Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchChang and Eng Bunker: The Siamese Twins Who Took Control of Their Fame
Episode 13493
In 1824 Scottish merchant Robert Hunter saw what he took for a strange creature in a river in Siam and found two teenage boys joined at the chest. Ch…
1 week ago
Quarantine History: Venice's 40 Days, Eyam, Typhoid Mary and Apollo 11
Episode 13492
After walking on the moon in 1969, the Apollo 11 crew spent 21 days sealed in a modified Airstream trailer in case they had carried back a lunar micr…
1 week ago
CRISPR's Origin Story: From Odd Bacterial DNA Repeats to Gene Editing Cures
Episode 13491
In February 2025 doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia used gene editing to treat a child with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficien…
1 week ago
Elizabeth Loftus and False Memories: Lost in the Mall to the Courtroom
Episode 13490
Ask a witness how fast two cars were going when they smashed rather than hit, and their estimate climbs by nearly 10 miles per hour. That 1974 findin…
1 week ago
Dopamine Is Not the Pleasure Chemical: Motivation, Parkinson's, Addiction
Episode 13489
Some patients who take dopamine drugs to steady their movements suddenly develop compulsive gambling, a condition called dopamine dysregulation syndr…
1 week ago
The Mozart Effect Myth: From 36 College Students to Georgia's Baby CDs
Episode 13488
In the late 1990s expectant mothers pressed headphones playing Mozart to their bellies, convinced it would raise a genius. This episode traces the id…
1 week ago
David Rosenhan's 'On Being Sane in Insane Places' and the Fraud Behind It
Episode 13487
In the early 1970s Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan told a psychiatric hospital he heard a voice saying thud. Inspired by a lecture from R.D. Lai…
1 week ago
The Appendix Is Not Useless: Darwin's Error and the Gut Bacteria Safe House
Episode 13486
Charles Darwin called the human appendix a shrunken, useless leftover, and medicine largely agreed for over a century. This episode maps the organ, a…
1 week ago
Daniel Hale Williams: The 1893 Chest Surgery and the Founding of Provident
Episode 13485
In July 1893 James Cornish arrived at Chicago's Provident Hospital with a knife wound over his heart, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams opened his chest w…
1 week ago
Christiaan Barnard's 1967 Heart Transplant and His Piggyback Heart Gamble
Episode 13484
Christiaan Barnard told dying grocer Louis Washkansky he had an 80 percent chance of surviving a procedure that had never succeeded in a human. This …
1 week ago