Lady Science

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg Producer: Leila McNeill Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide In this episode, the hosts say goodbye and share some of their favorite moments from the podcast. Thank you to everyone who has tuned in at any point during our podcast run.

American suburbia of the 1950s and 60s had one foot in the future and the other in the past. The suburban mindset was a vast and ambitiously idealistic movement that claimed future happiness could be found in uniformity, not to mention a detached home, an accessible mall, and automobile dependent lifestyle.

The public health maxim "breast is best," touted by organizations such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization, has become a popular adage. But debates about the merits of maternal breastfeeding compared to other methods of infant feeding abound—and they have for centuries.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the “anti-vax mom” has loomed large in the public consciousness and the popular press. She is the monster emblematic of our moment: She attends rallies maskless, pulls her children out of public schools to dodge state-mandated vaccinations, and takes to her blog to pen screeds that are at best ill informed and at worst deliberately manipulative.

In 1969, Margaret Fuchs, an unassuming housewife and mom of three living in California, received a letter from the White House. It was a message from Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel-prize winning chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and personal adviser to President Nixon. The most famous chemist in the U.S. at the time, Seaborg was considered the world’s foremost authority in nuclear science.

CW: child abuse, anti-semitism and racism. Whenever a photograph is taken, there is always an objective. The objective can be positive, such as capturing a beautiful landscape, a delicious meal, or a cherished memory. But a photograph can also be used to deceive, manipulate, or humiliate subjects. When photography was invented, it was impossible to predict the way in which it would be used to categorize and destabilize.

In the fall of 1946, Frances “Betty” Snyder discovered she had a problem. Snyder (later Holberton) was one of the original programmers of the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—the state-of-the-art in electronic computing in the U.S. at the time.

In the past year, public health officials have attempted to use various methods—from lotteries, college scholarships, and gift cards—to incentivize vaccination against the COVID-19 virus. Now, some jurisdictions in the U.S. are trying out another method to encourage folks to roll up their sleeves—utilizing social media influencers.

At the end of 2021, Lady Science will be closing. Before anything else can be said about that, we want to thank everyone we’ve worked with over the last seven years, and especially the current staff who will see us through to the end of the project. It’s been an extraordinary privilege to have such dedicated and talented people share our enthusiasm for this project, and we couldn’t have done it without them. This was a difficult decision, but it was one we were very lucky to be able to make.

Perhaps best known for her 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross sparked a conscientious debate about the process of passing away and the care of the terminally ill. Her well-known model on the "Five Stages of Grief" has become fundamental in relieving and comforting patients with a limited life prognosis.