pplpod

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After walking on the moon in 1969, the Apollo 11 crew spent 21 days sealed in a modified Airstream trailer in case they had carried back a lunar microbe. This episode traces quarantine from that trailer back through history, starting with the difference between isolating the sick and restricting people who might have been exposed. It covers seven day isolation rules in Leviticus, Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine in 1025, Ragusa's 30 day rule for arriving ships in 1377, and Venice's 1448 extension to 40 days, the quarantena, which happened to cover the plague's roughly 37 day course.

The story moves to the village of Eyam, which sealed itself off in 1665 and lost at least 260 people, and to 1918, when American Samoa's blockade kept flu deaths at zero while neighboring Western Samoa lost over 20 percent of its adults. It explains maritime yellow flags, the 1852 sanitary conventions, Mary Mallon's 26 years in isolation, the 1984 Siracusa Principles, and nurse Kaci Hickox's 2014 challenge to an Ebola quarantine. A Lancet review documents the psychological toll.

• The cordon sanitaire and why it works as a geographic quarantine
• Governor John Martin Poyer's total blockade and the political will it required
• Why a single yellow Quebec flag now means a ship is healthy
• Mary Mallon, linked to at least 53 typhoid cases and three deaths, who never showed symptoms
• Proportionality and the least restrictive means test in modern quarantine law

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In February 2025 doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia used gene editing to treat a child with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a disorder that lets ammonia build up in the blood. This episode traces the tool back to 1987, when Yoshizumi Ishino's team in Japan found strange repeating palindromic DNA in E. coli. In 1993 Dick van Soolingen used the repeats to tell tuberculosis strains apart, and Francisco Mojica found them in salt loving archaea and 20 species of microbes. In 2001 Mojica and Ruud Jansen named them CRISPR.

In 2005 three groups found that the spacers between the repeats matched viral DNA, suggesting bacteria had an adaptive immune system, and all three papers were first rejected. Rodolphe Barrangou proved it with yogurt bacteria. The episode explains how Cas1 and Cas2 file new spacers at the front of the array and how the PAM sequence keeps the system from cutting itself. In 2012 Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna fused two RNAs into a single guide, work that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• Why a palindromic DNA sequence folds into a hairpin
• Cas9's blunt cut versus the staggered sticky ends of Cas12a
• How Cas13's collateral cutting powers the SHERLOCK diagnostic test
• The 2015 embryo experiments using tripronuclear zygotes that could never develop
• A 2026 shift to Cas12a enzymes guided by sturdier DNA instead of fragile RNA

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Ask a witness how fast two cars were going when they smashed rather than hit, and their estimate climbs by nearly 10 miles per hour. That 1974 finding came from Elizabeth Loftus, born Elizabeth Fishman in California in 1944, who lost her mother to drowning at 14, studied math and psychology at UCLA and Stanford, and grew bored calibrating word problems before car crash research at the University of Washington. This episode explains the misinformation effect and reconsolidation, the idea that each recall puts a memory back on a workbench where it can be edited.

Her testimony in the 1990 George Franklin trial exposed a gap in her data, so she set out to plant entire false memories. With her student Jim Coan's technique, about 25 percent of subjects came to remember being lost in a mall, and later studies had people recalling Pluto licking their ear at Disneyland. Her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory brought death threats and armed guards, and trauma researchers pushed back. The Jane Doe case led the University of Washington to investigate her for 21 months before she moved to UC Irvine.

• Source monitoring errors and how details from a fake news report blended into memories
• Kenneth Pope's criticism and the dissociative amnesia argument from trauma specialists
• Testimony in more than 300 cases, including O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy, and Harvey Weinstein
• Her theory about financial incentives at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the studies she could not cite
• False memories of getting sick from strawberry ice cream that changed what people ate

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Some patients who take dopamine drugs to steady their movements suddenly develop compulsive gambling, a condition called dopamine dysregulation syndrome. This episode uses that puzzle to take apart the idea that dopamine is the pleasure chemical. It explains motivational salience, which marks an outcome as worth chasing or avoiding, how the D1 and D2 receptor families can excite or inhibit a neuron, and how the brain builds its own dopamine from phenylalanine, tyrosine, and L-DOPA because dopamine itself cannot cross the blood brain barrier. About 400,000 neurons out of roughly 86 billion make it.

