Distillations: Science + Culture + History

The human brain is mysterious and complicated. So much so, one might be tempted to argue that it only makes sense that we still don’t have a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, despite decades of research. But this isn’t the whole story. We’ve partnered with Vox’s Unexplainable science podcast to talk about how Alzheimer’s researchers have been stubbornly pursuing a single theory for decades. The Amyloid Hypothesis is the reigning champ amongst pharmaceutical companies and scientific scholars and it has pushed all other theories to the wayside. Over the years scientists have developed many drugs based on the Amyloid Hypothesis but the the clinical trials keep failing. Now some researchers are starting to wonder if the reason we still don’t have a cure is that we’ve put all of our scientific eggs in one faulty basket.  You can hear more about the Alzheimer’s disease on the previous Distillations Podcast episodes: The Alzheimer’s Copernicus Problem Parts 1 and 2. Credits: Distillations: Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elis

Ever since the book A Discovery of Witches debuted in 2011, the All Souls franchise has taken on a life of its own with devoted fans all over the world. The TV show and annual All Souls Con—which the Science History Institute occasionally hosts—is based on the trilogy of books about witches, vampires, and demons by author Deborah Harkness. Distillations sat down with Jen Daine and Cait Parnell, the hosts of the All Souls podcast, Chamomile and Clove; art historian Stephenie McGucken; and medievalist actor, journalist, and author Sarah Durn to talk about the series’ alchemical roots, the material culture in the TV show, and how the book’s found-family theme mirrors the fandom. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

Since humans have been living we’ve also been dying—best case scenario: after eight or nine decades and plenty of good times. But we’re not wholly content with that. Never have been, probably never will be. In fact, working on how not to die is one of the most human things about us. It’s occupied the minds of everyone from ancient Chinese emperors and medieval European alchemists to now, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They think it’s within sight and completely different from how this quest was approached in the past. Or is it? Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

Jeremiah McCall is a history teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School and the author of Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary School. He talked to Distillations about what it's like to use video games in his history classes, the criteria he uses in choosing games, and why he likes his students to question the media they are consuming. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

The pandemic made gamers out of many Americans, including our producer, Rigoberto Hernandez. He played a lot of historical video games and it got him thinking: can you learn history from video games even though they are obviously fiction? Throughout history there have been many moral panics about people consuming historical fiction and taking what they read and watch as fact, so how do video games stack up? It turns out that they can empower players in better ways than TV shows, films, and books. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

Anna Reeser is a historian of technology and Laila McNeil is a historian of science. Together they co-founded and are editors-in-chief of Lady Science, an independent magazine about women, gender, history, and popular culture of science. Now the duo has a new book titled Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science. They talked to us about moving beyond biographies, how women who had knowledge about the natural world are suspect, and reintegrating women’s history into the mainstream.

For decades, the official fire policy of the Forest Service was to put out all fires as soon as they appeared. That might seem logical, but there is such a thing as a good fire, the kind that helps stabilize ecosystems and promotes biodiversity. Native American communities understood this and regularly practiced light burning. So why did the Forest Service ignore this in favor of unabated fire suppression? In 1910 a massive fire known as “the big blow up” or “the big burn” devastated northern Idaho and Western Montana. It left a huge mark on the then five-year-old Forest Service and had consequences we still see today. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

Ghost hunters on television all seem to have a common goal: to prove that ghosts are real using sophisticated, yet inexact technology. Colin Dickey, the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, says this is not an accident. The relationship between technology and ghosthunters is as old as the telegraph. But Dickey is not interested in proving they are real; he is fascinated with what the ghost stories we tell reveal about our society. Credits: Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

The 19th century was a time of rapid technological leaps: the telegraph, the steam boat, the radio were invented during this century. But this era was also the peak of spiritualism: the belief that ghosts and spirits were real and could be communicated with after death. Seances were all the rage. People tried to talk to their dead loved ones using Ouija boards and automatic writing. Although it might seem contradictory, it's not a coincidence that this was all happening at the same time. There have always been questions about life after death, but in the 19th century people found new ways to investigate them using these new cutting-edge technological tools. And part of it was that some of these new tools felt supernatural in and of themselves. The radio, the telegraph, the phonograph: these allowed us to speak over inconceivable distances, communicate instantly from an ocean away, and even preserve human voices in time and after death. But something else was going on in the 19th century. The people who were t

In the 19th century a mysterious illness afflicted rural New England. Often called the Great White Plague for how pale it made its victims, it was also called “consumption” because of the way it literally consumed people from the inside out, gradually making them weaker, paler, and more lifeless until they were gone. Today we know it as tuberculosis, an infectious bacterial disease that attacks the lungs and causes a hacking cough, a wasting fever, and night sweats. But back then the main suspect was vampires. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

This summer leave reality behind and join Distillations for an entire season about fantasy! We're talking vampires! Ghosts! Witches! And we promise, it all has to do with the history of science. Season launches on June 29.

