Podcast
Distillations | Science History Institute
Hosted by Science History Institute · EN
Distillations is the Science History Institute's critically acclaimed flagship podcast. We take deep dives into stories that range from the serious to the eccentric, all to help listeners better understand the surprising science that is all around us. Hear about everything from the crisis in Alzheimer's research to New England's 19th-century vampire panic in compelling, sometimes-funny, documentary-style audio stories.
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth
Mar 1900:37:28Tap to summarizeThis episode is a co-production with Lost Women of Science. Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world. But the way we talk about Agnes's life and work often falls back on familiar tropes about women's domestic roles, assumptions about how science gets done, and what it looked like to do science as a woman in the 19th century. Agnes's story invites us to rethink how we define success for scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what might we gain if we crack it open a bit wider? Credits Host: Alexis PedrickExecutive Producer: Mariel CarrProducer: Rigoberto Hernandez Additional Reporting: Sophia Levin Art Design: Lily Whear Fact-Checking: Alexandria Attia Sound Design: Ana Tuirán Guests Brigitte Van Tiggelen Brigitte Van Tiggelen is the Science History Institute's director of international affairs, working from the Institute's office in Paris. Trained as both a physicist and a historian, she is the coeditor of Women in Their Element: Selected Women's Contributions to the Periodic System (2019), a volume that brings together more than two decades of research and publication of the life and work of women in science. Donald L. Opitz Donald L. Opitz is a historian of science who teaches in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Department of History at DePaul University. He is writing a book that traces the international movement for the advancement of women in agriculture and horticulture from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Petra Mishnik Petra Mischnick was a professor of food chemistry at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. There she founded and ran the Agnes Pockels Student Lab to inspire young children, especially girls, to pursue science. Resource List Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory and Opitz, Don. "Agnes Pockels - Surface Chemist and 'Hausfrau'," The Changing Image of the Sciences. 2002. Pockels, Agnes. "On the Relative Contamination of the Water-Surface by Equal Quantities of Different Substances." Nature, 1892. Sella, Andrea. "Pockels' Trough." Chemistry World, 2015. Tiggelen, Brigitte Van. "Fräulein Agnes Pockels: The Shaping of a 'Forschende Hausfrau'," paper presented at the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Bergwik, Staffan; Opitz, Donald L.; Tiggelen, Brigitte Van. Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science. 2016. A full transcript is available on our website.
Transcribe →
Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment
Sep 3000:52:04Tap to summarizeAlexis Pedrick joins Katie Hafner to bring you an episode from The Lost Women of Science Initiative, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to telling the forgotten or untold stories of remarkable female scientists and their groundbreaking work through history. The episode, which originally aired in October 2023, is about Flemmie Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in Home Economics. In the early 1960s, Flemmie decided to see what would happen if you gave poor kids a boost early in life, in the form of a really great preschool. Every day for two years, parents would get free childcare, and their kids would get comprehensive care for body and mind—with plenty of nutritious food, fun activities, and hugs. What kind of difference would that make? And would it matter later on? Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Flemmie Kittrell audio interviews, Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library Institute Kittrell, Flemmie, "The Negro Family as a Health Agency," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Health Status and Health, 1949 Baure, Lauren, "Does Head Start Work?," The Brookings Institution, 2019 Horrocks, Allison, Good Will Ambassador with a Cookbook: Flemmie Kittrell and the International Politics of Home Economics, University of Connecticut, 2016 First report on Howard Preschool Experiment: Prelude to School: An Evaluation of an Inner-City Preschool Program, Children's Bureau (DREW), Washington, D.C. Social and Rehabilitation Service, 1968 Talbot, Margaret, " Did Home Economics Empower Women?," The New Yorker, 2021 Zigler, Edward, and Muenchow, Susan, Head Start: The Inside Story Of America's Most Successful Education Experiment, 1994.
