# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Rachael is a producer for Radiolab. She started on the show’s Special Projects Unit, where she worked on Radiolab Presents: Gonads and Radiolab Presents: G. Now she mostly spends her time writing about herself in the third person, or trying to craft a masterful pun that makes everyone roll their eyes. Before joining Radiolab, she studied food science and worked as a cheese curd flipper, pastry chef, and egg scrambler. She also spent some time hanging out at NPR, Politico, and Slate.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.body
If you’ve ever lost someone, or watched a medical drama in the last 15 years, you’ve probably heard of The Five Stages of Grief. They’re sort of the world’s worst consolation prize for loss. But last year, we began wondering… Where did these stages come from in the first place?

Turns out, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But the story is much, much more complicated than that. T hose stages of grieving? They actually started as stages of dying. After learning that, producer Rachael Cusick tumbled into a year-long journey through the life and work of the incredibly complicated and misunderstood woman who single-handedly changed the way all of us face dying, and the way we deal with being left behind.

Special Note: Our friends over at Death Sex and Money have put together a very special companion to this story, featuring Rachael talking about this story with her grandmother.  Check it out here.

This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, with production help from Carin Leong.

This story wouldn’t have been possible without the folks you heard from in the episode, and the many, many people who touched this story, including: Anne Adams, Andrew Aronson, Audrey Gordon, Barbara Hogenson, Basit Qari, Bill Weese, Bob McGan, Carey Gauzens, Clifford Edwards, Cristina McGinniss, Dorothy Holinger, Frank Ostaseski, Ira Byock, Jamie Munson, Jessica Weisberg, Jillian Tullis, Joanna Treichler, Jonathan Green, Ken Bridbord, Ladybird Morgan, Laurel Braitman, Lawrence Lincoln, Leah Siegel, Liese Groot, Linda Mount, Lyn Frumkin, Mark Kuczewski, Martha Twaddle, Peter Nevraumont, Rosalie Roder, Sala Hilaire, Stefan Haupt, Stephanie Riley, Stephen Connor, and Tracie Hunte.

Special thanks to all the folks who shared music for this episode, including:

Lisa Stoll, who shared her Alpine horn music with us for this episode. You can hear more of her music here.

Cliff Edwards, who shared original music from Deanna Edwards.

The Martin Hayes Quartet, who shared the last bit of music you hear in the piece that somehow puts a world of emotion into one beautiful tune.

And an extra special thank you to the folks over at Stanford University - Ben Stone, David Magnus, Karl Lorenz, Maren Monsen -  the caretakers of Elisabeth’s archival collection who made it possible to rummage through their library from halfway across the country. You can read more about the collection here.

To learn more about Elisabeth and the folks who are furthering her work, you can visit the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation website here.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].about.body
View the Episode Archive »

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes | RSS.

#smartbinge Radiolab podcasts

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
The remarkable story of the woman who showed us all how to stare down death: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.transcript
JAD ABUMRAD: Before we start, I just want to let you know there is a moment or two of strong language in this story.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

LATIF NASSER: And I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. And today we have the story of a journey, you could call it.

JAD: Yeah. Sort of The Journey, really.

LATIF: Because it's—it's The Journey because it's all of our journeys. It's a journey we're all on at some point.

JAD: Yes. And the person who is gonna take us on this journey today—you're on your own after this—but today is our very own producer Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL CUSICK: So back in the early-2000s when I was five years old, my favorite thing on TV was this infomercial.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, infomercial: Are you ready for the wildest paint set you've ever seen? It's the amazing Rainbow Art Set! Painting has never been this easy, or ...]

RACHAEL: For The Rainbow Art Set.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, infomercial: Create amazing drawings and works of art instantly!]

RACHAEL: Whenever that commercial came on, I lost my shit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, infomercial: Now that's magic! As easy as 1-2-3. Simply dip, dab and draw.]

RACHAEL: It was this little foam brush that you could swipe across these six wheels of colors, stacked like Oreos, and then you could paint rainbow dragonflies and rainbow bicycles and rainbow palm trees. And amazingly ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, infomercial: With Rainbow Art, look! No splatter, no drips, and the colors dry instantly. Amazing!]

RACHAEL: The colors never bled into each other. I begged for that art kit for months. And eventually for my birthday, I got one. I remember painting with that thing for hours, twirling the foam brush across a blank page into circles and butterflies and butterflies made of circles, each swipe this perfect little tidy rainbow of colors.

RACHAEL: And those pictures, they were cards, really. I would tape them to the bed frame where my mom slept while she recovered from chemo, while she was put in hospice, and when she eventually died when I was six. After she died, I don't remember seeing her body, I don't remember crying, I don't remember any of the eulogies, and I don't remember what we had for dinner that first night that her seat at the table was officially empty. But I do know that we weren't supposed to talk about the sadness of that empty chair.

RACHAEL: And during those years, I really remember sitting at our dinner table, looking around at my older siblings and the grown-ups in our lives, and they just looked so normal. And I know it didn't feel normal to them and it wasn't this simple. But to me, as this, like, little sister looking up to everybody, it looked like they had figured out how to handle this thing that had happened to us. And I—I tried to act normal too, but this mess inside me would just snowball. Like, I would sneak cookies in my pockets and binge eat them until it hurt. And I would slam doors and burst into tears so easily. It just felt like I spent my childhood fighting off these feelings and failing, and fighting and failing, and thinking there must be something wrong with me.

RACHAEL: But then one day when I was older, in my late teens I think, I finally found what I thought was a way out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Grief often comes in five stages.]

RACHAEL: I'm not sure when or how exactly I came across it, but ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're gonna go through what we call the five stages of grief.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Five stages of grief.]

RACHAEL: It was this five-part checklist.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There are five stages of grief.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What are you talking about?]

RACHAEL: You might have heard of these stages. The idea is pretty simple. It's basically that in the wake of losing a loved one, you'll go through a series of feelings. First ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Stage one ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Denial.]

RACHAEL: Denial.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Denial.]

RACHAEL: Then stage two.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Step two, that's anger.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Anger.]

RACHAEL: Then bargaining.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bargaining.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Okay.]

RACHAEL: After that is ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Depression.]

RACHAEL: Depression. And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Finally, acceptance.]

RACHAEL: ... last but not least, acceptance. I think when I first came across the stages, they were really like the first time I had heard this word "grief” kind of underlined as, like, this thing to go through. Like, oh! Maybe that door slamming the other week, maybe that was the anger stage. And finally, those things were okay to feel. Like, they were these designated stops on a bus to acceptance. And so I just let myself be angry and then I'd be depressed. But anger always came back, and the feelings, they just kept coming at the wrong times and repeating. And I felt like I should have been over this. Like, it was exhausting, and it felt like when it came to grief, I just couldn't do anything right. The stages, they became these, like, supermodel tight jean versions of quote-unquote "normal" grieving that I couldn't fit into. And I was finally just like, "Fuck this."

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Like, who the hell sold me this crock of shit?

LATIF: [laughs] Right.

RACHAEL: And I remember, like, the night I felt like I was, like, interrogating Google. I was like, "Who gave me the stages?"

LATIF: Like, "I want to—I want to strangle them!"

RACHAEL: I—yeah. And so then I went over—one thing I do a lot when I, like, find something or someone that, like, I don't like is I go to Google Images.

RACHAEL: In my head, I'm picturing, like, this slicked-back, sleazy car salesman with, like, a grinning smile and, like, a self help-y Dracula-caped monster. But when I googled the stages of grief, the first image I see is, this woman who's like—has this old, gray wispy hair and is wearing, like, this purple button-down shirt that's like the color of Barney the Dinosaur. And she's crouched in a pile of daisies. And I'm like, "This? Like, this is the lady?"

JAD: [laughs] And you were like, "Wait!"

RACHAEL: I was like, I kind of want to borrow that shirt. Like, I was feeling so complicated. I remember staring at it for a few minutes, just thinking, "Who is she?"

RACHAEL: So the daisy lady, her name was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

LATIF: Oh! I've—I've heard that name before. Maybe?

RACHAEL: I hadn't, but at a certain point in time, she was pretty famous. And actually, the thing that made her famous is not studying how people grieve, it was studying how people die.

LATIF: Huh!

RACHAEL: And I was like, "Okay, I'm curious." And so I started digging around. Problem is, there's endless crap about the stages, but not really any one place where you can go to learn about Elisabeth and her story. So I ended up on this very odd journey that's taken over my life for the past year. I spend my days and nights just digging through archives, reading and listening to whatever interviews or talks with her I could find, and calling up anyone I thought might have anything to tell me about her. And what I was eventually able to piece together was a story of this incredibly complicated woman who single-handedly changed the way we all face dying. And the way that we all deal with being left behind.

JAD: Well, all right!

LATIF: Yes.

RACHAEL: Okay, okay. [laughs]

LATIF: Take us on the journey.

JAD: Take—yeah, let's go. Let's do it.

RACHAEL: Okay, so Elisabeth died back in 2004, but I called the photographer of that daisy photo

KEN ROSS: Hi, my name's Ken Ross. I'm the son of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and I'm also the president of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation.

RACHAEL: Growing up, like, did everybody know her, and then you're like, "Gosh, my mom's famous for dying, and I just want to blend in like a normal teenager?"

KEN ROSS: Oh, yeah, totally. It was just hugely embarrassing when she's on the cover of People Magazine, or especially when she was on the cover of Playboy. You know, things ...

RACHAEL: She was on the cover of Playboy?

KEN ROSS: Yeah. I mean not obviously, you know, her picture.

RACHAEL: Not a centerfold. [laughs]

RACHAEL: So let me back up a little bit and tell you how Elisabeth Kübler-Ross became the face of dying. She was born in Switzerland.

KEN ROSS: In Zurich.

RACHAEL: In 1926. And she was the first of triplets.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And so I grew up being very famous.]

RACHAEL: That's Elisabeth, by the way.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: We had big billboards.]

RACHAEL: I guess it must have been exciting back then to see a triplet? But this was so much of who she was, because her parents and, like, everyone in their world couldn't tell them apart.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I cannot remember anybody who knew that I was me. We were the famous triplets.]

KEN ROSS: And so, you know, it really set this thing off in my mother that she had to find her own voice.

RACHAEL: And so as she grew up, she kind of became this rebel of the family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Then my father was a very authoritarian Swiss. You know, he told you what to order in a restaurant, what to eat, when to come home. Everything was his control. And I said, "No, thank you." And so I left home.]

KEN ROSS: She joined a peace group the day the war ended.

RACHAEL: World War II.

KEN ROSS: She would have been, what, 19 years old?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Went all the way to Russia and back.]

RACHAEL: In all these war-torn villages and, like, goes to a concentration camp. And after a few years, she comes home, signs up for medical school. And she's in medical school standing over a cadaver when she meets her husband.

KEN ROSS: My soon-to-be dad.

RACHAEL: His name is Manny.

KEN ROSS: He was from Brooklyn.

RACHAEL: They fall in love.

KEN ROSS: My parents got married. She had graduated a year ahead of my dad, and she was put in charge of seven villages out in the country.

RACHAEL: And she's like the only town doctor.

KEN ROSS: And my mother loved it. She had a little moped, and she'd go from village to village, fixing up farmers. And being a Swiss country doctor, you know, you don't go in and spend five minutes with a patient and leave. She would sit on a corner of the bed with the patient, and she would hold their hand.

RACHAEL: And oftentimes, she'd be a witness to death.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: When somebody is dying, the attempt is to keep them at home. And the family, including the children, are preparing themselves slowly to face the fact that this loved person is going to die soon.]

RACHAEL: According to Ken, that was really meaningful to her.

KEN ROSS: But my dad had other plans, and so we kind of dragged my mom back, reluctantly, to New York.

RACHAEL: The family moves around a bit. Eventually, Elisabeth becomes a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago. And one day she's sitting in her office, when these four theological students walk in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Theology students had a research project on crisis and human life. And four of the whole class have chosen dying as the biggest crisis human beings have to face. But you can't do research on this. You can't verify it. You can't make double blind studies.]

RACHAEL: They were like, "We don't know what to do."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: They were stuck.]

RACHAEL: But Elisabeth was just like, "Why don't we just go talk to someone who's dying?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And this seemed very simple, and since I was a physician at the hospital I volunteered to get such a patient.]

RACHAEL: So she starts going to each floor of the hospital, asking the nurses and the doctors if she can talk to any of their terminal patients. But ...

KEN ROSS: She was universally told on every floor and every ward that there was no dying patients.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: In this big, big hospital, there was no dying patient. Nobody.]

RACHAEL: And she was like, "Okay, this is really weird. Like, what are the odds that in one of the biggest cities in America, in a world-renowned hospital, there are no dying patients?" So she just started walking the halls on her own, going room to room.

KEN ROSS: So she always had these Hawaiian Aloha shirts on, she had her Birkenstocks.

RACHAEL: Tiny little woman, walking down these long hallways with green tiles, shiny floors and bad lighting.

KEN ROSS: So my mother walked to a few rooms and okay, there you got a broken leg. They got this, they got that.

RACHAEL: But still no dying people. Next day, she walks the halls again. Same thing. And then one day she gets to the end of this hallway. She looks in the room, and there in the bed is an old man who's dying.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And I entered this old man's room, and I just babbled out and told him that I wanted to learn what it's like to be very sick and dying. Does he feel like talking? I just had to get it out. And this man looked at me with a big amazed, surprised, very happy face, very relieved. And put his arms out and said, "Please sit down now." This welcome of this old man was something I'll never forget. I saw his pleading eyes, I heard him say, "Please sit down now." I saw his arms stretched out, truly an open welcome to sit down now. ]

RACHAEL: But Elisabeth ...

KEN ROSS: She's like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. We need to have the students here."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I had walked miles. I had asked dozens of people. I was on the telephone, I was begging, I was frustrated. I was insulted. I was not about to give up my first patient to interview him in front of my students. And I walked out, and I said very grateful to him, "I'm going to see you tomorrow at one o'clock." Tomorrow at one o'clock came. I went in there with my four students, terribly proud that I had a patient. The patient was on a lot of pillows, and oxygen tent and he could hardly breathe. And he looked at us with the same kind of pitiful look that he had on his face the day before when I left. And he said, "Thank you for trying anyway." And he died about half an hour later.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: We were never able to listen to him. We didn't hear what he really wanted to share with another human being.]

RACHAEL: This moment, it grabbed hold of Elisabeth and just wouldn't let her go, because that man, he wanted to talk about dying, but Elisabeth missed it. And really, at that time in America, we were all missing it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ladies and gentlemen, nowhere in the world except in the Americas is it possible for any nation to devote a great sector of its effort to life conservation rather than life destruction.]

RACHAEL: We were waging a war and the enemy was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Cancer.]

RACHAEL: And smallpox.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Diphtheria.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Syphilis, whooping cough.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tuberculosis.]

RACHAEL: And at this moment in time, we finally had some ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Serums, vaccines.]

RACHAEL: ... weapons in our arsenal.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The powerful and invisible x-rays.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Penicillin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The new, improved iron lung]

RACHAEL: And the army we recruited for this war on death ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The soldiers of the treatment front.]

RACHAEL: ... were, of course ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The doctors.]

RACHAEL: ... the doctors.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: For on him now rests all responsibility.]

RACHAEL: And in the heat of that fight, the possibility of defeat became something you weren't even supposed to acknowledge.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I think there's a great attempt to deny the reality of death in this country.]

RACHAEL: This was a time when, like, doctors didn't even tell patients, like, what their diagnoses were.

KEN ROSS: In the mid-1960s, I've heard that doctors did not tell their patients they were dying of cancer. They would say, "Well, there's a spot on the X-ray. We're doing more tests."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The families tell us, "I know he has cancer, but don't tell him." The doctor tells us, "I know he has cancer, but he doesn't know, so don't tell him." And the patient tells us, "I know I have cancer, but my family and my doctor don't want to talk about it." So everybody plays kind of a conspiracy of silence.]

JAD: I get—I get it on some level because, you know, the Hippocratic Oath is, if you push it all the way, is like you don't—you don't do harm, right? Like, you don't do anything to hurt the patient. Death is like a failure.

RACHAEL: Exactly.

JAD: And so you don't—you don't lean into that.

RACHAEL: Yeah. And maybe they saw it as this act of compassion, but in the process, the experiences of the people who are actually dying—and really, the people themselves—got pushed aside.

KEN ROSS: All the dying people were at the backsides of the hospitals, you know, floors people didn't use much.

RACHAEL: Wait. Is that really something that happened?

KEN ROSS: Oh, absolutely, yeah. They were put in the farthest corners of the hospital. So the medical staff didn't even want to see them or walk by the room to be reminded that they have dying patients.

RACHAEL: Oh!

RACHAEL: But after Elisabeth found that man and saw how desperately he wanted to talk to someone about what he was going through ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: This started the stone rolling.]

RACHAEL: Suddenly, she needed to find out, like, what did the dying want to tell us?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: What kind of fears, fantasies, turmoils they go through. What kind of hopes and expectations perhaps they wish to share.]

RACHAEL: And she just decided, like, I'm gonna start a seminar where we find dying patients, and we talk to them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: You know, let's get as close to them as they allow us to come. Let's sit with them and listen to them as long as they allow us to sit and listen.]

KEN ROSS: She would just start going to these rooms and, you know, nurses would try to kick her out, doctors would try to kick her out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: It took an average of 10 hours searching for a doctor who gave us permission to see one single patient.]

RACHAEL: So she teamed up with the Theology Department of the school.

DENNIS KLASS: We weren't looking for a particular thing. We were just looking for somebody with a terminal diagnosis.

RACHAEL: This is Dennis Klass, he was Elisabeth's research assistant.

DENNIS KLASS: And there were four research fellows. I was only one of them.

RACHAEL: Elisabeth's team would start going into people's rooms and saying, "We want to talk to you about dying."

DENNIS KLASS: You know, if they said yes, I'd say, "Okay." And then I would just start wheeling her through the corridors down to the seminar room.

KEN ROSS: The patient would come in ...

RACHAEL: And there's a smaller room where Elisabeth and a chaplain—a chaplain often came to be able to, like, mediate these conversations about faith. So Elisabeth, a chaplain and a patient are sitting in this tiny room.

KEN ROSS: Behind a two-way mirror.

RACHAEL: And then on the other side of that glass, there's a group of people watching and listening, because Elisabeth made these interviews open to students, to other doctors, to cleaning staff. Anyone in the hospital who wanted to come and hear these voices.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Which the patient is fully aware, naturally, that it's tape recorded and of the audience who he cannot see and hear, but they can see and hear us.]

RACHAEL: And then Elisabeth would start asking questions.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Does death mean anything special to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: No.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Like, all of us have a certain concept of what it's like.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: I don't know, I've never been dead.]

RACHAEL: That was a young dad diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at 30.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: I've lived a very good life so far. I mean, I've heard people say "Well, I'm 90 years old, I've had a full life." Well, this is true. Maybe they have.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: But you're 30 years old.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: But I think I have had a very good life for—for 30.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Yeah.]

RACHAEL: And much of what you hear is maybe less dramatic than you would have expected. But you have to remember the people listening in had never heard from someone who knew they were going to die.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: What's the worst that can happen?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: The worst that can happen to me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient: Well, I can die.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Yeah.]

RACHAEL: That was the only original recording I could find, but there were bunches of transcripts of these interviews, and so we asked people to come and read a few of them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: It is not the big things that count, when you're so sick and so weak. It's the little things that count.]

RACHAEL: And the thing you hear so clearly is that the patients themselves felt forgotten.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: Why in the world can't they talk to me? And why can't they tell you before they do certain procedures?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross voiceover: What really upset you that much yesterday morning?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: It's really very personal but I just have to tell you. Why don't they supply you an extra pair of pajamas when you go for this colon X-ray? When you get done, you're an absolute mess, and then you're supposed to sit in a chair and you just don't have any desire to sit in that chair.]

RACHAEL: Nobody had asked them even the most basic questions about what they wanted.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: I requested a chaplain in the middle of the night, and there was no night chaplain. I mean, this is just unbelievable to me. Unbelievable. Because when does a man need a chaplain? Only at night, believe me. That's the time when you get down with those boxing gloves and have it out with yourself. That's the time you need a chaplain. And if you were to show a chart, it would probably have a peak at about three o'clock.]

RACHAEL: Or about the pain they were feeling.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: Because, you see, if you have an illness and you have the pain, and you have grief that's unresolved, and you have a person that you were living with who meets every aspect of the grief business, you know, you say, "Well I don't know how I'm gonna live through this business of our daughter dying," and that sort of thing.]

RACHAEL: This guy was dying but had also lost his own daughter. And he talked about how his wife, when they talked about grief, or the fact that he was dying ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: The answer comes right back: "Keep your chin up, positive thinking."]

RACHAEL: And he said that being told that just made him feel totally alone.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Nobody knew who was behind the medical diagnosis. The implication was nobody cares.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: I have thought of the worthlessness that, if I were to die tomorrow, my wife would go on perfectly normal.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross voiceover: Just like nothing happened?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: That's the way I feel. She wouldn't miss a beat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: My sisters only come once a week, and sometimes they don't come at all. I need people, and then they don't come.]

RACHAEL: This was a young nun with Hodgkin's Disease, and she was in the hospital for the eleventh time because of it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: When people are sick, they stay away from you, you know? They think that you don't want to talk even though you can't respond. Even if they'd just sit there, you'd know you wouldn't be alone.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross voiceover: Why do you think loneliness is so dreadful to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: I think—no, I don't think I dread loneliness because there are times when I need to be alone. I—it isn't dying alone, it's the torture that pain can give you. Like, you just want to tear your hair out. You don't care if you don't bathe for days because it's just so much effort. You still want to be a person.]

RACHAEL: But in these conversations, there's also these surprising little moments of hope.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, patient voiceover: And certain things happen. You may watch a good TV program or listen to interesting conversation, and after a few minutes, you're not aware of the itching and the uncomfortable feeling. All these little things I call bonuses, and I figure that if I can have enough bonuses together one of these days, everything will be a bonus and it will stretch out to infinity. And every day will be a good day. So I don't worry too much.]

RACHAEL: I found these conversations to be so beautiful. But the doctors back in the '60s, they were not fans of what Elisabeth was trying to do.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Some of them became very rude and very inappropriate and very angry and called us names. We were called—what do you call that?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Vultures?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Vultures.]

KEN ROSS: And if you can imagine, I mean, doctors would literally spit on her in the hallways, and leave her nasty notes in her room. And so the administration called her in and they're like, "Hey, we don't want to be known as a death and dying hospital."

RACHAEL: But more and more people kept showing up to these seminars. And ...

KEN ROSS: Eventually, the hospital had to acknowledge that the classes were extremely popular. So after two years, they made it an official class of the school.

RACHAEL: Even though the doctors didn't want to deal with death in this way, outside the walls of this hospital ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Nixon: Our country is at war.]

RACHAEL: ... we were on the heels of two world wars.

[NEWS CLIP: Suicide pilots off Okinawa.]

RACHAEL: And then the Korean War. And by the time Elisabeth moved to Chicago ...

[NEWS CLIP: The sweaty jungles of South Vietnam.]

RACHAEL: The war in Vietnam had been rumbling for years at this point.

[NEWS CLIP: Many of your pals left you that day.]

RACHAEL: Over 600,000 Americans killed from war alone in two generations. Not to mention, all the other kinds of death there are in the world. Death was everywhere, and now here was this woman who really for the first time ever was helping us look directly at this thing that was happening all around us.

RACHAEL: Soon, Elisabeth starts putting these interviews and her thoughts about them down on paper.

KEN ROSS: After about 10:00, 10:30 at night the clicking would start.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

KEN ROSS: And she was typing with two fingers. I remember that click-click-click-click. You know, and she'd have her coffee and cigarettes. Probably some Swiss chocolate.

RACHAEL: And then in 1969, she published this book.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Dr. Ross's first book on death and dying is about to appear.]

RACHAEL: It's called On Death and Dying. And when she started going around and giving talks about the book ...

KEN ROSS: You know, it was like being on a rock tour.

RACHAEL: ... these talks ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: All of the people in this room are going to die.]

RACHAEL: ... they exploded.

KEN ROSS: You know, I was traveling with her all over the world. I think I went to 19, 20 different countries with her. Go outside and it was like a line, you know, down around the block. And it's like wow, she's sold out the Sydney Town Hall three nights in a row. 2,000 people, 5,000 people.

RACHAEL: And she was getting stopped in airport bathrooms, and people were slipping her books under the stalls to autograph. She was like the fucking Rolling Stones, man. Like, people rolled out the carpets for her.

JAD: [laughs] I'm imagining all of these—these young kids in the streets just going ...

RACHAEL: "Aaaaaah!"

JAD: Like—like the Beatles.

RACHAEL: "Elisabeth! Oh my God!" Start crying.

BALFOUR MOUNT: What struck me was one of the neurologists, a man I had a great esteem for, was standing on his tiptoes in the third line at the back. You know, it's like seeing Jesus carrying out the garbage, you know? I mean, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

RACHAEL: That's Balfour Mount. He's the founding father of palliative care in Canada. And he actually got into that work because he went to go see Elisabeth speak at one of those early lectures.

BALFOUR MOUNT: She was remarkable.

RACHAEL: Even though it was like a rock hall on the outside, on the inside of the seminars, things were intimate.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I think it did bother her.]

RACHAEL: She wouldn't stand behind the podium.

BALFOUR MOUNT: She chose to sit on the lecture table, swinging her legs back and forth.

RACHAEL: She would just talk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The horrible question that we're all afraid of, and that never happens, that the patient looks at you and says, "Am I going to die?"]

BALFOUR MOUNT: But when she started speaking in that little soft voice, she could have an audience in the palm of her hand for the next 45 minutes.

KEN ROSS: I mean, there was not a sound in the audience.

BALFOUR MOUNT: She just had them.

RACHAEL: Like, I didn't think it was possible to see a twinkle in someone's eyes from, like, fuzzy, YouTube archival videos, but when she speaks about this, you just see this superpower in her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And how do you react to the nasty, unpleasant, mean patient? What do you do? Honest.]

BALFOUR MOUNT: At one point, she was recalling a discussion with somebody, and she said, "And what do you think he was saying when I heard that?" And a young guy sitting close to me answered the question. He said he was afraid.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: That you come in peppy. That you come in and actually function.]

BALFOUR MOUNT: He was afraid.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Because you're going to rub in all the things that he's in the process of losing.]

BALFOUR MOUNT: Just the level of connection that she could generate.

RACHAEL: This is actually where we get to the stages. Like, the five stages. Because during these speeches ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And if we summarize, we have found that most of our patients go through similar stages.]

RACHAEL: ... Elisabeth would talk about this series of reactions she had seen her dying patients go through.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Then this denial will be replaced with a tremendous anger.]

RACHAEL: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: And this is true for all patients.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Without exceptions.]

RACHAEL: She started to use them to organize her talks.

KEN ROSS: She said back in the '60s, there was no common language. There was nothing they could talk about. So she said by creating five stages is something simple that any layman or any family member can remember.

BALFOUR MOUNT: Because I mean, look, it only takes you five minutes to learn the stages.

RACHAEL: My whole problem with the stages is that they were these tidy little boxes that my feelings would never fit into. And on top of that, there was this prescriptive order that never worked for me. But the thing is, when Elisabeth created these things, they were stages a dying person would go through, not a grieving person like me. And they weren't even as tidy and orderly as the world made them out to be. If you actually go back and read Elisabeth's book ...

RACHAEL: "On Death and Dying.' [yawns]

RACHAEL: ... which I did.

RACHAEL: I just had to take my retainer out for reading this.

RACHAEL: I'd read it every night before bed.

RACHAEL: So yeah, there's, like, how many chapters? Oh my God, I'm so bad with Roman numerals! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. 12 chapters. Only five stages.

RACHAEL: And the stages really just serve as these chapter headers.

RACHAEL: She starts each chapter with these poems.

RACHAEL: Like, when you get to those pages, it's really hard to find ...

RACHAEL: Just all these beautiful transcripts.

RACHAEL: ... one singular emotion.

RACHAEL: "These means will last for different periods of time, and ..."

RACHAEL: She says you could go through all these stages and then repeat some.

