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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Hand Transplant, DNA, and a Backwards Heart
00:55:38
An astrophysicist discovers wild parallels in her research and romantic life, a surgeon details his involvement in one of the world’s first-ever hand transplants, and a geneticist is called to testify in a murder case and lays the groundwork for DNA fi...
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- [00:00]
Unnamed Advertiser
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- [01:08]
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- [02:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. We've got a full hour of stories for you from the Moth Radio Hour coming up. And this time it's three classic stories from the World Science Festival. But before we get to that, I want to let you know that the Moth main stage is going to be back in Los Angeles on December 2nd. We're going to do a show called Naughty or Nice, presented by kcrw. David Crabb is going to host that one. For tickets and information on all of our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org here's the moth Radio Hour right here on the Moth Podcast.
- [02:54]
Jay Allison
From prx. This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Ellison and I'll be your host this time in this program. Our stories come from a live Moth event produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival with the theme Dark Stories of Stars Aligned. The show took place at the Players Club in New York City. All the storytellers were scientists and physicians, and all were asked a philosophical question by way of introduction, which was, if the laws of science could be suspended for one night, what would you do? Our first storyteller, the astrophysicist Jana Levin, said simply, I'd take the day off. Here's Jana Levin live at the Moth.
- [03:44]
Jana Levin
Einstein famously said only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And then he added, and I'm not so sure about the universe. And it's true that there's a realistic possibility that the entire universe is finite. It's mathematically and physically possible. And there was a period in my time, in my research when I was obsessed with this idea. I was fixated on the implications that you could leave the Earth and travel in a straight line to a distant galaxy on the edge of the observable universe and realize it was the Milky Way that you had left behind you and that the planet planet you landed on was the Earth. And there was also weirder possibilities that the Earth was reconnected like a Mobius strip, that if you took a left handed glove on that same trip, it would come back right handed. And during this time, the hazard for a scientist working on something so esoteric is the possibility that it just might not be true or it might not be answerable. And I felt myself kind of navigating this precipice between discovery on the one side and obscurity on the other side. At the time, I was working at Berkeley and living in San Francisco, and I would spend a lot of time in the coffee shop across the street from my apartment. I was trying to find some kind of tangible connection to a more earthbound reality. And it was there that I met this guy named Warren. Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him and pinned me with his blue eyes and said, you're the astrophysicist. Which I knew. And then he had so much momentum from having built up the nerve to say this to me. He kept walking. He didn't wait for my response. He goes right out the coffee shop and down the street. And so it begins. Warren is just everything I would never want in a man. He can't drive, he's never had his name On a lease. He's by his own confession, completely uneducated. He's a self professed obsessive compulsive. He comes from a really tough part of working class Manchester. He writes songs like Daddy Was a Drunk. Daddy was a singer. Daddy was a drunken singer murdered in a flop house, broken drunk. You get the idea. It's not good. So naturally, I'm completely smitten. And he is mesmerizing. He has all this intensity, all this energy and opinions. He's full of opinions. He was going to start his own music station called Shut the Folk Up. And I said, you know, the gag is going to be that nobody can understand his accent. Nobody will understand a word he says. He'll just rant. And the beauty of his accent, it was a Manchester accent, but it did seem even more tangled than one would expect just from that excuse. It was quite a brogue. And he would kind of talk so fast that the words would just slam together. It was really undecipherable. But when he sang, this big, huge, beautiful, warm tone just lifted out of him. It was like this old timey crooner, this rare crisp and clear sound. So I used to tell him, if there's anything that's really urgent that you need me to understand, just sing it to me. So Warren and I start seeing each other and he never asks me about my work, which is really quite a relief from my own sort of mental world. And it's like we're both in exile. Warren's in exile from his actual country and I was in a kind of mental exile. And he would obsess all day about music and melody, and I would obsess all day about mathematics and numbers. And it was like we were pulling so hard in such opposite directions that the tension kind of. It kept both of us from floating away. After a few weeks of seeing each other, Warren decides we should live together and he's going to convince me that I should let him move in. So he gives me this argument with some fairly inventive logic, which I'm a little suspicious of and laden with all kinds of Manchester slang. I don't really follow. But Warren can convince me of anything, just anything. So I relent and he says, I'll be right back. He's so excited. He comes back in less than an hour and he's moved in. He's carrying his guitar and whatever he can carry on his back because he has this philosophy, if you can't carry it, you can't own it, right? So he moves in with me. And my parents