Distillations | Science History Institute

We talk to William Haseltine, a scientist, entrepreneur, and author who has lived through three epidemics (polio, HIV/AIDS, and now COVID-19). He tells us how his lab in the 1980s was better prepared to deal with HIV/AIDS than we are now for COVID-19 and what he thinks lies ahead for us with this pandemic.   Over the next several weeks Distillations will be talking to people who have special insight into the coronavirus crisis—biomedical researchers, physicians, public health experts, and historians. Credits Hosts: Elisabeth Berry Drago, Alexis Pedrick  Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Researcher: Jessica Wade Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer​​​​​​​

Over the next several weeks Distillations will be talking to people who have special insight into the coronavirus crisis—biomedical researchers, physicians, public health experts, and historians. In this episode we speak with Susan Weiss, a microbiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director for the Penn Center for Research on Coronavirus and Emerging Pathogens. She’ll talk about her 40-years of experience researching coronaviruses, how her field reacted to the 2002 SARS and 2012 MERS outbreaks, and the importance of studying diseases that transfer from animals to humans.  Credits Hosts: Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Researcher: Jessica Wade Additional production: Dan Drago

Over the next several weeks Distillations will be talking to people who have special insight into the coronavirus crisis—biomedical researchers, physicians, public health experts, and historians.  In this episode we speak with Sue Desmond-Hellmann, an oncologist who worked with HIV patients in San Francisco in the 1980s during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She was also the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation up until December 2019. Desmond-Hellmann tells us about her experiences working as a doctor during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and as a CEO of the Gates Foundation during the Ebola pandemic. She also discusses what we learned from HIV and Ebola that can help us in fighting COVID-19.  Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Researcher: Lisa Grissom Image: by Krista Kennell/Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.

Over the next several weeks Distillations will be talking to people with special insight into the coronavirus crisis—biomedical researchers, physicians, public health experts, and historians. In this episode we speak with John C. Martin, a biomedical researcher and former CEO of Gilead Sciences. Gilead is a pharmaceutical giant best known for its antiviral therapies for HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, but it’s also the company behind remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has recently made headlines as a possible treatment for COVID-19. Martin talked to senior producer Mariel Carr about remdesivir, antiviral treatments for HIV and other illnesses, and working with Anthony “Tony” Fauci. Credits Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez Music: "Balti," "Tuck and Point," and "Slimheart" by Blue Dot Sessions. Research Notes "Fauci: New Drug Remdesivir Cuts Down Coronavirus Recovery Time," NBC Nightly News. April 29, 2020.

The historical curator of a new exhibition at the Mütter Museum discusses the eerie parallels between the 1918-1919 flu pandemic and the coronavirus. In the fall of 1918 the (misnomered) Spanish flu ravaged much of the world. Philadelphia was hit especially hard: it had the highest death rate of any major American city. Over the course of six weeks 12,000 people in the city died. Hospitals were overcrowded and bodies piled up. When the Mütter Museum embarked on the multiyear exhibition and public art project Spit Spreads Death, the curators and researchers behind it had no idea how relevant it would become—or how quickly.

Over the past few years our producers have been saving all the raw tape from our tracking sessions (maybe to blackmail us at some point?) But because we all need some levity these days, we dug it out for your listening pleasure. We hope these outtakes (improvised songs about the history of science, complaints about squeaky chairs, and musings about various forms of a dystopian future) amuse you as much as they amused us. "Climbing the Mountain" by Podington Bear.

Stay tuned for our upcoming season, dropping in summer 2020!

Philadelphia just had the wettest decade on record, and all that precipitation has wreaked havoc on the city’s waterways. Like most old cities, Philadelphia has a combined sewer system—that is, one pipe is used to carry both sewage and stormwater. When it rains a lot, the system gets overwhelmed, forcing the water department to send raw sewage into rivers and creeks. City officials and engineers knew this was going to be a problem when they built the sewer system in the 1800s. The reason why they used a combined system anyway can be best explained by two forces: knowledge ceilings and path dependency. In this episode we’re going to explore how the city got to this point and how, in an interesting twist, it led to Philadelphia having one of the most innovative water systems in the country.    Philadelphia is home of the Distillations podcast. For this episode we are going to break down three centuries of water-pollution history in our backyard. It is a special collaboration with the Philadelphia Inquirer as part of their series From the Source: Stories of the Delaware River. Credits Host: Elisabeth Berry Drago Reporter: Rigoberto Hernandez, Sebastian Echeverri Senior Producer: Mariel Carr Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez  Audio Engineer: James Morrison  Additional production: Dan Drago Special thanks to the Science History Institutes, oral history department, and the museum team for doing some of the research that went into this episode. This includes Rebecca Ortenberg, Christy Schneider, Samantha Blatt, Zackary Biro, and Grey Pierce. Resource List Grabar, Henry. “Tunnel Vision.” Slate, January 2, 2019. Handy, Jam. “Waters of the Commonwealth.” Pennsylvania Sanitary Water Board, 1951.  Henninger, Danya. “The Incredible Fairmount Water Works: Explosions, Mark Twain and the Long-Lost Philadelphia Aquarium.” Billy Penn, October 10, 2015. Kummer, Frank. “The Secret Scourge of Climate Change? More Raw Sewage in Philadelphia’s Waterways.” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13, 2019. Levine, Adam. “Fairmount Water Works.” Philadelphia Water Department Water and Drainage History Course, 2015.  Nemiroff, Sydney P., dir. “Road Ahead: Milestone 3.” Philadelphia Department of Records, ca. 1960.  Schulman, Alexis. “Sustainable Cities and Institutional Change: The Transformation of Urban Stormwater Management.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018.   Stutz, Bruce. “Philadelphia Is Tackling Its Stormwater Problem.” Yale Environment 360 (March 29, 2018). 

In 1970 Jane Hodgson became the only person in the United States ever convicted for performing an abortion in a hospital. A patient came to her St. Paul, Minnesota OB/GYN practice seeking an abortion. She had two kids, was pregnant with her third, and had rubella.  Minnesota's abortion law was one of the strictest in the country, but Jane Hodgson broke it. Then she called her local DA and turned herself in. This is a bonus episode exploring one part of the story from our last episode: Roe v. Wade v. Rubella. Special thanks to Physicians for Reproductive Health for giving us permission to use the 2000 oral history interview with Jane Hodgson.

The story of how abortion became legal in the United States isn’t as straightforward as many of us think. The common narrative is that feminist activism and the sexual liberation movement in the 1960s led to Roe v. Wade in 1973. But it turns out the path to Roe led over some unexpected and unsettling terrain, and involves a complicated story involving culture, society, disease, and our prejudices and fears about disability. In the 1960s a rubella epidemic swept the United States and panicked every pregnant woman in the country. Rubella, also called German measles, is a disease we hardly remember anymore, but it’s the “R” in the MMR vaccine. Though the virus is relatively harmless for most people, when contracted during pregnancy, it can severely harm the developing fetus. During the epidemic many pregnant women who may have never identified as abortion-rights advocates suddenly found themselves seeking abortions and dismantling barriers to access. Though not everyone agreed with these women, people listened. And this historical moment, sparked by a virus, helped pave the way for the legalization of abortion.