Pod Insights Radiolab Worth About this episode This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss.
In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth?
EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Shahib Al-Masawa Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim HowardFact-checking by - Michelle Soraka
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Books -
Memoir of A Debulked (https://zpr.io/WJz2Ybvq3HmT) Woman by Susan Gubar
Being Mortal (https://zpr.io/8J47trRcbjKh) by Atul Gawande
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Transcript 13,012 words · 8 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasr. And today, we're resurfacing a quite provocative episode we originally reported in 2014. Now, that sounds like a long time ago until you start listening and you start to realize how many parallels there are between 2014 and this moment, right now. Outrageous healthcare costs, war in the Middle East, climate change. In every one of these cases, the specifics that they're referring to have changed, but the overall picture remains depressingly the same. Honestly, since it came out, I still think about these stories. I still remember them all the time, especially the last one.
0:42 Speaker 00 I would say this episode is one of my all-time top 10 Radiolab episodes. I hope you feel the same way, whether you are hearing it for the first time or hearing it for the 10th time. Here it goes. Worth.
0:54 Speaker 01 Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right.
0:57 Speaker 02 Okay.
0:58 Speaker 01 All right.
1:01 Speaker 03 You're listening to Radiolab.
1:04 Speaker 01 Radiolab.
1:05 Speaker 02 From? WNYC.
1:09 Speaker 02 Rewind.
1:13 Speaker 04 Are you ready?
1:14 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:14 Speaker 04 Feeling full of worth?
1:16 Speaker 05 I'm feeling full of value.
1:18 Speaker 04 Well, in that spirit, I'm Jad Abumrad.
1:19 Speaker 05 I'm Robert Krulwich.
1:21 Speaker 04 This is Radiolab, and today...
1:22 Speaker 05 Three very different stories that try to put a dollar value. Million is okay. One million dollar? Seven dollars. $10,000.
1:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, I would say five bucks.
1:30 Speaker 05 One thing's...
1:32 Speaker 04 That seemed...
1:32 Speaker 05 Priceless. Priceless. Priceless.
1:34 Speaker 06 Is it really?
1:39 Speaker 04 Okay, so start at the top.
1:40 Speaker 06 Bring on the pressure.
1:42 Speaker 04 So tell... All right, we're gonna start the show with a story from our producer, Molly Webster.
1:47 Speaker 06 I don't remember any of it.
1:48 Speaker 04 Who we might actually want to rename Molly Wongster, because she recently got herself into some serious numeracizing. Actually, it didn't start as a wonky thing. It started actually with some medical journals.
1:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was... So that was interesting, because it was some of the most... Poetic writing I've seen out of doctors, ever. One journal article said like, "What would one more month mean to a 37-year-old mother who has four children?" Or, "What would one more month mean if you are a 67-year-old who's about to go traveling around the world?" People were just kind of like drifting these questions out there.
2:26 Speaker 07 All these questions seemed to circle around a seemingly simple story of the pricing of a drug, cancer drug.
2:34 Speaker 06 And the story, if you really want to tell it from the beginning, it begins with this guy named Leonard.
2:39 Speaker 07 Leonard Salz. I'm a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
2:43 Speaker 06 Which is here in New York, and it's one of the largest cancer centers in the country.
2:48 Speaker 07 I mean, we have 17 doctors here who treat colon cancer.
2:51 Speaker 06 Just for colon cancer.
2:52 Speaker 07 We treat a very large number of patients.
2:54 Speaker 06 It's a huge hospital, and one of the things Leonard's been noticing in the last, I don't know, decade, is cancer drug prices have just gone through the roof.
3:03 Speaker 07 I mean, we have drugs out there that are many hundreds of dollars per pill.
3:06 Speaker 06 Really? Yeah. Oh, just wait. Let's see, where does this start? It starts, it's June in 2012. Leonard Salz is at a conference, and at this conference is a pharmaceutical company called Sanofi, and they give a presentation about a new drug that they have.
3:22 Speaker 07 A drug called Zaltrap. And Zaltrap is a drug that, without getting into the science too much, targets the blood supply to the tumor.
3:32 Speaker 06 It cuts off the blood supply, which means the tumor can't grow.
3:35 Speaker 07 That's, that's the scientific hypothesis.
3:37 Speaker 06 So this new drug is presented, and they like present the data.
3:40 Speaker 07 And they showed that the survival difference-
3:43 Speaker 06 Between the people who got Zaltrap and the people who didn't.
3:47 Speaker 07 Was 1.4 months, or 42 days.
3:49 Speaker 06 In other words, if you take this drug, you could get 42 more days of life, on average, which means you could get three more days, you could get no days, you could get 42, or you could live another three years. Forty-two.
4:01 Speaker 07 Forty-two days.
4:02 Speaker 06 Down to the, down to the fine grain.
4:03 Speaker 07 Oh, please. I could show you some graphs that have been put up at meetings that show survival curves. Calculated out to two decimal places in terms of months. So I'm looking at the-
4:15 Speaker 06 That's like not a tenth of a month.
4:16 Speaker 07 A hundredth of a month. A hundredth of a month. That's a little over seven hours.
4:20 Speaker 06 What?
4:20 Speaker 07 Pretty amusing, actually.
4:22 Speaker 06 Why would you, why would you-
4:24 Speaker 07 It's pseudo-precision.
4:25 Speaker 06 Pseudo-precision.
4:26 Speaker 07 At any rate.
4:26 Speaker 06 Anyways, after the conference, the FDA approves the drug. And basically, once the FDA approves a drug, public insurance has to take it. And then the private insurance companies just follow suit, which means you get prescribed the drug and people pay for it.
4:41 Speaker 07 And what does the drug cost?
4:42 Speaker 06 That's the thing.
4:43 Speaker 07 It costs, uh-
4:45 Speaker 06 Roughly?
4:45 Speaker 07 Thirty thousand for a three-month course.
4:48 Speaker 06 Wow.
4:49 Speaker 07 So-
4:50 Speaker 06 So Leonard's like, "Wow, that is expensive." And there was already another drug on the market, did the same thing, and it cost half as much. To put that in context, this is just one drug that's $11,000 a month. A normal cancer patient might take dozens of drugs.
5:06 Speaker 07 There are anti-nausea medicines that are sometimes used that are in the range of $90 to $100 a tablet. And you take a tablet once a day for three days. One needs growth factors to help support the white blood cell count, which you sometimes need in chemo. Those can be $5,000 every two to three weeks. If you need antibiotics to treat infections, those aren't cheap. And then you need a pharmacist to prepare it. They're labor-intensive. You need tubing and equipment and needles to give it. You need trained nurses to administer it. You need doctors to take care of the patients. And don't forget, there's a cost for a CAT scan or MRI. And then, of course, someone's got to pay for the real estate, the heat and the lights. None of those prices are figured into it. Okay? I'm just giving you the cost of the drug.
5:50 Speaker 06 So Leonard calls up one of his colleagues.
5:52 Speaker 05 Uh, my name is Peter Bach. I'm a physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
5:56 Speaker 06 Peter is the number cruncher of the group. He does the statistical analysis of, I don't know, the cost of care. And Len grabbed him and ran him through all the data.
6:04 Speaker 05 And we walked through the out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare beneficiaries, if they don't have additional insurance, 20 cents of every dollar they pay out of pocket.
6:15 Speaker 06 And that number sort of hit him because he realized for Medicare patients, they'd be paying something like $2,000 out of pocket every month for just this drug.
6:24 Speaker 05 It's 2,200, if I remember the number correctly.
6:26 Speaker 06 For a lot of Medicare patients.
6:28 Speaker 05 That's all of their money. Never mind other drugs. That's when I thought we should go public with it.
6:35 Speaker 06 Memorial Sloan-Kettering, they decide to boycott this drug.
6:42 Speaker 07 Now, that-
6:43 Speaker 06 Is that- I mean, I'm just stopping you because when you guys made that decision, was that- that feels like a big deal?
6:50 Speaker 07 It did feel like a big deal, and it felt like a big enough deal that we decided to write the op-ed piece in the New York Times.
6:56 Speaker 06 They write an op-ed in the Times that basically says, "Look, this is crazy. $11,000 a month for a drug that maybe gives you 42 more days of life?"
7:04 Speaker 07 Is that worth it? And a little less than a month after the op-ed piece came out-
7:09 Speaker 06 The company that makes Zaltrap-
7:10 Speaker 07 They went to individual doctors' offices, sent representatives, and said, "We are offering a 50% discount."
