Mules, Arsenic, and Sesame: Untold Black History in the Americas
Jayson Porter has written for Distillations magazine on topics ranging from mules and sesame seeds, to arsenic and porgy fish. At first, the...
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Science & Medicine
Distillations: Science + Culture + History
Each episode of Distillations podcast takes a deep-dive into a moment of science-related history in order to shed light on the present.
Episodes
20 of 374 episodesLive Show! October 29th in Philly
Come celebrate our newest Distillations podcast season, American Vice . From cigarettes to alcohol to fireworks, this season is all about ou...
From Hysteria to Long COVID: Invisible Illnesses
Many of us have heard of Long COVID, but few of us understand the depth and breadth of the diagnosis or the history leading up to it. We tal...
Chasing Shiny Things
Silver's Volatile History. How long have people been pinning their hopes on silver? And what makes it valuable to us? Is it just because it'...
The Acid Queen: An Interview with Susannah Cahalan
A conversation with the author of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary . If you've e...
Jersey City's Secret Water Experiment
How did a covert chemical treatment permanently change our drinking water? In 1908, two men, John L. Leal and George Warren Fuller, spent 99...
Cigarettes in America, Part 2: The Reckoning
Cigarettes: they provide no nutrition and quench no thirst. They serve no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind...
Cigarettes in America, Part 1: The Rise
Cigarettes: they provide no nutrition and quench no thirst. They serve no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind,...
American Vice: New Season Coming September 15th
Check out our new season, dropping weekly on Tuesdays, starting September 15th.
The History of Clinical Trials: From Fake Exorcisms to Testing Today
Alexis Pedrick joins Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti to bring you an episode from Tiny Matters , an award-winning podcast from the American...
Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth
This episode is a co-production with Lost Women of Science . Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockel...
Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment
Alexis Pedrick joins Katie Hafner to bring you an episode from The Lost Women of Science Initiative , a non-profit educational organization...
The CRISPR Babies
In 2018 news broke that a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had used CRISPR to edit human embryos, and twin girls had been born as a result. Th...
Humans and Monsters: An Interview with Surekha Davies
The fears about genetic engineering were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s. From lab leaks to disease epidemics to the ability t...
IVF: An Interview with Robin Marantz
Our producer Rigoberto Hernandez spoke with Robin Marantz, the author of Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproduc...
Gene Therapy's Families
When Rebekah and Evan Lockard's daughter, Naomi, was diagnosed with a devastating ultra-rare genetic disease, they didn't know where to turn...
Gene Therapy's Dark Ages
Gene therapy is based on a simple-sounding, yet deceptively complicated premise: adding or replacing faulty genes to fix medical problems. A...
'The Andromeda Strain': An Interview with Luis Campos
Producer Mariel Carr talks to historian of science and former Science History Institute fellow, Luis Campos , about his article " Strains of...
The People vs. Recombinant DNA
In 1976, Harvard University wanted to build a specialized lab for recombinant DNA research. But first, it had to get permission from the cit...
Science, Interrupted: Part 2
Genetic engineering breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s came with a lot of promise—and peril too. Fears about what could happen...