RACHAEL: "Replace each other or exist at times side by side."

RACHAEL: This book ...

RACHAEL: [Yawns] Da da da da da.

RACHAEL: ... is not a five-stage-shaped anything.

RACHAEL: What does the preface say? "I have worked with dying patients for the past two-and-a-half years, and this book will tell about the beginning of this experiment."

RACHAEL: And the first page literally says ...

RACHAEL: "It is not meant to be a textbook on how to manage dying patients, nor is it intended as a complete study of the psychology of dying. It is simply an account of a new and challenging opportunity to refocus on the patient as a human being."

RACHAEL: This is the goal of the book. Like, that is it.

RACHAEL: "I'm simply telling the stories of my patients."

RACHAEL: The real substance of this book ...

RACHAEL: “It is hoped that it will encourage others not to shy away from the hopelessly sick, but to get closer to them."

RACHAEL: The ocean of color and texture that the stages are tucked inside is not escaping death, it's standing in it, and not running away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: If we do not come and give them a pat on the back and say don't cry. It's not so bad. It is bad to leave everything and everybody you love.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Everything. Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: So if we help them be angry and help them be sad and let them express it and cry, and not say, "You're a man. It's not manly to cry."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I think this is terrible.]

RACHAEL: And, like, everything that you're feeling is okay, and none of it should fit into these boxes. But, like, the best thing that we can do for each other as human beings is to just sit there and listen to it as it's coming up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Just be you. If you feel like screaming, you scream. If you feel like crying, you cry. Don't try to follow a textbook or have somebody else tell you what to do. Trust yourself, your own natural emotions.]

RACHAEL: Like, when I read it, I shot up in bed.

JAD: Hmm.

RACHAEL: Because I was like, "Oh my God, this is it!" This book, it wasn't meant for me. It was for my mom. And, like, she never let herself feel those things. I think it was just because she was trying to fight it for so long and be there for us. And, like, death wasn't an option for her. But it was—it was the only thing. And so when she—when she died, I don't know, for me at least, I felt like I had to stay strong for her. But then here was Elisabeth in some way kind of talking to both of us and saying, like, "It could have gone differently." And I guess because of that, I just started building this little pedestal for her. And, like, every day I was shining it and, like, putting flowers on it.

JAD: [laughs]

RACHAEL: But then as I kept digging into her story, all that changed.

JAD: We'll get to all of that in a moment. And honestly, to a truly incredible conversation—one of the most honest conversations I've ever heard on tape. After a short break.

LATIF: And just shortly before that short break, Rachael hooked up with friends at the podcast Death, Sex and Money. And not just Rachael. Rachael and her grandmother, her mother's mother. And so when you get to the end of this episode and you are gonna want to hear more from Rachael, I promise you. That's where you can go to hear her talk about more of this stuff. We'll give you more details about that at the end of the show. In the meantime, break, then back with Rachael and the rest of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's story.

[LISTENER: Hello, this is Erin Skornya, currently located in Arlington, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

JAD: Okay, here we go!

LATIF: Ahh! All right!

JAD: Jad

LATIF: Latif

JAD: Radiolab.

LATIF: And ...

RACHAEL: You good?

LATIF: Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL: So we are talking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, this woman I came to idolize because of the way she embraced death. But when I learned about the next part of her life, there was kind of this pile up of things that happened all together that just made me feel differently about her and what she could teach me. And it all started with this thing.

DENNIS KLASS: Elisabeth—Elisabeth had some other realities.

RACHAEL: Elisabeth's former assistant, Dennis Klass told me.

DENNIS KLASS: Did you read about Mrs. Schwartz?

RACHAEL: No, who's that?

DENNIS KLASS: Well, I did not recruit Mrs. Schwartz for the seminar, but somebody did.

RACHAEL: Dennis said Mrs. Schwartz was one of Elisabeth's patients. But then one day ...

DENNIS KLASS: Mrs. Schwartz appeared to her in the hallway by her office and said something about, "You are called to this. Keep it going."

RACHAEL: The only problem is ...

DENNIS KLASS: Mrs. Schwartz is dead.

JAD: [gasps]

DENNIS KLASS: And Elisabeth asked for—she said, "Would you write this down so that I can show people you were really here?" And Mrs. Schwartz wrote it down and she signed "Mrs. Schwartz."

JAD: Was it one of those, like, where you write a letter knowing it's gonna to be delivered after your death? Or did she ...

RACHAEL: No. No, Elisabeth told Dennis that she had received a letter from a dead lady. And Elisabeth's son Ken said it wasn't a one time kind of deal. Like, around this time, Elisabeth started talking about these things that she called "her spooks."

KEN ROSS: You know, that word I think in particular really set off the media. Elisabeth is talking about her spooks.

RACHAEL: Other dead people like Mrs. Schwartz, but with names like Mario and Willie.

KEN ROSS: The only one I remember her mention by name was Joseph.

JAD: Yeah that's kind of bizarre.

RACHAEL: Yeah. It's a little bit funny, but it also was a turn that ended up taking her to a very dark place.

DON SCHUMACHER: Hello?

TOM FRANTZ: Hello?

RACHAEL: I'm just gonna let these two guys tell it.

DON SCHUMACHER: Don Schumacher.

RACHAEL: And Tom Frantz? Or France?

TOM FRANTZ: Frantz. I was a faculty member at the University of Buffalo.

DON SCHUMACHER: My most recent job was as the president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

RACHAEL: Both these guys spent their lives working in dying and grief. And they both got into this work because of Elisabeth.

TOM FRANTZ: It really changed my career dramatically, meeting her.

DON SCHUMACHER: Oh, absolutely. For me, life changing.

RACHAEL: They both went to Elisabeth's lectures after the book came out.

TOM FRANTZ: We were all enamored of her, and thought she was fantastic.

RACHAEL: And they kept going to these talks, Don and Tom and five of their friends.

TOM FRANTZ: There were seven of us.

RACHAEL: They started calling themselves The Buffalo Seven.

TOM FRANTZ: We—I suppose we were sort of groupies.

RACHAEL: And they were Elisabeth's biggest fans until ...

DON SCHUMACHER: Shanti Nilaya.

RACHAEL: Elisabeth eventually got fired from the hospital in Chicago for reasons that are kind of unclear. But after that, she bought some land out in Southern California so she could start a healing center. She called it ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Shanti Nilaya ...]

RACHAEL: Which means "Final Home of Peace." And I've heard from numerous people, the center, it kind of looks like a motel. But the idea was people could come and take workshops with her to talk about dying and grieving. So in 1977, Don and Tom took a visit to Shanti Nilaya.

TOM FRANTZ: This was a little—well, a very far-out experience.

DON SCHUMACHER: But it was not at all anything that I thought it was going to be.

RACHAEL: So Tom and Don, they go with Elisabeth into this room.

TOM FRANTZ: Very large room like a—like a cafeteria room.

RACHAEL: With a couple dozen other people there.

TOM FRANTZ: So we all sat in chairs around the edge. And then the lights were turned down.

DON SCHUMACHER: And it just got stranger and stranger and stranger. It really did.

TOM FRANTZ: People began singing. "You Are My Sunshine" was Elisabeth's favorite song. We sang the hell out of it.

RACHAEL: Then Tom said through the dark, in the middle of the room, he saw these scarves ...

TOM FRANTZ: Scarves, they would light up.

RACHAEL: ... shimmying and dancing around.

TOM FRANTZ: Two or three of them in different colors.

RACHAEL: And then ...

DON SCHUMACHER: We were told that we would be approached by our spirit guide.

TOM FRANTZ: An entity ...

DON SCHUMACHER: Our soulmate in this experience.

TOM FRANTZ: ... would take human form and be created and speak to you.

RACHAEL: A moment later, Don says ...

DON SCHUMACHER: Your spirit guide approached you.

TOM FRANTZ: It was pitch black.

RACHAEL: But Tom says he could tell that a person, like an actual person, was standing there.

TOM FRANTZ: A human being seemed to be there.

RACHAEL: And that spirit guide would lead them into another room.

TOM FRANTZ: Like a closet, because it was very small, and they needed it to be isolated and free of all other human contact during this time, we were told.

DON SCHUMACHER: And they would talk to you about your past lives.

RACHAEL: Who was your spirit guide, do you remember? Or was it so dark you couldn't see them?

DON SCHUMACHER: Well, you couldn't see them, but you could feel them because—you know, you could absolutely feel them. [laughs]

RACHAEL: Wait, what does that mean, absolutely feel them? Just like you were, like, up close to them?

DON SCHUMACHER: Oh. Oh no, you were holding them. Like, you're—like you were hugging them.

RACHAEL: In Tom and Don's case, their spirit guide was clearly a woman.

TOM FRANTZ: And she had no clothes on.

DON SCHUMACHER: And it wasn't quite sexual.

RACHAEL: Wait, but you hug them when they're talking?

DON SCHUMACHER: Yes. Well, yes, you were hugging them while they were talking.

RACHAEL: Okay.

DON SCHUMACHER: Yeah, it was weird. It was very weird.

RACHAEL: Do you remember thinking, like, "What's going on here?" as it was happening? Or ...

DON SCHUMACHER: Oh God, yeah.

TOM FRANTZ: I didn't know what to expect. You didn't know for sure what was gonna go on.

RACHAEL: How long were you in the dark room for?

TOM FRANTZ: I would say two hours. And the lights came on. And I just know that it stopped.

JAD: Oh, God!

LATIF: Oh, no!

RACHAEL: Yeah. And if you think about it, like, these two guys flew across the country to California to just think deeply about working with dying people. And in this room they just ended up having this weird uncomfortable encounter that they didn't really even understand.

DON SCHUMACHER: So it was hard. It was hard to go through.

RACHAEL: And it got worse. Like, fairly soon after Elisabeth opened Shanti Nilaya, the man who ran these dark room sessions, this guy named Jay Barham, was accused by numerous people of engaging in sexual misconduct in these dark rooms.

LATIF: Oh, no!

RACHAEL: Yeah. And Elisabeth protected this guy. Saying like, "He couldn't possibly have done this, he's one of the most gifted healers I know." And she said that for over a year before she eventually fired him.

DON SCHUMACHER: And everybody was shocked and dismayed, I think, when we got out of there that we had been taken advantage of.

RACHAEL: Did you have to pay to go?

DON SCHUMACHER: I don't think so, but I don't recall.

RACHAEL: So when you say 'taken advantage of,' it's more like emotionally and psychologically not, like, financially.

DON SCHUMACHER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And more than that, that Elisabeth was being taken advantage of.

RACHAEL: A lot of people I talked to about this said that they don't think Elisabeth really knew what was going on, that she was manipulated by Jay just like everybody else. But I don't know. Like, I have a really hard time figuring out how to feel about this. And so did a lot of people. Like, her husband divorced her. And at this point, Elisabeth left California and ran away to this small town in Virginia to get another center off the ground, but the locals there did not want her there. People protested, they sent her death threats, someone killed her pet llama.

JAD: Oh, damn!

RACHAEL: And then eventually, her house mysteriously burnt to the ground. She and Ken both suspected arson. And after that, she ended up having a series of strokes, so again she moved back across the country to Arizona. And at this point, she kind of fell off the map for years until she herself started dying.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was in preparation for dying herself. So the death and dying lady was getting ready to die.]

RACHAEL: All of a sudden everybody wanted to hear from her again.

DON LATTIN: My name is Don Lattin, and I'm a journalist. So yeah, I wrote an article about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross which appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on May 31, 1997. "Expert on Death Faces Her Own."

RACHAEL: The whole world wanted to know ...

DON LATTIN: This is the death and dying guru, and how is she—how was she dealing with it personally?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: But I went out to Arizona to talk to her, and found out that she's not so keen on dying right now.]

RACHAEL: Don says it didn't look like she was handling it too well.

DON LATTIN: Her house was very cluttered. Not exactly a hoarder but, you know, getting there.

RACHAEL: She's sitting in a beige lounger chair.

DON LATTIN: She was chain smoking, and it was Dunhill cigarettes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: Elisabeth says she's ready to die, but she's not going gently.]

RACHAEL: It was a pretty similar scene to the day Oprah was there. Like, she's grouchily fielding questions about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: Did you go through those stages yourself?]

RACHAEL: ... which stage of dying she was in.

DON LATTIN: She didn't miss a beat. I said, "What stage are you in?" And she said, "Anger! I'm pissed!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: I was angry, angry, angry and enraged. Nothing but anger and negative.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: So no denial for you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: No. Are you kidding?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oprah Winfrey: No.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: No denial.]

RACHAEL: It was this massive trainwreck of a story people couldn't look away from. Like, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Queen of Dying, couldn't die in peace herself. And on top of that, during this time, she started working on another book called On Grief and Grieving, where she talked about those stages of death as stages of grief. It was published after she died, in the years following my own mom's death. And these stages ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Five stages ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The five stages of grief.]

RACHAEL: ... they took hold.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Grief often comes in five stages.]

KEN ROSS: Everyone just couldn't stop talking about them.

RACHAEL: They were everywhere.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're gonna go through what we call the five stages of grief.]

RACHAEL: From Scrubs to ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Which are: denial.]

RACHAEL: ... The Office.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross ...]

RACHAEL: Grey's Anatomy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... we all move through five distinct stages of grief.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Big Bird, don't you remember we told you ...]

RACHAEL: To Sesame Street.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... Mr. Hooper died? Well, I'll give it to him when he comes back.]

RACHAEL: To ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 'Cause I'm not dying. Why you little—!]

RACHAEL: The Simpsons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'll get you!]

RACHAEL: Even ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This May ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There are five stages of grief.]

RACHAEL: ... movie trailers from this past summer.

RACHAEL: And I know pop culture has a habit of doing this, stripping out all of the nuance of things. But it felt like on her way out the door, she leaned into the stages and then aimed them over at grief. And then really just the hardest part to watch for me was just the way she died. She was so angry and disgruntled. And it just felt like she was turning away from everything her work was telling me to look towards. It was like she was saying, "Don't trust anything I taught you." But then ...

KEN ROSS: Can I share my screen with you?

RACHAEL: Oh, yes. Hold on.

RACHAEL: At one point, Ken ...

RACHAEL: Oh my gosh!

RACHAEL: ... showed me all these pictures of her from her final years.

KEN ROSS: So there is Elisabeth on Halloween. She used to dress like ET on every Halloween.

RACHAEL: Oh, wait every ...

RACHAEL: I started seeing all these colors of that last part of her life. Like, how she absolutely loved ET.

JAD: Oh, my God!

RACHAEL: Like, she would put her finger out when people came and say hello to them that way by touching fingers, because she had such chronic pain that that was like her little hello.

KEN ROSS: So here's my mother with her finger again.

RACHAEL: Her little booties!

KEN ROSS: It's—she always had that little finger up.

RACHAEL: Oh, my gosh! These photos are amazing.

KEN ROSS: Here's my mom on her 75th birthday. We took my mom to see her sisters one last time.

RACHAEL: Oh, my God. The triplets all altogether.

KEN ROSS: Right, yeah. You know, here she was doing these wheelchair races. It was a big mix mash.

RACHAEL: She looks really happy there. I don't know. Like, she just seems happier in her final years. I think more so than I thought, because I—the articles you read that she was angry or she was depressed. But, like, these seem a little bit more complex.

KEN ROSS: You know, occasionally she had those days, but that's not who she is.

JOANNE CACCIATORE: She was angry but she wasn't just angry. I mean I think it's important for people to understand that. I—I think the source of her anger was more frustration. She just wanted people to see her in all of her humanness and fallibility, and accept who she really was.

RACHAEL: This is Joanne Cacciatore, who was pretty much Elisabeth's best friend during that time.

JOANNE CACCIATORE: Yeah we were very, very, very close. I would take her shopping. She loved shopping. She loved Costco.

RACHAEL: She loved Costco? A woman after my own heart! [laughs]

JOANNE CACCIATORE: That's right. You know, we would sit around and watch Johnny Depp movies, because she had a crush on Johnny Depp and so did I. And she would get hundreds of letters every day from people. And she'd say, "Read me three letters," or "Read me ten letters."

RACHAEL: Joanne told me that she and Elisabeth would have these really beautiful conversations about grief.

JOANNE CACCIATORE: You know, I would go to her and I could tell her, you know, like, "Oh my God, this happened today in class." Or, "This happened. I met a new bereaved family. This is what their doctor did," or "This is what their counselor told them," you know? And she would—she would go, "Ach!" She would be outraged! She would just share my outrage. And I felt, you know, seen and heard. And she was one of the few people, you know, in the world at that time who really saw my own grief, my own deep grief for my child who died, and who held space for it in a way that was congruent with the depth and breadth of the suffering.

RACHAEL: She was still holding that space for messiness in a way that we weren't holding for her.

B.J. MILLER: There's a perfect irony to criticizing Kübler-Ross for dying in a messy way when she was always trying to help us understand that messes are natural and that's okay, and it's just part of the deal.

RACHAEL: That's B.J. Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care doctor.

B.J. MILLER: She just was—sounds like she was just taking her own medicine and letting it rip, letting it fly.

RACHAEL: Like, that mix of rage and joy, sadness and bravery and shouting and listening, that mudslide of emotions, that was her final seminar for us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Just be you. If you feel like screaming, you scream. If you feel like crying, you cry. Don't try to follow textbook.]

RACHAEL: And on Tuesday August 24, 2004, Elisabeth died. I've been thinking a lot about how—why I really like this story, and I just—I don't think I was ever able to, like, bear witness to death when my mom died because of my age and because people were kind of like sheltering me.

JAD: Yeah.

RACHAEL: From having to stare at it so deeply as a kid, which I think is probably, like, an act of compassion. Like, for sure. But when you walk into the world, and all you're left with is a silhouette of what happened to you and also to the person you love, you don't have a bridge to living in a world without them. And in the end, in both her life and death, Elisabeth really showed all of us the power of a rich human messy, maybe ugly but also beautiful picture of death. But the real gift Elisabeth gave me was making me bump into ...

TOM RILEY: Hello?

RACHAEL: This man.

RACHAEL: [Laugh] So I'm gonna hang up on the phone.

TOM RILEY: Yep.

RACHAEL: And you're still here? Okay.

TOM RILEY: I can hear you.

RACHAEL: Great.

RACHAEL: His name is Tom Riley.

TOM RILEY: I'm a 54-year-old father of three. And I have stage four pancreatic cancer.

RACHAEL: A very, very serious form of cancer he's dying from.

TOM RILEY: So yeah, the time frame, I think, is like 20 months.

RACHAEL: How come you have a podcast studio in your home? What was that for?

TOM RILEY: This is actually for what I'm going through right now. So I started doing this just a couple of—I don't know, about three weeks ago. I call it "Eff Cancer."

RACHAEL: F Cancer?

TOM RILEY: Eff-cancer.com, yeah [laugh]. Yeah E-F-F cancer.

RACHAEL: He has these long interviews with his loved ones where they talk about whatever they want to talk about, with his life and death. And then they get to keep those interviews after he dies.

TOM RILEY: The whole approach that I've had with—with my family and my friends, is just kind of complete honesty.

RACHAEL: And when I first met Tom, I figured we'd talk once, maybe twice. But ...

TOM RILEY: Well, we can do another one of these.

RACHAEL: Yeah, I was just gonna ask you that because it just seems like ...

RACHAEL: But after that first call, we just kept talking.

[phone ringing]

RACHAEL: Again ...

TOM RILEY: Hey, Rachael, it's Tom. How are you?

RACHAEL: Good, how are you?

TOM RILEY: I'm doing okay. I had a CAT scan this morning. So ...

RACHAEL: How did it go?

RACHAEL: ... and again.

RACHAEL: Would this time work?

TOM RILEY: Thursdays are always good for me.

[phone ringing]

TOM RILEY: Hello?

RACHAEL: Hi Tom, this is Rachael.

RACHAEL: And again.

RACHAEL: Happy New Year's!

RACHAEL: Not really knowing why, but the two of us just kept feeling this pull to keep calling.

[phone ringing]

TOM RILEY: Tom Reilly.

RACHAEL: Hello, Tom Reilly. This is Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL: And to keep answering.

TOM RILEY: Hey Rachael. Good, how are you?

RACHAEL: Good! I just settled into a new apartment, so I'm calling you from a brand-new ...

RACHAEL: We talked nearly every week for seven months now, and I think the reason is ...

RACHAEL: Are there—this is my last question, I promise.

TOM RILEY: Come on, I blocked the rest of the afternoon. I've really enjoyed this.

RACHAEL: ... because Tom ...

TOM RILEY: Kind of feel like we're on this journey together, so ...

RACHAEL: I kind of do, too. I feel it's so presumptuous of me. [laughs]

TOM RILEY: I mean, I felt weird even saying it.

RACHAEL: Yeah. [laughs]

RACHAEL: ... has let me ask the questions I wished I could've asked my mom.

[phone ringing]

RACHAEL: Because my mom was sick during 9/11, and I wonder—I've always wondered what it's like to be dealing with this really serious illness at a time of a national crisis.

TOM RILEY: I mean, a very real question for me at the beginning—because I had no reason to believe that I was gonna even make it past, you know, Halloween—was, "Oh God, I'm not even gonna get to see the election!" And that—that was actually, you know, probably in the top 10 things that I thought of in the first, you know, hours of kind of facing it was like, I want to see what the next iPhone looks like.

[phone ringing]

RACHAEL: And can you tell me, like, the bad of chemo, physically what is that like?

TOM RILEY: Oh, sure. It feels like your arms weigh a hundred pounds each without anything in them. And some of it's mental. Like a boredom coupled with some feeling that you're not supposed to be feeling this right now.

RACHAEL: Boredom is not a word that I ...

TOM RILEY: I know!

RACHAEL: ... would have put in that sentence. So tell me more about the boredom.

TOM RILEY: It's the way it felt, though. So you can look forward right now, Rachael, and you can say, "I've gotta get this story done on deadline. And I've got this weird story with Tom that might be three months away or six months away," or, you know, whatever.

RACHAEL: [laughs] Mm-hmm.

TOM RILEY: But, like, right? That's just life. You're balancing things that are near-term, short-term, long-term, big pressure, no pressure, you know, all that stuff. And I have virtually none of that right now. I feel like I outlived myself on some level.

RACHAEL: What does that mean? What do you mean you're outliving yourself?

TOM RILEY: And we'll make jokes about playing the C-card because, you know, we were trying to get a reservation at something. And I'm like, "Tell them your dad has stage four cancer." And sometimes it actually works. [laughs]

RACHAEL: [laughs] Hey, if you've got it, flaunt it, man. It has to be good for something.

TOM RILEY: Well, yeah!

[phone ringing]

RACHAEL: Do you think that that amount of acceptance is ever hard for your family? Like, do you think they're like, "I don't want you to accept this death so much. And I don't want to, like, feel that it is so imminent and, like, real?"

TOM RILEY: Totally. Not with everybody, not all the time. And yes. Like, I actually just got feedback from my kids from family counseling that I'm spending too much time trying to teach them.

RACHAEL: Wait, really?

TOM RILEY: They said, you know, "Is that deliberate?" I said, "Are you fucking kidding me? Of course it's deliberate." [laughs] I mean, you think I could possibly be in this position right now and not be thinking about does each one of these kids know how to cam—work a camera? You know, really know how to do it? You know, of course I—you guys don't even know how the TIVO works. You know, I'm gonna teach you everything.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

[phone ringing]

RACHAEL: When—is there anything that you're still afraid to talk about with your family in relation to your diagnosis or you leaving?

TOM RILEY: Well, I don't know if it's afraid to talk to them about—I don't think there's anything like that. Like, they catch me crying every once in a while and they freak out. Like yesterday, they all went out for a walk. And I kind of looked out the window and saw them all walking down the street, and they were taking the dogs for a walk. And that really, really hit me.

RACHAEL: Hmm. What—what exactly were you thinking when you saw them through the window?

TOM RILEY: The first thing was, they're gonna be okay. Because they were out and they were having fun and they were laughing and I just [sniffles]—sorry.

RACHAEL: Don't apologize.

TOM RILEY: I had a—like, a flash forward to seeing them doing that, you know, a year from now, two years from now, whatever. And it just made me feel great and that made me feel sad. And that was easy to understand because that was—they're gonna do great, and you're not going to be able to see it.

RACHAEL: Tom died a couple months after that conversation, and just weeks before this story was supposed to come out. And those conversations we had, I miss them all the time. But I think I treasure them more than anything else. Like, talking to him, it felt like letting out this breath I'd been holding my whole life.

JAD: Hmm.

RACHAEL: And this thing Elisabeth tried to show us, I finally understood, and in a visceral way. There isn't a simple way out of grief. What there is is people. Sitting with them, listening to them while they're still here, for as long as you can.

RACHAEL: So far, I have been thinking a lot about, like, oh my gosh, what is it gonna be like the day that I call and you don't pick up? Like, that I think about a lot. But I don't really have any dread or fear. It's kind of just like a question.

TOM RILEY: No, I think about—I think about you sometimes. I'm glad we met.

RACHAEL: I am too, Tom.

RACHAEL: I am so grateful to the many—and I mean many—people who helped me put this story together. Like, so many I can't actually fit them all here. But their names are on our website. Go check that out. And I just want to send an extra special thank you to Martha Twaddle who connected me with Tom. Carin Leong, who made all of my montage dreams come true for this episode. And to Soren Wheeler for telling me to look up that lady who created those damn stages of grief. And Pat Walters who received more middle-of-the-night Elisabeth fangirl updates than any human being should have to endure.

JAD: And of course, thanks to you, Rachael Cusick.

LATIF: Who we should say, like, single-handedly reported and produced this piece. As I mentioned before the break, you probably want to hear more from Rachael right now, and to be able to do that you can go to the podcast Death, Sex & Money. They released an episode today where you can hear Rachael talking with her grandmother.

RACHAEL: I always wondered what it was like for me to be working on this story while you were sick. I don't know if you have any thoughts about it. Like, I remember one day the nurse came to your house and I had the On Death and Dying book. And she gave me this look like "Holy shit, you're really just out there doing it, aren't you?"

GRANDMA: [laughs]

RACHAEL: And I wonder, like, what you feel about it. Is it weird? Is it comforting? What does that feel like for you?

GRANDMA: No I don't—I thought it was something you needed to do. I just thought this was your way of, you know, of dealing with this. And that's a smart way, that's an intelligent way to delve into it and see what it's all about. So I just thought that was a comfort to you, perhaps. And that however it worked out, it would be—it would be okay.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

LATIF: Go check it out. Just search for Death, Sex & Money wherever you get your podcasts. What's it called, Rachael?

RACHAEL: It's called, "When Grief Doesn't Move in Stages."

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

LATIF: Thank you for listening.

JAD: Yeah.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliaee, Sarah Sandbach, Carin Leong and Candace Wall. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.]

-30-

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.body
In this hour of Radiolab, stories of cross-species communication.

When we gaze into the eyes of a wild animal, or even a beloved pet, can we ever really know what they might be thinking? Is it naive to assume they're experiencing something close to human emotions? Or is it ridiculous to assume that they AREN'T feeling something like that? We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks, ask whether dogs feel guilt, and wonder if a successful predator may have fallen in love with a photographer.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].about.body
View the Episode Archive »

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes | RSS.

#smartbinge Radiolab podcasts

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
Can a whale be gracious? Can a leopard seal fall in love with its photographer? That guilty look a dog gives you, does it really FEEL bad? What is it exactly are these animals thinking?

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.transcript
Introduction:                You're listening to Radiolab.

Introduction:                Radiolab.

Introduction:                From.

Introduction:                From WNY.

Introduction:                C.C.C.

Introduction:                C.

Introduction:                And NPR.

Robert Krulwich:           So where are we?

Jad Abumrad:               Um, we're at church.

Robert Krulwich:           In a church. Oh, that's, that's different for us.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah. It's not usually where we start, we're in a church.

Robert Krulwich:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jad Abumrad:               Cathedral really. A huge cathedral in upper Manhattan, St. John the Divine. We've got an organ.

Church Envior.:             (preacher)

Jad Abumrad:               The preacher, there's the preacher.

Robert Krulwich:           Congregation of course.

Jad Abumrad:               Mm-hmm (affirmative). A couple of thousand people in the pews at least.

