The normals | Episode 3
Science Magazine Podcast
Science Podcast
4.3 • 842 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Last episode, we talked about what happened to the Normals program after the days of the |
| 0:08.5 | happy normals that came over from the Anabaptist churches. |
| 0:11.7 | The program got bigger, as the government funding continued to expand, started recruiting |
| 0:16.7 | more broadly, stepping away from specific religious groups towards colleges, universities, |
| 0:22.3 | and unions. |
| 0:23.6 | But as budgets started to shrink nationwide, the Normals program shrank along with it and |
| 0:28.5 | started to turn to more hourly patients. |
| 0:31.1 | Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of research fellows came through the system and conducted |
| 0:36.6 | all these different experiments, |
| 0:38.2 | making it really difficult to judge the value of the normals program in the 60s and 70s. |
| 0:43.4 | Laura Stark's book, The Normals, wraps up in the 1980s, right after the death of Bernadette |
| 0:48.9 | Gilchrist. |
| 0:50.4 | But the Normals Project at NIH continues. |
| 0:58.6 | It's revealing that the program changed its name then. |
| 1:00.3 | Oh, when did they change their name? |
| 1:03.1 | They changed their name right after Bernadette died, and it shifted more towards a public communication kind of vibe. |
| 1:11.1 | It has now the phrase public liaison in the name, |
| 1:14.5 | public liaison and patient recruitment program. |
| 1:17.5 | So not the normals or the normal controls anymore. |
| 1:20.2 | No more normalcy. |
| 1:21.6 | So today, if we were to describe the normals program, |
| 1:24.8 | it would kind of be like, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
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.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

