Worth

Summary

Radiolab — “Worth”
Original Release: 2014 (Resurfaced May 22, 2026)
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich, Lulu Miller, Latif Nasser
Producers: Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler, Matt Kielty

---

Episode Overview

This Radiolab episode, “Worth,” brings together three provocative stories exploring how we calculate, assign, or try to resist putting a price tag on things that seem inherently priceless—human life, loss, and the natural world. The hosts and reporters investigate the messy intersections of health care economics, war reparations, and ecological value, asking: What is a year of life worth? How do we compensate for accidental deaths caused by war? And could it ever make sense to put a price on nature? The episode is both timely and timeless, revisiting its themes from 2014 amidst ongoing debates about healthcare costs, conflict, and climate change.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Price of Life—Healthcare and Drugs

(00:46–28:44)

Setting the Stage: Medical Value Judgments

• Story by Molly Webster: Explores the true value of a medical treatment in the context of astronomically priced cancer drugs.
• Examines the case of Zaltrap, a new cancer drug, approved in 2012, offering just 42 extra days of life at a cost of $11,000 a month, totaling around $30,000 for a three-month course.
• Dr. Leonard Saltz (Memorial Sloan Kettering): Highlights cancer drug prices going “through the roof.”

  “I mean, we have drugs out there that are many hundreds of dollars per pill.” (04:27)

• A boycott and public outcry led the pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, to halve the price nationwide (08:35).

The Dilemma of "Value for Money"

• Compare Zaltrap with Sovaldi: a $1,000-a-pill Hep C cure, $84,000 per course, yet effectively curative—raising the question: Does more efficacy justify a bigger price tag?
• Bruce Mohl (Commonwealth magazine): “In the first half of 2014, 70,000 people in the country… were treated, and it had a 95% rate of cure. In other words, holy cow, the virus was eradicated.” (13:35)
• High prices force rationing: patients must be sick enough for insurers to approve treatment (14:51).

Society’s Stake & “The Value of a Year”

• Insurance pools mean society shares individual costs:

  “At what point does society say… there isn’t an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system?” – Dr. Saltz (09:52)

• WHO guidelines: spend 1–3x GDP per capita on a “quality year of life.” In the U.S., that’s roughly $50,000–$150,000 (19:00).

Patients’ Perspectives

• Molly Webster’s Times Square Man-on-the-Street: People struggle to attach a number to a year of life; responses range from $7 to $10 million (21:10).

  “No one punched me… people are ready—not ready, but willing—to engage in this conversation.” (21:39)

• Susan Gubar (patient, ovarian cancer): Emphasizes the emotional and practical complexity when facing “worth” as a patient:

  “The American individualistic, optimistic response would be, well, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Life is worth it. Whatever it takes. But whatever it takes will not cure my cancer. So I think this question changes when you have incurable cancer. It becomes a different question, which is when is enough enough?” (25:28)

Notable Quotes

• Dr. Leonard Saltz: “There isn’t an infinite number of dollars… Sooner or later, this system is going to fall apart.” (09:52)
• Susan Gubar: “It’s about what kind of days, not just how many days.” (26:46)

---

2. The Price of Amends—War and Compensation

(31:59–53:12)

Wedding Convoy Drone Strike in Yemen

• Gregory Johnson (BuzzFeed): Details a 2013 U.S. drone strike that killed 12 people in a Yemeni wedding convoy.
• After past mistakes, the U.S. government has a tradition of paying condolence money—sometimes called “money as a weapons system” (MAAWS).

History & Legalities of Reparations

• John Witt (law professor, Yale): Tracks the origin back to General Pershing in WWI, when the U.S. Congress authorized compensating European civilians harmed by American troops, establishing a new precedent (41:08).
• Payments come with exclusions: no compensation in actual combat situations.

How Much Is a Life Worth in War?

• In Iraq/Afghanistan, condolence payments averaged $2,500 for a death—sometimes less than for a damaged car (46:40).
• For 9/11 victims: payouts ranged from $250,000 to almost $7 million (48:05).
• Marla Keenan (Center for Civilians in Conflict):

  “If I told you $10,000, would you feel better about it?… $10,000 doesn’t buy anything more back than what you lost.” (49:00)

The Power—and Limits—of Money as Amends

• Marla Keenan: After losing a friend in Libya, she wanted “not just I’m sorry, but ‘here’s what happened.’ It’s the explanation and the apology that matter.” (50:17)
• Legal, cultural, and emotional aspects complicate finding a “fair price.” In the Yemen strike, families received $30,000, more than in Iraq/Afghanistan—yet the need for meaningful acknowledgment endures.

Notable Quotes

• John Tracy (former Army claims officer):

  “Most of them… just wanted to look at somebody who’s in a uniform and say, you really messed with my life.” (51:34)

• Gregory Johnson (via translator, regarding the Yemeni father):

  “How you can persuade someone who lost his son… except if the payment was equal to those in America?” (52:31)

---

3. Nature’s Worth—Valuing Ecosystems and Biodiversity

(57:34–78:35)

If Nature Sent Us a Bill

• Nature provides vast “ecosystem services” for free: bats that eat pests, marshes that filter water.
• Robert Costanza: Global estimate of these services is $142.7 trillion per year—more than total GNP worldwide (60:56).
• Assigning dollar values can inform policy, e.g., in shrimp-farming vs. mangrove preservation in developing countries:

  “In some cases, the services that mangroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp.” – Soren Wheeler (65:43)

Case Study: The Parable of the Bees

• In China’s Mao County, pesticide use and habitat destruction wiped out bee populations.

  Farmers resorted to hand-pollinating apples with brushes, leading to a 30% increase in yield—until rising wages made hand pollination uneconomical (71:56).

• The market’s valuation of bees shifted rapidly: priceless to worthless to invaluable.

The Danger of Reducing Nature to a Dollar Figure

• Doug McCauley (ecologist):

  “The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money, and then we’re really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn’t make us money.” (66:25)

• Glenn Marie Lang (World Bank economist): Without accounting for nature, it gets valued at zero in policy—even though its true worth is incalculable and irreplaceable (67:43).
• J.B. MacKinnon (writer):

  “All this biological diversity, all these amazing things… is like an extension of our own brains… when we draw down on that pool… we deeply impoverish ourselves—doing harm to our own ability to think and dream.” (76:56)

Notable Quotes

• Robert Krulwich:

  “Economics is just not a good way to go. You do it and you think you’re smart, but then the value changes.” (74:41)

• Jad Abumrad:

  “When you put a number on a bee or a bat… it’s like an attempt to force a kind of long-term thinking.” (75:49)

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Societal Limits on Healthcare (09:52): “There isn’t an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system.”
• Demand for Transparent Value (19:48): “The last time we tried to talk about cost in medicine, it ended up in the whole death panels.”
• War Amends as Explanation, Not Payment (50:17): “It’s the token that’s given with the apology and with the explanation.”
• Economic Value vs. Intrinsic Value (66:25): “When you don’t put a value on these services, they don’t get counted.”
• Biodiversity’s Real Value (76:56): “All this biological diversity… is like an extension of our own brains. When we draw down on that pool… we deeply impoverish ourselves.”

---

Timestamps of Important Segments

• [03:11] — Drug pricing and cancer treatment value
• [10:04] — Who pays: societal role in healthcare decisions
• [14:51] — Sovaldi pricing, rationing Hep C medicine
• [19:00] — WHO’s GDP-based “value of a quality year”
• [21:10] — Man-on-the-street: What’s a year of life worth?
• [25:28] — Patient’s perspective: ‘Whatever it takes’
• [31:59] — War reparations: Wedding drone strike in Yemen
• [41:01] — WWI origins of reparations for wartime civilian harm
• [46:40] — $2,500: Standard condolence payment per civilian death
• [60:56] — $142.7 trillion/year: Estimated value of global ecosystem services
• [71:56] — Mao County’s hand-pollinating apple farmers: the rise & fall of “human bees”

---

Episode Tone

The tone is inquisitive, personal, and often somber, blending investigative reporting with philosophical reflection. The hosts and guests approach difficult questions with empathy, curiosity, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths—often leavened by moments of humor and irony.

---

Final Reflection

"Worth" pushes listeners to confront the implicit calculations that underlie modern life—whether in the hospital, on the battlefield, or amid the silence of a vanishing forest—and leaves us with the sense that, while precise answers may remain elusive, the act of asking these questions is itself vital.

---

For more Radiolab, visit radiolab.org. This summary covers all major stories and moments, omitting advertisements, promos, and non-content sections.

Transcript

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[WNYC Studios Announcer]

WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com pop, pop, pop.

[Radiolab Promo Announcer]

That is the sound of popcorn popping. To announce the big news that Radiolab is headed to the Tribeca Festival podcast stage for a special live show in New York City. We will be headlining the podcast program with this one night only live show at the festival's 25th anniversary. Come on out on June 9 at 6pm for a show that will literally give you chills. Tickets are available [e-mail] that's tribecafilm.com audio.

[Latif Nasser]

Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. And today we're resurfacing a quite provocative episode we originally reported in 2014. Now that sounds like a long time ago until you start listening and you start to realize how many parallels there are between 2014 and this moment right now. Outrageous healthcare costs, war in the Middle east, climate change. In every one of these cases, the specifics that they're referring to have changed, but the overall picture remains depressingly the same. Honestly, since it came out, I like I still think about these stories. I still remember them all the time, especially the last one. I would say this episode is one of my all time top 10 Radiolab episodes. I hope you feel the same way whether you are hearing it for the first time or hearing it for the 10th time. Here it goes. Worth wait. You're listening.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right.

