Stayin' Alive

Summary

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Radiolab – “Stayin’ Alive”

Episode Date: June 2, 2009
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich

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Episode Overview

In “Stayin’ Alive”, Radiolab takes a characteristically inventive look at the one thing no one can avoid: death. Through four distinct but interwoven stories, the episode explores big questions about the line between life and death, whether our essence or information can survive, the possibility of reviving what’s lost, and a real-world lesson in staying alive—via CPR set to the Bee Gees’ disco classic.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Boundary Between Life and Death

[03:09 – 05:51]

• Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad bring in George Church (Harvard geneticist) to probe whether death is truly absolute.
• Church argues that death may not be a sharp threshold—a “point of no return”—but a continuum, especially as technology advances:
  • “Depending on the probability of a doctor coming into the room… and the probability of more advanced technology being able to reverse all kinds of pathological damage, there's a value to saying that there is a continuum between life and death.” (George Church, 04:12)
  • Church speculates about the “information” perspective: if you could record the position of every atom in a person, you could theoretically reconstruct them, even after total destruction.
  • “The main thing that is retained through all this is the information.” (George Church, 05:49)
• Memorable exchange:
  • Robert: “Wait, wait. At some point… you will be dead.”
  • Church: “Unmistakably over with current technology, but not necessarily with future technology.” (04:32)

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2. Becoming Part of the Ecosystem

[06:14 – 10:10]

• The episode shifts tone with a story from Bernd Heinrich (biologist, University of Vermont). He recounts being asked by a dying student, Bill, to be buried in the wild—a nod to Edward Abbey’s famous “abbey burial,” in tune with nature.
• Heinrich articulates a different comfort with death:
  • “A casket would be… an unacceptable cage for otherwise free and ever-recycling molecules.” (08:37)
  • He finds the idea of decomposing and being reabsorbed into the web of life “comforting” rather than “frightening”:
    • “To be part of the ecosystem, to be composed into grass, to be composed into ravens, to be composed into flowers and trees… that's a comforting thought to me.” (09:10)
• Hosts reflect on this vision of death as “release.” Jad raises the counterpoint: for all the beauty of physical transformation, the person—“the union that was here”—is gone, leaving a “vacancy.” (10:07)

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3. Information Never Truly Dies?

[10:10 – 13:19]

• Jad introduces the concept of lost languages, referencing David Eagleman (neuroscientist). Every 14 days, a language is lost forever; with it, unique collections of ideas die.
• Eagleman shares a stunning (if speculative) proposal: What if conversations during ancient pottery-making were, by micro-vibrations, unintentionally etched onto the surface—making the pottery, in effect, a primordial record?
  • “If you could play it back from these pieces of Roman pottery, you could actually hear the people in the room talking in Latin.” (12:14)
  • Though unlikely, the thought experiment illustrates our deepening ability, through technology, to revive what’s believed irretrievable.
  • “We're constantly coming up with new technologies where then we can retrieve things that we once thought were dead.” (12:34)

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4. An Ode to “Persisters”: How to Stay Alive (with CPR)

[13:38 – 16:53]

• Producer Ellen Horn visits a CPR training class in Manhattan, led by Alison Inaba, pediatric emergency physician.
• Correct CPR tempo is crucial, but students struggle to internalize “100 beats per minute.” Inaba’s innovative teaching tip: anchor the tempo to a pop song.
  • “I thought, find a song, a popular song that had a beat of approximately 100 beats per minute.” (15:22)
• The perfect track? The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.”
  • “The song he came up with… Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees.” (15:40)
• The tip caught fire, spreading to CPR classes worldwide.
  • Further, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” also at 100 bpm, is considered—though with a darkly comic edge:
    • Jad: “Oh, that's so wrong.” (16:35)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Nature of Death

• “I think there’s a continuum between non-living and living. … There will be a certain point in which you are unmistakably over with current technology, but not necessarily with future technology.”
  — George Church, [04:29–04:32]

On Returning to Nature

• “To be part of the ecosystem, to be composed into grass, to be composed into ravens, to be composed into flowers and trees. You know, that's a comforting thought to me.”
  — Bernd Heinrich, [09:10]

On Lost Languages & Information Retrieval

• “We're constantly coming up with new technologies where then we can retrieve things that we once thought were dead.”
  — David Eagleman, [12:34]

On CPR & Staying Alive

• “The song he came up with... Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees.”
  — Alison Inaba, [15:40]
• “Another one bites the dust.”
  — Alison Inaba (suggested as a song for CPR), [16:32]

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Key Timestamps

• 03:09 — Introduction to death continuum with George Church
• 06:14 — Bernd Heinrich on ecological burial and returning to nature
• 10:10 — Jad & Eagleman on lost languages and information persistence
• 13:49 — CPR class scene: teaching the right tempo with “Stayin’ Alive”
• 16:32 — “Another One Bites the Dust” joke in CPR class

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Episode Tone and Style

The episode is lively, thought-provoking, and gently humorous, matching Radiolab’s signature blend of curiosity and sound-rich storytelling. The hosts toggle between philosophical speculation and earthy practicality, with warmth, gentle irreverence, and deeply human curiosity grounding even their wildest thought experiments.

