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Tracy V. Wilson
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Mandy Woodruff Santos
This is Mandy Woodruff Santos from Brown Ambition. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously, Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in store, discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it, but they're true American success stories and you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands@walmart.com today.
Ari Chambers
What's up fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers.
Sam J.
Hey, what's up y'?
Holly Fry
All?
Sam J.
It's your girl, Sam J.
Ari Chambers
And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from 2gether.
Sam J.
We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports.
Ari Chambers
From game changing performances to culture shifting conversations. We'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way
Sam J.
because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone watches women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hoda Kotb
Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy101 It's a new podcast hosted by me. How to Copy if you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Open open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CBS.
Lele Pons
My first guest is Paris Hilton. Shakira, Luke and Yerim.
Sam J.
You have surprises, many surprises.
Lele Pons
Welcome to the Sweet 305 podcast where the group chat comes to life. What up? You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst. It's lemonade. This is suite 305. Here, oversharing is encouraged. Listen to suite 305 with Lele Pons on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Holly Fry
Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.
Tracy V. Wilson
Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
Holly Fry
And I'm Holly Fry.
Tracy V. Wilson
And I'm this week we spent the whole week talking about Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Something that became clear to me very early in the research was going to be two parts, both because I wanted to spend a little more Time talking about her peace activism, her work, basically saying we should cooperate internationally as scientists. All of that which is mentioned in most writing about her, but maybe not a lot of time spent on it. And also, I just loved her.
Holly Fry
She's great.
Tracy V. Wilson
I kept finding more reasons to love her the longer I worked on the episode and it. When I was in England, I sent myself a number of emails that just sat said as the subject line, some person's name or some event or whatever that I had just found reference to.
Holly Fry
Yeah, I do the same when I travel.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah. Eventually, for some reason, I got tired of doing that and I started just taking pictures of signs. And then after I got back to my desk, I was just flipping through my camera roll and seeing all the pictures of signs I had taken and, you know, displays in museums and things like that. And that was when I realized, number two, number one, a bunch of stuff was tagged as happening on Dorothy Hodgkin Road. And then number two, that I had multiple things related to Dorothy Hodgkin that I had taken pictures of while I was doing that I had also taken pictures of. First, the exterior of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
Which is at the hospital where he was working in London. Holly, have you been there?
Holly Fry
I have been by there. I have not been in there.
Tracy V. Wilson
Okay.
Holly Fry
But I know where you're talking about. Exactly.
Tracy V. Wilson
So this trip to England, we arrived in London. Patrick and I spent a few days in London. We met up with some friends in Birmingham where Patrick was at a convention. And then my friend and I came back to London together. And then Patrick and her husband came back separately together. And my friend and I decided to go have dinner at a barge in Little Venice, which was a wine and cheese barge.
Holly Fry
Perfect.
Tracy V. Wilson
Which we were planning to have wine and cheese and then do a second round of food somewhere else. But we filled up on wine and cheese. So as we were walking out there, we saw the exterior of the building. There's a, like a, you know, a marker. It's. It's clear. This is the building where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. We came back by a different route that took us on the other side of the building and realized that there was a museum there that I didn't know existed. That was the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. And this was maybe a two minute walk from the hotel where Patrick and I were staying. And so the next morning, it was of those days where you're just. All you're doing is flying back home.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
But the flight home doesn't leave until the afternoon. So you have a little bit of time in the morning. That's time to do something, but not time to do much. And I said, why don't we walk over to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory museum? Because it's two minutes away. It opens at 10. We need to be checked out of the room by 11. It was the perfect amount of time to go. It is a very small museum. It is his laboratory that has been reconstructed to look like it looked when he was working there. And then a room where a brief film is shown and then a display about, like, the development of penicillin and the history of penicillin. And it turned out to just be the really perfect way to close out the trip, have a brief thing to do before heading off to the airport. And then another thing that brought up the name of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in all of this. One of the things. There were several things that jumped out to me. One is that we. Something that we referred to when we were talking, which is her doing chemistry experiments in the house.
Kia Seltos Advertiser
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
Unsupervised, as far as I know.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
I think it was in the biography of her that I referenced, which, as I've started doing lately, that was the thing that I read last after the outline was largely put together, that kind of filled in some little gaps in what I knew about her biography. So that is by Georgina Ferry, and it is called Dorothy Hodgkin A Life. It was first published in 1998. A second edition came out in 2014. There might be another edition more recently than that. But one of the things she said was, quote, modern parents might question the wisdom of letting children play with naked flames in the attic of an old house. And I was like, yeah, I couldn't even play with naked flames at the dining room table, not in the attic.
Holly Fry
Well, I mean, you were a very highly supervised child.
Tracy V. Wilson
I was, yeah. This is correct. Yeah.