[Gabby Santos]

Okay.

[Gregory Johnson]

All right.

[Hannah]

You're listening to Radio Lab Radio from wnyc.

[Soren Wheeler]

Rewind.

[Hannah]

Are you ready?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Feeling full of worth?

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm feeling full of value.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, in that spirit, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

And today, three very different stories that try to put a Dollar value. A million.

[Greg Alten]

It's okay.

[Molly Webster]

$1 million.

[Jad Abumrad]

$7.

[Matthew Kielty]

$10,000.

[Molly Webster]

Yeah, I would say five bucks on things that seem priceless.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

Priceless.

[Jad Abumrad]

Priceless.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

Priceless.

[Molly Webster]

Is it really?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so start at the top.

[Molly Webster]

Bring on the pressure.

[Jad Abumrad]

So tell to. All right, we're gonna start the show with a story from our producer, Molly Webster.

[Molly Webster]

I don't remember any of it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Who we might actually want to rename Molly Wonkster because she recently got herself to some serious numericizing. Actually, it didn't start as a wonky thing. It started actually with some medical journals.

[Molly Webster]

Yeah. So that was interesting because it was some of the most poetic writing I've seen out of doctors ever. One journal article said, like, what would one more month mean to a 37 year old mother who has four children? Or what would one more month mean if you are a 67 year old who's about to go traveling around the world? People were just kind of like drifting these questions out there.

[Jad Abumrad]

All these questions seem to circle around a seemingly simple story of the pricing of a drug, a cancer drug.

[Molly Webster]

And the story, if you really want to tell it from the beginning, it begins with this guy named Leonard.

[Leonard Saltz]

Leonard Saltz. I'm a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan

[Molly Webster]

Kettering Cancer center, which is here in New York, and it's one of the largest cancer centers in the country.

[Leonard Saltz]

I mean, we have 17 doctors here

[Molly Webster]

who treat colon cancer just for colon cancer.

[Leonard Saltz]

We treat a very large number of patients.

[Molly Webster]

It's a huge hospital. And one of the things Leonard's been noticing in the last, I don't know, decade is cancer drug prices have just gone through the roof.

[Leonard Saltz]

I mean, we have drugs out there that are many hundreds of dollars per pill.

[Hannah]

Really?

[Molly Webster]

Yeah. Oh, just wait. Let's see, where does this start? It starts It's June in 2012. Leonard Saltz is at a conference, and at this conference is a pharmaceutical company called Sanofi. And they give a presentation about a

[Leonard Saltz]

new drug that they have, a drug called Zaltrap. And Zaltrap. Zaltra is a drug that, without getting into the science too much, targets the blood supply to the tumor.

[Molly Webster]

It cuts off the blood supply, which means the tumor can't grow.

[Leonard Saltz]

That's the scientific hypothesis.

[Molly Webster]

So this new drug is presented and they present the data and they showed

[Leonard Saltz]

that the survival difference between the people

[Molly Webster]

who got Zaltrap and the people who

[Leonard Saltz]

didn't was 1.4 months or 42 days.

[Molly Webster]

In other words, if you take this drug, you could get 42 more days of life on average, which means you could get three more days. You could get no days, you could get 42. Or you could live another three years. 42. 42 days down to the fine grain.

[Leonard Saltz]

Oh, please. I could show you some graphs that have been put up at meetings that show survival curves calculated out to two decimal places in terms of months. So I'm looking at.

[Molly Webster]

It's like not a tenth of a

[Leonard Saltz]

month, a hundredth of a month. A hundredth of a month. That's a little over seven hours.

[Molly Webster]

What?

[Leonard Saltz]

Pretty amusing, actually.

[Molly Webster]

Why would you.

[Leonard Saltz]

It's pseudo precision.

[Molly Webster]

Pseudo precision.

[Leonard Saltz]

At any rate.

[Molly Webster]

Anyways, after the conference, the FDA approves the drug. And basically once the FDA approves the drug, public insurance has to take it. And then the private insurance companies just follow suit, which means you get prescribed the drug and people pay for it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what does the drug cost?

[Molly Webster]

That's the thing.

[Leonard Saltz]

It costs roughly 30,000 for a three month course.

[Yin Sun Chen]

Wow.

[Leonard Saltz]

So.

[Molly Webster]

So Leonard's like, wow, that is expensive. And there was already another drug on the market, did the same thing and it cost half as much. To put that in context, this is just one drug. That's $11,000 a month. A normal cancer patient might take dozens of drugs.

[Leonard Saltz]

There are anti nausea medicines that are sometimes used that are in the range of $90 to $100 a tablet. And you take a tablet once a day for three days. One needs growth factors to help support the white blood cell count which you sometimes need in chemo. Those can be $5,000 every two to three weeks. If you need antibiotics to treat infections, those aren't cheap. And then you need a pharmacist to prepare it. They're labor intensive. You need tubing and equipment and needles to give it. You need trained nurses to administer it. You need doctors to take care of the patients. And don't forget, there's a cost for a CAT scan or mri. And then of course, someone's got to pay for the real estate, the heat and the likes of. None of those prices are figured into it. Okay, I'm just giving you the cost of the drug.

[Molly Webster]

So Leonard calls up one of his colleagues.

[Peter Bach]

My name is Peter Bach. I'm a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

[Molly Webster]

Peter is the number cruncher of the group. He does the statistical analysis of, I don't know, the cost of care. And Len grabbed him and ran him

[Peter Bach]

through all the data and we walked through the out of pocket expenses for Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare beneficiaries, if they don't have additional insurance, 20 cents of every dollar they pay out of pocket.

[Molly Webster]

And that number sort of hit him because he realized for Medicare patients, they'd be paying something like $2,000 out of pocket every month for just this drug.

[Peter Bach]

It's $2,200, if I remember the number

[Molly Webster]

correctly, for a lot of Medicare patients.

[Peter Bach]

That's all of their money, never mind other drugs. That's when I thought, we should go public with it.

[Molly Webster]

Memorial Stone, Kettering. They decide to boycott this drug. Now, that is that. I mean, I'm just stopping you because when you guys made that decision was that that feels like a big deal.

[Leonard Saltz]

It did feel like a big deal. And it felt like a big enough deal that we decided to write the op ed piece in the New York Times.

[Molly Webster]

They write an op ed in the Times that basically says, look, this is crazy. $11,000 a month for a drug that maybe gives you 42 more days of life.

[Leonard Saltz]

Is that worth it? And a little less than a month after the op ed piece came out,

[Molly Webster]

the company that makes Saltrap, they went

[Leonard Saltz]

to individual doctors offices, sent representatives, and said, we are offering a 50% discount.

[Jad Abumrad]

They cut the price in half just like that?

[Leonard Saltz]

Yep.

[Molly Webster]

Nationwide or like just in this area?

[Leonard Saltz]

Nationwide.

[Peter Bach]

It was sort of incredible.

[Molly Webster]

We reached out to Sanofi to talk about the price of Zaltrap, and they declined to comment. But in a statement that they released when this whole Zaltrap thing happened, they said that they incur so many costs for researching and developing and bringing a drug to market that that is what their pricing is based on. Leonard doesn't disagree.

[Leonard Saltz]

We need these companies. They're the ones developing the drugs which

[Molly Webster]

aren't easy to develop. I mean, Leonard gave us just one example.

[Leonard Saltz]

If we talk about colon cancer, he

[Molly Webster]

says, for years, there was only one drug on the market called 5fu.

[Leonard Saltz]

5fu was patented in August of 1957. It was from 1957 until 1996 that a second drug came along.

[Molly Webster]

That's how long it takes to develop a good drug.

[Leonard Saltz]

Or in that interim, there were over 70 drugs that were tried and failed.

[Molly Webster]

I feel like I don't give it enough credit because that just astounded me.

[Leonard Saltz]

It's very, very hard.

[Molly Webster]

And that, according to Leonard, is one of the reasons why prices are just gonna keep going up.

[Leonard Saltz]

But sooner or later, this system is going to fall apart. And at what point does society say, hmm, there isn't an infinite number of dollars that we can commit to our healthcare system?

[Molly Webster]

It's funny, because I had this interesting reaction to the word society. Because all of a sudden I thought like, why is not like a, you know, crazy death panel way, but I thought, why? Why is society involved? In my conversation with my doctor about if I want to take this drug that may give me another month and

[Leonard Saltz]

a half of life, why is society involved? Because you're not paying unless you have hidden resources. I'm aware of. Probably couldn't afford 10,000 to $15,000 a month in drug bills. Someone else has to pay that.

[Molly Webster]

Obviously, he says it's your insurance. I mean, say you're part of a policy that has 1,000 members.

[Leonard Saltz]

Let's say that the premium for that is $100. So we got $100. Thousand people. We got ourselves $100,000. Okay, so we now have $100,000 to take care of that thousand people for that month, whatever amount of time. If now one person comes up with a health care cost, let's say it's for a month, that is $100,000 in that month. Everybody else is in trouble. There's no money left.

[Molly Webster]

So they write this op ed saying like, prices are too high and the drugs are not that great. And sort of the next notable wave is there's this journal called Blood, which is really big to anybody that works in a community to have.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a journal called Blood.

[Molly Webster]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

How did we not know about this when we made the blood show?