Church Envior.:             Jesus said "Therefore, I trust you."

Jad Abumrad:               Your basic Sunday service.

Church Envior.:             If any of you find worrying, and the single-[crosstalk 00:00:51]

Jad Abumrad:               Except today. You've also got... Here it comes.

Church Envior.:             (barking)

Jad Abumrad:               Dogs.

Church Envior.:             Look at the dogs over here. (howling)

Jad Abumrad:               The reason we begin here is because today the church is filled with dogs.

Interviewer:                  Can I talk to you about your dog?

Speaker 5:                    Yeah.

Interviewer:                  What's his or her name?

Speaker 5:                    His name is [Blizzer 00:01:09].

Interviewer:                  And what is he?

Speaker 5:                    He's a Labrador and poodle mix.

Speaker 6:                    Well I have Legend who I just adopted in January.

Interviewer:                  Okay.

Speaker 6:                    I have Denzel.

Jad Abumrad:               Note by the way, you know more than dogs you've got birds.

Speaker 7:                    His name is Jessie. It's a barn owl.

Interviewer:                  And now has this guy ever been blessed before?

Speaker 7:                    I don't think so. No. He was just born this year.

Jad Abumrad:               And hamsters.

Speaker 8:                    His name is Tubby. Tubby toes, and if he'd come out you'd see why, it's because he's really fat.

Jad Abumrad:               And all kinds of creatures.

Interviewer:                  We've got a little girl with a falcon, and behind her... Oh, it's a giant tortoise.

Jad Abumrad:               This is the St. Francis day of the animals, it's a yearly event.

Interviewer:                  Wait and coming towards us.

Jad Abumrad:               Where people bring their animals to be blessed.

Interviewer:                  Is a donkey.

Jad Abumrad:               The folks that are gathered here...

Interviewer:                  And there's a little girl with a hermit crab.

Jad Abumrad:               They don't think there's anything weird or inappropriate about this. In fact if you ask them...

Interviewer:                  And here comes a bull.

Jad Abumrad:               Here's what they say.

Speaker 9:                    I don't know if it means anything to her but it means it to me.

Speaker 10:                  Yeah.

Speaker 9:                    Because you know you want it to, um, baptize your babies.

Speaker 10:                  Yeah.

Speaker 9:                    And this is more or less the same kind of thing.

Interviewer:                  And what is it, what does it mean to you?

Speaker 9:                    It just means when, when she finally does go away she's gonna, uh, go to heaven.

Interviewer:                  And what kind of parrot is she?

Speaker 11:                  A Macaw, blue and gold.

Chuckles:                      Mama.

Speaker 11:                  Oh, yeah don't put your hand near his face.

Interviewer:                  And what's his name?

Speaker 11:                  Chuckles.

Interviewer:                  Chuckles.

Chuckles:                      Bye, bye.

Interviewer:                  Do you feel like he has a, a soul, or an inner life of some sort?

Speaker 11:                  It's a thinking being. They're, they are as smart as we are, really. [crosstalk 00:02:33]

Robert Krulwich:           Jad?

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah.

Robert Krulwich:           Uh, since you invited me here I don't want to be impolite or anything.

Jad Abumrad:               Say what you're going to say.

Robert Krulwich:           Well, okay. Th- th- these people of course they love their animals.

Jad Abumrad:               Sure, yeah you can hear that.

Speaker 13:                  Because when I'm feeling sad he comes in the bed, and he lays down spine to spine with me, and he just doesn't leave my side.

Robert Krulwich:           But aren't they presuming a little bit, that the animals they love are going to feel the grace of the prayer, or feel the blessing, which is a...

Jad Abumrad:               Which raises a question.

Robert Krulwich:           What do we really know about what goes on inside the animals mind?

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, all those things you might feel in a church grace, gratitude, uh, guilt. Can the animals feel those things too?

Robert Krulwich:           How much can we share?

Jad Abumrad:               And can you measure it?

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:           I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad:               This is Radiolab.

Church Envior.:             (organ music/singing)

Robert Krulwich:           And we'll begin the hour with a story about an animal who would I'm sure loved to have been at the worship service but was, it was a very inconvenient thing for him.

Jad Abumrad:               He didn't get the info.

Robert Krulwich:           He couldn't quite get there.

Jad Abumrad:               Okay just to get things rolling. This is a story, uh, that we heard about-

Mick Menago:               It's okay I give them enough to talk about as it is.

Jad Abumrad:               First from the following dude.

Jad Abumrad:               Hey is it Mick or is it Mike?

Mick Menago:               Uh, I got by Mick. There's way too many Mikes around.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs) Oh, okay. Mick [Menago 00:04:04] is his name.

Mick Menago:               Well the boats down here-

Jad Abumrad:               And, uh, we met Mick recently at the Emeryville Marina, which is not far from San Francisco, where he's got a boat called the Super Fish. That Mick says he rents out for all kinds of things.

Mick Menago:               Nature trips to ash scattering, bachelor parties, fireworks watching. I don't care. I got a little cardboard sign, I stand by the freeway it says have boat, need work.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs) So yeah that's Nick. And our story begins one morning in December.

Mick Menago:               Probably eight o'clock in the morning or something as I recall.

Jad Abumrad:               It's a few years back, Mick just kind of sitting at home.

Mick Menago:               I was at home, yeah. It was the middle of December we didn't have any work.

Jad Abumrad:               But then he gets this call.

Mick Menago:               Hello. I got this call... Hello there.

Jad Abumrad:               It was a call relaying a message from a fisherman way out at sea.

Mick Menago:               18 miles maybe, outside the Golden Gate Bridge. They told me that there was a whale in trouble, tangled up in crab gear, and it didn't appear to be able to move. (music)

Jad Abumrad:               So after he hangs up Mick immediately calls a few dive buddies.

Mick Menago:               Tim Young.

Tim Young:                   Tim Young, Air Force Pararescue.

Mick Menago:               And then, uh, let's see.

James Moskito:             James Moskito.

Mick Menago:               James Moskito.

James Moskito:             Professional diver.

Mick Menago:               I called him and said "Hey you know here's the deal. Are you interested?"

Tim Young:                   It was a no brainer.

James Moskito:             I said "Yeah, I'm in absolutely."

Mick Menago:               I figured alright we're going.

James Moskito:             So I packed up my stuff.

Tim Young:                   Grabbed my gear, and I went directly to the boat.

Holly Drewyard:            And we left underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. (music) Nothing but the horizon in front of us.

Holly Drewyard:            My name is Holly [Drewyard 00:05:27] I am James' significant other. (laugh) We motored out for about two hours. I did due west towards the Farallon Islands.

Speaker 19:                  What were you feeling when you were on the boat heading out?

Holly Drewyard:            I didn't think we'd find her. I really didn't.

Jad Abumrad:               But at 18 miles off the coast, completely open water one of the divers spots some crab buoys in the distance, and some seagulls flying overhead. And as they got closer...

Holly Drewyard:            Well I saw the whale.

Tim Young:                   It was just a-

Holly Drewyard:            Just the very top of the whale.

Tim Young:                   Sticking up about maybe six inches out of the water.

Holly Drewyard:            At the surface.

Jad Abumrad:               A tiny sliver of black.

Tim Young:                   And that was it. And then I said “Okay, we need to see what's going on, so uh..."

Jad Abumrad:               So Tim and James jump into an inflatable boat, and they paddle about a couple of hundred feet from the whale.

James Moskito:             And it just wasn't happening. Every time that this whale came on up it would just displace the boat back again, so it would push us back again.

Jad Abumrad:               Not to mention.

Tim Young:                   The visibility in the water was just terrible.

Jad Abumrad:               They couldn't even see down there to see, you know what they were dealing with.

James Moskito:             And you know what sometimes plans have to change in, in mid-flight.

Jad Abumrad:               So Tim and James look at each other and without saying a word.

James Moskito:             Boom we got out of the boat and-

Tim Young:                   Splashed into the water.

James Moskito:             And I see a shadow. This massive animal.

Tim Young:                   A hazy silhouette.

James Moskito:             And, we just started swimming.

Tim Young:                   To the whale. About a 100 feet away...

James Moskito:             Uh, you know parts of blubber and skin floating around.

Tim Young:                   35 feet. 20 feet.

Jad Abumrad:               And then they see it.

James Moskito:             My goodness this thing is the size of a school bus.

Jad Abumrad:               A female humpback whale is one of the largest creatures on the planet, 50 feet long, 50 tons, and this particular whale wasn't in a kind of C shape. Where it's head was at the top of the water, but it's tail was almost pointed directly down.

James Moskito:             It was almost like somebody was pulling her down by the tail to the bottom of the ocean.

Tim Young:                   Yeah there was probably 20 crab traps. 2,000 pounds at least just tied up to the tail.

James Moskito:             She had just become an anchor.

Tim Young:                   An anchor.

James Moskito:             And to see her not be able to move that tail, and to struggle.

Tim Young:                   Just like (breath sound) The whale was actually really (breath sound) laboring to breathe. (breath sound) Just a little puff and there was just rope everywhere.

Tim Young:                   It went around the whale's mouth, around the whale's head.

Jad Abumrad:               Across her eye, over her back.

Tim Young:                   Wrapped around the pectoral fins, all the way down to his tail. I thought there was no hope.

James Moskito:             There was no chance.

Tim Young:                   We're looking at a dead whale. The whale just doesn't know it yet.

Tim Young:                   But I knew that I had to try when to swim to the whale. And as soon as I decide okay I'm going to swim to the whale, well the whale decides she wasn't going to have that.

Jad Abumrad:               What she'd do.

Tim Young:                   She put up her pectoral fin, which is like her arm, and this pectoral fin I about 15 feet long, it's about four feet wide, and she just (music) splashed down the water in front of me. You know it's the size of an airplane wing coming down on top of you, just inches from my head.

Tim Young:                   So, you, you know at that point I backed off and, uh, waited.

Jad Abumrad:               Waited for the whale to settle down.

James Moskito:             She was physically exhausted.

Jad Abumrad:               Which she did, and then they both swim back. James goes to the tail and Tim, up to the whale's head.

Tim Young:                   You know I was there with a, a six inch dive knife.

Jad Abumrad:               Cutting out line right near her eye.

Tim Young:                   Which was the size of grapefruit.

Tim Young:                   And her eye was moving, keeping an eye on me.

Jad Abumrad:               Really.

Tim Young:                   Absolutely.

Jad Abumrad:               He would go left, her eye would go left. He'd go right, her eye would go right.

Tim Young:                   She was tracking me.

Jad Abumrad:               And all the while they're just cutting as much rope as they can.

James Moskito:             You really had to saw at it. It was very strong, very tight. Sometimes I'd cut a rope, and it would be a loose rope and all of a sudden something else would tighten up. Which was the one rope that would let it all free.

Jad Abumrad:               This whole process took hours. But finally James gets to the end of the this, at the tail sawing his way through that big clump of line. And he realizes at a certain point that to cut through line.

James Moskito:             I'm going to have to stab the whale to get my knife underneath the rope.

Jad Abumrad:               Ah.

James Moskito:             It was that tight though. I, uh, jabbed my knife into the whale's tale, and pulled the rope and then cut it.

Jad Abumrad:               And once the rope went (flipping sound).

James Moskito:             It was a very surreal moment looking down and seeing the 20 crab traps and buoys just disappear into the abyss. (music)

Jad Abumrad:               And just like that the whale was gone.

James Moskito:             I'm spinning around going where she go, where she go.

Jad Abumrad:               But as the water settled they realized they'd done it. They'd freed her.

James Moskito:             As soon as I came up I, I was like "Whew who."

Tim Young:                   Wow.

James Moskito:             Whooping it up, and yelling.

Tim Young:                   (hooting sounds) Unbelievable.

James Moskito:             I was screaming.

Tim Young:                   Can you imagine it.

Jad Abumrad:               Now here's where the story takes, uh, a pretty startling turn.

James Moskito:             Hi fiving.

Jad Abumrad:               In fact the whole reason we wanted to tell this story to begin with is for what happens next. So Tim and James and the other divers are in the water, they're celebrating, hi fiving, and then all of a sudden James looks down.

James Moskito:             Next thing I know I have this 50 ton whale coming right at me, and I'm thinking "Oh my God. Stop, I just saved you."

Jad Abumrad:               Wait so this whale is coming at you from below, like Jaws.

James Moskito:             Yeah, she's rising up towards me.

Tim Young:                   Oh God.

James Moskito:             And I'm just thinking this is going to hurt, and...

Jad Abumrad:               And...

James Moskito:             And, uh when she was only inches away from my chest... She stopped. And pushed me on the chest backwards, and then released me, and then kind of pushed again, and then release, and pushed again (music), and again.

Jad Abumrad:               Wow.

James Moskito:             And then she swam up right next to me, puts her head up above the water so that her eye was above the water, and then came up and looked directly at me.

Jad Abumrad:               And for what felt like 30 seconds he says she just stared at him.

James Moskito:             The pupil didn't move around. She wasn't looking for anything else. She was just looking at me.

James Moskito:             You're in the presence of something that great. It makes you feel small.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah.

James Moskito:             It, it really was a, a very emotional feeling. You know I wasn't quite sure what to make out of it, make of it.

Jad Abumrad:               But then he says she went off to the next diver.

James Moskito:             And did the same thing.

Tim Young:                   I, I remembered distinctly I was 18 inches away from her eye, and she just looked at me and let me touch her, and then swam off.

James Moskito:             And then she went off to the next diver and did the same thing, and the next person and did the same thing.

Jad Abumrad:               One by one.

James Moskito:             Coming up right next to him. Looking at him really good, you know inches away, eyeballing him.

Holly Drewyard:            She swam around every diver.

Mick Menago:               All the guys got it.

Holly Drewyard:            So it was about dusk, um, the water was glass flat. I was sitting at the helm of the boat just in awe. And they had to leave the whale, she didn't want to leave them.

Jad Abumrad:               Now there's a real question here. What exactly was that whale doing, or saying? Was she saying anything? If you ask James or Tim, or Mick, or any of the other divers that were in the water that day they'll tell you.

Tim Young:                   I felt this whale was really thanking us.

James Moskito:             I know it sounds crazy, but I could see the look in her eye. This mammal, this, this 50 ton mammal was literally saying thanks. Thanks for helping me out. And you know I'll, I'll bring that to my grave knowing the gratification that I felt. (organ music)

Robert Krulwich:           Hmm. Wow.

Jad Abumrad:               So what do you think? I mean here's the question really.

Robert Krulwich:           Uh huh.

Jad Abumrad:               Was that whale saying thank you?

Robert Krulwich:           Was the whale saying... Well I think the whale was saying something. I mean a whale, if she was just freed of her ropes, I would think she would just go off and say "Whew, I'm free." So the fact that she would-

Jad Abumrad:               That she hung around.

Robert Krulwich:           And make these specific=

Jad Abumrad:               Circle, eyeballs.

Robert Krulwich:           Visits. Like I don't know I feel that she, there's something intentional about that. She didn't leave anyone out, right?

Jad Abumrad:               No, she-

Robert Krulwich:           She went to everybody.

Jad Abumrad:               In fact according to one of the guys one the boat she actually went to the boats and did the same thing to the boats.

Robert Krulwich:           She said thank you to the boats.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah.

Robert Krulwich:           Hmm, well then. So she was looking at the people, but she also thought that the craft was somebody she should say thank you, or say deal with.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah.

Robert Krulwich:           So maybe she was just psyched, maybe she was just, uh... I really don't know what she. I mean I don't, I don't feel completely comfortable just saying... Of course, I know what I want to feel.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, me too.

Robert Krulwich:           But let's just try to straighten up for second. We have a guy named Clive Wynn. He teaches at the university...

Clive Wynn:                  Hello.

Robert Krulwich:           Hey.

Jad Abumrad:               Oh, hi is this Mr. Clive Wynn.

Clive Wynn:                  Yeah this is Clive Wynn.

Jad Abumrad:               Hi.

Robert Krulwich:           Uh. Clive is with the psychology department at the University of Florida.

Clive Wynn:                  Who am I talking... Who's this?

Jad Abumrad:               This is Jad from Radiolab in-

Clive Wynn:                  Right, hi Jad.

Jad Abumrad:               Clive also happens to be an expert on animal psychology.

Robert Krulwich:           Hi, and this is Robert also. Um...

Clive Wynn:                  Hi Robert.

Robert Krulwich:           Can you hear us pretty well?

Clive Wynn:                  I can hear you pretty well. I'm, I'm wondering how well I'm going to distinguish your voices.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs) Oh, no need to do that.

Robert Krulwich:           Treat us as a unitary figure.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah.

Clive Wynn:                  (laughs) Okay.

Robert Krulwich:           But so let me, let me begin, now this is Robert talking.

Clive Wynn:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Robert Krulwich:           We'll tell you a story, and we want to know what you think of the story?

Robert Krulwich:           So once upon a time and not too long ago.

Jad Abumrad:               Alright we're going to fast forward a bit. Because we ran Clive through the entire whale story, front to back.

Robert Krulwich:           So my question to you is. If a diver said to you this whale said thank you to me. What would you say?

Clive Wynn:                  Well I would be in a difficult situation, because I don't doubt that what these people experienced was a very moving moment with that whale, but the problem is I just don't speak whale, so-

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Clive Wynn:                  I don't know what thank you looks like in whale. If I'm going to be a cynic about it I would say "Well the whale has been trapped for I believe over a day, and may just be disoriented."

Robert Krulwich:           Well this was, this was parking herself with one individual and the moving to the next. That's not a distracted, that looks like its got some intention.

Clive Wynn:                  It shows some interest in the individuals. I'll give you that. But how do we, how do we get from that, to deducing that the whale is trying to express things.

Jad Abumrad:               But what do you mean? Its just-

Clive Wynn:                  Let's play a different example. Let's oppose that you found a bear in the woods that was caught up in some netting that ended up in the woods. And you work for hours to free the bear, and then the bear eats you. Does that mean, that the, the, the bears are an ungrateful species of animal.

Jad Abumrad:               Yes. (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               No, I don't truly believe that.

Clive Wynn:                  Right, well so, so I mean it would make as much sense to escribe ingratitude to the bear, and it does to escribe gratitude to the whale. I just don't think that's a useful way of trying to understand animals.

Clive Wynn:                  And, I think it, ultimately it demeans them, because it means that instead of living in a world that's full of a diversity of wonderful creatures, each with its own ways of relating to other members of its own species and other members of other species. We say well we don't live in a world like that. We live in a world that's basically a world of human beings. It doesn't matter some of these human beings have fur suits on.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Clive Wynn:                  Some of these human beings weigh hundreds of tons, and live under the ocean, and can hold their breath for a very long time. None of that really matters ultimately they're all basically like us, and I just don't find that satisfying.

Robert Krulwich:           Mm. Are you saying that you don't know if there's a possibility of sharing, or that you don't think that there's a possibility of sharing at a emotional level between two species?

Clive Wynn:                  Um, I don't doubt that there is the possibility of sharing between two species. I mean you, I see it with dogs all the time. But I think it would be a mistake if we thought that the love we feel for our dogs, is the same feeling that the dog has back to us. It, it has different qualities, and it's very-

Robert Krulwich:           But when you pet your dog, and it wags its tail, and it seems happy to see you.

Clive Wynn:                  Yeah.

Robert Krulwich:           Do you just like not trust that?

Clive Wynn:                  Well okay so let me make clear that I wear two hats. When I'm talking about a dog particularly a pet of my own. I'm wearing... I have two possible hats I can wear, and one is that when the dog pants back at me I just hug the dog, and you know let him kiss me, and that's, that's life with a dog.

Clive Wynn:                  But if I'm, if I'm now wearing my scientific hat, I'm getting my blanket as wet as I possibly can.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Clive Wynn:                  Then I ask myself "What do these behaviors mean among dogs." (dog barks/girls laughing)

Clive Wynn:                  There's a, a beautiful study that came out recently from Alexander Horowitz.

Horowitz: Uh, I'm Alexandra Horowitz, and I study dog cognition.

Jad Abumrad:               Where do we find her?

Clive Wynn:                  She's... Well she's around the corner from you. She's at Barnard College.

Jad Abumrad:               So we sent our producers Soren Wheeler.

Soren Wheeler:             Yo. That's me.

Jad Abumrad:               To meet her, and he ended up hanging out with her, and her dog [Finnegan 00:18:57].

Soren Wheeler:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               In a park. (dog barking)

Horowitz: Oh, oh, good snuffle. That's a nice snuffle. You want to snuffle with Mike.

Clive Wynn:                  She did this beautiful experiment that shows that, um, when people think their dog is looking guilty.

Horowitz: Ears back, eyes lowered, tail between the legs.

Clive Wynn:                  Actually the dog is just being submissive.

Soren Wheeler:             So here's what she did. She tracked down a bunch of dog owners.

Horowitz: Posted on Craigslist, and put out posters.

Soren Wheeler:             And she found a bunch of owners who believe that like most dog owners do that their dog feel guilt.

Horowitz: Yes my dog feels guilty when he's done something wrong.

Soren Wheeler:             And then she set up a situation where all of the dog owners had to scold their dogs. Because, you know they had been told that their dogs did something bad, but the trick of the experiment is that only half the dogs had done something wrong.

Clive Wynn:                  Half the dogs had actually been naughty, and half the dogs had not been naughty. But then she...

Horowitz: Misinformed the owners.

Clive Wynn:                  Lied to half of the owners.

Horowitz: So we lied to the owners.

Soren Wheeler:             So even the owners whose dogs hadn't been bad, thought their dogs had been bad. So everybody scolded their dog.

Horowitz: Almost everyone did this the same way, which was to say no loudly to their dogs, and maybe put their hands on their hip and just express just a quiver.

Soren Wheeler:             No, and Finnegan.

Horowitz: Yes, Finnegan.

Soren Wheeler:             I can't believe you ate.

Horowitz: Finnegan. Oh. It's okay.

Soren Wheeler:             No this is true. See Finnegan just made the look, even though he hadn't done anything wrong. And that's essentially what she found. Even the non-guilty dogs made the guilty look.

Clive Wynn:                  It didn't matter whether the dog had transgressed or not. All that mattered was whether it was being chastised by its owner.

Robert Krulwich:           So bad dog, bad dog.

Clive Wynn:                  Right.

Robert Krulwich:           That creates the look, not the deed.

Clive Wynn:                  That's exactly right.

Jad Abumrad:               But, but for me the pivotal question here is not whether or not they all had the look, but what's attached to that look. What feeling in the dog is attached to that guilty look. Maybe the dogs who were falsely accused still felt bad.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Clive Wynn:                  (laughs). Well maybe they did. Maybe they did, and maybe there are angels on top of this control console here.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs) (music) (barking/howling)

Jad Abumrad:               I thought it was a perfectly valid question.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, we should thank, uh, Alexander Horowitz, her latest book is called Inside of a Dock. (music/howling)

Robert Krulwich:           And I, before we end this section, have we resolved the question of what was that whale doing with those people. Was she saying thank you or no?

Jad Abumrad:               No, and do we ever resolve any questions at all.

Robert Krulwich:           Well we try. We get a little closer, and we kind of just go- (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               No, we have not resolved it.

Robert Krulwich:           So we will try harder.

Jad Abumrad:               But, but, but, but in our next section a mere 70 seconds away we will try very hard to actually get scientific about it.

Robert Krulwich:           Good.

Tim Young:                   Hi this Tim Young out in California, uh, on my first take of reading the Radiolab credits. So here it goes.

Tim Young:                   Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Clive Wynn:                  Hi, this is Clive Wynn. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, and distributed by NPR.

Jad Abumrad:               Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:           And, I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad:               This is Radiolab. Today is our...

Robert Krulwich:           Animal minds. Animal minds.

Jad Abumrad:               Right.

Robert Krulwich:           Do, do, can, can one animal really know what's going on in another animal's head?

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, like really know.

Robert Krulwich:           Really know.

Jad Abumrad:               Thanks for meeting us.

Jad Abumrad:               So we were thinking about that whale story that we heard before the break.

Robert Krulwich:           Yep.

Jad Abumrad:               You know where the divers meet the whale, and they were sure the whale was sayings thanks-

James Moskito:             Literally saying thanks. Thanks for helping me out.

Jad Abumrad:               Okay that is their opinion, but we wanted to know like what can you actually scientifically say about that kind of exchange. And that question led us.

Speaker 23:                  Introduce yourself.

Jad Abumrad:               To this guy.

Patrick H.:                     Uh, my name is Patrick [Hoff 00:22:56]. I am a neuroscientist at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Robert Krulwich:           Although, actually the truth is he's really from some place like Geneva. He's a Swiss from the French part of Switzerland.

Jad Abumrad:               Right. Bang out, we came to him because he may have found a way of separating the animals. Of knowing which animals can genuinely have human emotions, and which can't.

Patrick H.:                     It, it, it starts, it starts in 1995. We were studying the anatomy of the human cingulate cortex.

Jad Abumrad:               That's part of the brain that's right here. Kind of between your eyes, but down.

Patrick H.:                     And, uh, a student in my [Esther Chimski 00:23:31].

Jad Abumrad:               She was looking at some brains, and she saw...

Robert Krulwich:           Something odd.

Patrick H.:                     This very slender [inaudible 00:23:38] neuron. I've never seen a neuron like that. Maybe it's abnormal, it's pathological.

Jad Abumrad:               Just to be sure she got some slides of other human brains, looked in the same place.

Patrick H.:                     We-

Jad Abumrad:               And there it was again.

Patrick H.:                     Started to see them in-

Robert Krulwich:           And again.

Patrick H.:                     And we were very pleased. So okay we have discovered a new cell type. (horns) Whew, something that is unique to human.

Jad Abumrad:               But then they went to the library and discovered that some guy...

Patrick H.:                     Who's name is [Constantin von Economo 00:24:09].

Robert Krulwich:           Costanto.

Patrick H.:                     Constantin von Economo.

Jad Abumrad:               This Romanian guy.

Robert Krulwich:           Von Economo.

Jad Abumrad:               He'd seen these cells 70 years ago.

Robert Krulwich:           And he named them spindle cells.

Jad Abumrad:               Because of their shape. Oh, that must have been a very sad day for Esther.

Patrick H.:                     No, no, no.

Jad Abumrad:               Because now they believe that these little brains cells may be a key to how humans relate to one another. And whether or not other creatures can relate to us in the same way.

Robert Krulwich:           Right.

Jad Abumrad:               Is it possible to, for us to see a spindle cell.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah, we can, we can show spindle cells.

Robert Krulwich:           Patrick Hoff took us down the hall.

Jad Abumrad:               Yep.

Robert Krulwich:           Jad went first, and parked him in front of a big microscope.

Patrick H.:                     Here find it again. Look at it.

Jad Abumrad:               Will it be obvious to me-

Patrick H.:                     Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               From looking at is.

Patrick H.:                     Crossing the middle of the field you can see a series tall slender...

Jad Abumrad:               It's making me dizzy a little bit.

Patrick H.:                     We have one, two, three, four, five.

Jad Abumrad:               Is that the spindles?

Patrick H.:                     Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               Oh, they're everywhere.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               Oh. You want to see them?

Robert Krulwich:           What do you mean I want to see them? I mean yeah. Here you hold the mic.

Robert Krulwich:           Oh, yeah there's a whole troop of them, and they're long, and skinny, and purple.

Jad Abumrad:               It's funny because the normal brain cells which you can also see in there are like dot, dot, dot, but these ones are (sounds). Like little purple bananas.

Robert Krulwich:           Like a team of purple bananas.

Jad Abumrad:               And the thing that makes these cells so interesting...

Robert Krulwich:           All seeming to head off in this direction.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               According to Patrick Hoff is that you know in the normal brain cells they just talk to their neighbors, but these because they're so long...

Robert Krulwich:           They seem to be yelling across a big, uh, distance.

Patrick H.:                     Exactly. We know that these cells send an action at some distance. (Hello sound)

Robert Krulwich:           It's across the valley.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah, it's across the valley, exactly. It's projecting.

Jad Abumrad:               But projecting what, and from where to where? Well Patrick Hoff doesn't entirely know, but he says he can make a pretty good guess based on... Well if you look at a microscope you do notice some things.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah, yeah so here, here on the top of the spindle points to all surface of the brain.