7:18 Speaker 04 They cut the price in half, just like that?
7:20 Speaker 07 Yep.
7:21 Speaker 06 Nationwide, or like, just in this area?
7:23 Speaker 07 Nationwide.
7:24 Speaker 05 It was sort of incredible.
7:29 Speaker 06 We reached out to Sanofi to talk about the price of Zaltrap, and they declined to comment, but in a statement that they released when this whole Zaltrap thing happened, they said that they incur so many costs for researching and developing and bringing a drug to market, that that is what their pricing is based on. Leonard doesn't disagree.
7:48 Speaker 07 We need these companies. They're the ones developing the drugs.
7:51 Speaker 06 Which aren't easy to develop. I mean, Leonard gave us just one example.
7:55 Speaker 07 If we talk about colon cancer-
7:56 Speaker 06 He says, "For years, there was only one drug on the market called 5FU."
8:00 Speaker 07 5FU was patented in August of 1957. It was from 1957 until 1996 that a second drug came along.
8:10 Speaker 06 That's how long it takes to develop a good drug, or-
8:13 Speaker 07 In that interim, there were over 70 drugs that were tried and failed.
8:17 Speaker 06 I feel like I don't give it enough credit, because that just astounded me.
8:20 Speaker 07 It's very, very hard.
8:22 Speaker 06 And that, according to Leonard, is one of the reasons why prices are just going to keep going up.
8:27 Speaker 07 But sooner or later, this system is going to fall apart. And at what point does society say, "Hmm, there isn't an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system."
8:40 Speaker 06 It's funny, because I had this interesting reaction to the word "society," because all of a sudden, I thought, like, why is- not, not like a, you know, crazy death panel way, but I thought, "Why, why is society involved in my conversation with my doctor about if I want to take this drug that may give me another month and a half of life?"
9:03 Speaker 07 Why is society involved? Because you're not paying. Unless you have hidden resources I'm aware of, probably couldn't afford $10,000 to $15,000 a month in drug bills. Someone else has to pay that.
9:17 Speaker 06 Obviously, he says, it's your insurance. I mean, say you're part of a policy that has 1,000 members.
9:23 Speaker 07 Let's say that the premium for that is $100. So we got $100, 1,000 people, we got ourselves $100,000. Okay? So we now have $100,000 to take care of that 1,000 people.
9:39 Speaker 06 For that month.
9:40 Speaker 07 For whatever amount of time. If now one person comes up with a healthcare cost, let's say it's for a month, that is $100,000 in that month, everybody else is in trouble. There's no money left.
9:56 Speaker 06 So, they write this op-ed saying, like, prices are too high and the drugs are not that great. And sort of the next notable wave is, there was this, there's this journal called Blood, which is really big to anybody that works in a community that has like-
10:10 Speaker 07 It's a journal called Blood?
10:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
10:12 Speaker 07 How did we not know about this when we made the Blood show?
10:14 Speaker 06 Oh, I knew. Just kept it in here.
10:17 Speaker 07 Anyhow.
10:18 Speaker 06 So, yes, there's this journal called Blood, which is basically like the, the journal for anybody that works in a field that has to do with blood. And what happens is, like, 100 doctors get together and they co-sign an editorial, which basically says, "We totally agree with everything you guys are saying, but we have an even bigger issue." You know, with Zaltrap, you're talking about an expensive drug that maybe doesn't really do that much. It's kind of easy, even though it had never been done before, to say, "We're not going to use this." What all of these doctors in the Blood editorial are saying, what do you do when you have a really expensive drug, but it's really, really good? It's like a drug you actually want to take.
10:58 Speaker 07 Is that like a, like a "one day in the future, we will face this" kind of question?
11:02 Speaker 06 No, that is like a "now, today" question.
11:07 Speaker 06 Important new medicine approved this year. Everyone I talked to pointed me to this new drug. Called Sovaldi. It's known as Sivaldi.
11:14 Speaker 03 Sivaldi. Why many in the medical community are calling the new medication. A blockbuster.
11:19 Speaker 06 Sovaldi came on the market last December. So that's December 2013. That's correct. This is Bruce. Bruce Moll, I'm the editor of Commonwealth Magazine. He's written about Sovaldi, and here's the basic story, right?
11:33 Speaker 06 It is a drug that treats. Hepatitis C. Which is caused by a virus. And the disease itself goes to work on your liver. It inflames it, it scars it. It can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis, it can be fatal. And for the longest time, the treatments that they had just really weren't that great, or they just had wretched side effects. But along comes Sovaldi, and it's one pill, 12 weeks. You take it with some other antiviral meds, it is a super simple treatment option. And the side effects are very minimal. Like this, it was like kind of like the savior drug. And so a lot of doctors start to prescribe it. In the first half of 2014, 70,000 people in the country, in the United States, were
12:17 Speaker 06 treated, and it had a 95% rate of cure. In other words. Holy cow, that's big. The virus was eradicated. That's very big. But, in fitting with our story. This drug costs $1,000 a pill. Whoa. For like one, one pill that I take. One a day.
12:43 Speaker 06 Which, as you can imagine, it angered a lot of people with Hep C. In total, it costs $84,000. And if you think about the fact that in 2014, we know at least 70,000 people got this drug. Then you're starting to talk about serious money. Wait, I wanna, I, I just wanna say that I, that I, I just times out 70,000 times 84,000, and I got something with seven zeros in it, it's 588, and then there's seven zeros, which is like, a bi- five billion dollars? Yes, yeah.
13:18 Speaker 03 The big question is how states will pay for what could be upwards of.
13:22 Speaker 06 And so we have a situation where states are basically having to ration. Yeah. Say in Massachusetts. Most of the insurers currently are requiring some.
13:31 Speaker 04 Some liver damage before you can take the drug.
13:34 Speaker 06 Similar restrictions are happening in other states. Florida, it's happening in Oregon, Illinois.
13:40 Speaker 03 The doctor says the only option may be to wait until you're even sicker.
13:44 Speaker 06 And then there's Arizona, out of the entire state. Public insurance only approves 180 people for treatment.
13:51 Speaker 04 Well, just 180?
13:52 Speaker 06 Just 180. Now, when I talked to a representative of the company that makes the drug.
13:57 Speaker 02 Greg Alton, executive vice president for corporate and medical affairs for Gilant Sciences.
14:01 Speaker 06 He says, "You've got to keep in mind, this is not a chronic care situation. This is a..."
14:06 Speaker 02 Cure. Here, you're actually curing a person of a disease. We're talking about 12 weeks of therapy, period. That's it, and you're done, and you've cured somebody.
14:14 Speaker 06 So he says, "This is a one-time deal. This is like one-time $84,000, and then you're done. Think about all the years you'll live without having an illness. Then you'll see..."
14:24 Speaker 02 Over a 20-year period, the savings that will accrue to the system by having a patient cured of hepatitis C.
14:30 Speaker 06 He also said, "It's important to understand that every hepatitis C sufferer is not going to hit the system at the same time. So all of the cost is spread out, right? Which is totally true, but I think there's like this bigger picture here. And Bruce points it out, too.
14:46 Speaker 04 It's sort of like a precursor of what could come, because these companies are developing drugs all the time. What if you could get a drug, but it was very expensive to treat diabetes?
14:59 Speaker 06 And then, you're talking tens of millions of people.
15:02 Speaker 04 An enormous segment of the population.
15:05 Speaker 06 Even if just a fraction of them want a drug that's $1,000 per day? That's practically our entire US budget.
15:11 Speaker 04 What do you do in that case? A drug comes along like that and throws everything out of whack.
15:19 Speaker 06 This is the part where I really sort of got hooked in, where it's like, how do you answer this question? Is it that, you know, at a certain point, you just draw a line and you say, "Beyond this point..."
15:31 Speaker 06 We're not paying.
15:32 Speaker 04 But beyond what point?
15:33 Speaker 06 Exactly. I mean, that's the hard part. Like, how good does a treatment have to be for you to say, this is worth the price that it's been set at?
15:43 Speaker 07 I don't think we have rejected out of hand, but I don't think-
15:45 Speaker 06 I got into this a bit with Leonard. In the case of Zaltrap, they said, alright, 42 days, that much money, we're not going to do it. But would it have been different if it was 50 days? Or 100? Uh, is that enough? I'm sure you want to be talking in years, but I guess the question is, like, what would be a, is there a magic line for you?
