 Communication Officer for FEMS. I'm joined by Professor David Sharap from University of Oxford here at the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences in Split where we're running the FEMS summer school for postdocs. And you'll be speaking to our postdocs later today and also tomorrow, so thanks for joining me. So my first question to you is what topic are you gonna be talking about to the postdocs? I'm going to be talking about DNA. I grew up in a working class village and mining village in fact. And I had as a young teenager, I had no idea what I wanted to do until I was 13 and I went to a Christmas lecture in my local university Leicester. And the lecture was called DNA and I was transfixed and I decided, this is me, this is what I'm going to do. And I've been able to do it in a career now that spans more than 50 years. I guess I have three questions now that I kind of try and ask everyone. And the first one is, what's your favorite microbe and why? Right, so I was interested in DNA and I wanted to know how it worked. And what I realized is the genetic material in all organisms is DNA. But what I also realized is that if one starts with bacteria, they don't bleed, they don't squeal, they're easy to grow. And so very early on, I decided that to work with E. coli, Eschercher coli, this normal gut bacteria, it was clear in the mid 1960s that this would become a model. You could grow it easily. We used to grow it in the domestic washing machine. And you could grow it. There are ways of extracting the DNA and the enzymes that worked on the DNA. And subsequently, it turned out that this was the organism in which so-called genetic engineering was developed. And I always imagined early on that, I would move on to yeast or plants or humans or worms or something. Something bigger. Something bigger, because when I started, it seemed to me that I thought of E. coli and all bacteria is just bags, unorganized bags, in which it was convenient to look at chromosomes and examine chromosomes. But then what I've realized in the ensuing years that bacteria are highly evolved. In fact, in some ways, some of the most highly evolved organisms on this planet. And there are fundamental questions about life that one can understand from studying E. coli and other microbes. And of course, microbes cause disease. More importantly, they're required for all biological transformations on this earth. Fixing nitrogen, breaking down compound. If we didn't have bacteria, we would be a thousand miles high and rubbish. So bacteria are important and they're sophisticated. And it turns out that I've got more and more interested actually in E. coli biology. I'm still driven by DNA, but the way that E. coli manages its lifestyle, how it becomes resistant to antibiotics, how it survives in difficult circumstances, how it causes disease. Okay. So E. coli then, I guess. E. coli. But now at least your favorite microbe. Yeah. So second question is, who is your microbiological hero and why? What scientist or mentor would you like to say? Well, I think at one level, Louis Pasteur, because he was the first person that really began to think about what microbes do. Before him, of course, Anton Livenhoek, who first saw bacteria in the microscope. You know, in my lifetime, there have been enormous number of people that have influenced me. And, you know, some of the pioneers of gene regulation, Jacob Mono, Beckwith have always been stimulating. And someone would I like to mention is when I was in Edinburgh as a PhD student, Willie Donoughy, he made me not that well known, was a very deep and intellectual microbiologist who we used to laugh at then because he didn't come to the lab very often, but he was so deep thinking. And now looking back, he made the most important seminal contributions to understand when E. Coli divides, how it divides and how this is controlled. But at the time, we used to joke at him because he used to appear about half past 11 in the morning in the lab and we usually gone by too. But it wasn't, he wasn't thinking or working, he was just, you know, this was his lifestyle on the subject. Okay, good. And so my final question, and this is kind of to sort of think about how microbiology can affect everyone in the world is what one piece of microbiological knowledge should everybody in the world know about? Well, I think what everyone knows about is the fact that bacteria can cause disease and that antibiotic resistance is a real problem. And there may be some populist dictators somewhere that don't believe that indiscriminate antibiotic use is causing problems, but antibiotic resistance is a huge problem, particularly for aging populations in the developing world because bacterial infections are not going to go away. And sadly, there's been very little development of new antibiotics or new antimicrobials in the last 30 years. So I think most people that read newspapers are aware of this problem. Okay, but hopefully we should make sure that everyone knows it. Yes. Okay. Cool, well, thanks for spending some time talking to me. And I hope the talk goes well this evening and tomorrow. Well, you can tell me, can't you? Yeah.