In an engaging exploration of genetics, join me as I converse with the distinguished Dr. Maya Chopra of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. We delve into her captivating journey of researching rare and complex disorders, providing an intriguing insight into the intersection of research and clinical practice. We also explore the crucial role of clinical geneticists in the fast-paced world of gene therapy.
The middle segment of our conversation takes an ethical bend as we dissect the moral dilemmas and credentialing challenges associated with gene therapy. We discuss the complexities involved in assigning scores to ethical considerations and examine how the recredentialing process in healthcare has transformed over time. Moreover, we touch on the benefits of approaching medical learning from a mature perspective.
In the final part of our discussion, Dr. Chopra shares an enlightening account of her discovery and research on the Chopra-Amiel Gordon Syndrome. This dominant condition exhibits varied levels of severity, adding to the complexities of its understanding. We also highlight the importance of genetic counseling in genomic medicine and shed light on the power of multilingual communication in this sphere. The episode concludes on a lighter note with Dr. Chopra sharing amusing anecdotes about her canine companions. Tune in to this compelling episode for an immersive experience into the world of genetics!
In an engaging exploration of genetics, join me as I converse with the distinguished Dr. Maya Chopra of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. We delve into her captivating journey of researching rare and complex disorders, providing an intriguing insight into the intersection of research and clinical practice. We also explore the crucial role of clinical geneticists in the fast-paced world of gene therapy.
The middle segment of our conversation takes an ethical bend as we dissect the moral dilemmas and credentialing challenges associated with gene therapy. We discuss the complexities involved in assigning scores to ethical considerations and examine how the recredentialing process in healthcare has transformed over time. Moreover, we touch on the benefits of approaching medical learning from a mature perspective.
In the final part of our discussion, Dr. Chopra shares an enlightening account of her discovery and research on the Chopra-Amiel Gordon Syndrome. This dominant condition exhibits varied levels of severity, adding to the complexities of its understanding. We also highlight the importance of genetic counseling in genomic medicine and shed light on the power of multilingual communication in this sphere. The episode concludes on a lighter note with Dr. Chopra sharing amusing anecdotes about her canine companions. Tune in to this compelling episode for an immersive experience into the world of genetics!
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mystifying Genetics. Today my guest is Dr Maya Chopra from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. She's a clinical geneticist and we talked about her research and her various research interests, some of her academic articles and we also talk about genetic counseling in French. Hello everybody, and welcome to the Mystifying Genetics with Dr Maya Chopra. Hi Maya, how are you?
Dr Maya Chopra:Hi Matt, I'm very well. It's great to chat to you.
Matt Burgess:Excellent. So first things first. I think it would be good for me to make a disclosure. You know I can set the scene. I think it's good for people to know how I identify. I'd just like to say I'm a proud . Are you a proud Novacastrian and can you tell our listeners what a is?
Dr Maya Chopra:Yes, I'm also a very proud , otherwise known as a Newie, which is that I was raised in the beautiful town of Newcastle, which is, for those of you who are not familiar with it, a couple of hours north of Sydney, and it is a beautiful, beautiful well I should say city, really located on the coast, with beautiful beaches and, I think, a really bustling young and professional kind of population.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, good description. We both live in the United States, but I really miss Newcastle, so excellent. Okay, now I think the second thing to say is I am doing some study at the moment. I am writing my thesis and you are actually my external supervisor for my doctorate. So yeah, that's interesting.
Dr Maya Chopra:It is, it is. I was going to ask if you've been doing your homework, matt.
Matt Burgess:I haven't been doing my homework and it's a little bit. It's so nerdy, but one of my other supervisors read a draft and she said that I needed to put a reference in. And I actually used one of your papers and you had a sentence that was just perfect and I was like, oh, I can use that. So it kind of made me smile.
Dr Maya Chopra:Oh, I'm so good.
Matt Burgess:So you are a clinical geneticist, so that's a medical doctor that has specialized in genetics. You live in Boston. You work at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. What's it like to sort of do a combination of research and clinical work?
