Distillations | Science History Institute

Science History Institute
  • 4.5 (94)
  • History
  • Updated Bimonthly

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.

  1. 6d ago

    The Acid Queen: An Interview with Susannah Cahalan

    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.

    The Acid Queen: An Interview with Susannah Cahalan

  2. Sep 28

    Jersey City's Secret Water Experiment

    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

    Jersey City's Secret Water Experiment

  3. Sep 22

    Cigarettes in America, Part 2: The Reckoning

    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 in America, Part 2: The Reckoning

  4. Sep 15

    Cigarettes in America, Part 1: The Rise

    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.

    Cigarettes in America, Part 1: The Rise

  5. Aug 31

    American Vice: New Season Coming September 15th

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

  6. Jun 30

    The History of Clinical Trials: From Fake Exorcisms to Testing Today

    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

  7. Mar 19

    Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth

    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.

    Agnes Pockels and the Kitchen Sink Myth

  8. 09/30/2025

    Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment

    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.

    Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment
See All (367)

Trailers

4.5
out of 5
94 Ratings

About

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.

Information

You Might Also Like