are thrilled. So their recently PhD conferred daughter, I have a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT, is living with an illegal immigrant who can't spell words like non viable, unfeasible. And you know, I think even our friends are full of doubt. So our good friend, the musician Sean Hayes, is writing lyrics like, let's just play this one out until it explodes, until a thousand tiny pieces. What's your story, universe? Your melody, your numbers, your shapes and your rhythms. Warren and I hear this and we're pretty sure it's about us. And I'm filled with doubt too. I mean, this is a crazy situation. It's totally improbable. And my fellowship's coming to an end and the only other offers I have are in England. And Warren hates England. I mean, he slumps when he describes the low hanging skies and the black mark of his accent there and the inescapability of his class. But he says, baby, I'll follow you anywhere, even to England. As though like I'm bringing him to the acid marshes of hell. Right? You know? But he makes himself feel better by convincing me we have to sell all our stuff because you can't own what you can't carry. So he convinces me, before we go to England, we have to sell everything. So we're sitting on the steps of our apartment and I watch stuff that I've been carting around my entire life just disappear. And people come in and out of the coffee shop to talk to us. And people come by and say, so you're the astrologer? And I say, I say, well, no, I'm more of like an astronomer. And they asked me, but how is it possible that the universe is finite? And I explained how Warren and I could go on this trip from San Francisco to London and if we kept going in as straight a line as possible, we'd eventually come back to San Francisco again, where we started. Because the earth is compact and connected and finite and maybe the whole universe is like that. And Warren and I make this leap, you know, his left hand and my right hand and we board a plane to the uk and it does suck. It does suck. We have this very difficult wandering path. But finally I land a fantastic fellowship at Cambridge. It's beautiful. But not before we spend a few weeks in a coin operated bedside it outside of Brighton actually. And if you run out of pound coins, your electricity goes off and the lights go out and we often ran out of pound coins. And towards the end we were so despondent we would Just sit in the dark. And I could hear, though not see. Warren say things like, at least I don't have to look at the wood chip wallpaper. Which for some reason really depressed him. This very English quality of the wood chip wallpaper. But eventually we get to Cambridge and my work takes this beautiful turn. I start working on black holes, these supermassive dead stars tens of kilometers across, spinning hundreds of times a second, ripping through space at the speed of light. This is very concrete compared to my previous research. So I'm excited about the direction my work's turning in. I'm in Hawking's group in Cambridge, which is very exciting, but he doesn't pay me any attention at all. But I'm invited by Nobel laureates to, to Trinity College for dinner. And I get to watch this sort of ceremony of dinner at this old beautiful college from the privileged perch of high table. And meanwhile, Warren's down the road at another college washing the dishes because it was the only job he could get. And as things go on, we both start to retreat into our mental worlds. Me my math and Warren his melody. But it's like we're not really keeping each other from floating away so much anymore. Eventually it starts to rain and it rains forever. You know, Woody Allen said forever is a very long time, especially the bit towards the end and a rainy winter in Cambridge is a very long time. Warren picks up mandolin and he starts playing these Americana bluegrass tunes over and over again. Na na na na na na na na. And it's like this manic soundtrack to our mounting insanity. And eventually we explode. It takes about six months of that relentless rain and we explode and it's over. And all we see is how improbable we are. We see that we're non viable and unfeasible, which, by the way, Warren can spell those words by then. And we both leave. We both decide we're leaving and we pack up everything we have, each of us just what we can carry. We end up leaving Cambridge, we end up in a bus terminal in London clutching each other. And I'm waiting for Warren to convince me because he can always convince me that we can do the impossible. But it's like the light's gone out in his eyes and I just disappear into London and he just disappears. And the silence is total. A graduate student of mine recently said to me, the emotional dimension is the least interesting part of the human experience. And I know scientists are odd, but I agree, it was like, yeah, I what you mean? And so it's difficult for me to recount how dark those nights were. Even in my worst moments. I knew that my despair was just sort of not interesting. And I needed to get back to mathematics and the universe and this connection. Because in its sheer magnitude, it would diminish the sort of importance of my personal trials. So I searched all over London until I found a perfect warehouse to move into. Because I wanted to connect with a kind of more earthbound reality while I was doing my research. And I found the perfect place. It had broken windows and shutters and nothing. It was dead empty. No bathroom, nothing. It was empty. And I had the windows replaced. And I had a bathroom installed. And my unit became the kind of soul or heart of this artists community building on the east End of London along the canals. Not least of which because I had the sense to install a shower and a bathroom. So I had a great community around me. And I started a new life there. And I started to write a book. I got a book deal. And it was a book about whether or not the universe was finite. And it was a diary. It was as much about the terror as a scientist of working on that really frightening divide between discovery and total oblivion. And it became a parallel story about Warren. About the kind of unraveling of an obsessive compulsive mind. And I think, if I'm honest, it was also a way of still hanging on to him, you know? And this book kind of came out of me fully formed. It took one year, and it just sort of was out. When the book was finished, I delivered it to my publisher. And in part fueled by the London gloom and in part fueled by nostalgia, I decided I wanted to go back to San Francisco just to recuperate. Just to go back to where the book actually starts. Starts when we sell all our stuff on the steps in San Francisco. And I go back to California and I take these beautiful walks in the city. San Francisco is so beautiful. And I find myself despite myself, because I tell myself not to do it. Walking past my old neighborhood, and I end up going past my old coffee shop. And I'm going like, three miles an hour. There's what, like 5,000ft in a mile? And there's like 3,600 seconds in an hour. So I'm going about four and a half feet, I figure per second. Takes me about two seconds to go past this coffee shop window. And in that time, because I'm looking at my building, my old apartment, full of, like, sentiment, what I don't realize is on the other side of that window, Inside the coffee shop is Warren, who after I left him in London bus terminal, had gone back to California, come back to London, gone to France, come back to London, and has recently returned to San Francisco, gotten a job in the coffee shop where he was regaling the patrons with stories about his travels. He was so unrooted, but the light was like back on in his eyes. And as he's turning around to deliver a coffee, he lifts his head to see me in those two seconds, walk past the frame of the window and he shouts, it's self service. So he stumbles out of the coffee shop. People are like grabbing muffins and coffees. They're like, warren, what's up? And he's trying to get out of the coffee shop. He's banging his head on the glass door. He's trying to grab onto the handle of the door. He keeps banging his head. It's like a bird trying to get out the window. And all of a sudden, announced by the banging on the door, it swings open and deposits Warren in front of me. And you know, you often think like, what am I going to say when I bump into my ex? But it's just like this electric moment between us. We just laugh. There's just a swell of warmth and we laugh that we're back where we started, on this very spot in San Francisco. And I just try to give him the essential data. I'm living in London Fields and he tells me I have moved on to the block he lived on when he was 19 and squatting in London out of the whole of city of London. And he recognizes the names of all the locals I can rattle off. And by the end of the conversation he's saying, I'm coming with you back to London, aren't I? And I'm thinking, are you out of your mind? I mean, what woman in her right mind is going to let this lunatic come back to London with her? There is no way. About a year later, we're married. Our rings, which were made by a friend of ours, are stamped with the words, the lyrics, melody and numbers, shapes and rhythms, with no small dose of irony and defiance. About a year after that, we're having a baby and we're laughing at how improbable this kid is and how unlikely he's going to be. And we have no idea when this kid is born. He is so beautiful. And after he's born, a young resident comes charging into my hospital room and he's beaming, he's so excited. And I'm thinking he sees how Beautiful this boy is, but he's carrying an X ray, which he slaps on the wall, or on the window rather, of my hospital room so the light can come through and I can see it better, but I still don't know what I'm looking at. And he says, you, son's heart is on the right side. And he doesn't mean the correct side, he doesn't mean the left side. He means my son's heart is on the right side. And all I can think in this terrifying moment is, Get Warren. And he says, you, son has dextrocardia with situs inversus. All his organs are on the opposite side. And I say, get Warren. And he tells me he's so excited because he's never thought he'd ever see anything like this. To his knowledge, nobody in the hospital seen it in real life. And he's describing studies for me that are made up of 12 cases because the numbers are so rare. And Warren's there and he's saying in that rough, raw, beautiful accent what only he can convince me of. The totally impossible. He's saying he's perfect. And our now 8 year old son is a perfectly formed mirror image of the more conventional human anatomy and a very rare and unlikely alignment. It's as though Warren and I took our left handed code on a Mobius strip around the universe and brought back this right handed boy. And that boy, as intense and spirited as his father, is like a living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we're on. Thank you.
- [20:22]
Cody Azari
Jana Levin is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her books include A Madman, Dreams of Turing Machines and How the Universe Got Its Spots. Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by prx.
- [20:48]
Unnamed Advertiser
Support for the Moth comes from Sonos, the smart system of wireless speakers. Sonos lets you listen to any song in any room of your house or the same one in every room. Classics in the kitchen, R and B in the bedroom, your favorite podcast in the living room, and rock and roll in the whole house. Learn more@sonos.com themoth this is the Moth.
- [21:10]
Jay Allison
Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. This is a live storytelling event produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival, and all the storytellers are scientists and physicians. Up next is surgeon Cody Azari. When asked the question every storyteller was asked, what would he do if the laws of science were changed for a single night, he said he Would travel back in time to observe the universe before the big bang. Here's Cody Azari live at the mall.
- [21:50]
Eric Lander
So when I was a young boy, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Nothing more than a fighter pilot. And I'm not sure what attracted me to it because I would never be able to kill someone. I would never be able to drop the bomb. But I think there was this sense of power within these machines, this sense of purpose, this sense of commitment and the sense of the mission that there is no failure. You have to make this mission happen and it has to be perfect because you have a 20 something million dollar plane in your hand. Except there was a problem. And the problem was that I'm Persian, I'm an immigrant from Iran. And any self respecting Iranian parent would never let their child be anything more than a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. Those were the three options, but mainly Dr. Or an engineer. And there was no choice other than that. So there was no way my parents were going to let me do anything otherwise. So I had to tell a lie. And my lie was, you know what? I'm going to become a physician. And I said that just to get them off my back. And really that's all it took. And then all my family members started to accost me. And in one particular case, I remember this little old lady that was a family friend that lives in Pittsburgh. She would start sending me articles, and she sent me articles about this young pioneering transplant surgeon by the name of Tom Starzl. And this was a man that was revolutionizing the field of transplantation by performing liver transplants. Now, liver transplants are commonplace right now, but back then they weren't. Liver transplants were unbelievable at that time. And to put it into perspective, these were bloody, bloody operations. Some of these operations would require 1000 units of blood. 1000 units of blood for one person. In fact, they were so bloody that in a large room, these were not small operating rooms, they would have to put blankets at the doors so that the blood wouldn't gush out into the middle of the hallway. On top of that, for example, in the city of Pittsburgh, they would have to stop elective operations. They would stop them because the city's run out of blood for this one patient. So none of the other hospitals could do elective operations because there's no blood available in the city. Add to that, the patients were dying. They either died on the table or they died in the ensuing weeks. Now, can you imagine what this young surgeon was going through? The hospital administration was after Him. The public was after him, the media was after him. And why are you doing these operations? Yet he had this conviction and he had this sense of purpose to know, to push the operation forward. And now today, transplantation of livers is routine in our hospital. For example, we do three in a given day. Yet it took this person's conviction to do that. So I decided, you know what? I think I can. I'm going to be a transplant surgeon. So I decided to go to medical school. Yet in medical school, a transformation happened to me. And the transformation was almost in gross anatomy class. And it was the dissection of the human hand. And the reason this transformation happened is I'm not a religious person, but if there's any evidence of divine intervention, it has to be the human hand. There is no greater source of functional anatomy other than the human hand. It's perfect. It's an organ of grasp, so I can grab things. It's an organ of strength. I can break bricks with my hand. It's an organ of precision. I can play the concert piano or the concert violin with the same hand. It's an organ of sight. I want you to close your eyes, touch anything in front of you without looking at it. You know exactly what you've touched. It's a sexual organization. And finally. And it's an organ of expression. You all know what this means. You all know what this means. You all know what this means. And you certainly know the New York taxi cab driver is a middle finger. So could we do hand transplantation? Could we actually take a hand from another human being and attach it to a hand of somebody that's lost one? Well, nobody had done it back then. It was only in thought. Yet the complexities were too great. So I decided to become a hand surgeon and go into hand transplantation surgery. And I thought it would be done if it was going to be anywhere, it would be in Pittsburgh, where this young man was. So I went and did a general surgery residency, I did a plastic surgery residency, I did a hand and microsurgery residency, and then I did a tissue engineering fellowship. Wait, did I just do what my parents had wanted me to do? A doctor, an engineer? I think so. So this was a grueling period. And it was a grueling period of 110 to 120 work hour weeks. And I remember not having an entire day off in one year. In fact, I remember walking into the MRI unit with my wallet. I forgot to take it out to push a patient in in the middle of the night. And then my wallet became demagnetized so my credit cards became demagnetized and I had run out of cash. I couldn't use an ATM and I wasn't able to go home at all. And I wasn't able to go to the bank and get my ATM reset, my credit card reset. So I remember begging for money from my co residents for about a 10 day period. Listen, can I have your meal card? I'm really hungry anyways. 18 years after high school I'm finished with training and now I'm a hand surgeon. So obviously I take my first job in Pittsburgh where we're trying to start a hand transplantation program. And this was a program that took almost seven years to put together. It took an extraordinary amount of effort to put this amazing program. And towards the end we were ready to do a transplantation. Except the next problem happened and it happened to be my wife. My wife gave me the ultimatum, there's no way that she was going to take another winter in Pittsburgh. So my only choice was move to California. So right before we were able to finish this program and perform transplants in Pittsburgh, I moved to California. Yet there was no way I was going to be denied. I was going to absolutely participate in this program and I was absolutely going to do this operation that I had devoted at least 18 years to learn how to do. But not many people had done it before. So I'm in California and It's March of 2009 and we received a call. Our first patient that we were on the transplantation list had received a match. We had a match. We had a donor for him and he was a young man. He was a 26 year old Marine that had lost his dominant