Rob Stein
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-23-2025 5PM EDT
The Health and Human Services Department is cutting off funding for all the centers that have been collecting data about tens of thousands of women who've been participating in the Women's Health Initiative for decades. The project has produced a series of landmark discoveries about women's health, including the risks and benefits of hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-23-2025 5PM EDT
Scientists say the decision cuts off crucial research at a time when the nation needs to study older women and chronic disease more than ever. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-02-2025 5PM EDT
Researchers at Brown University analyzed data collected from more than 73,000 older adults in the United States and Europe between 2010 and 2022. They weren't surprised to find that the wealthiest people in both the U.S. and Europe tended to live longer than the poorest. But they were surprised by this.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-02-2025 5PM EDT
The wealthiest Americans didn't live as long as the most affluent Europeans and only tend to have the longevity of the poorest Western and Northern Europeans. That's despite the fact that the U.S. spends more than any other wealthy country on health care. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-29-2025 3PM EDT
The damage to the painting, titled Gray Orange on Maroon No. 8, happened during what a museum spokesperson called an unguarded moment when a child scratched the painting, leaving superficial marks visible in the unvarnished paint layer in the lower part of the painting. A spokesperson for Rotterdam's Museum, Boymans von Beunigen, says it's considering the next steps on how to repair the damage.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-29-2025 3PM EDT
The abstract painting is estimated to be worth more than $50 million. The museum did not comment on who will be held liable for the damage to the 1960 painting, but it's previously billed visitors who have caused damage to artworks on display. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-20-2025 6PM EDT
The FDA says that it plans to impose new requirements on COVID vaccines to focus on immunizing people at highest risk for serious complications from COVID. That would include people who are age 65 and older and younger people with other health problems.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-20-2025 6PM EDT
For children and younger healthy adults, the FDA wants vaccine companies to conduct additional research to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. The FDA says the moves are necessary to restore trust in the vaccines.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-20-2025 6PM EDT
Critics say the moves are unnecessary because the vaccines are very safe and effective, and they would limit the ability of younger, healthy people to get vaccinated. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-02-2024 8PM EST
What it will ultimately include is dependent upon what the Trump administration does. And we are fully prepared to provide ongoing access to abortion medication in the state of California should the Comstock Act be weaponized.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-05-2025 7PM EST
The cap would cripple the search for new cures for diseases, and three lawsuits challenged the legality of the cap. The cap would cripple the search for new cures for diseases, and three lawsuits challenged the legality of the cap. The federal judge in Massachusetts agreed, extending what had been a temporary restraining order on implementing the cap nationwide. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-01-2025 5PM EDT
The Department of Health and Human Services says that all new vaccines must now be tested against an inert substance, a placebo, before they can be made available. And while the administration isn't specifically naming the COVID vaccines, a spokesman indicated any update to the COVID vaccines would make them, quote, new vaccines, requiring this extra testing.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-01-2025 5PM EDT
The administration says this is necessary to ensure the safety of the vaccines. Critics say the move is unnecessary and could make it impossible to make updated vaccines available by next fall. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 10-27-2024 5PM EDT
The CDC is endorsing recommendations from independent advisors that anyone aged 50 and older get a shot that can protect them against bacteria that can cause pneumonia and other potentially serious complications. Previously, the CDC only recommended the so-called pneumococcal vaccine for those aged 65 and older.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 10-27-2024 5PM EDT
The CDC is also recommending people ages 65 and older and younger people with moderate or severe immune system problems get at least two doses of one of the new COVID vaccines instead of just one. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-19-2025 8AM EDT
Exit polls show Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski barely edging out Karol Nowrocki, a member of the right-wing Law and Justice Party, by around two percentage points, suggesting a June 1st runoff could be closely contested. Trzaskowski is a center-left politician aligned with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who speaks foreign languages and holds pro-European Union views.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-19-2025 8AM EDT
Navrotsky, who has positioned himself as a defender of conservative values and national sovereignty, was welcomed by President Donald Trump at the White House earlier this month in what was seen as an endorsement. Navrotsky has also embraced anti-Ukrainian rhetoric in his campaign. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-08-2024 7PM EST
When I was chief security officer for a company, I didn't produce any profits, revenue, gross or net. I just cost the company money.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-07-2025 4PM EDT
Colossal Biosciences in Dallas says company scientists edited the genes of gray wolves to breed animals with key traits of dire wolves. Dire wolves have been extinct for more than 12,000 years and were featured in the HBO series Game of Thrones. The colossal scientists created embryos from genetically modified gray wolf cells and then implanted them into female dogs.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-07-2025 4PM EDT
