Health & Medicine Episodes
Public health, biotech, research, medicine, and more
Aug. 14, 2023
What Can You Do With Just 493 Genes?
How did we get here? That's today's big question, and today my guests are Roy Moger-Reischer , and our first three-time guest, Brandon Ogbunu . Roy Moger-Reischer is a scientist trained in microbiology, evolution and data ana...
July 10, 2023
How To Live A Happy Life
How can we live happier lives? That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Marc Schulz, the co-author with Dr. Robert Waldinger of “The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness” They're t...
May 29, 2023
Best of: How to Protect Yourself from Wildfire Smoke
What's in wildfire smoke and how can you protect yourself from it? Those are today's big questions, and my guest is Dr. Mary Prunicki. Dr. Prunicki is the Director of Air Pollution and Health Research at Stanford University u...
May 17, 2023
Health Care Is A Human Right
Is healthcare a human right? That's today's big question, and it clearly shouldn't be a question, but here we are. My guest to help explain the obvious today is Dr. Sheila Davis, the CEO of Partners in Health . Sheila entered...
April 17, 2023
Best of: Black Moms Matter
Why is it so dangerous to have Black babies in America? April 11-17th is Black Maternal Health Week , and so we are replaying one of our favourite episodes from 2021 with guest Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a n...
April 10, 2023
Finding the Humanity in Artificial Intelligence
If you had all of the data in the world at your hands, what question would you ask first? That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Emma Pierson . Emma is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Techni...
April 3, 2023
Best of: What Really Happens When You Just Give People Money?
What if we just gave people money? That's today's big question and my guests are Caroline Teti and Michael Faye from GiveDirectly . This conversation from 2021, one of my all-time favorites is one of those conversations that ...
Feb. 20, 2023
Clean Air Is An Inside Job
Imagine you’re in a sci-fi movie. The one where everything’s on the line . And while dinosaurs or aliens or a virus takes over down on the ground, you’re the scientist unexpectedly riding in the helicopter with the actual pre...
Dec. 19, 2022
Can Your Poop Predict The Next Pandemic?
We’re taking giving a shit quite literally this week! Our guest is Newsha Ghaeli , the president and co-founder at Biobot Analytics . If you read our newsletter, you’ll have heard me go on and on about Biobot , whose mission ...
Oct. 17, 2022
Automated Synthetic Biology (I'm sure it's fine)
Let's talk robots. But first: There’s a very particular bottleneck where groundbreaking science is more applicable than ever but inaccessible to many. The tools are unaffordable to the schools and groups who could use them to...
Sept. 19, 2022
When You REALLY Need a Clinical Trial
Let’s say you get sick. Diabetes. Cancer. Heart disease. Long COVID. PTSD. MS. Depression. Alzheimer’s Despite the best efforts of your physician, nothing’s working. They’re out of answers, and you’re out of questions. You mi...
July 11, 2022
Vaginas and Friends
We have ignored vaginas for so long. Hear me out. On the one hand, history and popular culture, from god-kings to love songs to movies to fan fiction, are littered with supposedly straight men with a single pursuit: intercour...
June 9, 2022
COVID: The Update
Soup to nuts, I’m more concerned about COVID today than I’ve been at any point in the past year . I don’t think it’ll be a horror show soon, not like it was before, but we haven’t (yet!) put ourselves in a position to get ahe...
June 8, 2022
Why We Can't Focus
We are all being pulled in so many different directions. The clock is ticking and we have a climate and virus and society and economy to fix and we’re distracted, all of the time . Not just by all of these immense, complicate...
May 16, 2022
Black Moms Matter, Redux
A woman’s right to choose is under renewed attack in America and the federal protection it has benefited from for so long, however tenuous, is closer than ever to going away. It's vitally important we understand the underlyin...
May 3, 2022
Internal Activism
If you give a shit, well, you’ve probably had at least a few moments where the enormity of what’s in front of us has challenged your mental health in some way . I can’t imagine there are many folks listening to this show who’...
March 21, 2022
3 Billion Shots, Part Deux
A little while ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Madhukar Pai about vaccine equity. In it, I tried to understand why and how developed countries were spending billions on COVID vaccine boosters, but so relatively little in l...
Feb. 28, 2022
The Cure of a Lifetime
Jafar Tabebordbar was in his early 30’s, living and working as an accountant in Shiraz, Iran, when he became a father. It was 1986, nearly a decade after the 1979 revolution, and Jafar’s muscles were already beginning to whit...
Jan. 31, 2022
3 Billion Shots
It's been 26 months since so many of us took our kids out of schools, downloaded an app called Zoom, and started videoconferencing our work from our kitchens and sweatpants. For many others, especially the marginalized and th...
Dec. 21, 2021
129. Indigenous DNA
In Episode 129 , Quinn tries to better understand data privacy, data stewardship, and what it means for Indigenous cultures in the future of biotech, how we design equity into genetic research, and who gets to make those deci...
Nov. 1, 2021
124. Birth Control 2.0
In Episode 124 , Quinn interviews Dr. Elizabeth Ruzzo , a brilliant human geneticist who left the world of academia to launch adyn , her effort to help women find the best birth control for their unique bodies. Family plannin...
July 19, 2021
118. F*cking Mosquitoes
In Episode 118 , Quinn discusses: the big mosquito problem . Our guest is Dr. Omar Akbari , one of the world’s pre-eminent biotechnology and mosquito researchers. For how afraid people are of sharks, mountain lions, or even j...
June 28, 2021
116: What Really Happens When You Just Give People Money?
In Episode 116 , Quinn wants to know: why is simply giving people money the most effective way to 1) help them make positive changes to their lives and 2) erase global poverty along the way? To help him understand the answer,...
June 22, 2021
Best of the Best: Do We Really Know What’s in that Moisturizer (& Where the Hell Did it Come From?)
In light of new research on toxic ingredients, it looks like America might finally start regulating cosmetic products, so it’s a great moment to re-run one of our most popular episodes with Beautycounter CEO Gregg Renfrew. In...