16:01 Speaker 07 Um, um, if I, this is a, I can't personally determine it for everybody. I wouldn't presume to try. But ultimately, as a society, we're going to have to reach an understanding of what that cut point is. Because we can't afford not to.
16:22 Speaker 06 And the question that sort of bubbles out of this conversation is, what is one more year, or one more month, or one more day of life worth to us?
16:31 Speaker 05 Are we willing to pay $1,000 for an extra day of life? Well, what about $100,000 for an extra day of life?
16:36 Speaker 07 You know, people like to say, yeah, so what's the value of a human life? And the answer is, boy, that's a complicated question. But a really important one. Because nobody thinks it's infinite.
16:46 Speaker 06 He said that, and I was like, okay, it's not zero, and it's not infinite. Is there an answer, like, in the middle? And so, I started looking around. I don't know, I guess I was wondering, has anyone actually thought about this? And so I started looking around, and what I realized was that the World Health Organization actually, I mean, I guess they almost have a number, but it's a number per country. They have the recommendation that, that countries spend, it's going to get gobbledygooky, but just bear with me, that countries spend one to three times the GDP per capita, which is like, the gross domestic product per individual.
17:25 Speaker 04 So take the entire fat ball of money that is in a country and divide it per individual?
17:30 Speaker 06 Divide it by the individuals, and then you spend one to three times that on one more good year of life.
17:36 Speaker 04 And what would that be for us?
17:37 Speaker 06 So for the US, um, that's about 50,000 to 150,000.
17:41 Speaker 04 Interesting. And is that, does that have any, any teeth?
17:46 Speaker 04 That recommendation?
17:46 Speaker 06 It legally doesn't have any teeth, but it has teeth in the sense that doctors in the US are actually going to start using this WHO number to evaluate medical treatments for cardiology. They said they were going to do this in a paper, and it was kind of very quiet, very subtle. But in other countries, this conversation is very loud, actually. It happens at the government level. They're also passing out surveys where they're asking citizens, what is your limit on how much you want to spend on one more good year of life?
18:19 Speaker 04 Have they done that here?
18:20 Speaker 06 As far as I know, no.
18:22 Speaker 04 Why not?
18:24 Speaker 06 Because the last time we tried to talk about cost in medicine, it ended up in the whole- Death panels? Death panels. Death panels, or so-called death panels. ...thing. And I don't know, I just wondered- Right, into the mess of it. Hey, Times Square. If I actually tried to go out and ask this question in a very basic way, how would people respond? Excuse me, can I ask you a question? What is a year of life worth?
18:54 Speaker 01 Wow, what a question. That's deep. Can I think about it? That's a tough one, but-
19:00 Speaker 06 I was really surprised at how seriously people took the question.
19:03 Speaker 01 Man, what is a year of life worth?
19:07 Speaker 06 That was the first thing I noticed. Then the next thing was, no one could answer the question until I had answered like a million questions of theirs.
19:14 Speaker 01 Am I going to die tomorrow?
19:15 Speaker 06 Yes. Where do I get that year? Do I get it at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end?
19:19 Speaker 04 How would I spend that year of life?
19:21 Speaker 06 Good, it would be a good year of life.
19:22 Speaker 04 A good year of life depends-
19:23 Speaker 03 Is this like a pie in the sky kind of answer?
19:26 Speaker 06 They wanted to know, would they be emotionally happy, alone, with friends or family? Where did they get the money? Could they borrow the money? Did they have to pay the money back? Were they dying? Was it an emergency? Were other people also trying to get money at the same time? Because then there'd be like a rush on the money in America.
19:42 Speaker 04 Oh, interesting. Did you actually ever end up getting numbers?
19:46 Speaker 06 I did get numbers, but they were- At least $10,000.
19:49 Speaker 01 $15,000.
19:51 Speaker 06 Thirteen? Quarter million. $7. All over the place. Yeah, I would say five bucks. $10 million.
19:59 Speaker 04 $44,000.
20:00 Speaker 06 Interesting. One woman said 10 million.
20:02 Speaker 04 $10 million for a year? Irresponsible.
20:06 Speaker 03 Well, you're asking me about my personal choice?
20:08 Speaker 04 $10 million?
20:09 Speaker 03 Not about a public policy question.
20:12 Speaker 04 What, do you have any way of parsing all this?
20:15 Speaker 06 No. I really, I honestly don't. Like, I think my biggest takeaway was like, no one punched me, which, which makes me feel as if people are ready, not ready, but willing to engage in this conversation. But I also realized I kept talking about things and I just wanted to be in the room with patients. Like, I just wanted patients in the room with me because it was like, we were all having this conversation that eventually will all be patients, I guess. But we were also having this conversation around, like, a group of people that weren't ever present. Like, they're not at conferences or not in research articles. And so that was when I started talking to patients.
20:55 Speaker 03 Ah, well.
20:56 Speaker 06 I guess what is 42 days, what does 42 days mean in the sense of, is that something that you'd pay $50,000 for if you were, I mean, of course you would. That, it's like, I almost can't even ask the question, but I don't know.
21:14 Speaker 03 Well, I, no, I think it's a good question. I think ethically, it would be to the good of patients and doctors to have this conversation.
21:23 Speaker 06 This is Susan.
21:24 Speaker 03 Susan Gubar, writer of the Living with Cancer blog for the New York Times.
21:29 Speaker 06 Back in 2008, Susan went to the doctor. She hadn't been feeling well for a while. They thought it was some sort of bowel issue, but then the doctor walked into the room and said she had
21:38 Speaker 03 advanced stage ovarian cancer. Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed at a late stage, and it's, it's basically incurable. It can be handled, it can be managed, it can be kept at bay, and for longer periods of time now, we hope. But you're given a diagnosis of three to five years.
22:01 Speaker 06 Wow, that is, you go from having unlimited time in your mind to three to five years in, like, a doctor's visit.
22:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big shock. You sort of enter a zone.
22:15 Speaker 03 Well, you're not quite aware of what you're doing.
22:20 Speaker 06 That day, the day she was diagnosed, she was told, "Pack a bag, get in a car, and drive to Indianapolis. You need surgery now."
22:27 Speaker 03 So I went the next day to Indianapolis. And the day after that, I had the debulking surgery, which takes out the ovaries and the uterus and the fallopian tubes and the spleen and sometimes the cervix and sometimes the appendix and sometimes the bowel.
22:43 Speaker 06 Holy shit. Are you serious?
22:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's called the mother of all surgeries.
22:47 Speaker 06 And then, just like that, she was doing multiple rounds of chemo.
22:51 Speaker 03 Chemicals that are used, they destroy all quick-growing cells. So, for example, you have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that, you know. You also can... I got terrible sores in my mouth. I have no idea why, but I know this happens to other people. But yeah, the other thing is this extreme fatigue.
23:11 Speaker 06 And Susan, who writes for a living, couldn't even read.
23:14 Speaker 03 I would look at a page and think, "Had I turned a page?"
23:19 Speaker 03 Chemotherapy, it really is toxic to the spirit, to the heart, to the mind. Just the normal aspects of life feel polluted.
23:33 Speaker 06 Have you ever had to think about cost?
23:36 Speaker 03 I was never informed of the cost of any drug or any procedure I was given, which really makes me think about how masked these costs are.
23:49 Speaker 06 Would you want to be thinking about cost while you're going through it? Or is it better to just say, "Here are your treatment options. These are statistical outcomes. Like, pick one, and then we'll deal with it on the other side."
24:04 Speaker 03 I think there's a kind of unspoken agreement among everyone that the insurance company or Medicare is going to pay. And if it's the government, that means our grandchildren are going to end up paying for all of this money. So yes, I guess to answer your question, I think it would be healthier to know what these things cost. On the other hand, I have to say, as a patient, I was so traumatized, I'm not sure I could have taken that information in. I was thinking about your "What It's Worth," "What's It Worth?" title, and I was thinking that the American individualistic, optimistic response would be, "Well, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Life is worth it, whatever it takes.
24:49 Speaker 03 But whatever it takes will not cure my cancer." So I think this question changes when you have incurable cancer. It becomes a different question, which is, "When is enough enough?"
25:03 Speaker 06 I remember when she said that, "When is enough enough?" I was just-
25:11 Speaker 07 I don't know that we are ready to say there's one magic line.
