The Normals | Episode 1

Science Magazine Podcast

Science Podcast

Science, News, News Commentary

4.3 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals. Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals. We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today. All Normals episodes Appearing in this episode: Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University Dale Horst, former Normal patient Shirley Burry Geissinger, former Normal patient Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer Additional resources: The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, an international leader in research, education, and patient care.
0:07.9	The medical and graduate school is part of the Mount Sinai Health System, one of the largest academic medical systems in New York City.
0:15.6	Ranked among the top recipients of NIH funding, researchers at Mount Sinai have made breakthrough discoveries advancing
0:21.9	the health of patients. Here, clinicians and scientists push the boundaries in cardiology,
0:27.5	cancer, immunology, neuroscience, genomics, geriatrics, environmental medicine, and artificial
0:34.0	intelligence. The Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, we find a way.
0:38.3	Doing experiments on people has a dark history. Today, if you're participating in a research
0:47.3	study, you can expect to be informed of your rights and the responsibilities of the researchers.
0:52.3	They must inform you what they're going to do and get your consent.
0:56.0	Researchers themselves have to go through hours of training on ethical protocols.
1:00.9	All of these levels of protection for human subjects were only formalized in the 1970s.
1:06.2	If you go back to World War II, we have human experimentation during the Holocaust and in concentration camps.
1:12.7	And there's also experimentation on prisoners of war in Japan at the same time. The Tuskegee
1:18.3	experiment, these were all studies that put people's bodies at risk and they had no say in what
1:23.8	was happening to them. Researchers who weren't committing human rights violations at the time were usually just
1:29.8	experimenting on themselves or, in some cases, friends and family, students, which was neither
1:35.3	very safe nor very rigorous.
1:38.3	But in the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health set out to do something unprecedented. They wanted to start
1:46.8	studying humans on a grand scale. They had a lot of resources after what Congress saw as clear
1:53.0	contributions to the war effort. They coordinated research between universities, supported breakthroughs
1:58.4	like mass production of penicillin, and they got a big boost in funding.
2:03.1	So in Bethesda, Maryland, there was a small set of researchers who were realizing that they had pretty much everything in place.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science Podcast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Science Podcast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.