The surrogate mother dogs gave birth to three healthy wolves with dire wolf traits. The company named the animals Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. Colossal hopes to do something similar with other extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-18-2025 3PM EDT
The original federal websites had provided the public with basic information about COVID-19, such as vaccines, treatment, and testing. But those sites are gone, and now direct visitors to the White House website and a page titled, The True Origins of COVID-19. That theory argues the virus escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, China, and then spread around the world.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-18-2025 3PM EDT
Most scientists believe that the virus most likely originated naturally in a wild animal and then spread to people in a market located in Wuhan. Rob Stein, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-18-2025 3PM EDT
They simply said they had been given orders not to allow me to visit him.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
It's funny, reforestation a lot of times, I think the general public, myself included, before I got into this, you know, you think you put a tree in the ground, it's just it's going to grow, right? Turns out that's not the case. A lot of times we put things in the ground and they die. And it's the same thing for tree seedlings as well.
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How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
We're dealing with more severe droughts, just more harsh conditions in general. So it's just the seedlings need more of a leg up to kind of get established.
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How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
The way in which the experiment works, we're testing essentially four kind of types of seed sources at each site. And so we test the historic seed that would have existed there historically, the current seed that would exist under the current climate, and then we project out to the future climate and then end of century climate.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
All we're doing is we're matching what that future climate is with a different spot that's currently on the landscape. So as long as we match up some of those climate variables, like a mean cold month temperature is a very common one we use, or a summer heat moisture index are two really common variables that we use for seedlot selection.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
We're just matching them in space from what's predicted in the future to what currently exists on the ground.
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How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
You're generally moving it from a climate that it was historically adapted to that it evolved under. Um, and then you're moving it to a climate that you think is going to exist in the future at a given location. Um, and that's, yeah, that's assisted population migration also referred to as assisted gene flow. Um, but it's sticking within the existing habitat range of that species.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
And so it's generally considered less risky than like, uh, assisted species migration where maybe you're moving, uh, um, you know, species far outside of its natural range.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
Where they were planting different populations. There was this understanding that, you know, based on how those trees evolved under the given set of conditions in which where the population existed, they would perform better than trees that evolved under a different set of conditions. And so now we're just using the concept to spin it on its head.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
That's Rob Stein, Ping Huang, and Jonathan Lambert. Thank you so much for joining me, and good luck in continuing to report on this. You're welcome, Emily. It's great to be here.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Giselle Grayson and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Special thanks to Aurora Berry and Rachel Waldholz. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Mark Belisle and Nellie Simmons came out to the D.C. March, one of 32 rallies around the country, from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to Cornell University's rally in late February. Cornell is where Marguerite Pacheco spoke with our colleague Aurora Berry at WSKG. Marguerite is a Ph.D.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
student in biomedical engineering and says these days writing to grant providers has been like writing to ghosts.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
The Trump administration's stated goal in all of this is to cut what they claim is administrative bloat, the kinds of taxpayer dollars that fund research overhead costs. But Marguerite wonders what will happen if basic research in the U.S. starts to falter.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
The thing about science, and I've heard this over and over again from people in the field, is that science is fragile. Research that can take a lifetime to prop up can be dismantled in a matter of days. So today, with three of my colleagues on NPR's science desk, we're going to explore the first 50 days of science under the current Trump administration by focusing on three U.S.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
agencies, the NIH, the CDC, and the National Science Foundation. I'm Emily Kwong, and this is Shorewave from NPR.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
All right. So we're going to get into some updates from the science world from the first 50 days of the Trump administration. And I've got here my colleagues, Rob Stein, who's been covering the NIH, Ping Huang, who's been covering the CDC, and Jonathan Lambert, who's been covering the National Science Foundation. Hey, everyone.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Hi there. Hi. 50 days later, here we are. We're going to start, Rob. With the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research all over the U.S., what has been going on there?
