Last time on the normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health had lots of money

and wanted to recruit healthy volunteers for their research.

The institution's goal was to study normal human physiology, test drugs

and treatments on healthy people, instead of sick people. Two peace churches, Mennonites

and the Church of the Brethren, had an excess of healthy human volunteers. These were conscientious

objectors looking for alternative service instead of being drafted to serve in the war.

These were the normals.

And the normal surprisingly flourished at NIH, supporting each other while they underwent sometimes painful and dangerous procedures.

On off-study days, they had picnics and bopped around the D.C. area.

In this episode, we look at how a program that started with religious

objectors in the 1950s expanded to include more and more people from all over the country.

One of the big concerns that started to arise in the late 1950s was just this worry that there was something fishy with the data.

Laura Stark is a science historian and author of the book The Normals, a people's history of modern America in five human experiments.

She says the NIH researchers were noticing that this big program that they'd set up in the 50s with all these happy, healthy normals, their numbers were all over the map, especially when it came to psychological research.

They were kind of at a loss for how they could actually come up with some sort of scientifically interesting results given the data they were getting back.

So there was a ton of variety.

I really thought homogeneity was going to be the problem.

I know. I know, right? Yeah. No. It was not.

And the NIH scientists were pretty convinced that it was the subjects who were the problem.

Not their study designs, not their approach

to studying schizophrenia, not the use of LSD in all of these people.

An I.H did a survey on the normality of normals that they had on hand in the late 1950s.

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