hand in a munitions accident. I don't know what it means not to have a hand. I don't think many people do. I know what it means when I get a paper cut, I can't type that day my finger is sticking out. But I don't know what it really means not to have a hand. Yet we have a hand for this man. And why it's such a incredible experiences. It's difficult to find a hand. Not only do we have to have the exact same match, so it has to be a blood group match just like any other organ. But this is an external organ. It has to be matched according to size. It has to be the same size, it has to be the same color, the same skin tones, it has to be the same hair patterns as this marine. And we found that yet I'm in California and the hands in Pittsburgh. I got the call during the middle of the day. It was a Thursday, and I was already in the operating room. And I certainly couldn't stop my operations. I finished my operations that day and took my car, went to the airport and bought the first ticket out of Los Angeles. Now visions of 911 are happening to me because there's this crazy guy saying, I gotta get to Pittsburgh. I gotta get to Pittsburgh with a credit card. I don't care if it's one way or not, you know, Took the red eye and I was in Pittsburgh. Now it's 24 hours that I've been awake. And in the plane I was this caged animal. I couldn't sleep. My legs are shaking because. And I can sense that when I look at boxers, they're just standing there when they're giving the instructions by the referee. They're like these animals that want to explode yet something. They're just waiting to go. And I was just waiting to go. Yet at the same time, I was filled with this incredible sense of dread. Can I stay awake for another 15 hours? I've already been up 24 hours. Can I really stay up and have my faculties intact to do this incredible operation? Once I got into the operating room, something happened. And that's called the zone. And athletes talk about the zone. Yet I don't know how to explain it. I was an athlete younger when I was younger, and I remember setting the high school record in the 100 meter dash. And I felt this sense of moving effortlessly through time, effortlessly through space. And everybody else stood still. And I think that's what athletes meant. And doing this operation was really the same way. It was this effortless motion where you're looking down a goggle. You don't know what's going on around you. You almost can't hear. All you're seeing is the task ahead of you and you're moving very, very quickly, yet everybody else is moving in slow motion. It's really an incredible feeling that I've only felt this one time in my life. And we begin this operation, and this is a difficult operation. You have to attach the bones. There are two bones. You have to get them the right length. You have to make sure they're absolutely the right length to attach them. Then you do the tendons. You have 23 tendons. You have to find the scar tendons in the forearm of this individual. Well, there's no markings on it. You have to find out where they are. And then you have to attach it to the new hand, but you have to do it in the absolute perfect balance. The reason we can use our hands so well is because the tendons in the palm and the tendons in the back are in absolute harmony. Their tensions are set appropriately. Yet there is no cookbook of how to put these tendon tensions together. This hasn't been really done before. Then come the nerves. Well, the reason everything moves is because the nerves have been appropriately put back together. And nerves are like coaxial cable in your tv, except there's no red to red, green to green, yellow to yellow coming. And you have to put those back together. Then comes the vessels, arteries, and the veins. And these are tiny structures. The veins were one millimeter, in fact. We have to use a microscope, magnify it 30 times. And then you're using sutures that are just a quarter size of the human hair. You actually can't see them with your eyes. And you have to absolutely perfectly bring them back together in order for that to work. Otherwise the graft will fail, you'll get a clot and it'll fail. And to add to the tension of all this is we haven't done this before. There is no cookbook of how to do it and make it even harder. Your hands are frozen. We have to do this on ice to preserve the hand. So my hands were burning, they were so cold. And all I could think about was, I wish somebody could pour warm water on my fingers. Fifteen hours later, the operation is done and we take this young marine into the recovery area. It was this great sense doing this operation that I felt it was a sense of failure is not an option. I'm not going to be denied. There's no way this is going to fail. And I remember at the same time thinking, I wonder if this is what the jet fighter pilots feel like when they're trying to land this multimillion dollar plane on top of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the night in some unknown gulf somewhere. The marine is back into the operating room. He's finished. He's back into the recovery area. And I asked him to move. I asked him to move his fingers when he woke up. Started with the thumb. There's a flicker of the thumb. He hasn't had a hand for six years. Then the index finger, then the small finger. By the time we're at the small finger, there's not a dry eye in the room. And I'm continuously sobbing. It's an incredible feeling to be able to give back to someone that's given so much to you. I went back to California and then I met him a year later. I met him back at the Pentagon. And outside of family events, this was one of really the most incredible events of my life is because I looked at his face and I shook his hand and the hand was warm, it was strong and it was sweaty. Human hands are sweaty if they have nerve function. And of course I'm going to get a pose, I'm going to get a photo op. So I'm like, well, let's get one arm wrestling. Next thing you know, this young Marine has pinned me and I can't get out. Not really a great photo op. So my practice has changed in Los Angeles in that I've been involved with this incredible organization where we reconstruct our wounded service members hands when they're injured in these two conflicts. We pay for their operations, we take care of them. So a good portion of my practice is taking care of these guys, reconstructing their hands to those that have given so much. Yeah, I'm not flying fighter jets but. But I'm reconstructing those that have been injured doing so.
