2 December 2021 - In this episode of the EMBO podcast, we spoke with Harmit Malik about his journey from chemical engineering to biology, books that inspire future scientists, and the importance of simply showing up. We discussed the Malik lab’s research on the genetic conflicts between centromeres, mobile genetic elements, retroviruses, and of course the host innate immune response – which his lab studies in several different models, ranging from yeast to primates. Thomas Lemberger joined the conversation to talk to Harmit about peer review, preprints, and EMBO’s journal agnostic platform for manuscript review, Review Commons.