Dr Maya Chopra:I think for me it's happened very naturally and organically, and I would say that I spent many years as a clinician, working in a range of healthcare settings, and I think that the roadblocks that I faced in my clinical practice the sorts of questions that I was being asked by families about what a diagnosis means, what's going to happen to the child and what is the pathway towards therapeutic development I always felt that they were roadblocks and I think what has been very natural and very motivating for me is now to be able to focus my research on answering those questions.
Matt Burgess:Okay, so the research that you're doing is very practical in nature and sort of able to translate research into the clinical world.
Dr Maya Chopra:I think so and I think you know I think spending a long period of time in clinics seeing families has helped me understand what the real research questions are, and it's helped me understand how important they are for families. And there were questions that I always felt I was at a loss to be able to answer, especially when it came to therapies. I've worked in a range of settings, but the questions that families have are the same what's going to happen to my child and what treatment is there? And I never really felt completely comfortable in being able to even begin to answer those questions. So for me that's been a real driver for my research and that's been the real, I guess, source of inspiration. And so for me it's been a very natural transition to go from clinic to research work and hopefully be able to feed that back to better clinical care.
Matt Burgess:I think that's really interesting as a clinical geneticist saying that, because even though you are a medical doctor where we think of doctors, you know their job is to treat but really you know, I mean maybe it's a little bit of a generalization, but clinical geneticists are usually involved with, like the treatment and ongoing management and more like the diagnosing sort of part of things. So it sounds like that's an interesting sort of combination. Like, maybe as a clinical geneticist you sounds like you felt like you weren't able to answer all of those questions, but adding the research on is sort of helping with that goal.
Dr Maya Chopra:I think so. I think that's right. I think, historically, clinical genetics has very much been focused on diagnosis and we can now make a diagnosis in about 50% of our patients who present with these rare and complex interesting presentations. Historically, once a diagnosis has been made, we usually send those patients to their various sub-specialists for continuing surveillance or for management or for specific recommendations. I think the way that the field is evolving now is that clinical geneticists are needing to become more aware about the newer therapeutic options and about things like clinical trials and understanding registries and understanding what steps need to be taken to go from the diagnostic odyssey all the way through to the post-diagnostic odyssey. Well, we can make a diagnosis. We can tell you the exact genes change, for example, that has resulted in your child's developmental difficulties. But what next and what does that mean and what are the next steps? And I think that now, as clinical geneticists, we have to take that leap and we have a lot to contribute, I think, as a profession as that field moves forward.
Matt Burgess:Wow, how exciting, and I think that one of the areas of clinical medicine that is really expanding and exploding at the moment is gene therapy. Do you see that a clinical geneticist has a role in administering gene therapy or being involved in that, or is it still just you make the diagnosis and then other doctors will do the gene therapy, even though it's genetic medicine?
Dr Maya Chopra:I think that it's going to need a multi-disciplinary approach. I think that clinical geneticists have a role to play in this path towards therapeutic development. Part of that is that we've spent years, decades, understanding the craft of rare disorders, understanding the nuances of the variability of presentations, understanding the complexity of interpreting genetic tests, and I think all of those skills the clinical skills, the molecular skills, correlating what we call genotype and phenotype, meaning correlating the gene change with the patient symptoms and signs they're all really important for therapies. So I'd like to see more emphasis placed on treatment through clinical genetics training programs and in fact the American College of Medical Genetics, which is the national body here in the US for medical geneticists, has recognised this and recently put out a statement really to help set the scene for the role of clinical geneticists as we move towards clinical trials and gene therapy.
Matt Burgess:Excellent. Okay, so one paper that you have written that I wanted to talk to you about. It's one that was published last year called Gene Target a framework for evaluating Mendelian neurodevelopmental disorders for gene therapy. You published that with Kira Kira dies a lovely genetic counsellor and you had sort of told me about this paper. I'd heard about it and I thought, okay, you know, I guess that sounds interesting. And it wasn't until sorry.
