How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals. 

Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals.

We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today.

All Normals episodes

Appearing in this episode:

Additional resources:

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices