can you paint a picture of what the world was like before antibiotics? Can you paint a picture of what the world was like before antibiotics? Oh, yeah. I live in a small community, and about five kilometers down the road is a church that was founded, I guess, in the late 1800s. And they have a small graveyard behind that church. And if you stroll around the gravestones from 100 years ago, what you will see is a lot of young people under the age of five who died. Wow. And so what we tend to forget is that families were large for a reason back then.

It's because there was a good chance you wouldn't make it out of being an infant or being a child. And the reason for that is almost exclusively infection. And so antibiotics have changed the way that that equation happens for us, right? Antibiotics as well have also enabled all these amazing medical therapies. therapies. So think of cancer chemotherapy. There you're taking a very toxic drug that very often will destroy your immune system temporarily. And so you're very, very vulnerable to infection. The only reason why physicians and oncologists can think about giving you these poison materials to be able to treat cancer is because they know they can treat the subsequent infection if it arises. Or imagine a heart transplant, a kidney transplant, where you're probably on immune suppressing drugs for the rest of your life. You have to be conscious of infection. So if you're in a situation where the antibiotics don't exist anymore, you can't do all of these remarkable

therapies that we have come to expect, as you said, and that have extended our lifespan. The lifespan of Canadians in 1920 was about 59 years old. That was the predicted lifespan. And now it's north of 80. And is that ascribable entirely to antibiotics? And is that ascribable entirely to antibiotics? No, but it's been really our ability to control infection. So sanitation, clean water, so we're not getting bacteria in the water. Vaccines, so we're preventing disease.

But also antibiotics that allow us to, if you do have that infection, treat it. So this combination of our ability to treat infections has given us an extra 25, 30 years of lifespan. In less than a century. And the dynamic that you described earlier, where we're heading in the opposite direction, where they're no longer working for us the way they have been. Can you look forward into the future and just tell us what the statistical models are suggesting about where we're headed in terms of infection? Yeah, so there's been a lot of efforts to try and figure out where we're going to be if we don't get this problem under control. And some of them are quite stark with estimates that 50 million people a year would die by the year of, uh,

by the year 2050, if we don't solve this problem, uh, right now, 5 million people a year die who from an antibiotic resistant organism who previously would have been alive because we could treat those infections. But the fact that we're losing, um,

the efficacy of our drugs, those 5 million people a year are no longer with us. Go ahead. I was going to say, if you extrapolate that to the future, then we're in a situation where infectious diseases now, caused by drug-resistant organisms, kill more people than cancer. I understand that you had a close call with your own health about 12 years ago. May I ask about that? What happened? Yeah. So, you know, I've been working on antibiotics and antibiotic resistance for most of my career and, uh, you know, never thought I would be the, the subject of my research, but it turned out that the, that's the case. So we were in France for a vacation with my wife.

And I got tummy problems, as what happens to lots of people when you go traveling. You eat something that you shouldn't and you're having a rough time. So that exacerbated from this gastrointestinal sort of discomfort over time to a raging bloodstream infection. Because the bacteria that had been in my gut had made it through the wall and into my bloodstream. Septic. Yeah. So I was getting pretty dicey. So when we landed in Toronto, I asked my wife to drive me directly to emergency because by then I was feeling pretty bad. And I remember asking the emergency physician at the time, I said, this comes from a GI infection.

So it's probably an E. coli or a salmonella or campylobacter or something like that. And what do you know about antibiotic resistance in those organisms in Europe? And he looked at me like I was from Mars, right? He said, I'm going to give you ciprofloxacin because that always works. And he sent me off with this ciprofloxacin. And of course, two days later, I was almost comatose. And this is a wide spectrum antibiotic, which is like the hammer that can get anything. Cipro. Exactly. So that's one of those drugs that it's usually safe to give to someone with this kind of symptoms that I had.

And of course, it didn't work. And so I managed to contact, so at the time I was running an infectious disease research institute and I managed to contact some colleagues, actually my wife did because I was in no shape to be on the phone, and was able to get at that point then a third generation cephalosporin, so IV antibiotics. And that did the thing. So I know firsthand what it's like to be super sick and then an hour later feeling like I'm almost back on the mend again because of the miraculous action of antibiotics. Incredible. And I didn't feel good for months after that. Like it really did take tremendous impact on my health. And, you

know, amplify that to, you know, the 6 billion people on the planet. It becomes inevitable that we're in this situation where we're in this crisis. It must have been, to say the least, disquieting to have that reaction from the emergency room physician. Could you talk about how aware you think we all are as a society or as in the health system of this problem? So in the health system where physicians are increasingly aware of the resistance problem because they're seeing failures that I like the one that I just mentioned that happened to me increasingly and they're also really starting to get the message from clinical associations and what have you that this is a significant challenge and a threat to the way that they practice medicine. So they're being very careful about this. I think that the general public, though, doesn't know very much about this. And that's a problem. It's a significant issue. And it's hard, I think, for people to understand it

because it's something that they can't see. You can see bacteria if you come to my lab, but you can't see them in your everyday life normally. People don't use antibiotics very often unless they're in the hospital. So it's kind of abstract, I think, for the most part, until it affects them personally. You say that there are solutions to this crisis. Where are they emerging from? Well, the solutions really are coming from academic labs, small companies, because as I said,

the pharmaceutical industry, for the most part, has not seen this as something that they can invest in. It includes all sorts of old-style drug discovery work, as well as applications of new technologies. In our lab, we use a lot of synthetic biology to be able to manipulate organisms so that they can produce new drug candidates. produce new drug candidates. And we're trying to find new molecules that we can bring into development by some means that we haven't figured out yet to help solve this problem. But there's lots of other options out there. Like vaccination for bacterial diseases is not very common because antibiotics have worked so well, but that's an option. I mean, we've seen just the stunning success of the mRNA vaccines and COVID. If we start thinking about applying those to bacterial infections, I think, you know, there's opportunities there. As one of

the Killam laureates this year showed, bacteriophages, that is viruses that infect bacteria and destroy them, can be remarkable tools and are used in a niche-like manner to treat chronic infections already. The colleague you're talking about, your co-winner, is Sylvain Moinon, who told me actually in our own interview that new possibilities sometimes emerge unexpectedly, as with the phages that he works with. What does that tell you about how to direct this research? It speaks to the importance of ensuring that there's an opportunity for scientists to think outside the box, to use a very well worn out idiom. We need to be able to fail. And it's hard to do that in a system that is based entirely on success.

But that's how these innovations happen, right? That you have to keep pushing against an ever expanding wall of stuff that we don't know. So as I said at the beginning of our conversation, there's so much stuff out there to learn and we just need the opportunities to learn them and then think about how we might apply them. I think one of the challenges that people have when they think about science is that they think instantly of what's the application for me today, right? And if we think again, think of the mRNA vaccines and COVID.

Yes. included the amazing formulation strategies that came up with here in Canada. It's all fundamental research that people weren't necessarily thinking about, oh, this is how we're going to withstand a future pandemic, right? And the number of failures that happened before that, for that to happen, are just uncounted. It's one of the challenges of trying to explain to people who aren't scientists just how important it is to continue to support science, just simply because we don't know, but we don't know. Exactly. Well, and what you're describing is really like what undergirds, you know, the scientific method, which is, as you say, the opportunity to fail.

But contained in that ability to fail are two things. One, maybe, are the resources, and one is public knowledge. So how do you make resources possible for scientists to have the opportunity to fail? What does that look like? Yeah, and certainly in the current climate, that's coming almost exclusively from government sources, which is challenging. Again, it's stuff that people don't see tomorrow. Like if you pave someone's street, they will notice the next day. If you invest in research that might have an impact on antibiotics or vaccines 10 years from now, they don't see it. So they don't see the value in it. It's hard to think. It's just human nature.

And so it's important that the government structures and people in government understand that there is value here and they continue to support it. You know, I worry a lot about the future of science in Canada because I think that there's a lot of lip service about how important it is. But then, you know, we end up in a situation where there simply isn't enough resources to be able to continue to do this. If you look at what's happening in, say, in the United States right now, where there is a sort of, the people who are going to be in charge of health and health research, you know, if the appointments go the way that it looks like they're going to go, are actually hostile to these ideas of trying to understand infection and find solutions. So it's a big challenge. Yeah.

