16 Deborah Blum - The Science of Poisoning

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2014

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a writer, Deborah Blum says she has a "love of evil chemistry." It seems that audiences do too: Her latest book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, was not only a bestseller, but was just turned into a film by PBS.The book tells the story of Charles Norris, New York City's first medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, his toxicologist and forensic chemist. They were a scientific and medical duo who brought real evidence and reliable forensic techniques to the pressing task of apprehending poisoners, who were running rampant at the time because there was no science capable of catching them.On the show this week we talk to Blum about this “golden age for poisoners” and the science that goes along with it.This episode also features an interview with Quartz meteorology writer Eric Holthaus about whether global warming may be producing more extreme cold weather in the mid-latitudes, just like what much of America experienced this week.Subscribe:itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, January 10th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.8	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:07.0	Each week we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:13.7	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
0:18.6	You can find us online at climatedust.org. You can follow us on Twitter
0:22.0	at Inquiring Show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast. So you might have noticed
0:33.4	that for the first time, I don't have my essential co-host, Indre Viscontas, here with me.
0:39.8	As Indra told you on a recent show, she was then about to have a baby on Saturday.
0:45.3	That happened. She had a healthy baby boy, and so, not surprisingly, she's taking some time off.
0:50.3	She'll be back with us in a little while. Congratulations to her. So for this show, I went
0:56.7	ahead and did it just me, and I talked with Deborah Blum. She's a science writer who I've known
1:02.3	for a long time, and whose wonderful best-selling book The Poisoners Handbook, Murder and the
1:07.5	Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age, New York, was just turned into a film by PBS.
1:13.6	The book tells the story of Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, a forensic medicine duo
1:19.1	who came into a situation in New York in the early 1920s where really you could poison people
1:24.8	with impunity and not get caught.
1:31.2	And these two pioneering forensic scientists did something about that. And here's a clip from our interview in which Deb Blum describes and tells us a little bit about her protagonist and what they did.
1:38.8	What they did is they said, this, it does not work.
1:43.4	We cannot let science just sit here and say, we have no tools,
1:50.2	we have no way to catch this, we have no way to protect people, we're going to turn that
1:54.5	around, and that's really what they did. So we had a wide-ranging discussion about the science
2:00.1	of poisoning, both malicious and also
	...

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