Distillations | Science History Institute

Our conference center is open for event rentals, our library is open by appointment only, and our museum remains closed to the public. Learn more >>

Science and Disability: Part 2

What is intelligence?

Bonus Episode: Interview with Kim Nielsen

A short history of disability in the United States.

Science and Disability: Part 1

Is seeing believing?

Stress Baking and the Comfort of Connection

Pandemic Perspectives

Baking homemade bread anchors us to millennia-long traditions.

Collecting Monstrosity

The surprising origins of developmental embryology.

The Sun Queen and the Skeptic: Building the World’s First Solar Houses

In the mid-20th century, colleagues-turned-rivals Maria Telkes and Hoyt Hottel engineered new ways of heating American homes.

Recommended

Exhuming the Flu

Pandemic Perspectives

Remembering the Spanish flu 100 years later.

San Francisco’s Plague Years

Pandemic Perspectives

As officials spread disinformation, a deadly epidemic edged its way into the United States.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Book Club: The Story of the Polio Vaccine

The Science History Institute book club reads David M. Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story.

Instrumental to Survival

At the turn of the 20th century diphtheria was a feared childhood illness, until a new treatment method came to the rescue.

Pandemic Perspectives

Smallpox, polio, and the political and scientific haggling behind two medical triumphs.

Pandemic Perspectives

How do virologists stop something that is ubiquitous and deadly?