So when it comes to persuading both the private sector and the governmental sector to mobilize or to act on this problem, how much do you think that's part of your job, communicating the dangers? Yeah, it's mission critical for us. So if we don't sound the alarm, who will, right? And I think it's really part of my

job, especially now with, you know, at this stage of my career and as, you know, as a Killam laureate, I think we have a platform perhaps to be able to make these cases to people who want to listen. to people who want to listen. The good news is what I found is that, you know, when we've had politicians say, come to the lab and we talk to them about the importance of the work that we're doing, they get it. Where it gets more challenging is when they go back to Ottawa and try and make these decisions,

and it becomes a competition with other resource issues. So the good news is, is that we can convince people, even if it's one at a time, of the importance of this area. And I think it's just a matter of pressure over time. And we have to be, as scientists, we have to be somewhat relentless, I think, to be able to make our case. Although it can be exhausting, frankly. I can imagine, especially, as you say, in this environment in which we exist, which I think you would agree, you know, post-COVID, post-pandemic, you know, has sadly sort of elevated the level of mistrust in science. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most heartbreaking outcomes of the pandemic that I can imagine has happened.

It's just this lack of respect for expertise. I've dedicated 35 years of my life to this. As we traverse this crisis, what is our role as the public? The important thing that average people who aren't scientists should be thinking about is, how does treating infections affect me personally? How is my grandmother doing? Is she susceptible to pneumonia? How is my infant daughter dealing with an infection? And then to realize that the way that we're able to not worry too much about these kinds of things anymore is because of

these miracle drugs that we have. And I think what I would hope is that people stop for a second and think critically about why we're no longer worrying about childhood mortality, at least in Canada, the way that we used to. What we don't want to do is turn back the clock to where infections became the major reason why we died. And I think it's important to just pause for a second and realize how important these drugs are to the way that you live your life and to think that they're precious resources

and we need to invest in them. And where scientists and scientific process are concerned? Well, most people don't know a scientist, right? Let's be honest. And when I grew up, I didn't know any scientists. I didn't even know you could do this as a job. scientist. I didn't even know you could do this as a job. So I was, I was frankly shocked and excited when I went to university, when I met my, the first scientist that I ever met in my life. And I realized just how passionate they are about the research that they're doing, even if it sounds esoteric and strange to me. It has its importance in our society, and it should be valued. And eventually, you never know. There might be an application out there that'll be essential to you as you're navigating your life forward. Well, I hope at the end of this episode that all of us will have gotten to

know a scientist and one who's doing very important work. Jerry Wright, thank you so much. Congratulations on your Killam Prize, and thank you for your insights. Wright, thank you so much. Congratulations on your Killam Prize and thank you for your insights. Well, thank you very much for your interest. You're listening to Ideas and to our spotlight on some winners of the 2024 Killam Prize for Excellence in University Research.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends

will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. The annual Killam Prizes are $100,000 awards given to working Canadian scholars who have demonstrated sustained research excellence, making a significant impact in their fields. They are funded by the Killam Trust and administered by the National Research Council. I met my next guest when I hosted the 2024 Killam Prize Ceremony. Clément Gosselin of Université Laval. Dr. Gosselin is a robotics researcher whose work has a tremendous impact on the field. Dr. Gosselin is a leading international figure and has established himself as a prominent and very productive roboticist.

Please join me again in welcoming and congratulating Dr. Clément Gosselin. My name is Clément Gosselin. I'm a professor at Laval University in Quebec City. My research is on robotics. I'm trying to develop robots that are intelligent enough to operate in the physical world and mainly interact with people. So I'll just start by saying félicitations, Clément. Merci beaucoup. How are you feeling after receiving that award?

Well, of course, I'm deeply honored for several reasons. One of them being that it recognizes the importance of the research work that we're doing. Another one being that I, you know, I come from a rather modest background, and so I'm very happy to have been recognized at this Canadian level for the research. It's a great honor for me. That's really beautiful, and it's very inspiring. The prize, as you say, is a recognition of the research and the work. And in part, it was for what is a remarkable robotic hand. Can you describe what you wanted to achieve with this hand?

Yeah, well, I started working on robotic hands roughly 30 years ago. And back then, what you could find were either very sophisticated robotic hands with lots and lots of actuators, sensors, and so on. Very complex, very difficult to control. Or at the other end of the spectrum, you could find some very simple grippers that were used in industry to manipulate simple parts. manipulate simple parts. So my research question then was, can we develop something that will have some capabilities close to the very complex hands, but that would be much easier to control? And the inspiration for this was the human hand. Not because it's simple, it's very complex, of course, but it's not really easy when you move your fingers to control each of the degrees of freedom, each of the articulations independently. So the

