Bats have been following Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Dick McCombie for his whole life. There’s a childhood trauma in Cincinnati, Ohio. There’s a run-in with a real-life Batman in Austin, Texas. Then, one day in Washington, DC, McCombie comes back from lunch to find a dead bat lying on his desk. “It got worse,” he says before going on to detail an encounter with a cauldron of footlong grey-headed flying foxes at the botanical garden in Sydney, Australia.
Little does McCombie realize during these brushes with terror that the creatures he fears most might one day become the subject of one of his most publicized discoveries. In 2023, McCombie, CSHL Professor Adam Siepel, and postdoc Armin Scheben report how bats’ immune systems have been hypercharged over the course of evolution. The finding could have major implications for our understanding of cancer, immunity, and aging. So, as it happens, the flying mammal that has followed McCombie since childhood ends up bringing his research to the pages of the New York Post and the Daily Mail.
Hear the full story from Professor McCombie himself in this special Halloween edition of Cocktails & Chromosomes, and sign up now for our final installment of 2024. CSHL Professor Chris Vakoc will discuss “Cancer’s identity crisis” on November 21. Can’t make it? Never fear! Cocktails & Chromosomes will return in 2025. Look for more details coming soon.