Holly Fry
Like, my parents were a little more tired by the time they got to me. Cause we had. I had three older siblings.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah. I was the oldest. And my mom was an anxious person.
Holly Fry
Yeah, My mom was, too. But there was a lot of finger crossing and we're tired.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
So I played with open flames a
Tracy V. Wilson
lot as a kid. Yeah. I don't remember how old I was when I got a chemistry set, which was one of, you know, the commercially made chemistry sets for children. But I begged for it for. For Christmas. Christmas or birthday, one or the other. And. And got it. And most of the experiments that I wound up doing out of it were the experiments that I could do unsupervised. That did not involve open flame, did not involve anything that was marked as being hazardous.
Holly Fry
Oh, I had my own lighter by the age of nine.
Tracy V. Wilson
That's funny.
Holly Fry
Part of that, to be fair, it wasn't like I was just running around setting things on fire, but I already sewed a lot by that point. And I was taking ballet and I would singe the ends of my. The ribbons on my shoes.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
So I just, it was just part of my life at that point.
Tracy V. Wilson
They gotta not fray. I also really thought a lot while working on this episode about the nature of science as an international cooperative endeavor and how devastating it is that how much of how much science funding has been gutted in the United States. Because that affects not just the United States, but all of these other countries that were interconnected with United States research. Some of the other countries that have started increasing their science funding to try to make up for the drop in funding of the United States. Like, it is not. It doesn't compare the amount of money that was being spent in the US like just. It was enormous and interconnected with so many things interconnected with the higher education system. A lot of university universities have basically been scientific research centers that were being subsidized by the government. And without that money, like what happens, A lot of the research is not being done. And then it also connects to people being denied entry in the United to the United States or being. Not having their visas removed, renewed or their whole class of visa. Maybe that's going to go away. Like all of it. I found I just kept thinking about it the whole time. I was thinking about all of her trips.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
To make connections with scientists and work with people and encourage them in so many different places, including places that it was really frowned upon for her to be going. Yeah, like going to North Vietnam.
Holly Fry
Yeah. Like you, I am very disheartened by the funding cuts that have been made to a lot of programs. And I know there are people for whom that seems logical. I don't think their logic is sound, but I understand how for somebody who is susceptible to this kind of rhetoric, if someone says they're not producing anything, they're wasting this money, that might sound like a good idea, but part of it is that people don't always understand what these labs and these research groups are doing. It's not like they can go, look, we made a this this week. Like some of these studies are years and years long and they don't even know what the outcome will be for quite a ways into it. And it just. It breaks my heart that we're not letting it. Those programs continue. And to have time, I know some have gotten like, you could continue, but you have to hurry everything up. And it's like, well, that's not how science works. No. Speed science. No. There are processes that are just gonna take time anyway. It's very disheartening.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah. And the results might be, no, this doesn't work. And we still learned something if that's the case.
Sam J.
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
So, yeah. Yeah.
Mandy Woodruff Santos
This is Mandy Woodruff Santos from Brown Ambition. You probably think of Walmart as a store that carries just about everything under the sun and maybe not as the place to discover small brands. Well, two things can be true at the same time, because Walmart is home to thousands of small brands founded by people who had an idea, took a chance, and built something of their own. Behind everyone is a real story and a lot of hard work. So why not take a little time to recognize all the people building small brands across the country and support everything they're creating? Walmart is proud to give those brands a place on its shelf. And online, it's never been easier to find and support small brands. So take a look at Walmart. You might come across something new, something unexpected, or a brand whose story speaks to you. You never know what you're missing until you look. Discover thousands of small brands@walmart.com.
Ari Chambers
what's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.
Sam J.
Hey, what's up, y'? All? It's your girl, Sam J.
Ari Chambers
And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I heart women's sports because, let's
Sam J.
be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.
Ari Chambers
The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire
Sam J.
timeline and the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going.
Kia Seltos Advertiser
All week.
Ari Chambers
Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.
Sam J.
We'll give you our takes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements.
Ari Chambers
We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments, and get into what's happening on and off the field, court, track, and beyond.
Sam J.
Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it, because everyone watches women's sports. So if you're already a fan or
Ari Chambers
you're just getting into the game, there's a seat for you right here.
Sam J.
Listen to Everyone Watches women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hoda Kotb
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
Holly Fry
Okay.
Hoda Kotb
If you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
Sam J.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and
Tracy V. Wilson
that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Hoda Kotb
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had never no choice but to be a gymnast.
Tracy V. Wilson
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it.
Hoda Kotb
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lele Pons
My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke, and Yerin Samira E. Gracie.
Tracy V. Wilson
I'm so excited. On the bouncy bed, you have surprises, many surprises.
