Advertise on podcast: Distillations | Science History Institute

Come celebrate our newest Distillations podcast season, American Vice. From cigarettes to alcohol to fireworks, this season is all about our relationship with risk, how science plays a role in it, and how it has shaped the American experience. To do it, we're partnering with our friends at the Crossroads Comedy Theater to bring you a special edition of their popular Study Hall: Comedy Inspired By Lectures show. Join us for an experience unlike any you have seen before—or will ever see again! Enjoy short talks about topics from our podcast episodes, after which Crossroads' cast of amazing improvisers will use what they learned (or didn't learn) to create hilarious scenes right before your eyes! You'll learn, laugh, and leave without homework. The museum will stay open until 6pm, at which time the show will begin. The event is free, but registration is required. Light refreshments will be served.

Many of us have heard of Long COVID, but few of us understand the depth and breadth of the diagnosis or the history leading up to it. We talk with medical anthropologist Emily Mendenhall about her book on invisible illnesses and what happens when medical symptoms are hard to explain. We discuss why patients are dismissed and how the history of hysteria, neurasthenia, and chronic fatigue syndrome all contribute to Long COVID denialism. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Seth Samuel Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya Music by Blue Dot Sessions Resource List Mendenhall, Emily. Invisible Illnesses: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID. University of California Press: 2026.

Silver's Volatile History. How long have people been pinning their hopes on silver? And what makes it valuable to us? Is it just because it's shiny and pretty or do we care about its practical uses too? Join us as we go down the rabbit hole to find out how Nevada got its nickname as the Silver State, how The Wizard of Oz might have actually been a hidden story about money, and how a trio of billionaire brothers managed to control more than a third of the world's silver supply. Along the way, we'll find the science in a story about a volatile asset. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Seth Samuel Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

A conversation with the author of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. If you've ever read anything about the history of psychedelics, the name Timothy Leary will probably sound familiar. He was a Harvard psychologist who researched psychedelics within academia before getting fired in 1963 and taking his experiments underground. But you might never have heard of Timothy's wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary. We talk with author Susannah Cahalan about her book on Rosemary and how she played a quiet but foundational role in our early understanding of LSD. We also talk about our history of pinning our hopes on a miracle chemical and why some people are skeptically embracing psychedelics today.  Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Samia Bouzid Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Corrections In this interview, the Timothy Leary Papers were described as consisting of 400 boxes. The collection actually includes 610 boxes, 11 oversized folders, 22 tubes, 67 audio files, and 1.78 Gigabytes of computer files. A full list can be found here.  In this interview, the Rosemary Woodruff Leary Papers were described as ancillary. Technically, the New York Public Library does not refer to the collection as "ancillary" or "secondary." Rosemary's collection has its own separate call number. More information can be found here.   In this interview, the Rosemary Woodruff Leary Papers were described as consisting of 25 boxes. The collection actually includes 24 boxes, 1 volume, and 11.75 mb of computer files. A full list can be found here.  In this interview, Rosemary's mystical experience was described as taking place when she was seven years old. The incident actually took place in 1943 during the summer after her 8th birthday.  In this interview, Martin McLuhan was described as having told Timothy Leary to sell the LSD experience like Coca-Cola. Martin actually told Leary to sell it like Pepsi.

How did a covert chemical treatment permanently change our drinking water? In 1908, two men, John L. Leal and George Warren Fuller, spent 99 days secretly constructing something that would fundamentally alter the Jersey City water supply. Their decision to add chlorine is one that continues to impact our lives for the better, but there was no large-scale testing or approval process. This episode, brought to us by producer Caitlin Faulds, explores the big questions about Leal and Fuller's great experiment. Do the ends justify the means? What if it hadn't worked? And how did people react when they found out? Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Reporter: Caitlin Faulds Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Seth Samuel Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya

Cigarettes: they provide no nutrition and quench no thirst. They serve no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind before getting right back to it. And on top of that, they're deadly. As far as American vices go, they might be at the top of the list. So how did they get and stay popular for so long? And why are they making a comeback? This two-part episode dives into the rise of this quintessential American product, the science that proved it was dangerous, and the eventual reckoning that came from a mysterious box of documents—one delivered with the return address of an iconic cartoon character. Along the way, we'll uncover what has driven so many Americans to risk their lives to light up despite what the science has told us. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Seth Samuel Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya

Cigarettes: they provide no nutrition and quench no thirst. They serve no purpose other than being an excuse to take a break from the grind, before getting right back to it. And on top of that, they're deadly. As far as American vices go, they might be at the top of the list. So how did they get and stay popular for so long? And why are they making a comeback? This two-part episode dives into the rise of this quintessential American product, the science that proved it was dangerous, and the eventual reckoning that came from a mysterious box of documents—one delivered with the return address of an iconic cartoon character. Along the way, we'll uncover what has driven so many Americans to risk their lives to light up—despite what the science has told us. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Sound Design: Seth Samuel Fact-Checking: Alexandra Atiya Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Check out our new season, dropping weekly on Tuesdays, starting September 15th.

Alexis Pedrick joins Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti to bring you an episode from Tiny Matters, an award-winning podcast from the American Chemical Society produced by Multitude. The episode, which originally aired in February 2026, explores the surprising origins and evolution of one of modern medicine's most important tools: the clinical trial. Tiny Matters follows the development of experimental design across centuries to modern-day randomized control trials and the debates about their limitations, trying to answer the question, "How do we know whether a treatment truly works?" Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Senior Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Resource List Placebo Controls, Exorcisms and the Devil  The Eight Wars of Religion (1562–1598) The Emergence of the Randomized, Controlled Trial The Emergence of the Randomized Controlled Trial: Origins to 1980  Streptomycin Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Estimated Costs of Pivotal Trials for Novel Therapeutic Agents Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, 2015-2016   Conservative Treatment of Acute Appendicitis: An Overview Most Patients with Appendicitis Can Have Antibiotics as Their First Treatment, Rather than Appendectomy Assessing the Gold Standard—Lessons from the History of RCTs

This 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 Pedrick Executive Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: 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.

Alexis 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.

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. 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.

The 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.

Our 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.

When 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.