Podcast
WNYC Studios
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THE word “meme” wasn’t created to describe things that spread all over the internet. Rather, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term when he was hunting for an idea-focused counterpart to the concept of a gene.
If animals and plants create copies of genes every time they reproduce, what happens when cultural phenomena replicate themselves over and over? Dawkins invented a word for this by riffing off the Greek word mimema, which means imitated, and blended it with “gene” to create meme.
This etymological lesson comes courtesy of Science Diction, a podcast launched in March by the New York-based WNYC Studios and the team behind its main science podcast .
Hosted by Johanna Mayer, the podcast comes in short sharp bites that rarely stretch beyond 15 minutes, with each unveiling the origin of science words and phrases by telling the stories behind how they came to be.
Another head-turning episode takes on the word “vaccine“, which was coined by British physician Edward Jenner in the 18th century.
The story begins with Jenner testing the idea that physicians could use cowpox to prevent the related, but deadly, disease smallpox. In 1796, he gave cowpox to an 8-year-old boy, then exposed him to a sample of smallpox, itself a violation of “about 1000 ethical rules, but it went down in history as the first official scientifically documented vaccination”, says Mayer.
The boy never contracted smallpox, even after Jenner exposed him to the disease dozens of times.
Jenner wrote up his findings in a book called An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variola Vaccinae. In Latin, variola means pustules, and vacca means something that comes from a cow.
So variola vaccine basically refers to cow pustules or cowpox, according to Mayer.
Engaging and breezy narration, ornamented with light sound design, keeps Science Diction moving at a brisk pace. The words and phrases being examined will be familiar to most listeners and some of the stories will be too. But having them brought together in a podcast is a more than pleasant way to spend a quarter of an hour.