Jad Abumrad:               The top he says seems to shoot up, or it's those more modern parts of the brain that are involved.

Patrick H.:                     High order cognition.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, language, abstract thinking. Whereas the bottom of the spindle seems to shoot, found deep down.

Patrick H.:                     Lower centers in, in the brain.

Jad Abumrad:               Towards those older parts of our brain that involve feelings emotions, instinct. So, perhaps this is what Patrick Hoff thinks. That these cells are a kind of network, a really important one that allows the different parts of our inner selves to connect.

Jad Abumrad:               Like you've got the parts of us down here that feel things can now communicate with the parts of us up here that think things. And this is an oversimplification of course, but the point, the larger point is that this is exactly what happens when you look into the eyes of another human being.

Jad Abumrad:               Because it begins with a kind of thought. Your eyes seem sad, but then that thought within you travels a great distance and connects with the feeling of sadness, so that you feel sad too.

Patrick H.:                     Yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               I mean it's the basis of kind of empathy.

Patrick H.:                     Exactly, exactly. You know I, I see you happy you know, so, so that I feel good about it.

Jad Abumrad:               You know and consider those times I mean not just empathy where like your thoughts and feelings are in conflict, and they've got to really talk to one another.

Robert Krulwich:           Like for example when you get in front of me at the microphone yet again.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           And I hate you, but I know that I have to work with you, so I, I, I sit on that feeling. I just sit on my... It's going down to the bottom of my brain, but I say take a nap.

Jad Abumrad:               See that's the best part of your spindle situation, is that it's not just that thoughts connect to feelings, but those thoughts can sometimes suppress feelings.

Jonah Lehrer:                Yeah I, you know I think that's the idea is that humans in social interactions can't rely on these hard wired emotions in the same way other animals might be able to.

Jad Abumrad:               That's Jonah Lehrer, science writer.

Jonah Lehrer:                Um, you know we can't like a dog just hump every other dog and see what happens.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jonah Lehrer:                We've, we've, we've got to flirt and be funny, and you know buy a couple of drinks.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Jonah Lehrer:                But, but that, that was... You guys have to cut that because I don't want hate mail from-

Robert Krulwich:           I am so astonished.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Jonah Lehrer:                Well I was like wow-

Robert Krulwich:           We've got to use that Jad.

Jonah Lehrer:                Um, I just, I just turned into a frat boy. So (laughs) but the point being that our social interactions are very complicated, and that, and that we can't rely... It's much tougher for humans to rely on simply these hard wired, primitive instincts.

Jonah Lehrer:                You know so the job of spindle cells is to simple broadcast (beep sound) content to the rest of the brain.

Jad Abumrad:               Because without our whole brain involved we'd never able to navigate the social world, and make any kind of connection.

Robert Krulwich:           Right. So if spindle cells then allow us to talk gently and emotionally to one another, the questions is, this is the question for the hour. What about intra-species. Is it intra or inter.

Jad Abumrad:               Intra.

Robert Krulwich:           To look within.

Jad Abumrad:               Intranet.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah, that's inside.

Jad Abumrad:               I think a cross species is what you mean.

Robert Krulwich:           Does any other animal have spindle cells.

Jad Abumrad:               And as it happens...

Patrick H.:                     So, where I'm taking you to my cold room.

Jad Abumrad:               Just down the hall from his office Professor Hoff has a freezer.

Patrick H.:                     Uh, where I store the specimens.

Jad Abumrad:               This is a very, very big door too.

Patrick H.:                     So-

Jad Abumrad:               Full of brains.

Patrick H.:                     Yes, so it's going to get really cooler here. (music)

Jad Abumrad:               All different kinds.

Patrick H.:                     We have brains of all your species, the cetacean are over there. We have the great apes around here.

Robert Krulwich:           This is the whale wall.

Patrick H.:                     That's the whale wall. Yeah-

Jad Abumrad:               He's got dozens and dozens of brains in buckets, and in jars, and he keeps them all organized. Uh, where each category of species has its own shelf. (music)

Patrick H.:                     You have more apes down there with gorillas and orangutans.

Robert Krulwich:           Uh.

Patrick H.:                     Whew.

Robert Krulwich:           It was really cold in there.

Jad Abumrad:               So what they did was they took a bunch of those brains off the shelf, and walked them down the hall to the lab, and put little pieces of them under a microscope. They didn't expect to find any of those [bizarro 00:30:17] neurons in any of these other creatures, because he was pretty sure.

Patrick H.:                     This is something that is unique to human.

Jad Abumrad:               But...

Patrick H.:                     One day we were looking at the brain of the humpback whale, and we stiff found spindle cells, plenty of spindle cells.

Robert Krulwich:           Oh, so what was that, did you, were you surprised?

Patrick H.:                     And I was there, and said okay this is fascinating.

Robert Krulwich:           You weren't expecting that?

Patrick H.:                     I was not at all expecting that.

Jad Abumrad:               But on the other hand...

Patrick H.:                     Here we have the, the humpback whale which is a very social animal. They, they, they form clans, they, they communicate. The males have a song. (whale sounds) They hunt together, they develop hunting strategies, which requires perfect coordination of many whales, so they have to act together to do that.

Jad Abumrad:               Now if acting together is the key, you know in having complex social structures, well then these things shouldn't just be limited to whales. And in fact over the years Hoff and other scientist have found spindle cells in chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, gorillas, which begs the question.

Jad Abumrad:               Like if we want to have an experience with another creature, and not just at the zoo, but a real shared experience. Do those creatures need to have these things? Do you think the existence of spindle cells creates more of a possibility of having that cross species sharing moment?

Patrick H.:                     I think so. If we assume that these cells and have such an influence on, uh, the sociability of species. It is very likely that you would, uh, experience something of that kind with a species that has them. I doubt you would get a very good experience if you were trying to do this with a hyena.

Jonah Lehrer:                So maybe what we see when we look into, you know these sad eyes of a blue whale, or, or when we look into, you know the eyes of an elephant, um, cradling a baby elephant, which are just the cutest things on earth. Maybe what we recognize is, is, is that same flavor of emotion, that same inner life for feeling. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, maybe that inner life requires spindle cells. (music)

Robert Krulwich:           But how big is that maybe? I mean it sounds like a really maybe, maybe.

Jonah Lehrer:                I mean you know as some point this is all just a... I think this is still very theoretical.

Robert Krulwich:           And in fact if you ask people, like Clive Wynn the fellow who, who, who poo-pooed our, our whale thank you from before.

Jad Abumrad:               Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Robert Krulwich:           Ask Clive, like could you look at animal and find something in the animal that says yep if he has that, he's got feeling.

Clive Wynn:                  Well wrong. I don't for a moment imagine that there's going to be a type of nerve cell or a type of structure in the brain which is going to be such an asset test of whether an animal has a particular psychological capacity. That we can then find that kind of neuron and say well now we know. Without having to look at the behavior of the animal, now we know that this species has this or that psychological ability.

Jad Abumrad:               Well let me ask a question a different way. I mean do you think spindle cells, or no spindle cells, let's just toss them out for a second. Do you think there are a category of creatures that are more likely to have empathic experiences with us? Would you draw lines between beings?

Clive Wynn:                  Well the thing I would, the thing I would emphasize if we're looking for empathy between, uh, different species, is there, um, developmental experiences.

Robert Krulwich:           To make his point Clive told us about this experiment. He says let's take a chip with all the spindle cells inside the chimp brain in there. Put the chimp in a room, and in front of the chimp let's put two cups face down.

Robert Krulwich:           Now one of the cups has a grape, something delicious under it, and the chimp doesn't know where the grape is. It could be under cup A or cup B. So what you the experimenter do is you simply point to the cup that has the grape. Like that's the one, that one right there.

Clive Wynn:                  And all the animal has to do is to go to the cup that's pointed to. It seems simple enough.

Robert Krulwich:           But chimps Clive says chimps...

Clive Wynn:                  Find this stunningly difficult to understand.

Robert Krulwich:           Get this wrong.

Jad Abumrad:               What do you mean?

Robert Krulwich:           I mean they just look at you pointing, and they look at you pointing, and they look, and you're pointing, and they just go what.

Clive Wynn:                  Whereas dogs...

Robert Krulwich:           Who don't have spindle cells.

Clive Wynn:                  Most pet dogs get this from the get go.

Jad Abumrad:               The dogs can do this and chimps can't?

Clive Wynn:                  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They quite spontaneously recognized that you should go where, where they point.

Robert Krulwich:           And Clive says the explanation here is not that dogs have some special cell in their brain. It's simply because...

Clive Wynn:                  Because they grow up in our households.

Robert Krulwich:           They grow up with us.

Clive Wynn:                  Right.

Jad Abumrad:               Huh.

Robert Krulwich:           To test this idea he did this same study.

Jad Abumrad:               The pointing one.

Robert Krulwich:           Yep. Except this time with some wolves.

Clive Wynn:                  Because wolves are the animals from which dogs are descended, but they haven't lived in human households obviously.

Robert Krulwich:           And normally like the chimps wolves totally screw up the pointing test.

Clive Wynn:                  But we've done some tests on some wolves that were hand reared by human beings, and are very friendly to human beings, and we find that those wolves behave just like the dogs. That they are just as good at following the human pointing to find the food.

Jad Abumrad:               Really? Did you have to train them, or?

Clive Wynn:                  No we did not train them.

Jad Abumrad:               They just picked it up?

Clive Wynn:                  Well they just picked it up. But these are exceptional wolves in so far as they were reared by human beings. They were bottled fed when they were wee babies.

Jad Abumrad:               Ah.

Robert Krulwich:           Ah.

Clive Wynn:                  Because there are things that go on earlier in our development that are crucial, and that included learning who are your, who are your kind. What the, who am I? What am I? And you learn that in a critical period in your early life by looking around you and seeing who you're interacting with. Pretty much every dog you might meet has learned to accept humans as social companions, and that's because it was reared in a human home, and because evolution has prepared it with a relatively slow development so that it's pretty easy to tame a dog.

Clive Wynn:                  The wolf on the other hand it goes through its childhood, and adolescence in the blink of an eye, in the course of just a handful of weeks. And, so, it's actually extremely difficult to successfully hand rear a wolf, because you have so little time available to you. And you have to invest 24 hours a day, seven days a week during that brief period that a wolf is open to the possibility of learning who its companions might be.

Jad Abumrad:               That's really interesting. You know one, one of the pieces of the interpretation that I find intriguing, and I want to, I want to run by you, is that when-

Robert Krulwich:           Ooh, that's so interesting. I'm now sitting here thinking-

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           Boy if I could raise a whale with a baby bottle, then I would know whether the whale was saying thank you to me because I would've learned... It's not like I have to learn whale, but whale would've learned human.

Clive Wynn:                  Well that's right. I mean of course this is completely hypothetical. The whale is a really bad example to choose.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Clive Wynn:                  But my guess would be if you bottle fed a whale, you would get a whale that might plausibly do something like a behavior that expresses thanks.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs) That is such a hard mental image to conjure.

Clive Wynn:                  Well that's right, that's right.

Jad Abumrad:               Robert bottle feeding a whale.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah, well because we have to keep rising to the surface for 21 years to breathe.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           Before I actually get to the experiment.

Clive Wynn:                  Yes, there a number of draw backs to that experiment.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah. (music)

Jad Abumrad:               Radiolab will continue in a moment.

Micha:                          My name is [Micha Toi 00:37:55] a Radiolab listener in Singapore.

Micha:                          Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. For more information about Sloan go to www.Sloan.org.

Jad Abumrad:               Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:           I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad:               This is Radiolab. Today, uh, kind of a hard topic to describe. We're calling it, um, animal minds, animal minds.

Robert Krulwich:           Or maybe the better way to say this is minds other than our own.

Jad Abumrad:               Which would be the animals, no?

Robert Krulwich:           That's the animals.

Jad Abumrad:               We're animals though. Yeah you're right.

Robert Krulwich:           No, yeah.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah you're right.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah, so we live with other... Yeah so we live with... We're having enough trouble just talking to each other. (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           But imagine if I were trying, if you were a Labrador.

Jad Abumrad:               That'd be tough.

Robert Krulwich:           See then we'd have a problem. Or a whale.

Jad Abumrad:               No, maybe we wouldn't. That's kind of what we're looking at. How much can you really share with, you know a Labrador or a whale.

Robert Krulwich:           Right, and we're not solving this problem in this show at all.

Jad Abumrad:               No.

Robert Krulwich:           But maybe we can do this. Maybe instead of talking to scientist about other minds, maybe we should talk to, um...

Jad Abumrad:               A writer.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah.

Speaker 27:                  Paul can you hear me? Paul can you hear? Paul, oh Paul. Paul? Paul?

Robert Krulwich:           The writer we chose to look for you may now know was named Paul.

Speaker 27:                  Okay stand by.

Robert Krulwich:           Put Paul through.

Speaker 27:                  I'm not hearing anything.

Robert Krulwich:           He's the author of any number of travel books, novels.

Jad Abumrad:               Didn't he win a big prize.

Robert Krulwich:           I'm sure.

Paul Theroux:               Yes. Is that Jad?

Jad Abumrad:               Yes, hi.

Paul Theroux:               J- A- D-.

Jad Abumrad:               That's me. Like a Pulitzer or one of the, one of the big ones.

Paul Theroux:               Okay.

Robert Krulwich:           No, he didn't win a Pulitzer, but he, he won the prize of my heart when he wrote the Patagonian Express.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Paul Theroux:               Oh, so you're tapping. Okay great.

Jad Abumrad:               Yes.

Robert Krulwich:           Yes.

Jad Abumrad:               Anyhow, uh, Paul Theroux travels all around the world writing about all kinds of things. But the reason we called him is for something that actually happened in his backyard.

Robert Krulwich:           Which luckily for him happens to be in the state of Hawaii.

Paul Theroux:               I own, uh, seven acres on a slope, a west facing slope on the north shore of Oahu.

Robert Krulwich:           Oh.

Paul Theroux:               And I had very, very long grass. And someone said "oh, I know what you need are some geese. They'll take care of that grass.", so I got a couple.

Robert Krulwich:           And you decided not to go to the hardware store and buy a lawn mower. You decided to buy two animate birds.

Paul Theroux:               That's right. I would have need a really, really serious industrial mower. Instead, I got two non industrial geese. (music) Well I actually got three, two ganders and a goose, and a strange thing happened. One of the ganders imprinted on me.

Jad Abumrad:               So what does that mean?

Robert Krulwich:           So it means the baby chic boy looked at you-

Paul Theroux:               Yes.

Robert Krulwich:           And, and-

Paul Theroux:               The first moving thing they see is the mother figure. This goose became very attached, very protective. It would sit in my lap, when another goose came up it would peck at them. It was both protective and attentive. (horns)

Robert Krulwich:           But as the gander grew up strange things began to happen.

Paul Theroux:               First it became detached from me, then aggressive toward me, and then needed me. It was very strange, and it made me think I want to get some more geese, and I ant to read more about them, and then, and then watch them.

Robert Krulwich:           So he, well he asked friends, and friends said to him “Look if you want to know everything that's important to know about geese you have to read E.B. White.”

Paul Theroux:               Most people mention E.B. White when they talk about geese, and of course I know and love E.B. White.

Robert Krulwich:           And if you're not a martian you probably love E.B. White too.

Jad Abumrad:               Well, you, I mean. What do you mean? People it's possible-

Robert Krulwich:           How many people have read Stuart Little, or how many people have read Charlotte's Web.

Jad Abumrad:               It's true.

Robert Krulwich:           And if you don't love the children's fiction, he certainly one of the great, greatest of all America essayist.

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, see that's the point. He's one of the great American writers. He actually, uh, wrote the Bible for writing.

Robert Krulwich:           The Elements of Style.

Jad Abumrad:               The Elements of Style.

Robert Krulwich:           By, uh, Strunk.

Jad Abumrad:               Which is still the bible for writing weirdly, and it was written like 50 years ago.

Robert Krulwich:           So when people point to anything by E.B. White, you point seriously.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           And in this case very late in life after you moved, uh, up to a cabin in, in Maine. He was in his 70s, and this particular essay we're going to talk about is called very simply...

Paul Theroux:               The Geese.

Robert Krulwich:           The Geese, Allen Cove, July 9th, 1971.

Robert Krulwich:           I have had a pair of elderly gray geese, a goose and a gander living on this place for a number of years, and they have been my friends. (geese) So Paul Theroux opened the essay fully expecting to learn all about geese. But then he kept running across these little phrases, and adjectives that made him cringe.

Paul Theroux:               You know he talks about a gosling that grows into, I'm quoting now.

Robert Krulwich:           A real dandy.

Paul Theroux:               A real dandy.

Robert Krulwich:           Full of pompous thoughts and surly gestures.

Paul Theroux:               Pompous thoughts and surly gestures. You know- (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               I mean come on. I mean doesn't that make the goose a little bit more, um, easy to relate to.

Paul Theroux:               Alright take one word. Malice.

Robert Krulwich:           I could not tell whether the look in his eye was one of malice or affection.

Paul Theroux:               Malice, malice is a word you use for, you know Mussolini, or, uh, you know somebody else, not for, not for a goose.

Robert Krulwich:           But what's the sin in that? If a man who's a professional story teller, and one of the greatest ones says let me tell you about my geese, and then talks about them as though they were uncles, and aunts, and neighbors with moods that are distinctly human. So what.

Paul Theroux:               Well I suppose you could say so, or you could say but, but so what if he put them in, you know little Halloween costumes too, for that matter, so what.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Paul Theroux:               But I'm in the writing business, the writing business should be unsparing. He could be quite unsparing himself in his writing. You're giving (laugh) E.B. White too much license if you're saying it really doesn't matter. It does matter to me.

Robert Krulwich:           And the reason it matters says Paul Theroux. "Is that E.B. White got so attached to the idea of those geese as aging critters like himself." That he missed something deep and important about the geese.

Paul Theroux:               The elements of that behavior that is, that is pure goose.

Robert Krulwich:           Paul pointed to the end of the essay.

Robert Krulwich:           Suddenly I heard sounds of a rumble outside in the barnyard where the ganders were.

Robert Krulwich:           Where a formerly great gander gets unseated by a younger male goose as a big fight, lots of squawking, and the old gander loses. (music)

Robert Krulwich:           I watched as he threaded his way slowly down the narrow path between clumps of thistles and daisies. His head was barely visible above the grasses, but his broken spirit was plain to any eye. I felt very deeply his sorrow and his defeat.

Paul Theroux:               Wow, the defeated gander goes off. Well this isn't true at all. When a gander loses a battle he goes off, gets his strength back, and waits for a chance to attack again. That gander is going to come back and fight again.

Robert Krulwich:           So you're saying he got it wrong about the geese?

Paul Theroux:               Yes, of course. Of course. Here is a man who is solitary, he's a New Yorker who goes to Maine and becomes a gentleman farmer of a kind, and begins to relate to his geese, and then writes about them as though he's one of them. I know I'm not one of them.

Robert Krulwich:           But if you can't use words that are, you know very human and psychological words, and if you can't because you're not a goose have whatever it is that geese have on their insides, then what if you wanted to share something with a goose and I'd bet you, you do. Is there anyway in which you could honestly describe yourself as a friend of any of these geese?

Paul Theroux:               Yeah, I, I would you say, you know that, that this is a very good question. I, I had a very surly (laughs) to use an E.B. White word, a very, a very, um, rambunctious gander, and he got very sick. You know the thing is sitting on the ground just following its nest. I, I thought he was really going to die, and I nursed him back to health.

Paul Theroux:               I gave him a, an antibiotic with a turkey baster, and it took about three or four weeks. And the first thing he did when he was nursed back to health, was he got up on two legs and I came up with the turkey baster to give him one last drink, and he bit me.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Paul Theroux:               And I thought, um-

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               Where did he bite you?

Paul Theroux:               He bit my leg. Hard. And I thought okay he's back to health.

Jad Abumrad:               You didn't think ow how could you?

Paul Theroux:               Well I thought he, he's, he's healthy, he's healthy again, and he's behaving just as goose would.

Robert Krulwich:           Don't you see though that if the moment of true, of your true most goosy moment is a moment when you're with a goose that you help bites you, then you are out of this story in a fact.

Paul Theroux:               I absolutely agree with that. I, I... In, in all of this there's an implied, uh, loneliness. (geese) I'm not his friend, I'm not a feathered creature. I'm a human being among birds.

Robert Krulwich:           Although, curiously Paul Theroux does have an approach to communing with his geese. He takes a chair, puts it on the lawn, plops down in the chair, and disappears.

Paul Theroux:               You know my writing day ends in the early afternoon. I have lunch, and after lunch there's a long sunny period in the afternoon when I'm alone, I'm with the geese, and I sit around with them, and try to make out what they're doing among each other, and paying no particular attention to me. It's simply watching the world as it was. You're seeing creatures who are behaving as though cities don't exist, presidents don't exist, governments don't exist, roads don't exist.

Robert Krulwich:           Ah.

Paul Theroux:               As if it's before the fall.

Jad Abumrad:               Mm.

Paul Theroux:               As though it's the peaceable kingdom. Simply watching animals who are content doing their thing. Then you feel a bit like Adam. (geese/music)

Horowitz: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, and Soren Wheeler, Michael Rafael, Ellen Horn.

Clive Wynn:                  And Lulu Miller. With help from [Addy Narrian 00:49:11], and Tim Howard.

Horowitz: Special thanks to [Brianna Breen 00:49:12] and [Kelly Carmedie 00:49:13]. Apologies for betraying any names.

Jad Abumrad:               Wait a second. Stop, stop the machine. It just feels weird to end the show this way, with this lonely geese thing. So we're going to play for you one final story. It's kind of a continuation, uh, of Paul Theroux and his geese, except it involves a very different guy in a very different climate.

Jad Abumrad:               First of all who, what, who are you? What's your name?

Paul Nicklen:                 My name is [Paul Nicklen 00:49:37] and I'm a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine.

Jad Abumrad:               Paul Nicklen is basically National Geographic's arctic guy.

Paul Nicklen:                 Its, I've been pegged as their polar specialist.

Jad Abumrad:               In this particular tale involves his attempt to photograph one of the great arctic predators.

Paul Nicklen:                 The Leopard seal.

Jad Abumrad:               Leopard seal which by reputation is a very nasty creature.

Paul Nicklen:                 Preface to this story is...

Paul Nicklen:                 In 2003 tragically a scientist was actually killed, uh, Kirsty Brown was doing underwater research, and she was taken down by a leopard seal, and drowned.

Jad Abumrad:               Was she just yanked off the ice, or...

Paul Nicklen:                 She was swimming and it just came up and grabbed her.

Jad Abumrad:               Oh.

Paul Nicklen:                 And took her down to 300 feet.

Jad Abumrad:               None the less our story starts with Paul and his guide [Godan 00:50:14]. They're in a boat in the Arctic Ocean looking for seals.

Paul Nicklen:                 The first seal we encountered, I'd never seen a leopard seal before, and we, we came around in, into this bay where there was a penguin colony. And right away Godan who's seen many, many leopard seals, he said to me “You know bloody hell that's the biggest seal I've ever seen.” And she came up to boat with a penguin in her mouth, and she went underneath the boat and she started ramming the penguin underneath the whole of the boat. Lifting the bow out of the water, and that's when Godan looks to me and he says “Paul it's time for you to get in the water, yeah."

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Paul Nicklen:                 In his thick Swedish accent.

Jad Abumrad:               Wow were you freaking out?

Paul Nicklen:                 I had dry mouth, um, just from the nervousness. I was trembling, and you know I put my mask on, and slipped over in the 29 degree Fahrenheit water. And, uh, there she was, instantly right there. Massive, huge.

Jad Abumrad:               Well how huge?

Paul Nicklen:                 Probably over a 1,000 pounds.

Robert Krulwich:           Oh my God.

Paul Nicklen:                 12 feet long.

Paul Nicklen:                 She dropped her penguin, she came right over to me, and she opened up her mouth. And she engulfed the front of the camera, her canines were on top of my top to where below chin. You know I'm basically staring down her throat.

Jad Abumrad:               I can't believe you managed to take a picture of this. Because I'm looking at this picture, and these teeth are huge.

Paul Nicklen:                 The canines.

Jad Abumrad:               You know like massive.

Robert Krulwich:           So you were doing business at this moment?

Paul Nicklen:                 Yeah, I'm working at that point.

Jad Abumrad:               You can even see the textures of the seals tongue. Like she has these little fibers on them.

Paul Nicklen:                 Oh, it's 180 degree view, so you had to get that, that perspective I'm basically in the mouth to get that shot.

Robert Krulwich:           Wow, so then what happened?

Paul Nicklen:                 She backs off, looks at me, sniff my flipper, touched them with nose, poked me in bum, came up did this open mouth threat display again, and then she swims away.

Robert Krulwich:           Ooh.

Paul Nicklen:                 Wow, just, I was just getting ready to swim back to the zodiac, you know I've been in the water for quite a while, and I'm cold. And all of a sudden she shows up with a freshly caught live penguin chick in her mouth.

Robert Krulwich:           Huh.

Paul Nicklen:                 And I'm sitting there staring at her and she stops about 10 feet away from and she's got the penguin by the feet, and the penguin is flapping its flippers trying to get away. She lines the penguin up to face perfectly in my direction and then she lets it go. The penguin swam right by me and she chases off after it and grabs it, comes back and does this again, and again, and again.

Robert Krulwich:           Why?

Jad Abumrad:               Yeah, man what was she doing?

Paul Nicklen:                 At first, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I thought maybe she was having a hard time eating it, and then it dawned on me she was trying to feed me.

Robert Krulwich:           Where, uh, did you make any attempt during this period to say no thank you?

Paul Nicklen:                 No. Nope I'm so, in such disbelief at this point, I'm just trying to capture it.

Robert Krulwich:           Well didn't you feel compelled as a social human to just offer some kind of gestural explanation. I mean with me I would have made some look like come I don't eat that stuff or-

Jad Abumrad:               Or maybe it's like you, you take, you take the penguin at that point.

Paul Nicklen:                 Well I mean I couldn't catch him.

Jad Abumrad:               I mean when in Rome, you know.

Paul Nicklen:                 The penguin is swimming 15 miles and hour you know.

Jad Abumrad:               Oh, so you mean when she let's go, it just goes (speed sound).

Paul Nicklen:                 Like a bullet.

Robert Krulwich:           No, he's pathetic is what he's saying, is I'm a pathetic creature, I can't actually catch the thing.

Paul Nicklen:                 I'm thinking exposures, get the shot, keep shooting.

Robert Krulwich:           You're such a photo dude, you know.

Paul Nicklen:                 (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Paul Nicklen:                 Well I'm, I work for National Geographic.

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Paul Nicklen:                 I don't want to anthropomorphize too much, but as the penguin was swimming by this huge seal she looked over at me and I swear she had a look of disgust in her face.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Jad Abumrad:               (laughs)

Paul Nicklen:                 So, she goes off and gets another penguin, and this penguin now is quite weak and tired looking, so I think she's worn it down. She lets the penguin go, the penguin takes off. She grabs it, does that a couple of more times.

Jad Abumrad:               And you're still not eating the penguin.

Paul Nicklen:                 Right, next encounter was bringing me dead penguins. And sometimes she would just drop off a dead penguin right on top of the camera and she would just sit there with this dejected look on her face, staring at me.

Robert Krulwich:           (laughs)

Paul Nicklen:                 And then she went to the stage of flipping dead penguins on top of my head, and trying to force feed me these penguins. Telling me at this point, you know eat these damn penguins, I'm trying to feed you. And why won't you eat my penguins, eat the penguins.

Paul Nicklen:                 And then she would start to eat the penguins right in front of me, and show me how to eat them. She would rip them apart on the surface, get the skin off them, and she's shredding them in the water in front of me.

Jad Abumrad:               And, and how much time is passing here? I mean we're talking minutes, hours?

Paul Nicklen:                 This went on for four days.

Jad Abumrad:               Four days.

Robert Krulwich:           Four days. (laughs) Oh God.

Jad Abumrad:               And, and when you're in the water, you know day after day. What's happening for you at this point? Are you still just a guy with a camera, or...