Dr Maya Chopra:I just took out the paper to add to the reading list.
Matt Burgess:Well, it wasn't until I actually started reading that I thought, oh my God, it is actually quite interesting and it's very interesting, and it's talking about something that I'd not ever really thought about before, and it's about, if I can summarise it myself, what diseases should be studied. Is it diseases that the researcher is interested in? And I think, as a layperson, or as someone, that I hadn't really thought about you know this topic I thought, well, if researchers are at universities and they want to study a condition, like, go for it. I guess it's up to them.
Matt Burgess:But then, you know, is it the pharmaceutical companies that have got a lot of money and they're sort of, you know, back in a particular condition? Is that what we should be going for? Or is it sort of the support groups, where you know there's lots of people affected, or you know they have really strong support groups? And I think obviously it's a combination of all of it and it kind of made me think, you know, like, is there some sort of like ethical or moral component to this? And, you know, do we live in like a utilitarian sort of society where it's sort of like the best for the most people? How did you go into writing this paper and did your sort of views on things change as you were writing this article?
Dr Maya Chopra:This is a great question, so just to explain what that long, really long title was. So the area of genetics specifically that I'm interested in and that I'm working on is the genetics of neurodevelopmental disorders. So that's an umbrella group of disorders that encompass intellectual disability, developmental delay and autism, and also epilepsy and other neurodevelopmental presentations. There are now about a thousand individual genes that have been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders and I guess what we were looking at is, out of all of these 100, a thousand different genetic causes, how do we decide which ones are the right ones to focus on for therapies and who gets to make that decision and what's the framework to inform that decision making? If you were to ask a scientist who spent their entire life studying one disorder, of course the most important disorder for that scientist would be that disorder. If you to ask a pharmaceutical executive, they may say well, it needs to be commercially viable because otherwise the whole program will collapse. Maybe an ethicist would say that we should pick those disorders that are most severe and that are the most life limiting. And perhaps an epidemiologist would say we should pick the disorder that is the most common of the rare disorders, because we have the greatest potential to impact a greater number of people. So these are all multiple views. And if you then kind of superimpose on top of that, if you ask any parent of a child who has a rare genetic disorder, of course they're going to say the disorder that affects my child. So how do we as a scientific community come together and bring all of those perspectives together?
Dr Maya Chopra:And really we wrote this paper because there was a gap in the literature that really zoomed out and looked at this big picture.
Dr Maya Chopra:There was a lot of literature at the moment on gene therapies, on the types of delivery for gene therapy, the types of viral vector, on individual conditions and on different mechanisms, but we really wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture, at all of the factors that should come into play and how we kind of navigate those priorities which sometimes compete.
Dr Maya Chopra:In terms of how did my views change? I think the more I looked, the more I realized how difficult this whole field is, the more I realized the importance of engaging with families, patient advocacy groups, the more I understood that we're going to have to tackle this together. We're going to have to pull together science, medicine, families and industry in order to be able to do this in a rational way. The thing that I think I still feel is the biggest challenge is how this is ever going to be scalable and how such technologies are going to be delivered and offered in an equitable fashion. We want to have a system where patients who need therapies can access the therapies globally, and how we're going to do that.
Matt Burgess:So does that mean that we can't give everything to everybody, so we need to have a way to figure out what we can do in a fair way.
Dr Maya Chopra:I think it's important to remember that these are new technologies and most of them are still at their trial stage. So a lot of it comes down to how do we balance which disorders are the best ones to pursue these trials for. Part of that is a risk-benefit analysis. So for a given disorder, does the potential benefit outweigh the risk and what is the risk of doing nothing? So, disorders that are life-limiting or that are severe, if you look at community beliefs, of course the community and this has been published communities will come back and say yes. I think that disorders that are more severe are the ones that we should target first.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, it's fascinating. And it's funny because when I sat down to read the paper I thought, okay, Maya's a doctor, she's quite quantitative in her approach. I'm a genetic counselor. I'm much more qualitative and there are some things on here that I feel like as a scientist, it's very easy to assign a number to Like has the gene been found, yes or no, or can you do this? But then there are sort of things like the gene target is actually an acronym and so the E stands for ethical principles have been considered, and then the T is target populations are accessible and engaged and I kind of was like oh, that's a bit more subjective, Like you're trying to be very objective in how you assign numbers, but it still has a very subjective sort of feel to it. But I think you do really well.
