Science History Podcast

Why is it that decades after scientists discover problems of paramount importance, such as global climate change or lead pollution, those problems still persist? Why do corporations get away with producing products that harm human health or the environment? How do corporations shape our society, our politics, and even our psychology? With us to untangle these questions is my guest, Barbara Freese. Barbara is an author, energy policy advocate, and environmental attorney.  After earning a law degree from New York University in 1986 she returned to her home state of Minnesota and spent a dozen years enforcing the state’s environmental laws as an Assistant Attorney General. In the mid-1990s, she litigated the science of climate change against the coal industry. She became so interested in coal’s larger impact on the world that she dug deeper into the issue, and in 2003 published the book, Coal: A Human History. An updated edition of Coal was published by Basic Books in 2016. After writing Coal, she spent years working with and for nonprofit groups, particularly the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she was a senior policy advocate. Her work focused on pushing for state and national policies to protect the climate, on stopping the construction of new coal plants, and on closing old coal plants. The subject of today’s episode is Barbara’s latest book, Industrial-Strength Denial, published this year by the University of California Press. 

Discoveries in basic science often translate into material goods, and frequently in surprising ways. Material goods, in turn, facilitate scientific progress. Therefore, science and technology advance in tandem. Today we delve into the history of materials science with the help of Ainissa Ramirez. Ainissa is a scientist and science communicator, and the author of The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, published by MIT Press. 

Today we explore what mathematicians would refer to as the non-trivial intersection between science and poetry. Guiding us through these overlapping sets is a person uniquely suited to the task, the science writer Dava Sobel. Dava is the author of prominent and best-selling science history books, including Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, and The Glass Universe. She is also the editor of Meter, the poetry series in Scientific American. Dava began her career as a science journalist in 1970. She worked as a science writer for the Cornell University News Bureau and as a reporter for the New York Times. She also wrote pieces for many other outlets, including Harvard Magazine, Omni, Science Digest, Discover, Audubon, Life, and The New Yorker. She says that her best academic credential is undoubtedly her diploma from the Bronx High School of Science, where she graduated in 1964. Dava has received numerous literary prizes in recognition of her outstanding contributions to science history.

Frogs have hopped around this planet for 200 million years. In comparison, anatomically modern humans have only been around for 200 thousand years. But the last half century has seen a tragic loss in amphibian biodiversity around the world. It seems especially striking that a group of animals that predate the dinosaurs have been devastated by modern human activities. With us today to discuss the history of discoveries in the area of amphibian declines is David Wake. David graduated from Pacific Lutheran College in 1958, and received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California in 1960 and 1964. He then taught at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. At Berkeley, David served as curator of herpetology and Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. He also served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Society of Zoologists. In 1998, David was elected into the National Academy of Sciences.

Chemistry has given the world the incredible diversity of fuels, pharmaceuticals, and household products that we rely on every day, along with tremendous advances in fighting infectious diseases and ensuring an abundant food supply. But the products of chemistry also include tens of thousands of toxic compounds that compromise human health, degrade the environment, and drive species to extinction. The advent of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s produced a new field of chemistry dedicated to providing for the needs of society with less toxic and less environmentally damaging alternatives. This intellectual endeavor coalesced into the field of green chemistry. My guest, Terry Collins, is a leading green chemist and one of the founders of the field. His education includes a bachelor of science in 1974 and a PhD in 1978, both from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He held a faculty position at the California Institute of Technology in the 1980s before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 1988, where he is now the Director of the Institute for Green Science and the Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry. Terry is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award in 1998 and the Heinz Award for the Environment in 2010. He is also a Fellow of the American Chemical Society.

Rachel Carson alerted the world to the dangers of pollution with the publication of her book Silent Spring in 1962, and in the process, she helped to launch the environmental movement. My guest, Paul Ehrlich, alerted the world to the dangers of human population growth and resource consumption with the publication of his book The Population Bomb in 1968, and in the process, he accelerated the environmental movement. He has played a major role in that movement ever since, authoring dozens of influential books and many more articles. Ehrlich received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 and a PhD from the University of Kansas in 1957. He has been a professor at Stanford University since 1959, where he is the president of the Center for Conservation Biology. He is the recipient of numerous environmental prizes, such as a MacArthur Fellowship, the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Blue Planet Prize, and the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America. Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society; he is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Global biodiversity is in the midst of a mass extinction driven by rapid human population growth and over-consumption of resources. These forces drive habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, climate change, and the many other proximate causes of species losses. The study of these forces, and how they can be mitigated to preserve biodiversity, is the responsibility of scientists engaged in the field of conservation biology. My guest, Thomas Lovejoy, is a founding scientist of this field, and often referred to as the Godfather of Biodiversity. Tom received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biology at Yale. He then held many prominent positions related to conservation, including with the World Wildlife Fund, the Smithsonian Institution, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. He served in many scientific advisory roles for the U.S. government, and as a Conservation Fellow and Explorer at Large for National Geographic. Tom is a professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous environmental awards, including the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Blue Planet Prize. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Linnean Society of London, and the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Nothing is more human than language, and no one has done more to advance the science of linguistics than Noam Chomsky. Noam was born in 1928, and completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania just after the Second World War. He earned his PhD in 1955, and by 1957, he was already publishing landmark works in linguistics that disrupted the field and fundamentally altered the understanding of language. His work also devastated the field of behaviorism, led by the likes of B.F. Skinner. Noam is known as the father of modern linguistics, but his influence extends well beyond the study of language to include fundamental applications in computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, and many other fields. Noam has taught at MIT since 1955, and at the University of Arizona since 2017.

Space exploration thrills kids and adults alike. Today I discuss the history of NASA and space science with Pam Melroy. Pam piloted the Space Shuttle missions STS-92 in 2000 and STS-112 in 2002, and she commanded STS-120 in 2007. We discuss the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz programs, the Mariner 9 mission, Landsat satellites, Skylab, the Space shuttle, and the International Space Station. We also discuss scientific advances achieved in space in telemedicine, microgravity and health, protein crystal growth and drug development, and materials science, as well as the future of space science.

Freshwater ecosystems and their resident species have declined more rapidly than either terrestrial or marine systems and their species. Freshwater ecosystems face myriad stressors, from habitat loss and pollution to dams and climate change. Today I discuss the state of freshwater conservation science with Ian Harrison. Ian obtained his Ph.D. in systematic ichthyology at the University of Bristol in the UK. He has conducted research on marine and freshwater fishes in Europe, Central and South America, Africa, the Philippines, and the Central Pacific. He has worked for Conservation International and the IUCN’s Global Species Programme since 2008 and he is currently the freshwater specialist for Conservation International’s Moore Center for Science. Ian publishes extensively on the biology and conservation of fishes and the conservation of freshwater ecosystems.