From Fleming's famous moldy petri dish to worldwide medical revolution, Wade traces penicillin's decade-long journey from laboratory curiosity to lifesaving medication. This episode reveals how World War II necessity, international collaboration, and chance discoveries (including a particularly productive strain found on a grocery store cantaloupe) transformed medicine forever, while exploring how scientific breakthroughs actually happen through persistence, teamwork, and cross-disciplinary problem-solving.

Wade unravels the twisted tale of DNA's discovery, focusing on Rosalind Franklin's crucial yet underrecognized contributions. Through her meticulous X-ray crystallography work, Franklin provided the critical evidence Watson and Crick needed for their famous double helix model, yet her data was shared without her consent and her role minimized for decades. This episode explores scientific ethics, gender bias in research, and how credit is distributed in collaborative discoveries.

Ezra Wade tells the remarkable story of Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician who wrote the world's first computer algorithm a century before computers existed. Born to the infamous poet Lord Byron and raised by a mathematics-obsessed mother, Lovelace's unique "poetical science" perspective allowed her to envision computing possibilities that even Charles Babbage couldn't imagine, including computer-generated music and art.