Distillations | Science History Institute

This episode is a co-production with Lost Women of Science.

Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science that quietly shape our everyday world. 

But the way we talk about Agnes's life and work often falls back on familiar tropes about women's domestic roles, assumptions about how science gets done, and what it looked like to do science as a woman in the 19th century. 

 Agnes's story invites us to rethink how we define success for scientists. Is our definition too narrow? And what might we gain if we crack it open a bit wider? 
 

Credits

Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Additional Reporting: Sophia Levin
Art Design: Lily Whear
Fact-Checking: Alexandria Attia
Sound Design: Ana Tuirán
 

Guests

Brigitte Van Tiggelen
Brigitte Van Tiggelen is the Science History Institute's director of international affairs, working from the Institute's office in Paris. Trained as both a physicist and a historian, she is the coeditor of Women in Their Element: Selected Women's Contributions to the Periodic System (2019), a volume that brings together more than two decades of research and publication of the life and work of women in science.

Donald L. Opitz
Donald L. Opitz is a historian of science who teaches in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Department of History at DePaul University. He is writing a book that traces the international movement for the advancement of women in agriculture and horticulture from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

Petra Mishnik
Petra Mischnick was a professor of food chemistry at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. There she founded and ran the Agnes Pockels Student Lab to inspire young children, especially girls, to pursue science.
 

Resource List

Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory and Opitz, Don. "Agnes Pockels - Surface Chemist and 'Hausfrau'," The Changing Image of the Sciences. 2002.

Pockels, Agnes. "On the Relative Contamination of the Water-Surface by Equal Quantities of Different Substances." Nature, 1892. 

Sella, Andrea. "Pockels' Trough." Chemistry World, 2015.

Tiggelen, Brigitte Van. "Fräulein Agnes Pockels: The Shaping of a 'Forschende Hausfrau'," paper presented at the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Bergwik, Staffan; Opitz, Donald L.; Tiggelen, Brigitte Van. Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science. 2016.
 
A full transcript is available on our website.

Alexis Pedrick joins Katie Hafner to bring you an episode from The Lost Women of Science Initiative, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to telling the forgotten or untold stories of remarkable female scientists and their groundbreaking work through history. 

The episode, which originally aired in October 2023, is about Flemmie Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in Home Economics. In the early 1960s, Flemmie decided to see what would happen if you gave poor kids a boost early in life, in the form of a really great preschool. Every day for two years, parents would get free childcare, and their kids would get comprehensive care for body and mind—with plenty of nutritious food, fun activities, and hugs. What kind of difference would that make? And would it matter later on?

Credits

Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Resource List

Flemmie Kittrell audio interviews, Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library Institute

Kittrell, Flemmie, "The Negro Family as a Health Agency," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Health Status and Health, 1949

Baure, Lauren, "Does Head Start Work?," The Brookings Institution, 2019

Horrocks, Allison, Good Will Ambassador with a Cookbook: Flemmie Kittrell and the International Politics of Home Economics, University of Connecticut, 2016

First report on Howard Preschool Experiment: Prelude to School: An Evaluation of an Inner-City Preschool Program, Children's Bureau (DREW), Washington, D.C. Social and Rehabilitation Service, 1968 ‍

Talbot, Margaret, " Did Home Economics Empower Women?," The New Yorker, 2021

Zigler, Edward, and Muenchow, Susan, Head Start: The Inside Story Of America's Most Successful Education Experiment, 1994.

In 2018 news broke that a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had used CRISPR to edit human embryos, and twin girls had been born as a result. The story set off an explosive bioethical controversy. As gene editing expert Kiran Musunuru put it, "He Jiankui's genetic misadventures were the biggest medical story of the century so far." Both scientists and the public had a lot of questions. What was the unmet medical need that justified the gene editing? Was the science ready for prime time? And, if it was, was He Jiankui the right scientist to do it? Seven years later these questions are far from resolved.
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
Baylis, Françoise. Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
CBS News. "Chinese Researcher Claims He Helped Make First Gene-Edited Babies." CBS News, November 26, 2018.
CBS News. "Chinese Scientist Behind Gene-Edited Babies Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison." CBS News, December 30, 2019.
Cobb, Matthew. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age. New York: Basic Books, 2022.
Greely, Henry T. CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.
"He Jiankui presentation and Q&A, International Summit on Human Genome Editing." Youtube Video, November 26, 2018.
Marchione, Marilynn. Associated Press. "Chinese researcher claims first gene-edited babies." AP News, November 26, 2018.
"Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of 'China's Frankenstein.'" MIT Technology Review, May 23, 2025.
Musunuru, Kiran. The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World's First Gene-Edited Babies. BookBaby, 2019.
NBC News. "Chinese Scientist Says He Helped Create First Gene-Edited Babies." NBC News, November 26, 2018.
"World's first successful tailor-made gene therapy saves baby born with rare disorder." CBS Mornings. May 16, 2025.

The fears about genetic engineering were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s. From lab leaks to disease epidemics to the ability to make "Frankenstein creations," many of those fears are still with us today. We talk to author Surekha Davies about her latest book, why she thinks of monsters as category breakers and why blurring boundaries can be so terrifying for us, but maybe doesn't have to be.
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
Davies, Surekha. Humans: A Monstrous History. University of California Press: 2025.

Our producer Rigoberto Hernandez spoke with Robin Marantz, the author of Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. She tells us about the history of IVF, from the first known artificial insemination by donor produced in Philadelphia in the 19th century to the scientific race in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the first so-called "test-tube baby."
Credits
Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Resource List
Henig, Robin Marantz. Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2006.