Inside the Breakthrough - How Science Comes to Life

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Spreading the News

Science communication has impacted our lives more than we ever thought it would. Getting complicated scientific and medical information out to a large number of people is crucial to our public health. And it is not easy. We will look at how stories can help spread and preserve information. We start with the oldest true story ever told and ask why and how it stood the test of time. Then we will listen to the most talked about radio play of all time: War of the Worlds. The lessons we can lea...

Guinea Pigs

Let’s talk about the use of animals in medical research. It’s not a subject that people are very comfortable discussing, but we are going to do it anyway. We will start with an incredible story of a fire in Bar Harbor Maine that impacted the health of people all over the world for years, even though they never even knew about it. Then we will ask the question ‘what really causes Ulcers, and how did researchers figure that out?’ Dr Wayne Lautt has used animals in his experiments for years....

Follow the Money

The relationship between researchers and funders is complicated. Some people think that researchers should be left to their own direction and that all financial support should be ‘no-strings attached.’ But is that possible? Is it desirable? We look at how the Roman Colosseum was funded, and ask ‘what impact did that have on its design and its use?’ Then we turn our attention to NASA --- is the space agency funded by the military? Should it be? And how has its unique funding arrangement im...

Old Meets New

The Amish community in Pennsylvania is heavily impacted by genetic diseases. You might think that their resistance to modern technology would make it difficult to treat these conditions. But actually their philosophies around family and community make it easier to manage these diseases. John Franklin’s ships were lost to the world for more than a century and a half. They were only discovered by a team of people that combined modern search tools with historical knowledge. We talk with Jenne...

Too Much or Too Little?

We often complain about having too little of something: Too little time, too little money. But today in first world countries a lot of our problems come from having too much of something: Too much sugar, too much technology. We point this lens at a pair of historical stories to better understand if tragedies and hardships of the past were really the result of having ‘too little’ of something, or if we need to use a different perspective. We talk with Dr Jason Fung about his views on fastin...

Unintended Consequences

We’ve all heard the saying about “the best laid plans….” but there is a caveat to that. Not all unexpected consequences are bad. Sometimes something really amazing occurs unexpectedly. This episode tells the story of Henry Molaison, better known as Patient HM, or “the most important brain in the history of neuroscience.” Henry didn’t set out to be a guiding light for the world of neuroanatomy. He just wanted a cure for his epilepsy. But what happened to him and the impact he had on the worl...

Double Blind

Join us for a wild ride through Vienna and Paris. We will hang out with Mozart, Marie Antoinette, and the incredible Dr Mesmer. We will drink cocktails and stay up way too late. All in an effort to answer the question: Is it possible that being blinded could help you see new things? I’m not talking about literal blindness here, I mean when you intentionally deny yourself some key piece of information. If you are hiring someone and are conducting interviews, would you make better decisions ...

Tools for Testing

Sometimes great discoveries have to wait for the creation of the perfect tool. What is the best screw ever invented? If you said the Phillips, you are wrong. The Phillips is the most popular screw type, but not the best. The standard slot screw is also very popular, but it isn’t the best either. The best screw type ever invented is the Robertson, and the story behind why it never became the biggest selling screw in the world is one you have to hear. What is the difference between Latitude ...

The Trouble With Trials

Ten years ago, in a hospital in London England a drug company conducted a clinical trial. That trial went horribly wrong. The lessons learned from that event have informed every pharmaceutical trial since then. We will hear from one of the men who took that experimental drug. We will also look to history -- and uncover the origin of the first ever clinical trial. It was conducted on a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean. The lessons learned from that experiment saved thousands of lives ...

What's in a Name?

Kick back and enjoy a cold Corona beer as we tell stories about the importance of names. From cameras to resumes to hormones, names matter. George Eastman decided to name his company Kodak after playing a game of Anagrams with his mother. But the choice wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberately constructed name with a very clear intent. Similarly the brewers of Corona beer didn’t pull that name from the top of their head, They had a very clear idea of who they were speaking to when they wr...

Introducing Season 2

Dan Riskin invites you to listen to season 2 of Inside the Breakthrough - How Science Comes to Life. This innovative series combines stories of the distant past with modern updates to get a better understanding of how science works. In season two we will explore the connections behind naming a new hormone, ridding a city of snakes, and battling Napoleon on the high seas. Along the way we will learn how a professor at Stanford turned mild mannered young men into cruel vicious prison guards,...

