The Normals Episode 1

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals. Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals. We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today. All Normals episodes Appearing in this episode: Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University Dale Horst, former Normal patient Shirley Burry Geissinger, former Normal patient Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer Additional resources: The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can listen to The Normals Episode 1 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Normals Episode 1 is an episode from Science Magazine Podcast by Science Podcast.

This episode is 23:42 long.

This episode was published on Apr 7, 2026.

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