Transcribe →
The CRISPR Babies
Sep 1100:53:33Tap to summarizeIn 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. The story set off an explosive bioethical controversy. As gene editing expert Kiran Musunuru put it, "He Jiankui's genetic misadventures were the biggest medical story of the century so far." Both scientists and the public had a lot of questions. What was the unmet medical need that justified the gene editing? Was the science ready for prime time? And, if it was, was He Jiankui the right scientist to do it? Seven years later these questions are far from resolved. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Baylis, Françoise. Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. CBS News. "Chinese Researcher Claims He Helped Make First Gene-Edited Babies." CBS News, November 26, 2018. CBS News. "Chinese Scientist Behind Gene-Edited Babies Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison." CBS News, December 30, 2019. Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Greely, Henry T. CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. "He Jiankui presentation and Q&A, International Summit on Human Genome Editing." Youtube Video, November 26, 2018. Marchione, Marilynn. Associated Press. "Chinese researcher claims first gene-edited babies." AP News, November 26, 2018. "Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of 'China's Frankenstein.'" MIT Technology Review, May 23, 2025. Musunuru, Kiran. The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World's First Gene-Edited Babies. BookBaby, 2019. NBC News. "Chinese Scientist Says He Helped Create First Gene-Edited Babies." NBC News, November 26, 2018. "World's first successful tailor-made gene therapy saves baby born with rare disorder." CBS Mornings. May 16, 2025.
Transcribe →
Humans and Monsters: An Interview with Surekha Davies
Sep 900:31:38Tap to summarizeThe fears about genetic engineering were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s. From lab leaks to disease epidemics to the ability to make "Frankenstein creations," many of those fears are still with us today. We talk to author Surekha Davies about her latest book, why she thinks of monsters as category breakers and why blurring boundaries can be so terrifying for us, but maybe doesn't have to be. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Davies, Surekha. Humans: A Monstrous History. University of California Press: 2025.
Transcribe →
IVF: An Interview with Robin Marantz
Sep 200:43:49Tap to summarizeOur producer Rigoberto Hernandez spoke with Robin Marantz, the author of Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. She tells us about the history of IVF, from the first known artificial insemination by donor produced in Philadelphia in the 19th century to the scientific race in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the first so-called "test-tube baby." Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Henig, Robin Marantz. Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2006.
Transcribe →
Gene Therapy's Families
Aug 2600:42:45Tap to summarizeWhen Rebekah and Evan Lockard's daughter, Naomi, was diagnosed with a devastating ultra-rare genetic disease, they didn't know where to turn. Then they found Terry Pirovolakis, an IT professional who had made a gene therapy for his son with the same disease. But the process of getting Naomi treated has been an uphill battle, full of financial and logistical obstacles. The Lockard's story flips the question we've been asking all season on its head. Instead of wondering, "if we could do something, should we," we're now asking, "if we can do something that helps patients, should we do it at any cost?" And this question isn't for scientists or researchers, it's for the rest of us. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Mast, Jason. "A dad built a gene therapy for his son. Can he save other kids, too?" STAT News. Elpida Therapeutics. "Battling SPG50 and changing the world." August 17, 2022. The Jackson Laboratory. Brent, Jonathan R. and Deng, Han-Xiang. "Paving a way to treat spastic paraplegia 50." "AAV gene therapy for hereditary spastic paraplegia type 50: a phase 1 trial in a single patient." June 28, 2004. "Colorado family pushes for more funding, awareness around rare neurological disorder." August 12, 2024. CBS News Colorado. Naomi's Corner.
Transcribe →
Gene Therapy's Dark Ages
Aug 1900:49:02Tap to summarizeGene therapy is based on a simple-sounding, yet deceptively complicated premise: adding or replacing faulty genes to fix medical problems. A compelling idea that came out of breakthroughs in DNA research, the field grew lightning fast. But the death of teenager Jesse Gelsinger after a gene therapy clinical trial left the public and scientists questioning the field's promise. Why did researchers push ahead with clinical trials despite gene therapy still being in its infancy? What does the Jesse Gelsinger story tell us about the personal risk behind medical breakthroughs? Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List American Experience: The Boy in the Bubble. PBS. Begley, Sharon. "Out of Prison, the 'Father of Gene Therapy' Faces a Harsh Reality: a Tarnished Legacy and an Ankle Monitor." STAT News, July 23, 2018. Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2022. "C‑SPAN: Paul Gelsinger." C‑SPAN. Gelsinger, Paul L. "Jesse's Intent." Circare. ABC Evening News. Vanderbilt Television News Archive, December 8, 1999. CBS Evening News. Vanderbilt Television News Archive, May 28, 1999. NBC Nightly News Broadcast. Vanderbilt Television News Archive, December 8, 1999. "Report and Recommendations of the Panel to Assess the NIH Investment in Research on Gene Therapy." Georgetown University Library. Rinde, Meir. "The Death of Jesse Gelsinger, 20 Years Later." Science History Institute, June 4, 2019. Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. "The Biotech Death of Jesse Gelsinger." New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1999. "Teen Dies Undergoing Experimental Gene Therapy." Washington Post, September 29, 1999. "The Glimmering Promise of Gene Therapy." MIT Technology Review, November 1, 2006. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 1999-12-08. NewsHour Productions. American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Wilson, James . "Lessons learned from the gene therapy trial for ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency."
