Podcast Episodes

Malaria & Reminiscences: Nobel Laureate Peter Agre

Season 1 Episode 76

Peter Agre received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of aquaporins. Peter is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…

Published on 1 year, 8 months ago

Retrospective: Oliver Sacks

Season 1 Episode 75

In 1994, while attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, I had the pleasure of seeing a lecture by Oliver Sacks in which he discussed his work on sleeping sickness and vari…

Published on 1 year, 9 months ago

Novichok: Vil Mirzayanov

Season 1 Episode 74

Novichok is the most deadly chemical weapon ever developed. With us to discuss the history of Novichok is Vil Mirzayanov. Vil worked in the secret Soviet chemical weapons laboratory that developed No…

Published on 1 year, 9 months ago

Pascual Jordan's Duplicity: Ryan Dahn

Season 1 Episode 73

How could a brilliant scientist and mathematician, an innovator in quantum theory, who worked closely with Jewish colleagues, become an ardent Nazi? How did this man, who has a field of mathematics n…

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago

Scientific Espionage: Eli Lake

Season 1 Episode 72

Many of the most important secrets held in international contests are technological or scientific in nature, and wars are often settled due to technological superiority of one side over the other. Th…

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago

Retrospective: The Franck-Hertz Experiment

Season 1 Episode 71

A retrospective on the Franck-Hertz experiment, which resulted in James Franck and Gustav Hertz receiving the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Image credit: By Infoczo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://c…

Published on 2 years ago

Retrospective: James Franck

Season 1 Episode 70

A retrospective on James Franck, recipient of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Published on 2 years, 2 months ago

Ancient DNA: Maanasa Raghavan

Season 1 Episode 69

The ability to extract DNA from ancient fragments of biological material has revolutionized our understanding of recent evolutionary history, including human evolution and phylogeography. Analysis o…

Published on 2 years, 2 months ago

Pandemics: Leslie Reperant

Season 1 Episode 68

The world just experienced a devastating pandemic, yet in the context of historical pandemics, COVID-19 was a relatively minor event in the history of disease. What do we know about the history of pa…

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago

Lazaretto: David Barnes

Season 1 Episode 67

Before the advent of the germ theory of disease in the 1870s, quarantine provided one of the few effective means to prevent or alleviate epidemics. The Lazaretto quarantine station in Philadelphia il…

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago