Do you know what kills more women during and after pregnancy than anything else? The answer is probably going to surprise you. And do you have a pretty good understanding of how evolution works? If so, we might have another surpirse for you.
Joining us from the University of Utah is Marcela Smid, an assistant professor of maternal and fetal medicine and the first author on a recent paper that suggests that the most common cause of pregnancy-associated death in Utah is drug-induced, and that women are at greater risk after child birth.
With us on the line from Indiana University Bloomington is Amelia Randich. She was the first author on a recent paper in Current Biology that shows the first proof that new genetic coding sequences can arise when viruses infect and replicate within bacteria. This finding is key to our quest to better understand evolution and genetic diversity. (Since our interview, Randich has become a postdoctoral researcher at the Brown Lab at the University of Missouri.)
