Every year, Vancouver's innovators, artists, and thinkers take to the stage for TEDxVancouver – a one-day celebration of ideas worth sharing.
The lineup of speakers for the Oct. 18 event boasts geographers, TV anchors, soccer players, fashion designers, spiritual leaders, urban experimentalists, and more.
But it was Dr. Jennifer Gardy who caught our attention this year. In her bio, Gardy says she has one of the best jobs in the world, and we believe her.
Most of the time, she is a senior scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, where her she uses DNA sequencing to solve public health problems, like figuring out how outbreaks of infectious disease begin and spread.
But, when not tracking disease, Jennifer works in science documentary television, subjecting herself to "all sorts of indignities in the name of science communication." She’s floated in zero-gravity, been dunked in ice-cold water, and spun around in a human centrifuge as part of work for CBC television’s long-running documentary series The Nature of Things, and appears regularly as a guest co-host of Discovery Channel Canada’s nightly science newsmagazine Daily Planet.
We had to know more.
Everyone is talking about Ebola, but, in your experience, what should we really be scared of?
Ha. Thank you so much for asking me that. I wish more people would ask that question. I wrote this kids book earlier in the year called It's Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes. And in it, we talk about a whole bunch of different diseases, and when I was doing media interviews for the book, everyone would say, 'What's the scariest pathogen out there? It must be Ebola. Ebola is the most dangerous. Ebola is the most terrifying.'
It is not the most dangerous and terrifying of pathogens, you can be certain. But it made me realize that people's perception of risk is really, really way off, and there are so many things that we encounter in our day to day lives that are far bigger issues.
Right now you've got people… not really panicking, but very concerned about Ebola. It's on the news every night, it's in the newspapers, it's on Twitter. But not as many people are making a big deal about things like, 'Hey, look how much sugar is in our processed food that we're feeding our children.' Look how much overweight and obese our children are than a generation before. Look at how none of us are getting the recommended physical activity in a day and are glued to our tiny screens.
There are so many things that, I guarantee you, 99 per cent of the population – myself included – are guilty of that are huge deals and are going to impact how long and how healthy and how happy our lives are. But one exciting hemorrhagic fever comes along and just totally turns people's attention in the wrong direction.
Why is that?
If you dig into the risk communication literature the reasons for this start to become apparent, but people often have a lot of outrage over things that are extremely low hazard. Ebola is a disease of under-resourced countries. Where… Ebola could be killed with soap. Essentially we can kill it with bleach and disinfectant. But if you don't have the resources to establish a solid infection control program and have appropriate quarantines in place and have the right physical rooms and structures to handle these cases and the right equipment to disinfect rooms and offer protection to doctors and nurses, then of course it's going to spread.
Is it like the movies, or do they get it wrong?
No! No, no. Science is never, ever like the movies. Science is surprisingly few lab coats. No coloured liquids in test tubes. They get Ebola wrong, too. Everyone's popular perception is that Ebola basically melts you from the inside out, and you'll be bleeding from every orifice. That does happen in some cases, but the vast majority of cases, on the outside, just look like a very serious flu.
How does it ultimately kill you?
It's basically systemic organ failure, so basically your blood starts to move around your body very slowly. You're not getting enough oxygen to any of your organs. Tissues start dying, fluids start leaking out of your tissues. Basically everything dies at the same time. It's horrible, but it looks very peaceful from the outside.
When you and your colleagues get together around the dinner table, what are you talking about right now?
A bunch of us were around the table for dinner last Monday! There were about 20 of us, and the topics varied a lot. We talked about Hepatitis C and how all these new drugs to treat chronic illness are about to come online, and Hepatitis C is poised to be the new HIV, to the point where we can manage it and prevent transmission of the disease through appropriate medication and treatment. We talked about wide-ranging public health policy. And, of course, Ebola.
What will your TEDx talk focus on?
This is going to be fun. It actually has nothing to do with infectious diseases. It's going back deeper into my interests. When I started studying science as an undergraduate, my major was in cell biology and human genetics. The talk is probably the world's first combination genetics lesson and live cello performance.
It's a co-talk with my very good friend and collaborator Peter Gregson. He's a cellist based in the United Kingdom. Peter had done some work in cello interpretations of data, using software to guide cello performances, so we hatched an idea to combine his cello playing and interest in data, with my access to data and knowledge of human genetics. It gets at the origins of some really interesting aspects of human culture.
In your career, you've had a lot of access to incredible experiences through television etc., but what has been the highlight?
I think my favourite one so far this year was a back-to-back series of things we did for a CBC Nature of Things that's going to be airing on Oct. 23. One week we were in Munich, Germany, visiting BMW. They took us out in this beautiful BMW on the autobahn, and the car was driving itself. So, amazing vision of the future. And then flip it around and a few days after we were in the forest, several hours outside of Tokyo in Japan, doing this serene walk through the forest learning about how inhaling some of these phytochemicals that trees produce is a natural relaxant.
But the most dramatic moment, where I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm having all the feels,' was I got to interview Chris Hadfield for a little CBC event we were doing. He hugged me after the interview and I felt like a girl at a Beatles concert in the '60s. He's everything you expect and more. He could be the president of everything, he's so wonderful.
TEDxVancouver takes place Oct. 18 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets and info at TEDXVancouver.com. This interview has been edited for brevity.