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
From almost the moment President Donald Trump took office, he has made his plans for science and the federal funding of science known. Just a few days after the inauguration, Trump suspended public communications across the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Okay, so this was just days after the inauguration. What happened next?
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
And the Trump administration announced then a wave of job terminations across the federal government, decided through Doge as part of its aggressive effort to downsize bureaucracy. Rob, how many workers did the NIH lose in particular?
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Got it. Yeah. And where do things stand at the NIH when it comes to grants?
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
And on top of all of that, we have a new potential head of the NIH. Tell me about this person.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
They oversee the National Institutes for Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. Trump then issued executive orders to terminate all work related to DEI, environmental justice, and gender inclusivity. And these effects rippled through scientific institutions. The CDC purged thousands of pages from its website.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Okay, so that is Baudetoria. The NIH. Let's move on to the CDC. Ping Huang, you are covering the agency responsible for protecting the nation's health, including combating infectious disease. What's going on with the CDC? Yeah.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
There's really a kind of a back and forth between the executive and the judiciary branches at the federal level. Yeah, absolutely.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
The CDC does a lot. It does a lot. But you mentioned earlier that some folks have been brought back. Some of these firings have been reversed. What's going on there?
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
The National Science Foundation froze grantmaking for a while to comply with the orders. And DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, started to shrink the federal workforce, firing thousands of workers from all corners of the government. All of this has put science on the defensive. The Stand Up for Science movement organized to fight back.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Oh, okay. So it's like such a zigzag. Where does that leave the CDC now, this week?
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
All right. So we have a new head of the CDC, a new head of the NIH, which is pretty standard for when there's a new presidency, a new administration. But let's talk about the NSF. John, you have been covering the National Science Foundation, which dispenses federal funding for basic research. These are like fundamental questions across all areas of science. What has it been like over at the NSF?
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Yeah. This really would be such a different way of doing science from how it's been done for many decades now in the U.S.,
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Wow. Okay. 50 days hence, where do things stand now with the NSF?
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Yeah. Uncertainty really does seem to be the status of science in the U.S., at least when it comes to federal funding, but maybe just period. So all three of you, I want to ask, what does this mean for the future of science in the U.S. and particularly for current students or people who are hoping to go into scientific fields?
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yes, exactly. These scientists, they work at a Dallas biotech company called Colossal Biosciences. And they say these little woolly mice are a key step towards that audacious, and I have to say quite controversial, goal.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
So to answer that, I have to start with the mammoths. Okay. Colossal Biosciences wants to bring the mammoth back by using the latest genetic engineering techniques to create modern-day elephants with key traits from the mammoth. Cool. You know, traits like their signature thick coat and their fat metabolism that kept them warm in the Arctic.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
So they started by comparing genomes from samples of ancient DNA recovered from mammoth remains with genomes from living African and Asian elephants, the mammoths' closest living relatives.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
That's Beth Shapiro, the chief science officer at Colossal.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Exactly. And they narrowed down that list of candidate genes to 10 genes for the coat and the fat. Okay. But they wanted to make sure that the genes they had identified were really responsible for the traits that they wanted.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
They couldn't just, you know, try to engineer Asian elephants with genes they thought might control those traits because it would be unethical given the fact that Asian elephants are endangered.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's exactly how it works. The mice are great little critters for doing these kinds of experiments, seeing the effects of genetic changes, because they reproduce so fast and scientists, you know, they just know how to work with them.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yeah. One change gave the mice hair three times longer than usual. Wow. Another made their coats wavy. Another turned their coats this kind of golden blonde, you know, color like mammoths, et cetera, et cetera.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
That's the idea. I mean, these little creatures, you know, they kind of look like what mammoths would look like if they had a good bath and a blowout. Yeah.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Gina, I'll send you some photos of them right now.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Don't you just want to cuddle up with them? Yes.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yeah, and that's exactly what Beth told me when I talked to her about this.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
And that will enable them to create mammoth-like Asian elephants by genetically engineering Asian elephant embryos with the traits that made the mammoths mammoths. implanting those edited embryos into female Asian elephants, you know, surrogates, to hopefully breed these mammoth-like creatures with the ultimate goal of releasing herds of these creatures back into the Arctic someday.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yep. I'm here this time to talk about little fuzzy squeaky animals.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Well, you know, some other scientists think it's pretty cool, at least on one level. Like, you know, Vincent Lynch. He's a professor of biology at the University of Buffalo.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
But Vincent and others caution, a mouse is not an elephant. So who knows if they could do the same thing with that species.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
And even if they could, Vincent is among those who don't think bringing back the mammoth is such a great idea.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Well, they think, first of all, that the money would be much better spent saving species that are still alive but are on the brink of extinction. Wow. And also, who knows what unintended consequences could result. I talked about this with Carl Flessa. He's a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
How did you know? Yes, indeed. I'm talking about mice. And these aren't just any mice.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Well, Beth and her colleagues, they defend their project. They say reintroducing mammoth-like creatures could actually repair the environment by helping restore the ecosystems where the mammoth once lived.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
And Ben Lamb, Colossal's founder and CEO, says the tools the company's creating in this project could help prevent more species from going extinct.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
The researchers say they hope to produce their first mammoth-like Asian elephant embryos next year.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Yeah. And then they'll implant them into female Asian elephants, which will hopefully give birth to the first mammoth-like Asian elephant calves by 2028. Wow. I'm going to mark my calendar.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
And, you know, Gina, they're also working on bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger. Yeah.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Well, Gina, you've heard of the woolly mammoth, right?