Paul Nicklen:                 I mean I was starting to fall in love with this seal. It's just, uh, this animal that's just so intelligent and so, uh, powerful, and it can kill you in an instant, yet your... I mean-

Robert Krulwich:           But when you say you were in love, what, you were... Were you in love with the idea of this, or did you really like her?

Paul Nicklen:                 I really liked her. She was beautiful, she was big. She had this, this beautiful face, beautiful silver color to her. She kind of glowed underwater. I'm just so in love with this seal at this point. I'm not sleeping at night, I have a hard time eating. I just can't wait to see her. I can't. The first thing in the morning, you know the first sign of light I'm in that zodiac.

Paul Nicklen:                 And then on the fourth day is when, you know I was thinking okay maybe she's weary of me, and she's getting tired of me, so I'm just going to totally leave her alone. That's when I started going off and presenting myself to other seals who were swimming around the [recrein 00:55:24].

Paul Nicklen:                 And, I was in the water, and the same big female came up to me, and she started to do all these really beautiful ballet like moves. I'm photographing her, and looking at her, and all of a sudden she drops her penguin, she turns upside down, and she does this big guttural go, go, go, go, this big jarring noise that's vibrating my whole body. I can really feel it in my chest, it's so loud, and I'm thinking am I being attacked. She finally told me that she's sick of me and wants me off her feeding grounds.

Paul Nicklen:                 But, as soon as she did that another leopard seal shot out from right behind me. And so this leopard seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that noise to chase that seal away, a smaller seal. She chased the seal way, it too had a penguin. She grabbed its penguin and brought me that seal's penguin and dropped it off in front of me.

Jad Abumrad:               Wow.

Robert Krulwich:           Wow.

Jad Abumrad:               Wow.

Robert Krulwich:           You're a lucky guy. Wow.

Paul Nicklen:                 I mean I'm almost getting emotional reliving that. I mean it's very powerful.

Robert Krulwich:           Have you ever been in love with an animal quite this way before?

Paul Nicklen:                 Never. Never.

Jad Abumrad:               Have you every had an experience with, uh, with another human that rivals this?

Paul Nicklen:                 Perhaps when I was kid with my mom. Someone taking care of you, and feeling safe and nurtured, and protected, but I've never had that in, in my life as an adult.

Jad Abumrad:               It sounds, this is such an interesting species moment here.

Robert Krulwich:           Yeah, it sounds like you're doing something-

Jad Abumrad:               You're transgressing or something.

Robert Krulwich:           It sounds like you're stealing something from the Gods right here, right at this moment.

Paul Nicklen:                 I, I mean I don't know what words I can find to, to explain it.

Robert Krulwich:           Hmm.

Jad Abumrad:               Thank you so much.

Paul Nicklen:                 Thank you guys. (silence)

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab, where he has reported stories on everything from snowflake photography to medieval robots to a polar bear who liked to have sex with grizzly bears. Earlier this year, he hosted the miniseries The Other Latif, about his Moroccan namesake who happens to be Detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay.

In addition to his work in audio, Latif is the host and executive producer of the Netflix science documentary series, Connected.  He has also given two TED talks, and written for the Boston Globe Ideas section. He has a PhD from Harvard's History of Science department.

Follow Latif on Twitter.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].shows[].about.body
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].shows[].about.people[].image.alt-text
Producer Sarah Qari, smiling and standing proudly in the foreground of a field of sunflowers.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].shows[].description
About Radiolab

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Radiolab is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check your local station for airtimes. It's also available via the CBC, ABC, and the BBC.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Contact Radiolab using this form.

Apply to become a Radiolab intern!

Embed the Radiolab widget on your blog or website.

All press inquiries may be directed to Jennifer Houlihan Roussel at (646) 829-4497.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].shows[].tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Matt started at Radiolab as an intern. Now he works here as a Senior Producer. Around and in-between those two things, he lived in Minnesota, attended school in Arizona, tried to find himself, lived in Washington D.C., learned radio from Rob Rosenthal at the Salt Institute for Documentaries Studies, hung around This American Life, was awarded the Above the Fray fellowship to report in Uganda, and had a metal plate screwed into his wrist.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Tracie Hunte is a correspondent for The Experiment. She’s previously worked at Radiolab and as a producer in the WNYC newsroom.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Annie grew up in Dunrobin, Ontario, headed east for school and ended up in St. John's, Newfoundland. It was there that she fell under the patient mentorship of Chris Brookes at Battery Radio who taught her about sound and tape. She furthered her studies in radio at the Transom Story Workshop and then, under a series of confounding and improbable events, she ended up at Radiolab. She loves it here. When she's not cutting tape she likes to be outside.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.body
One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. But in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of heroism turned into a rationale for making his personal life into political opportunity. What happens next makes us wonder what a moment, or a movement, or a whole society can demand of one person. And how much is too much?

Through newly unearthed archival tape, we hear Sipple himself grapple with some of the most vexing topics of his day and ours - privacy, identity, the freedom of the press - not to mention the bonds of family and friendship.

Reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte. Produced by Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte.

Special thanks to Jerry Pritikin, Michael Yamashita, Stan Smith, Duffy Jennings; Ann Dolan, Megan Filly and Ginale Harris at the Superior Court of San Francisco; Leah Gracik, Karyn Hunt, Jesse Hamlin, The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, Mike Amico, Jennifer Vanasco and Joey Plaster.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Episode originally published 09/21/2017

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.image-caption
Oliver Sipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, tells how he struck the gun just as it was fired in the direction of President Ford as he left a downtown hotel in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.image-main.caption
Oliver Sipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, tells how he struck the gun just as it was fired in the direction of President Ford as he left a downtown hotel in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].about.body
View the Episode Archive »

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes | RSS.

#smartbinge Radiolab podcasts

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
In a flash of heroism and humanity, Oliver Sipple saved a life and became something he never wanted to be. 

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.transcript
JAD ABUMRAD: This story contains a couple moments of profanity, cursing—just a few. Know that before you go in.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: This is Radiolab, I’m Jad Abumrad. So today I want to play for you really one of my favorite stories we've ever done on Radiolab. It's one of those like perfect stories where all the different things you want in a story come together all at once. Like you've got this single human being going through something truly unique and difficult. But inside that single human being story is—in that kind of universe, in a blade of grass sort of way—is everything. You know, it's that kind of story. Comes from Latif. This is back in the days when Latif was a producer and this is before he was hosting the show with Lulu Miller and I. It’s back in the time when I was hosting the show with Robert Krulwich, so I don't know, let's just let it roll.

JAD: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today, we are going to start.

LATIF NASSER: Okay, so let's start...

JAD: With our producer, Latif Nasser.

LATIF: Yeah...

ROBERT: Well, let's just, let's just go back to San Francisco on a particular day at a particular time...

LATIF: Well and a particular woman.

SARA JANE MOORE: Hello.

LATIF: Hi. Is this Sarah Jane?

SARA JANE MOORE: Yes, it is.

LATIF: A woman named...

SARA JANE MOORE: Sarah Jane Moore.

LATIF: Sarah Jane.

JAD: Okay.

LATIF: So this is San Francisco. The particular date was September 22. The particular time...

SARA JANE MOORE: 1975

LATIF: It's a Monday morning. Was it a nice day?

SARA JANE MOORE: Oh, yeah. I don't remember anything different, so I assume it was a nice day.

LATIF: Okay, all right, sure, sure.

SARA JANE MOORE: I was kind of, you know, in my own head. I remember...

LATIF: So Sarah Jane on this Monday morning, she wakes up early, drops her nine year old off at school, runs a few errands. Then she drives downtown to this—this big fancy hotel.

LATIF: What was the name of the hotel?

SARA JANE MOORE: Uh, I think it's the St. Francis, isn't it? I'm 87 years old, don't expect me to remember all the details like that.

LATIF: Ok, alright, fair enough.

SARA JANE MOORE: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah.

SARA JANE MOORE: Uh-huh, but at any rate, you know, I parked in the parking garage across—right across from the hotel, there’s a park, but there’s a parking garage underneath. Walked over and walked across the street. There were—there were sidewalks on both sides of the street. There were people on both sidewalks.

LATIF: She joins the crowd across the street from the hotel.

SARA JANE MOORE: It was very crowded.

LATIF: A couple thousand people. It’s like a—it’s like a big scene.

SARA JANE MOORE: And there was a barrier—a rope barrier—right—keeping us back on the sidewalk. And my plan had always been to be back in the crowd—uh, you know, and I was dressed like every other middle aged woman that was there. So I…

LATIF: What were you—do you remember what you were wearing? I mean, I’m sure there’s, uh…

SARA JANE MOORE: Oh, there are pictures of it, yes. I was wearing—I was wearing slacks. That was—that was at the beginning of when it was natural for women to wear slacks. I had a coat on. And I was carrying a purse. And I went back into the middle of the crowd, as I had planned to do. Anyway, I felt a man come up against me, and socialized as I was in that day and time, I spun around to slap his face.

LATIF: She sees this guy there, big strong guy, blonde hair…

SARA JANE MOORE: Looked at him and realized that it was crowd pressure, that he had not done anything out of—out of ordinary, that…

LATIF: Mhmm.

SARA JANE MOORE: So I turned back around and uh, went on about my business. Uh, I was then pushed up, the crowd pressure was such—I tried to stay back in the crowd—but I got pushed up almost onto the ropes in the front. Right up on the curb of the sidewalk. It’s where I had not planned to be. Uh and—and he apparently was still right behind me, so maybe he was pushed up by the crowd also.

LATIF: And so Sara Jane is just crammed into this crowd and she’s just standing there.

SARA JANE MOORE: Yes.

LATIF: And were you—were you nervous?

SARA JANE MOORE: Oh, nuh-uh. You set out to do something, and I was just going about doing what I had set out to do.

LATIF: So, she waits and she waits, and an hour goes by and two and three and then finally…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP [drumroll]]

LATIF: Out of the hotel comes none other than the president of the United States, Gerald Ford. And he has police and Secret Service and they're all coming, they're walking out of the hotel.

SARA JANE MOORE: To get in his car, which was parked there on the street.

LATIF: But he sees the crowd, Sara Jane actually says he looks directly at her, and he waves. He waves to the crowd, and everyone starts applauding and cheering—now, right at that moment—Sara Jane reaches her right hand into her purse…

SARA JANE MOORE: And pulled the gun out of my purse.

LATIF: A 38 caliber revolver. She cocks it, and then she takes aim right at Gerald Ford's head. And then…

[NEWS CLIP [sound of gunshot]: Oh my God, there’s been a shot—there’s been a shot…]

SARA JANE MOORE: But—Mr. Ford did not fall.

[NEWS CLIP : We’re being pushed back by the police.]

LATIF: The bullet flies a few feet to the right of Ford, chips the wall behind him. Ford freezes in place. Sara Jane…

SARA JANE MOORE: Never planned to take a second shot.

LATIF: Now she’s just still standing there.

SARA JANE MOORE: With my hand still in the air holding the gun.

LATIF: Looking over the smoking barrel of the gun. And she’s got enough time if she wants it, but before she can take that second shot, the blonde man behind her lunges at her, grabs her gun arm, pulls it down, and deflects it for just that crucial second that these police officers nearby need to get to her. They tackle her, they take her gun, and they pin her to the ground.

SARA JANE MOORE: So I couldn't move.

LATIF: And by that point, the Secret Service has whisked off the president into the limousine…

SARA JANE MOORE: And I was immediately picked up and carried across the street…

LATIF: Into the hotel…

SARA JANE MOORE: Arrested…

LATIF: And eventually—uh, she went to prison. And she served 32 years in prison.

JAD: Huh.

LATIF: Uh and then—and then after that was released on parole. And then we talked to her.

JAD: Woah…

LATIF: There’s a...

JAD: I was not prepared to be told the—a first person narrative from the perspective of someone who was about to assassinate the president. That was not what I was expecting.

LATIF: I was hoping that, um...

ROBERT: Wait, can you explain though why it is she decided to shoot the guy?

JAD: Yeah, why—why did she shoot?

ROBERT: Yeah...

LATIF: Well, Sara Jane's never fully explained that uh and in fact when—when I asked her…

SARA JANE MOORE: Well, this is not…

LATIF: She was like, I'm not going there.

SARA JANE MOORE: This is not an interview about what was driving me or about what I did or why I did it. This is an interview about Mr. Sipple.

ROBERT: Sipple?

LATIF: Yeah. Oliver Sipple.

ROBERT: Huh…

LATIF: He’s the random blonde guy who just happened to be standing next to Sara Jane Moore that day. The guy who grabbed her arm and saved the president's life.

SARA JANE MOORE: And he paid dearly for that.

LATIF: I actually called up Sara Jane and had her tell that whole story because I was actually interested in what happened to Oliver Sipple after that.

SARA JANE MOORE: Because had he not reached out and put his hand on my arm...

[NEWS CLIP: Somebody fired a shot...]

SARA JANE MOORE: None of this would have happened to him.

JAD: Wait, what happened to him?

LATIF: So Oliver Sipple actually died in 1989, but um, before we get to the story, I just want to give you a picture of the guy. So uh, just google search Oliver Sipple, Ford...

JAD: Okay...

LATIF: Or something…

JAD: Wait, okay, wait—I see the picture. Oh, I see, look at that.

LATIF: He’s a muscular guy, kind of blonde hair. He’s a—he’s a—he's a um—he’s a handsome guy.

JAD: He's a little bit James Dean and Marlo Brando had a baby, kinda?

LATIF: He feels like an all American—he feels all American. There's something all American about him.

DANIEL LUZER: Thank you.

LATIF: Yeah—yeah, we're bringing in another all American for this story. Uh, Daniel Luzer.

DANIEL LUZER: An editor at Oxford University Press. Um, and a few years ago—this was probably more than five years ago—I wrote an article about Oliver Sipple. But anyway…

LATIF: To get back on track.

DANIEL LUZER: September 22nd, 1975…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Gun shot]

LATIF: Sara Jane Moore fires that shot. Oliver Sipple grabs her arm—the police…

DANIEL LUZER: Wrestle Moore to the ground…

LATIF: And then the police actually grab Oliver, too, pull him inside the hotel to question him.

DANIEL LUZER: Because there's initially some confusion about what he was doing there, and some thought that—you know—he might have been a suspect.

LATIF: And so he’s in this hotel, trying to light a cigarette, but he just couldn't do it because he was shaking so hard.

JAD: Hm.

LATIF: Turns out, Oliver had served two very rough tours in Vietnam.

DANIEL LUZER: Loud noises would make him very unhappy. I think this is the sort of thing we might call post traumatic stress disorder now.

LATIF: But when eventually Oliver started to calm down, the Secret Service were like—what are you even doing here?

DANIEL LUZER: It was kind of hard for him to answer, because it's like, he didn't even really know. It was just like—I don't know, I was taking a walk.

LATIF: And I just bumped into this huge crowd of people, asked what was going on.

DANIEL LUZER: People were like, oh, like Gerald Ford is going to be here, you know, the president is going to be here.

LATIF: So, he said he thought, I might as well see him. And then he was standing there for a couple of hours until…

DANIEL LUZER: He saw a flash of metal…

LATIF: Realized it was a gun.

DANIEL LUZER: Reacted quickly.

LATIF: Instinctively.

DANIEL LUZER: And then…

LATIF: You guys all pulled me in here.

DANIEL LUZER: That's how I came to be here.

LATIF: So he's questioned for three hours. He goes home—home to his fourth floor walk up—and there's a reporter there waiting for him. But he—he just wants to sort of be left alone, and he told this reporter, um quote—I'm a coward. I don't know why I did it. It was the thing to do at the time. And then even after that, he just kept getting phone calls from reporters. And—and some of them learned that he was a Marine, and so they would ask him questions like, oh, was it your—you know—was it your training? Is that why you did this heroic thing?

DANIEL LUZER: But he said, oh, you know, listen, don't mention any of that stuff about the Marines. Let’s keep that under wraps.

LATIF: Quote—I’m no hero or nothing.—But...the next day…

[NEWS CLIP: Yesterday in San Francisco, a shot fired…]

LATIF: Oliver's story...shot across the country.

[NEWS CLIP: But the aim deflected by an ex-marine. A Vietnam veteran named Oliver Sipple.]

LATIF: His name's on television…

[NEWS CLIP: Marine, Oliver Sipple…]

LATIF: On the front page of newspapers where there's headlines like, ex-Marine deflects weapon as woman shoots. That's the LA Times. Chicago Tribune—hero tells how he deflected woman's arm. And so, despite his best efforts, Oliver becomes a national hero for a day.

DANIEL LUZER: And it appears that he sort of thought that would be it.

LATIF: Maybe his friends would give him a pat on the back, buy him a couple rounds.

DANIEL LUZER: And then—you know, over the next couple of days, it all sort of like rippled out of control.

LATIF: Because that very same day that Oliver was being painted as a hero, this guy named Herb Caen…

DANIEL LUZER: The longtime San Francisco columnist.

LATIF: Walked into his office and on his answering machine were two messages saying—hey, that guy Oliver Sipple, the hero?

DANIEL LUZER: Who has saved the president's life? Is gay.

JAD: Huh, Was he—was he out?

LATIF: Well, he was sort of out—and sort of not.

ROBERT: What does that mean?

LATIF: Well, to explain, you've got to understand this particular time and place. So let’s just—you know—take a magic carpet ride. Close your eyes and let the sound take you away.

[NEWS CLIP: A city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated, but prized.]

[NEWS CLIP: San Francisco—sometimes labeled with a sly caption, Queen City of the West.]

LATIF: So, San Francisco…

[NEWS CLIP: It’s a great day, it’s a gay day.]

[NEWS CLIP: Happy day.]

[NEWS CLIP: Happy day.]

LATIF: Was one of the first cities in America to have a gay pride parade. And in the ‘70s…

[NEWS CLIP: It’s a wonderful city, this city.]

[NEWS CLIP: Boys go to bed with boys, and girls go to bed with girls, and...]

LATIF: For gay people, San Francisco was like this shelter from the storm.

KEN MALEY: Many of us were immigrants from somewhere.

LATIF: This is Ken Maley.

KEN MALEY: Longtime San Francisco resident…

LATIF: And gay activist, who at the age of 19, uh, came to San Francisco from Kansas…

KEN MALEY: I escaped from Kansas because what the west offered was the ethereal promise—if you will—of reinvention. You could cross a line in which your past stayed behind you.

LATIF: It was a place where you could be out, but to the people you left behind, you could still be in.

DANIEL LUZER: So uh, so...

LATIF: And so for Oliver—you know—he came from Michigan…

DANIEL LUZER: From a working class family. Uh, he had a lot of brothers and sisters. I think he was one of eight children.

LATIF: And so, after the war, when he got to San Francisco, he actually started going by the name Billy.

DANIEL LUZER: Billy. Uh, Billy Sipple. And he was perfectly open about his sexual orientation and would tell anybody who asked that he was a gay man. But you know, he never told his family.

LATIF: And so Oliver lived, like a lot of gay people at the time, this double life.

DANIEL LUZER: Yeah, yeah.

LATIF: And do we know that this is the reason why Sipple came to San Francisco or was there a different reason…

DANIEL LUZER: It may have just been because Harvey Milk was there.

LATIF: The Harvey Milk—you know—famous gay activist, San Francisco politician.

DANIEL LUZER: He was friends with Harvey Milk.

KEN MALEY: The New Yorker. An immigrant from New York.

LATIF: Turns out, Oliver had actually met Harvey a decade earlier in New York, and I—I just want to mention this because I think it's so cool, at different points in time, they actually dated the same guy…

DANIEL LUZER: Who was the inspiration for Sugar Plum Fairy.

[MUSIC IN: Walk on the Wild Side]

LATIF: In Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side. Just a fun fact—just a fun fact, that’s it. [MUSIC OUT] But um, Oliver and Harvey, they were pretty good friends. They corresponded, stayed in touch when they lived in different places in the country. Actually, Harvey even loaned Oliver money sometimes because Oliver didn’t have a job. He, you know collected disability from his time in the Marines. But anyway…

KEN MALEY: By the beginning of the '70s…

LATIF: When Oliver got to San Francisco, reconnected with his old friend…

KEN MALEY: Harvey was—uh shall we say, evolving into…

DANIEL LUZER: A huge figure there.

KEN MALEY: A gay public figure.

LATIF: Ken was actually friends with Harvey, worked on one of his campaigns.

LATIF: And—and.

KEN MALEY: But this, I’m sorry.

LATIF: No, no, no, and and I'm just thinking like one of the things we were talking about on the phone was about sort of the—the kind of two different schools or two different…

KEN MALEY: I was just about to segway to that.

LATIF: Oh, perfect. Okay go—yeah, yeah go for it.

KEN MALEY: So this, older, other—I would say older, but other generation of gay, mostly men, was that—they were content to go to tea with the mayor or public official of some kind. [MUSIC IN]

LATIF: They would show up to like a rally…

KEN MALEY: Wearing jackets and ties.

LATIF: And like, ask for their rights politely.

KEN MALEY: They really weren't, shall we say, activists. [MUSIC OUT]

LATIF: Because according to Ken, the activism came…

[NEWS CLIP: Peace now, peace now, peace now...]

LATIF: When in the late '60s, early '70s, you had young, gay men and women…

[NEWS CLIP: [Protest chant]]

KEN MALEY: Who came out of the Vietnam war protests into the world…

LATIF: Took a look around…

[NEWS CLIP: The CBS news survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear.]

KEN MALEY: The police are still raiding bars…

[NEWS CLIP: What they consider discrimination in jobs and housing...]

KEN MALEY: People are still getting beaten…

[NEWS CLIP: One of whom has said, uh, queer faggot we’re gonna beat the shit out of you, something to that effect, uh, we’re gonna kill you.]

KEN MALEY: Both violently and nonviolently.

[NEWS CLIP: Got up in the middle of the street, they knocked me down and started beating me with their hands and their feet, their elbows, uh tried to muffle my screams.]

KEN MALEY: And...after a while, a body of people get to a point where they just will not take oppression anymore.

LATIF: So...

[NEWS CLIP: Oh Harvey…[MUSIC IN]]

LATIF: In came the activists like Harvey.

KEN MALEY: Pony tail, mustache, he was a banker turned hippie.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: You know you lying, you know you’re changing the statements around.]

KEN MALEY: He was very outspoken…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: I question what is your real motive behind it.]

KEN MALEY: Very militant…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: And stop this phony issue that you know is a phony issue.]

KEN MALEY: And to Harvey…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: We are saying that a gay person should have the right to say.]

KEN MALEY: Gay people were living in a half life opportunity.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: I am gay, that is a part of society, period.]

KEN MALEY: Not being able to be who they were.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: Every gay person must come out...As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell you relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell you neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in, and once—once you do, you will feel so much better.]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

LATIF: And so...cut back to…

DANIEL LUZER: September 22nd, 1975.

LATIF: In the blink of an eye, Oliver Sipple becomes this hero. And that same night, Oliver’s friend Harvey hears about all this news and kind of senses, wait, maybe there’s an opportunity here. So, he picks up the phone and he calls the columnist Herb Caen, a very, very well known, well loved gossip columnist. And Caen isn’t there, so Milk leaves a message on his answering machine. And he basically says, look, I’m a friend of Oliver Sipple’s. I’ve known him for years. Uh Oliver Sipple worked on my campaign for supervisor. So, basically, with—without Sipple’s consent…

KEN MALEY: Harvey outed him.

LATIF: Milk outed him.

ROBERT: What was Harvey Milk thinking that he would do this?

KEN MALEY: Well, for Harvey...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: I think the stereotypes, the lies, the innuendos...]

KEN MALEY: Of gay people as limp-wristed and drag queens and stuff…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: Distortions...all gay people are child molesters...]

KEN MALEY: Well, here's a true gay hero.

LATIF: A square jawed, heroic Marine…

DANIEL LUZER: Who seemed to be a sort of like, regular like, red blooded American.

LATIF: And so Harvey said, and this was written down by his biographer, who I'm quoting, "It's too good an opportunity. For once, we can show that gays do heroic things, not just all that caca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms."

ROBERT: Wasn't there someone who said, no, no, no, you gotta ask the guy, you can't just do that?

KEN MALEY: Harvey just did it.

ROBERT: Really?

KEN MALEY: Yeah, he just did it.

LATIF: So Caen—the next morning—Caen arrives at his office, he listens to the message, and Caen tries to call Sipple, but he can’t reach him. But there was another guy who was a gay activist. His name was the Reverend Ray Broshears. He was the head of what's called—what was called the Lavender Panthers. And he also independently called Herb Caen to say, oh, that guy Oliver Sipple everyone's talking about on the news? Gay. So he got two independent sources, both of people who said that they were friends with Sipple and that he was gay. And for Caen, I think this was juicy. This was a juicy thing.

DANIEL LUZER: Um, and he uh. Let's see. What's this? Let me like just go back and get this.

LATIF: So, two days after the assassination attempt, Caen’s column comes out.

DANIEL LUZER: And the way that he wrote it up, this is the precise paragraph: one of the heroes of the day, Oliver Billy Sipple, the ex-Marine who grabbed Sara Jane Moore's arm just as her gun was fired and thereby may have saved the president's life, was the center of midnight attention at the Red Lantern, a Golden Gate Avenue bar he favors. Reverend Ray Broshears, head of Helping Hands Center, and gay politico Harvey Milk, who claim to be among Sipple's close friends, describe themselves as "proud, maybe this will help break the stereotype."

LATIF: And then, that day, this guy named Daryl Lembke…

DARYL LEMBKE: Lembke. L-E-M-B-K-E.

LATIF: Picks up his issue of The Chronicle, sees Herb Caen's column.

DARYL LEMBKE: I read and I reported to the office.

LATIF: The office of the Los Angeles Times.

DARYL LEMBKE: I was a reporter for the LA Times in San Francisco, and so, my office told me, get an interview with Oliver Sipple.

LATIF: But really quickly before we get there, we actually managed to get a recording of this very specific interview in the LA Times collection at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. And I think the reason they hung onto it was cause it was kind of controversial.

LATIF: So, the night that Caen's article comes out, Daryl goes to Oliver's house, Oliver's there.

DARYL LEMBKE: Two reporters from the Sentinel were there also.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: What is the Sentinel?]

LATIF: That right there is Daryl.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Sentinel reporter: It's a gay newspaper.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Gay newspaper, uh-huh.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Sentinel reporter: Wanna be put on our mailing list?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Sure.]

LATIF: So they're all sitting in Oliver's living room, and what the reporters are all wondering is—have you heard from the president?

DARYL LEMBKE: The president hadn't bothered to thank him at that point.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: The president can award what they call Medals of Freedom to people for outstanding acts. If he offered to have you brought down to the White House, would you go?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Certainly.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Would you like to meet him?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Well, yeah, I stood in line for three hours to see him. Of course I would.]

LATIF: And that voice right there? That’s Oliver.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: He didn't have time to meet you at that occasion. Have you heard from the mayor?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: No. I've heard from nobody. I've heard only from the press and reporters and reporters and the press and that’s it...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Of course, you have been hard to get a hold of...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: You really have to dig…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: But then, I'm sure the mayor could find you. He has access to police records that know where you are.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Okay, can we go on background...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: For some reason, San Francisco police department has now referred any inquires about you to the sex crimes and missing persons detail. That's something I think you should know.]

LATIF: Something Oliver should know because this is, again, this is at a time when the assumption was that all gay men were just...pedophiles. Perverts.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: And when I said background, this is information that cannot be printed.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Well, can I ask somebody about it?]

LATIF: Daryl actually asks if he can call somebody and ask about it.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Yeah, would you do that right now?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: No, I...well, do you want me to?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: You're damn right I do.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: They aren't giving any reasons as to why. The number is 553-1361.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Who is the guy to talk to?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Talk to either Sullivan or Hettrick.]

LATIF: Daryl calls local authorities, but he can’t get ahold of anyone.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: He said to call back around 1:00.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: And they have said nothing to you about that?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Mm, mm (negative).]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Do you have any sex crimes on your record?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: I've never had a sex offense in my entire, I've never been arrested, well, except for being drunk a couple times. But I don't think there's no marine in the world who hasn't been drunk a couple times.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Would you like us to check that out further to see if there's more...than they're giving you?]

