University of Gothenburg

So it is, it's, you know, you can over, you can make, treat these poles with too much significance.

And in fact, Henrik Ekingen Oskarsson, who's like the sort of, the cephalogical sort of, nerd at gothenburg university sort of expert on voting percentages and stuff he he he said that some of these polls we should look at them because people are taking them too seriously they're not looking at the margin of error and the polls themselves can have a big impact on the election result because as i said if the public thinks they're at 3.5 they're much more likely to give a tactical vote so the polls themselves make it more likely that the um that the liberals are going to get in So it's very interesting.

And obviously, I never expected this to happen.

I thought they were doomed.

This is Dr. Fernando González's bread and butter.

He's a neuroscientist and medical doctor at the University of Gothenburg, and I sat down with him to learn more about his work in the detection of neurological disease.

Fernando, thank you so much for joining us today on The Big Questions.

Um, why don't we start by you just telling us a little bit about yourself and about your research interests?

So if we apply a similar concept to dementia, instead of talking about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, if we can say, "Okay, independent of where it started, these are the molecular characteristics.

This, this, this could be the treatment and this is how the neurons die," we could start to develop treatments against this to kind of move a- how we talk about the diseases more based on the molecular understanding of it r- rather than, yeah, at the moment these diagnoses are dependent on, on so many things coming together.

It's really, really fascinating that you bring up oncology and cancer research, 'cause actually I had, um, a chat recently also for this episode with, uh, Dr. Fernando Gonzalez at the University of Gothenburg, and he brought up exactly the same thing.

We, our sort of conversation went in exactly the same direction, where we, we reached a point where we were like if we could characterize dementias in the level of precision that we're now able to do with types of cancer, then we could be looking at much more targeted, much more personalized, hopefully, treatment, and that would be a real game changer.

My name's Tristan Mackenzie.

I am a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, uh, soon to be actually assistant professor at Imperial College, and, uh, my pronouns are he/him.

From a very broad perspective, I research coastal oceans and chemistry, effectively the human connection through groundwater to the coast.

I think in, uh, academia and especially in the sciences, the culture is that one should not bring their private life into the workplace, right? And I think that's changing, but it's been slow to change.

And ironically, we are now seeing established advanced Western democracies backslide.

University of Gothenburg's 2026 report named 10 new countries sliding towards autocracy, six of them in North America and Europe.

And they include Italy, the UK, and the US.

The three are governed by very different parties, so it's not necessarily a left-right issue.

That's lovely.

I'm a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

And I study human animal interaction from a social work perspective.

And this study that I have done now, it's a kind of a small study, a qualitative study.