- [36:25]
Cody Azari
Cody Azari is an internationally known plastic surgeon and hand surgeon. He's an associate professor of orthopedic surgery and plastic surgery at UCLA and is the director of the hand transplantation program. You can find out more about the moth and pitch us a story of your own all@themost.org the Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by the Public Radio Exchange prx.org the Moth is.
- [36:59]
Unnamed Advertiser
Supported by audible.com Audible has more than 180,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazines and newspapers. And Audible's offering a free audiobook of your choice along with a free 30 day trial membership. Moth podcast listeners might enjoy the award winning A brief history of seven killings written by Marlon James. Just go to audible.com themoth and choose from over 180,000 titles. Download a title free and start listening. Go to audible.com themoth and get started today from PRX.
- [37:38]
Jay Allison
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison. You're listening to a live storytelling event produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival with the theme Dark Night Stories of Stars Aligned. Our final scientist storyteller is Eric Esslander and his answer to the question what would he do if the laws of science were suspended for one night? Was that he would travel back in time to see the origins of life, the asteroids that destroyed the dinosaurs and the Brooklyn Dodgers win a World Series in Ebbets Field. Here's Eric Lander live at the mall.
- [38:18]
H
In January 1989, I got a phone call from a scientific friend at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long island, asking me if I'd come participate in a meeting that he was organizing on DNA fingerprinting. Now, this was back in the days before DNA fingerprinting was a staple of CSI and law and order. In fact, it was before DNA fingerprinting was actually used in the courts in the United States. And he wanted to organize a meeting to get some judges and some lawyers and some scientists to see if we could anticipate what the problems might be with DNA fingerprinting. So I'm a human geneticist. I work on the Human Genome Project in human genetic variation. He thought it could be useful to have me around, so I said, sure. So a couple weeks later, I go down to Cold Spring Harbor, Long island, for this meeting. And there's the usual talks and there's some discussion and then the afternoon coffee break. These two New York lawyers, tall guy with bushy hair, short guy with black straight hair, corner me. They drag me into the side room, they lock the door, they take out these X ray films and they hold them up to the window and they say, what do you think? So it turns out these X ray films were evidence in a criminal case in the Bronx. A woman had been stabbed to death, and the police suspected the janitor. When they interviewed the janitor, a man named Jose Castro, they noticed a spot of blood on his watch. So the police took the blood from the deceased woman and the blood from the watch and sent it off to a testing laboratory to do this new DNA fingerprinting. Let's call the testing lab Life Codes, because that actually is what its name was. So when DNA fingerprinting is done right, you get this beautiful X ray film with these bands showing different positions in the human DNA and they differ between people, and you can line them up and see if they match. So these X ray films looked absolutely nothing like that. I'm from Brooklyn. The technical term for what they look. Thank you. Thank you. As you know, if you're from Brooklyn, the technical term for what they look like is schmutz. They were a mess. They were the sort of things a first year graduate student might bring you. And you'd say, look, don't bother trying to interpret this experiment. Just go do it again. Well, you can imagine the lawyers were incredibly excited to hear me say this because they immediately said, will you testify to that in the court? And I said, Oh, I need this like a hole in the head, I don't have time to do this, I've got work to do, etc. And so I said, no, look, I can't possibly do that. So they pressed and I resisted and they pressed and I resisted. And finally one of them says, all right, all right, don't testify, but would you teach us so we could do a good job? Now that got my Achilles heel, because in addition to being a scientist, I'm a teacher. For 25 years I've taught the introductory biology course at MIT. I love teaching. And more than that, I firmly believe that no matter what I do in my own scientific career, the most important impact that I can ever have on the world is going to be through my students. So very, very, very reluctantly, I agreed to teach them. The plan was this. The judge was going to have a pre trial hearing in the Bronx about whether this DNA evidence should be admitted into court. So we take a couple of weeks and we talk about the basics of DNA analysis and, and the protocols and how they could go wrong and then look at the lab reports and see if they made sense. And then when the hearing started, they'd send me the transcripts and we'd look at the transcripts and talk each night about the transcripts and I'd suggest questions you might ask. So, all right, the trial starts in, the hearing starts in the Bronx. First couple witnesses are academic scientists who come and describe DNA and DNA fingerprinting and basic stuff. First one was actually Rich