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Each episode of Distillations podcast takes a deep-dive into a moment of science-related history in order to shed light on the present.
This episode is a co-production with Lost Women of Science . Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockel...
Alexis Pedrick joins Katie Hafner to bring you an episode from The Lost Women of Science Initiative , a non-profit educational organization...
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...
The fears about genetic engineering were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s. From lab leaks to disease epidemics to the ability t...
Our producer Rigoberto Hernandez spoke with Robin Marantz, the author of Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproduc...
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 is based on a simple-sounding, yet deceptively complicated premise: adding or replacing faulty genes to fix medical problems. A...
Producer Mariel Carr talks to historian of science and former Science History Institute fellow, Luis Campos , about his article " Strains of...
In 1976, Harvard University wanted to build a specialized lab for recombinant DNA research. But first, it had to get permission from the cit...
Genetic engineering breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s came with a lot of promise—and peril too. Fears about what could happen...
Genetic engineering breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s came with a lot of promise—and peril too. Fears about what could happen...
Check out our new season, dropping weekly on Tuesdays, starting August 5th.
Feeding kids a healthy lunch every school day is a feat of science and logistics. Molded into shape by nutrition scientists who wanted to op...
ALS is a fatal neurological disease that kills motor neurons. Even though it was first described more than 150 years ago, there is no cure,...
In 1973 a bombshell study appeared in the premier scientific journal Science . It was called "On Being Sane in Insane Places." Its author, a...
For more than 100 years, biologists who suggested that some cancers may be caused by viruses were the pariahs of genetics. However, they per...
In 1973 biochemist Bruce Ames created a simple test that showed if chemicals had the potential to cause cancer. The Ames test made him a her...
Ozempic and others in this family of drugs are nothing short of miraculous. Meant to treat Type 2 Diabetes, the drug exploded in popularity...
The impact of cars on wildlife extends beyond roadkill, affecting species that never venture near roads. Car noise disrupts bird communicati...
In 1856, Henry Perkin's attempt to synthesize quinine led to something very different: a vibrant purple dye. Perkin's mauve revolutionized t...
The color pink has long been in vogue, and when Barbie hit theaters in 2023, its appeal only increased. But its popularity dates back much f...
For centuries people have been drawn to the potential healing powers of colored light. From a civil war general to a Thomas Edison wannabe,...
In his epic poem, The Odyssey , Homer mentions the colors black, white, red, and yellow. But despite numerous mentions of the brilliant Gree...
Check out our new season, dropping weekly on Tuesdays, starting June 4th.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a new public interest in health inequities research. Wit...
Of all wealthy countries, the United States is the most dangerous place to have a baby. Our maternal mortality rate is abysmal, and over the...
Certain medical instruments have built-in methods of correcting for race. They're based on the premise that Black bodies are inherently diff...
When the plague broke out in San Francisco in 1900 the public health department poured all of their energy into stopping its spread in China...
In 2005 the FDA approved a pill to treat high blood preassure only in African Americans. This so-called miracle drug was named BiDil, and it...
The word "Tuskegee" has come to symbolize the Black community's mistrust of the medical establishment. It has become American lore. However,...
In 1991, as crews broke ground on a new federal office building in lower Manhattan, they discovered human skeletons. It soon became clear th...
In 2019, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a community organizer and journalist, learned that the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology had a colle...
In the 1990s a liberal population geneticist launched the Human Genome Diversity Project. The goal was to sequence the genomes of "isolated"...
In the 1970s Barry Mehler started tracking race scientists and he noticed something funny: they all had the same funding source. One wealthy...
In 1793 a yellow fever epidemic almost destroyed Philadelphia. The young city was saved by two Black preachers, Richard Allen and Absalom Jo...
In 2018 ancient DNA researchers revealed their analysis of a 10,000 year old skeleton called Cheddar Man. He was the oldest complete skeleto...
It might seem as though the way we think about race now is how we've always thought about it—but it isn't. Race was born out of the Enlighte...
Our new season, Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race , drops on February 7th.
What comes to mind when you think of a chemistry lab? Maybe it's smoke billowing out of glassware, or colorful test tubes, or vats of toxic...
The Disappearing Spoon , a podcast collaboration between the Science History Institute and New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean, retu...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called Angel of Rome. His voice earned him fame...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about the strange origin story of the American Medical Association. The creation...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about Hermann Muller, a geneticist who in the 1920s discovered that radiation cau...
On this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about a murder mystery that rocked Boston in 1849. Harvard University alum and ph...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean breaks down the history of nitrocellulose. This thick, transparent liquid was the world...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about Mary Ward, a budding naturalist and astronomer from Ireland. She spent a lo...
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean talks about memory fugues, a psychological disorder that wipes out biographical informa...
On this episode of The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean delves deep into the science behind the evolution of animal and human bodies. Like anim...
In this episode of Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean discusses the horrors of a particular genetic disease that was, literally, sweeping through...
Animal trials have always been part of society, but we are not talking about the ones with lab mice. In medieval times dozens of animals wer...