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PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

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All Episodes

22:17

Sildenafil: The Failed Angina Drug From Sandwich,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1989 a Pfizer team led by Simon Campbell in Sandwich, Kent synthesized compound UK92480, hoping to treat high blood pressure and angina. Trials at Morriston Hospital in Wales showed almost no effect on chest pain, but researchers led by Ian Osterloh noticed men reporting erections. Pfizer repositioned the drug, patented it in 1996 and won FDA approval in 1998, the same year three scientists won the Nobel Prize for discovering nitric oxide signaling. This episode explains how sildenafil blocks the

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23:33

The Liver: Prometheus's Myth, 500 Jobs and Regrowth...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In Greek myth an eagle ate Prometheus's liver every day and it grew back every night. The ancient Greeks got the biology right: the liver is the only internal organ that genuinely regenerates, and it can regrow from as little as 25 percent of its mass. This episode tours the roughly 3.3 pound organ that performs about 500 vital functions, from its surgical dividing line, Cantlie's line, to the fact that 75 percent of its blood arrives from the gut through the hepatic portal vein. Inside, hexagonal

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25:07

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Gut Yeast That Makes Sober...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Imagine blowing a dangerously high number on a breathalyzer without having had a drink in weeks. This episode explains auto-brewery syndrome, also called gut fermentation syndrome, in which yeasts such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same species used by bakers and brewers, along with strains of Candida and some bacteria, colonize the gut and ferment carbohydrates into ethanol. Normally the liver's alcohol dehydrogenase clears the trace alcohol digestion produces. In this condition production

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19:46

The McGurk Effect: Why Seeing Ga and Hearing Ba Makes...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1976 researcher Harry McGurk and his assistant John MacDonald were running an infant study on how babies perceive language when a technician dubbed a video of a face saying one syllable over audio of another. When they played it back, they heard neither sound. Their brains produced a third. This episode explains the McGurk effect: hear ba ba while watching lips form ga ga and you perceive da da, a fusion the brain builds when the eyes and ears disagree. Researchers who have studied it for more

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26:51

Neuroplasticity: London Cabbies' Brains, Phantom...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

For decades the medical establishment treated the adult brain as fixed hardware. This episode traces the evidence that it is not, starting with Italian anatomist Michele Vincenzo Malacarne, who in 1793 trained one animal of a littermate pair for years and found its cerebellum substantially larger. Santiago Ramón y Cajal coined the term neuronal plasticity in the early 1900s over objections from peers such as Walter Spielmeyer. Eleanor Maguire's MRI scans of London taxi drivers, who memorize the city

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20:34

The Eye's Blind Spot: Edme Mariotte Shows Louis XIV...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Each eye has a hole in its vision, and the brain hides it. This episode explains the physiological blind spot, the punctum caecum, which sits where the optic nerve exits through the optic disc, an area with no photoreceptors at all. It lies about 12 to 15 degrees toward the temple and 1.5 degrees below the line of sight, measures about 7.5 by 5.5 degrees, roughly the size of a fist at arm's length, and is joined by angioscotomas, the shadows cast by retinal blood vessels. The visual cortex covers

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24:43

Phosphenes: Newton's Bodkin, the Prisoner's Cinema...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Pressing your palms against closed eyes produces a light show without a single photon entering the eye. These lights are phosphenes, from the Greek for to show light. This episode explains pressure phosphenes, including the shifting grid one scientist compared to a crumpling, fly-spotted fly screen, and how squeezing retinal ganglion cells makes them fire signals the brain can only read as light. It covers Isaac Newton sliding a blunt bodkin behind his own eyeball, 1800s French physicians pressing

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24:18

Déjà Vu Explained: Boirac's 1876 Term, Brain Double...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Déjà vu, French for already seen, strikes roughly two thirds of people at least once. French philosopher Émile Boirac coined the term in 1876 in The Future of the Psychic Sciences. This episode explains who experiences it most, including younger people, frequent travelers, heavy film watchers and people who remember their dreams, and why a 2008 study found no diagnostic link to schizophrenia. It does accompany temporal lobe epilepsy, often as a seizure aura, with links to variants of the LGI1 gene

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21:51

Endorphins: Pig Brain Discovery, POMC and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In the early 1970s, researchers hunting for a painkiller without morphine's addiction risk asked why the brain had receptors that fit a poppy extract so precisely. In 1973 they reasoned the body must make its own matching molecule, and they isolated natural opioid peptides from pig brains, called enkephalins, then similar peptides from calf brains. The word endorphin, joining endogenous and morphine, followed. This episode explains how the pituitary gland makes endorphins by cutting a large

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22:50

Hypothermia Stage by Stage: Paradoxical Undressing...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Freezing to death is rarely the quiet drift into sleep shown in films. This episode follows the body as its core temperature falls below the normal range of 36.5 to 37.5 degrees Celsius. Below 35 degrees, mild hypothermia brings violent shivering, a racing heart and cold-induced diuresis, as blood pulled from the limbs makes the body sense too much fluid in its core. Below 32 degrees shivering stops because cold muscles can no longer burn their fuel, and amnesia and slurred speech set in. The

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22:41

Beriberi and White Rice: Takaki's Navy Voyage and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Beriberi, a name said to mean I cannot, I cannot in Sinhalese, is thiamine deficiency. With a half-life of about 17 days in the body, vitamin B1 must be constantly replaced, and without it cells cannot turn glucose into usable energy. This episode describes dry beriberi, which destroys peripheral nerves; wet beriberi, which leads to high-output heart failure; and infantile beriberi, which can paralyze a baby's vocal cords into a silent cry. It traces the disease from Ge Hong's third century Chinese

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22:38

Insulin's Story: Cone Snail Venom, a Coin Toss in...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The cone snail Conus geographus hunts by releasing a weaponized insulin that sends a fish's blood sugar crashing and leaves it sluggish enough to engulf. This episode follows insulin from that reef to the islets of Langerhans, spotted by Paul Langerhans as a Berlin medical student in 1869. It explains how beta cells release insulin to move glucose into cells through GLUT4 transporters, how glucagon from alpha cells does the reverse, and why insulin, 51 amino acids in an A chain and a B chain, is

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12:39

Walter Reed's Yellow Fever Commission and the Camp...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Walter Reed was born in 1851 in Gloucester, Virginia, the son of a traveling Methodist minister. He earned a medical degree from the University of Virginia before turning 18, still the youngest ever there, and a second in New York by 1870. After passing a 30-hour exam he joined the Army Medical Corps in 1875 and spent 16 years in the West, treating soldiers, Geronimo's Apaches and pioneers, saving Jules Sandoz's shattered foot from amputation, and adopting a Native American daughter named Susie

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21:50

Tuberculosis: Mammoth Cave Cure, Waxy Armor and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Tuberculosis infected an estimated 10.7 million people in 2024 and killed 1.23 million, making it the deadliest single infectious agent on Earth. This episode traces it from skeletons dated to 4000 BC and Egyptian mummies with spinal decay to 18th and 19th century Europe, where consumption caused a quarter of all deaths. With no germ theory to guide him, Dr. John Croghan bought Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and between 1838 and 1845 housed patients in huts underground. Every one died within a year, and

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25:36

Triage From the Edwin Smith Papyrus to Larrey's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Triage comes from the French trier, to sort, a word once used for grading coffee beans and wool. This episode follows how medicine came to sort people instead, starting with the Edwin Smith Papyrus of 17th century BCE Egypt, which divided injuries into those a healer could treat, those to fight with, and those that could not be healed. Under Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire, the sickest soldiers were ordered treated first. Then Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's

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22:13

Thomas Midgley Jr.: Leaded Gas, Freon and the Pulley...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Thomas Midgley Jr., born in 1889 in Pennsylvania to a family of inventors, carried a periodic table everywhere and treated chemistry as a practical toolkit. After joining General Motors in 1916 under Charles Kettering in Dayton, he worked through the elements looking for a cure for engine knock. Tellurium worked but smelled like rotting garlic. In December 1921 he found that tetraethyl lead stopped the knocking. This episode explains why GM chose a patentable lead additive over ethanol, branded it

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22:39

Synesthesia: Red Letter A, Derek Tastes of Earwax and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Synesthesia, from the Greek for joined sensation, is an involuntary condition in which stimulating one sense or cognitive pathway triggers an experience in another. This episode covers some of the more than 80 documented types, from grapheme-color synesthesia, in which the letter A is overwhelmingly seen as red, to lexical-gustatory synesthesia, in which pub owner James Wannerton tastes earwax whenever he hears the name Derek. It explains the split between projectors, who see colors and shapes out

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23:41

Split-Brain Patients: The Chicken and Snow Shovel...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The corpus callosum is a bundle of hundreds of millions of myelinated nerve fibers linking the brain's two hemispheres. Surgeons first cut it partially in the 1930s, when Walter Dandy sought a path to deep pineal tumors, and later as a last resort for violent grand mal seizures that spread from one hemisphere to the other. This episode explains why split-brain patients seem normal in daily life and how, in the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga exposed the divided mind by flashing images to

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22:53

Spaceflight's Toll on the Body: Boiling Saliva, Bone...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1966 NASA engineer Jim LeBlanc was testing a prototype spacesuit in a vacuum chamber when his pressurization hose came loose. Within 10 seconds his suit pressure fell to near zero, and he stayed conscious for 14 seconds, long enough to feel the saliva on his tongue begin to boil. A colleague got oxygen to him within about 25 seconds, and he walked away with an earache. This episode works through what leaving Earth does to a body built for one g, a thick atmosphere and a magnetic shield: launch

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20:47

René Laennec's Rolled Paper Tube: How Awkwardness...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1816 at a Paris hospital, physician René Laennec was called to examine a young woman with the signs of heart disease. Tapping her chest told him little through the extra tissue, and pressing his ear to her bare chest, the accepted method then called immediate auscultation, broke the social propriety of the day. Remembering that a pin scratched at one end of a solid piece of wood can be heard clearly at the other end, a game he had seen children playing in the Paris streets, he rolled a quire of

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13,829 results

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