Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)
speaker
109 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I do have to play this bonkers ad that my editor remembers hearing a lot when she grew up in the Midwest.
How much were you thinking about your own experience as you were writing these studies? All the time.
She was actually never that worried that taking a bit of meth a handful of times would stop her from finishing her thesis, largely because of that research that shows the brain can recover.
I tried that for one report that I did. This was not for Science Fest. It was for something else. And I just was so embarrassed and thought I sounded like such a fool. I never did it again.
So when it comes to science versus math.
And now that I know the evidence, it's definitely a naughty drug.
But you might catch me humming a little ditty about it.
That's science passes.
Okay, there's so much controversy right now around water fluoridation. I know. Which we'll get to. Okay. But first, I have to tell you the, like, wild and surprising story about why we started putting fluoride in the water in the first place. Because it is kind of weird that we do this, right? I guess so. How did it all start? Well, it's actually a detective story. It starts in 1901.
So picture a young dentist. Frederick McKay moves to Colorado Springs. And he starts seeing patients and immediately notices that there's something weird going on. A lot of his patients have dark brown stains on their teeth. He writes that the color was sometimes dirty or an almost ebony black.
Do you want to see pictures?
All right.
Yeah. So McKay starts to obsess over this, searching for an explanation. He writes to a friend at one point who responded, quote, I have never seen a stain that penetrated the enamel so deeply before. And this guy guessed that maybe the stains came from dead organisms. Hmm. So, like, they had no idea at first, like, what was going on here.
I mean, it looks, you could see, it looks like mold on their teeth.
Yeah. It must have been pretty startling, right? Yes. So, McKay starts traveling around the U.S. looking at other places which also have this staining. And he starts suspecting that it's coming from, quote, something in the drinking water. But he doesn't really know for sure.
But then he goes to this town in Arkansas where people only started getting stains in their teeth if they were born after 1909. And apparently that's when the town switched water supplies. So now they just have to see what is in the new water supply. Yes, what's different. And so someone does this analysis and McKay finally gets an answer after three decades of searching. It was the fluoride.
Yeah. Yeah, it had really high fluoride in that water. They weren't adding it, but these places just happened to naturally have a lot of fluoride seeping into the water from the Earth's crust.
And now we know that when you drink water with high levels of fluoride, it can mess with the crystal structure of your teeth and that can lead to staining.
But then McKay also noticed something else that was weird about these people with the stained teeth. they basically weren't getting cavities. So like, even though the fluoride was turning teeth brown, it was also like protecting them.
Yeah, and so they figured like, okay, what if we could... like add fluoride to the water in places that don't already have it, like just a little bit so that we can get this like protection from cavities, but not so much that it turns the teeth brown. So this was the beginning. Yeah, this is like the birth story of water fluoridation.
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