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Ep 205 Cancer Part 4: Where do things stand today?
For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent, but what if we didn’t have to use treatmen
Ep 204 Cancer Part 3: How do we treat it?
A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple notebooks to delineate all of the variou
Special Episode: Lawrence Ingrassia & A Fatal Inheritance
For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellular dynamics underlying cancer, and what t
Ep 203 Cancer Part 2: Why does it happen?
Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a consequence of complex life. The features that make a cell cancerous are those that, under other
Ep 202 Cancer Part 1: What is it?
Cancer has touched every one of us in some capacity, and learning of a diagnosis inspires many more questions than it answers. In this four-part series on cancer, we aim to lay a foundation of knowledge that will help make sense of this mul
Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City
What happens if you put a bunch of rats in an enclosure and provision them with unlimited food and water? Researcher John B. Calhoun was committed to finding out. Results from Calhoun’s “rat utopia” experiments from the mid-20th century rev
Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away
Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ingrained disgust towards poop. Flush toilets and intricate sewer systems have revolutionized healt
Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made
It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind
Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite
For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from how they taste to what we eat, refrigerati
Ep 199 Sleep Part 2: Predictably unpredictable
Now that we know just how critical sleep is, we’re all making sure we get the amount we need, right? Unfortunately no. One-third to one-half of Americans are not getting enough sleep, according to public health guidelines. Why is that? Hypo
Ep 198 Sleep Part 1: Sleeping with one eye open
Sleep is a universal experience. It’s not just the lion that sleeps tonight - it’s also the butterfly, the chicken, the jellyfish, the dog, the snake, the worm, and of course the human. What is this widespread physiological process whose sp
Special Episode: Daniel Stone & American Poison
The widespread use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century led to one of the world’s biggest public health and environmental disasters, the effects of which are still present today. Since its development in the 1920s, leaded gasoline has bee
Ep 197 Detox: Enemas for everyone
Ah, the new year. After the last month and a half of indulgent food and drink, disrupted schedules, and laying around the house, who doesn’t feel like they’re in need of a whole-body cleanse? There are plenty of companies who are more than
From the Vault - Endometriosis: Menstrual Backwash (Ep 88)
This episode originally aired on January 11th, 2022. Chances are you know someone with endometriosis, or perhaps you’re affected yourself. But despite its incredibly high prevalence, endo remains almost criminally understudied, undertreated
From the Vault - Hepatitis B: Hepatiti, Take 2 (Ep 89)
This episode originally aired on January 25th, 2022. In light of the recent changes by RFK jr’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to eliminate the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine in the US, a decision which
Ep 196 Health Myths: Fact or fiction?
Did your grandma ever warn you against going out in the cold with wet hair because “you’ll catch your death”? Or have you ever tossed a few more carrots into your shopping basket in the hope that they’ll improve your vision? There are count
Special Episode: Dr. Homer Venters & Outbreak Behind Bars
[Content warning: self-harm, suicide, violence] In this day and age, we are equipped with an abundance of tools and knowledge to fight the spread of disease. Yet what good does that toolkit do if we lack the resources or the will to impleme
Ep 195 Salt Part 2: The Substance
We ended last week’s episode on a bit of a cliffhanger: is salt actually bad for us and if so, why does there still seem to be a debate? This week’s episode holds all the answers. We’re sifting through the noise to figure out what salt actu
Ep 194 Salt Part 1: The Seasoning
Have you ever thrown a pinch of spilled salt over your left shoulder? Or said to someone “well, take his opinion with a grain of salt”? Or looked up the potential salary of a job listing? Salt is so deeply embedded in our cultures, our lang
Special Episode: Gabriel Weston & Alive
In an anatomy and physiology class, you may learn how the different heart valves work to circulate your blood, how the structure of your kidney helps to maintain electrolyte levels, and how the expansion and contraction of your lungs sets o
Ep 193 Necrotizing Fasciitis: A strange beast
If you were asked to describe necrotizing fasciitis in three words, you might choose: rapid, deadly, and rare. The third of those adjectives may provide some comfort, but the first two are the clear inspiration for this infection’s more lur
Ep 192 New World Screwworm: Oh-oh here they come
It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. A fly lands on an open wound and lays hundreds of eggs, from which hatch countless ravenous maggots. There they writhe, devouring flesh, insatiable and relentless. Every minute they dig deeper and deep
Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal & Dead Ends!
Science doesn’t always get it right the first time (or the second, or the third, or even the ninety-ninth!). And while we may chuckle at the outlandish things people believed or the goofy experiments they tried, we forget two things: 1) tho
Ep 191 Famine: More than starvation
As we learned last week, starvation extends far beyond hunger and what a lack of food does to the human body. Similarly, famine is much more than a food shortage and starvation on a population-level scale. This week, we’re picking up where
Ep 190 Starvation: More than hunger
Deprived of food, our bodies do the best they can to keep us alive and functioning as long as possible. As the days pass, the rhythms of our lives change: our metabolism, our heartbeats, our hormones, even our thoughts shift to adjust to th
Special Episode: Antonia Hylton & Madness
The United States is in the midst of a monumental mental health crisis, with one in four people predicted to experience mental illness at some point in their lives. Adequate mental health care remains out of reach of so many due to a myriad
Ep 189 Newborn screening: The future is here
Every year, millions of babies around the world are screened for dozens of treatable conditions within the first day or two of life. What it takes is a few drops of blood on some filter paper, and what it gives is profound: potentially life
Ep 188 Candida yeast: Here, there, and everywhere
None of us are ever truly alone. Our bodies are home to untold numbers of microbes, chilling on our skin, in our guts, throughout our respiratory tract, inside our bellybuttons, under our fingernails, and beyond. For the most part, we live
Special Episode: Mary Roach & Replaceable You
When your car breaks down or your fridge goes on the fritz, you can order a replacement part and get things back up and running in no time. The same cannot always be said for another intricate machine: the human body. For centuries, scienti
Ep 187 Hypothermia Part 2: How it helps
Last week, we took you through all the ways that cold can harm us and the harrowing history of humans perishing at its icy hands. Ending the story there would be skipping over the parts where cold gets to play the hero, rather than the vill
