The Normals (opens in new tab)

Last time on The Normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to recruit many healthy volunteers for basic research. Two peace churches, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, had an excess of healthy human volunteers. The “Normals” recruited from these Anabaptist churches were surprisingly happy, even as they went through sometimes painful procedures. In this follow-up episode, we hear about how the sources of normal human subjects changed in ...