[Molly Webster]

Oh, I knew. Just kept it in here anyhow. So, yes, there's the journal called Blood, which is basically like the journal for anybody that works in a field that has to do with blood. And what happens is like a hundred doctors get together and they co sign an editorial which basically says, we totally agree with everything you guys are saying. But we have an even bigger issue, you know, with Zaltrap, you're talking about an expensive drug that maybe doesn't really do that much. It's kind of easy, even though it had never been done before, to say we're not going to use this. What all of these doctors in the blood editorial are saying, what do you do when you have a really expensive drug? But it's really, really good. It's like a drug you actually want to take.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that like a, like a one day in the future we will face this kind of question?

[Molly Webster]

No, that is like a now today question.

[Jad Abumrad]

The most important new medicine approved this year.

[Molly Webster]

Everyone I talked to pointed me to this new drug called Solvaldi. It's known as Sovaldi by many in the medical community.

[Susan Gubar]

Community are calling the new medication the blockbuster.

[Bruce Mohl]

Sovaldi came on the market last December.

[Molly Webster]

So that's December 2013.

[Bruce Mohl]

That's correct.

[Molly Webster]

This is Bruce, Bruce Mohl.

[Bruce Mohl]

I'm the editor of Commonwealth magazine.

[Molly Webster]

He's written about Sovaldi. And here's the basic story, right? It is a drug that treats hepatitis C, which is caused by a virus.

[Bruce Mohl]

And the disease itself goes to work on your liver. It inflames it, it scars it.

[Molly Webster]

It can cause liver cancer, cirrhosis, it can be fatal. And for the longest time, the treatments that they had just really weren't that great or they just had wretched side effects. But along comes sovaldi, and it's one pill, 12 weeks. You take it with some other antiviral meds, it is a super simple treatment

[Bruce Mohl]

option, and the side effects are very minimal.

[Molly Webster]

Like this. It was like kind of like the savior drug. And so a lot of doctors start to prescribe it.

[Bruce Mohl]

In the first half of 2014, 70,000 people in the country, in the United States were treated, and it had a 95% rate of cure. In other words, holy cow, the virus was eradicated. That's very big.

[Molly Webster]

But in fitting with our story, this

[Bruce Mohl]

drug costs $1,000 a pill.

[Robert Krulwich]

Whoa.

[Molly Webster]

For like one. One pill that I take, one a day. Drop the price. Drop the price. Drop the drug, which, as you can imagine, it angered a lot of people with Hep C. In total, it costs $84,000. And if you think about the fact that in 2014, we know at least 70,000 people got this drug, then you're

[Bruce Mohl]

starting to talk about serious money.

[Molly Webster]

Wait, I want to. I just want to say that I just times doubt. 70,000 times 84,000. And I got something with seven zeros in it. It's five, eight, eight. And then there's seven zeros, which is like $5 billion.

[Bruce Mohl]

Yes.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

The big question is how states will

[Molly Webster]

pay for what could be upwards of. And so we have a situation where states are basically having to ration.

[Matthew Kielty]

Yeah.

[Molly Webster]

Say in Massachusetts, most of the insurers

[Bruce Mohl]

create are requiring some liver damage before you can take the drug.

[Molly Webster]

Similar restrictions are happening in other states. Florida, it's happening in Oregon, Illinois.

[Susan Gubar]

The doctor says the only option may

[Molly Webster]

be to wait until you're even sicker. And then there's Arizona. Out of the entire state, public Insurance only approves 180 people for treatment.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just 180.

[Molly Webster]

Just 180. Now, when I talk to a representative of the company that makes the drug,

[Greg Alten]

Greg Alten, executive vice president for corporate and medical affairs for Gilead Science, he

[Molly Webster]

says you got to Keep in mind this is not a chronic care situation. This is a cure here.

[Greg Alten]

You're actually curing a person of a disease. We're talking about 12 weeks of therapy, period. That's it, and you're done and you've cured somebody.

[Molly Webster]

So he says this is a one time deal. This is like one time, $84,000 and then you're done. Think about all the years you'll live without having an illness. Then you'll see over a 20 year

[Greg Alten]

period, the savings that will accrue to the system will by having a patient cured of hepatitis C. He also said

[Molly Webster]

it's important to understand that every hepatitis C sufferer is not going to hit the system at the same time. So all of the cost is spread out. Right? Which is totally true. But I think there's like this bigger picture here and Bruce points it out too.

[Bruce Mohl]

It's sort of like a precursor of what could come because these companies are developing drugs all the time. What if you could get a drug, but it was very expensive to treat diabetes?

[Molly Webster]

And then you're talking tens of millions

[Bruce Mohl]

of people, an enormous segment of the

[Molly Webster]

population, even if just a fraction of them want a drug that's $1,000 per day, that's practically our entire US budget.

[Bruce Mohl]

What do you do in that case? A drug comes along like that and throws everything out of whack.

[Molly Webster]

This is the part where I really sort of got hooked in, where it's like this. How do you answer this question? Is it that, you know, at a certain point you just draw a line and you say beyond this point we're

[Jad Abumrad]

not paying, but beyond what point exactly?

[Molly Webster]

I mean, that's the hard part. Like how good does a treatment have to be for you to say this is worth the price that it's been set at?

[Leonard Saltz]

I don't think we reject it out of hand.

[Molly Webster]

But I don't think I got into this a bit with Leonard. In the case of Zaltrap, they said, all right, 42 days, that much money, we're not going to do it. But would it have been different if it was 50 days or 100? Is that enough? I'm sure you want to be talking in years, but I guess the question is like, what would be, Is there a magic line for you.

[Leonard Saltz]

If I. This is a. I can't personally determine it for everybody. I wouldn't presume to try. But ultimately as a society, we're going to to have to reach an understanding of what that cut point is because we can't afford not to.

[Molly Webster]

And the Question that sort of bubbles out of this conversation is, what is one more year or one more month or one more day of life worth to us?

[Peter Bach]

Are we willing to pay $1,000 for an extra day of life? Well, what about $100,000 for an extra day of life?

[Leonard Saltz]

You know, people like to say, yeah, so what's the value of a human life? And the answer is, boy, that's a complicated question, but a really important one because nobody thinks it's infinite.

[Molly Webster]

He said that. And I was like, okay, it's not zero and it's not infinite. Is there an answer like in the middle? And so I started looking around. I don't know, I guess I was wondering, has anyone actually thought about this? And so I started looking around and what I realized was that the World Health Organization actually, I mean, I guess they almost have a number, but it's a number per country. They have the recommendation that countries spend. It's going to get gobbledygooky, but just bear with me. The countries spend one to three times the GDP per capita, which is like the gross domestic product per individual.

[Jad Abumrad]

So take the entire fat ball of money that is in a country and divide it per individual, divide it by

[Molly Webster]

the individuals, and then you spend one to three times that on a one more good year of life.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what would that be for us?

[Molly Webster]

So for the US that's about 50 to 150,000.

[Jad Abumrad]

Interesting. And does that have any teeth, that recommendation?

[Molly Webster]

It legally doesn't have any teeth, but it has teeth in the sense that doctors in the US are actually going to start using this WHO number to evaluate medical treatments for cardiology. They said they were going to do this in a paper and it was kind of very quiet, very subtle. But in other countries, this conversation is very loud. Actually, it happens at the government level. They're also passing out surveys where they're asking citizens, what is your limit on how much you want to spend on one more good year of life?

[Hannah]

Have they done that here?

[Molly Webster]

As far as I know, no.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why not?

[Molly Webster]

Because. Because the last time we tried to talk about cost in medicine, it ended up in the whole death panels.

[Hannah]

Death panels, Death panels, or so called death panels thing.

[Molly Webster]

And I don't know, I just wondered right into the mess of it. Hey, Times Square, if I actually tried to go out and ask this question in a very basic way, how would people respond? Excuse me, can I ask you a question? What is a year of life worth? Wow, what a question.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

That's deep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can I think about it?

[Marla Keenan]

That's a tough One.

[Molly Webster]

But I was a real, really surprised at how seriously people took the question.

[Hannah]

Man, what is a year of life worth?

[Molly Webster]

That was the first thing I noticed. Then the next thing was no one could answer the question until I had answered like a million questions of theirs. Am I gonna die tomorrow? Yes. Where do I get that year?

[Jad Abumrad]

Do I get it at the beginning, the middle, or the end?

[Hannah]

How would I spend that year of life?

[Molly Webster]

Good. It would be a good year of life.

[Hannah]

A good year of life, depending.

[Marla Keenan]

Is this like a pie in the

[Yin Sun Chen]

sky kind of answer?

[Molly Webster]

They wanted to know, would they be emotionally happy alone with friends or family? Where did they get the money? Did they borrow the money? Did they have to pay the money back? Were they dying? Was it an emergency? Were other people also trying to get money at the same time? Because then there'd be like a rush on the money in America.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, interesting. Did you actually ever end up getting numbers?

[Molly Webster]

I did get numbers, but they were at least $10,000. $15,000. 13 quarter million, $7 all over the place. Yeah, I would say five bucks. $10 million.

[Latif Nasser]

$44,000.

[Molly Webster]

Interesting. One woman said 10 million.

[Greg Alten]

$10 million for a year.

[Latif Nasser]

It's irresponsible.

[Molly Webster]

Well, you're asking me about my personal choice.

[Hannah]

$10 million, not about a public policy question. Why?