25:14 Speaker 06 thrown back to this conversation that I had with Leonard Salt, where he was saying that-
25:18 Speaker 07 We have to look at everything in terms of value.
25:21 Speaker 06 You need to think deeply about the kind of life you want to live. It's not just about how many days, it's about what kind of days.
25:30 Speaker 07 So if you told me that there was something that gave 72-day survival benefit, but it makes people feel nauseous for most of the time, is that worth it?
25:39 Speaker 06 When we're trying to draw this line as a society, before we figure out what we're willing to pay, we have to think about what we are paying for.
25:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I don't think we know what-
25:50 Speaker 06 For Susan, you know, six years ago, she decided that she was going to get chemotherapy because, in part, it would be more time with her daughters.
25:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:00 Speaker 06 And suddenly, it's worth it.
26:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I think we're changed by the treatment, too.
26:07 Speaker 06 For now, Susan's cancer is basically under control because she's on this new drug.
26:14 Speaker 03 For two years and now a month, and I am counting.
26:18 Speaker 06 Okay, fair.
26:19 Speaker 03 I've been alive without a recurrence, without the cancer growing, by taking these pills every day.
26:27 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
26:28 Speaker 03 And I take them at home. They're not infused in the hospital through my veins, they're just pills. And it's made the last few years remarkably normal-like, the new normal.
26:43 Speaker 06 Yeah.
26:44 Speaker 03 But when these drugs stop working, and I've been told they will stop working, I'm not sure I would want to go back to chemotherapy.
26:58 Speaker 03 But I suspect I don't know until I get there.
27:19 Speaker 04 Producer Molly Webster.
27:21 Speaker 01 And now for the thank yous for that piece. We want to thank Stephen Hall and I want to mention Susan Gubar's book called Memoir of a Debalked Woman.
27:30 Speaker 04 And thanks also to Dr. Atul Gawande for all his help and his latest book.
27:35 Speaker 01 Which is really, I really thought it was wonderful. It's called Being Mortal.
27:38 Speaker 04 Yeah. And thanks also to Nikki Haynes.
27:40 Speaker 01 And to Glenn Blumquist.
27:41 Speaker 04 Radiolab will continue in a moment.
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28:12 Speaker 06 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term sponsor, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Last night, I was having a nice sleep when my eyes popped open and suddenly I remembered an email I forgot to send. And then I was just left wondering if my right eye should be as itchy as it was. Here's the thing. Anxiety does not pay attention to business hours. It shows up on the weekends, on vacation, and yes, after hours. But therapy can help. Having someone to talk to about those things on your mind can turn fitful nights into dreamy bliss. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp says it works with more than 125
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30:04 Speaker 06 Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn
30:17 Speaker 04 with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:28 Speaker 04 Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radio Lab, and today... Well, we're still on the subject of worth, but this is a totally different take. Yeah, and this comes from our producer, Matt Kielty.
30:38 Speaker 07 So, next, a slightly different story about worth. A story that, rather than being about how much we value our own lives, is about how much we value someone else's. Right. And it starts with BuzzFeed writer Gregory Johnson.
30:52 Speaker 04 So, OK, maybe you should start with what has now become sort of the infamous wedding, wedding drone strike. Is that, was that sort of where it started for you?
31:00 Speaker 07 Yes. So, this strike happens in a very rugged part of Yemen, where there are no paved roads, no electricity.
31:06 Speaker 06 There's no running water.
31:08 Speaker 04 It's Thursday morning.
31:09 Speaker 06 December 12th, 2013, and...
31:12 Speaker 04 Early that morning, in a small village.
31:14 Speaker 06 A group of guys, roughly 50 to 60 people.
31:18 Speaker 04 Including a soon-to-be-married man, pile into a bunch of cars, and they start driving.
31:22 Speaker 06 This is the convoy, the wedding convoy.
31:24 Speaker 04 Now, in the lead car of this convoy was this man.
31:29 Speaker 04 His name is Abdullah Mohammed Al-Tayisi. We spoke to him through an interpreter in Yemen.
31:37 Speaker 04 Abdullah told me it was his neighbor, who was the groom, to be married that day.
31:44 Speaker 04 And so, they were all driving up to the bride's village. Abdullah said they got there a little before noon, ate lunch, recited wedding poems.
31:51 Speaker 06 After lunch.
31:52 Speaker 04 They grabbed the bride.
31:53 Speaker 06 And just a few of her bridal attendants, a few females.
31:56 Speaker 04 And they start driving back to the groom's village for the actual wedding ceremony.
32:04 Speaker 04 Abdullah said that ever since they'd left that morning, through lunch, all day long, they heard this...
32:11 Speaker 04 Humming.
32:11 Speaker 06 This sort of metallic whirring, this metallic thumping overhead.
32:15 Speaker 04 No one in the convoy could see it, but they knew what it was: a drone.
32:20 Speaker 04 Some sound hearing all the day.
32:22 Speaker 06 It's nothing new for people in rural parts of Yemen by this point. They don't think anything of it.
32:27 Speaker 04 It's common to hear those sounds. Yeah, you usually hear it there. So, they keep driving.
32:33 Speaker 06 Basically, if you can imagine it, they're sort of winding through these waters, these desert, mountainous places. Yeah, the road, he said, is mountainous. They're all strung out on this rutted-out little dirt track.
32:46 Speaker 04 Eleven cars, single file.
32:47 Speaker 06 Finally, they reach this little clearing.
32:52 Speaker 04 Up near the top of this cliff, where they all slowed down and started to bunch together. Because apparently, one of the cars had gotten a flat. Some guys got out, fixed it, got back in their cars, and right at that moment...
33:05 Speaker 06 The sound shifts somehow, and then...
33:13 Speaker 04 The missiles start.
33:16 Speaker 04 Four of them. In quick succession. The shrapnel is just flying everywhere. In a blink, it's over. People are trying to figure out what has happened. All the screaming, there's fires that are burning. And Abdullah...
33:32 Speaker 04 His car was torn up. He had shrapnel in his face. Two wounds in his face, one in the right hand, left thigh, one on in the back.
33:45 Speaker 04 And he says that, once he saw there was smoke, his first thought was, "Where's my son?"
33:51 Speaker 04 He was looking for his son. His son was there? Yeah, a young man who'd been a few cars back from him. He had the fourth car on the convoy. And he was married with two boys and one daughter. Abdullah said he could move, so he got out of his car and stumbled back toward the fourth car.
34:12 Speaker 04 To find his son. Yeah, he said he found him just next to the car. Before he died.
34:25 Speaker 04 No, he didn't talk to him. Just he looked at him and just passed away.
34:36 Speaker 04 So, it turns out that there are 12 dead. And typically what happens in Yemen is that as soon as someone is killed, they're buried very, very shortly thereafter. What happens here is something different.
34:51 Speaker 04 The people in the convoy take the bodies of the dead, and they take them back to Reda. This big town, where the drone strike occurred. There's a video I have. That's what you're hearing, where you see some men take these 12 dead bodies. And they line them up in the street on this bright blue tarp, and they sort of wrap them in these cheap blankets. And so, there's this huge crowd that just...
35:16 Speaker 06 gathers around to stare at these dead bodies who are laid out in the street.
35:20 Speaker 04 And at a certain point.
35:22 Speaker 06 This very tiny, very leathery old Yemeni who's sort of holding on to the back of a pickup with one arm.
35:29 Speaker 04 He stands over the dead.
35:31 Speaker 06 Sort of swaying over the bodies and just lecturing the crowd on what happened. He's just screaming at them and so.
35:38 Speaker 06 You can hear his voice.
35:42 Speaker 06 Start to go hoarse.
35:45 Speaker 06 And he's screaming, "An American drone killed these. It was a massacre. These people are on their way to a wedding. Why did this happen? Why were they killed?"
36:06 Speaker 04 Why did they target this convoy? Well, according to the US government, they had received intel that on that day, in this convoy, was an Al Qaeda operative.
36:17 Speaker 06 Named Shauqi Al-Baddani.
36:18 Speaker 04 Who apparently had been planning attacks against the US.
36:21 Speaker 06 That's why they took the shot. And in fact, they say that he was wounded in this wedding convoy strike.
36:28 Speaker 04 And do we have any reason to believe that?
36:32 Speaker 06 I have no reason to believe it.
36:34 Speaker 04 Greg spent weeks in Yemen, talked to survivors of the drone strike.
36:38 Speaker 06 Talked to people who were there. No one knows this guy.
