Pod Insights Radiolab Gray's Donation About this episode Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that reverberated through a world that they never bothered to think about. Years later, after a couple of awkward phone calls, they go on a quest and manage to meet the people and places for whom Thomas’ short life was an altogether different kind of gift. We originally made this story back in 2015, but we wanted to play it again because we love that it brings a view of science that is redemptive, tender, and unexpected.
Since we first released this episode, Sarah Gray wrote a book called A Life Everlasting (https://zpr.io/GVYisRaqe9d6), it’s a memoir about Thomas that dives into the world of organ donation and medical science. She’s also written a beautiful short story about shame called The Lacemaker Fairy Tale (https://zpr.io/Li5BMtfHmf92). And, right now she’s working on a script for a movie called Raincheck. EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Jad Abumradwith help from - Latif NasserLATERAL CUTS -
The Cathedral (https://radiolab.org/podcast/cathedral)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks)
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. And today, we have a story for you that gets at the satisfaction of knowing. There are lots of moments in life when you are a piece of someone's story, just a little part of it for a moment, and you never get to see how that story shakes out or what impact you actually had. This story starts out like that. A family puts something out into the void, something very meaningful to them, without any expectation that they will ever hear back about it. But then they decide, actually, wait a second. We do want to know what came out of that. And so they go on a quest to find out.
0:44 Speaker 00 It's an episode we originally released in 2015, and we've got a little update for you at the end. I should say, at the top, this episode discusses medical issues with a pregnancy, if that is a sensitive topic for you. Either way, I think it's one of the most profound episodes we've ever put out at this show. Here it is, Gray's donation.
1:06 Speaker 01 Wait, you're listening.
1:13 Speaker 02 You're listening to Radiolab.
1:15 Speaker 01 Radiolab.
1:16 Speaker 02 From?
1:17 Speaker 01 WNYC.
1:25 Speaker 00 Hi, this is Jed. Hi.
1:27 Speaker 03 Hey, it's me, Jed.
1:28 Speaker 04 And I'm Robert.
1:29 Speaker 03 And today's story started when we bumped into an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
1:34 Speaker 00 Were you a little bit weirded out as to why we are calling you?
1:37 Speaker 04 Yes. I don't, you know, I mean, I just don't understand the whole thing.
1:41 Speaker 03 The story really gets going with a phone call to this woman, Elizabeth Mason.
1:45 Speaker 04 I'm a receptionist slash swishboard operator.
1:48 Speaker 03 She works at a research lab in Boston. And one day, she's sitting at her desk, and she gets a call from a woman who says that she has donated some eyes to them, and she wants to know what happened to them.
1:59 Speaker 01 That's not a call you get every day.
2:01 Speaker 04 I just remember it was just very unusual, right? I just, I didn't know what to do with it. I just felt like I gotta find somebody to help this woman.
2:09 Speaker 03 Today, we're gonna tell you the story of the woman on the other end of that phone call. This is her story. You might say their story.
2:15 Speaker 05 So for my title, should I say, um, I'm Sarah Gray. I'm the mom.
2:19 Speaker 06 I'm Ross Gray. I'm Thomas's dad.
2:21 Speaker 03 And how did you guys meet? While we're.
2:23 Speaker 06 We met in a bar in Glasgow.
2:25 Speaker 03 Really?
2:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was on vacation with a girlfriend.
2:27 Speaker 03 And was it, was it, was it, what, what, what happened? Without getting us too many.
2:34 Speaker 06 I don't know. I think we've got different ideas and different recollection of what happened, but.
2:40 Speaker 05 Well, he started dating across the ocean for a year and a half. And then he moved to America.
2:46 Speaker 03 Five days after he arrived, they were married. A few years after that, they were pregnant with twins. And when did you first know that something was up?
2:54 Speaker 05 It was at the 12 week screening. They call it the first trimester screening and they're checking for birth defects. I think the most common one is Down's syndrome. But it was September 30th, 2009.
3:06 Speaker 03 They went in for the screening. The ultrasound tech took a scan of the two fetuses. And shortly after, the doc came into the room.
3:12 Speaker 05 And said that only one of the twins would make it. And one of the twins had anencephaly and would die within a few minutes or hours of being born. And he said he could see that because one of the twins had a round skull and the other one had a bumpy skull. The bumpy skull showed him that the skull wasn't correct, wasn't round enough.
3:33 Speaker 03 The brain and skull weren't forming properly, which is what anencephaly is.
3:37 Speaker 06 Bit of a shock, obviously.
3:40 Speaker 05 I couldn't believe it.
3:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, you're just kinda, it's difficult to process it, I think. You think, no, that can't be right. They've just told us it's identical twins, but one of them's completely different from the other.
3:49 Speaker 05 It sounded fictional to me.
3:51 Speaker 03 Making matters worse.
3:52 Speaker 05 The doctors said that the unhealthy twin was posing a threat to the healthy twin. And if we were to be safe, we would do a selective termination to save the life of the healthy twin.
4:03 Speaker 03 So Sarah says they were suddenly faced with this choice.
4:06 Speaker 05 I actually talked to two priests on the phone about it.
4:09 Speaker 03 Really?
4:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:10 Speaker 03 Her family's Catholic. She was raised Catholic.
4:12 Speaker 05 I don't know. I guess I wanted to see what their take was on this.
4:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:16 Speaker 05 This is probably not the direction we want to go to for this radio story, but.
4:20 Speaker 03 No, I mean, I'm suddenly interested.
4:21 Speaker 05 Basically, what I was saying is, would you come and do a blessing over the selective termination?
4:25 Speaker 03 And what'd they say?
4:26 Speaker 05 One priest said, no, he just said he wouldn't do a blessing over a selective termination. And then the other priest said that because of a Thomas Aquinas rule of, like, I think it was called double account or something, basically, like the rule that if you, if a train is coming and you, like, you want to save the life of someone on the train tracks and you shoot the driver, that's the right thing to do.
4:53 Speaker 03 After looking it up, it's actually called the doctrine of double effect. And she's basically right. Maybe not the part about shooting the driver, but the overall idea is that if you're trying to do good, and on the way to doing good, you must inadvertently do some harm, it's okay in certain circumstances, as long as your intentions are good.
5:14 Speaker 05 Anyway, the priest said, because you're doing this with the intent of saving the healthy twin, that he would be there and he would do a blessing.
5:21 Speaker 03 Fest forward a few weeks.
5:22 Speaker 05 We'd booked a hotel and we'd packed our bags. And the night before was really terrible for both of us, because, I don't know, we had seen him on the screen and we sort of were attached to this little kid.
5:33 Speaker 03 Next day, they go in for the procedure.
5:34 Speaker 05 We go into the room and the doctor puts the sonogram on me and start getting ready. And he said, your placenta has moved since the last time you were here. And the location where it is right now, I don't think we should do this. He said, if I nick it, if I even just nick it a little bit. Like you're gonna bleed uncontrollably and this is not safe to do.
6:01 Speaker 06 He said that he wouldn't do it on his wife either.
6:04 Speaker 03 What was that like to be on the, on the table? You've gone to the
6:07 Speaker 05 Relief.
6:08 Speaker 03 Was it relief, really?
6:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, it was a relief.
6:10 Speaker 05 Oh my God, we like got in the elevator, we just hugged, we were like, ah.
6:14 Speaker 06 And the decision's taken out of your hands, you know, so it's
6:16 Speaker 05 It's not our fault.
6:17 Speaker 03 But then your healthy twin is more at risk, maybe?
6:19 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:20 Speaker 05 It was like a nail biter for the rest of the six months.
6:23 Speaker 03 And according to Ross, those six months were deeply strange.
6:26 Speaker 06 Just buying one of everything when you know there's two babies coming. And we knew we were gonna be having a funeral as well. So, you know, I, I called the, um, what should we call it, the funeral director and told them, you know, we're gonna be having a funeral. And like, well, when was the death? Like, well, I don't know, the guy's not even born yet, you know, but I know.
6:46 Speaker 03 All right. So they get to the day of March
6:49 Speaker 05 Twenty third.
6:49 Speaker 03 Twenty third, okay. Two thousand and ten.
6:51 Speaker 06 Ten thirty AM.
6:52 Speaker 05 Thomas came out first and he's the sick one that had an encephaly. And then a minute later, Callum came out. And I wasn't sure if Thomas was gonna be born alive. I sort of expected him to die within a few minutes, but.
7:04 Speaker 06 He was, he was struggling at first when he came out. They didn't think he was gonna last too long, but then he kinda
7:09 Speaker 05 He rallied.
7:10 Speaker 06 He rallied and he was doing pretty good and then.
7:12 Speaker 03 Oddly, it was then Callum, the healthy twin, who started to have some trouble at the beginning. And so he and Sarah went off to the infant ICU. And so Ross says, in the delivery room.
7:22 Speaker 06 It was just me and Thomas for quite a while, actually. We were just sitting together.
7:27 Speaker 03 What was that like, Ross?
7:29 Speaker 06 It was, it was, you know, he was, he was cute, you know, he's it was like a brand new baby, you know, they, they cry, but he was like grabbing onto my finger and I don't know, doing the kind of things that babies do, you know? There's nothing you can do but just kinda give him a cuddle, you know, and try and, try and stop him crying and cheer him up.
7:48 Speaker 05 I, and I remember coming to the recovery room and Ross had this little bundle in his arms and I said, who's that? And he said, Thomas. And I said, he's alive? And I'm like, oh, let me hold him. And so I held him and yeah, he was cute. Like he breastfed and we could feed him with the bottle.
8:04 Speaker 03 They ended up taking him home?
8:05 Speaker 05 I hadn't really planned on that. Like, we didn't have another car seat.
8:09 Speaker 05 We just didn't think of that. And I remember thinking, like, what if he's gonna beat the odds? Like, do we need to arrange daycare? And like, you know, we hadn't thought of that.
8:18 Speaker 06 It seems all right. You know, he could hang in here for a while, you know?
8:21 Speaker 03 But then soon after, Thomas started having seizures, started having trouble breathing, stopped eating.
8:27 Speaker 05 And at the time, I remember thinking, you know, like, come on, little guy, like, just eat some more. Like, if you eat some more, then you'll be stronger. I was like, just eat, just eat.
8:38 Speaker 03 Well, so how, how, how long did Thomas live in the end?
8:43 Speaker 06 Six days.
8:44 Speaker 03 Six days.
8:44 Speaker 05 He died in Ross's arms and he was surrounded by all of the people that loved him.
8:52 Speaker 05 And then, right then, we called the Washington Regional Transplant Community. They sent a van over to our house and they picked up his body and took him to DC Children's National Medical Center.
9:08 Speaker 03 Okay, so this is where the story really gets going, I guess. So
9:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:11 Speaker 03 How did that idea of donating his organs get, come into your head?
9:15 Speaker 06 Did you see an article in the paper, a newspaper article or something?
9:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, my mom saw an article about a baby who had anencephaly, who donated liver cells. And most major religions support organ donation.
9:27 Speaker 03 Oh, okay. So the van came, picked up Thomas. What happened next?
9:32 Speaker 06 Nothing happened.
9:33 Speaker 03 Nothing happened.
9:34 Speaker 06 For a long, for a long time, you know, you, I think
9:36 Speaker 05 We got some letters.
9:37 Speaker 06 We got a letter in the mail, I guess.
9:38 Speaker 03 It was sort of a form letter. It basically said, thank you for your generous donation. Thomas's corneas have been sent to this place in Boston, where they study a potential cure for blindness. And his livers have been sent to this place in Durham, North Carolina, where they study ways to treat liver disease.