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you have any way of parsing all this?

[Molly Webster]

No, I really, I honestly don't. Like, I think my biggest takeaway was, like, no one punched me, which. Which makes me feel as if people are ready, not ready, but willing to engage in this conversation. But I also realized I kept talking about things and I just wanted to be in the room with patients. Like, I just wanted patients in the room with me because it was like we were all having this conversation that eventually we'll all be patients, I guess, but we were also having this conversation around, like, a group of people that weren't ever present. Like, they're not at conferences or not in research articles. And. And so that was when I started talking to patients.

[Bruce Mohl]

Ah.

[Molly Webster]

Well, I guess. What is 42 days? What does 42 days mean in the sense of, is that something that you'd pay $50,000 for if you were? I mean, of course you would. It's like I almost can't even ask the question, but I don't know.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Well, no, I think it's a good question. I think ethically it would be to the good of patients and doctors to have this conversation. This is Susan, Susan Gubar, writer of the Living with Cancer blog for the New York Times.

[Molly Webster]

Back in 2008, Susan went to the doctor, she hadn't been feeling well for a while. They thought it was some sort of bowel issue. But then the doctor walked into the room and said she had advanced stage ovarian cancer.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed at a late stage and it's basically incurable. It can be handled, it can be managed, it can be kept at bay and for longer periods of time now we hope. But you're given a diagnosis of three to five years.

[Molly Webster]

Wow, that is. You go from having unlimited time in your mind to three to five years in like a doctor's visit.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Yeah, it's a big shock. You sort of enter a zone where you're not quite aware of what you're doing.

[Molly Webster]

That day, the day she was diagnosed, she was told, pack a bag, get in a car and drive to Indianapolis, you need surgery now.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

So I went the next day to Indianapolis and the day after that I had the debulking surgery which takes out the ovaries and the uterus and the fallopian tubes and the spleen and sometimes the cervix and sometimes the appendix and holy shit, sometimes the bowel.

[Molly Webster]

Are you, are you serious?

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Yeah, it's called the mother of all surgeries.

[Molly Webster]

And then just like that, she was doing multiple rounds of chemo.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Chemicals that are used, they destroy all quick growing cells. So for example, you have no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that you know, you also can. I got terrible sores in my mouth. I have no idea why, but I know this happens to other people. But yeah, the other thing is this extreme fatigue.

[Molly Webster]

And Susan, who writes for a living, couldn't even read.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

I would look at a page and think, had I turned a page, chemotherapy, it really is toxic to the spirit, to the heart, to the mind. Just the normal aspects of life feel polluted.

[Molly Webster]

Have you ever had to think about cost?

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

I was never informed of the cost of any drug or any procedure I was given. Which really makes me think about how masked these costs are.

[Molly Webster]

Would you want to be thinking about cost while you're going through it? Or is it better to just say, here are your treatment options. These are statistical outcomes like pick one and then we'll deal with it on the other side.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

I think there's a kind of unspoken agreement among everyone that the insurance company or Medicare is going to pay and if it's the government, that means that our grandchildren are going to end up paying for all of this money. So yes, I guess to answer your question, I think it would be healthier to Know what these things cost? On the other hand, I have to say, as a patient, I was so traumatized, I'm not sure I could have taken that information in. I was thinking about your what it's worth, what's it worth title. And I was thinking that the American individualistic, optimistic response would be, well, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Life is worth it. Whatever it takes. But whatever it takes will not cure my cancer. So I think this question changes when you have incurable cancer. It becomes a different question, which is when is enough enough?

[Molly Webster]

I remember when she said that when is enough enough? I was just.

[Leonard Saltz]

I don't know that we are ready to say. There's one magic line thrown back to

[Molly Webster]

this conversation that I had with Leonard Saltz where he was saying that we

[Leonard Saltz]

have to look at everything in terms of value.

[Molly Webster]

You need to think deeply about the kind of life you want to live. It's not just about how many days. It's about what kind of days.

[Leonard Saltz]

So if you told me that there was something that gave 72 days survival benefit, but it makes people feel nauseous for most of the time, is that worth it?

[Molly Webster]

When we're trying to draw this line as a society, before we figure out what we're willing to pay, we have to think about what we are paying for.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Yeah. I don't think we know what for Susan.

[Molly Webster]

You know, six years ago, she decided that she was gonna get chemotherapy because in part, it would be more time with her daughters.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Yeah.

[Molly Webster]

And suddenly it's worth it.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

Yeah. But I think we're changed by the treatment too.

[Molly Webster]

For now, Susan's cancer is basically under control because she's on this new drug

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

for two years and now a month, and I am counting, I've been alive without a recurrence, without the cancer growing by taking these pills every day. And I take them at home. They're not infused in the hospital through my veins. They're just pills. And it's made the last few years remarkably normal. Like the new normal.

[Molly Webster]

Yeah.

[Susan Gubar (patient)]

But when these drugs stop working, and I've been told they will stop working, I'm not sure I would want to go back to chemotherapy. But I suspect I don't know until I get there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Producer Molly Webster.

[Robert Krulwich]

And now for the thank yous for that piece, we want to thank Stephen hall and we want to mention Susan Gubar's book called Memoir of a Debulked Woman.

[Jad Abumrad]

And thanks also to Dr. Atul Gawande for all his help and his latest

[Robert Krulwich]

book, which is really, I really thought it was wonderful. It's called Me Mortal.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, and thanks also to Nikki Haynes

[Robert Krulwich]

and to Glenn Blumquist.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is supported by Strawberry Me. As a Radiolab listener, chances are you're a curious person who asks how things work and why people do what they do, trying to make sense of the world around you. But what about turning that same curiosity inward, especially when it comes to your work? Because so many people know what it feels like to show up every day, get through the to do list and still wonder things like is this what I really want? Could this be different? Maybe you felt stuck or restless or just quietly ready for something more, but aren't sure what that looks like or how to get there. That's where Strawberry Me comes in. Strawberry connects you with a thoughtful career coach who helps you step back and reflect on what motivates you, what's missing, and what kind of work can actually fit the life you want. Think of it as bringing the same curiosity you have about the world to your own career. Explore your path forward at Strawberry meradiolab and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me. Radiolab. Radiolab is supported by AT&T. Summer is great for many reasons. The best reason our plans we made. Finally making it out of the group chat because there's more time to fit everyone in whatever you've got in store this summer, capturing those memories is a must. And AT&T has your summer essential in the iPhone 17 Pro. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. No awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And AT&T makes sharing those moments with everyone easy because you got to share the pick or it didn't happen, right? Right now at ATT ask how you can get an iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan terms and restrictions. App subject to change. Visit@&T.com iPhone or visit an AT and T store for details.

[WNYC Studios Announcer]

WNYC Studios is supported by WISE Wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world With a Wise account, you can send, spend and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, Get Wise. Download the Wise app today. Terms and conditions apply.

[Molly Webster]

This is Hourglass on this American life.

[Hannah]

One thing we like is a good mystery Sometimes about really big things, things

[Soren Wheeler]

you hear in the news.

[Hannah]

But most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants.

[Doug McCauley]

I don't know.

[Molly Webster]

I've never seen this happen. I've got skirts, I've got shorts. This is true.

[Greg Alten]

This is true.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mysteries of every size. Each week. This American life, wherever you get your podcasts. 3, 2, 1. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

And today, well, we're still on the subject of worth, but this is a totally different take.

[Hannah]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this comes from our producer, Matt Kielty.

[Hannah]

So next, a slightly different story about worth. A story that rather than being about how much we value our own lives, is about how much we value someone else's.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

Right?

[Hannah]

And it starts with BuzzFeed writer Gregory Johnson.

[Jad Abumrad]

So, okay, maybe you should start with what has now become sort of the infamous wedding drone strike. Was that sort of where it started for you?

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

Yes. So this strike happens in a very rugged part of Yemen where there are no paved roads, no electricity, there's no running water. It's Thursday morning, December 12, 2013.

[Hannah]

Early that morning, in a small village,

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

a group of guys, roughly 50 to

[Hannah]

60 people, including a soon to be married man, piled into a bunch of cars and they started driving.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

This is the convoy, the wedding convoy.

[Hannah]

Now, in the lead car of this convoy was this man. His name is Abdullah Mohammed Al Taisi. We spoke to him through an interpreter in Yemen, and Abdullah told me it was his neighbor who was the groom to be married that day. And so they were all driving up to the bride's village. Abdullah said they got there a little before noon, ate lunch, recited wedding poems.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

After lunch, they grabbed the bride and just a few of her bridal attendants,

[Hannah]

a few females, and they start driving back to the groom's village for the actual wedding ceremony. Now, Abdullah said that ever since they left that morning, through lunch, all day long, they heard this

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

humming, this sort of metallic whirring, this metallic thumping overhead.

[Hannah]

No one in the convoy could see it, but they knew what it was. A drone.

[Gregory Johnson]

The same sound hearing all the day.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

It's nothing new for people in rural parts of Yemen by this point. They don't think anything of it.

[Hannah]

It's common to hear those sounds.

[Gregory Johnson]

Yeah, you usually hear there.

[Hannah]

So they keep driving.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

Basically, if you can imagine it, they're sort of winding through these wadis, these desert, mountainous place.

[Gregory Johnson]

The road, he said, is mountainous.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

They're all strung out on this rutted out little dirt track.