Dr Maya Chopra:Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting point because we actually we submitted the paper without the scores. We just had this mnemonic and said well, these are the factors that need to be considered, good luck considering them. And the reviewers came back and said that's great, but how do you weigh them against each other? How do you weigh the ethics against whether or not we know the natural history of a disorder? So we'd like you to propose some scores, and that was really hard because these scores aren't validated. We came up with them by consensus and they're just a suggestion and they will clearly need to be refined with time, but we think that they're a starting point. So that was an interesting. That was interesting how that evolved. We didn't actually start with scores and particularly, as you pointed out, how do you score ethical considerations? That was really hard, so we had to keep that quite broad.
Dr Maya Chopra:And really we just wanted it to serve as a reminder of the talking points, to remind everybody that the ethical considerations need to be really central to this discussion. And really you could have a very long discussion just on the ethics of gene therapies, but we just had to contextualize it within this all of these other factors that need to be considered.
Matt Burgess:Well, well done. I think you guys did very well and it's a very interesting paper. Have you heard of TrackGene? Trackgene is a clinical genetic software solution used by over 1,000 genetics experts around the world. You can customize the front page so it's streamlined to your specific workflow. The Intuitive Patient Information entry page makes data entry efficient and user-friendly. Pedigrees are easy to draw and document. Here's another vital feature it supports HL7 integration to be used with other clinical genetic software databases and hospital information systems. You can build custom reports with the Simple Drag and Drop Report Builder. This has an interface with data visualization tools such as those from Microsoft. There are more features on the way, all designed with you in mind as a genetics expert. Trackgene has an experienced team who has been working in the clinical genetics industry for over 15 years. You can request a demo for free. Go to trackgenecom that's T-R-A-K-G-E-N-Ecom.
Matt Burgess:Changing topics a little bit, we're both Aussies and we trained in our professions in Australia and then we moved to this lovely country. However, with our qualifications we weren't able to actually work clinically. Me as a genetic counselor. With my qualifications, and even though I'm board certified and I actually teach genetic counseling in the United States, I can't actually sit the board exam. To be able to sit the board exam, I basically have to start from scratch. Is that what you had to do as a doctor? Did you have to go back to? How far back did you have to go to be able to sit the board exams?
Dr Maya Chopra:here I had to do a set of exams that medical students do, called the USMLEs. That was a fun thing to do during COVID. I've had to do a lot of obviously a lot of recredentialing, and I'm currently going through the process of obtaining a medical license. So that's been quite a process and a challenge. But I will say there's a blurred line between seeing patients clinically and through research. Ultimately, either way, as clinical genocists, we see patients, we try and make a diagnosis, we choose a test, we try and explain what the results of those tests mean and decide on next steps, and ultimately that's what you do as a clinician, and you can do the same thing in a research context, which is what I've been doing. So yeah, I say it's been an interesting journey to try and have everything completely signed off, but I've been able to certainly do some interesting and satisfying work in the meantime.
Matt Burgess:Excellent, because it does sound a little bit annoying having to go backwards or feel like you're going backwards, and I would imagine as a medical student you're very broad in your learning and then you get more and more specific. Have there been any advantages to going back and relearning stuff that you might not have thought about for many years?