9:55 Speaker 05 It seemed generic to me because I thought, I want to know, like, like, who ordered it? Which researcher got it? And what study are they working on?
10:02 Speaker 03 But, you know, they went on with their lives because they had this new baby Callum to raise. So they put it behind them for the most part. But then Sarah says they got to the one year anniversary.
10:11 Speaker 05 The one year anniversary felt like a big moment to me, like that's when I can, that's when it stops being in the present and it can start being in the past. You know, just explaining it to people, at least I can say it was a year ago. So they don't have to feel stressed out when they talk to me. And it felt like a big deal. Like, I think we were gonna go to the cemetery and put some flowers on his grave. And I wanted to tell my family what were the results of his donation.
10:36 Speaker 03 So she called the donor family services person at the place that picked up Thomas's body, and she basically asked them.
10:42 Speaker 05 Like, is there any more information you can give us about the specific study or the researcher if something was published? And they didn't have any. So I just thought, okay, well, I tried, you know?
10:53 Speaker 03 But she couldn't quite let it go.
10:55 Speaker 05 Me, what do you mean she couldn't quite let it go?
10:57 Speaker 03 You know, curiosity. But I also think she was having, on some level, like a big conversation with the universe. I think they both were, like, this terrible thing happened. How do you explain it to yourself?
11:10 Speaker 06 I don't know.
11:10 Speaker 05 I mean, I think honestly, it sort of shook my faith in God and how the universe works. I thought that karma worked, or if I was basically a good person and I obeyed the rules, good things would happen to me.
11:23 Speaker 03 Whatever the reason, these thoughts about Thomas and where he ended up, they were just there. She had no real opportunity to act on it, so they would just kind of come in and out of her mind. But then around the two year anniversary, so this is now a year later.
11:36 Speaker 05 I had a business trip to Boston, and I was exhibiting at a conference at Heinz Convention Center. And I Googled it, and I saw that Skypens Eye Research Institute was just a few miles away.
11:46 Speaker 03 That's where Thomas's corneas had been sent. Ah, lunch break.
11:51 Speaker 05 That's exactly what I did. I called Skypens, and I said, you know, I donated my son's eyes to this lab a couple of years ago, and I'm here in town. Is there any chance I can come by for a tour for like 10 minutes?
12:05 Speaker 03 That must have been a weird phone call.
12:07 Speaker 05 Yes, I mean, yes.
12:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, that was like a waker upper.
12:10 Speaker 03 That's Elizabeth Mason again.
12:12 Speaker 04 It was just very unusual.
12:13 Speaker 05 I think she was surprised.
12:14 Speaker 04 I didn't know what to do with it.
12:16 Speaker 03 Had you ever gotten a call like that before?
12:18 Speaker 04 Never have gotten a call.
12:19 Speaker 03 And she's been working there for 25 years.
12:21 Speaker 05 She said, hold on, let me connect you to the right person. Don't hang up.
12:24 Speaker 04 A lot of times when I say something, they hang up on me. So I said, please hold the line while I started searching for someone to speak with her.
12:31 Speaker 05 It's gonna take me a while, because I gotta figure out who that is, but don't hang up. And they connected me with someone in donor relations, but it was financial donor relations.
12:40 Speaker 03 Oh, like, like the development department?
12:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:45 Speaker 06 Not, not an organ donor.
12:47 Speaker 05 But they, because they don't have any other donor relations that, you know, like that was the person that gives the tours and deals with the public. So that she got to talk to me and she was.
12:56 Speaker 03 Sarah says the woman was a little bit flustered, but super nice and said, we know, we've never done this before, but yeah, come on down. We'll give you a tour.
13:05 Speaker 05 I was so excited. I took pictures of the outside of the building and I felt, I stood in the lobby and I put one of the brochures in my purse and I just felt like I can't believe I'm here. This is like being in Santa's workshop or something like, I didn't think this was a place you could actually visit.
13:21 Speaker 03 She was taken around and eventually she got taken to the lab where Thomas's corneas went.