[Hannah]

11 cars, single file.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

Finally, they reach this little clearing

[Molly Webster]

up

[Hannah]

near the top of this cliff where they all slowed down and started to bunch together because apparently one of the cars had gotten a flat. Some guys got out, fixed it, got back in their cars. Then right at that moment, the sound shifts somehow.

[Latif Nasser]

And then

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

the missiles start. Four of them in quick succession. The shrapnel is just flying everywhere.

[Hannah]

In a blink, it's over.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

People are trying to figure out what has happened. All the screaming, there's fires that are burning.

[Hannah]

And Abdullah, his car was torn up. He had shrapnel in his face.

[Gregory Johnson]

Two wounds in his face. One in the right hand, left thigh, one in the back.

[Hannah]

And he says that once he saw there was smoke, his first thought was, where's my son?

[Gregory Johnson]

He was looking for his son.

[Jad Abumrad]

His son was there?

[Hannah]

Yeah, a young man who'd been a few cars back from him.

[Gregory Johnson]

My son had the fourth car on convoy, and he was married with two boys and one daughter.

[Hannah]

Abdullah said he could move, so he got out of his car and stumbled back toward the fourth car to find his son.

[Gregory Johnson]

Yeah, he said he found him just next to the car before.

[John Tracy]

Just.

[Gregory Johnson]

He.

[Hannah]

He died?

[Gregory Johnson]

No, he didn't talk to him. Just he looked at him and just passed away.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

So it turns out that there are 12 dead. And typically what happens in Yemen is that as soon as someone is killed, they're buried very, very shortly thereafter. What happens here is something different. The people in the convoy take the body of the dead and they take

[Hannah]

them back to Rada, this big town near where the drone strike occurred.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

There's a video I have, that's what

[Hannah]

you're hearing, where you see some men take these 12 dead bodies, and they

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

line them up in the street on this bright blue tarp, and they sort of wrap them in these cheap blankets. And so there's this huge crowd that just gathers around to stare at these dead bodies who are laid out in. In the street.

[Hannah]

And at a certain point, this very

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

tiny, very leathery old Yemeni who's sort of holding on to the back of a pickup with one arm, he stands over the dead, sort of swaying over the bodies and just lecturing the crowd on what happened. He's just screaming at them. And so you can hear his voice start to go hoarse, and he's screaming, an American drone killed these. It was a massacre. These people are on their way to a wedding. Why did this happen? Why were they killed?

[Jad Abumrad]

Why did they target this convoy?

[Hannah]

Well, according to the US Government, they had received. Received intel that on that Day in this convoy was an Al Qaeda operative named Shauki Al Badhani, who apparently had been planning attacks against the U.S. that's

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

why they took the shot. And in fact, they say that he was wounded in this wedding convoy strike.

[Robert Krulwich]

And do we have any reason to believe that?

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

I have no reason to believe it.

[Hannah]

Greg spent weeks in Yemen, talked to survivors of the drone strike, talked to

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

people who were there, talked to. No one knows this guy.

[Hannah]

And Greg says the guy isn't really a member of either of the tribes that were involved in the wedding. And so to him, it makes no

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

sense that he would be there.

[Hannah]

To him, this was a terrible mistake. But what really got me interested in Greg's reporting, which you can read on buzzfeed.com, highly recommend it, is that he goes really deep into the question of, like, what the US did next. Because the question is, like, what do you do in this case? How do you repair something like this? When you have two totally different cultures with two different traditions, how do you find a way to try to make this right?

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't think. Can you?

[Harold Thibault]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, historically, do soldiers have an obligation to repair the damage they do?

[Hannah]

No, there's no obligation. But what's happened is we've actually created an obligation for ourselves.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hmm. Americans have.

[Hannah]

Yeah, yeah. This has a really long history. A history that's.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean legally.

[Hannah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Legal history, really.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

And there's a great law professor at Yale.

[Jad Abumrad]

What's his name?

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

His last name is Witt. It's John Witt.

[Matthew Kielty]

That's me.

[Hannah]

We ended up tracking down John Witt.

[Matthew Kielty]

Hi, Jed.

[Latif Nasser]

How are you?

[Hannah]

To talk about how the US first started to try to right the wrongs in war.

[Robert Krulwich]

So what is the foundation story of all this?

[Matthew Kielty]

That starts with General Pershing in World War I.

[Hannah]

So 1917, America is called to arm. The great War ramps up. So we start shipping young men, thousands

[Molly Webster]

of them and millions more, to follow,

[Hannah]

over to Europe, specifically France. And in charge of these men was a man named John J.

[Matthew Kielty]

Commander of American forces on the Western Front.

[Hannah]

Stern man, handsome mustache, bit of a maverick.

[Matthew Kielty]

General Pershing's nickname was. Was Blackjack.

[Hannah]

And when he first arrives in France with his troops, General Blackjack Pershing, he's

[Matthew Kielty]

got this problem, which is that he

[Robert Krulwich]

has jeeps built in America, shipped to France, and manned by our men.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

So World War I is the first war in which the US is shipping

[Hannah]

a lot of automobiles, more than 100,000

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

for the soldiers to drive.

[Hannah]

Cars, trucks.

[Matthew Kielty]

Jeeps and jeeps are really great. They get his men from one place

[Hannah]

to another, from Paris to Amiens to, I don't know, Marseille.

[Matthew Kielty]

But they also run into French farmers. Chickens and cows, children, sometimes just the farmers themselves.

[Jad Abumrad]

Were these random collisions or were there no roads?

[Matthew Kielty]

I'm gonna bet there was some of everything. Sometimes it was probably just ordinary car accidents, and sometimes, no doubt, a little French wine was involved.

[Hannah]

So this is Pershing's problem. He's trying to run a war overseas

[Matthew Kielty]

and it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear.

[Hannah]

And so Pershing has an idea which he actually borrows from the Brits, and that is he will use cash money to right our wrongs.

[Matthew Kielty]

And so he goes to Congress and begs for a statute. And Congress obliges really quickly. There's no sign. This is a controversial thing, but it

[Hannah]

was a genuinely new thing because for the first time in the history of war, as far as we could tell, you had a state compensating individuals. Usually it's state to state. Here you have state to individuals. And so the US government starts systematically paying money for the loss of a non American life in war.

[Jad Abumrad]

How much?

[Matthew Kielty]

Geez, I don't know.

[Hannah]

It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation mentioning specific amounts. But whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked.

[Molly Webster]

We're gonna swear our debts to you.

[Hannah]

Hershing wrote in his biography that the swift impromptu settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people. So it seemed to work really well.

[Jad Abumrad]

And is this, I mean, is the idea here that like this is what we would do with the drone strike victims? We talked about that we'd pay them money?

[Hannah]

Well, it's actually, it's a bit trickier than that because the thing that Pershing got in World War I, it came

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

with a catch, and that is that there's a combat exclusion in case you just walked in.

[Hannah]

That's Gregory Johnson. And what he means is that this law, basically what it said is that we'll pay your claims. If it didn't happen on the field of battle and it wasn't a combat situation, if it was combat and it was on the field of battle, then tough luck, that's just war.

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

So if US soldiers were driving to a fight and they ran their car into somebody and they damaged that car or killed that person, those people would not be able to get compensation. Whereas if the US soldiers were driving to a bar and got in an accident, they would be able to get compensation.

[Hannah]

But the problem is, once we get into these counterinsurgency wars, civilians are suddenly

[Matthew Kielty]

in the middle of the fray, charges

[Robert Krulwich]

have been made that troops killed as many as 567South Vietnamese civilians during a sweep.

[Hannah]

This is, in a way, the story of modern warfare.

[Harold Thibault]

Air raid sirens are beginning to sound over Baghdad.

[Latif Nasser]

President Karzai says he's delivering his final warning to the US After a US

[Molly Webster]

airstrike accidentally killed more than a dozen mothers and children.

[Hannah]

By the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting is happening in cities. So there's no difference, really, between the battlefield and where people live. And so the line between what's combat related and what's not combat related, it starts to get blurry.

[Marla Keenan]

And so in 2003 in Iraq, what happened was there were actually people lining up. You know, there were civilian military operations centers. People started lining up outside of these, saying, my family has been harmed. I want help.

[Hannah]

How many people do you remember?

[John Tracy]

If I had to guess, it was, you know, maybe around 80 people or so.

[Hannah]

Oh, gosh, that's a ton of people. Yeah, that's John Tracy. He was a military lawyer in Iraq in 2003. And before him, Marla Keenan.

[Marla Keenan]

I'm managing director of center for Civilians in Conflict.

[Robert Krulwich]

So when they came with a complaint, what sort is it? Like, you ran over my chicken or you knocked out my window?

[Marla Keenan]

No, no, no, no much.

[John Tracy]

I mean, I think of cluster bombs. During the Shock and Awe campaign. One of the types of bombs that we were using or the Air Force was using were what they call cluster munitions.

[Hannah]

Basically, John says Air Force planes would fly over these targets and drop hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little bombs,

[John Tracy]

smaller than a Coke can.

[Hannah]

And a lot of them would land in maybe a parking lot or a field, and they wouldn't explode.

[John Tracy]

So on a number of occasions, you'd have. Mostly it was kids, right? Because the kids would see it and

[Hannah]

they didn't know any better.

[John Tracy]

It would just run over and kick it, and then that's when it would explode.

[Hannah]

That's when it would indent.

[John Tracy]

Right. I had a lot of those, close to a dozen. And so that was a difficult one because, well, it's combat because the Air Force dropped it because they were, you know, bombing the city.

[Hannah]

Right.

[John Tracy]

But at the same time, days, weeks, even months have gone by, and this thing is just sitting in the ground. Couldn't we say it's not combat?

[Hannah]

And this was a real question that John had to ask his boss. And then his boss asked his boss.

[John Tracy]

They eventually sent the question up to the Army Claim Service, and they said,

[Hannah]

no, it's combat, meaning they're not going to pay.

[Marla Keenan]

Basically, like we are in an armed conflict. And this was an unfortunate incident, but an incident that happened during a lawful combat operation and therefore we're sorry. And that's basically it.

[John Tracy]

So I said no to a lot of people.

[Hannah]

And so like in World War I with General Pershing, military officers, they started lobbying their bosses for an expanded system so they could start making more payments. And eventually the military does expand it. In fact, I talked to one of the military's top lawyers, Brigadier General Richard C. Gross.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

I go by Rich. I'm the legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[Hannah]

And he told me that around 2006, paying out these kinds of condolence payments actually became sort of a key part of military strategy.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

Absolutely.

[Hannah]

Even had its own acronym, maaws.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

M A A W S. It's Money as a Weapons System. Which, you know, I'm not sure that title resonates with everybody, but.

[Greg Alten]

Interesting phrase for sure.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

Yeah, exactly. But it's the idea that money can be used to win hearts and minds that help bring the population over.

[Hannah]

And it just got me wondering how much money makes a good weapon?

[Marla Keenan]

Well, I haven't, like the US Military hasn't given me access to a database or anything like that. But through FOIAs and interviews, I've seen different numbers.

[Hannah]

Marla says that in 2006 the ACLU filed a FOIA request and eventually got their hands on hundreds of claims files. And in those files what you see are a bunch of different numbers, but one that comes up again and again.

[Marla Keenan]

$2,500.

[John Tracy]

2,500, by and large.

[Hannah]

Now, someone like John could have paid more, but that meant they'd have to run the claim up the chain of command.

[John Tracy]

Exactly.

[Hannah]

So it was almost like there were these ceilings.

[John Tracy]

2,500 for a life, 1500 for property damage. And then eventually the property damage amount got raised to 2,500 as well. And that didn't make any sense to me that somebody could get so much for a Toyota Corolla, but you were just going to get the same amount for a lost life.

[Hannah]

Like, I can't get over. I mean, 2,500 seems like just such a nominal amount. And the practicality of that money, of like if you were to kill someone who is the breadwinner of a family, that $2,500 would not be able to support this family in any way.

[Marla Keenan]

Right, but we're not actually trying to pay full compensation.

[Molly Webster]

Right.

[Marla Keenan]

Like, we're not trying to say we think if this 20 year old man had lived to be the average age in Afghanistan that he. You know, that it would have been $60,843. Right. Like, that's not the thing.

[Yin Sun Chen]

Do you ever.

[Robert Krulwich]

You know, we had people who were killed here in an attack.

[Molly Webster]

The federal government is one step closer to cutting its first checks to families

[Narrator (possibly Gregory Johnson or another reporter)]

of those killed and injured on September

[Robert Krulwich]

11, and those people have been compensated. The levels of compensation to the New York victims is pretty.

[Latif Nasser]

The range of payments for a death

[Molly Webster]

claim ranged anywhere from $250,000 to just under $7 million.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you notice that?

[Marla Keenan]

I do. I do.

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

But it is to a large degree,

[Hannah]

comparing apples and oranges, that's general gross

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

again, because you're talking about a legal

[Marla Keenan]

system where a country is paying their

[Rich (Brigadier General Richard C. Gross)]

own victims versus condolences in a. In an area where there's no legal obligation to make those payments in the first place.

[Marla Keenan]

So that's a very different type of monetary payment.

[Hannah]

Well, yes and no. Essentially, it's a person's life. And, I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that there's an empathy in the number that you come up with, in the amount that you pay for someone's life.

[Marla Keenan]

I totally get what you're saying. The $2,500. I think it's any amount of money. If I told you 10, would you feel better about it?

[Hannah]

I'd feel a little bit better.

[Molly Webster]

You would?

[Hannah]

I think so. 10,000.

[Marla Keenan]

What does it get you, though, in the end? $10,000 doesn't buy anything more back than what you lost.

[Hannah]

I don't know what $10,000 gets you exactly in Afghanistan, but my assumption is that it gets you a lot more than 2,500.

[Marla Keenan]

But does that really help you? Is that really what you want?

[Robert Krulwich]

Is the money unimportant to you? Really? It sounds like the money's really.

[Marla Keenan]

I'm not a victim, so I don't know that I can answer that to me if it happened.

[Hannah]

And at this point, Marla told us a story about how before she got into this line of work, I had

[Marla Keenan]

several friends who were journalists.

[Hannah]

One of those friends was a man named Chris Hondros.

[Marla Keenan]

Yeah, He's a photojournalist. He was a photojournalist.

[Hannah]

And back in 2011, Chris was on assignment in Libya moving with a rebel group when they were fired upon. And Chris was killed.

[Marla Keenan]

Yeah.

[Hannah]

And Marla says when she found out

[Marla Keenan]

that happened, I wanted someone to explain to me why that happened. I mean,

[Latif Nasser]

sorry.

[Marla Keenan]

I just wanted someone to explain. I didn't, you know, like, I knew his family wasn't going to get any money. I knew that these guys that shot a rocket propeller grenade at him weren't going to care. No one was going to explain. But I wanted that.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the money then becomes an occasion for you to say, like, not just I'm sorry, but here's what happened. It's the here's what happened part.

[Marla Keenan]

I think it's the token that's given with the apology and with the explanation.

[Robert Krulwich]

But it's the apology and the explanation that matter to you.

[Marla Keenan]

Yeah, that's why we call it amends, making amends.

[Matthew Kielty]

One of the things that is true of money damages generally is there are desperate effort to find some common language between the party paying and the victim, some Esperanto for communicating the meaning of what's happened in a language that the other side knows matters.

[Hannah]

That's how John Witt puts it.

[Matthew Kielty]

Because we see it everywhere we look. We see not just apologies, sometimes not apologies at all, but we see the almighty dollar, which is both distressing and also we know it's meaningful.

[Hannah]

But the problem is, in order for that Esperanto to work, it has to say the same meaning to both sides, which for John Tracy wasn't really about the money at all, or not just about the money. It was as much about the envelope that the money was in or that there was a real person there to hand it to them.

[John Tracy]

I wasn't the one who raided their house. I wasn't the one who. Who killed their daughter. But most of them, they just wanted to look at somebody who's in a uniform and say, you really messed with my life.

[Hannah]

And that opportunity is exactly what Abdullah Altaisi will never get. His son was killed by a drone he never saw, operated by a man he'll never meet on behalf of a country that still doesn't emit. It was a mistake. And so the money he got, Which in the end he says was the equivalent of US$30,000, way more than anyone got in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, all he can do without anything else to go on is just compare amounts.

[Gregory Johnson]

Oh, he can accept that only if, if, if, if he gets, you know, the, like, the payment equal to those, you know, to, like in America. How, how you can persuade someone who, who lost his son, for example, killed

[Hannah]

if the payment was. If the payment was equal.

[Jad Abumrad]

Producer Matthew Kilty.

[Robert Krulwich]

Big thanks to Gregory Johnson, writer at large for buzzfeed, who started us off on this adventure when he brought us the initial story.

[Jad Abumrad]

And also thanks to buzzfeed editor Steve

[Robert Krulwich]

Kandel and to Shayib Al Masawa for helping Matt organize that interview in Yemen when the country's going through an awful lot of tumult and he was able to get interviews that we didn't think he could get.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to him. Coming up, that's next.

[Radiolab Promo Announcer]

Hi Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. May is mental Health Awareness Month and as someone who reports on mental health, who likes talking to people about their mental health and what they look to in science, in the natural world, in faith, in friendship, wherever it may be to help guide them through the rough patches of life, I just wanted to take a moment to say what seems to help people turn corners, find relief, get out of ruts, and even flourish is having someone with you. As much as we can feel private about our mental health struggles, you do not have to go it alone. So this May, why not treat your mental health to a buddy? And who better to talk to than a fully licensed mental health therapist? With over 30,000 therapists available, BetterHelp has someone you can talk to available at pretty much any time that's convenient for you at the push of a button. And because finding the help you need often depends on the therapist client vibe, rest assured, with BetterHelp you can switch providers at any time. Remember truly your mental health matters and you don't have to go it alone. Find the support you need anytime with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is supported by Addio, the AI CRM for modern businesses. Close deals twice as fast, prep for calls in minutes, effortlessly spin up handoff briefs that used to take hours. Get pipeline intelligence without building a single dashboard. How Ask Adeo Addio is the AI CRM that keeps teams ahead of the pack. It connects to your email, calendar, calls, product and billing data and more, creating a complete picture of your entire business. While others are wading through multiple tools to find information, teams are using Adeo to surface insights and get answers on their go to market data instantly. Powered by Universal Context, Addio's Intelligence layer, Addio searches, updates and creates across your data to accelerate your workflow. Ask more from your CRM Ask Addio Try Addio for free by going to addio.com Radiolab that's a T T I O.com Radiolab Radiolab is supported by Smalls

[WNYC Studios Announcer]

Smalls Fresh Cat Food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients you'd find in your fridge and and it's delivered right to your door. Cats are oblique carnivores who need lots of real meat to stay healthy. But most cat foods out there use meat by products and cut their food with cheap grains, fillers and artificial ingredients. Basically stuff that isn't great for your cat. Smalls recipes are over 80% animal protein, and they never use fillers or artificial ingredients. Their food is so healthy that 88% of cat parents say that after feeding Smalls, they notice that their cat has better digestion, is softer and shinier, and has more energy to play. If you want to invest in your cat's health, Smalls is giving you 60% off your cat's first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you go to smalls.com Radiolab that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com Radiolab Radiolab is supported

[Latif Nasser]

by the Persistence Lab, a podcast from AbbVie. The show explores what happens when science meets real human resilience. Each episode highlights a challenge in medicine or healthcare, and the people who refuse to give up hear from scientists, experts, and patients as they share important moments and motivations that inspire progress and contribute to the future of care. If you're curious about what's really happening behind the scenes in health and science, search the Persistence Lab wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Soren Wheeler]

Okay, now it's my left ear. Hello, Soren. How are you?