Dr Maya Chopra:It's been quite interesting because medicine has changed a lot. I graduated from medical school from the University of New South Wales in 2000 and lots of things in medicine have changed since then, so I kind of had to relearn it all, which has been interesting. But we're different now, aren't we? I think when we go through our university in our 20s, we're at a different stage of our life than we are now when we try and re-credential. So I think we're only able to do what we can do when we're older. In terms of trying to get some balance, it certainly was very. It was hard to spend weekends every day on weekends doing a couple of hours of study in order to get these exams out of the way.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, Well, well done. So recently you had a disease named after yourself. I think that's amazing. So it's Chopra-Amiyel Gordon syndrome. So it's to do with a gene that I've never heard of before. I think this condition must be quite rare, but there are lots of really interesting things to say about this. I don't know where to go first, but I know when I was sort of learning about tests, looking at many genes all at once, like the whole enzyme and whole genome, I think what the hypothesis was that when we were going to be making these diagnoses, they were going to be recessive conditions, and I think one of the shocks was that a lot of these conditions are actually new dominant conditions. And this condition that has your name associated with it, is it a new dominant condition?
Dr Maya Chopra:Yes, it is so. For most individuals who have this disorder it's a de novo gene change, meaning that it just started in that individual. Having said that, we know of a couple of individuals who actually inherited the variant from a parent and that only became clear after the child was diagnosed and the parents were tested and one of the parents was found to harbour a variant in this particular gene. But when questioned, these parents would reveal in retrospect that they had some developmental difficulties, that they needed a bit of extra help at school or that they were quite delayed in the attainment of their developmental milestones. And then, when we looked at them, some of them had the physical features. So it is like many disorders can be very variable.
Dr Maya Chopra:It can result in quite a significant intellectual disability, but on the other hand can be relatively mild and perhaps fly under the radar until someone has a child, when things kind of bubble to the surface.
Matt Burgess:Cool. It must be an amazing feeling to see your name on OBEAM.
Dr Maya Chopra:I'll tell you. What has been quite useful is that I remain very interested in this disorder and have set up a cross-sectional natural history study, which means we're really trying to deeply understand the spectrum of this disorder and understand the types of gene variants and understand the full clinical presentation. And it has been useful having the name attached to it, because it means that when someone anywhere in the world is diagnosed, or a physician diagnoses a patient, they often stumble across our study and find their way to us, which has been very useful for a disorder that's very bad.
Matt Burgess:Excellent, and so this research did it come about from your time in France.
Dr Maya Chopra:It did. It did, yes. So it came about from a study actually looking at a cohort of patients with cleft palate, so that's a structural malformation, and specifically we were looking at individuals who had cleft palate and other features, so syndromic cleft palate this was under the Arnielle laboratory, so that's one of the other names in the syndrome and we saw a girl who was about 17 and had a cleft palate which had been repaired and she had a really significant developmental disability she was nonverbal, she had epilepsy, she had a number of other interesting structural malformations. She only had one kidney, so renal agenesis, and she had scoliosis, so she had a curvature of the spine and she had been investigated very extensively over the years without a diagnosis and we performed this was about five or six years ago a research exome. So we sequenced all of the coding parts of her genes and identified a change in a gene called Anchorin D17, which at that time was not known to be associated with human disease.
Dr Maya Chopra:It took about three or four years to then find a cohort of patients around the world they sort of trickled in one by one who also had variants in this gene and they looked similar. They looked sort of like they fell under this particular umbrella, so we were able to publish this as a new or previously unrecognized syndrome. So it was a lot of collaboration. But this kind of story of identifying a variant in a gene, finding out the patients in the world, that's really been the story of gene discovery over the last decade. That's what we've been seeing. These new genes that have been described as disease genes. I think there's probably been about three to five a week new disease genes that are published. So it's very hard to keep track of them and it doesn't surprise me that you haven't heard of it.
Matt Burgess:And how was your time? I mean, it sounds like a bit of a silly question, but how was it in France and how was it working? And what percentage were you speaking in French versus English and were you able to see patients in French?
Dr Maya Chopra:First of all, it was amazing. It was wonderful and anything that you can imagine. It was exponentially more wonderful than even that it was incredible. It was a wonderful experience, living and working. I think living and working in France was just one of the highlights of my life.
