Blood & Guts: Stories about hemoglobin and intestines
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s episode, we wade into the bloody (and sometimes gory) side of science.
Part 1: Shawn Musgrave wants to donate blood, but runs headfirst into the FDA’s lifetime ban on gay men as donors.
Part 2: While working with the condor recovery program, Molly Astell opens a freezer to find every researcher’s nightmare.
Shawn Musgrave is a lawyer, journalist, lawyer-who-represents-journalists, and somewhat recent transplant to New York. His work has appeared in The Intercept, POLITICO, The Verge, VICE, and the Boston Globe, among other publications, as well as in the Netflix docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal.
Molly Astell is a wildlife biologist who originally never wanted to be one of those "bird people", yet went on to exclusively work with endangered birds in their career. Fourteen of those years were spent working as part of the California condor recovery program in a variety of different roles, mostly with the wild condors in southern California, but also with the captive breeding birds in Boise, ID. Currently, they are a graduate student at Boise State University doing research with condor data they helped to collect, and is discovering the joys of teaching biology to undergraduates.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | It was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey, everyone. Hey everyone, welcome to The Story Clutter, where true personal stories about science help us to discover how weird, wonderful, and gross it is to exist in this world and be a human. |
| 0:33.3 | I'm your host, Mishigayevsky, and today's stories are bloody brilliant, literally. |
| 0:38.7 | This episode is all about blood and guts. |
| 0:41.2 | These stories are funny, involve bodily fluids, and are totally worth it. |
| 0:45.4 | You're going to love them. |
| 0:46.5 | Let's get into it. |
| 0:47.9 | Our first story is from lawyer and journalist Sean Musgrave. |
| 0:50.7 | You might recognize him from his work in Politico, The Verge, Vice, or the Netflix |
| 0:55.3 | docu-series, How to Fix a Drug Scandal. |
| 0:57.7 | His story is recorded last year at one of our go-to New York spots, QEDAstoria, and Queens, |
| 1:02.0 | New York. |
| 1:02.7 | Here's Sean. |
| 1:26.3 | It's 2006. I'm 16 years old, and I am walking into my very first blood drive in the suburbs of Tucson, Arizona, in a mall near our house. |
| 1:30.1 | I'm going there with my mom. She's a nurse, |
| 1:37.1 | and she's instilled in me and my siblings that at any point, somewhere out there, there is a patient who needs blood. And so giving blood is an easy way to do a good thing, maybe even save a life while sitting in a |
... |
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