[Gregory Johnson]

Good.

[Hannah]

How are you doing?

[Soren Wheeler]

I'm good.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwitz.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. And so far we've been talking about the value of our lives, and then

[Robert Krulwich]

the value of other people's lives.

[Jad Abumrad]

Next up, the value of

[Leonard Saltz]

everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

All of it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

And by everything, of course, we mean

[Soren Wheeler]

the value of nature.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Carl Zimmer, science writer, regular blower of minds.

[Soren Wheeler]

So we think of ecosystems as just kind of sitting there, but actually they're doing things. If they weren't doing them for us, we would have to pay to do them artificially. For example, cotton farms in South Texas. So the farmers are doing their thing, like this guy James Parker, planting their cotton. They're collecting it.

[James Parker]

I farmed about, I don't know, usually 5 to 6, 700 acres of cotton. So say 2,000 bales.

[Soren Wheeler]

They're doing what farmers do.

[James Parker]

I spend a lot of time on a tractor, and you have to check your water every morning, every evening.

[Soren Wheeler]

Meanwhile, they have all this extra help in the air.

[James Parker]

Yes, they have bats how many bats are out there? You really don't know?

[Soren Wheeler]

Flying all the bats eat the equivalent of two thirds of their own weight in insects every night.

[Gregory Johnson]

Wow.

[James Parker]

They eat all night long.

[Robert Krulwich]

All kind of bugs, a whole bunch

[Soren Wheeler]

of pests that would otherwise be eating the cotton.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, a few years ago, a guy

[James Parker]

named John Westfall did a calculation just

[Robert Krulwich]

to see how this arrangement was working out.

[James Parker]

He came out to my farm and did a. Did a study. He had some college girls that worked for him, and those girls were out there all hours of the night listening to what the bats were saying.

[Soren Wheeler]

And each year, the farmers, collectively, they make about four or five million dollars off of these farms.

[Robert Krulwich]

The question was, how much of this was because of the bats? You know, bats are natural pesticides.

[James Parker]

You know, the more they're eating, the less I gotta spray.

[Robert Krulwich]

And here's what the scientists figured out.

[Soren Wheeler]

Out of four to $5 million, it was around $700,000 that you could ascribe to the bats.

[James Parker]

It's just beautiful.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. I mean, it does make me think that if you're those farmers, you should be compensating the bets somehow.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, yeah, it does give you a glimpse at the kind of scale of value, economic value, that nature has, that we generally just totally ignore.

[Jad Abumrad]

But we talked to a guy who didn't ignore it.

[Greg Alten]

My name is Robert Costanza.

[Robert Krulwich]

In fact, he took this way of thinking to the absolute. Yes.

[Greg Alten]

So the question was, what's the value of all of these ecosystem services globally,

[Soren Wheeler]

all the services on Earth?

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, it's bugs eating leaves, worms turning the soil, beetles chewing tree stumps,

[Robert Krulwich]

coral reefs, protecting cities during storms, everything.

[Greg Alten]

We tried to synthesize all of the studies that had been done around the

[Jad Abumrad]

country and the world like that bat study, except they didn't just look at cotton farms.

[Hannah]

They looked at tropical forests, rivers and

[Soren Wheeler]

lakes, coral reefs, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, the ocean woodlands, temperate forests.

[Greg Alten]

You know, it goes on and on.

[Hannah]

Grasslands.

[Jad Abumrad]

This must be some Excel spreadsheet.

[Soren Wheeler]

It's kind of the Excel spreadsheet from hell.

[Greg Alten]

It can get tricky.

[Robert Krulwich]

So Costanza and his colleagues took all these different studies, summed them together, did a whole bunch of math, and came

[Molly Webster]

up with a number which, in Today's

[Soren Wheeler]

dollars is $142.7 trillion per year of services. That's more than all of the gross national products of the world. That's how valuable the services of nature are.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Let me ask you, like, I get. I get the way this would work with a bat. Like, the bat's eating the bugs but, like, how do you do it with like, with like a, like a field or something? Like, do you just walk through and you're like, yeah, that's 20 bucks of services. That's 50. Like, how do you even figure out what the services are?

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, they came up with a list. So the list kind of depends on the ecosystem you're talking about because different ecosystems provide different services. For example, a salt marsh.

[Matthew Kielty]

And we are in the water now.

[Harold Thibault]

Yes, we're in the water.

[Jad Abumrad]

What is a salt marsh? Is it like the Florida wetlands, but salty? I suddenly don't know what a salt marsh is.

[Soren Wheeler]

Salt margin salt marshes are wetlands that are on the coast.

[Jad Abumrad]

Got it.

[Harold Thibault]

Yep. We're standing in about a foot of water here. We're quickly approaching high tide.

[Robert Krulwich]

We sent one of our producer, Simon Adler, to a nearby salt marsh, partially to Hazen.

[Harold Thibault]

Your boots are much more waterproof, but

[Robert Krulwich]

really to talk to this guy.

[Harold Thibault]

My name is Adam Welchel, and I'm the director of science for the Nature Conservancy here in Connecticut.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Adam gave Simon a kind of

[Harold Thibault]

inventory of some of the services provided by coastal salt marshes. It's a stream of goods and services that have been provided over time.

[Soren Wheeler]

One of the things it does is it takes water that's coming in from inland and it's laden with all sorts of pollutants, all sorts of bad stuff.

[Jad Abumrad]

The salt marsh will trap that water so that the pollutants settle, and then very often, the marsh grass will suck

[Soren Wheeler]

up that water into the roots and clean it up.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you could ask very simply, how

[Soren Wheeler]

much would you have to spend to keep your water that clean?

[Harold Thibault]

Well, there is one other study.

[Jad Abumrad]

Adam Welshall said that scientists in New England have already figured that out.

[Harold Thibault]

For flood control, water supply protection, pollution control. It's roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year.

[Robert Krulwich]

Then you got to add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plates.

[Harold Thibault]

$338 annually per acre.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then there are the bird watchers that buy lattes and to support the local

[Harold Thibault]

economy, $490 per hectare.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then there's habitat provisioning.

[Robert Krulwich]

The list goes on and on and on and on.

[Soren Wheeler]

You do get kind of obsessed with it. You start like, you start becoming an accountant and writing down numbers just furiously. And it gets you to think about nature in a different way than you had before.

[Tim Howard]

There's this galling element, though, or this aspect like when I first came across the.

[Jad Abumrad]

At this point, our producer, Tim Howard jumped into the interview and you'll also hear our producer, Soren Wheeler in just a second.

[Tim Howard]

I do feel like, in an example, like the salt marsh, which cleans water, that's all reliant on people being there that need the water. So if you didn't have people there, does that salt marsh cease to have any value?

[Jad Abumrad]

But, Tim, haven't you ever had a conversation with somebody who just doesn't get, like. If you make the aesthetic argument, which is that nature should be. Should be preserved for its own sake, there's a whole category of humanity that just doesn't respond to that argument. This becomes a way to talk across the aisle.

[Tim Howard]

But it does still feel like it demotes something of infinite value to something of a Pidley value.

[Doug McCauley]

It can't really be infinite value.

[Tim Howard]

I mean, what's like a mother's love? You don't think your mother's love is priceless?

[Soren Wheeler]

I mean, you know, okay, I totally accept that there is this sort of priceless aspect of nature. But if you are in the government in a very poor country, you have some tough choices to make if somebody comes to you and says, okay, you've got these lovely mangroves. Now, it turns out that this sort of setting where the mangroves are is the perfect place for shrimp aquaculture, because

[Jad Abumrad]

shrimp farms need lots of seawater, so it makes sense to put them by the sea.

[Soren Wheeler]

We're going to put in these farms, we're going to grow shrimp. You are going to get millions and millions of dollars in tax revenue. If you're thinking about the welfare of all the people in your country, many of whom are starving, that might be a really powerful argument. Now, into that kind of a discussion, you can bring in the fact that these mangroves are sitting there very quietly doing all sorts of incredibly valuable things. In fact, they've done these kind of calculations. And in some cases, the services that manGroves provide are four times more valuable than what you could get out with shrimp. So it's stupid. It's just stupid in a very basic sense to wantonly replace lots of mangroves with shrimp aquaculture.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that a hypothetical situation? No, that's a conversation you have.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

No, that's what we're asked.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Glenn Marie Lang. She's an environmental economist for the World bank. And she says very often she finds herself in exactly this kind of conversation.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

Particularly, you know, I work for the World bank, so our primary clients are government, Philippines, Vietnam. And when you're talking to a minister of finance and saying, you know what you.