LATIF: And then the tape recorder goes off. Comes back on.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Uh, well, who do I call with some authority with the police department, then?]

LATIF: And now, Oliver's on the phone with the police department.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Yeah. Is this Detective Allen? Yeah, well, my name is Oliver Sipple, and I'd like to know why I've been turned over to your department, sex crimes and missing persons. This is me, yes. That's correct, sir. Yes, sir, I'd like some information, a bunch of press came over...well, not a bunch, just three people from the press came over this afternoon, and they said they were trying to get some information about me from the police department, and I was turned over to the sex and crimes acts? What the hell is that all about? Oh, I see, well, Jesus, God, I mean, I said, what the hell is going on? Okay, guy. I tried to call the mayor's office just now, and I tried to call the chief of police office just now, and I thought, what the Sam Hill is going on? Okay, thanks a lot, guy. Yeah. Just the opposite. One of the officers that was involved with the assassination, er assassination attempt, is in that department, that's all. That's why it's being turned over. Is that making sense to you? You got me really shook up, young man. I was just about to go downtown and whup some ass somewhere.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: We find out anything more about it, I'll let you know.]

LATIF: Now, the reason this tape is so controversial is because according to Oliver, before the interview began, before the you know recorder started rolling, he had said to the reporters from the Sentinel, um okay, I'm going to talk to you guys about my sexuality, but then he had said to Daryl I don't want you to write anything about that. I don't, I don’t want that in a national paper. Daryl says he doesn't remember that. But then right here in this interview, this thing happens where Daryl says…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Oh, I'll make one more try on the gay thing. Uh…]

LATIF: I'll make one more try on the gay thing.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: You don't...you don't want to change your mind on that?]

LATIF: You don't want to change your mind on that?

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: No, uh...I just don't want to change my mind on that.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: May we quote you as saying homosexuality has nothing to do with this?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: You can quote me as saying that if I were a homosexual, I was not—you can quote me on that. It doesn't make me any less of a man than I am.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Okay.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: But I think that that has nothing to do with the act itself. Uh...so I don't think you should be pushing for any of that...]

LATIF: And eventually…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Okay.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Okay.]

LATIF: Interview ends. And Daryl says that when he left that interview, he felt like when it came to Oliver’s sexuality....

DARYL LEMBKE: He didn’t want to be quoted.

LATIF: That was it, like just don’t quote me on it. But still…

DARYL LEMBKE: I was trying to report from all sides about it. The big side for me was that he was a hero and the president of the United States was very slow on the take in thanking him for saving his life.

LATIF: And Daryl thought that Oliver's sexuality, the fact that he was gay might have something to do with that. Because just seven months earlier…

[NEWS CLIP: On March 6th, Sergeant Leonard Matlovich disclosed to a supervising officer at Langlay Air Force Space in Virginia that he was a homosexual and wanted to stay in the Air Force.]

LATIF: This Air Force sergeant named Leonard Matlovich who, uh, had the purple heart, had the bronze star, he comes out that he’s gay and he’s kicked out of the Air Force.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Leonard Matlovich: In conversations, you hear people say that you know we’re discharging this queer, that queer, throwing them out of the Air Force. I mean inside I just burn up with, you know just, am I a coward here, and I’m just gonna stand here. And never really can have the protection of my fellow minority group and—and just keeping quite and my consciousness wouldn’t let me do it anymore. I had to come forward and say, no more America.]

LATIF: And now, you've got this former Marine, saved the president's life and it’s two days later, he still hasn’t heard from the president.

DARYL LEMBKE: So that’s when I knew...

LATIF: So for Daryl, even though Oliver had said, don’t make this about my sexuality…

DARYL LEMBKE: I still thought it was a national story and it was pretty hard to ignore it after Herb Caen had started the ball rolling.

LATIF: So that night, after the interview, Daryl calls in his story to the LA Times office, and he uses this phrase. He says that Oliver is a former Marine who was quote, a prominent figure in the gay community.

DARYL LEMBKE: Put it downaways in the story, but the rewrite guy put it in the lede…

LATIF: Really...

DARYL LEMBKE: And it made it the big thing.

LATIF: And so, three days after the assassination attempt, the LA Times runs a story with the headline, no call from president, hero in Ford shooting active among SF gays.

DARYL LEMBKE: And uh, the LA Times did a news service…

LATIF: And so, Daryl's story, it goes, I mean, it goes everywhere.

[NEWS CLIP: In another strange twist to the story…]

LATIF: Headlines are like, gay vet, or homosexual hero...

[NEWS CLIP: It’s been reported that the ex-marine who deflected Mrs. Moore’s shot on Monday is well known in San Francisco’s gay activist circles…]

LATIF: And so, it was not just running in Los Angeles. It’s also running in Chicago, it’s running in Dallas, it’s running in Indianapolis, and it’s running, you know, off all places, in Oliver Sipple’s hometown. In Detroit.

ROBERT: I guess what I'm wondering is, if you have a guy who says... please don't talk about this. This has nothing to do with what I did yesterday. Shouldn't that play some role in what you decide to write or not to write?

DARYL LEMBKE: Well, you know news sources are always reluctant to talk, and so I guess I took it as my duty to take up that angle, especially since it involved the president of the United States.

ROBERT: Right.

DARYL LEMBKE: But uh….

ROBERT: If you were to do it all over again, would you do anything differently?

DARYL LEMBKE:  Uh—I don't know. Uh—I—hadn't—taken into account maybe, uh—the potential harm of saying it. I don't know if I'd do it over again or not. But I'm not able to turn back the clock for something like that. [MUSIC IN]

JAD: The clock marches forward after the break.

[JAZ ADAM: My name is Jaz Adam, and I’m calling from Los Angeles. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. We're back with the story of Oliver Sipple from reporter/producer Latif Nasser.

LATIF: So the assassination attempt was on Monday, and on Thursday...Sipple and his lawyer call a press conference.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: Well, I think you all know this is Oliver Sipple, who saved the president's life, and he has a prepared statement on a subject that's appeared in the press today.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: In the past few days, I have been asked many questions having to do with my sexual preferences. I have been asked whether or not I am gay or homosexual. This is—there is—this is my reply to the line in question: the first reason—you are—interested in my, in me is the fact—the woman who tried to shoot the president—see, I'm sorry, I'm so nervous, excuse me.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: This is a handwritten statement and he's having a little difficulty reading it. We Xeroxed it in order to get it to you this afternoon. Reason you were interested in me is the fact that I deflected…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Oh, okay, I couldn't get the word there. My sexual orientation has nothing at all to do with saving the president's life, just as the color of my eyes or my race has nothing to do with what happened in front of the St. Francis Hotel on Tuesday. My sex—

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: Sexuality...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: my sexuality is a part of my—private life, and I have not—I have no…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: and has no…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: and has no bearing on my—response to the act of a person seeking to take the life of another. I am first and foremost a human being who enjoys and respects life. I feel that a person’s…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: Person’s worth…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: worth is determined by how he or she…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: Responds…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: responds to the world in which they live, not on how or what—or with whom a private life is shared.]

LATIF: He basically says like, stop, stop. It's kind of as simple as that.

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: But there's something else that happens in the press conference that is—makes the whole thing, I mean, so much more—personal.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: Finally…]

LATIF: And it actually was the very reason that Oliver called the press conference in the first place.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: I want you to know that my mother told me today that she could not walk out of her front door or even go to church because of the pressures she feels because of the press stories concerning my sexual orientation. Naturally, I never anticipated such…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: interference...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: interference with my family's relationship, which I—when I supposedly saved the president's life.]

LATIF: Oliver would later say that uh, when he was talking on the phone with his mother, she said to him, I don’t want to speak to you ever again.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: And she hung up on him.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: And also hung up.]

LATIF: Did you call him Uncle—Uncle Oliver, or…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Yes, I called him Uncle Oliver, yeah.

LATIF: This is George Sipple, Jr., Oliver's nephews. He told me that most of Oliver’s family stayed in Detroit. Oliver’s two brothers and his dad worked together at an auto plant there.

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: They all worked for General Motors. And the story that I've heard is that…

LATIF: The day after Oliver saved the life of President Ford…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: They walked in and everyone wanted to like, buy them a beer. You know, everybody on the factory floor um was congratulating them, patting them on the back, you know, your brother's a hero, your son's a hero. You know, when they would take their shift break, and this was the old days, right, they would take a shift break and they would go to the bar, and everybody wanted to like, buy them a round of drinks. So then, the news comes out whatever—a day—a couple of days later, that he's this gay Marine, and there's teasing on the factory floor.

ROBERT: Teasing, mean teasing, or teasing...

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Yeah. Yeah. Mm hm. Yeah.

LATIF: And George says, what happened is, reporters back in Detroit just sort of descended on Oliver’s parents…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: To get more of the story. And so they kept knocking on my grandmother's door, and she, I guess apparently told them to go away, I guess neighbors were harassing her. She thought the media was harassing her. My grandmother just said, I don't want to deal with it. And so, don't come knock on the door, leave us alone. They just wanted it to go away, and go back to their, you know, private lives.

LATIF: Now, one of the things that I found actually after talking to George, were these interviews done with Oliver's family after the news broke that Oliver was gay. And there’s just—I just want to read you this one particular passage. Here. "Have you talked to any other members"—this is from George F. Sipple, who is Oliver Sipple's brother. "Have you talked to any other members of your family since September 1975 about Oliver?" "Um, I mentioned it once to my father." Question—"And what was his response, what did he say? And if you can remember." "I was on afternoons then, and I had seen him because I had come in early. And he mentioned the fact that the next person that even said he had a son named Oliver, he was going to literally break their damn neck."

JAD: Whoa. So his dad was like—this is his brother talking about his dad's reaction?

LATIF: Brother talking to the dad, yeah. And then so then the brother says, "and he told me quite clearly in two letter words, "just forget you got a brother." And I let him alone."

JAD: Wow.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: I never anticipated such interference with my family's relationship, which I…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Lawyer: when I…]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: when I supposedly saved the president's life. This is all I have to say on this subject. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Any questions, they go to the minister or to my lawyer.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: I'd like to ask Mr. Sipple a question if I could, what would you like to see happen now?]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: I don't know. I'm just, I'm very shook up. I may even have to go even see a doctor over this. I'm very emotionally shook up, and I just—I'm feeling very sorry for my family, too. It's awful. Just awful. I've got nothing more to say.]

ROBERT: Can you tell us the story of the letter?

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Uh, I wish I would have brought it. I, I do have it, but I didn't bring it today.

LATIF: The same day as that press conference, which was three days after the assassination attempt, Gerald Ford actually did write a letter to Oliver Sipple, which was then released publicly.

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: It's a nice letter. It's White House stationary, White House envelope. It's basically, Ford telling my uncle that you know he's thankful to him for this heroic deed, and he signed it Gerry Ford, which I've been told that Gerald Ford signed different ways. So, if he signed Gerry Ford, it meant something, it was like a personal touch.

ROBERT: Well, there's this other chapter where your uncle says, says to the president, I guess, writes the president…

LATIF: Well so yeah we found—we found a letter in the Gerald Ford library, it's from your uncle to the president…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Wow.

LATIF: That, yeah…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: I did not, I did not know about that letter.

LATIF: Really? I have the letter right now, so it's—so the date on it is September 30th, 1975. So here's what it says. Uh, dear Mr. President…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Wait, wait, wait, wait. You said it was what? It was when?

LATIF: September 30th, 1975. So that would be a couple days after he got the letter from Ford.

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: This was—so obviously, obviously—he got—my grandmother must have hung up on him...

LATIF: Right.

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: And then he wrote the letter.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like...

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Cause, cause, he couldn't…

LATIF: Yeah, yeah…

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: That's really interesting. What’s the letter say?

LATIF: Yeah, and stop me any time if you have thoughts or reactions. "Dear Mr. President, thank you for taking the time to write to me. In view of some of the events since the unfortunate attempt on your life on Monday, September 22nd, I really appreciate your publicly thanking me. As you probably know, there have been a number of stories concerning my personal sexual orientation in the news media. These stories have caused great anguish to my parents and to the rest of my family, I am sure. My mother hung up on me when I first called her after these stories began to be published. I know you are concerned with very many matters which are too important and pressing for you to be concerned with the details of my private life. However, the unexpected and glaring publicity, which has been given to my private life has very seriously disrupted my family relationships. Mr. President, it is a very hard thing to have your mother and family not want to have any contact with you. I know that your schedule is heavily occupied, but I respectfully request that you take the time to see my family or at least call my family. The telephone number is...I love my family, and I do not want to be separated from their love and companionship. Your help will be gratefully appreciated. Respectfully, Oliver W. Sipple."

GEORGE SIPPLE JR.: Wow...That's sad...Sadder to think that nothing came of it...You know?

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[MUSIC IN]

LATIF: We tried really hard to find out if Ford ever made that call. The archivists at the Ford Library, they went through his call logs and there was no evidence that he ever made that call. And then, we talked to George Jr. and he talked to everybody in his family and they don't remember it, either. Anyway, you can't say for sure but, as far as we can tell, that call never happened. But we did find out that the same day that Oliver sent that letter, back to Ford, he and his lawyer filed a $15 million lawsuit against the press.

JAD: Really? Saying what?

LATIF: That the newspapers, when they publicized that he was gay without his consent, they violated his privacy.

JOEY PLASTER: Okay, walking out of Civic Center BART, onto Civic Center in San Francisco.

LATIF: It's just, it’s one of these cases where it pulls your head in one direction and it pulls your heart in the exact opposite direction, and so we wanted to get into the legal case files, and could not find them. We looked and looked and looked, and then we found them.

JAD: You found them?

LATIF: We found them.

JAD: Where'd you find them?

JOEY PLASTER: Uh, so the clerk's office is I guess not surprisingly right off City Hall.

LATIF: They were at this court in San Francisco, and so we recruited this guy, this researcher, a historian of the you know gay movement in San Francisco, uh, great name, Joey Plaster, and he…

Clerk: Okay, so I'm going to need your ID…

JOEY PLASTER: Okay.

LATIF: Um, went and got these files for us. And then when we found them, it turned out there were like, thousands and thousands upon thousands of pages.

JOEY PLASTER: And is that everything?

Clerk: This is everything.

JOEY PLASTER: That's everything, okay.

DAN MORAIN: So the issue, you know it’s a very fundamental issue for those of us in journalism…

LATIF: And to help us make sense of the arguments lurking in those pages…

DAN MORAIN: What is privacy and what is invasion of privacy?

LATIF: We talked to Dan Morain.

DAN MORAIN: Editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.

LATIF: He actually first heard about this case in journalism school and also wrote about Oliver Sipple way back in the 1980s. So, anyway.

JOEY PLASTER: Okay, so here’s the first page of the file.

DAN MORAIN: The lawsuit was against the Chronicle.

JOEY PLASTER: The case is Oliver W. Sipple, Plaintiff v. Chronicle Publishing Company.

DAN MORAIN: It was against the LA Times.

LATIF: The Des Moines Register, the Chicago Sun Times, the Denver Post, the Indianapolis Star, and the San Antonio Express.

JAD: Wow.

JOEY PLASTER: Okay, let’s see, so this is the deposition of Oliver W. Sipple. Let's see…

LATIF: So one of the arguments that the lawyers for the newspapers were making is that Oliver’s sexuality was not actually private.

JOEY PLASTER: Lawyer: Were there any people that you knew in San Francisco in say, September 1975 who knew that you were homosexual? Sipple: Yes. Lawyer: Approximately how many people? Sipple: I have no idea. Lawyer: More than 10? Sipple: Yes. Lawyer: More than 50? Sipple: Yes. Lawyer: More than 100? Sipple: Yes.

LATIF: There were people in New York who knew he was gay, there were people in Dallas who knew he was gay, and it kind of-they settle in the like in the hundreds.

JOEY PLASTER: Lawyer: Did you tell anybody before September of 1975 that you were a homosexual? Sipple: If I were asked. Lawyer: I am asking you. Sipple: I don't know what you are asking.

LATIF: And they make the argument, the newspapers' lawyers that hey, this was already somewhat public a fact.

DAN MORAIN: But his personal business was his personal business.

JOEY PLASTER: "I have never attempted to obtain publicity for the fact that I am gay or predominantly homosexual in my sexual orientation."

DAN MORAIN: He was a private citizen.

JOEY PLASTER: "I have made my home approximately 1,800 miles away from home of my parents and my family so that I could move somewhat freely in the gay community without the fact of my sexual orientation getting back to my parents or family." And it goes on.

LATIF: But the newspapers made this other argument that was like, okay, whether or not you’re living a double life, whether or not you wanted to or whether or not you had to, there’s something here that’s bigger than that, that’s bigger than you.

DAN MORAIN: Which was he was a private citizen who thrust himself as anybody would hope they would do. He ran—he went toward danger, and when he did, he also thrust himself into the public eye.

[MUSIC IN]

LATIF: And to journalists, when you're in the public eye you become something else entirely. You become a public figure.

[NEWS CLIP: Yesterday in San Francisco a shot fired…]

LATIF: When that happened to Oliver…

DAN MORAIN: He lost his right to privacy.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Daryl Lembke: Oh, I'll make one more try on the gay thing. Uh…]

LATIF: And the newspapers argued, when it came to Oliver's sexuality…

DAN MORAIN: It was news at the time.

JOEY PLASTER: "It is, was, and at all pertinent times has been my judgment that Mr. Sipple's activities in the gay community are highly significant and newsworthy for two important reasons. First…"

[NEWS CLIP: On March 6th, Sergeant Leonard Matlovich disclosed that he was a homosexual…]

LATIF: So, like we said, when Daryl Lembke was writing that article about Oliver, you had this big story about the US Air Force trying to kick this guy Leonard Matlovich out because he was gay.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Reporter: Would you like to meet him?]

LATIF: And Oliver has heard nothing from the president. The president later said that that had nothing to do with Oliver being gay, but to people at the time…

JOEY PLASTER: The suggestion that the president's expression of gratitude to Sipple might have been affected by rumors of Sipple's activities in the gay

LATIF: That was news.

[NEWS CLIP: News secretary Nessen was asked if that was the reason president Ford has not yet personally thanked him.]

JOEY PLASTER: Second…

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: The lies, the innuendos…]

JOEY PLASTER: Sipple's public display of heroism in saving the life of the president of the United States...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Harvey Milk: Distortions, all gay people are child molesters…]

JOEY PLASTER:...presented an image

DAN MORAIN: That gay people are like everybody else. That they're heroes.

JOEY PLASTER: An image certainly contrary to the stereotype of persons associated with the gay community as weak and unheroic figures.

LATIF: Which is to say, this is newsworthy, this is worth knowing and it is something that the whole country wants to know. And the value of that is more than the value of this individual person’s privacy.

JAD: Did they make that explicitly? I mean, sort of putting it in terms of the public benefit outweighs the private privacy…

LATIF: Yeah.

JAD: Hm.

LATIF: So Oliver's case, it dragged on for nine years, so from 1975 to 1984. Um, but this is, I’m quoting the judgment, "The record shows that the publications were not motivated by morbid and sensational prying into appellant's private life but rather were prompted by legitimate political concerns, i.e. to dispel the false public opinion that gays were timid, weak, and unheroic figures, and to raise the equally important political question whether the president of the United States entertained a discriminatory attitude or bias against a minority group such as homosexuals." So...the court tossed Oliver’s case out. He lost. He didn’t get a dime.

JAD: I mean, if you think about it, it is weird that a journalist can just take a person's most private details and then, if it feels relevant...like if they can make that argument, they can just put it out there.

ROBERT: It is the job—like if we were to go silent because somebody says, don’t say that about me, then...and the government backs him up…

JAD: But if it's meaningful, then the person...out of which the meaning is being pulled painfully has nothing to say about it...that's just weird to me.

ROBERT: It's really hard…

DANIEL LUZER: I mean, I was thinking about this like even sort of on the train coming over here.

LATIF: Again, Daniel Luzer.

DANIEL LUZER: And it's like...the thing that like makes journalism law so complicated, and the things that make an invasion of privacy discussion so difficult is that like...what makes something not an invasion of privacy is not that it's okay, it's that it's politically, you know, relevant. So like the fact that the story, the fact that the private details of his life are politically relevant means that it's not an invasion of privacy. You know it doesn't mean that it isn't rude or that it doesn't hurt. It means that it's an appropriate story to you know, to publish.

LATIF: But I do think like, why should the journalists be the only ones to decide what is newsworthy? It’s not like why is it that then journalists...you just pick up a notepad and a pencil and, all the sudden, you have so much more power to say what's sayable than anybody else.

DANIEL LUZER: Well, I mean, we have the sort of long tradition of that in the United States. I mean, like that's what the first amendment is. I mean, I don’t know I mean it's like yeah sure, why do journalists get to decide that? Well, like, who would you rather have decide it? It's not a perfect system, but it's—you know—it kind of works.

TRACIE HUNT: So is Oliver just like this…

LATIF: This is producer Tracie Hunte, who was in on the interview.

TRACIE: Somebody whose life is basically kind of sacrificed to the altar of the first amendment in like this sad way?

DANIEL LUZER: Yes. Yeah.

JAD: Yeah, it feels like he was sacrificed from all sides, actually.

LATIF: Yeah. It feels like there is this one kind of man in the middle and then there are all these forces around him, these like larger than life forces, like the White House, there's the gay movement, there's the freedom of the press, and all these people are sort of batting around all these, all these enormous and important abstractions, and then in the middle of it, there's this guy that just is trampled by all of them.

JAD: And so what ends up happening to him in the end?

LATIF: Well apparently, some people in the gay community—during and after the lawsuit—felt that he was trying to go back in the closet, so they sort of turned their backs on him. He, surprisingly, he was friends with Harvey Milk, till—till the end. Like when Harvey Milk was assassinated, Oliver Sipple went to his funeral. Um, he did have one brother, George Sr. who stuck by him throughout, but his parents did not. And they never fully accepted the fact that he was gay. And when his mom died, it was so bad that Oliver Sipple's father didn't let him go to the funeral. And because he sort of, he had so few people I guess at the end and because there weren't a lot news articles about him and because a lot of people from the gay community from that time have died because of the AIDS crisis, it was really hard to find out what happened to Oliver Sipple in those last five years of his life. And the only way we could was because when we were talking to Daniel Luzer, he mentioned this interview that he did with this guy named Wayne Friday. He was friend of Oliver's...

DANIEL LUZER: Wayne Friday was sort of like a, a pillar of the community in San Francisco, like a pillar of the gay community and then also a sort of political figure, and he was a cop and he was sort of fingers in every pie kind of thing.

LATIF: Wayne died last year, but Daniel still had the transcript of their conversation about Oliver Sipple's last days. And so…

GORDON PINSENT: If you guys need time to absorb or just think about for a sec, that's fine with me.

LATIF: We found an actor, the very gifted Gordon Pinsent, and we had him read it for us.

GORDON PINSENT: Okay, let me have a go. [As Wayne Friday] Uh, I forget. Was it 1975 the Sara Jane Moore...or...yeah, then I met him around '73. He was a swamper at a gay bar called Cockpit. Swamper, they used to clean the bars at night. They'd set the bar up for the next bartender in the morning, that's what he did. He...did it at two or three different bars. He was always at the bars. I'd see him. We actually became friends because we discovered we were both from Michigan. Bill was a good guy, he was just a fucking alcoholic. I mean, he'd get his disability check once a month, and he'd go down, one of the bars in the Tenderloin where he used to hang out was called the Queen Mary's Pub. He would go in there the day he got his check. I swear to God he'd spend his whole fucking check on everybody. And he'd get broke the rest of the month. He just couldn't control himself. And he was a little bit of a blowhard, you know. He'd get drunk and loud. And he'd get tossed out of bars. I used to drive him home. He had an apartment on Van Ness, had a little studio. A one bedroom on the first floor at about Turk. He'd be drunker than hell at the bar and I'd drive him home, so I always knew where he lived.

[MUSIC IN]

GORDON PINSENT: [As Wayne Friday] And after this thing with Ford, it really fucked his mind up. Sipple was a broken guy after that. The whole thing worked him. The publicity of it all and the fact that everyone knew he was a faggot, you know. He said to me a couple times, I went to the Marine Corps and I got hurt. And now what I am known for? For being a faggot. And I'd say, no, you're not. You're known for saving the president's life. You won't be known for what you did in bed, for Christ's sake. But he would get drunk and he'd start bemoaning that. I'd sit there in the bar with him, and I'd talk to him about it. Hey, man, it is what it is. But he was just—he was just—down to nothing. This thing happened, and it overcame him. It was too much for him to handle. And I think he got to feeling sorry for himself, and his family. Just...many a night, I would sit in the bar with Bill Sipple, and he'd cry on your shoulder, and you'd say, ok, Sipple, it's time to go home. And then I'd drive him home.

[SOUND OF RAIN]

GORDON PINSENT: [As Wayne Friday] I remember it was raining. It was pouring fucking rain. Bruce called me at my office over at the DA's office and said, Wayne, will you do a well being check on Sipple for me? And I said, why? And he said, nobody's seen the dude. He hasn't been around for a while. So we go out there together, and it was raining, and I'm ringing the bell, ringing the bell, ring...he doesn't answer. I notice on his door, there were these little stick 'em things, post-its. And he'd befriended this little old lady who lived next door, they kind of looked after each other. And she'd left all these little notes. Bill, call me. I can't get ahold of you. So I rang the manager's bell, and it was a little Filipino guy. I showed him my badge and I said, you've got to let me in. And so he did. And the door opened...and I knew what was going on. It's the smell. It's the smell you never forget. It's a sickening, sweet smell. Bill was sitting in the chair. He was bloated. He was bloated out real big. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels sitting there, and the television was still on. The coroner told me he'd been dead about ten days, as near as they could figure. God, I didn't know he was only 47. I thought he was older than that. Anyway. I got the guy to open the door for me. And the minute he did, I said, close it. And then I had to stand there and wait for the coroner.

[MUSIC IN]

GORDON PINSENT: [As Wayne Friday] I remember it was over here at the Campbell Funeral Home on Market Street. And then we buried him out in Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. And I remember it was, it was very small. The casket wasn't opened. The funeral was just, I mean—there were more media there than anything else. I've seen him buy drinks for more people than were at that funeral. He could have been buried in Arlington if they'd made an issue out of it. I mean, shit, there he was, this national icon, a gay whatever, and...there were just a few people out there for the funeral.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, Oliver Sipple: I believe in human life and I think that this country stands for human values...including life and freedom. I am first and foremost a human being who enjoys and respects life, but I feel that I...that I feel that a person's worth is determined by how he or she responds to the world in which they live, not on how or what or with whom a private life is shared. These are my words and they're my feelings. This is all I have to say on this subject. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.]

JAD: This story was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunt. It was produced by Matt Kielty and Annie McEwen with Latif and Tracie.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Bruce T. H. Burke, to Stacy Davis at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, to the GLBT Historical Society, Stephanie Arias at teh Huntington Library, James Kramen who's Gordon Pinsent's agent, and as long as we're on the subject of Gordon, the actor you heard just ending the piece, wow.

JAD: Yeah, wow.

ROBERT: Just wow.

JAD: Yeah, thank you to Gordon.

ROBERT: Special thanks also to Allen Jones, Danny Meyer and Floyd Abrams. Thank you all.

JAD: We had original music in this story. We used a lot of music from a guy named Patrick Cowley. He was a guy who grew up in Buffalo, moved to San Francisco in the seventies like Oliver Sipple, and, in 1982, he died of AIDS. This music was released posthumously by the label Dark Entries. We're super grateful to them and to Patrick Cowley wherever he is for the use of his music. And last but not least, before we close, we just wanna say a very sort of special belated goodbye to our senior producer Jamie York.

ROBERT: Who did a little of the legal research inside this story—tried to—because we had to really probe fairly deeply to get the legal files. Thank you, Jamie, for doing that…

JAD: And for everything…

ROBERT: ...for everything

JAD: For guiding so many of our stories and our whole team for the last few years. Jamie, we will really miss you.

ROBERT: Yes, we even do, at this very moment, miss you.