From there the episode follows the pathway from the substantia nigra that sets the action threshold for movement and fails in Parkinson's disease, and the reward circuit from the ventral tegmental area. It covers how cocaine blocks dopamine transporters, why stimulants help ADHD by raising activity in the prefrontal cortex, and why antipsychotics block D2 receptors. Outside the brain, dopamine widens blood vessels, increases sodium excretion in the kidneys, and is given by IV for shock. It was first synthesized in London in 1910, and Arvid Carlsson's 1958 work earned a Nobel Prize in 2000.

• Why L-DOPA can unlock movement and also overstimulate reward pathways
• How some amphetamines reverse transporters and dump stored dopamine
• Kathleen Montagu's 1957 identification of dopamine in the brain
• Dopamine's effects on insulin, gut motility, and immune cells
• The dopamine derived melanin behind butterfly wing patterns and caterpillar stripes

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In the late 1990s expectant mothers pressed headphones playing Mozart to their bellies, convinced it would raise a genius. This episode traces the idea back to a 1993 study in Nature by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky, which tested 36 college students on a paper folding and cutting task after hearing Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, relaxation instructions, or silence. The boost in spatial temporal reasoning faded within about 10 to 15 minutes, and the authors said they were not claiming Mozart raised general intelligence.

A 1994 New York Times column said Mozart makes you smarter, and Don Campbell's 1997 book The Mozart Effect, which borrowed a term from Alfred Tomatis, pushed claims about IQ and healing. In 1998 Georgia governor Zell Miller sought $105,000 a year for classical recordings for every newborn and played Beethoven to lawmakers. Replications failed, a 2010 meta-analysis of 39 studies found little evidence, and researchers tied the short boost to enjoyment arousal. A 2023 review found the epilepsy research flawed.

• The neural resonance theory and why it appealed to marketers
• A state representative who asked whether Charlie Daniels would do instead
• The same short boost from upbeat pop music and a Stephen King story
• Claims about a Yanni track and seizures, and rats that heard Mozart before birth
• A German sewage plant that played Mozart to its microbes, and Rauscher's advice to fund active music lessons

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In the early 1970s Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan told a psychiatric hospital he heard a voice saying thud. Inspired by a lecture from R.D. Laing, he described eight healthy pseudopatients who claimed to hear words like empty, hollow, and thud at 12 hospitals in five states. All were admitted, seven with schizophrenia, then held for 7 to 52 days despite acting normally. Staff logged note taking as abnormal writing behavior, doctors spent an average of 6.8 minutes a day with patients, and discharge files read schizophrenia in remission. His 1973 paper in Science, On Being Sane in Insane Places, fueled deinstitutionalization.

Psychiatrists Robert Spitzer and Seymour Kety fought back, with Kety comparing it to swallowing blood and faking an ulcer. Decades later, journalist Susannah Cahalan's 2019 book The Great Pretender found fabricated quotes and could identify only two of the eight pseudopatients. Rosenhan's own intake records showed he reported insomnia, suicidal thoughts, and sensitivity to radio signals, not just one word. In 2023 Andrew Scull called the study a successful scientific fraud, and a 2024 study found only a small first impression bias among therapists.

• Why 35 of 118 real patients suspected the pseudopatients were faking while staff did not
• Hidden pills flushed down toilets and the conditions inside 1970s wards
• The challenge from a teaching hospital that flagged 41 of 193 patients as impostors when Rosenhan had sent none
• Labeling theory and how a diagnosis reframed ordinary behavior
• A graduate student pseudopatient whose memories contradicted the published account

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Charles Darwin called the human appendix a shrunken, useless leftover, and medicine largely agreed for over a century. This episode maps the organ, a worm shaped tube about nine millimeters long anchored near McBurney's point, and explains why its position varies: it sits behind the cecum in about 67 percent of people in Ghana, appears on the left side in situs inversus, and is missing entirely in roughly one in 100,000 abdominal surgeries. It also explains how appendicitis develops, why the pain starts near the belly button before moving to the lower right, and what rebound tenderness signals.

The turn came around 2007, when William Parker and Randy Bollinger at Duke proposed the appendix as a safe house for gut bacteria that can repopulate the intestines after illness or antibiotics. A 2012 study found people without an appendix were twice as likely to have C. diff return. Surgeons also reuse a healthy appendix in the Mitrofanoff procedure to drain the bladder through the belly button. A 2013 study found the appendix evolved independently 32 to 38 times across mammals and was rarely lost.