[Jad Abumrad]

I know jobs are jobs, but you need those marshes. They have value.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

They'll say, well, yeah, that's true, but that means I'm going to have to reduce the money that I put into the education budget. So you've got to really make a strong argument about the benefits. That's really where the rubber hits the road.

[Doug McCauley]

Well, I mean, that's it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here's the counter argument. It comes from Doug McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

[Doug McCauley]

The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money, and then we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you do in a situation, he says, where, say, a bunch of rivers are running dry and they're depreciating in value?

[Doug McCauley]

You know, by the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets. That makes me feel really uncomfortable, he

[Robert Krulwich]

says, Just kind of a weird way to think about nature.

[Doug McCauley]

We had a proposal here in the state of California to make gay marriage legal. And economists had a look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California. Well, it's good to know that. I appreciate having that information in front of me. However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation. And I would say that when many legislators, legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state. They're thinking about a different set of values.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

On the other hand, I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these services, basically, they don't get counted.

[Jad Abumrad]

They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenn Marie language. And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.

[Greg Alten]

The parable of the Bees.

[Robert Krulwich]

We heard this first from writer J.B. macKinnon, who says the story begins in

[Greg Alten]

Mao county in central China.

[Robert Krulwich]

Rural area, fairly remote, lush green mountains filled with apple orchards.

[Greg Alten]

And apple orcharding was the main business.

[Robert Krulwich]

And according to JB in the 1990s,

[Greg Alten]

the wild bees of MAU county slowly started to disappear. There was a few different reasons given for that. It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in. The heavy honey Harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

[Robert Krulwich]

But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one, because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples. So they started spraying pesticide.

[Greg Alten]

Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others. End result is the bees stopped buzzing in MAU county, which if you are

[Robert Krulwich]

an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

[Greg Alten]

As bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar, they are, they're dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse. So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then you don't get fertile flowers to turn into fruit.

[Robert Krulwich]

And obviously if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what do you do?

[Greg Alten]

You're an apple farmer and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers. And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand.

[Harold Thibault]

In Mandarin Chinese we say, so basically that means manual pollination.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Harold Thibault.

[Harold Thibault]

I'm a correspondent in China for the French newspaper Le Monde.

[Robert Krulwich]

A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao county. So he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car.

[Harold Thibault]

We drive for like five or six hours until we reach this village, Nanshin, tiny little village, like only a few houses. And then we took a small road between the fields and we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the trees, like on the apple trees,

[Greg Alten]

straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches. Men and women that I've seen in photos.

[Robert Krulwich]

In any case, Harold and his friend took pictures. And if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding a little

[Greg Alten]

brush, this little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

[Robert Krulwich]

And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen. And then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen. They dip their brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again and they dip the brush back in again and they paint again, and then they dip again and they

[Greg Alten]

paint to make sure that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're talking hundreds and hundreds of flowers per tree.

[Harold Thibault]

It was very strange to see Humans doing the job of the bees.

[Jad Abumrad]

God, what a pain in the ass. That sounds like.

[Greg Alten]

Yeah, the image of this. Of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world through environmental circles. And the message that it seemed to send was that this is what happens if you lose biodiversity. You end up standing in the trees doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing.

[Robert Krulwich]

For free.

[Latif Nasser]

For free.

[Yin Sun Chen]

Those people are just like human bees.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then this guy enters the story. This is Yin Sun Chen.

[Yin Sun Chen]

Yeah, human bees.

[Jad Abumrad]

Four years ago, he traveled to Mao county to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County. But what he discovered, weirdly, was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.

[Yin Sun Chen]

More production? More production. This can be confirmed. There are more production for hemp pollination. Apple tree than bee pollination apple tree. Humans are more efficient.

[Soren Wheeler]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

You mean the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, a lot better.

[Greg Alten]

Fruit production went up 30%.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what the farmers told Yin Sun

[Yin Sun Chen]

Chen, which is kind of amazing. The only word I remember, amazing, because I think hemp pollination can pollinate more thoroughly. They can pollinate every flower, and bees

[Jad Abumrad]

don't pollinate every flower.

[Greg Alten]

Bees are a little bit, you know, they're a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating. You're so polite. They don't like it if it's cold, they don't like it if it's damp. They don't like it if it's windy.

[Robert Krulwich]

In all those cases, bees often decide to stay indoors and just take the day off.

[Greg Alten]

But you send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom, and they're gonna do it. And there is the additional benefit of the people that you paid. They'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries. They'd spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.

[Jad Abumrad]

So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are. You know, this whole parable of biodiversity.

[Robert Krulwich]

It turns out maybe the lesson's just the opposite. That actually we don't need bees, and maybe we never did.

[Greg Alten]

If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places, or that we might even do better to take care of those processes ourselves.

[Harold Thibault]

Right, so let me find my notes about the wages. Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

But there's one more chapter to the story. Harold Thabeau told us that when he Visited Nanchen.

[Harold Thibault]

I talked with one farmer, his name is Zeng Zegao, he's 38. And he said in his opinion the hand pollination might disappear in a few years.

[Robert Krulwich]

Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.

[Harold Thibault]

The wages are getting so high for the workers that the farmers have to employ to help them. Basically it's not efficient economically to do the end pollination anymore. That's what a lot of farmers say.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now they're likely thinking, damn, we need those bees back.

[Harold Thibault]

Right? Yeah. Problem is there are no bees in those villages anymore.

[Robert Krulwich]

One farmer told Harold, beekeepers in other parts of China aren't going to bring their bees to this area because they worry about the pesticides that the farmers have used. And as for when wild bees might

[Harold Thibault]

come back, well, for this we have no idea. It's very hard to make a prediction. If you ask the farmers, they're like,

[Hannah]

I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here's where that story leaves me. It leaves me thinking that economics is just not a good way to go. Putting a value, even a precise and thoughtful value on a bee or on a pound of pesticide. You do it and you think you're smart, but then the value changes. The bees go from being worth a lot to being worth nothing to being worth everything, all within a few years. This is what markets do. They swing back forth and we pretend that we can predict, but we never can. So you can't put a value on because you're always going to be wrong. Is a.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, no, no, I want to argue the other side for a second. Nowhere in this story did someone walk into the middle of the proceedings and say, you know what? The bees do have value. Here's the number. In fact, you know what Carl, when we were talking to him told us?

[Soren Wheeler]

You know, there have been estimates that the value of the pollination that comes from wild bees is $190 billion.

[Jad Abumrad]

So that's globally.

[Hannah]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

But still there was nobody in the room giving that kind of number. So the bees were inherently valued at zero.

[Robert Krulwich]

But remember, bees are valued at zero only until humans get valued more than bees go down, bees go up. You have to have a lot of numbers in your head.

[Jad Abumrad]

But here's what I like about this idea is that when you put a number on a bee or a bat or a marsh, it's like an attempt to force a kind of long term thinking. You can't just say don't do that. I mean that's the thing that like conservationists say, don't don't, don't. But if you say, don't do that, because here's the value, here's the loss. Yeah, here's the loss, well, then that actually gives the whole precautionary. Don't thing some teeth.

[Robert Krulwich]

Except for this, that if you go business y on nature and you're wrong, there are irreversibilities. That's how environmental economist Glen Marie Lang puts it.

[Glenn Marie Lang]

This is one of the differences between nature, ecosystems and what we produce. You smash your car, hey, someone can build a new one. If you lose the bees, many instances, you cannot bring them back.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the question we got to is, is there another way to think about the value of nature? I mean, a way that's not economic and therefore shortsighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty, because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

[Greg Alten]

The best I was able to do

[Robert Krulwich]

thinking about this writer J.B. macKinnon again

[Greg Alten]

was when it struck me that in a way, all of this diversity that's out there, all this biological diversity, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own. That we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we as humans are able to draw. And that we, when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves. In a sense, we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to dream.

[Robert Krulwich]

JB McKinnon's book is called the Once and Future World. He's written many, but this one is my fave.

[Jad Abumrad]

Deep thanks to Carl Zimmer, who's reporting in the New York Times on this topic is really what got us launched into this whole thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

And what got us through this whole thing is Simon Adler, whose production assistance was invaluable.

[Jad Abumrad]

That was him freezing his ass off in the marsh.

[Robert Krulwich]

I talk so long he nearly died. His toes fell off, I think. Anyway, thank you, Simon.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thank you, Simon. And thank you guys for listening. I'm Jad Abumra.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Grillich.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll see you next time.

[Gabby Santos]

Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Director. Our managing editors, Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of Sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez Sindhu, Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Margauker, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitce, Arian Wax, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Semay.

[Marla Keenan]

Hi, I'm Aubrey calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolabs science programming is provided by the Simons foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[WNYC Studios Announcer]

WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com at

[Susan Gubar]

Nature's Bounty, the belief is simple. You already have a brilliant body. Supplements just help support your journey. For over 50 years, nature's bounty has offered vitamins and supplements to help you eat, sleep, thrive, repeat from magnesium glycinate for heart and muscle support to hair growth capsules for fuller, thicker hair and probiotics. With 20 billion live cultures for digestion. Nature's Bounty it's in your nature to thrive. Learn [e-mail] these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.