Katelyn Geleynse presses the button and the machine groans to life. The massive metal plates shift until a half-ton of compressed plastic tumbles out onto the waiting pallet. The crowd cheers. Permanent markers are passed around and everyone takes turns signing the massive block.  

It’s February 16, 2024, and the members of the Promega Sustainability Committee are gathered to witness the first bale of plastic film being ejected from the Madison campus’s new baler. It’s only the first bale, but it represents a major step in the company’s efforts to reduce plastic waste.

“All of this would have gone to the landfill if we hadn’t set up this program,” Katelyn says. “It feels good to know that at least some of my waste is getting a second life.”

Plastic film is notoriously difficult to recycle and takes decades to break down in a landfill. The Promega initiative to divert this waste was started by a small group of employees who noticed a problem and worked for over a year to build a sustainable solution. What began as a small volunteer operation grew to spur capital investment in a process that will rescue around 35,000 pounds of plastic per year.

Continue reading “Employee-Led Program Reduces Landfill Waste by Rescuing Plastic Film”

Each year, Promega employees are offered the opportunity to receive up to 40 hours paid time off to donate in volunteer service through our Promega In Action program. Providing sustained support of organizations in our community, our employees participate in a wide range of activities.  

In 2023, we awarded 26 individuals who volunteered for 23 different organizations, some bringing along their Promega team members in attendance. From crafting comfort shawls for families of future organ and tissue donors, to volunteering with Meals on Wheels, to journeying to South Africa to deliver charitable donations for children in need, the opportunities to contribute to our community are abundant and impactful.

Continue reading “Celebrating Our 2023 Promega In Action Awardees”

Your ability to navigate space and time is anchored in your memory, particularly episodic memory, which catalogues the experiences you have in a given location. This type of memory is shaped by complex neural networks firing within your hippocampus. So how exactly do we store memories of the hundreds of things that happen to us in a day, especially when they unfold in the same settings?

There are theories as to how we form single-shot, or “episodic”, memories, many of which center around the activity of place cells, which light up when you are in a specific environment. The idea here is that, with every event that happens in a place, these cells would shift and fire in novel patterns. Scientists at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University questioned this—while it is known that place cell activity can certainly be affected by experiences, they wondered whether there could be an alternative explanation for episodic recall that wouldn’t require the constant remapping of one’s core memory of a place.

Continue reading “Studying Episodic Memory through Food-Caching Behavior in Birds”

This guest blog post is written by Poncho Meisenheimer, Vice President of Research and Development.

I got into an argument with ChatGPT this morning.

That’s not unusual. I argue with ChatGPT a lot. In fact, that’s usually my goal.

As a scientist and a leader, it’s important to pressure-test my ideas. I need to account for biases, identify limitations, and strengthen weak points. Large language models like ChatGPT have given me a powerful tool in my pocket to become a better version of myself.

The advent of generative artificial intelligence has changed our world. We can’t keep doing things the way we did even only a year ago.

Promega is embracing AI. Every department is finding groundbreaking and responsible ways to deepen their impact using our ChatGPT enterprise license. As the Vice President of Research and Development, I have been working with our scientists to think beyond simple queries and imagine new horizons we can explore with these tools. 

Make no mistake: I don’t think that ChatGPT and other AI tools can, will or should replace human scientists. Instead, they will empower all scientists to ask more ambitious questions and uncover new answers. They will upend our current paradigm about what science is and how it operates, and will help us build an even deeper understanding of the world around us.

Continue reading “AI in the Research Lab: Where We Are, and Where We’re Going”