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Summary

“Stayin’ Alive” investigates the permeability of the boundary between life and death—from the standpoint of science, ecology, culture, and practical medicine. The episode’s stories—ranging from cryonics fantasies, through ecological burial wishes, to CPR set to disco—underscore how humans both fear and yearn to transcend death, whether through preservation, transformation, or revival. The final note, tying staying alive to the beat of a Bee Gees track, wryly grounds the cosmic in the everyday: sometimes, saving a life is a matter of keeping the right rhythm, one that listeners might just carry with them for the rest of their lives.

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Transcript

[Robert Krulwich]

Jegarunas fiestas at the Home Depot yeso.

[George Church]

Significa ahros de Black Friday, enramientas de.

[Robert Krulwich]

Potencia y alhambricas oy mismo al compra unqui de bateria selectionado de el guna marca te lleba suna raminta selecionada gratis que mejora partos the Black Friday and the Home Depot limited.

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[Alex Honnold]

Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes, and now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon Forest Guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Christopher Kimball]

Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Milk Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am. We're the number one most downloaded food podcast in America, you know. Milk Street Radio travels the world in search of the very best food stories. You'll hear about smuggling eels on the black market, the secret intelligence of plants, and insider tips to eating in Paris. And every week, listeners call in with their toughest culinary mysteries. Discover a world of food stories by searching your podcast app for Milk Street Radio.

[Jad Abumrad]

Listening To Radiolab, the podcast from WNYC and npr. Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krelwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, the podcast. And today on our podcast, we have four little stops we're gonna make, all centered around that thing, which none of us can avoid, that's coming for us all. I'm talking, of course, about the big.

[Robert Krulwich]

D. Well, we all know we're going to die, except some of our science friends. Remember when we were at Harvard and we were talking to George Church?

[George Church]

George Church, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

[Robert Krulwich]

We were doing a show about bioengineering.

[George Church]

So here's an example where we might grow a large batch of cells in a fermenter.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. George Church was the guy who was trying to use little bacteria to make gasoline.

[George Church]

A couple of liters.

[Robert Krulwich]

He is manipulating life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Robert Krulwich]

He also flirts around with the idea of eliminating the concept of death.

[George Church]

I think. I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non living. I think there's a continuum between non living and living. And you can create all sorts of things.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, wait. At some point, if I were to shoot you in the head and you were to fall on the floor with a hole in your head and bleed, and I have no nurse or no doctor help you, at some point your state will have changed fundamentally. You'll stop breathing and you'll be over.

[George Church]

But I won't necess.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, you will be dead.

[George Church]

I'm saying that depending on the probability of a doctor coming into the room and fixing me and the probability of. Of more advanced technology and being able to reverse all kinds of pathological damage, There's a value to saying that there is a continuum between life and death.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'll give you the continuum. But I'm also saying there will be a certain point in which you are.

[George Church]

Unmistakably over with current technology, but not necessarily with future technology. And there may be.

[Robert Krulwich]

And you're saying that it is possible that you can never be totally dead, that that might be a reversible state at some point?

[George Church]

Well, if we recorded the position of all my atoms and we could recreate the position of all those atoms, you could completely burn me into atoms and then reassemble. And isn't there. Isn't it the end, I'm alive again?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes. I suppose in the conceptual. If you get to be really, really, really clever, I guess you could reverse everything, but maybe we could never get that clever. Or do you think that.

[George Church]

I mean, I think it's going to boil down to cost the idea of death implies that there is a sharp point at which you. A point of no return. And I'm saying this gets harder and harder and harder.

[Robert Krulwich]

But not impossible.

[George Church]

And I don't see that as particularly impossible. I mean, if you've recorded the state of the living thing before it starts going into this impossible decay. You just start from scratch and you build it from scratch. Nothing is really completely lost. Nothing is completely gained. The main thing that is retained through all this is the information.

[Robert Krulwich]

And George Church thinks that being alive is having all that information. So, Jed, if I knew where all your atoms are right now. You could always come back. That's his view. Oh, God, come back.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a terrible thought for you, isn't it?

[Robert Krulwich]

For my taste. There's a much more pleasant way to think about it. What's that? The other way to think about it is to think like Bernd Hendrick, a professor at the University of Vermont. Who got a curious letter and a wonderful letter, I think, from a student of his named Bill.