Transcribe →
'The Andromeda Strain': An Interview with Luis Campos
Aug 1200:39:31Tap to summarizeProducer Mariel Carr talks to historian of science and former Science History Institute fellow, Luis Campos, about his article "Strains of Andromeda: The Cosmic Potential Hazards of Genetic Engineering." He shares how Michael Crichton's first novel and the subsequent film influenced the conversation and controversy around recombinant DNA research in the 1970s. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List The Andromeda Strain. IMDb. Campos, Luis A. "Strains of Andromeda: The Cosmic Potential Hazards of Genetic Engineering."
Transcribe →
The People vs. Recombinant DNA
Aug 500:44:33Tap to summarizeIn 1976, Harvard University wanted to build a specialized lab for recombinant DNA research. But first, it had to get permission from the city of Cambridge. The resulting city council hearings drew TV stations and captured the attention of the whole country. At the center of the controversy? A wise-talking mayor, a young outspoken molecular biologist, and an important question: in scientific research, how much say should the public have? Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid Resource List Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Krimsky, Sheldon. Genetic Alchemy: A Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984. Rogers, Michael. "Biohazard." Nova: The Gene Engineers. Dailymotion. "Cambridge DNA Hearings, 1976." Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy. "Cambridge RDNA hearings, volume 1, 1976." Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy. "National Academy of Sciences. Forum. Washington, DC, 1977 March 7–9." Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oral History Program, oral history collection on the recombinant DNA controversy. "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: Genetic Engineering." American Archive of Public Broadcasting. From Controversy to Cure: Inside the Cambridge Biotech Boom. MIT Video Productions. "Pantechnicon; Dna, 1976." WGBH. The Andromeda Strain. IMDb. Jurassic Park. IMDb. CBS News – 04.06.1977 NBC News – 05.24.1977
Transcribe →
Science, Interrupted: Part 2
Jul 3000:44:24Tap to summarizeGenetic engineering breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s came with a lot of promise—and peril too. Fears about what could happen with recombinant DNA experiments put scientists in the middle of a moral dilemma. Did they have a responsibility to consider how others might use their work? Or was their place simply to be on the lab bench? In this two-part episode, we'll share the story about the first time scientists stopped and considered the ramifications of their work, with a self-imposed moratorium. And we'll explore all the controversy that led to the historic pivotal meeting at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in 1975 to determine the future of genetic engineering. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List A Deep Conversation with Jon Beckwith: A History of Scientific and Social Activism. University of California Television. YouTube. Berg, Paul. "Paul Berg Letter." Wellcome Collection. Chemical Heritage Foundation: The Emergence of Biotechnology. Science History Institute. Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Cohen, Stanley N. Science, Biotechnology, and Recombinant DNA: A Personal History. UC Berkeley. DNA Learning Center. "Asilomar Meeting." Genetic Dreams, Genetic Nightmares. BBC. Fredrickson, Donald S. Asilomar and Recombinant DNA: The End of the Beginning. DNA: The Secret of Life. IMDb. Jurassic Park. IMDb. Late 1960s-Early 1970s Anti-War Marches. YouTube. "Letter from Maxine Singer and Dieter Söll to Philip Handler." Lear, John. Recombinant DNA: The Untold Story. Goodreads. Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. Simon & Schuster. McElheny, Victor. Attempting the Impossible at Asilomar. McElheny, Victor. Gene Transplants Seen Helping Farmers and Doctors. The New York Times, May 20, 1974. Nova: The Gene Engineers. Dailymotion. Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level. YouTube. Rejection of Science Worries American Scientists. The New York Times, April 5, 1970. Rogers, Michael. The Pandora's Box Congress. Rolling Stone. The Gene: PBS. PBS Learning Media. "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report: Genetic Engineering." American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Transcribe →