13:27 Speaker 05 And there were refrigerators with signs that said, no food. And then she introduced me to this guy called Dr. James Ziski, who's a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Med School. And he was eating his lunch at his desk and she explained who I was. And he said, you know, thank you for the donation. And do you have any questions for me?
13:48 Speaker 03 Of course she did.
13:49 Speaker 05 I wanted to know how valuable the eyes were, like if they get thousands and thousands, or if they get one or two, or like when the delivery came, was everyone excited? Or was it no big deal? Like, was it sitting on a shelf collecting dust? Or were people doing stuff with it?
14:03 Speaker 03 He put down his lunch.
14:04 Speaker 05 And he said, most of the eyes that we get are from people who are older, just because most people are older when they die. And infants' eyes are worth their weight in gold.
14:13 Speaker 03 Wow.
14:14 Speaker 05 I was like, could barely speak. I was like, um, could you tell me why? He said, because they regenerate, they have regenerative properties. And he said, if you don't mind me asking, how long ago did your son die? And I said, about two years ago. And he said, well, we're likely still using your son's cells right now. Because that's how long they last.
14:36 Speaker 03 Wow.
14:37 Speaker 05 I know.
14:38 Speaker 03 So at that point, Sarah was like, okay, since that worked out so well, why not just go, keep going with it and visit all of the places where bits and pieces of Thomas ended up. So, you know, chase down his liver, his retina, his cord blood. How many doctors might that be?
14:55 Speaker 01 Do you have any idea?
14:56 Speaker 03 Well, there's the Boston one, there's two in North Carolina. She would ultimately discover one in Richmond, Virginia, one in Philly.
15:03 Speaker 01 But wait a second, what if, what if it turns out that these people, you know, didn't find anything, you know, research is research, you don't always have a hit.
15:12 Speaker 03 That's true.
15:13 Speaker 01 She's not heading for validation necessarily here, she might find, she might get further lost.
15:19 Speaker 03 Well, yeah.
15:20 Speaker 01 But she's gonna go?
15:21 Speaker 03 She's gonna go, and she's not gonna stop. Cross your fingers, it's coming up.
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15:57 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Jad, I'm Rod.
15:59 Speaker 01 I'm Robert Krulwich.
16:00 Speaker 03 Uh, this is Radiolab.
16:01 Speaker 01 Where are we at this point?
16:02 Speaker 03 Okay, yeah, so Sarah Gray, when we left her, she was standing in a research office in Boston and feeling good.
16:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:07 Speaker 03 She's gotten this rose of a success. And so after that, her and Ross get in a car and head down south.
16:12 Speaker 05 To Durham, North Carolina.
16:13 Speaker 03 To track down Thomas's liver and a bit of his blood.
16:16 Speaker 05 Cord blood.
16:17 Speaker 03 Because it turns out that in the delivery room, right after both twins were born, nurses had withdrawn a little bit of cord blood from both twins, sent it off to Duke, where researchers were studying the disease that killed Thomas, anencephaly.
16:30 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
16:31 Speaker 03 She says they walked in.
16:32 Speaker 05 We met the study coordinator, this guy who worked on the Human Genome Project, a grad student.
16:38 Speaker 03 They met all these different researchers who all seemed really excited about her twins' blood samples.
16:42 Speaker 05 I think it was just weird that one of them had anencephaly and one of them didn't, and they were genetically identical.
16:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, so it's a good control study for them to compare.
16:51 Speaker 03 After they all took the tour, one of the researchers even told them that they had compared Thomas's blood to Callum's.
16:57 Speaker 05 And they found, um, there were a thousand differences in epigenetics between both twins. They're called epigenetic differences. I think their genes are the same, but the things that control the genes were different.
17:09 Speaker 03 That's so interesting. So they began identical, but then somehow in utero, thousand little changes crept up between them.
17:16 Speaker 05 Yes.
17:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
17:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:17 Speaker 03 It's possible that a few of those changes might one day explain the disease.