thinking was maybe we don't need to be able to control them independently, maybe we can have some kind of synergy within the fingers and that's what we call mechanical intelligence that is embedded in the mechanics of the hand. There is some form of intelligence. So can you explain how that form of intelligence is different from what is available in nature? Actually, it's very much inspired from nature. In robotics, what we do is we're trying to develop machines that will perform actions that are similar to what the living world does. However, we don't have the same materials, we don't have the same components, so we cannot just copy. We can try to mimic, and even that is maybe not the best approach. We get inspiration from nature,

from biological systems, but because we're using components that are completely different, we have to rethink how we are going to build the systems to perform these tasks. It's an invention, really. Yes. So has trying to mimic, as you say, the capabilities of a real human hand over a product of nature, but at the same time so much different from everything else in nature. The human hand, I think, is the source of the human intelligence. It has developed in parallel with the brain.

And so I think it's a marvel, like I just said. Was there a single moment, a eureka moment, where you realized you and your colleagues had achieved success with the hand? Or was it kind of a gradual process? more gradual process, but there are, of course, a few milestones. And one of them that I recall, may not be the most important one or the most remarkable one, but I really remember, we also worked on the hands for prosthetics. And so we were doing some tests with a prototype of a prosthetic hand that we had developed. And we had one of the graduate students in the lab who was doing the tests for us. He was an amputee. And so we were doing some tests, trying to grasp some objects and so on. And then someone said, do you think you would be able to catch a ball?

And so he said, okay, we can try. So maybe one or two tries, and he was able to do it very easily. And we were amazed by this, you know, to see that the extent of the capabilities that he had reached with the very simple hand that we had developed. Tell me about that moment, just what went through you. When such things happen, you realize that the gap between robotics and the living world is narrowing. And that's the global objective. And every time you can narrow it just a little bit, then you feel that you've accomplished something.

So you mentioned this hand being a prosthetic, but what other applications, what else can they be used for? We've worked mainly for industrial applications, applications in difficult environments. We've built a hand for the nuclear industry, for the cleaning of contaminated areas and so on. When we develop robots, we try to build robots that will be able to accomplish tasks that we refer to as the 3Ds, that is dull, dirty, dangerous. How many such hands or robots, I guess, are already operating out there, doing some of those 3Ds, as you say? Well, there are many, of course. Some of them are rather simple,

some of them more sophisticated, depending on the tasks, depending on the applications. And in many cases, they could be improved. That's why we keep working on the extension of what we already have. However, what I'd like to say is the work that we're currently doing is on the physical human-robot interaction. So that's another aspect where the hands are important, but also the other parts of the robots, like the arms and so on. And this is a big challenge at the moment, to be able to develop robots that will be able to interact with humans in human environments, everywhere, including at home. And what I would like to use as an example is the recent developments in autonomous vehicles. The progress has been phenomenal over the last decade or so.

And the challenges there are the sensors, the perception, the inference, and so on. But there's no challenge on the mechanical side, because we've been building cars for more than a century. We know how to build cars. But if we're looking at, let's say, domestic robots, for instance, that will be able to interact with people, We have the same challenges in terms of perception, inference, reasoning and so on. But on top of that, we have the mechanical challenges. We don't know how to build robots that will be able to perform tasks that require sufficient force, you know, to be able to accomplish the task that we do at home, but at the same time, being entirely safe to humans, interact with humans intuitively, and so on. So these are big challenges on the hardware side.

So sufficient gentleness as well, obviously. Yes. I have to say that as you're speaking, it's hard to avoid this question, which is, will this kind of work, these hands, will they ultimately, you say they can do possibly anything, will they eventually take jobs out of those human hands that we talked about earlier? The human hands that perform tasks, let's say, in industry or other places, usually these tasks are done by humans not only because they have dexterous hands, but also because the tasks require other qualities. They may be able to perform the same task, but the control of that task may not be as smooth or as evolved as in a human being.

Is that comforting enough for the question, this kind of question that probably comes up often for you? Yeah, it does. But if I compared this question that was asked to me 30 years ago, the situation now is quite different. Back then, it was definitely, oh, you're trying to develop robots, and so you will steal jobs from many people and so on. So you will steal jobs from many people and so on. Nowadays, people realize that there are millions of robots working in factories around the world, and we still have jobs for people. So the job market has evolved, of course. And so I think we need people to build these robots, to operate these robots, to design these robots and so on. robots, to design these robots, and

so on. So I think it's a balance. And there is also economy behind that. Sometimes for some applications, using robots is not economically viable, whereas in other applications, it may be better to use robots. So the equation is not as simple as it looks in terms of replacing people with robots. Yeah. So maybe that leads perfectly to my next question, which is, you know, we've seen artificial intelligence worry a lot of people, even to people who are involved in the research.

