In this week’s episode, we wade into the bloody (and sometimes gory) side of science.

Part 1: Shawn Musgrave wants to donate blood, but runs headfirst into the FDA’s lifetime ban on gay men as donors.

Part 2: While working with the condor recovery program, Molly Astell opens a freezer to find every researcher’s nightmare.

Shawn Musgrave is a lawyer, journalist, lawyer-who-represents-journalists, and somewhat recent transplant to New York. His work has appeared in The Intercept, POLITICO, The Verge, VICE, and the Boston Globe, among other publications, as well as in the Netflix docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal.

Molly Astell is a wildlife biologist who originally never wanted to be one of those "bird people", yet went on to exclusively work with endangered birds in their career. Fourteen of those years were spent working as part of the California condor recovery program in a variety of different roles, mostly with the wild condors in southern California, but also with the captive breeding birds in Boise, ID. Currently, they are a graduate student at Boise State University doing research with condor data they helped to collect, and is discovering the joys of teaching biology to undergraduates.

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