By Kambiz Shekdar, Ph.D.
Biology, maybe more than the other sciences, is a lot like cooking, but not many people know that. I was happily surprised when DJ Brenda Black started our interview by asking about cooking. Brenda is a popular DJ in Manhattan’s best known gay bars and clubs. She is also an excellent interviewer. She made me feel so completely comfortable and at ease, that talking about how we’re cooking up a cure for AIDS was as fun as talking making Boeuf Bourguignon.
A transcript of how Brenda started is below:
Brenda Black: What’s your name?
Kambiz Shekdar: Hi, my name is Kambiz Shekdar.
Brenda Black: What’s your favorite cooking spice?
Kambiz Shekdar: I don’t know if this counts as a spice, but I would have to say butter because whatever you add butter to, it makes it taste better.
Brenda Black: When you hear the phrase, “United we stand, divided we fall,” what does that mean to you?
Kambiz Shekdar: I think that means, and it applies to almost any area, if people come together behind a common goal, we can achieve a lot more than factions warring against each other.
Brenda Black: I work with TFKTWA, Training Foster Kids to Work With Animals. Our dual mission is to prepare kids for adulthood and help animals at the same time. These kids soon will be getting their own apartment for the first time. What cooking advice would you give them?
Kambiz Shekdar: The best advice I got was in a restaurant in Paris. Between working in labs, I always wanted to be a waiter and one summer in college and grad school, I got a job in a cafe in a restaurant in Paris and they had me make a couple of dishes. They showed me how to make this one dish called Boeuf Bourguignon which is a meat stew with red wine and carrots and onions, and you cook it for many, many hours and it’s really delicious. They put me in front of the kitchen and showed me all these ingredients. They gave me a couple of tips, but no exact recipe, no “this many grams of this and that many liters of that.” I asked them, “What should I do?” And they said, “Mix these until they taste good, until it tastes good.” I think in the kitchen, as well as in biology and in the lab, you have to get a feeling for this, you have to dive in, you have to mix things and get a feeling in your hands what makes a recipe really come alive.
Rockefeller University alumnus and biotech inventor Kambiz Shekdar, Ph.D., is the president of Research Foundation to Cure AIDS and Science & LGBTQ editor at WestView News. To support RFTCA, go to https://rftca.org/.
You can tune in to DJ BRENDA BLACK PRESENTS every Monday on at 8:30 pm on Manhattan cable TV, Spectrum67, RCN85, FIOS36 and livestream on www.mnn.org. To see the 14-minute video of our chat, go to YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=svFlafUJYq8&t=398s.