JAD: Alright, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: To play the message press 2…]

DANIEL LUZER: Uh good afternoon this is Daniel Luzer. I guess this messages for Latif I'm calling in…

JOEY PLASTER: Hi, This is Joey Plaster in New Haven, Connecticut to um…

DAN MORAIN: Hi this is Dan Moraine from the Sacramento Bee to um record the credits...okay.

JOEY PLASTER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler.

DANIEL LUZER: So starting now...Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte...

DAN MORAIN: Tracie Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, Nijar Farrell, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. If there are any problems with that, please let me know and I'd be happy to record it again. But I think that should work fine with—you know—edits and stuff. Thanks a lot look forward to hearing, hearing the piece, bye.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: End of message.]

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].bio
Pat started out at the show in 2010 as a production assistant, became a producer, and spent about five years on staff making stories about all kinds of things, from a brain tumor that may have turned a man into a pedophile to the greatest comeback in the history of basketball to the reason 90 percent of humanity is right handed. He left for a few years to edit Pop-Up Magazine, the world’s first “live magazine;” host a podcast at Gimlet Media called Undone; and help create the Peabody Award-winning podcast Uncivil with Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Pat’s delighted to be back at his radio birthplace.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Rachael is a producer for Radiolab. She started on the show’s Special Projects Unit, where she worked on Radiolab Presents: Gonads and Radiolab Presents: G. Now she mostly spends her time writing about herself in the third person, or trying to craft a masterful pun that makes everyone roll their eyes. Before joining Radiolab, she studied food science and worked as a cheese curd flipper, pastry chef, and egg scrambler. She also spent some time hanging out at NPR, Politico, and Slate.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.producers[].lede
Bethel's an associate producer at Radiolab. Previously, she produced podcasts for Reuters and co-produced the For Colored Nerds podcast. She picked up her early radio chops at the Transom Story Workshop after getting her graduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Before grad school she worked for a non-profit management company, a D.C. restaurant with really great Indian food and a volunteer organization in Baños, Ecuador. Back in undergrad, she was a reporter and later the news editor of The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s independent student newspaper. She spent the rest of her time studying political philosophy, working retail and salsa dancing. These days she’s into wandering around New York City, practicing yoga and running the occasional 10k. She is child of immigrants who taught her to try her best, keep her promises and never eat injera with her left hand.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.body
Albert Einstein asked that when he died, his body be cremated and his ashes be scattered in a secret location. He didn’t want his grave, or his body, becoming a shrine to his genius. When he passed away in the early morning hours of April, 18, 1955, his family knew his wishes. There was only one problem: the pathologist who did the autopsy had different plans.

In the third episode of “G”, Radiolab’s miniseries on intelligence, we go on one of the strangest scavenger hunts for genius the world has ever seen. We follow Einstein’s stolen brain from that Princeton autopsy table, to a cider box in Wichita, Kansas, to labs all across the country. And eventually, beyond the brain itself entirely. All the while wondering, where exactly is the genius of a man who changed the way we view the world?

This episode was reported by Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters, and produced by Bethel Habte, Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters. Music by Alex Overington and Jad Abumrad.

Special thanks to: Elanor Taylor, Claudia Kalb, Dustin O’Halloran, Tim Huson, The Einstein Papers Project, and all the physics for (us) dummies YouTube videos that accomplished the near-impossible feat of helping us understand relativity.

Radiolab’s “G” is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].about.body
View the Episode Archive »

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes | RSS.

#smartbinge Radiolab podcasts

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].about.body
Radiolab’s “G” is a multi-episode exploration of one of the most dangerous ideas of the past century: the concept of intelligence. Over six episodes, the series unearths the fraught history (and present-day use) of IQ tests, digs into the bizarre tale of one man’s obsessive quest to find the secret to genius in Einstein’s brain, reveals the ways the dark history of eugenics have crept up into the present, looks to the future with a controversial geneticist who has created a prenatal test for intelligence, and stages a raucous game-show throwdown to crown the smartest animal in the world.

Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.series[].tease
Radiolab’s “G” is a multi-episode exploration of one of the most dangerous ideas of the past century: the concept of intelligence.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
When Albert Einstein died, someone stole his brain — and kicked off a scavenger hunt for genius that won’t seem to let us go.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.transcript
[ADVERTISEMENT]

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

PAT WALTERS: Hey this is G, a Radiolab mini-series. I’m Pat Walters.

RACHAEL CUSICK: And I’m Rachael Cusick.

PAT: And today, we're gonna go looking for intelligence in what might seem like one of the more obvious places.

RACHAEL: Do you need water?

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, water's okay.

PAT: And the story starts with this guy.

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, my name is Steven Levy. I am an Editor at Large at Wired Magazine.

RACHAEL: Thank you so much for coming in. Basically, I guess, where did this all start for you?

STEVEN LEVY: So in 1978, I was working for a magazine called New Jersey Monthly.

RACHAEL: Steve was young, fresh out of school.

STEVEN LEVY: It was my first real job in journalism.

PAT: Offices were in a suburb outside Princeton, New Jersey.

STEVEN LEVY: Sort of an office park, very bland set of offices with cubicles and, you know, really Dunder Mifflin-ish.

PAT: Steve says it was a typical, boring entry-level job, until this one day ...

STEVEN LEVY: We had a new editor.

PAT: It got interesting.

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, he called me into his office and said, "I want you to find Einstein's brain." And I thought, "What?"

PAT: Yeah. Were you like, "That sounds exciting," or were you like, "I don't know."

STEVEN LEVY: I thought that sounds pretty cool. That sounds pretty cool. You know, I had been working on a piece about the psychology of the New Jersey driver, right?

PAT: Right. Not really stiff competition.

STEVEN LEVY: I mean, I literally did a service piece about racquetball, which was a big trend then. This is better.

PAT: Now, the reason the editor assigned him this story is there had been these rumors going back years that when Einstein died back in 1955, moments after his death, someone had literally stolen his brain and run off with it.

STEVEN LEVY: Sort of an urban legend. Einstein's brain is somewhere. And, you know, the Russians have it and they’re trying to clone Einstein.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

PAT: And Steve's editor just wanted him to get to the bottom of it.

STEVEN LEVY: He literally said to me, I want you to find Einstein's brain.

RACHAEL: What did you know about Einstein at that point, and his brain?

STEVEN LEVY: Well, you know, what I knew about Einstein is what anyone on the street would know about Einstein, essentially. You know, there was this guy with the funny hair, relativity, right? Whatever that was.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

RACHAEL: What he would quickly learn ...

STEVEN LEVY: Something to do with the atom bomb ...

RACHAEL: After a little bit of reading, is that in the early 20th century, Einstein pretty much rewrote the way we thought the universe worked.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Einstein, brilliant physicist, a theoretical mathematician ...]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: A scientific giant.]

RACHAEL: He said that mass is equivalent to energy.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: E equals MC squared.]

RACHAEL: Which led to the atom bomb.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Jaw-shattering devastation in which was born the atomic age.]

PAT: He also said time and space could both bend, which led to the discovery of black holes and, like, a million other things.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: He enabled man to embark at last on a total adventure.]

RACHAEL: And it didn’t take long before Einstein just became a symbol ...

[TELEVISION CLIP: Do you think you're smarter than Einstein?]

RACHAEL: For ...

[TELEVISION CLIP: I said, "No, ma. No.”]

RACHAEL: Intelligence.

PAT: For genius.

[TELEVISION CLIP: I'm not a genius. I'm not Einstein.]

[TELEVISION CLIP: You don’t have to be an Einstein.]

[TELEVISION CLIP: Little Einsteins.]

PAT: So that was Steve’s assignment. Find the brain of the guy whose name basically means genius.

STEVEN LEVY: And he said, "By the way, this is gonna be our cover in August." A few weeks, six weeks away or something?

PAT: Didn't have a lot of time.

RACHAEL: How do you even begin looking for the brain of a guy that died decades ago?

STEVEN LEVY: You know, there was this thing called the library.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

RACHAEL: So Steve knew Einstein lived in Princeton and died in Princeton.

STEVEN LEVY: April, 1955.

RACHAEL: So he headed over to the local public library, pulls up the newspaper archive.

STEVEN LEVY: Look at the microfilm.

RACHAEL: And he finds this article.

STEVEN LEVY: Written a couple days after Einstein died, and it said Einstein's brain to be preserved for study. And it talked about, yeah, there's gonna be a study of Einstein's brain and, you know, they're gonna have a press conference about it.

RACHAEL: So he pulls up the next day’s paper, thinking there will be a big front page story about this press conference.

STEVEN LEVY: And nothing.

RACHAEL: Crickets.

STEVEN LEVY: Nothing. There was no press conference.

PAT: It didn't happen?

STEVEN LEVY: No!

PAT: So then he thinks, okay.

STEVEN LEVY: That's 23 years ago. You know, the brain's studied. Something’s got to be published.

PAT: Like, by scientists.

STEVEN LEVY: I went through all sorts of scientific periodical guides. No papers. I mean, I really looked hard.

PAT: And eventually he realizes, that little newspaper article ...

STEVEN LEVY: That was literally, that was the last thing written about Einstein’s brain.

PAT: But there was one clue in that little newspaper article. A name. The name of the guy who was supposed to hold that press conference that never happened.

STEVEN LEVY: Dr. Thomas Harvey.

PAT: Who it seemed, in addition to being the guy who didn't hold that press conference, was also the pathologist who would have done the autopsy on Einstein.

RACHAEL: So, the next stop on Steve’s search ...

STEVEN LEVY: The Princeton Hospital.

RACHAEL: The place Einstein died, and where supposedly this Harvey guy worked at.

STEVEN LEVY: And I went there. I found -- I talked to the vice president and I asked him about the pathologist, this guy, Dr. Thomas Harvey. Where’s Dr. Harvey?

PAT: Hospital guy says ...

STEVEN LEVY: He left here a long time ago.

PAT: And then Steve's like, "What about the brain? I heard the brain got taken, is it here at the hospital?"

STEVEN LEVY: And he didn’t know anything. I had to talk to Dr. Harvey.

RACHAEL: So what do you do to find Harvey?

STEVEN LEVY: So -- you know, so looking for a person in 1978, there's no Google. You know, there's no Facebook, there's no LinkedIn. So -- and there's a lot of places, a lot of cities. You know, each -- every city had a phone book. But you couldn't look at every phone book.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

STEVEN LEVY: I eventually figured one place I might go is the American Medical Association.

PAT: Figures this guy Harvey is a doctor, maybe they have his contact info.

STEVEN LEVY: So I called them up. You know, I said, "I’m really trying to find this Dr. Thomas Harvey. Thomas S. Harvey." I knew his middle name. And this very kindly woman, you know, looked up stuff, and then told me there is a Thomas S. Harvey in Wichita, Kansas.

PAT: So he calls directory assistance in Wichita, and says, "Do you guys have a number for a Thomas Harvey?" They said yes. He asks, "Is that number listed?" And they said yes.

STEVEN LEVY: And they gave me his phone number. And I took a deep breath and dialed the phone number. Back then, if someone wasn’t there, it would just ring and ring and you’d hang up and that would be it. Because it's pre-answering machine. But he picked up the phone. And I said, "Is this Dr. Harvey?" And he said yes. And I said, "Is this the Dr. Harvey who worked at Princeton Hospital in 1955?" And there was this pause. Like, I figured, this is sort of yes or no question, right?

RACHAEL: [laughs]

STEVEN LEVY: There was a pause. Like, he was almost debating whether to own up to this. And finally he said yes. In retrospect, maybe it was a little of the jig is up. And he said, "Well, I don't know if I could help you." And I said, "Well, I’d just like to talk to you." He said, "Well --" and he, you know, was sort of not saying yes or no. And I said, "You know what? I'm coming out there to talk to you." So I booked a ticket for Wichita, Kansas.

RACHAEL: Steve hops on a plane to Kansas. He spends the night. And then the next morning he wakes up, gets a cab and goes over to Harvey's lab.

STEVEN LEVY: I rang the bell or whatever, and Dr. Harvey came to open the door for me.

RACHAEL: What did he look like?

STEVEN LEVY: He looked like, you know, the guy who would be your pediatrician. You know, this kindly-looking guy in his sixties, I guess. He's wearing a lab coat, and I remember very clearly he had in his pocket one of those pens that could write in three colors, you know, red, green, blue? And he took me back to the back of the facility to his office which was basically a glassed-in cubicle. And with a desk and a chair, some shelves, and some cardboard boxes behind the chair. And I sat down and we talked.

PAT: Now at this point, Harvey hadn’t admitted to anything. But Steve had a feeling, a definite feeling.

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, you could tell he's very cautious, very guarded. You know, and I'm asking every way to try to figure out where the brain is. And I asked him a few times, you know, "Where's the brain?" And he really didn't want to answer that. And then finally, I just said, "Well, don’t you even have any pictures of it?" And then he sort of broke down when I asked, you know, maybe because he sensed I was so frustrated. Because, you know, I was saying, "No pictures, even?" And he just sort of, like, sagged a little. So he gets up and he walks behind me and there was sort of like a beer cooler near where he was. And I’m thinking, "It's in the beer cooler? No!" He keeps walking past there, and he goes behind me to where one of the cardboard boxes is.

PAT: And he pulls out these two jars.

STEVEN LEVY: And in one of the jars there are these pieces of biomass floating in there. They’re clearly brain stuff. And I'm, like, staring at this thing. And I'm, like, thunderstruck. I mean, it was like a jolt, you know? This was amazing. I mean, you know, you could hear the chorus of angels singing, "Ahh, Einstein's brain!" I'm taking this in and I'm like, "This is the brain that changed the world." And to see that brain was a moving experience, actually. I have to say. I’d gotten this glimpse of something.

RACHAEL: Of what though?

STEVEN LEVY: Of something big. Of something -- you know, of a mystery.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: It follows from the special theory of relativity ...]

PAT: In this episode ...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: ... that mass and energy are both ...]

PAT: We’re going to try to untangle that mystery.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: ... but different manifestations of the same thing.]

PAT: What can the brain of one of the greatest geniuses that humanity has ever produced ...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: A somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.]

PAT: Like, what can that brain tell us?

JAD ABUMRAD: Well, I'm just gonna say for the record that I think that's silly. And I think that brain is just a whole ...

PAT: Who invited you?

JAD: I do not think ....

RACHAEL: You just come in here with your egg sandwich.

JAD: [laughs] Don't bring my egg sandwich into this. I would just like to declare my bias that I don't think there's anything special about his brain.

PAT: Anything? Not even ...

JAD: I mean, he was clearly a genius.

PAT: So what is that? Where ...

JAD: There's something about the idea that his genius is tied to the physical structure of his brain that makes me itchy.

PAT: Hmm.

JAD: Literally, that's the physical sensation I have. I start to itch.

PAT: Yeah. I think you're dismissing it too soon. I think there's more to it than you suspect.

JAD: Hmm. All right. Well, let me ask you a more basic question. What's the fellow's name again?

PAT: Thomas Harvey.

JAD: How did he end up with that brain to begin with?

FRED LEPORE: Well, you know, to answer your question ...

PAT: This is Dr. Fred Lepore, he's a neurologist. Also wrote a book about Einstein. He’s one of the people we talked to to answer that very question. And he says you gotta go back to winter of 1955.

FRED LEPORE: Einstein was living on borrowed time.

PAT: He's 76 years old, retired, living in Princeton. And he gets sick. Starts to feel this pain in his abdomen.

FRED LEPORE: It was so -- it almost felt like a gallbladder attack.

RACHAEL: Turned out to be way worse than that.

FRED LEPORE: Ultimately, he had an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Frank Glenn, who was a neurosurgeon -- not a neurosurgeon, a surgeon at Cornell came down.

RACHAEL: Ready to operate.

FRED LEPORE: But Einstein basically said, look, you know, my time is up. I -- I will die. I think he said I will die elegantly. He knew he was -- and that was a brave thing to say, because he was in pain.

RACHAEL: And eventually, in the spring of 1955 ...

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Einstein entered the hospital Friday, died this morning after refusing surgery, which it turned out, would not have helped him recover from a ruptured artery.]

FRED LEPORE: As the story goes in the early morning hours of April 18th, he muttered a couple of incomprehensible words -- incomprehensible to his nurse, who didn't speak German. And then, in the early morning hours, he was found dead.

PAT: Now Tom Harvey, our guy, was the chief pathologist at Princeton hospital. His job was to do autopsies. And that night, April 18th, 1955, he’s at home sleeping, and he gets a call.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Yeah. I think the phone call came some time before dawn and it was Einstein’s personal physician who called him to let him know that Einstein’s son had given permission for an autopsy to be performed on his father.

PAT: This is Carolyn Abraham.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: A science journalist. Author of Possessing Genius: The Story of the Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain.

PAT: Harvey actually died in 2007, but before he did Caroline spent some time with him and got his take on that day.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: He, you know, gets himself ready and he remembered it was a really nice morning. Spring was in the air and, you know, things were turning green. And he was walking towards what he realized was going to be a major opportunity in his professional life. He got to that hospital and he got to his pathology lab, and someone that morning had already placed Einstein on the autopsy table.

PAT: She says he walked into the room, Einstein’s laying there flat on the table.

FRED LEPORE: And ...

PAT: He picks up a scalpel.

FRED LEPORE: And you know, he opened the abdomen, and he saw it was full of blood from the aneurysm. So he establishes cause of death.

PAT: Did a routine examination of the heart.

FRED LEPORE: But then he did something that was not in the script. He removed the top of the skull ...

PAT: Cut a bunch of cranial nerves and arteries ...

FRED LEPORE: And he took the brain out.

PAT: And then he put the brain in a jar, and walked out.

JAD: So he literally just stole the brain out of Einstein’s skull? Just stole it?

PAT: Yeah, which is pretty gross.

JAD: Isn't that a crime?

PAT: Probably?

FRED LEPORE: History has not been kind to Thomas S. Harvey.

PAT: But ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: In Tom Harvey's estimation, and he actually put it this way in our conversations once, is that he would have felt ashamed if he didn't take it.

RACHAEL: Ashamed?

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Ashamed, because here was this opportunity to learn something about sort of the biological underpinnings of intelligence, of genius, you know, from arguably, you know, certainly one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, and to not study it would have been negligent.

PAT: According to Carolyn, however misguided it might seem, Harvey says he wasn't taking the brain for himself, he was taking it for all of us. Like, for humanity. For science.

FRED LEPORE: But ...

PAT: Fast forward to the next day.

FRED LEPORE: The family, at this point, they read on the front page of the April 19th New York -- '55 New York Times read that the brain was preserved for science. And they were flabbergasted.

RACHAEL: Whoa, that was, like, the first time they heard of it?

FRED LEPORE: Yeah.

PAT: In the paper?

FRED LEPORE: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Oh, my God! They’re, like, having their Cheerios and that's how they find out?

FRED LEPORE: Yep.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: The family didn't know and didn't give permission.

FRED LEPORE: The understanding -- although you'll find none of this in the will, but the understanding was Einstein would be cremated.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: And his ashes scattered in a secret location so that quote unquote "No one could come and worship at my bones."

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: He was the first scientist to become a public figure, a legend in our times.]

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Einstein was always very uncomfortable with the attention that celebrity brought with it.

RACHAEL: He was really afraid that people were gonna start to see him as something superhuman.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: The realities of 20th century science, its power, are linked to Einstein’s image.]

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: It speaks to the fact that in the 20th century, science sort of displaced religion as what people put their faith in. And he was, you know, sort of its high priest.

RACHAEL: And so he didn’t want his gravesite ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: ... to become a shrine.

RACHAEL: That’s why he wanted to be cremated.

FRED LEPORE: As he was on April 18th. But Harvey kept the brain.

RACHAEL: So the family, when they saw that headline ...

RACHAEL: Do they knock on Harvey’s door?

PAT: Yeah, what do they do?

RACHAEL: And sort of say, what the hell?

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: No, they phone the hospital. They phone Princeton hospital and they’re very upset.

PAT: And eventually Hans Albert, Einstein’s eldest son, gets on the phone with Tom Harvey. Now, we don’t know exactly what they said to each other. You can probably imagine Hans Albert was upset, probably yelled at Tom Harvey. Tom Harvey apparently ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Apologized for taking it without permission.

FRED LEPORE: And finally Harvey makes the pitch of his life. He says, you know, this is the mind for all the ages. We're never gonna get this opportunity again, and I pledge that I will do a scholarly study.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: He made this very solemn vow to take care of this brain, to not allow it to become sort of an object of fascination.

PAT: Tom Harvey told Hans Albert he’d never let the brain become a spectacle. He’d honor Albert Einstein’s wishes. But if he could just study this brain it might reveal something.

FRED LEPORE: The secret of human genius and creativity. You can’t pass it up. And the son, Hans Albert said yes, you can study it.

PAT: But only as long as it’s serious science, no spectacle.

FRED LEPORE: So the next step that Harvey has, he's trying to craft a kind of a do-it-yourself approach to studying a famous brain.

PAT: Even though he’s a doctor ...

FRED LEPORE: Harvey's not trained in this kind of neuropathology. He learned some, but not to the degree that a specialist would.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: He spends evenings taking photographs. He weighs it. He measures it.

FRED LEPORE: He hit some standard textbooks.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Different reference guides. One of the really interesting things he did during this period, he brought this artist in to paint a portrait of Einstein's brain.

RACHAEL: Oh!

PAT: Really?

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: When it was whole. He said he just wanted to have it. And he never did hang that painting.

RACHAEL: Really?

PAT: What an interesting thing to do.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: I think partly, it was because he knew what had to happen next, or in his estimation, what he was going to do next.

FRED LEPORE: He's gonna cut the brain into 240 sections.

RACHAEL: And after that ...

FRED LEPORE: He goes across the Delaware ...

RACHAEL: I love that. Like he's George Washington or something.

FRED LEPORE: ... to the University of Pennsylvania, where there's a technician who he had worked with.

RACHAEL: He gave her some of those chunks of brain, and she slices them really thinly.

FRED LEPORE: Into microscope slides. And they made 12 sets. So when the smoke clears, and I’m sorry I’m dragging this out on you.

PAT: No, no. This is great, this is great!

FRED LEPORE: The smoke clears, and he’s got, I’m told 12 sets of at least 200 slides per set. And his job for the next few years is to try to take it individually to various neuropathologists who might be able to study this brain.

PAT: So Harvey sends out slides and photos and samples of Einstein’s brain.

FRED LEPORE: He was trying to collaborate with experts in the field

PAT: Specialist after specialist.

FRED LEPORE: We don't exactly know how many photographs he gave out, how many slides, who he gave them to.

PAT: But it was a lot.

RACHAEL: Despite all that effort, though ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: There's no record of them ever getting back to him or doing anything of importance. From the few scientists I was able to contact at that time who received those pieces who were still alive, they said they didn't really know what they should be looking for. Which of course, was true. This is where Tom Harvey ran into the reality of, you know, neuroscience at that time.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Everything we human beings ever do, no matter how ordinary it seems, has a complex beginning in our brains.]

RACHAEL: At that point, scientists had just started to figure out.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Neurons]

RACHAEL: What neurons do, how they communicate back and forth.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: The brain alone has ten thousand million of them.]

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: They hadn’t even scratched the surface of sort of the understanding of a normal brain, let alone trying to, you know, solve the mystery of genius in Einstein's brain.

PAT: So years and years go by and nothing.

FRED LEPORE: But he wouldn’t give up. He knew it was of significance. He thought there was something that could be learned, and he never abandoned that.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: And I think at this point, Harvey began to see himself as kind of a living time capsule. He was going to take this brain with him into the future when science would be equipped to study it properly.

RACHAEL: But in the meantime, Harvey's life sort of falls apart. He has an affair, he gets divorced and he loses his job at Princeton. And then he kind of just disappears.

FRED LEPORE: Yeah, he does.

PAT: That is until 1978, when a young reporter from New Jersey knocked on his door asking about a brain.

STEVEN LEVY: Got an airplane home.

RACHAEL: Wait, did you call your editor or something on your way?

STEVEN LEVY: Well the first thing that I did, I went straight to my editor’s house. And he was, like, watching a basketball game. And we watched a little of the basketball game, and -- without saying anything. And finally he says, "Well, did you find the brain?" And I said, "Yup."

RACHAEL: That’s how you tell him? That's like -- you hold it for halftime? Why wouldn’t you just bust open the door?

STEVEN LEVY: It was this moment, you know? That was it. And then I had to write it. We got a great image for the cover. The cover line was My Search for Einstein's Brain. And then one of the people who got the press release was the AP. So when the story came out, the AP ran a thing about it and bang! It was in every newspaper in the country.

[CLIP: Johnny Carson theme.]

STEVEN LEVY: Johnny Carson made a joke about the brain.

PAT: Oh, really?

RACHAEL: What was the joke, do you remember?

STEVEN LEVY: Something about the brain, you know, if it was really Einstein's brain, it would have been smart enough to get out of Wichita, or something like that.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

PAT: [laughs]

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah. And Dr. Harvey had people camped out on his lawn.

PAT: Really?

STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, everyone wanted to see the brain. It was, you know, a lot of attention. The Einstein estate went bonkers.

PAT: I mean, this is exactly what they didn't want to happen.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: People came calling. There were cash offers for the brain. People all over the place started to write to him to volunteer to become its next keeper, and they offered him money.

PAT: So not only did Harvey fail to come up with any science about the brain, but he also broke that promise he made to the family.

RACHAEL: But, because of all the attention at least on the science side, his luck kind of changed.

STEVEN LEVY: One place that picked up the story was Science Magazine.

RACHAEL: By the late '70s, neuroscience had picked up.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: The human brain.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: A report of a woman who had electrodes implanted in the brain.]

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Two new techniques for exploring brains have been developed.]

RACHAEL: For example, we figured out there were opioid receptors in the brain.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Millions of these sensory receptors.]

RACHAEL: : And had developed a treatment for Parkinson’s. So scientists at this point were just slightly more equipped, and when Steve’s story came out ...

STEVEN LEVY: It actually kicked off real research into Einstein’s brain that directly flowed from my making it public.

JAD: So what happens?

PAT: So the first thing that happens is he gets a call from this scientist named ...

MARIAN DIAMOND: My name is Marian Diamond.

PAT: Marian Diamond.

JAD: That's a good name.

PAT: That's a great name. She's a professor of anatomy at Berkeley.

MARIAN DIAMOND: And I've been teaching here for many decades.

PAT: She was sort of famous on campus for carrying around a hat box.

MARIAN DIAMOND: Do you get excited coming to class?

PAT: And she would ...

MARIAN DIAMOND: How many have never seen a human brain before?

PAT: She'd begin her freshman anatomy lecture in front of all these kids by bringing her hat box onto the table and open it. And it was like a flower-print hat box.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

PAT: Open it up and pull out this brain.

MARIAN DIAMOND: Because this mass only weighs three pounds, and yet it has the capacity to conceive of a universe a billion light years across.

PAT: Some people call her one of the founders of modern neuroscience.

MARIAN DIAMOND: Now, isn't that phenomenal? A mass of protoplasm could do that?

PAT: So she did these studies on rats which became very famous, where she figured out that if you put a rat in an enriched environment, so a cage with a lot of toys, things to climb around on and lots of other rat friends to hang out with, instead of just putting them in the boring old normal cage, what you'll find is that their brains actually change. They'll have more of these little cells called glial cells, which for a long time people thought glial cells were just, like, the scaffolding of the brain.

JAD: Hmm.

PAT: Like, neurons were where the action was. That's where all the thinking happened. And glial cells were just like, you know, the studs and mortar of the house, just kind of holding everything together. But around this time when Marian Diamond was doing these studies, they were starting to realize that the glial cells also had neurotransmitters flowing through them. Like, that they might be more important than we thought. But shortly after she publishes her rat studies, she hears about Harvey.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: She saw, you know, a little piece about it in the journal Science, and so she started to track down Harvey and she called him.

PAT: And in 1984, Harvey sends her four chunks of brain.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: She went looking in Einstein’s brain to see if there was, you know, something similar to what she had been recording in her animal experiments.

PAT: And she finds that compared to the average brain, Einstein had a lot of glial cells.

JAD: What's -- what's a lot? Like, twice as many? Three times as many?

