Karl Schmidt was a world-renowned herpetologist, and on September 25, 1957, he made a mistake. While helping a colleague examine a snake to confirm its breed, he shifted his grip wrong and got bitten. Only this wasn’t a serpent of the harmless garden variety; it was a boomslang, one of the deadliest snakes on the planet. His ghastly, first-hand account of the symptoms has helped scientists learn something important about antivenom.

Why Keep a Diary of a Toxic Snakebite?

When you bite into a traditionally made taco, quesadilla, or anything else made with a corn tortilla,  your taste buds get to experience the results of an ancient chemical process. Dive into the world of Nixtamalization, an ancient alkaline process that helped Mesoamerican civilizations to thrive. It’s a technique that hasn’t changed since 1500 BCE and involves cooking corn kernels with calcium hydroxide like lime or wood ash, which makes the dough softer, tastier, and more nutritious. 

Special thanks to Benjamin Miller, Christina Martinez, Tom Culton, The Free Library of Philadelphia's Culinary Literacy Center, and Joel Tannenbaum's food history class at Community College of Philadelphia.

Episode 210: The Ancient Chemistry Inside Your Taco

Our current devastating opioid crisis is unprecedented in its reach and deadliness, but it’s not the first such epidemic the United States has experienced or tried to treat. In fact, it’s the third. 

Treating America’s Opioid Addiction is a three-part series that investigates how we’ve understood and treated opioid addiction over more than a century. Through the years we’ve categorized opioid addiction as some combination of a moral failure, a mental illness, a biological disease, or a crime. And though we’ve desperately wanted the problem to be something science alone can solve, the more we look, the more complicated we learn it is. 

Part 1  focuses on a government-run prison-hospital, the Narcotic Farm, just for people addicted to opioids. When it opened in 1935, it promised to find a cure for drug addiction. 

Credits
Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Reporter: Mariel Carr with additional reporting by Meir Rinde
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: James Morrison 

Music
Our theme music was composed by Zach Young. 
Additional music courtesy of the Audio Network. 

Research Notes
Interviews:

Claire Clark, author of The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States. 

Nancy Campbell, historian and the head of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

John Stallone, former Narcotic Farm patient.

Sources: 

Claire Clark, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States. 

The Habit, Opioid Addiction in America, Backstory.  

Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction, Smithsonian Magazine. 

Films: 

The Distant Drummer: Flower of Darkness 
The Distant Drummer: Bridge From No Place
The Narcotic Farm

Treating America’s Opioid Addiction: Part 1: The Narcotic Farm and the Promise of Salvation

Distillations podcast explores the human stories behind science and technology, tracing a path through history in order to better understand the present.

Why Keep a Diary of a Toxic Snakebite?

Science History Institute

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