Roberts, a very good molecular biologist who'd later go on to win a Nobel Prize. Then it started getting interesting. The lab director from Lifecodes took the witness stand and we'd agreed on some questions to ask him. And they asked the questions, we started getting back answers and it got stranger and stranger. I'll just tell you one aspect of this case. Life Codes tested the samples to see the sex, the sources. They took a probe for the Y chromosome and if you use a probe for the Y chromosome and it's a male sample, you get a single band in just the right place that says this is from the Y chromosome. And if it's from a female, you see nothing. So they tested the samples and the blood from the deceased woman, nothing. The blood from the watch, nothing. They declared a perfect match. Now, in science we often like to have this thing called a positive control, something that would tell you that the experiment had actually worked. And they did indeed. Over on the right side of this X ray film, have a lane labeled control. And if you looked in the lane labeled Control. You saw nothing. So I suggest that we ask the lab director, who's the control? So they asked him, who's the control? And he said, we use cervical cancer cells. Two weeks later, the technician who actually performed the experiments takes the witness stand. I suggest ask him, why are they using cervical cancer cells? So they ask him and he says, cervical cancer cells. We don't use cervical cancer cells. We use DNA from somebody in the lab. I get DNA from my lab mate, Arthur Eisenberg. Arthur Eisenberg. So two weeks later, the lab director is back on the witness stand. And I suggest they ask him if that's DNA from Arthur Eisenberg, what's up with his Y chromosome?
- [44:37]
Eric Lander
Like.
- [44:40]
H
Why isn't there a band there? And so they ask him, and without missing a beat, he says, oh, that's very interesting. Arthur has an unusual genetic condition. He has a short Y chromosome that's missing those sequences. Eventually, life codes would come to testify that it wasn't actually Arthur Eisenberg at all. It was a woman in the lab named Ellie Mead. And the way they figured this out was they got everybody in the lab and they did DNA fingerprinting on everybody in the lab to figure out who their control had been for the DNA fingerprinting. So it was pretty clear these guys were bungling this case. They were clearly making up protocols in the lab. And maybe they were making up things on the witness stand too. I don't want to say, but I had gotten completely radicalized. And at this point I told the lawyers, okay, I'm going to testify. I flew down to New York, went to the Bronx, to the Bronx Criminal Courthouse on the Grand Concourse on 161st street in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, to testify in the courtroom of Judge Jerry Sheindlin. As an aside, Judge Sheindlin's wife was also a New York City judge, a family court judge, Judith Sheindlin, until she stepped down from the bench a few years later to become a judge on television, where you may know her as Judge Judy. But anyway, I digress. Judge Sheindlin was having the time of his life. He was bragging to all the other judges in the criminal courthouse. You guys have these drug dealers and rapists and pimps. I have the best scientists in the world testifying in my courtroom. And he was in no rush to end this hearing. So I testified for a solid day and another day and another day. By the time I was done, I had testified for six days in this pre trial hearing. And then I called up five other scientific friends and persuaded them to come and testify too. This went on for quite a while. By the middle of May, the prosecutor had scheduled a vacation in the Caribbean and she asked the judge, could we get a postponement at the delay in the hearing so I can go on my vacation in the Caribbean? The judge, being nice, said, okay, fine, we'll take a week off. And she went off to the Caribbean. As it happened, I went to Cold Spring harbor for another scientific meeting. And there I met Rich Roberts, who had been that first prosecution expert witness. I said, rich, did you ever actually look at the evidence? And Rich said, no, I was testifying about DNA in general. So I grabbed Rich, pulled him into the back room, closed the door, took out copies of those X ray films, held them up, and I said, what do you think? And he agreed. It was terrible. So he came up with a plan. Rich was going to call all the scientists who had testified for the prosecution. I called all the scientists who testified for the defense. We'd meet in a conference room in Manhattan and we'd all discuss the evidence together. Now, apparently this sort of thing isn't typically done in criminal cases. I heard later it's never been done in criminal cases, but what did I know? So we met, we got together, we met, we looked at the evidence. After a day of reviewing all this, the verdict amongst the scientists was unanimous. The evidence really was schmutz. So we wrote up a statement, everybody signed their name, we sent it off to the judge. Prosecutor gets back from the Caribbean, finds out that all of her witnesses have now switched sides. I thought she was going to fold there, but she dutifully soldiered on for several more weeks. And finally, 15 weeks after the beginning of this pre trial hearing, both sides rest. Judge Sheindlin takes a month to write an opinion and when it comes out, it says, what else could it possibly say? The