How do you stay on top of, you know, on the ethical and humane side of the technology that you develop? That's a very good question. And this has been a concern for me throughout the years to make sure that what we develop is for the good of humanity and to help people more than to bring new strange objects or devices that may not be in the interest of people. So the approach that I've taken is always to ask the question why we're doing things, what they could be used for, and how to develop these robots such that the possible interaction, I'm talking about physical interaction, but also other types of interactions, how to develop these systems such that the interaction would be as natural as possible. So if the interaction with humans is natural,

I feel that it means that it is something that is compatible with humanity. Dr. Clément Gosselin, congratulations again on your 2024 Killam Prize for Engineering. Thank you very much. Next, the winner of the 2024 Killam Prize in Natural Sciences, Sylvain Moineau of Université Laval. Dr. Moineau is a microbiologist and researcher renowned for his outstanding work on bacterial viruses called phages. He and his research group have developed an innovative, integrative approach to better understand the diversity, biology, and evolution of these specialized viruses. His peers note that the breakthrough findings made by Dr. Moineau and his team through a wide range of studies in different fields have dramatically changed our view of phage-bacteria interactions.

our view of phage-bacteria interactions. Dr. Moineau's pioneering discoveries have inspired researchers around the world and paved the way for some of the most significant scientific advances in biotechnology and genome editing. Congratulations, Dr. Sylvain Moineau. My name is Sylvain Moineau. I'm a professor of microbiology at Université Laval, specifically in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Bioinformatics. Félicitations, Sylvain.

Merci. It must have been very satisfying. Yeah, it's been a great, great honor. Even though it recognizes me, but it's also the recognition of all the students and postdocs that have passed through my lab over the years. So even though it's a personal award, I feel it's a team award, really. That's lovely. It's also, I imagine, in a lab, I've worked in labs.

I mean, I just wonder what it would be like after a moment like this, because they're very rare, aren't they? Yeah, they are. Well, we kind of celebrate these awards a few times when you get the news and then when you actually get the awards and so forth. So, yeah, it's been a great time. And it's been going on for quite some time. Every time we have good news in the lab, we stop and we celebrate. Quite important for everyone.

Sylvain, you're a man obsessed with a virus. Can you tell us what we need to know about phages, the good, the bad, and the ugly? What are they about? Phages are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. There's nothing more abundant than viruses. They'll be on you, they'll be in you, they'll be in our environment, in our foods. They're really everywhere. So they're important to control the bacterial populations in our ecosystems. They can be bad in a way because sometimes when we are using bacteria to make fermented products, these phages can kill those good bacteria. So sometimes phages can be bad for biological and technological processes. They can also be good in a way because of all the bacteria

that are becoming resistant to antibiotics. There's a number of groups now that are studying these bacterial viruses to see if we could use them to kill pathogenic bacteria, especially those that are resistant to antibiotics, because a lot of groups are looking at alternatives to antibiotics, and phages might be one of the possibilities. Can you tell me why you call them phages? If they're viruses, why do you call them phages? So bacteriophage means eating bacteria.

So that's where the name came from. Actually, it's a French word, bacteriophage. It was published in 1917 in a French publication, a scientific French publication. But it really means to kill bacteria. So to replicate, it needs to get inside the cell, inside the bacteria. And it would take control of your bacteria, of your cells,

and start replicating, multiplying. And after a while, the cell, the bacteria will burst and these new virions that have been produced will be released into the environment and restart this cycle. So the big difference between the bacteria and the viruses, the viruses really need or a phage will really need a bacteria to replicate, whereas the bacteria can replicate by itself. So you said they could be everywhere, or they are everywhere. Does that include the ocean? They're found in oceans and soils.

They're really abundant in oceans. Like I said, everywhere you find bacteria, you'll find these. Even in the Canadian North? Yeah, we do have colleagues that go to the North, and they're taking samples and bringing them here. And we can find phages in the soil samples, in water samples. There's a big research going on because, as you know, because of the climate changes, our Canadian north is going through some changes. And we often think that these phages are satellites of what's going on out there

because if the temperatures start to increase, well, the bacteria might start to grow, might start to multiply. And if they multiply, well, some phages might start killing them and then we'll see what's going on almost in real life, in real time, sorry. So like I said, they're sentinels of what's going on and that's why people are studying them. Sentinels, like kind of phages in the mind. I understand that Université Laval is also home to phages, like many, many phages. Can you talk about your collection?

