The Disappearing Spoon, a podcast collaboration between the Science History Institute and New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean, returns for its second season on October 5, 2021.
To celebrate, our producer, Rigoberto Hernandez, sat down with Kean to talk about his new book The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science. This interview is a great companion piece for The Disappearing Spoon series since some of the stories in the book relate directly to some of the stories in the upcoming season.
In this interview Kean talks about some of the case studies in his book, including how Thomas Edison shifted his ethics on the death penalty because of a grudge, how a part-time chemist from Philadelphia became an unlikely spy, and how an American doctor purposefully infected people in Guatemala with venereal diseases—all in the name of science.
Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
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Acts of God, Acts of Men: When We Turn Nature into a Weapon
Old Brains, New Brains: The Human Mind, Past and Present
Fads and Faith: Belief vs. Fact in the Struggle for Health
Innovation and Obsolescence: The Life, Death, and Occasional Rebirth of Technologies
Trash Talk: The Persistence of Waste
Life with HIV: Success without a Cure?
Babies on Demand: Reproduction in a Technological Age
Fogs of War: The Many Lives of Chemical Weapons
Wake up and Smell the Story: Sniffing out Health and Sickness
The Teeth Beneath Your Feet: Oddities in Urban Archaeology
Intoxication and Civilization: Beer's Ancient Past
Alchemy's Rainbow: Pigment Science and the Art of Conservation
Meet Joe Palca: A Radio Story About Making Radio Stories
Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels
Why the Chicken Became a Nugget and Other Tales of Processed Food
Digging Up the Bodies: Debunking CSI and Other Forensics Myths
Zombies! How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zombie Apocalypse
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