Episoder
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In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a new public interest in health inequities research. With this new focus, there also has come new funding with many researchers and institutions clamoring to receive lucrative funding and recognition in the field, but there are no official guidelines to distinguish a health equity expert.
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Elle Lett who coined the term "health equity tourism" to describe when privileged and previously unengaged scholars enter the health equity field without developing the necessary expertise.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producers: Padmini Raghunath & Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions -
Of all wealthy countries, the United States is the most dangerous place to have a baby. Our maternal mortality rate is abysmal, and over the past five years it’s only gotten worse. And there are huge racial disparities: Black women are three times more likely to die than white women. Despite some claims to the contrary, the problem isn’t race, it’s racism. In this episode we trace the origins of this harrowing statistic back to the dawn of American gynecology—a field that was built on the bodies of enslaved women. And we’ll meet eight women who have dedicated their lives to understanding and solving this complex problem.
CreditsHost: Alexis Pedrick
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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Certain medical instruments have built-in methods of correcting for race. They’re based on the premise that Black bodies are inherently different from White bodies. The tool that measures kidney function, for example, underestimates how severe some Black patients’ kidney disease is, and prevents them from getting transplants. Medical students and doctors have been trying to do away with race correction tools once and for all. And they’re starting to see some success.
About Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race“Correcting Race” is Episode 9 of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine. Published through Distillations, the Science History Institute’s highly acclaimed digital content platform, the project examines the scientific origins of support for racist theories, practices, and policies. Innateis made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Credits | Resource List | Transcript CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
A Unifying Approach for GFR Estimation: Recommendations of the NKF-ASN Task Force on Reassessing the Inclusion of Race in Diagnosing Kidney Disease, by Cynthia Delgado, Mukta Baweja, Deidra C Crews, Nwamaka D Eneanya, Crystal A Gadegbeku, Lesley A Inker, Mallika L Mendu, W Greg Miller, Marva M Moxey-Mims, Glenda V Roberts, Wendy L St Peter, Curtis Warfield, Neil R Powe
A Yearslong Push to Remove Racist Bias From Kidney Testing Gains New Ground, by Theresa Gaffney
‘An entire system is changing’: UW Medicine stops using race-based equation to calculate kidney function, by Shannon Hong
Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, by Lundy Braun
Expert Panel Recommends Against Use of Race in Assessment of Kidney Function, by Usha Lee McFarling
Hidden in Plain Sight – Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms, by Darshali A. Vyas, Leo G. Eisenstein, and David S. Jones
Medical student advocates to end racism in medicine, by Anh Nguyen
Precision in GFR Reporting Let’s Stop Playing the Race Card, by Vanessa Grubbs
Reconsidering the Consequences of Using Race to Estimate Kidney Function, by Nwamaka Denise Eneanya, Wei Yang, Peter Philip Reese
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When the plague broke out in San Francisco in 1900 the public health department poured all of their energy into stopping its spread in Chinatown, as if Chinatown were the problem. This episode reveals why they did it, what it has to do with race science, and what it tells us about the history of public health.
CreditsHost: Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In 2005 the FDA approved a pill to treat high blood preassure only in African Americans. This so-called miracle drug was named BiDil, and it became the first race-specific drug in the United States. It might sound like a good a good thing, but it had the unintended consequence of perpetuating the myth that race is a biological construct.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, by Dorothy Roberts
Oprah’s Unhealthy Mistake, by Osagie K. Obasogie
Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, by Jonathan Kahn
Saving Sam: Drugs, Race, and Discovering the Secrets of Heart Disease, by Jay Cohn
The Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis: Dissemination and Appeal of a Modern Race Theory, by Jay S Kaufman, Susan A Hall
Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini
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The word “Tuskegee” has come to symbolize the Black community’s mistrust of the medical establishment. It has become American lore. However, most people don’t know what actually happened in Macon County, Alabama, from 1932 to 1972. This episode unravels the myths of the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Syphilis Study (the correct name of the study) through conversations with descendants and historians.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
Black Journal; 301; The Tuskegee Study: A Human Experiment
Descendants of men from horrifying Tuskegee study want to calm virus vaccine fears, by David Montgomery
Examining Tuskegee: The infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
Nova: The Deadly Deception
Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers’ Boys and the Tuskegee Syphis Study
Tuskegee Legacy Stories
Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care, by Vanessa Northington Gamble
Voices For Our Fathers Legacy Foundation
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In 1991, as crews broke ground on a new federal office building in lower Manhattan, they discovered human skeletons. It soon became clear that it was the oldest and largest African cemetery in the country. The federal government was ready to keep building, but people from all over the African diaspora were moved to treat this site with dignity, respect, and scientific excellence. When bioarchaeologist Michael Blakey took over, that's exactly what they got. But it wasn't easy.