Dr Maya Chopra:I will say that I arrived without any French at all, so I did not study French at school, but I did grow up in a bilingual household and I studied Japanese at school and I learned Mandarin when living in China. So I think being a language person and really liking languages definitely made it easier. It probably took a year before I was confident enough to be able to interact with patients. I actually started that with a genetic counsellor who was very encouraging and said you've just got to do it, come with me. And we did see a cystic fibrosis clinic together because it was very formulaic I just had to describe one pattern of inheritance and answer some questions and that got my confidence up and eventually I was lucky enough to be able to see patients, usually with either a genetic counsellor or a resident trainee in genetics, and it was wonderful and really despite my fears about families being really disappointed to see this Australian physician whose French was not perfect.
Dr Maya Chopra:They were actually very encouraging and very nice, and a few of them since fed back to the team that they liked my very simple French explanations of patterns of inheritance and of genetic testing. Because it was so simple they could easily understand it. I thought, well, that was very eye-opening and you can all really think about the way that we communicate complex ideas to families.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, I think sometimes we do make things a bit more complicated than what they really need to be. So that's great feedback. Another disclosure I have is that I am a frank-afile, so I lived in France and I do speak French myself and I had a similar client interaction in Sydney. You know like, when I spoke to the client for the first time on the telephone and I drew her family tree, I did that in French and then for the first appointment I had the French interpreter. So I just spoke in English and she spoke in French with the interpreter.
Matt Burgess:But I could understand everything and it was a bit confusing and I was just, I was still training, I was an associate genetic counsellor at the time and when it came to the results appointment, she was positive for the particular condition that we were working or looking at and the interpreter cancelled at the last minute and this lady was leaving to go back home overseas the following day and I couldn't like. I just was like she really needs an interpreter, I could get one and we decided to go ahead with me conducting the session in French and I really sort of I must admit I freaked out a little bit because I was still training and normally, I see, I was seeing patients with a doctor. I kind of felt like I had the safety net there, but he didn't speak French and he was actually a bit of a not a liability, but like you know, because he didn't understand what was going on. He kept sort of annoying me and I was like shut up, oh, but they actually, you know, like I.
Matt Burgess:You know there were certain things that you know, I know in English how to say like the proper medical terms for it, but then in French I didn't know how to say. You know like um, what was it like? Bilateral salpingo ufaractomy? I didn't know how to say that in French, but I did.
Dr Maya Chopra:I could say remove your ovaries, which is essentially what you know, is probably exactly what the family needed here.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, and I felt like you know I think I was just being really paranoid. The session was fine and I remember saying to them you deserve to have all of this information in a language that you understand. And they're like Matt, we have understood it, every word you've said, we understand the result and we're really grateful and I was like, okay, I think you know there is a good message in there.
Dr Maya Chopra:There are lots of good messages. I mean it's really very humbling. It's a very humbling thing to be out of your comfort zone and to be the foreigner and to be the guest in the country, particularly as a medical professional we see foreign medical professionals all the time but to be able to step into their shoes and experience what it's like to really sit in a meeting and try and take everything in and come up with a response and by the time you've formulated your response, of what you're going to say, the topic has changed. And to be the person who can understand but still can't quite get the jokes or can't quite have the same personality that you would have in your first language, to not be able to be charming or funny, to feel like you're just a little bit of a shadow of yourself. It's a very humbling experience and I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to do it to do it, Because going through that, I think, is it's transformational Everyone should do it.
Matt Burgess:Yes, I agree. I think it's funny that I just wrote my read situations up with laugh and maybe laugh a little bit louder than what I normally would. I just wanted people to know that I understood it. I got the joke. I got the joke. I'm not quite fast enough to reply or say something, but yes, I understood and it was funny.
Dr Maya Chopra:Yes, yes, that is funny.
Matt Burgess:So you said that you graduated from medicine a little while ago and since then you've worked in some really interesting places with some interesting conditions and maybe not what you expected your professional career to be like. And I'm guessing, along the way, that you've worked with some good genetic counselors. And can you sort of make a comment on genetic counseling and like how you've seen it evolve over the years and the advantages of being a genetic counselor?
Dr Maya Chopra:Well, that's a great question. I think I've worked with genetic counselors every step of the way. The way that we interact and work together has definitely evolved and changed, but I think that they are and I'm not just saying this because you're a genetic counselor I think the genetic counselors are absolutely critical, especially now, especially now that genomic medicine is being integrated into healthcare, now that testing is becoming readily more accessible and now that we have a lot more variants for which there is uncertainty to deal with, it's absolutely critical that we are able to, that we're able to, as a health system, establish the infrastructure, including genetic counselors, to be able to handle all of this. Traditionally in Australia, genetic counselors and geneticists will work together in a department of clinical genetics. I think that things have evolved now where we will see genetic professionals throughout specialties neurology, cardiology, certainly the cancer fields. So I think you know, I think that it's definitely a career that people should consider if they're listening and they're interested in genetic counseling.
Dr Maya Chopra:I will say I've worked with genetic counselors both in the traditional clinical model so in Australia with the really nice model of working hand in hand to see patients having a genetic counselor assess families before we see them, take a family history and really, really dig deep to find out what these families' concerns are, right through to in my current role, where my genetic counselors work with me on a number of research projects, and the skills that they bring in the skills of being able to consent families, being able to explain complex tests, being able to see beyond the patient right through the rest of the family have been absolutely critical, even at a research level.
Matt Burgess:Beautiful, excellent. Okay, finally, I think we need to sort of, you know, sadly, wrap up this conversation, but just to end on. I think we both have doodles, don't we?
Dr Maya Chopra:Yes, we do, we do. Yes, I have a beautiful golden doodle. Her name is Coco and middle name Chanel, and she is the love of our lives and she's sleeping just outside this door right now. And you've got Banjo.
Matt Burgess:Yes, banjo Patterson Patterson is his middle name. My beautiful Banjo isn't quite as big as Coco, he's a little bit smaller, but yeah, it's my first dog and I think I've gone dog crazy since I've had him.
Dr Maya Chopra:Oh, they changed your life. I think we both got. We both had COVID puppies, didn't we?
Matt Burgess:Yeah.
Dr Maya Chopra:Yeah, yeah, I think that they're just such beautiful creatures and I've been awe. I've been awe of their intelligence and I've always been very interested in communication. Clearly, you know communication, children with developmental disabilities and how they communicate, and I love languages and I'm just fascinated by these dogs and their ability to understand and their ability to communicate with different barks. It's really something.
Matt Burgess:Yeah, I taught Banjo I mean, I didn't even know how I did it, but I taught him to ring the bell when he needs to go outside, and he does, and he's very consistent Like he will go. I think, you know, maybe 10% of the time he's just bored and wants to go outside, but 90% of the time if he needs to go potty he'll ring the bell and he'll just sit there and look for us to open the door for him. I think, oh, he's so intelligent.
Dr Maya Chopra:That is excellent. That's very good matters. We've taught Coco to not start her meal until we say Bon Appetit. And sometimes I forget and I come. We'll leave the room and come back and she's still sitting there and they'll say oh, bon Appetit, coco.
Matt Burgess:Oh, come say my role. That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for demystifying genetics with me this afternoon. I've had a great time chatting to you about your career and about your research interests, and I think that our listeners will really enjoy the conversation as well.
Dr Maya Chopra:Thank you for having me, Matt.
Matt Burgess:Okay, then take care, bye, bye.
Dr Maya Chopra:You too Bye bye.
Matt Burgess:Thanks for watching another episode of Demystify and Genetics. I'd like to say a big thank you to Dr Maya Chopra for being my guest on this episode, thank you to Track Jean for sponsoring this episode and to my lovely producer, omi, and thanks everybody for listening.