17:21 Speaker 05 In fact, I even asked the grad student who worked on it most closely, Dujia Krup, I said, were you surprised by what you saw? And she said, for me to be surprised, that implies that I knew what to expect. She said, we're just at the beginning of this, trying to learn about this.
17:37 Speaker 01 So that's two roses. Like, this is, this is amazing.
17:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, visit two sort of kicked butt.
17:41 Speaker 01 She's on a roll here.
17:42 Speaker 03 So after visit two, they got in the car, drove down the street to this place called CytoNet, which is where Thomas's liver ended up.
17:49 Speaker 05 Basically, CytoNet will take a solid liver and they liquefy it. And then they inject the liquid liver into a baby that's waiting on a liver transplant as a bridge therapy.
17:59 Speaker 03 Liquid liver.
18:00 Speaker 06 Liver in a tube.
18:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
18:02 Speaker 03 They went in, again, got a tour.
18:03 Speaker 05 Refrigerators, Petri dishes.
18:05 Speaker 03 The whole thing. The researchers then tell her that they had a little issue with Thomas's liver.
18:09 Speaker 05 His liver was bruised when they got it, so they couldn't inject it into a baby.
18:15 Speaker 01 Hmm.
18:15 Speaker 03 But then they told her that they were able to use it in an experiment.
18:19 Speaker 05 To determine what was the best temperature to freeze infant liver cells, which is negative 150 degrees Celsius, as you already know.
18:26 Speaker 03 Aye.
18:27 Speaker 06 Common knowledge.
18:28 Speaker 01 Okay, half a rose there.
18:29 Speaker 03 Half a rose.
18:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:30 Speaker 03 And she says at one point, as they were being walked around the place.
18:33 Speaker 05 We walked through the break room and someone had taken a picture of Thomas that we had handed out. And they took the photograph and they taped it up in the break room with a little sign that they wrote on it saying, Thomas Gray was a donor here, March 29th, 2010. And I was so excited to see that because I thought, they're just as curious about us as we are about them. Like, I always wonder, who, what kind of person goes to work and opens up a box with a liver in it? And they're probably wondering, what kind of person takes their loved one's liver and puts it in a box and mails it over here?
19:04 Speaker 02 So my name is Arupa Ganguly. I'm a professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
19:13 Speaker 03 Now, Arupa Ganguly, just to switch to her for a second. She studies a kind of cancer of the eye called retinal blastoma, which happens almost exclusively in children. And at this point, she doesn't know Sarah. She has no concept of this whole search that's happening. She is just studying eyes.
19:29 Speaker 01 Where are we, by the way?
19:30 Speaker 03 Philly.
19:30 Speaker 01 Philly, Philadelphia.
19:31 Speaker 03 Now, she studies tumors, but she also needs healthy retinas in order to do her work.
19:35 Speaker 02 Now, you can imagine that getting a normal retina is not a very easy task, because why would you get a normal retina from a baby? I must tell you that if and when an eyeball comes, it is not a pleasant experience, right? Because for a moment, you have to think the origin, the sources of this eyeball. And it's sad. In every possible setting, it's sad.
20:08 Speaker 03 Sad and frustrating, she says.
20:09 Speaker 02 Because only when a normal child dies, that's when I can get this retina. So it's a horrible setup in my mind.
20:20 Speaker 03 So she says often, when the retinas arrive, which happens maybe once a year, and you pull them out of their packaging.
20:25 Speaker 02 You, right away, you feel like...
20:28 Speaker 03 Like maybe you're trading on other people's misery.
20:31 Speaker 02 And I mean, it's so bad when a child dies, but I am asking for his or her retina. In a way, I had this sense of guilt in my head.
20:46 Speaker 03 Now, Arupa had never spoken to a parent of any of her samples. So when she got that email, and she was sitting at her computer, and she read the email from the company that provided her the sample, saying, "The mother of this sample wants to get in contact with you."
21:01 Speaker 02 I paused, I stopped, and doing what I was doing. And I thought, why does the mother want to talk to me? That was my first question. So...