Lele Pons
Welcome to Suite 305 where the group chat comes to life. You're the only person I know that loves yellow Starburst. It's lemonade. This is suite 305. Listen to suite 305 with Lele Pons as part of my cultura podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tracy V. Wilson
Something else that I said to you, sort of in a moment between actual recording, was about Dorothy and Thomas's relationship.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
I. I feel like it's an overstatement to describe them as polyamorous, because that is not an idea that really, like that term had not been coined.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
I don't think for all of their lives. Definitely not for most of their lives. And I'm also not fully, fully sure what. What her feelings were about his other relationships.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
I know that conceptually she was like, we should be free to love who we want to love. But there's a difference between thinking that conceptually and what your feelings are about it.
Sam J.
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
And I. I'm not fully confident I know what her feelings were about it, but it does seem like she knew he was having these other relationships that neither of them felt like it was a betrayal in any way. And then it Just seems to have worked for them that they were so rarely in the same place for long periods of time, but continually writing each other letters. Yeah.
Holly Fry
I mean, their whole marriage is unconventional. Even if they did not have whatever agreement or understanding in place that, like, there could be other. Other romantic partners in the mix. Just the fact that they barely lived in the same place ever.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
Is.
Tracy V. Wilson
Well. And that was, like, also the plan for minute one. It was like, we're gonna get married, we're gonna go on a honeymoon, but we're immediately gonna live in two different places. Yeah. When I was in college, I might have told this story before. When I was in college, I dated a guy for a chunk of my time in college. And his parents were both tenured professors at different universities in different states. And that was just because, like, that was how their careers had evolved. They had both wound up on a tenure track in different places. And so they saw each other on weekends, holidays, summers. And they did a lot of driving back and forth between western North Carolina and North Georgia. And my perception was that that worked for them. And it. You know, they had basically two households in two different places that their children went back and forth depending on what was going on. And it seemed to work out.
Kia Seltos Advertiser
Yeah.
Holly Fry
I used to work with a guy who lived. It was in my brief foray into the gaming industry when I was working at Cartoon Network.
Tracy V. Wilson
And he.
Holly Fry
I realized after that I didn't want to stay in gaming because so many people, like, the game publishes. And then, you know, not that long later, either that whole team gets sunset or sometimes the company closes or whatever. Like, it's a very. For a lot of people, not everybody, but for a lot of people, it is a very kind of migrant career to have where you're constantly on the
Tracy V. Wilson
move, kind of volatile.
Holly Fry
And their thing was like, well, we need somebody to have a base of operations. Like, we need, you know, one stable place while recognizing that this other person is gonna live in other places a lot of the time. And for them, they were very devoted. Like, he was very devoted to his family, and they made it all work. But I would be miserable.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
Yeah. I don't wanna live away from Brian. No. He's my bff.
Tracy V. Wilson
It's funny to me because, like, it's obvious to me that this kind of relationship is not a relationship that would work for you and Brian in any way. Yeah. But the fact that they got married so quickly after meeting one another.
Holly Fry
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a little parallel.
Tracy V. Wilson
That did kind of remind me of you. And Brian.
Holly Fry
Well, their marriage date is very close to ours as well, which made me giggle a little. I'm like, oh, another person that married right away after they met in December. Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
I do feel like all of the distance and separation was hard for their kids.
Holly Fry
Oh, it had to have been at
Tracy V. Wilson
least some of the time. And I don't know how her other siblings felt about what their somewhat similar upbringing was like. Like, Dorothy talked about it making her a more independent person and that really becoming a part of her later life. But I don't really fully have a sense of how the younger sisters felt about how often their parents were separated. How often they were separated from their parents.
Holly Fry
Yeah. I mean, this is another interesting parallel. Right. Like, and there's not necessarily one answer, because there are. Like, my dad was career military, so there were times he was gone for sometimes years at a time. And I credit that with one of the reasons I'm very independent. But it's also, like, because that was a time where my mom was not always coping with things very well, and so I just kind of had to be. So it's like, on the one hand, great. It made me super independent. On the other, not great for the family overall. You know what I mean? You can have both simultaneously, so it's tricky if they didn't write it down anywhere.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
We may never know. Yeah. Yeah. I did have to giggle at one point when she was told to rest for a month.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
What? No. Your hands. No.
Tracy V. Wilson
Right, right. My impression was that she got no diagnosis at that doctor visit when she was told to rest for a month.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
And then she got home and found that John Bernal had made a breakthrough while she was at the doctor. So I think she had no diagnosis and these orders to rest and was like, well, I'm immediately diving into this huge project that we've made a big breakthrough on.
Holly Fry
I mean, I just can't imagine any scenario where I just rest for a month.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
I'd lose my mind. Like, sure. Take time off of work for a month. That sounds fun. Like, I would love a no obligation life for four weeks, but I would still be Putters McGee. I'd be in the sewing room making stuff. I'd be, you know, scooting along, doing, I don't know, trips. Things I just didn't like. It sounds like that rest for a month was. Especially because she was going for a complaint with pain in her hands.