Bonus Episode – How We Got Here

SciMar does more than produce a podcast. They are a real medical research company doing really amazing work in the field of type 2 diabetes. This episode tells the story of how they got here. ‘Here’ being: on the verge of a transformational breakthrough in metabolic health. It starts with a Eureka moment in a lab… travels to a biological science conference in Minnesota… and then spends a quiet week relaxing beside the lake in Jasper, Alberta. How does all that lead to a breakthrough in the w...

Seeing It With Your Own Eyes

We made it! This is the final episode in season one… and it is a huge day for the medical research group SciMar. Some scientific discoveries are exciting because they reveal something that was previously unknown. But a lot of ‘discoveries’ are actually visual confirmation of a proven fact. Roald Amundsen already knew the South Pole was in the middle of Antarctica. He already knew it was covered in ice and would be very, very cold. But he still risked his life to go see it. Oceanographers a...

Going Back to Square One

Starting a story at the beginning makes sense… but what if there is a mistake in that first sentence? Does it invalidate the rest of the story? What if your experiment is based on an assumption that later turns out to be false? And how can you protect your tower of discoveries from tumbling down? We start with an unbelievable story about New York City being buried in horse manure, and discover the solution is in Detroit. Then we witness how British doctors thought they had solved polio, but ...

Why Giving It All Away Doesn’t Always Work

You’ve probably heard that Banting and Best gave away the patent for Insulin for one dollar. But why did they do that? And did it achieve what they wanted? We often associate being successful with being profitable. And for a lot of enterprises that is true. But what if your goal is to win the second world war, and you do, but you go bankrupt in the process… is that a ‘success?’ What if your goal is to save a lot of people’s lives, and the only way to do that is to also make a lot of money? ...

Generations: What Newton taught Einstein

How many astronomers does it take to discover a planet that doesn’t exist? The Answer: Generations. Depending on where you live, (and a thousand other variables) your life expectancy is probably between 75 and 85 years. Even at the high end, that’s not enough to solve all the world’s problems. That’s why most big questions can only be answered by multiple generations. We follow the story of a Roman temple that became an British Castle, and then an English jail. Then we follow the story of ...

When Snake Oil Enters the Courtroom

What do you think of when you hear the term Snake Oil? Do you think of miracle vitamins with outlandish claims? Do you think of sneaky sales people trying to separate you from your money? Or do you think of actual snakes? The truth is, those are all true. Snake Oil is a complicated concept that includes shiffy profiteers, and an audience that is, if not ‘gullible,’ at least ‘susceptible.’ Joseph Sledge spent three decades in prison because of bad forensics, and when you learn how it played ...

Diversity, Leaded Gasoline, and Carjacking

The answers to life’s biggest questions will vary widely based on one simple variable: who you ask. If you do an experiment on men, you might get a different result than when you do it on women. Rich, poor, black, white, young, old… people are diverse and you learn more when you ask your questions of a diverse audience. Joseph Henrich figured out that a lot of experiments were being done on a very homogeneous group of people… he calls those people “WEIRD.” You’ll have to listen to find out w...

Why Unpopular Science is Good Science

When someone tells you “that is a stupid idea,” how do you react? Do you reconsider your position? Do you dig your heels in and get defensive? Do you quit, or work harder? Being unpopular is a regular state of affairs for scientists. The nature of the work requires you to disrupt paradigms and make people uncomfortable. How a scientist reacts to that criticism is crucial to their success. Galileo got told he was wrong by the Pope himself. Seriously, the entire Catholic Church told him his i...

Ross Geller and Marie Curie are Outsiders

The TV show Friends was king of primetime for a decade and while all six characters were ‘friends’ one of them was not like the others: Ross. We look at why he was such a poor fit with this group and what that means for real life scientists. Marie Curie studied at the Sorbonne. She discovered Polonium and Radium. Eventually she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. All that makes her a unique character. We go to Poland to discover what else made her an outsider. Host Dan Riskin confr...

How Bad Timing Killed the Electric Car

There was a time that the battle between Electric, Gasoline, and Steam powered cars was a dead heat. So why did gas win? Was it price? Or power? Speed, noise, marketing, or political influence? Or was it just Bad Timing? Reader’s Digest magazine told us about the invention of the LED 60 years ago. But those tiny lights that make your phone screen so clear didn’t transition immediately into everyday use. They have a long and muddled history. This story brings together Henry Ford, Thomas Edis...

Eureka! Before and After

When we tell science stories they usually have a long complicated build up, and finish with someone yelling Eureka. But is Eureka really the end? What if we look at it as the beginning? Or the middle? In this first episode, we meet Archimedes - a brilliant scientist from ancient Greece that is credited with the first use of the word “Eureka!” And we also travel to England for the story of Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin. Lastly we meet Dr Wayne Lautt and hear about his Eure...

Introducing, Inside the Breakthrough