36:41 Speaker 04 And Greg says the guy isn't really a member of either of the tribes that were involved in the wedding. And so to him.
36:46 Speaker 06 It makes no sense that he would be there.
36:48 Speaker 04 To him, this was a terrible mistake.
36:53 Speaker 04 But what really got me interested in Greg's reporting, which you can read on buzzfeed.com, highly recommend it, is that he goes really deep into the question of like, what the US did next? Because the question is like, what do you do in this case? How do you repair something like this? When you have two totally different cultures with two different traditions, how do you find a way to try to make this right?
37:19 Speaker 04 Can you? I mean, historically, do soldiers have an obligation to repair the damage they do?
37:26 Speaker 06 No, there's no obligation. But what's hap-
37:30 Speaker 04 And is we've actually created an obligation for ourselves.
37:33 Speaker 02 Hmm, and Americans have?
37:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, this has a really long history, a history that's rooted. You mean like legal, legally? Yeah, yeah, yeah, a legal history.
37:41 Speaker 02 Really?
37:42 Speaker 06 And there's a, there's a great law professor at Yale.
37:45 Speaker 04 What's his name?
37:46 Speaker 06 Uh, his last name is, is Witt. It's John Witt.
37:50 Speaker 02 Um, that's me.
37:51 Speaker 04 Uh, we ended up tracking down John Witt.
37:53 Speaker 02 Hi Jed, how are you?
37:54 Speaker 04 To talk about how the US first started to try to right the wrongs in war.
37:58 Speaker 02 So what is the foundation story of all this? That starts with General Pershing in World War I.
38:07 Speaker 04 So 1917.
38:10 Speaker 04 The Great War ramps up, so we start shipping young men.
38:14 Speaker 04 Over to Europe.
38:18 Speaker 04 Specifically France, and in charge of these men was a man named John J.
38:24 Speaker 02 Commander of American forces on the Western Front.
38:27 Speaker 04 Stern man, handsome mustache, bit of a maverick.
38:29 Speaker 02 General Pershing's, you know, nickname was Blackjack and uh.
38:32 Speaker 04 When he first arrives in France with his troops, General Blackjack Pershing.
38:36 Speaker 02 He's got this problem, which is that he has Jeeps.
38:42 Speaker 06 So World War I is the first war in which the US is shipping a lot of automobiles.
38:48 Speaker 04 More than 100,000.
38:49 Speaker 06 For the soldiers to drive.
38:51 Speaker 04 Cars, trucks, Jeeps.
38:52 Speaker 02 And Jeeps are really great. They get his men from one place to another.
38:55 Speaker 04 From Paris, to Amiens, to, I don't know, Marseille.
38:58 Speaker 02 But they also run into French farmers' chickens and cows, children, sometimes just the farmers themselves.
39:05 Speaker 04 Were these random collisions? Or were there no roads?
39:08 Speaker 02 I'm gonna bet there was some of everything. Sometimes it was probably just ordinary car accidents and sometimes, no doubt, a little French wine was involved.
39:16 Speaker 04 So this is Pershing's problem. He's trying to run a war overseas.
39:20 Speaker 02 And it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear.
39:25 Speaker 04 Hmm, and so Pershing has an idea, which he actually borrows from the Brits, and that is, he will use cash, money, to right our wrongs.
39:34 Speaker 02 Well, and so he goes to Congress and begs for a statute. And Congress obliges really quickly. There's no sign this is a controversial thing.
39:41 Speaker 04 But it was a genuinely new thing because for the first time in the history of war, as far as we could tell, you had a state compensating individuals. Usually it's state to state. Here you have state to individuals. And so the US government starts systematically paying money for the loss of a non-American life in war. How much?
39:59 Speaker 02 Geez, I don't know.
40:00 Speaker 04 It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation mentioning specific amounts. But whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked.
40:11 Speaker 04 Pershing wrote in his biography that the swift and prompt settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people.
40:19 Speaker 04 So it seemed to work really well. And is this, I mean, is the idea here that like this is what we would do with the drone strike victims we talked about, that we'd pay them money? Well, it's actually, it's a bit trickier than that because the thing that Pershing got in World War I, it came with a catch.
40:34 Speaker 06 And that is that there's a combat exclusion.
40:38 Speaker 04 In case you just walked in, that's Gregory Johnson. And what he means is that this law, basically what it said is that we'll pay your claims if it didn't happen on the field of battle and it wasn't a combat situation. If it was combat and it was on the field of battle, then tough luck. That's just war.
40:54 Speaker 06 So if US soldiers were driving to a fight and they ran their car into somebody and they damaged that car or killed that person, those people would not be able to get compensation, whereas if the US soldiers were driving to a bar and got in an accident, they would be able to get compensation.
41:13 Speaker 04 But the problem is, once we get into these counterinsurgency wars.
41:17 Speaker 02 Civilians are suddenly in the middle of the fray.
41:20 Speaker 04 Charges have been made that troops killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians during a sweep. This is, in a way, the story of modern warfare. Air raid sirens are beginning to sound over Baghdad. President Karzai says he's delivering his. Final warning to the US after a US airstrike accidentally killed more than a dozen mothers and children. By the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting is happening in cities. So there's no difference really between the battlefield and where people live. And so the line between what's combat-related and what's not combat-related, it starts to get blurry.
41:54 Speaker 06 And so in 2003, in Iraq, what happened was there were actually people lining up. You know, there were civilian military operations centers. People started lining up outside of these, saying, "My family has been harmed. I want help."
42:09 Speaker 04 How many people, do you remember?
42:10 Speaker 00 If I had to guess, it was, you know, maybe around 80 people or so.
42:13 Speaker 04 Oh, that's a ton of people.
42:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
42:16 Speaker 04 That's John Tracy. He was a military lawyer in Iraq in 2003. And before him, Marla Keenan. I'm managing director of Center for Civilians in Conflict. So when they came with a complaint, what sort? Is it like, "You ran over my chicken? Or you knocked out my windows?" No, no, no, no. Much more serious.
42:32 Speaker 00 I mean, I think of cluster bombs. During the shock and awe campaign, one of the types of bombs that we were using, or the Air Force was using, what they call cluster munitions.
42:43 Speaker 04 Basically, John says, Air Force planes would fly over these targets and drop hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little...
42:48 Speaker 00 Bombs, smaller than a Coke can.
42:50 Speaker 04 And a lot of them would land in maybe a parking lot or a field, and they wouldn't explode.
42:54 Speaker 00 So on a number of occasions, you'd have, mostly it was kids, right? Because the kids would see it and...
43:01 Speaker 04 They didn't know any better.
43:02 Speaker 00 They would just run over and kick it. And then that's when it would explode.
43:06 Speaker 04 That's when it would detonate.
43:07 Speaker 00 Right. I had a lot of those, close to a dozen. And so that was a, that was a difficult one because, well, it's combat because the Air Force dropped it because they were, you know, bombing the city.
43:22 Speaker 04 Right.
43:23 Speaker 00 But at the same time, days, weeks, even months have gone by, and this thing is just sitting in the ground. Couldn't we say it's not combat?
43:31 Speaker 04 And this was a real question that John had to ask his boss, and then his boss asked his boss.
43:36 Speaker 00 They eventually sent the question up to the Army Claims Service.
43:38 Speaker 04 And they said, no, it's combat. Meaning they're not going to pay.
43:43 Speaker 03 Basically like we are in an armed conflict and this was an unfortunate incident, but an incident that happened during a lawful combat operation and therefore we're sorry. And that's basically it.
43:56 Speaker 04 So I said no to a lot of people. And so like in World War One with General Pershing, military officers, they started lobbying their bosses for an expanded system so they could start making more payments. And eventually the military does expand it. In fact, I talked to one of the military's top lawyers. Brigadier General Richard C. Gross, I go by Rich. I'm the legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he told me that around 2006, paying out these kinds of condolence payments actually became sort of a key part of military strategy. Absolutely. Even had its own acronym. MAWS, M-A-A-W-S. It's money as a weapon system, which, you know, I'm not sure that title resonates with everybody, but. Interesting phrase, for sure. Yeah, exactly.
44:39 Speaker 04 But it's the idea that money can be used to win hearts and minds that help bring the population over. And it just got me wondering, how much money makes a good weapon?
44:52 Speaker 03 Well, I haven't, like, the US military hasn't given me access to a database or anything like that. But through FOIA's and interviews, I've seen different numbers.
