From Displacement to Reconnection
from Renaissance Circle Hosted by Steven Muskal, Ph.D.
Irina Ankoudinova is a biologist who has been displaced by technology over and over. She learned crystallization in the Kim lab at Berkeley, built zinc finger archives at Sangamo Therapeutics, and then CRISPR arrived. Every time technology made her work obsolete, she moved on. Now she wants to bring Ukraine’s damaged farmland back. Her mother is Ukrainian, from Kharkiv. After the war, Irina speaks Russian; the young generation speaks Ukrainian and has made it their identity. They do not want to talk to her. “A lot of pain,” she says. With Steven Muskal on The Renaissance Circle: the career arc from crystallography to CRISPR to DNA-encoded libraries; the language divide inside Ukraine; the drone strategy and mobilization policy; soil contamination, soil microbiomes, and Israel as proof of concept; a photo exchange idea for displaced people; and AI as the next displacement she is not afraid of. Soil scientists, agronomists, and Ukrainian students: reach out.
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