“Hate and fake news are what worries me the most”

Doctor. Mai Thi Nguyen Kim is considered a rock star among German scholars. Your Youtube demo videos titled MaiLab are cult. There are now two TV shows.

“How Safe Is AstraZeneca Really?” Mi Thi Nguyen-Kim faced this question in mid-March 2021 after confusion about the side effects of the vaccine. And 1.8 million users expressed an interest in the answer. The German news agency interviewed the Youtuber, PhD and author of several bestsellers (“The Smallest Common Fact: True, False, Reasonable – The Biggest Issues Examined Scientifically”) for an interview.

Does My Thi Nguyen Kim, a successful science teacher, also have an irrational side? Are you afraid of black cats? Friday the 13th – She has to laugh. “I should think about it now,” she says. “I’m not superstitious at all. I’m not religious either. I don’t even play the lottery, I think that’s ridiculous.” Her conclusion: “I’m a very rational person. But I would never say belief is nonsense, for example. I like to get involved in philosophical discussions. Or I don’t think we’ll fully understand something like love. And that’s fine, too.”

The big publicist gets two new TV shows

In a personal conversation, Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim comes across differently from her maiLab videos. She’s very outspoken on Youtube, and she has to get across a lot in no time. But when you talk to her, there are pauses to think, and she frowns. Above all, she always bursts into an infectious laugh. For example, when she says she’s never found mouth and nose protection that bad: “At least you don’t have to wear makeup.”

Federal Cross of Merit Journalist of the Year Most Successful YouTube Video of 2020, Grimme Award: It goes well for Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim. And now the 34-year-old science journalist is getting two new formats on ZDF and ZDFneo.

“Chemistry is great for me,” she said excitedly. Many are familiar with the phrase: ‘We are all made of star dust. “This is a fact. Every chemical element in the universe and made up of it originated at some point in a star. And when that star exploded, these elements were distributed throughout the universe.”

Donald Trump was the trigger

Mai The Nguyen-Kim was born in Heppenheim near Darmstadt in 1987 and grew up in Hemsbach, a city of 12,000 inhabitants in Baden-Württemberg. Her parents are immigrants from Vietnam. Even as a schoolgirl, she was curious and ambitious.

After graduating from high school, she studied chemistry in Mainz and Boston from 2006 to 2012. After receiving her PhD in chemistry from RWTH Aachen in 2017, she decided to work in science journalism. Those were Donald Trump’s early days as President of the United States, and there was a lot of talk about “alternative facts”.

She wanted to do something about it.

That is why she turned down a position as a laboratory director at BASF – much to the chagrin of her father, who is also a chemist. Now he sees things a little differently. YouTube channel maiLab Bestseller TV Oversight – How do you manage it all? She points to her face and laughs: “There are deep circles under the eyes under them.”

By the way, I also became a mother last year. When an acquaintance heard that she was pregnant, he wrote to her that it gave him courage for his children. Because if you take such a step, you still have hope for the world despite the climate crisis. This is also true.

More afraid of fake news than climate change

But there is another development that worries you more personally than climate change. This is the question about what social media does to our human interaction. The hate that is spreading there. False news. I’m more pessimistic about that. This is the biggest concern of my daughter’s life.”

But at the same time, the little one restored her faith in humanity. “In journalism you tend to be sarcastic. And when you experience something like this… this first time is really crazy. Now she’s starting to talk a little. They are very immaculate, curious and very happy. She wakes up in the morning really cheerful. Then I looked at them and thought: I didn’t even know what a wonderful species of Homo sapiens. “