45:01 Speaker 04 Marla says that in 2006, the ACLU filed a FOIA request and eventually got their hands on hundreds of claims files. And in those files, what you see are a bunch of different numbers, but one that comes up again and again.
45:12 Speaker 03 $2,500.
45:14 Speaker 04 $2,500 by and large. Now, someone like John could have paid more, but that meant they'd have to run the claim up the chain of command. Exactly. So it was almost like there were these ceilings. $2,500 for a life, $1,500 for property damage. And then eventually the property damage amount got raised to $2,500 as well. And that that didn't make any sense to me, that somebody could get so much for a Toyota Corolla, but you weren't you were just gonna get the same amount for a lost life. Like, I can't get over, I mean, $2,500 seems like just such a nominal amount. And the practicality of that money of like, if you were to kill someone who is the the breadwinner of a family, that $2,500 would would not be able to support this family in any way.
45:58 Speaker 06 Right, but we're not actually trying to pay full compensation, right? Like, we're not trying to say, we think if this 20-year-old man had lived to be the average age in Afghanistan, then he, you know, that it would have been $60,843, right? Like, that's not the thing.
46:15 Speaker 03 Do you ever, you know, we had people who were killed here in an attack. The federal government is one step closer to cutting its first checks to families of those killed and injured on September 11th. And those people have been compensated. The levels of compensation to the New York victims is is pretty high.
46:36 Speaker 04 The range of payments for a death claim ranged anywhere from $250,000 to just under $7 million.
46:44 Speaker 03 Do you notice that?
46:46 Speaker 06 I do, um, I do, but.
46:50 Speaker 04 It is, to a large degree, comparing apples and oranges. That's general gross again. Because you're talking about a a legal system.
46:57 Speaker 06 Where a country is paying their own victims.
47:01 Speaker 04 Versus condolences in a in an area where there's no legal obligation to make those payments in the first place.
47:07 Speaker 06 So that's a very different type of monetary payment.
47:11 Speaker 04 Well, yes and no. Essentially, it's a person's life. And, I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that there's an empathy in the number that you come up with, in the amount that you pay for someone's life.
47:25 Speaker 06 I totally get what you're saying. The $2,500, I think it's any amount of money. If I told you 10, would you feel better about it?
47:32 Speaker 04 I'd feel a little bit better.
47:33 Speaker 06 You would?
47:34 Speaker 04 I think so.
47:34 Speaker 06 What does it get you, though? In the end, $10,000 doesn't buy anything more back than what you lost.
47:40 Speaker 04 I don't know what 10,000 gets you exactly in Afghanistan, but my assumption is that it gets you a lot more than 2,500.
47:46 Speaker 06 But does that really help you? Is that really what you want?
47:49 Speaker 03 Is the money unimportant to you, really? It sounds like the money's really. I'm not a victim, so I don't know that I can answer that. To me, if it happened to my family--
47:57 Speaker 04 And at this point, Marla told us this story about how, before she got into this line of work--
48:01 Speaker 03 I had several friends who were journalists.
48:04 Speaker 04 One of those friends was a man named Chris Hondros.
48:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, he's a photojournalist. He was a photojournalist.
48:08 Speaker 04 And back in 2011, Chris was on assignment in Libya, moving with a rebel group, when they were fired upon, and Chris was killed.
48:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:17 Speaker 04 And Marla says, when she found out that happened--
48:19 Speaker 03 I wanted someone to explain to me why that happened. I mean--
48:26 Speaker 03 So--
48:28 Speaker 03 I just wanted someone to explain. I didn't, you know, like, I knew his family wasn't going to get any money. I knew that these guys that shot a rocket-propelled grenade at him weren't going to care. No one was going to explain, but I wanted that.
48:41 Speaker 01 And the money then becomes an occasion for you to say, like, not just, "I'm sorry, but here's what happened." It's the "here's what happened" part?
48:50 Speaker 03 I think it's the token that's given with the apology and with the explanation.
48:55 Speaker 01 But it's the apology and the explanation that matter to you?
48:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's why we call it amends, making amends.
49:12 Speaker 02 One of the things that is true of money damages generally is there are desperate effort to find some common language between the party paying and the victim. Some esperanto for communicating the meaning of what's happened in a language that the other side knows matters.
49:35 Speaker 04 That's how John Whit puts it.
49:36 Speaker 02 Because we see it everywhere we look. We see not just apologies, sometimes not apologies at all, but we see the almighty dollar, which is both distressing, and also, we know it's meaningful.
49:49 Speaker 04 But the problem is, in order for that esperanto to work, it has to say the same meaning to both sides. Which, for John Tracy, wasn't really about the money at all. Or not just about the money. It was as much about the envelope that the money was in, or that there was a real person there to hand it to them.
50:06 Speaker 05 I wasn't the one who raided their house. I wasn't the one who killed their daughter. But most of them, they, you know, just wanted to look at somebody who's in a uniform and say, "You really messed with my life."
50:20 Speaker 04 And that opportunity is exactly what Abdullah Al Taisi
50:24 Speaker 07 ما هو ما هو الاعتذار ولا الدفع؟
50:27 Speaker 04 will never get.
50:28 Speaker 07 الدفع هو الاعتذار. ما يقال دفع الا باعتذار.
50:31 Speaker 04 His son was killed by a drone he never saw, operated by a man he'll never meet, on behalf of a country that still doesn't admit it was a mistake. And so the money he got
50:39 Speaker 07 مقتون عندنا بالدفعية لدوك مياها؟ لا كملها ما يكفي.
50:43 Speaker 04 Which in the end, he says, was the equivalent of 30,000 US dollars, way more than anyone got in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, all he can do, without anything else to go on, is just compare amounts.
50:55 Speaker 07 ولا اذار جانا واحد وطلب مننا قال هذا احنا قادم نستلم في المقتول عندنا في امريكا ما اكمل هذا واعتذاروا لنا كان كنا خلاص. He can accept that only if, if, if, if he gives, you know, like the payment equal to those, you know, to like in America. How you can compensate someone who, who lost his son, for example, killed.
51:20 Speaker 04 If the payment was, if the payment was equal?
51:22 Speaker 07 Yeah.
51:45 Speaker 04 Producer Matthew Keelte.
51:48 Speaker 01 Big thanks to Gregory Johnson, writer-at-large for BuzzFeed, who started us off on this adventure when he brought us the initial story.
51:55 Speaker 04 And also thanks to BuzzFeed editor Steve Kandel.
51:57 Speaker 01 And to Shaiib Almasawa for helping Matt organize that interview in Yemen, when the country's going through an awful lot of tumult and he was able to get interviews that we didn't think he could get.
52:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to him. Coming up,
52:13 Speaker 04 that's next.
52:18 Speaker 04 Radiolab is supported by Capital One.
52:20 Speaker 06 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/banki. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.
52:44 Speaker 04 Radiolab is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone Trade-In, any condition. It has the ultimate Pro Camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro. Requires Trade-In of iPhone 14 or higher excluding iPhone 16E and eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details.
53:20 Speaker 04 Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
53:45 Speaker 04 OK, now it's my left ear. Hello, Zorn. How are you? Good. How are you doing? I'm good. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Rod.
53:50 Speaker 01 I'm Robert Krulwich.
53:51 Speaker 04 This is Radiolab. And so far, we've been talking about the value of our lives.
53:54 Speaker 01 And then the value of other people's lives.
53:56 Speaker 04 Next up, the value of...
54:02 Speaker 01 Everything.
54:03 Speaker 04 All of it.
54:04 Speaker 01 Everything.
54:05 Speaker 04 Everything. And by everything, of course, we mean... The value of nature. That's Carl Zimmer, science writer, regular blower of minds. So, we think of ecosystems as just kind of sitting there. Actually, they're doing things. They weren't doing...
54:21 Speaker 05 Doing them for us, we would have to pay to do them artificially. For example, cotton farms in South Texas. So, you know, the farmers are doing their thing.
54:31 Speaker 04 Like this guy.
54:32 Speaker 06 James Parker.
54:33 Speaker 05 Planting their cotton, they're collecting it.
54:35 Speaker 06 I farmed about, I don't know, usually five to six, 700 acres of cotton, so say 2,000 bales.
54:41 Speaker 05 They're doing what farmers do.
54:42 Speaker 06 I spend a lot of time on a tractor and you have to check your water every morning, every evening.