CreditsHost: Alexis Pedrick
Resource List
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race, by Michael Blakey
African Burial Ground Project: Paradigm for Cooperation? by Michael Blakey
The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space, by Andrea E. Frohne
The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery, documentary film by David Kutz
Reassessing the “Sankofa Symbol” in New York's African Burial Ground, by Erik R. Seeman
The New York African Burial Ground Final Reports, by multiple authors
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In 2019, Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a community organizer and journalist, learned that the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology had a collection of skulls that belonged to enslaved people. As Muhammad demanded that the university return these skulls, they discovered that claiming ownership over bodies of marginalized people is not just a relic of the past—it continues to this day.
CreditsHost: Alexis Pedrick
Resource List
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
It’s past time for Penn Museum to repatriate the Morton skull collection, by Abdul-Aliy Muhammad
Penn Museum seeks to rebury stolen skulls of Black Philadelphians and ignites pushback, by Abdul-Aliy Muhammad
Penn Museum owes reparations for previously holding remains of a MOVE bombing victim, by Abdul-Aliy Muhammad
City of Philadelphia should thoroughly investigate the MOVE remains’ broken chain of custody, by Abdul-Aliy Muhammad
Black Philadelphians in the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection , by Paul Wolff Mitchell
Some skulls in a Penn Museum collection may be the remains of enslaved people taken from a nearby burial ground, by Stephan Salisbury
Remains of children killed in MOVE bombing sat in a box at Penn Museum for decades, by Maya Kassutto
The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton's cranial race science, by Paul Wolff Mitchell
She Was Killed by the Police. Why Were Her Bones in a Museum?, by Bronwen Dickey
Corpse Selling and Stealing were Once Integral to Medical Training, by Christopher D.E. Willoughby
Medicine, Racism, and the Legacies of the Morton Skull Collection, by Christopher D.E. Willoughby
Final Report of the Independent Investigation into the City of Philadelphia’s Possession of Human Remains of Victims of the 1985 Bombing of the MOVE Organization, prepared by Dechert LLP and Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads LLP, for the city of Philadelphia
The Odyssey of the MOVE remains, prepared by the Tucker Law Group for the University of Pennsylvania
Move: Confrontation in Philadelphia, film by Jane Mancini and Karen Pomer
Let the Fire Burn, film by Jason Osder
Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (MOVE) Records, archival collection at Temple University's Urban Archives
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In the 1990s a liberal population geneticist launched the Human Genome Diversity Project. The goal was to sequence the genomes of “isolated” and “disappearing” indigenous groups throughout the world. The project did not go as planned—indigenous groups protested it, and scientists and anthropologists criticized it. This episode examines what went wrong and asks the question: can anti-racist scientists create racist science?
About Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race“The Vampire Project” is Episode 4 of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine. Published through Distillations, the Science History Institute’s highly acclaimed digital content platform, the project examines the scientific origins of support for racist theories, practices, and policies. Innate is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Credits
Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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In the 1970s Barry Mehler started tracking race scientists and he noticed something funny: they all had the same funding source. One wealthy man was using his incredible resources to prop up any scientist he could find who would validate his white supremacist ideology—and make it seem like it was backed by a legitimate scientific consensus.
About Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race“Keepers of the Flame” is Episode 3 of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine. Published through Distillations, the Science History Institute’s highly acclaimed digital content platform, the project examines the scientific origins of support for racist theories, practices, and policies. Innate is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
‘The American Breed’: Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund, by Paul Lombardo
The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, by William Tucker
The New Eugenics: Academic Racism in the U.S. Today, by Barry Mehler
The Phil Donahue Show
Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini
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In 1793 a yellow fever epidemic almost destroyed Philadelphia. The young city was saved by two Black preachers, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who organized the free Black community in providing essential services and nursing the sick and dying. Allen and Jones were assured of two things: that stepping up would help them gain full equality and citizenship, and that they were immune to the disease. Neither promise turned out to be true.
About Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race“Calamity in Philadelphia” is Episode 2 of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine. Published through Distillations, the Science History Institute’s highly acclaimed digital content platform, the project examines the scientific origins of support for racist theories, practices, and policies. Innate is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
Richard Allen voiceover by Jason Carr“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource ListHow the Politics of Race Played Out During the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, by Alicia Ault
A short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: with a statement of the proceedings that took place on the subject in different parts of the United States, by Mathew Carey
Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, by Rana A. Hogarth
A narrative of the proceedings of the black people, during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793, by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen
Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers, by Richard Newman
Observations upon the origin of the malignant bilious, or yellow fever in Philadelphia, and upon the means of preventing it: addressed to the citizens of Philadelphia, by Benjamin Rush
Bishop Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom, produced by Dr. Mark Tyler
Transcript -
In 2018 ancient DNA researchers revealed their analysis of a 10,000 year old skeleton called Cheddar Man. He was the oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in England, and the revelation that he had dark skin challenged assumptions many people had about what the earliest people in Britain looked like.
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It might seem as though the way we think about race now is how we’ve always thought about it—but it isn’t. Race was born out of the Enlightenment in Europe, along with the invention of modern western science. And it was tied to the politics of the age—imperialism and later slavery. This episode traces the origins of race science to the Enlightenment, examines how the Bible influenced racial theories, and considers how we still have a hard time letting go of the idea of race.
About Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race“Origin Stories” is Episode 1 of Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a podcast and magazine project that explores the historical roots and persistent legacies of racism in American science and medicine. Published through Distillations, the Science History Institute’s highly acclaimed digital content platform, the project examines the scientific origins of support for racist theories, practices, and policies. Innate is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
CreditsHosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer"Innate Theme" composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
Special thanks to our colleagues, Jacqueline Boytim and James Voelkel, for their help with this episode.Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race, by Michael Blakey
Breathing Race into the Machine: the Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, by Lundy Braun
Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, by Terence Keel
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, by Dorothy Roberts
"Jesus Loves the little Children," song by Cedarmont Kids
Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Differences in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, by Rana Hogarth
The Nuremberg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel
Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini
Find the full transcript here.
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What comes to mind when you think of a chemistry lab? Maybe it’s smoke billowing out of glassware, or colorful test tubes, or vats of toxic substances. Chemistry and hazardous solvents just seem to go hand in hand. But chemists like James Mack think there’s a greener way: It’s called mechanochemistry, a kind of chemistry that uses physical force to grind materials instead of solvents. And it’s getting the attention of such huge corporations as Exxon Mobil. Still, some chemists are not ready to give up their traditional techniques. “I thought they were married to the molecules,” says Mack, who is pictured above placing vials into a machine that uses fast-spinning ball bearings to pulverize molecules. “Little did I know they were actually married to the flask.”
Credits
Host: Elisabeth Berry Drago
Reporter, Producer, and Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath -
The Disappearing Spoon, a podcast collaboration between the Science History Institute and New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean, returns for its third season on March 8, 2022.
To celebrate, our producer, Padmini Parthasarathy, sat down with Kean to talk about his book The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code. This interview is a great companion piece for the new season of The Disappearing Spoon, which tackles all sorts of strange and interesting stories about the geniuses we know well—from Einstein and his great scientific blunder that turned out to be correct, to Monet and the cataracts that almost made him put down his brush forever.
Listen as Kean talks about violin protégé Niccolo Paganini, whose genes were both a blessing and a curse, the scientific arms race that led to the mapping of the human genome, and the sometimes-murky lines between human and non-human.
Credits
Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Parthasarathy
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called Angel of Rome. His voice earned him fame and money. So what's the secret behind the voice? What was his trick? It turns out that his trick can also make you taller and prevent baldness. The only catch: it requires castration.
CreditsHost: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer -
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about the strange origin story of the American Medical Association. The creation of this powerful medical society can be traced back to a duel between two doctors at Transylvania University in Kentucky.
CreditsHost: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer -
In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about Hermann Muller, a geneticist who in the 1920s discovered that radiation causes genetic mutations. This discovery happened around the same time that other geneticists were starting to link cancer with genetic mutations. Had both of these parties communicated they would have gotten a 50-year head start in cancer research. So why didn't scientists make this realization sooner? It turns out that Muller was a real jerk.
CreditsHost: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer -
On this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about a murder mystery that rocked Boston in 1849. Harvard University alum and physician George Parkman had gone missing. The last place he was seen alive was at the Harvard medical building, which had plenty of bodies, but police couldn't find Parkman’s there. That is until a janitor intervened and implicated a medical school professor. The ensuing murder trial was a media circus equivalent to the O. J. Simpson trial. And just like that trial, it also familiarized the layperson with forensic and anatomical sciences.
CreditsHost: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan PfefferPhoto: Wellcome Collection
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