Last year Distillations talked to people who have special insight into the coronavirus crisis—biomedical researchers, physicians, public health experts, and historians. In this episode we talk to Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, a biotech company that developed one of the three emergency-approved COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. The Moderna vaccine is unique in that it uses a new technology that has been decades in the making called messenger RNA, or mRNA. Bancel reflects on the development timeline of the vaccine: from learning about the virus while reading the Wall Street Journal in 2019 to the moment he finally got his own shot at a Moderna facility. He talks about the promise of mRNA and what’s ahead for Moderna. Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Senior Producer: Mariel Carr  Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Researcher: Jessica Wade Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

In the 1700s human dissection was a big taboo—people feared that it would leave their bodies mangled on Judgment Day, when God would raise the dead. As a result, government officials banned most dissections. This led to some unintended consequences, most notably a shortage of bodies for anatomists to dissect. To meet the heightened demand, a new profession emerged: grave-robbers. These so-called resurrectionists dug up the bodies of poor people to sell to anatomists, which led to riots in the streets. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music: "Trois Gnossiennes 3," "Stately Shadows," "Darklit Carpet," "Vernouillet," and "Tossed" by Blue Dot Sessions. "Conjunto Sol del Peru," by Pockra (Vol. 2: Musica de los Andes Peruanos). "Conjunto Sol del Peru," by Wuaylias Tusy (Vol. 2: Musica de los Andes Peruanos). "Conjunto Sol del Peru," by Ckashampa (Vol. 2: Musica de los Andes Peruanos) Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

How an early 20th century doctor pitted one scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis). Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music: “Delamine” by Blue Dot Sessions. ​​​​​​​All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is sometimes called the Lord God bird, a nickname it earned because that’s what people cried out the first time they ever saw one: “Lord God, what a bird.” Even though the last confirmed sighting was in the 1930s, birders have been claiming they have seen the Lord God bird throughout the years, turning it into a myth. The sad part is it didn’t need to be this way. And it’s all Hitler’s fault. As crazy as it sounds, the ivory-billed woodpecker was one of last victims of the Nazi war machine.  Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer

If Ted Talks were around in the early 1990s, Horace Fletcher would have given his fair share of them. Fletcher was a health reformer who thought people didn’t chew their food nearly enough. He believed that most swallowed food way too quickly. This had all sorts of detrimental health consequences, he said, including nasty bowel movements.​​ So he over-chewed his food. He once chewed a green onion 722 times before he let himself swallow it. His idea became such a sensation that it became a movement known as "Fletcherism." His ideas made it to the White House and could have even changed the tide of World War I. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music: Photo: Science History Institute.

Shakespeare had a go at at the longest word in the English language with “honorific-abilitude-in-i-tat-i-bus.” If you play the game of stacking suffixes and prefixes together, you can get “antidisestablishmentarianism,” one letter longer for a total of 28 letters. But the longest word by far appeared in 1964 in Chemical Abstracts, a dictionary-like reference for chemists. The word describes a protein in what’s called the tobacco mosaic virus, and it runs 1,185 letters long. Besides being too long to write here, it tells us a lot about the unusual chemistry of carbon. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer “Delamine” by Blue Dot Sessions. All other music composed by Jonathan Pfeffer.

The debut of the female birth control pill in 1960 was revolutionary. The combination of progesterone and estrogen allowed women to control their reproductive lives much more easily and effectively. But the pill had many unpleasant and even dangerous side effects. In fact, some doctors argue that it wouldn’t win government approval today. So why haven’t scientists tried to create a birth control pill for men? It turns out they have. In the 1950s scientists created a really good one. But it had one problem—you can’t drink alcohol when you take it. Credits Host: Sam Kean Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Music: Jean-Claude Risset - Mutations Peter B - The Growling Dog Hit Perry & Kingsley - Cosmic Ballad Charlie Hoistman - Ptpar(({|i|[i*8,Pbind(\scale,[0,2,4,7,9],\degree,Pseq(32.fib.fold(0,10),4)+(2*i+i)-10,\dur,1+2**i%2/6)]}!4).flat).play // #supercollider Régis Renouard Larivière - Contrée Raymond Scott - Lightworks Deerhoof - Despareceré Juk Suk R

From the Disappearing Spoon, our new podcast! Radium was once the trendiest element in the world. It glowed alluringly in the dark and was hailed it as a medical panacea. It was also the basis of Marie Curie’s research—for which she won her second Nobel Prize in 1911. But by 1920 radium was scarce and its cost was eye-popping: one hundred thousand dollars per gram. When Curie’s research ground to a halt because of the expense, thousands of American women stepped in to raise money for the precious chemical element.