PAT: Well, about 70 percent more than the control group.

JAD: But what does that even mean, though?

PAT: I don't really know how to describe that, which is part of the problem. And on top of that, after she published this research, some other scientists raised questions that maybe the experimental methods weren't valid. So ...

JAD: Hmm. Not convinced.

PAT: Yeah, me neither. So that's Diamond.

JAD: Diamond.

RACHAEL: So after Diamond, then this guy Britt Anderson comes along. And his whole thing, he studied five other adult male dead brains.

JAD: Okay.

RACHAEL: He looked at their pre-frontal cortexes, and that's, like, where higher cognitive abilities are located. So, like, if you were gonna take a test, that's the part of your brain that's gonna be activated.

JAD: Uh-huh.

RACHAEL: And he found that compared to the other brains that he had, the neurons in Einstein's brain were more tightly-packed there.

JAD: Huh. So his neurons were more tightly-packed in a certain part of his brain.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

JAD: Did he have more neurons at that part, or less neurons?

RACHAEL: Same number, roughly. They were just more crowded together.

JAD: What does that say?

RACHAEL: I kind of take that as, like, Einstein's problem-solving abilities could go much more quickly and efficiently.

JAD: Nah?

RACHAEL: Yeah actually, Britt Anderson, the guy who found this? He dismisses himself in a way. He found a difference, but he also was quick to say, like, we just have one of these brains.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: He said listen, you know, this was always gonna be an N of 1 in any experiment.

RACHAEL: He's kind of like the middle child of all these researchers. He made, like, the smallest splash.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: But it is through Britt Anderson that Tom Harvey hears about Sandra Witelson in Canada.

RACHAEL: And that was like the biggest splash of them all.

JAD: Really?

RACHAEL: Yes. So Sandra Witelson in the fall of 1995, she ends up getting this fax.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: A one-page fax from a man by the name of Thomas Harvey.

RACHAEL: And the fax basically says, "Hey, heard about your research."

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: "Would you like to study the brain of Albert Einstein?"

PAT: It almost seems like he would suspect it to be a prank. Like, I just picture it just being that sentence on a fax page.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, obviously, she faxed back. "Yes." And so ...

RACHAEL: Harvey hops in the car with the brain. Brain's in the trunk, actually. And drives north.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: To bring -- to bring the brain to Canada!

RACHAEL: And the reason he was so excited to have her look at the brain ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: What had really caught his attention was the fact that she had this collection of normal brains.

RACHAEL: She'd been doing this long-term before-and-after study. So years before, she had gotten this group together. Basically, like, they signed up, they'd, like, took IQ tests. They did all these things while they were still alive.

JAD: Oh!

RACHAEL: She knew their health history. And then when they died, she got to study their brains to see, like, a before-and-after picture of these people's brains.

JAD: Were these all smart people?

RACHAEL: So she had a mix, but the ones that she compared Einstein's brain to were all high-IQ men.

JAD: Hmm.

RACHAEL: So she makes this comparison, Einstein's brain versus these other brains in her collection. And she writes this article.

FRED LEPORE: And the gist of the article was that he had unusual parietal lobes.

RACHAEL: Unusual parietal lobes?

FRED LEPORE: The parietal lobes of Einstein's brain were anatomically exceptional, if you will.

JAD: Where is the parietal lobes again?

RACHAEL: It's kind of like where your baseball cap is, like, mainly ...

JAD: Isn't it sort of like top of your head, but back?

PAT: Or if you had a ...

RACHAEL: Yes, exactly.

PAT: A yarmulke.

RACHAEL: Yes.

RACHAEL: And this area of your brain, this is where all of your sensory information comes in. And because of that, it's also where your visual-spatial awareness is located. So like the way that you orient yourself in the world is mostly located in that part of your brain. Like, if you close your eyes and you think, "Where are my hands? Where my knees? Where are my feet?" Well, you have an internal mental map that's telling you where those things are. And that's your parietal lobe doing that. Anyhow, so what was different about this part of Einstein's brain is that if you imagine the brain to look like a walnut, which is kind of the only way I imagine the brain, there are, like, all these grooves and crevices. And there's this one groove, like a groovy groove, like a deeper crevice called the Sylvian Fissure. In Einstein's brain it was shorter than the rest of ours. And apparently that's very strange.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: When she described it to me, she said it was, you know, to see this unique pattern in Einstein's brain was as striking as seeing a face with the eyebrows beneath the eyes.

JAD: Huh.

RACHAEL: And Sandra Witelson proposed that maybe because this crevice was a little bit shorter, the electricity in this part of his brain could go much more quickly.

JAD: Oh, because it wouldn't have to travel around the ...

RACHAEL: Yeah, it didn't have to take a detour over a ditch. It could just go pkew!

JAD: Mm-hmm. So this was her -- this was her speculation?

RACHAEL: This was her speculation. Yes. And so she was saying, like, the parietal lobe, like, this is where his genius might be. And if you think about Einstein, like everybody says, like, one of his greatest talents is, like, the way that he could manipulate shapes in his mind. And then, like, orient objects in his head.

FRED LEPORE: I mean, just the idea that space-time is curved, you know? So he has this kind of great visual-spatial sense. And if you had to pick a part of your brain that could underlie mathematical abilities or visual-spatial abilities, that's parietal lobes.

RACHAEL: When I was looking up these papers, you see Thomas Harvey's name as, like, the co-author.

PAT: Oh, he was a co-author?

RACHAEL: Yeah. He's, like, cited in the paper. And it just made my heart happy, like he made it! He got it! Especially for Sandra Witelson, because he all these years had been, like, shepherding this forward. And when that paper came out ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: I think Tom Harvey felt then that -- that his work was over.

JAD: Because he felt at that point that they had pointed to something that was real.

RACHAEL: Yes.

JAD: And true.

RACHAEL: He felt like finally the work that he promised to do in the very beginning was finally done. And at that point ...

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: He actually decided to give the brain back to Princeton Hospital in the care of Elliot Krauss. Basically, the pathologist who holds the same job he did when he first took that brain in 1955.

RACHAEL: Wow, it came full circle.

CAROLYN ABRAHAM: You know, it's -- it's kind of uncanny that it's back where it was.

RACHAEL: Mm-hmm.

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: I'm just gonna rain on this parade for a second. I'm happy for Mr. Harvey, but in terms of the science, maybe you convinced me a little bit, like a medium bit, but it still kind of smells like phrenology to me. I mean, it's like, listening to it, the experience that I have is like, "Ooh! A Sylvian Fissure! His was smaller!"

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: And then I think to myself, what the fuck is a Sylvian Fissure? I don't even know what that is.

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: And like the fact that, like, we so clearly default to this fascination with a thing that I don't -- I can't even explain, it just kind of seems absurd.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

PAT: And we know that he said that, like, he didn't think he was a particularly special guy. Like, he said various -- there's lots of quotes from him where he talks about saying, like, I was just in the right place at the right time. Or ...

JAD: He does say that. Really?

PAT: Yeah. Or, you know, when he's talking about his fame, he has some quote about worrying that the packaging of him is better than the meat inside, or something. Like he's a sausage. I mean, this is part of the myth of him, is like -- I mean, he was very humble.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: There's another one where he talks about, like -- he sometimes talks about what made him special was his stubbornness, that he was really obstinate and he wouldn't let things go. That's one of the only things I feel like you hear him talking about as some innate characteristic of him that made him different than other people. But he never talks about being smart. He never talks about his brain. I mean, I haven't read every Einstein quote, but I feel like we've been swimming around in it for a while the last few months, and I haven't seen him say anything about his brain, ever.

JAD: It is interesting that he says he's -- he was in the right place at the right time.

RACHAEL: Mm-hmm.

PAT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Which can sound kind of like humble, but also maybe it's like if you take it seriously, maybe there is something to it.

PAT: Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about the neural connections inside his head, but you can also think about it a little more broadly. Like about the connections outside his head. Almost as if the neurons didn't stop inside his skull, but, like, continued outward into the world around him.

JAD: Hmm.

PAT: And that's what we're gonna do after a quick break.

[MADELEINE: Hi, this is Madeleine calling from Berlin, Germany. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. sloan.org]

[ADVERTISEMENT]

PAT: This is G, and we are -- we are, what are we doing here?

JAD: [laughs] What are we doing here, Pat?

PAT: We are back from our break.

JAD: Just to reset, I was intrigued by the thing you said at the end of the last chapter that, you know, there are the circuits in his head, but then what about the circuits outside his head? Maybe he just got lucky. What were you thinking of when you said that?

PAT: Yeah, I mean a lot of -- there's sort of the obvious things that must be said. Einstein was building on the work of lots of other physicists like Poincare and Lorentz who had been chipping away at these same questions that puzzled him. So there's that. But if you widen the lens a little bit and you start to think more broadly, you start to see some really interesting kind of bigger forces that were at work on Einstein when he was coming up with these ideas. Like, just take Special Relativity which most people would say is one of his most revolutionary ideas.

JAD: And Special Relativity is?

PAT: Special Relativity to put it, like, very basically is the idea that time is relative and that times slows down as you go faster. So if you're going a million miles an hour versus 10 miles an hour, time will literally slow down for you. It won't just seem slower, it will actually be slower.

JAD: I feel like this is the moment when science and common sense just parted ways. It's such a weird idea.

PAT: Totally. Well, that idea, like, came from Einstein, but it also kind of came from the world around him.

JAD: Hmm.

PAT: Okay, so I'm gonna give you a couple of really interesting examples that we came across as we were researching this.

JAD: Okay.

PAT: Number one ...

PETER GALLISON: I'm not at all an expert on the brain story, I'm looking at some of the same things that you have.

PAT: ... comes from this guy.

PAT: Could you introduce yourself?

PETER GALLISON: I'm Peter Gallison. I'm a professor at Harvard University where I work on the history and philosophy of science and on physics.

PAT: And what Peter told us is if you look at when Einstein came up with the idea of Special Relativity, this was 1905. The story that's often told is Einstein was working in the patent office, just sitting around all by himself thinking big thoughts. But if you look at what was actually happening at that moment. Like, outside ...

PETER GALLISON: This was a transformative moment in the technological history of the world.

PAT: Yeah, what were some of the big, like, hot inventions happening?

PETER GALLISON: Well, if you looked out the window of any Central European or Western European city, you would see new kinds of trams being installed, electric motors. You would see networks of clocks that were established. You would see all sorts -- new devices that were being invented that could send signals, the extension of the telegraph network. Everything in motion, everything in change. And ...

PAT: As a consequence, he says ...

PETER GALLISON: Time is -- has suddenly become a topic of immense interest.

PAT: Not just because the world seemed to be moving faster, but because for the first time in human history, you could be in several different times at once.

PETER GALLISON: As you ran trains, say you leave Chicago at 3 p.m., when you get to a distant city, what time is it there? Do you use the time that you started with in Chicago? Do you use the time that you're arriving at in Philadelphia? Who sets -- what are the times?

PAT: You know, before the railroad, time was local. Every town had its own time.

PETER GALLISON: Set in each town by the local jeweler who repaired and made clocks and watches.

PAT: But then with the railroad you needed a central time. And there were literally skirmishes over whose time would become the time. We actually did a show about this, like a million years ago.

PETER GALLISON: It was a big, big struggle. There were people who didn't like that at all. But suddenly the ability to traverse at a fairly high speed, hundreds even thousands of miles, created the demand to think about what time was and how to coordinate it.

PAT: So that was sort of the mood of the moment. Like, just outside the window of the patent office where Einstein was sitting there thinking big thoughts. And one of the specific questions he was wrestling with was the one Peter just threw out. Like, how would you coordinate two different clocks in two different cities? A lot of people at the time thought the way you do it is you send an electrical signal, like through a telegraph wire from one clock to the other, calculate the amount of time it would take that signal to get from the first clock to the second clock, then you take that miniscule amount of time and subtract it from one of the clocks or add it to one of the clocks, and then you'd have the same time in two places. And that sort of solved the problem. But then the next thought Einstein had was what if that signal you were using was traveling at the speed of light? And what if those two clocks -- like, what if one of them was moving? And if it was moving and the light was sort of chasing it, wouldn't it take the light longer to get there? And wouldn't that, like, screw up your whole ability to coordinate time? Why am I telling you this? Because these kinds of questions, they sort of infiltrated Einstein's dreams.

JIMENA CANALES: Einstein wrote about this in his autobiography, so we have a very good idea.

PAT: That's Jimena Canales.

JIMENA CANALES: I'm a historian of science.

PAT: At the University of Illinois. And she says Einstein wrote about these very particular daydreams he had.

JIMENA CANALES: He said that he imagined himself being propelled through space chasing after a light beam. And that, historians of science, biographers of Einstein often agree that it was that sort of experiment of seeing, you know, what actually happens if I pursue a light beam that had the -- provided the origin of his thought of the Theory of Relativity.

PAT: And I'll explain why that light beam was such a big deal in a minute, but the main thing Jimena wanted to tell me about it was that it often gets explained as something that just emerged from Einstein's brain. Like, that was purely an original idea of his.

JIMENA CANALES: But it was not his idea at all.

PAT: According to Jimena, a story he read sort of led him to it. She says Einstein loved science fiction as a kid.

JIMENA CANALES: And he said he was particularly taken by one author. The name is Aaron Bernstein, who wrote quite a few volumes. And Einstein says that he read them with quote "breathless attention."

PAT: And Jimena says the story that got Einstein thinking about chasing light beams was about ...

JIMENA CANALES: A faster-than-light traveler, and what happens if we travel faster than the speed of light.

PAT: The story sort of imagines that you could have a guy who shoots off into space and perches himself on a star, where he looks back at Earth. And what he sees isn't the same Earth he left.

JIMENA CANALES: But a different world, a different universe.

PAT: But an earlier Earth. Because, as Bernstein explains, when we look out at anything in space, we're not seeing it exactly as it is, but rather as it was.

JIMENA CANALES: For example, when you look at the sun, you're really seeing the sun eight minutes in the past, because the light waves take time to -- to reach you.

PAT: And because this traveler could travel faster than light ...

JIMENA CANALES: All you needed to do, you know, if you wanted to look at the Earth eight minutes in the past, all you needed to do was to go to the sun. And if you jump into farther and farther planets and stars, then you can choose whatever time in history you want to see.

PAT: So in this story, this traveler could bounce from that first star to a planet to another star and another and another.

JIMENA CANALES: Quote, "In one point in space, the light of the scenes of the French Revolution is just coming into view. And even farther away, the invasion of the barbarians has just become the order of the day. Alexander The Great is still conquering the world. Historical events that have long been dead for us will just be coming to life.

PAT: By the way, this was one of the first time travel stories in history, which is crazy to think about. 3,000 years of human writings and almost nobody to that point had imagined someone going back in time or going into the future. These stories that today are so much a part of movies and culture, they all basically started at the time Einstein was growing up. He just happened to be alive at that time. And Jimena says they opened his mind.

JIMENA CANALES: And he said that these stories really prompted him to imagine himself being propelled through space chasing after a light beam.

PAT: And the reason that mental image was so pivotal for Einstein was that right around the time it popped into his head, other physicists were noticing this weird thing about the speed of light. Unlike everything else in the known world, light always moved at the same speed, no matter how fast you were moving relative to it. And in picturing himself riding along beside this light beam, Einstein realized that if light always moved at the same speed, if light was constant then time must be relative. Which sort of, you know, eventually would turn our understanding of the universe upside down.

JAD: So you're saying that if he hadn't been alive at a time where there are railroads which created time problems, all the while there are people writing time travel fiction for the first time in history, all that hadn't been happening he might not have thought the thoughts that he thunk.

PAT: Yeah. Yeah, like I -- I still think there was something about his brain that explains part of it.

JAD: Okay.

PAT: But all this other stuff, the time travel, the railroads, the stories, I would say that that adds, like, another 25 percent.

JAD: So the brain is what, like a 20?

PAT: Yeah, give the brain maybe 20.

JAD: I would say 12, but that's okay. Let's go with 20. 20 plus 25, sort of like roughly half. I don't know. A half. Let's say it's a half.

PAT: Yeah, I like halfway there.

JAD: This precise math that we're doing.

RACHAEL: I'm gonna see if I can push us a little bit further.

JAD: Okay. You have another explanation.

RACHAEL: Oh, yeah.

JAD: Bring it. What do you got?

RACHAEL: I've got two. I'm gonna start small.

JAD: Okay.

RACHAEL: And the first one, I spoke to this guy, Alberto Martinez. He's a historian of science, and he told me that one of the other things Einstein was reading that really blew his mind was ...

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: David Hume!

RACHAEL: A Scottish philosopher David Hume, who had these pretty radical ideas including that the laws of nature kind of start in our heads.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: That the fundamental concepts of science are free creations, free inventions of the human mind.

RACHAEL: Alberto says that those ideas gave Einstein permission to think his own crazy thoughts.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: There's a letter from 1915 in which Einstein writes, "This line of thought was of great influence in my efforts. Very probably I wouldn't have reached the solution without those philosophical studies."

RACHAEL: And Einstein was kind of obsessed with him. So much so -- and this is a little bit of a digression, that just a couple of months before he was about to publish the Theory of Relativity ...

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: March of 1905.

RACHAEL: Einstein was supposed to meet with a group of his friends to discuss some of Hume's writings. Kind of like a study group. But one of the guys ...

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: This guy Maurice Solovine, he wanted to skip a meeting of their discussion group.

RACHAEL: Said he wanted to go see a violin concert or something.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: When Einstein and his mathematician friend Conrad Habicht arrive ...

RACHAEL: And find that their buddy isn't there.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: They are pissed off! So they're so upset that they take out their cigars and they start smoking and smoking and smoking, because they know Solovine hates smoking. And then they take the ashes of every cigar and smear them on his teapot, his tea kettle ...

RACHAEL: Oh my God! What a jerk!

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: Yeah! His -- his table, his pillow ...

JAD: His pillow?

RACHAEL: They totally trash his place. Such was Einstein's love of Hume.

JAD: I'm gonna give that, like, a seven. I'm gonna give that a seven percent.

RACHAEL: Okay, fine. But in terms of non-brain explanations of his genius, I'm about to give you my favorite.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: All right. Here I go, here I go.

RACHAEL: Okay, so we're gonna rewind a couple years, back before the apartment trashing. Einstein's working for the government.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: A third-class employee in the Swiss patent office.

RACHAEL: Not a great job.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: He's just a bureaucrat. He calls himself a federal ink shitter.

RACHAEL: He was in his mid-twenties. He wanted to be a physicist so badly, but no one wanted to hire him.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: Again and again they rejected him. Yet ...

RACHAEL: There was one person who thought he had something special.

ANDREA GABOR: So Mileva Maric was Serbian.

RACHAEL: This is writer Andrea Gabor, and she says Mileva and Einstein met in college.

ANDREA GABOR: At ETH in Zurich, the big university in Zurich. One of the few places where you could attend university as a woman.

RACHAEL: Mileva was actually the only woman in their class.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: They're both in the same program for preparing future science and math teachers.

RACHAEL: They become study buddies, and pretty soon ...

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: She becomes his girlfriend.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: I long terribly for a letter from my beloved witch. I can hardly grasp that we will be separated for so much longer. Only now do I see how frightfully much I love you.]

RACHAEL: Do you know anything about the early days of them as a couple? Were they -- I can -- I have this version in my head where it's like they were lovey-dovey but also speaking like they were on The Big Bang Theory. It's, like, these ridiculously scientific conversations.

ANDREA GABOR: Well, you know, I think it was -- I think it was both of those things. They’d go on these hikes in the Alps. They enjoy music together. It's a very romantic relationship, but it's also one that is very much based on this shared love of science.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: They're studying physics. They're reading great works in physics that Einstein was ...

RACHAEL: He would skip class and then she would stay in class and, like, update him.

JAD: Aw, she would take notes for him?

RACHAEL: Yeah. Then they would, like, write these letters to each other about, like, these new ideas that he was reading about.

[LETTER CLIP, MILEVA: I'm very curious what Kleiner will say about the two papers. He'd better pull himself together and say something reasonable.]

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: This is the stuff from which his work on relativity is born. So she becomes the first person that, you know, analyzes and thinks about these things with him.

RACHAEL: She was, like, the first person from what I can tell to, like, really engage with him as, like, this, like, weird, off-the-beaten-path kind of guy. And, like, support that and, like, love that about him.

JAD: Okay.

RACHAEL: So they get married, they have kids. She leaves the science community. He continues to do his thing.

JAD: Why?

RACHAEL: Not very successfully.

JAD: Just because it was ...

RACHAEL: Just because she's a woman and that always happens. It's just that one of them had to do it. And for a long time, historians didn't think much about her. But then ...

ANDREA GABOR: You know, then these love letters. I mean, they really were a big news item.

RACHAEL: In 1986, a pile of letters between Mileva and Einstein turned up. And there was one letter, and there was one line from Einstein that kind of like rocked the world.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: There's a letter from 1901 in which Einstein says, "How proud will I be when we both together bring our work on the relative motion victoriously to its end." That's what he literally says in his own penmanship.

RACHAEL: It says our work!

RACHAEL: Our work. Like, our theory.

JAD: Whoa!

RACHAEL: And everyone was like, "What? Like, could that -- like, was she helping him on the side?"

JAD: Oh my God, it was a collaboration?

RACHAEL: Yeah, that's what I was all about. I was like, "What?"

ANDREA GABOR: The sort of surprise at the idea that this iconic genius had had a wife who maybe was his equal.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: There's a couple of other letters in which Einstein again refers to "our work, our theory." When you put them all together, it's enough to give anyone the impression "relative motion, our theory," that Einstein's literally saying that Mileva was his secret co-worker.

JAD: Wow! I'm giving that a 20!

RACHAEL: But before we get too excited about this. And by "we" I mostly mean me. I need to throw in a few big buts.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: The replies that we have from her do not engage the science. The letters in which he writes these to her, he doesn't specify what she herself did.

RACHAEL: Alberto says when you read the letters, you realize what he believed at the time when he wrote that letter wasn't that special. That relative motion idea that he talked about in the letter, that's not relativity. In fact, that's kind of something everybody knew about at the time.

ALBERTO MARTINEZ: Did Einstein have the theory of relativity when he's writing them? And then the answer is no. He has nothing. And we have multiple sources in which he says, "I have nothing."

RACHAEL: So she probably wasn't his co-conspirator, but she did support him at this time when everybody else was kind of rejecting him. And for that, I would like to give her some points. I'm gonna say 15.

JAD: Based on -- based on what? Just because it makes you feel good to give her 15?

RACHAEL: Yeah. Just arbitrarily. I like to pick numbers out of the sky. It seems like that's what we're doing here.

JAD: True.

PAT: I'm with Rachael here. I support the 15.

JAD: No, I do too. I do too. Okay, so where does that leave us? That leaves us some percent for the physicists who came before, 25-ish percent for time and place, seven percent Hume, 15 percent Mileva, Yeah, that doesn't get us all the way there.

PAT: No. I know. So we decided to call one other person to see if we could get, like, a fifth thing. Because why not?

BRIAN GREENE: Well, I have an answer. And I think there are many ...

PAT: This is Brian Greene. Physicist. Professor at Columbia. He has written so much about Einstein. He's written about Einstein in his best-selling books, he's talked about him on television specials, he has a play about Einstein. He has written about all the ways Einstein has impacted the world, and all the ways the world impacted Einstein. But surprisingly, when we asked him about this, he brought it back to the brain.

BRIAN GREENE: I have to say if I was in the shoes of the pathologist at time, I may have absconded with his brain as well.

PAT: His basic point is yeah, there was the railroads and the time-travel fiction and there was Hume.

BRIAN GREENE: There was this confluence of so many different features ...

PAT: But those things were around for everybody. Somehow, all of them came together in this one brain in a way that was different.

BRIAN GREENE: Somewhere in the collection of atoms and molecules in the brain that we call Albert Einstein is the answer to why Albert Einstein was Albert Einstein.

PAT: Whether you think there was something innate about it like Einstein was born with some special mental equipment, or you think it had more to do with his environment, Brian says in the end, it doesn't really matter. Because everything you experience, rewrites your biology, it etches yourself into you. And so when you look at a brain, you're not just looking at a structure. You are, according to Brian, in some fundamental way looking at the life that person lived.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah, every genius thought, every deep insight, every pattern recognized, happened inside that gloppy, gray, three or four pound structure. That's all there is.

PAT: Whatever set him apart, Brian says, is in there. Somewhere.

BRIAN GREENE: And if we had the capacity to lay out every single circuit and every single influence that could cascade through that brain, if we were able to fully understand all the electrical signals and crackles that would go through that brain, yes, I believe that we would fully understand Einstein's process, and understand how it was that he was able to do what he did. We can't do that. Yet.

FRED LEPORE: Well, there's a lot of interest in this concept that the structure of the brain is gonna tell you something about the function.

PAT: That's neurologist Fred Lepore, who we heard from earlier. And he says people are trying, not so much with Einstein's brain anymore. But he says there's this whole exploding area of neuroscience where researchers are trying to describe the brain at the level of detail Brian's describing.

FRED LEPORE: That's funded to the tune of $4.5-billion.

PAT: He told us about one guy who's doing this, just about a mile from where Einstein lived.

FRED LEPORE: There's a Princeton University professor, Sebastian Seung, and what he does is he takes a cubic millimeter -- a cubic millimeter of mouse retina. That's neural tissue, it's not brain. But it's neural tissue.

PAT: Mm-hmm.

FRED LEPORE: And he slices this into these vanishingly-thin sections and then he tries to trace the axons, the dendrites, the neurons, the astrocytes, the oligodendroglia, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It can take months -- it can take months to do a cubic millimeter. And then you gotta have some kind of software that can analyze to see if the structure can lead you to some kind of conclusion about circuitry.

PAT: Right.

FRED LEPORE: Which might get you to function. Might get you to function.

PAT: Like, why not definitely? Like, if that doesn't get you to function, then what would? What would be -- what would be left out if we could map perfectly the structure of all the connections?

FRED LEPORE: Well, you're talking like me. You're talking like a -- see, I'm by default, I'm a neurologist, I'm a materialist. They call me a materialist because I'm saying, "Well, the left side of the brain has something to do with the right arm and speech." That's -- that's called materialism. But there's another school of thought and that's called dualism.

PAT: Uh-huh.

FRED LEPORE: Which is somehow mind, consciousness, spirit, soul, you pick out the noun you want there, is separate from the physical substrate of the brain.

PAT: Huh. How would that be science, though? Because I mean, I can imagine a school of thought which allows for that, but it feels like you're very quickly stepping out of science if you go that way.

FRED LEPORE: Well, yes. Yes. Okay. Probably, you know, see we're all brought up on this thing, when you read anything in the popular press about the brain, they'll show you functional neuroimaging. So when someone talks, the Broca's area, the speech area on the left side of the brain lights up. And you go, "Well, there's your answer! That's the structure, it lights up. That's what's creating language." Except when you deal with the neurophilosophers they say, "Well, we got one problem with that." It's called the hard problem. If you look at that chunk of brain that you're calling Broca's area that lights up when you talk, what exactly is happening there? How does that create -- how does that create a word? Or if you're looking at the occipital lobe and you're looking at the color red, how do you create that qualia, which is a fancy way of saying the sensation of color. We can show you where it is happening, we just can't show you how. We're all looking at the same thing. We're saying somehow if we could get a better handle on the anatomy, maybe we can explain a thought. But we can't explain a thought. I mean, forget -- forget relativity. We can't explain a thought yet.

[ARCHIVAL CLIP, EINSTEIN: “It follows from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing, a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.]

PAT: This episode was reported by Rachael Cusick and me, and produced by Bethel Habte, Rachael and me and Jad Abumrad. Music by Alex Overington. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Special thanks to Dustin O’Halloran, Tim Huson, Simon Adler and Minute Physics. Radiolab's G is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. We'll be back in two weeks with episode four of G.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To play the message press two. Start of message.]

[ALBERTO MARTINEZ: This is Alberto Martinez in Austin, Texas. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our Executive Producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Nora Keller, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O’Donnell, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, Audrey Quinn, W. Harry Fortuna, Ruth Samuel, Imani Leonard, and Neel Dhanesha. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you very much.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message]

-30-