Joe Palca: 175 Riverside Drive
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2016
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A series of incidents propels Joe Palca to a career in sleep research. Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. Since joining NPR in 1992, Dr. Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, “Joe’s Big Idea.” Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca has also worked as a television science producer, a senior correspondent for Science Magazine, and Washington news editor of Nature. Palca has won numerous awards, several of which came with attractive certificates. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientists a... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I 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 | Hi, everyone. Hi everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.4 | This week's story is from Joe Palka. It was recorded in February 2016 at DC9 in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:37.0 | Apologies about the audio quality, but we thought it was a great story, and we wanted to share it with you. |
| 0:48.5 | I'm going to tell you a story about fate, and if there were such a thing as fate, I would be a sleep researcher today. |
| 0:57.0 | And I'm going to give you six examples of fatal events or circumstances that were |
| 1:07.0 | propelling me inexorably to become a sleep researcher, |
| 1:12.2 | and at the end, you'll, I'm sure, agree with me that fate was definitely driving me in that direction. |
| 1:17.8 | So the story begins in New York City. |
| 1:21.0 | I grew up in the Upper West Side in an apartment building at 175 Riverside Drive. |
| 1:28.3 | Now, you know it? |
| 1:32.0 | I don't remember. |
| 1:34.5 | This is going to be on the quiz, |
| 1:36.3 | so I need somebody you to help me the address. |
| 1:40.7 | What is it? |
| 1:43.5 | What is it? What is it? What? |
... |
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