21:19 Speaker 02 I did not reply right away. But after my conversation with the lab, I took, I think, one day to compose a letter and I sent it back to Sarah Gray.
21:31 Speaker 03 And they ended up eventually talking on the phone.
21:34 Speaker 02 I told her, I think, at the very onset, that, Sarah, you have to understand that I feel awful.
21:42 Speaker 05 She said she felt kind of guilty because she wished for the sample.
21:45 Speaker 03 Like, almost by wishing for it. She had made it happen.
21:49 Speaker 02 She said, Arupa, you should not feel bad about it.
21:52 Speaker 05 If you didn't use my son's retina, I would have buried it in the ground. You're the only one that wanted it.
21:58 Speaker 02 Bad things happen to children. And so by being able to help you with your work.
22:05 Speaker 05 We added a layer to Thomas's life.
22:08 Speaker 02 That was...I was amazed.
22:15 Speaker 03 Eventually, Sarah and Ross visited Arupa's lab. She gave them a tour, and she showed them Thomas's retina.
22:21 Speaker 05 She still has samples of it in her freezer. Tiny little, I don't know.
22:27 Speaker 03 Tiny little vials, maybe a third the size of your pinky, filled with frozen liquid.
22:31 Speaker 06 Liquified retina?
22:33 Speaker 05 RNA. It didn't look like much, but it was amazing to think of how many people were involved getting these samples there. We had to approve it. We had to fill out this paperwork. Then the doctor had to come and remove the eyes. Then the eyes had to be processed. The eyes have to be shipped up there. Then they have to do whatever DNA process they do. And just how, I don't know, valuable, maybe even priceless, the sample is.
22:58 Speaker 03 Sarah says that throughout the whole process of losing a child and then seeing him reclaimed, bit by bit, by all of these different people.
23:07 Speaker 05 Something shifted in me.
23:13 Speaker 05 I used to think like the universe treated people the way it should. And now I don't really believe that. But I do believe that there are really amazing, kind people in the world. And science and medicine has something to do with that. I started feeling that these were Thomas's colleagues and his coworkers and that he was a valuable partner in this important research that was being done. And I felt an even more fundamental shift, almost like I had felt like I was a boat on an ocean that was like rocky and choppy with waves. And I've had this feeling that I'm not the boat, I'm the ocean.
23:58 Speaker 05 Like, the decisions that I make are changing other people as opposed to just I'm a boat getting slapped with waves all the time. It has made me feel
24:15 Speaker 05 powerful.
25:06 Speaker 01 I'd like to thank the Philadelphia Inquirer for getting us going on this.
25:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, especially, yeah, big thanks to Michael Vitez for his reporting and to Damio Marchetti for production support and to Latif Nasr for all that help with research. I'm Jadab Umar.
25:22 Speaker 01 I'm Robert Kralow.
25:23 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening.
25:30 Speaker 00 About a year after we originally aired this episode, Sarah Gray published a book with Harper One called "A Life Everlasting: The Extraordinary Story of One Boy's Gift to Medical Science." It's a memoir that dives into the world of organ donation and medical science with a different perspective on the afterlife. Sarah's also been up to all sorts of other stuff, too. She actually stayed in touch with the scientist that was working on eye cancer in the episode, Dr. Arupa Ganguly, and they became friends. And as a result of knowing her, Sarah actually wrote a nerdy rap song about Dr. Ganguly's role in a Supreme Court case.
26:12 Speaker 00 And then she performed that rap song live at, I didn't even know these existed, an NIH talent show. Sarah also published a beautiful short story about shame called "The Lacemaker Fairy Tale." Right now, she's working on a script for a movie as well as an album. You can find links to her book and her short story at our website, radiolab.org.
26:39 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from San Francisco, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandhan, Matt Keelty, Mona McGawker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercato,
27:24 Speaker 05 and Sophie Semai. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
27:48 Speaker 05 Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder that Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/BankGuy. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.
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