DNA evidence is not admissible. So we'd won. We'd won our point. It was settled, it was over. So what happened? The janitor, Jose Castro, his case never went to trial. While the DNA evidence was terrible, it turned out there was a mountain of other evidence linking him to the murder. He pled guilty and went to prison. The U.S. national Academy of Sciences, very concerned by what had come out about DNA fingerprinting from the Castro gays, set up a committee to recommend standards for the quality in DNA fingerprinting, which in fact has worked and led to the DNA fingerprinting quality we have today. Lifecodes Corporation, terminally embarrassed by their performance in this case quietly went out of business. Me, I went back to Boston to work on the Human Genome Project in my lab. The genome project was heating up. It was an exciting time. Worked on it. But I get phone calls. I got phone calls from defense attorneys and prosecutors and judges asking me to come testify in their DNA fingerprinting cases. I got a call from Judge Lance ito in the O.J. simpson case asking me to go testify in the O.J. case to all of this. I said, no, I've got my work. I've got to focus on that work. I just can't get involved in all of this. But much worse than this, I got letters. I got a handwritten letter from an inmate in a Texas penitentiary saying, I read about the Castro case. Will you help me? I'm really innocent. Help me. I got letters from prisons in Virginia, prisons in Kansas, from Attica, upstate New York. And there was nothing I could do. I couldn't do anything. I just couldn't possibly get involved. And the truth was, I couldn't tell who was really innocent. So I took these letters and I put them in my bottom drawer, and I felt guilty. But happily, the two lawyers who I taught in the Castro case, they got the letters, too. And they didn't put them in the bottom drawer. They began to investigate them, and they began to find that some of these people were innocent. And they started something called the Innocence Project. And the Innocence Project has gone on to lead to the exoneration of nearly 300 people, including 17 people on death row. And it's taught us that absolutely certain eyewitness identification can be absolutely wrong. So some years after that, these two lawyers, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, called me up and said, would I join the board of the Innocence Project? This time, I didn't hesitate. I immediately said yes.
- [51:52]
Eric Lander
Why do I teach?
- [51:53]
H
I teach because I firmly believe that no matter what I do with my own scientific career, the greatest impact I can possibly have is through my students. Thank you.
- [52:14]
Jay Allison
That was Eric S. Lander. Lander is one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project. He serves as president and founding director of the Broad Institute. All the stories you've heard in this hour are available at the Itunes store. You can purchase your own story@themost.org you may get a call back from us inviting you to develop your story with one of our directors and tell it at a live moth event. That's it for the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the Moth.
- [52:49]
Cody Azari
This live Moth event was produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival. Learn more@worldScienceFestival.com Special thanks to Tracy Day, Brian Greene and Kate Roth. The stories in the hour were directed by Katherine Burns, Artistic Director of the Moth, and Sarah Austin Janess, our producing director. The rest of the Moth directorial staff include Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Jenna Weiss Berman and Brandon Echter. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City supervised by Paul Rueest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Tin Hat Trio. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts with help from Vicki Merrick. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange prx.org for more about our podcast, for information on how to pitch your own story and everything else, go to our website themoth.org that's.
- [54:08]
Dan Kennedy
It from the Moth Radio Hour. Next week the Moth Podcast returns with a podcast episode featuring stories about identity, including a story from John Ronson.
- [54:20]
Eric Lander
I.
- [54:21]
Jana Levin
Was at war with a robot version of myself.
- [54:25]
Dan Kennedy
That's next week right here on the Moth Podcast. Thanks to all of you for listening. We hope you have a story worthy week.
- [54:32]
Unnamed Advertiser
Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock on An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with the Moth.
- [54:41]
Dan Kennedy
The Moth Podcast is produced by Whitney Jones. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City supervised by Paul Rueest. The Moth Podcast and the Moth Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more.
- [54:58]
Unnamed Advertiser
Public@Prx.Org the Moth podcast is supported by William Morrow. Presenting Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman in paperback. Trigger Warning is a new collection of short fiction from Gaiman, a New York Times best selling author and features a new exclusive American God story, Sherlock Holmes, remarkable bees and more. New from the author of the Sandman comic book series, the Graveyard Book, Coraline and more. Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman is now available in paperback from William Morrow.