[Bernd Heinrich]

He was a grad student in entomology at UC Berkeley when I was teaching there. And he came out and visited at the camp in Maine.

[Robert Krulwich]

Byrne, you see, has a cabin in the western part of Maine. Up on top of a mountain. It's actually very beautiful. Set in the woods, a spruce and pine. Bill, the grad student, did spend some time there. And then he moved back to Southern California. And a few years passed. And then this letter arrived. Did you have any sense that there was anything wrong before you got the letter, or was this out of the blue?

[Bernd Heinrich]

No, no, I had no sense whatsoever. No, he was hale and hearty. And then I got that letter.

[Robert Krulwich]

So here's how the letter went. It begins, yo burnt. I have been diagnosed with a severe illness. And I'm trying to get my final disposition arranged. In case I drop sooner than I hoped. I want an abbey burial. This phrase, abbey burial, refers to a guy named Edward Abbey. Who was a very, very famous ecologist. And who was brought into the desert by his best friends in a sleeping bag right after he died and just put in the ground. No embalming, no coffin lightly covered with sand. And that's where they left him. That is what Bill wanted to have happened. Anyhow, the upshot is he wrote, one of the options is burial on private property. What are your thoughts on having an old friend as a permanent resident at the camp? Signed Bill. In other words, Bill wanted to be laid out on the ground. Not even under the ground. At Berndt's place in Maine.

[Bernd Heinrich]

I wrote him, I think. I don't think I would want to have him laid out in front of my camp in Maine. I think that's. Although, you know, if it was a wilderness where, you know, people are not going to be walking around, then, you know, I would think more favorably of it. I think right now, I don't think we want to have carcasses lying around in the woods. You know, I definitely don't think that.

[Robert Krulwich]

But he did write Bill this. He wrote, I read you loud and clear. When it's my turn, I, too, want no less for myself. A casket would be for you, as it was for Edward Abbey, an unacceptable cage for otherwise free and ever recycling molecules that would soon become incorporated into the Earth's ecosystem.

[Bernd Heinrich]

You know, I agree with the idea. I just feel that, you know, being sealed up, totally removed from all the natural processes that normally occur with every animal on Earth is very somehow frightening. It seems unnatural and. I don't know, it just.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's funny that you used the word frightening. I think most people lock themselves up in a casket because they're frightened to be munched on by worms and beetles and things.

[Bernd Heinrich]

Yeah, No, I don't find that frightening at all. I find that comforting. To be part of the ecosystem, to be composed into grass, to be composed into ravens, to be composed into flowers and trees. You know, that's a comforting thought to me.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's the other way to think of it, is that you're releasing yourself for the chance to be lots and lots and lots and lots of different new and more beautiful lives that will succeed you. Which.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, wait, wait. I would say that if I could become plants and new animals, what would.

[Jad Abumrad]

That make you swoon?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, it would make me feel like I'm. Like I'm a collection of molecules. I'm here for a season, 60, 70, 80 years, whatever. And then I let my molecules go. I disappear and the molecules go on to new adventures.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, but that.

[Christopher Kimball]

There's something.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then you're gone.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, I'm gone.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're lost. The union that was here for 60, 70, 80 years, whatever, is suddenly not here anymore. And there is in that an absence. There's a vacancy. Don't you feel that? I mean, I'd love for the Beatles and the things and everyone to be together again. But there is also the sense that when you disappear, you're gone. I mean, I understand on some level what Jo George Church was saying to you. I mean, why, if you've got the technology, would you Want to lose something so precious as a friend or a family member or a lover or something, or a co host, when you. When you can bring that person back. And. And you know what? Forget us, because it gets kind of egocentric when you're talking about bringing yourself back. But what about collections of ideas that are lost forever? Like a language, I think, of status. Like one language disappears every 14 days, disappears from the earth, never to be spoken again. Because the last speaker of that language dies and then decomposes and is eaten by the Beatles, according to your fantasy.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, how would you recover them?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, who knows? But we were talking to a guy, David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist. I don't know what a neuroscientist would usually know about such things, but he mentioned this thought experiment that has to do with lost languages.

[David Eagleman]

For example, nobody knows what Latin sounds like, right? It's dead. Because all the people who spoke Latin, there weren't tape recorders around when they were doing it. And so essentially, we all say, all right, that's. That's a. It's dead, it's gone. But it turns out somebody made a proposal that probably wouldn't work. But it was so stunning in its creativity that I thought it was very interesting. Which is. He said, look, sometimes these Roman pottery makers, if you can imagine these wheels that turn these pottery wheels, and you have a little stylus against the piece of pottery to make the line that spirals down. He said, if there were people talking in the room while that was happening, there might be micro vibrations that caused the stylus to move in and out. And as a result, it essentially could.

