SEASON ONE · EPISODE 01 OUT NOW

The medicines that changed us—and the stories behind them.

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01INSULIN
02rDNA
03SILDENAFIL
THE GOOD PHARMA IDEA

Pharma and biotech have an outsized impact—and receive undersized attention.

Good Pharma is a podcast, created by Deeya Kotecha, exploring the business, science, and human stories behind medicine.

Deeya trained in medicine at Cambridge and worked as a doctor before moving into public markets and venture capital. She writes about biotechnology, the history of drugs, and the business of medicine. More about Deeya →

Behind the medicines are daring founders, accidental discoveries, difficult tradeoffs, and decades-long bets. Good Pharma follows those stories to understand how treatments are discovered, developed, and brought to the people who need them.

“The history of medicine is a history of people deciding what progress should mean.”

GOOD PHARMA · EDITORIAL NOTE
THE SHELF

Explore every episode

THE METHOD
01

Start with the record

We spend hundreds of hours reading books, papers, primary sources, and archives—then speaking with the people who were there.

02

Follow the incentives

The business story matters because incentives determine which ideas get funded, which medicines get developed, how they reach patients, and who can afford them.

03

Keep the human scale

Science becomes real in people’s lives. We keep patients, clinicians, researchers, and families at the center of every story.

NOTES FROM THE RESEARCH DESK

Never miss a story.

THE STORY

How a potent toxin became both therapy and cultural shorthand.

OVERVIEW

Botox is an exercise in controlled contradiction: a toxin used therapeutically, a medical product that became a beauty verb, and a brand whose cultural identity obscures the range of conditions it treats.

The story follows the clinicians, patients, and company builders who kept finding new uses for a surprisingly adaptable mechanism.

1989First approval
2002Cosmetic use
06Season finale

The finished episode will pair narrative reporting with primary-source research, archival material, and conversations with people close to the story.

This space is reserved for sources, reading notes, timelines, and corrections published alongside the episode.

The edited transcript will appear here when the episode is released.

NEXT ON THE SHELF

Continue the story.

GOOD PHARMA EPISODE 01 ELILILLY STORIES BEHIND MEDICINE Eli Lilly, Part 1 →