54:47 Speaker 05 Meanwhile, they have all this extra help in the air.
54:53 Speaker 06 Yes.
54:53 Speaker 05 They have bats.
54:54 Speaker 06 How many bats are out there, you really don't know.
54:57 Speaker 05 Flying all around. The bats eat the equivalent of 2/3 of their own weight in insects every night.
55:06 Speaker 04 Wow.
55:06 Speaker 06 They eat all night long, all kind of bugs.
55:09 Speaker 05 A whole bunch of pests that would otherwise be eating the cotton.
55:13 Speaker 04 Now, a few years ago.
55:14 Speaker 06 Guy named John Westfall.
55:16 Speaker 05 Did a calculation.
55:17 Speaker 04 Just to see how this arrangement was working out.
55:19 Speaker 06 He came out to my farm and did a, did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him and those girls were out there all hours of the night, listening to what the bats were saying and.
55:29 Speaker 05 Each year, the farmers collectively, they make about $4 or $5 million off of these farms.
55:35 Speaker 04 Question was, how much of this is because of the bats? Because, you know, bats are natural pesticides.
55:40 Speaker 06 You know, the more they're eating, the less I gotta spray.
55:42 Speaker 04 And here's what the scientists figured out.
55:44 Speaker 05 Out of $4 to $5 million, it was around $700,000 that you could ascribe to the bats.
55:51 Speaker 06 Uh, it's just beautiful.
55:52 Speaker 04 Wow. I mean, it does make me think that if you're those farmers, you should be compensating the bats somehow.
56:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, yeah. It does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value, that nature has that we generally just totally ignore.
56:13 Speaker 04 But we talked to a guy who didn't ignore it. Uh, my name is Robert Costanza. In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute limit. Yes. So the question was, what's the value of all of these ecosystem services globally?
56:26 Speaker 05 All the services on earth.
56:28 Speaker 04 You know, it's bugs eating leaves.
56:29 Speaker 01 Worms turning the soil.
56:30 Speaker 04 Beetles chewing tree stumps.
56:32 Speaker 01 Coral reefs protecting cities during storms.
56:34 Speaker 04 Everything. We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done around the country and the world. Like that bat study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms, they looked at.
56:43 Speaker 05 Tropical forests, rivers and lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean, woodlands, temperate forests.
56:50 Speaker 01 Goes on and on.
56:50 Speaker 05 Wastelands.
56:51 Speaker 04 This must be some Excel spreadsheet.
56:53 Speaker 05 It's it's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from hell.
56:56 Speaker 01 It can get tricky. So Costanza and his colleagues took all these different studies, summed them together, did a whole bunch of math, and
57:04 Speaker 01 came up with a number.
57:05 Speaker 05 Which in today's dollars is 142.7 trillion dollars per year of services. And that's more than all of the gross national products of the world. And that's how valuable the services of nature are.
57:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, let me ask you, like, I get I get the way this would work with a bat, like, the bat's eating the bugs, but like, how do you do it with like, with like a like a field or something like, do you just walk through and you're like, oh, that's 20 bucks of services, that's 50, like, how do you even figure out what the services are?
57:40 Speaker 05 Well, they they came up with a list. So it the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about, because different ecosystems provide different services. For example, a salt marsh.
57:56 Speaker 06 And we are in the water now.
57:58 Speaker 01 Yes, we're in the water.
58:00 Speaker 04 What is it? Wait, so a salt marsh, is it like the Florida wetlands, but salty? I suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is.
58:05 Speaker 05 Salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast.
58:08 Speaker 04 Got it.
58:08 Speaker 01 Yep, we're standing in about a foot of water here. We're quickly approaching high tide. We sent one of our producers, Simon Adler, to a nearby salt marsh.
58:16 Speaker 04 Partially to Hazen.
58:17 Speaker 06 Your boots are much more waterproof.
58:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
58:20 Speaker 01 But really, to talk to this guy. My name is Adam Welchel, and I'm the Director of Science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut. And Adam gave Simon a kind of inventory of Some of the services provided by coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that are provided over time.
58:36 Speaker 05 One of the things it does is it takes water that's coming in from inland, and it's laden with all sorts of pollutants, all sorts of bad stuff.
58:45 Speaker 04 The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle. And then, very often, the marsh grass will suck up that water into the roots.
58:53 Speaker 05 And clean it.
58:54 Speaker 06 Yep.
58:55 Speaker 01 So you could ask very simply.
58:57 Speaker 00 How much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean?
59:01 Speaker 06 One second. Well, there is one other study I want.
59:04 Speaker 04 Adam Welshell said that scientists in New England have already figured that out.
59:07 Speaker 06 Uh, for flood control, water supply protection, uh, pollution control. It's roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year.
59:16 Speaker 01 Then you gotta add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plate.
59:20 Speaker 06 $338 annually per acre.
59:22 Speaker 04 Then there are the bird watchers that buy lattes that support the local economy.
59:25 Speaker 06 $490 per hectare.
59:28 Speaker 04 And then there's habitat provisioning.
59:30 Speaker 01 The list goes on and on and on and on.
59:32 Speaker 00 You do get kind of obsessed with it and you start like, you start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously. Um, and, uh, it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before.
59:46 Speaker 05 There's this galling element though, or this aspect, like when I first came across the.
59:50 Speaker 04 At this point, our producer, Tim Howard, jumped into the interview and you'll also hear our producer, Soren Wheeler, in just a second.
59:56 Speaker 05 I do feel like in an example like the salt marsh, which cleans water, that's all reliant on people being there that need the water. So if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?
1:00:07 Speaker 04 But Tim, haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get, like if you make the aesthetic argument, which is that nature should be, should be preserved for its own sake. There's a whole category of humanity that just doesn't respond to that argument. It's this becomes a way to talk across the aisle.
1:00:25 Speaker 05 But it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of a, a, a piddly value.
1:00:32 Speaker 00 It can't really be infinite value. I mean, what's that mean?
1:00:34 Speaker 05 Like a mother's love. You don't think your mother's love is priceless? I mean, you know.
1:00:37 Speaker 00 Okay. I, I totally accept that there is this sort of priceless aspect of nature. But if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make. If somebody comes to you and says, okay, you've got these lovely mangroves. Now, uh, it turns out that, that the, the sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aquaculture.
1:01:03 Speaker 04 Because shrimp farms need lots of seawater, so it makes sense to put them by the sea.
1:01:06 Speaker 00 We're going to put in these farms. We're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in. Tax revenue. If you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving, that might be a really powerful argument. Now, into that kind of a discussion, you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there very quietly, doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things. In fact, they've done these kind of calculations. And in some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp. So it's stupid.
1:01:45 Speaker 00 It's just stupid, in a very basic sense, to wantonly replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture.
1:01:53 Speaker 04 Is that a hypothetical situation?
1:01:55 Speaker 06 No.
1:01:56 Speaker 04 That's a conversation you have.
1:01:57 Speaker 06 That's what we're asked.
1:01:58 Speaker 01 This is Glenn Marie Lang. She's an environmental economist for the World Bank. And she says very often, she finds herself in exactly this kind of conversation.
1:02:06 Speaker 06 Particularly, you know, I work for the World Bank, so our primary clients are governments.
1:02:12 Speaker 04 Philippines, Vietnam.
1:02:13 Speaker 06 And when you're talking to a Minister of Finance and saying, you know what?
1:02:16 Speaker 04 I know, jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value.
1:02:21 Speaker 06 They'll say, well, yeah, that's true, but that means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget. So you've got to really make a strong argument about the benefits. That's really where the rubber hits the road.
1:02:34 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, that's it.
1:02:35 Speaker 01 Here's the counterargument. It comes from Doug McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
1:02:41 Speaker 06 The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money. And then we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.
1:02:51 Speaker 04 What do you do in a situation, he says, where, say, a bunch of rivers are running dry and they're, quote, "depreciating in value"?
1:02:57 Speaker 06 You know, by the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets. That makes me feel really uncomfortable.
1:03:04 Speaker 01 He says, just kind of a weird way to think about nature.
1:03:07 Speaker 06 We had a proposal here in the state of California to make gay marriage legal. And economists had a look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California. Well, it's good to know that. I appreciate having that information in front of me. However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation, and I would say that when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state. They're thinking about a different set of values.
1:03:41 Speaker 03 On the other hand, I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these services, basically they don't get counted.