Tracy V. Wilson
Pain in her hands. Yeah.
Holly Fry
Would be a lot of do nothing for a month. And I think, again, this is before the wealth of entertainment options one has these days.
Tracy V. Wilson
Oh, sure.
Holly Fry
Like at that point, what do you just sit quietly in a room? I don't.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
That's torture.
Tracy V. Wilson
And I have, I have absolutely no concept whatsoever of whether rest would be helpful or harmful for somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, which they did not know yet from my understanding was what she had. Right. Yeah. Because there, like there are conditions where doing exercise is helpful, but there are also conditions where exercise can cause a flare up or can exacerbate situations unless it's done really carefully. And I have, I did not look into which of those. Well, or what combination is the case with rheumatoid arthritis. But yeah, like just as being like, oh, no rest for a month.
Holly Fry
We have some in my family and it's not the same for everybody.
Tracy V. Wilson
Okay.
Holly Fry
So you know what I mean? Some people do better if they're keeping up light amount of work and others just have inflammation that makes movement very, very painful.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah.
Holly Fry
And it, it gets exacerbated when they try to do more like exercise y things. So I think it just depends. I don't, I mean I could be wrong. And I also am going off of some of that being quite old information, you know, a couple of decades old. So I'm sure modern stuff. There's a lot more therapies, medications, et cetera. But I don't think it's the same for every person.
Tracy V. Wilson
No.
Holly Fry
So complicated in a variety of ways.
Tracy V. Wilson
I think the closest thing I've ever experienced to that are. Number one, when I was in high school, I got mono.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
And I had about two weeks when I really could do almost nothing physically. And then the first time I got Covid, the first few days of having Covid, I did not feel as sick as I have felt a couple of different times in my life. When I had like the. I felt worse one time when I had the flu and one time when I had a really bad bacterial upper respiratory infection, I felt physically worse. But I was so tired that I couldn't even think about the decision of what could. What can I watch next.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
Very often. So I just started watching things that were really long, like the entire. And also that I had seen before because I couldn't focus on things either. Let's watch the entire BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries because I know how that story goes. And this goes on for a very long time. So I won't even have to get up and like change anything.
Holly Fry
Right.
Tracy V. Wilson
And that I continued to have a lot of like really serious fatigue after getting better from like the respiratory symptom part.
Holly Fry
Yeah.
Tracy V. Wilson
And then also developed tachycardia.
Holly Fry
It's a party. It's a party.
Tracy V. Wilson
It's a whole thing. Anyway, so. Yeah, that's the closest thing I can imagine to like rest for a month.
Holly Fry
Not really the same thing. Anyway, I gotta be busy, Bee. I can't even just watch a thing. I gotta be doing something.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah. Once again, I love Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin.
Holly Fry
Yeah, she's terrific.
Tracy V. Wilson
Very glad that my trip to England kept just putting her in front of my face. Whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope you're able to take some time for yourself to rest, to rejuvenate yourself a little bit and that you're able to have patience with yourself and with other people and that other people are patient with you. I know sometimes I try other people's patience.
Holly Fry
I think everybody does.
Tracy V. Wilson
Yeah. I hope there's this as little of that as possible over your weekend. And if you're at work, I hope work goes very well and that everyone's nice. We will be back with a brand new episode on Monday and we'll have a Saturday classic tomorrow. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Mandy Woodruff Santos
This is Mandy Woodruff Santos from Brown Ambition. When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously. Walmart has thousands of small brands and they're all in one place. Just go online or in store. Discover and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind true American success stories. And you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands@walmart.com today.
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Ari Chambers
What's up fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers.
Sam J.
Hey, what's up y'?
Holly Fry
All?
Sam J.
It's your girl. Sam J.
Ari Chambers
And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from 2gether.
Sam J.
We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports, from game changing
Ari Chambers
performances to culture shifting conversations. We'll give you our takes, our debates and a few laughs along the way
Sam J.
because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone watches women's sports from the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
Hoda Kotb
Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 1011 It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Open your free iHeartradio app, search Joy101 and listen now. Joy101 with Hoda Kotfi is presented by CBS.
Tracy V. Wilson
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at the process of researching and producing the two-part series on pioneering chemist and crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Tracy and Holly reflect on Hodgkin's scientific impact, her work as a peace activist, her unconventional personal life, and muse about the wide-reaching relevance of her story—including the unexpected ways she kept cropping up during Tracy’s recent trip to England.
On loving Dorothy Hodgkin:
On unsupervised childhood science:
On declining science funding:
On marriage and independence
On 'resting for a month':
Final words:
This episode is an engaging, thoughtful debrief on the life of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin and the themes her story evokes—curiosity, resilience, and the importance of open borders and minds for science and humanity.