Harvard Science Book Talk: Noah Whiteman, in conversation with Ryan Nett, "Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins―from Spices to Vices"

A deadly secret lurks within our spice racks, medicine cabinets, backyard gardens, and private stashes.

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them? Based on cutting-edge science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience, Most Delicious Poison reveals:

• The origins of toxins produced by plants, mushrooms, microbes, and even some animals
• The mechanisms that animals evolved to overcome them
• How a co-evolutionary arms race made its way into the human experience
• And much more

This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth, but also is intimately tied to our own successes and failures. You will never look at a houseplant, mushroom, fruit, vegetable, or even the past five hundred years of human history the same way again.
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Noah Whiteman received his Ph.D. in tropical biology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2006 after completing his dissertation work in the Galápagos Islands where he studied co-evolutionary genetics of the Galápagos Hawk and its parasite community. In 2007, he was awarded an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at Harvard with Naomi Pierce and Fred Ausubel on a co-infection system involving the genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, caterpillars, and plant pathogenic bacteria. He discovered that a drosophilid fly called Scaptomyza flava he isolated from mustards growing at Beaver Brook Park in Belmont attacked A. thaliana, and decided to study it as a model plant-herbivore interaction system. Whiteman is now Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development at the University of California-Berkeley, where he has been faculty since 2016. Whiteman is currently a Miller Faculty Fellow at UC-Berkeley, a Royal Entomological Society Fellow, a California Academy of Sciences Fellow, and an American Ornithological Society Elective Member. In 2020 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2007 received the Harvard University Distinction in Teaching Award as Head Teaching Fellow for Animal Behavior. As an out gay person and first generation college graduate, he is committed to helping foster a more inclusive and diverse academy.

Ryan Nett grew up in rural Illinois and obtained his B.A at Gustavus Adolphus College in 2008 as a double major in Biology and Chemistry. Nett earned my PhD at Iowa State University in the lab of Reuben Peters, where he investigated the biosynthesis and biological function of plant hormones that are produced by plant-associated bacteria. As a postdoc, Nett worked with Elizabeth Sattely to study the biosynthesis and engineering of medicinal plant alkaloids. In 2022, Nett started his lab in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where he focus on understanding the unique chemistry and functions of plant molecules. In his free time, he likes to play basketball and hunt for mushrooms with his wife and kids.