The Mysterious Case Of Alpha Gal

For the first 40 years of her life, Amy Pearl was a card-carrying member of the meat club; she literally had a credit card from the famous Brooklyn steakhouse Peter Luger . Then one day she ate a porterhouse steak, and nearly died. This week we join forces with our friends at Radiolab to tell the story of how Amy's mysterious allergy was identified by scientists. Plus, she tells us how the allergy has changed her relationship to food — and we find out if it’ll ever go away. This episode originally aired on February 13, 2017, and August 16, 2021, and was produced by Dan Pashman, Anne Saini, Shoshana Gold, Dan Charles, Robert Krulwich, Soren Wheeler, Jamie York, Latif Nasser, Arianne Wack, and the Radiolab team. The Sporkful production team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Kameel Stanley, Jared O'Connell, and India Rice. Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful . Get all your favorite podcasts, more than 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, and live sports coverage with the SiriusXM app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can listen to The Mysterious Case Of Alpha Gal online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Mysterious Case Of Alpha Gal is an episode from The Sporkful by SiriusXM Podcasts.

This episode is 00:40:20 long.

This episode was published on Apr 13, 2026.

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