The Season Finale of "Standard Deviation"

This is Episode 5 of Standard Deviation with Dr. Oliver Bogler, our final installment of the season on the Out of Patients feed. If you’ve been following this bonus series, you already know what it’s about: sharp, deeply human stories from inside the wreckage of American science. This one closes the loop.

Dr. Marissa Russo trained as a cancer biologist. She studied some of the deadliest brain tumors we know how to name. She was supposed to run a lab, publish findings, and get patients one step closer to staying alive. Instead, her career got body-checked by the government mid-flight.

Marissa applied for an F31 diversity grant in 2024. She nailed the science. The feedback came back strong. She was ready to resubmit. Then everything glitched. Her application started disappearing and reappearing in the NIH system like a ghost. The date vanished. The study section got pulled. Her mentor had to explain what no one wanted to say out loud: DEI grants were being deleted in real time.

She rewrote her application in 10 days. She removed the language about being Latina. She deleted the parts about being LGBTQ. She stripped out her identity and submitted a version that could pass in this new sanitized environment.

It got denied. The grant she wasn’t allowed to tell the truth in was marked as unrealistic.

Marissa pivoted. She joined the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. She worked at STAT News. She started writing about the same system that shut her out. She traded the bench for the page.

This episode is about who gets to stay in science. Who gets funded. Who gets erased. And what it means to keep going when the door you were told to knock on disappears while you’re mid-sentence.

Marissa didn’t quit. She adapted. Not because the system worked, but because she wouldn’t let it break her.

This closes Season 1 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler. We hope you’ve found these stories as urgent, necessary, and unflinchingly honest as we have. They brought added and complementary value to Out of Patients, and we’re proud to have made space for them.

Listen to this episode. Then do me a solid—leave a review. Tell Apple or Spotify what you really think. Five stars help us reach more people who need to hear these stories. One review makes a bigger difference than you know.

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Out of Patients drops new episodes every week. We’ve been turning medical trauma into momentum for 17 years. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

EPISODE LINK ➡️ https://www.outofpatients.com/plan-b/