Yeah. So this phage collection that is harbored by the Université Laval started in 1982 by Professor Hans Ackermann, which was a microbiologist who was really interested in viruses. And so he started this collection of phages. Essentially, he was collecting viruses from different places around the world, and they were sending them to Laval, and he was collecting them. And he started the center where the mission was really to collect and distribute these phages to different research labs just to promote research and education. And Professor Ackerman retired in 2002.

And at the time, I was already at Université Laval and I offered to take over. So if you were to take me on a tour of this collection, what would I see? Fridge. Lots of fridges. So in terms of number, there are not that many, but it's really, they're extremely diverse.

So we have phages that are infecting about 135 different bacterial species, which makes it probably the most diverse phage collection in the world. And that's why we get so many requests from different research labs. In the past five years, I think we have shipped phages to maybe 350 research labs in over 40 countries around the world. And so also phage research is picking up quite a bit in the past 10 years. So there's more and more new research labs,

new scientists that are interested in this field. So it's quite exciting. So beyond curiosity, I'm wondering why you volunteered to do this. Like you said, I'm kind of crazy with phages. No, I thought it was a great resource. Because in microbiology, the worst thing that can happen to you is you're not working with the right biological materials. That's what the collection provides.

There's a word that we hear in the news quite a bit, and maybe a lot of us don't quite understand it, but it's actually a Nobel Prize-winning technology called called CRISPR or CRISPR-Cas9. That's revolutionizing research, certainly in genetics, obviously, including yours. Can you talk about how you use CRISPR-Cas9 to study phages? So I'll back up a little bit here. And I was telling you that phages are most abundant biological entities on the planet, which also means that bacteria are surrounded by phages. When a bacteria is in an environment, that bacteria will be in the soup of viruses or phages.

So that bacteria, it's got different systems to defend. So that bacteria, it's got different systems to defend. And CRISPR-Cas is one of the defense systems that the bacteria will use to defend against these phages that can infect them. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. What they did is they took part of the natural CRISPR-Cas system and developed a tool that is now called CRISPR-Cas9. This tool allows you to go in and modify a gene or a genome of interest and see what happens. And that technology being so efficient in a research laboratory, then the next step was, okay, can you actually modify now a human or a plant or go beyond the cell itself and go into the entire organisms? And that's why there's been some very interesting breakthrough

in the medical field. I was reading about CRISPR and the Nobel citation said, quote, one of the attractions of science is that it is unpredictable. You can never know in advance where an idea or a question may lead. How true is that for you? Oh, yeah, it's so true. And when we started studying CRISPR-Cas in 2005, 2012, we were really looking to improve the quality of cheeses. That was the whole point of doing this research.

We had phages in our dairy environment. They were killing those good bacteria. Our cheese quality was dropping. We wanted to improve that. And we stumbled into the CRISPR. We studied it and understood how it worked. And then you've got other scientists that took parts of that and developed this fantastic tool that's led to a Nobel Prize. And now we're treating people that have genetic diseases with the CRISPR-Cas9. Mind-blowing. And that's one of the reasons why you do need to fund research, fundamental research, because you never know what can happen.

And it's been a fantastic ride in the past 20-some years. So for the students of science out there, what would you say? Well, first of all, find your passion. That would be the first thing. I know it's cliche and everything, but it's so true. Find whatever the field is, find your passion. And really for us also, by the way, 10 or 12 years ago, when we saw all the interest and craziness with CRISPR-Cas, we also integrated that into our undergraduate curriculum. So all our students now in microbiology go through the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas system

and how it works. So they get all excited with that too. But yeah, so it's been a fun run. Sylvain Moinon, congratulations again on your 2024 Killam Prize for the Natural Sciences. And thanks again for talking to me. Thank you very much. the natural sciences. And thanks again for talking to me. Thank you very much.

Sylvain Moinon and Clément Gosselin of Université Laval and McMaster University's Jerry Wright are all recipients of 2024 Killam Prizes. Thank you to the Killam Trust, the National Research Council of Canada, Massey College, as well as all of this year's laureates. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Danielle Duval is our technical producer, with thanks also to Joe Costa of Massey College. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.