[Jad Abumrad]

Act like a record.

[David Eagleman]

And if you could play it back from these pieces of Roman pottery, you could actually hear the people in the room talking in Latin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Aha. You could play a vase like an lp, and then hear, like, Protheus, you know, the potter, you could hear his voice.

[David Eagleman]

Precisely. Now, the thing is, it probably won't work exactly like that, but what's interesting about the idea is that we're constantly coming up with new technologies where then we can retrieve things that we once thought were dead. In other words, we thought the information sort of scattered off into the universe. And then we're finding with a new technology, we're able to bring it all back together.

[Robert Krulwich]

What was that? What was that?

[Jad Abumrad]

Those are dead languages coming back. I don't know what that is. It was probably from a sound.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, I see. So all those languages that were disappearing, that's their return.

[Jad Abumrad]

I was just a Gesture. I was trying to evoke the sense of languages returning from the cosmos.

[Robert Krulwich]

Brilliantly done. Brilliantly done.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, smart guy.

[George Church]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, if you want to stand for the proposition, as you were earlier, that you'd be happy to decompose and become part of Mother Nature again in my time. Well, that's what I was gonna ask you. What if you had the choice right now to persist or. I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

I can't persist, obviously.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, okay, then. Let's end with a sort of ode to the persisters. And this one comes from our producer, Ellen Horn. So everybody's gonna count out loud. Okay, Set the scene for me. Where are we?

[Alison Inaba]

Well, we're near Wall street in Manhattan, and This is a CPR class. It's a Sunday afternoon.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everybody ready?

[Alison Inaba]

There's about 25 students here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Begin. And everyone's basically pressing on dummies. Is that what's happening? Yeah.

[Alison Inaba]

They press in the middle of the chest 30 times, and then they tip the mannequin's head back and blow into the mouth twice. But here's the central problem with doing CPR really well. It's the tempo. You need to get the tempo right. If you do it too slow.

[Jad Abumrad]

You.

[Alison Inaba]

Don'T get enough pressure up to get the blood moving around the body. And if you do it too fast, then the heart doesn't have time to fill back up.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what's the ideal speed?

[Alison Inaba]

This. The hundred beats per minute in this class? The class is just learning cpr. It's hard to hear, but if you listen. Just a little bit too fast.

[Jad Abumrad]

And how exactly do you get people to do 100 beats per minute? That seems like abstract or something.

[Alison Inaba]

Well, it's been shown that if you ask people to think of a song, they always remember it at the right tempo.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Alison Inaba]

There's this guy, Alison Inaba.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

I'm a pediatric emergency medicine physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.

[Alison Inaba]

He teaches cpr, and he was trying to figure out a good way to.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

Remember what 100 compressions a minute should feel like when you're doing CPR. So I thought, find a song, a popular song that had a beat of approximately 100 beats per minute.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what's the song?

[Alison Inaba]

The song he came up with.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

Staying Alive by the Bee Gees.

[Alison Inaba]

No. Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

Hopefully you help people stay alive.

[Jad Abumrad]

10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. Wow. And they did this. The class you went to, this has caught fire.

[Alison Inaba]

CPR classes all over the world.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

Egypt, Argentina, Botswana and Japan.

[Alison Inaba]

We're using this to teach the right tempo of cpr.

[Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physician]

Just happened to stumble upon it. And it was, I think, one of the best teaching tips I came up with in my career so far.

[Alison Inaba]

There is another song, though, that has a much simpler, more direct downbeat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Same tempo.

[Alison Inaba]

Same tempo. And I asked the class to try this song.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, remember, it's one and a half to two inches.

[Robert Krulwich]

Remember those numbers.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait a second.

[David Eagleman]

One, two, three.

[Robert Krulwich]

Again.

[Jad Abumrad]

One, two, three, four, five.

[Alison Inaba]

Another one bites the dust.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, that's so wrong. It's got a better beat in a way, than the other one, I guess.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. And it's certainly more frank.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes. But we should. We should let this podcast die. Yes. And speaking of which, just want to urge you, before we close to support your public radio station. Radiolab is carried on more than 200 stations across the country. You can check Radiolab.org to see if your station carries us. If they do, even if they don't, please consider making a gift to support that station. Because without them, without you, we wouldn't exist. We would die. Don't let us die. Radiolab is supported by the Sloan Foundation.

[Christopher Kimball]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Number one, Alfred P. Sloan.

[Robert Krulwich]

And number two, the National Science Foundation.

[Jad Abumrad]

And number three, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I'm Jad Abumra.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Kohlich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.