417 episodes listed below
Science history with the easy answers removed.
Distillations is a documentary-style science history show from the Science History Institute, built around careful reporting and expert conversation. Its recent episodes trace genetic engineering, reproductive medicine, forgotten women in science, and the cultural fears that gather around new technologies.
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Distillations is science history with its doubts left in. The show is less interested in clean origin stories than in the pressure points behind them: credit, evidence, fear, ambition, access, and consequence. A story about Agnes Pockels becomes more than a tale of a woman working at a kitchen sink; it becomes a challenge to assumptions about who influences whom in science. A story about Flemmie Kittrell's preschool experiment opens onto race, poverty, federal research, and the meaning researchers make from ordinary childhood behavior. The genetic engineering episodes are especially sharp. They follow the promise of gene therapy through proof-of-concept trials, failed hopes, families waiting for treatment, and the ethical strain of calling an experiment a therapy before anyone has truly been helped. The CRISPR babies episode carries the same caution into a newer era. It asks what oversight means when a technique seems ready before the central question has been answered: why do it at all? The show also has a cultural memory. It connects The Andromeda Strain to recombinant DNA anxieties, and it treats monsters not as cheap symbols but as clues to how humans police boundaries. Interviews give the series its texture. Surekha Davies discusses monsters as category breakers. Robin Marantz-Hennig explains IVF and the reproductive revolution. Marilyn Marchione appears in the account of reporting claims about edited embryos. The result is brisk, structured audio that still leaves space for complexity. It can be grave when families are caught inside medical scarcity. It can be dryly skeptical when scientific communities congratulate themselves too quickly. It can be warm when overlooked observers finally receive attention. Distillations works best for listeners who want history to clarify science without flattening it into heroes, villains, and inevitable progress.
Made for: Best for curious listeners who like science, history, biography, and ethics in reported form. It especially suits people interested in women in science, medical breakthroughs, and the social consequences of research.
What sets it apart: The show pairs narrative history with expert interviews and keeps returning to the question behind the discovery. It stands out by making scientific progress feel contingent, contested, and deeply human.
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.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Distillations makes the history of scientific progress tangible by following its ethical decisions, institutional pressures and human consequences.
Distillations follows scientific breakthroughs into the rooms where risk, permission and public trust are negotiated. Alexis Pedrick leads documentary reporting and interviews from the Science History Institute, using explanatory narration and first-person testimony to connect…
Baby-sized gene therapy doses are where your neat story about scientific progress starts asking awkward questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A homemade trough opens a clear window onto Agnes Pockels's careful science and family exchange.
Distillations follows Agnes Pockels as she turns household materials and an old pharmacist balance into a pocket trough, then uses it to study how soil, oil, and other impurities change the surface of water.
A preschool study opens into race, policy, and early childhood research.
The episode starts on the Howard campus and tracks a preschool study in which economics students went door to door in poor, mostly black neighborhoods, looking for children who met a long list of requirements before entering a federally funded nursery.
A careful look at how CRISPR hype became a public ethics crisis.
Distillations treats the CRISPR babies story as the moment genetic engineering stops reading like theory and starts looking like a pregnancy, a claim, and a public rush for proof.
Gene therapy's promise turns personal as dose size, age, and supply decide who can wait and who cannot.
Distillations moves from gene-therapy promise into the harder realities facing rare genetic disease. Alexis Petrick brings forward Naomi Lockard, a four-year-old from Colorado, and Rebecca Lockard's account of Michael's positive test and the hospital call gives the piece its…
Gene therapy's promise is traced through Jesse Gelsinger's story.
The story of gene therapy is framed through Jesse Gelsinger, from his childhood diagnosis of ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, or OTCD, and the ammonia buildup that made the disease dangerous, to French Anderson's effort to move from persuasion before the Recombinant DNA…
Tuskegee is revisited as both history and myth, with Nurse Rivers and the study's human details kept firmly in view.
This episode revisits Tuskegee and the myths around it, then follows how the study and its public story were shaped by public health ideas about race. It gives real weight to Nurse Rivers and Dr.
Dinosaur news with jokes and caveats.
History lives in the overlooked details.
Women in STEM history, with science and laughter.
History with drinks, tangents, and teeth.
Lily Tyson Head, daughter of a study participant, explains why the Tuskegee myth fueled Black Americans' COVID-19 vaccine fears.
A 19th-century doctor secretly inseminated an unconscious woman with a medical student's sperm, sparking ethical debates that still echo today.
Engineers John L.
A 4,000-page 1994 leak from Brown and Williamson gave Stanton Glantz a window into the tobacco industry's internal records.
Distillations host Alexis Petrick traces how cigarettes rose from a niche product to an American staple after James Bonsack patented a rolling machine in 1880.
Agnes Pockels wrote to Lord Rayleigh in 1891, and Nature published her letter after he recognized the value of her work on water surfaces.
Flemmy Pansy Cottrell, born in 1904 in Henderson, North Carolina, became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in home economics and the first Black woman to receive a PhD from Cornell.
Distillations traces the path from 1977 recombinant-DNA fears to Jennifer Doudna, CRISPR, and the first genetically edited babies.
An interview with historian Surekha Davies about her book exploring why humans invent monsters and what they reveal about our fears and boundaries.
An interview with Robin Marantz Hennig about the history of IVF and the first test tube baby.
Distillations from the Science History Institute follows the Lockard family — Naomi (four years old, SPG-50) and infant Jack — and Terry Pirovolakis, an IT professional from Toronto who raised $4.5 million to fund a gene therapy for his son Michael after being told there was no treatment for SPG-50, a condition affecting fewer than 100 people worldwide.
Distillations examines the 1999 death of Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old with ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency (OTCD), who died four days after receiving experimental gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania in a trial led by James Wilson.
An interview with Luis Campos about the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain and its influence on the recombinant DNA debates of the 1970s.
Jonathan King recounts the early days of recombinant DNA research and the Asilomar conference that led to a moratorium on genetic engineering.
An interview with Gregory Morgan about his book 'Cancer Virus Hunters', covering a century of tumor virology research from its origins to the development of the HPV vaccine and HIV discovery.
An interview with Paul Donald about his book 'Traffication' discussing the impact of cars on wildlife and nature, and potential solutions.
An interview with gender studies professor Dominique Grisard exploring the cultural history and gender associations of the color pink.