Health & Medicine Episodes
Public health, biotech, research, medicine, and more
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 Techn…
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 pr…
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 t…
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 m…
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: intercou…
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 ah…
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, complicat…
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 underlyi…
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 …
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 whi…
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 t…
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 dec…