# Joseph Herdy talks zombie cells, selfish genes, and Alzheimer's disease

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/beyond-lab-walls-salk-institute-6780063/joseph-herdy-talks-zombie-cells-selfish-genes-and-alzheimer-s-disease.md
Podcast: [Beyond Lab Walls | Salk Institute](https://stenobird.com/podcast/beyond-lab-walls-salk-institute-6780063)
Published: 2025-11-25T20:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.salk.edu/beyond-lab-walls-podcast/
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/f6581ef4-4950-4497-9ce2-674af8984163/BLW-Herdy.mp3?dest-id=4348308
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/beyond-lab-walls-salk-institute-6780063/episodes/joseph-herdy-talks-zombie-cells-selfish-genes-and-alzheimer-s-disease
Duration seconds: 2462

## Resource

While you might not appreciate a shipment of live, wriggling lamprey, Joseph Herdy, PhD, will tell you the parasitic fish can actually teach us quite a bit about our own genomes. Studying lamprey set Herdy off on a genomic journey, as he continued over the years to study the organization, flexibility, and instability of genomes. Today, he's a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Rusty Gage, PhD, where he researches how genomic plasticity influences Alzheimer's disease progression.

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## Transcript

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