1:03:53 Speaker 04 They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn Marie Lang. And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.
1:04:13 Speaker 06 The parable of the bees.
1:04:14 Speaker 01 We heard this first from writer J.B. McKinnon, who says, "The story begins..."
1:04:19 Speaker 06 In Mao County in central China, rural area, fairly remote.
1:04:23 Speaker 01 Lush green mountains filled with apple orchards.
1:04:26 Speaker 06 And apple orcharding was the main business.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 And according to J.B., in the 1990s...
1:04:32 Speaker 06 The wild bees of Mao County slowly started to disappear.
1:04:38 Speaker 06 And there's a few different reasons given for that. It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.
1:04:48 Speaker 01 But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one, because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market-based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples. So they started spraying pesticide.
1:05:01 Speaker 06 Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others. End result is the bees stopped buzzing in Mao County.
1:05:08 Speaker 01 Which, if you are an apple farmer, that's a disaster.
1:05:12 Speaker 06 As bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar, they are dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then you don't get fertile flowers. To turn into to turn into fruit.
1:05:31 Speaker 01 And obviously, if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income.
1:05:38 Speaker 04 So what do you do?
1:05:39 Speaker 06 You're an apple farmer and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers. And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand. In Mandarin Chinese, we say zhen gong chou fen. So basically, that means a manual pollination.
1:05:58 Speaker 01 This is Harold Thibault.
1:05:59 Speaker 06 I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper Le Monde.
1:06:03 Speaker 01 A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao County. So he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car and
1:06:09 Speaker 06 We drive for like five or six hours until we reach this village, Nan Xin.
1:06:14 Speaker 01 Tiny little village.
1:06:16 Speaker 06 Like only a few houses. And then we took a smaller road between the the fields. And we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the in the trees, like on the apple trees. Straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches, men and women that I've seen in in photos in any case.
1:06:35 Speaker 01 Harold and his friend took pictures. And if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding a little brush.
1:06:41 Speaker 06 This little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.
1:06:48 Speaker 01 And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen. And then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen. They dip their brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again. And then they dip the brush back in again and they paint again and then dip again and they paint.
1:07:03 Speaker 06 To make sure that that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.
1:07:10 Speaker 01 We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.
1:07:13 Speaker 06 It was very strange to see humans doing the the job of the bees.
1:07:19 Speaker 04 God, what a pain in the ass that sounds like.
1:07:21 Speaker 06 Yeah, the image of this of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world. World through environmental circles. And it, the message that it seemed to send was that, you know, this is what happens if you, if you lose biodiversity. You end up standing in the trees, doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing.
1:07:42 Speaker 04 For free.
1:07:43 Speaker 06 For free. Those people are just like human bees.
1:07:48 Speaker 04 But then this guy enters the story. This is Yin Sun Chen.
1:07:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, human bees.
1:07:52 Speaker 04 Four years ago, he traveled to Mao County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County. But what he discovered weirdly was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.
1:08:07 Speaker 06 More production, more production. This can be confirmed. There, there are more production for hand pollination, uh, apple tree than a bee pollination apple tree. Humans are more efficient.
1:08:20 Speaker 04 Really?
1:08:21 Speaker 01 You mean the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?
1:08:23 Speaker 06 Yes.
1:08:24 Speaker 04 A lot better.
1:08:25 Speaker 06 Fruit production went up thirty percent.
1:08:27 Speaker 01 That's what the farmers told Yin Sun Chen, which is kind of.
1:08:30 Speaker 06 Amazing. The only word I remember, amazing. Because I think hand pollination can pollinate more thoroughly. Uh, they can pollinate every flower.
1:08:40 Speaker 04 And bees don't pollinate every flower?
1:08:42 Speaker 06 Bees are a little bit, uh, you know, they're a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating.
1:08:48 Speaker 04 You're so polite.
1:08:49 Speaker 06 They don't like it if it's cold. They don't like it if it's damp. Uh, they don't like it if it's windy.
1:08:53 Speaker 01 In all those cases, bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off.
1:08:57 Speaker 06 But send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom. And, and they're gonna do it. And there was the additional benefit of the people that you paid. They'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries, they'd spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.
1:09:14 Speaker 04 So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are and this whole parable of biodiversity.
1:09:20 Speaker 01 And it turns out maybe the lesson's just the opposite. That actually, we don't need bees and maybe we never did.
1:09:26 Speaker 06 If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that, that, uh, some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places. Uh, or that we might even do better to, to take care of those processes ourselves. Right, so. Let me find my notes about the wages exactly.
1:09:47 Speaker 04 But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold Tabo told us that when he visited Nanchen.
1:09:51 Speaker 06 I talked with one farmer. His name is Zhang Zegao, he's thirty eight. And, uh, he said in his. The hand pollination might disappear in a few years.
1:10:06 Speaker 01 Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.
1:10:10 Speaker 06 The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them. Basically, it's not efficient economically to do the hand pollination anymore. That's what a lot of farmers say.
1:10:22 Speaker 04 Now they're likely thinking, damn, we need those bees back.
1:10:25 Speaker 06 Right, yeah.
1:10:26 Speaker 01 Problem is.
1:10:27 Speaker 06 There are no bees in those villages anymore.
1:10:30 Speaker 01 One farmer told Harold, beekeepers in other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used. As for when wild bees might come back?
1:10:40 Speaker 06 Well, for this, we have no idea. It's very hard to make a prediction. If you ask the farmers, they're like, I don't know.
1:10:51 Speaker 01 Here's where that story leaves me. It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go. Putting a value, even a precise and thoughtful value on a bee or on a pound of pesticide, you do it and you think you're smart. But then the value changes. The bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing, to being worth everything, all within a few years. This is what markets do. They swing back, forth, and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can. So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong. That's why economics is a dumb.
1:11:26 Speaker 04 Well, no, no, I want to argue the other side for a second. Nowhere in this story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, you know what, the bees do have value. Here's the number. In fact, you know what, Carl, when we were talking to him, told us. You know, there have been estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees is $190 billion. So that's globally, right? But still, there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero.
1:11:53 Speaker 01 But remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued more. Then bees go down, bees go up.
1:11:57 Speaker 04 I get it.
1:11:58 Speaker 01 You have to have a lot of numbers in your head.
1:11:59 Speaker 04 But here's what I like about this idea is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking. You can't just say, don't do that. I mean, that's the thing that like conservationists say, don't, don't, don't. But if you say, don't do that because here's the value.
1:12:15 Speaker 01 Here's the loss.
1:12:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, here's the loss. Well, then that actually gives the whole precautionary don't thing some teeth.
1:12:21 Speaker 01 Except for this, that if you go business-y on nature.
1:12:26 Speaker 01 And you're wrong.
1:12:28 Speaker 03 There are irreversible abilities.
1:12:30 Speaker 01 That's how environmental economist Glenn Marie Lang puts it.
1:12:33 Speaker 03 This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems, and what we produce. You smash your car, hey, someone can build a new one. If you lose the bees, in many instances, you cannot bring them back.
1:12:46 Speaker 04 So the question we got to is, is there another way to think about the value of nature, I mean, a way that's not economic and therefore short sighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty, because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?
1:13:02 Speaker 05 The best I was able to do, thinking about this.
1:13:05 Speaker 01 Writer J.B. McKinnon again.
1:13:06 Speaker 05 Was when it struck me that, in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diversity, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own, that we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we, as humans, are able to draw. And that when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves.
1:13:49 Speaker 05 In a sense, we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to dream.
1:14:12 Speaker 01 J.B. McKinnon's book is called The Once and Future World. He's written many, but this one is my fave.
1:14:17 Speaker 04 Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's reporting in The New York Times on this topic, is really what got us launched into this whole thing.
1:14:24 Speaker 01 And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Nadler, whose production assistance was invaluable. That was him.
1:14:29 Speaker 04 Freezing his ass off in the marsh.
1:14:31 Speaker 01 I talked so long, he nearly died.
1:14:36 Speaker 01 His toes fell off, I think. Anyway. Thank you, Simon.
1:14:41 Speaker 04 Thank you, Simon. And thank you, guys, for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.
1:14:43 Speaker 01 I'm Robert Rolich.
1:14:44 Speaker 04 We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron 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 Nainasambandan,
1:15:12 Speaker 06 Matt Kielty, Mona Margaucher, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angela Mercado, and Sophie Sami.
1:15:40 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. 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.
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