• How gut associated lymphoid tissue in the appendix helps train the immune system
• Why a blocked appendix swells, cuts off its own blood supply, and can rupture into peritonitis
• Antibiotics as an option in some uncomplicated cases instead of surgery
• Darwin's herbivore theory based on the huge cecum of the koala
• Studies from 2021 and 2023 linking the appendix to longevity and milder diarrhea in primates

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In July 1893 James Cornish arrived at Chicago's Provident Hospital with a knife wound over his heart, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams opened his chest with no antibiotics, no blood transfusions, and no breathing machine. This episode traces how Williams got there: born in 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, he lost his father to tuberculosis at nine, ran away from a shoemaker's apprenticeship in Baltimore, and ran a barbershop in Janesville, Wisconsin, before apprenticing with physician Henry Palmer. With backing from Chicago activist Mary Jane Richardson Jones, he earned his medical degree from Chicago Medical College in 1883.

Shut out of hospital privileges, Williams founded Provident in 1891 as a non-segregated hospital with a nurse training school. He repaired the tear in Cornish's pericardium, and Cornish walked out about 50 days later. Williams then ran Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, co-founded the National Medical Association in 1895, and in 1913 became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons. He died in 1931 in Idlewild, Michigan, in what some accounts call relative obscurity.

• Why opening the chest without positive pressure ventilation collapsed the lungs
• How Williams helped Emma Reynolds become the first Black woman to earn an M.D. from Northwestern in 1895
• Where his operation fits beside Henry Dalton's 1891 pericardial repair and later surgeries on the heart muscle
• His marriage to Alice Johnson, daughter of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel
• Why the architect of so many institutions faded from public memory

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Christiaan Barnard told dying grocer Louis Washkansky he had an 80 percent chance of surviving a procedure that had never succeeded in a human. This episode follows the South African surgeon from Beaufort West, where a brother died at age three of a heart defect, to his early work in Cape Town proving that intestinal atresia in infants was a blood supply problem. A detour across a hallway at the University of Minnesota put him in Walt Lillehei's open heart surgery lab, and he returned home in 1958 to join a race against Norman Shumway and Adrian Kantrowitz, whose animal results far outpaced his own.

On December 3, 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall, a young woman fatally injured by a car, using a technique he modified to protect the heart's septum. Washkansky lived 18 days before pneumonia killed him. About 100 transplants followed worldwide in 1968, and most centers then abandoned the procedure. Barnard kept going, introducing the heterotopic piggyback transplant in 1974. The episode also covers his 1978 remarks opposing one person, one vote, his Glycel skin cream, a 2016 assault allegation, and his death from asthma in 2001.

• Why none of Barnard's 48 test dogs lived past 10 days while Shumway's survived for over a year
• Hamilton Naki, the lab technician Barnard called a better craftsman, and the myth about the first operation
• The potassium injection used to stop the donor's heart before brain death was a legal concept
• Philip Blaiberg's 19 months with a transplanted heart and the controversy over donor Clive Haupt
• How a second heart wired in parallel let one later patient live more than 23 years

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In 1951 Palle Hardrup shot two people during a bank robbery in Copenhagen, then claimed his former cellmate Bjorn Schouw Nielsen had hypnotized him into doing it. The Danish court treated the man who planted the suggestion as the true murderer. This episode uses that case to ask what hypnosis really is, starting with James Braid, who popularized the word around 1841 to pull the practice away from Franz Mesmer's animal magnetism, and his eye fixation technique using a silver lancet case. It covers the ideomotor response, everyday trances like highway hypnosis, and the bell curve of hypnotic susceptibility.

The episode then lays out the state versus non-state debate. Ernest Hilgard's ice water experiments suggested a hidden observer that felt pain the hypnotized mind denied, and brain imaging points to changes in the anterior cingulate. Theodore Sarbin's camp argued that social role taking and compliance explain stage hypnosis. A 1966 CIA document from the MKUltra era concluded there was no evidence a hostile person could be hypnotized against their will, and the episode explains how prolonged manipulation inside a prison cell, not a magic command, fits the Copenhagen case.

• The lemon exercise and how a vivid thought can trigger a physical response
• Deirdre Barrett's two types of highly hypnotizable people: fantasizers and dissociators
• Hilgard's finding that about 70 percent of subjects raised a finger to signal pain they said they did not feel
• Why hypnosis is no longer trusted to recover memories, and the risk of source monitoring errors
• Clinical uses alongside cognitive behavioral therapy for pain, phobias, anxiety, and sleep