Distillations

This episode of The Disappearing Spoon traces how such a sweet treat has caused so much harm—from slavery to the Nazi death machine.

Can a White House conference muster the political will needed to address the nation’s food insecurity and obesity crises? A summit from 1969 offers clues.

The covert politics behind American efforts to establish scientific freedom around the world.

Rare earth elements make modern devices faster, brighter, and lighter, but it will take the creaky gears of government to make their production cleaner and more equitable.

The transfermium elements—the fleeting, lab-made substances that populate the end of the periodic table—have a history built on pride and acrimony.

In the last years of World War II a group of American scientists and soldiers raced to capture enemy physicists, sabotage Hitler’s nuclear ambitions, and do it all before their Soviet allies were any the wiser.

Science writer Deborah Blum chronicles one chemist’s fight to bring order to a lawless food industry.

The silent movie Where Are My Children? is more than a century old, but its central question—who “deserves” access to reproductive rights—still resonates today.

When crime and politics influenced American baking habits.

In a time of social, political, and environmental uncertainty, how do we imagine the future?

Why the recent findings of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine are enlightening, even if they aren’t surprising.

After the Vietnam War a mysterious yellow substance rained down from the skies of Southeast Asia. Was it a chemical weapon or something stranger?

 One of America’s most bizarre food battles.

Is the mayonnaise substitute Just Mayo the future of food or just another product from the hype machine?

Out of the lab and into the streets.

Physicist Rush Holt Jr. discusses his time in Congress and why scientists should embrace the political realm.

How a Republican president ushered in the EPA.

How the chemical agent made the transition from wartime weapon to domestic police tool.

Protesters from the March for Science in Philadelphia sent a clear message to the Trump adminstration.

Remembering a Holocaust survivor, immigrant, and inventor.

For more than 2,000 years human ingenuity has turned natural and synthetic poisons into weapons of war.

During World War I the effects of poison gas extended far beyond the battlefield to laboratories, factories, and government.

Every few years the warnings appear: the United States will run out of scientists if nothing is done. Is there really a looming shortage of the science educated?

A terrifying weapon emerged in World War I: poison gas. In response, armies scrambled to protect their soldiers against these weapons and to treat those injured.

Following World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower attempted a risky balancing act between war and peace, secrecy and transparency.

Pity butter’s poor relative, margarine, which has shifted from outlaw to savior to villain in the space of 100 years.

From the Institute’s oral history collections, here are tales of three Hungarian scientists who survived the Nazi occupation of their country and escaped Soviet oppression.

What happens when an 1880s cartoonist mixes science and politics to skewer his political enemies?

In the late 19th century, a golden age for political caricature, images of alchemists in the workshop were neither academic nor obscure. 

When Communist East Germany built a wall across Berlin, it created two different cities, two different countries, and for scientists two different careers.

In 1992 the Subcommittee on Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing to discuss the current state of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The title underlined the concerns of the committee’s senior members—“Toxic Substances Control: Still Waiting After All These Years.”

Archives place history at our fingertips, but sometimes that history needs a little interpretation. Take the records of early pharmaceutical company William H. Rorer, which point to a lesson in pharmacy and good government.

The 1944 Morgenthau Plan envisioned postwar Germany as an agrarian state. Fortunately, the Marshall Plan was adopted instead.

At the onset of World War II the United States faced a sudden shortage of rubber, an essential wartime material. One concentrated effort to find a sustainable domestic source occurred in an unlikely place: a Japanese American internment camp in California.

How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?

After Joseph Stalin’s death Nikita Khrushchev responded to the Soviet Union’s floundering economy with a program to improve agricultural and industrial productivity—and people’s lives.

British caricaturist James Gillray targets famed scientist Joseph Priestley after the devastating Priestley Riots.

Gwen Ottinger reviews three books on the relationship between science and public policy.

From lab accident to wonder drug to chemical has-been, saccharin’s history tracks the rise of consumer consciousness, government regulation, and the uncertainties underlying scientific evidence.

While politicians speak of renewable energy, energy policy in the United States has long focused on gasoline. Matthew N. Eisler takes a look at the issues behind any real shift in energy policy.

Community advisory panels link chemical facilities and neighboring communities. How well do they work?

How did National Socialism shape the conduct of management at IG Farben, the German chemical giant?

Sheldon Krimsky reviews Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner’s Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research.

What do the warning labels that appear on some products mean?

Interactions between the pharmaceutical industry, the biomedical sciences, and legislators is a hot topic in Washington.

Courtrooms rely on scientific evidence and its interpretation to help reach a verdict, but just how reliable is that evidence?

During World War II, over 50,000 people lived and worked at the DuPont Hanford Engineering site, the largest of the Manhattan Project sites. They were cut off from the outside world, but that didn’t stop them from trying to maintain a normal existence.

Cosmetics testing has created an issue for consumers: the potential cruelty to lab animals of tests meant to ensure product safety.