Distillations podcast

With a new public interest in health equity research, who is actually receiving recognition and funding in the field?

Why are Black women in America three times more likely to die during childbirth than White ones?

A group of medical students wants to take racial bias out of the equation.

When the plague struck San Francisco in 1900, public health officials blamed Chinatown, as if the disease itself had a racial component.

If there’s no such thing as biological race, why would the FDA approve a drug just for Black patients?

The word “Tuskegee” has become shorthand for the Black community’s mistrust of the medical establishment. But what really happened?

When yellow fever struck the city in 1793, faulty race logic almost destroyed it.

Vox’s ‘Unexplainable’ podcast interviews ‘Distillations’ about how Alzheimer’s research has stubbornly focused on a single theory for decades.

When an invisible threat plagued rural 19th-century New England, the evidence pointed to the supernatural.

“I just feel broken.”

From Paracelsus to OSHA.

The biochemical engineer and entrepreneur on her hopes for a better postpandemic society.

The MIT chemical engineer and entrepreneur talks about Moderna Therapeutics, a company he helped start, and his work developing a way for vaccines to self-boost in the body.

The Thermo Fisher Scientific executive tells us what it took for his instrumentation company to design a diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus.

The longtime biotech executive talks to us about how CRISPR can be used to make a faster diagnostic test for COVID-19 and how she’s advising a hospital in creating a vaccine. 

The scientist, entrepreneur, and author has lived through three epidemics. He tells us how this pandemic compares with his earlier experiences: “It is a tragedy that never needed to happen.”

The University of Pennsylvania microbiology professor talks about her 40 years of experience researching coronaviruses.

The former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recalls the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Ebola pandemic: “Early pandemic science is filled with uncertainty.”