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Exactly. Before they went extinct thousands of years ago, maybe because of climate change and hunting.
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Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Well, because someday some scientists want to bring a mammoth-like creature itself back from extinction.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
It did to me, too, especially when I first heard about it. But it's real. And they're trying to address a very real problem, which is that more than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for transplants in the U.S. And about 17 die every day without getting one because there just aren't enough human organs available.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah. And last month, I was there for the very first transplant surgery of one of the Rivivacor kidneys with these 10 genetic modifications into a living patient.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, I was inside the OR for the entire operation. And, you know, Gina, this is, I should say, very controversial in a lot of ways. I talked to bioethicists and scientists who have a lot of concerns, you know, concerns about the pigs, about the patients themselves who are desperate for anything, and even the possibility that this could cause a pandemic by spreading pig viruses to people.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, yeah. I've been following the developments of a biotech company called Revivacor that's been moving towards a very ambitious goal, and that is to use cloned, genetically modified farm animals to provide organs for transplants for humans.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
So this operating room is in New York City. And in the room, there was this huge screen on the wall with the flight path of one set of surgeons. They're flying back from rural Virginia with two kidneys from one of the cloned geneated pigs being bred at the Rivercore Research Farm.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, I met her a few minutes before they brought her into the OR. She's a 53-year-old grandmother. Her name is Tawana Looney. She donated one of her kidneys to her mother in 1999. A few years later, she developed chronic high blood pressure during her pregnancy, and her remaining kidney failed in 2016. And since then, she's been on dialysis four hours a day, three days a week.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Oh, absolutely. It's very experimental. There have been other patients who've received other kinds of genetic pig kidneys and even hearts, and those organs seem to work well.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, yeah. In fact, I went to visit this farm. I drove down a road through the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia to visit the Rivercore Farm back in February. This farm, it has like 22 buildings and around 300 pigs. We had to change into hospital scrubs before going inside to protect the pigs.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
But the patients in those cases were gravely ill with many other health problems and only survived weeks or maybe months. But like I said earlier, this is the first transplant of this specific kind of genetically modified pig kidney into a living person.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, that's right. In fact, the company's in conversation with the FDA to get approval for this right now, but it hasn't happened yet. So this was an exception to the FDA's usual requirements. It's called a compassionate use case, which, you know, gives patients who are desperately ill and basically have no other options access to experimental treatments.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And Tawana has an especially sensitive immune system, so doctors knew her body would reject a human kidney.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
But in the operating room, everyone was pretty optimistic.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
That's the lead surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery. I watched as an anesthesiologist put Tawana under... Everybody ready? Ready. And then the surgical team got to work. Robert, the surgeon, made an incision in Tawana's lower abdomen to begin painstakingly preparing a spot to implant the pig kidney.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, it was all very dramatic. You know, because as this was happening, the screen on the wall shows the helicopter approaching NYU Langone Health with the pig kidneys. The chopper swooped through the clear blue sky along the East River and sets down on the helipad.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
The arriving crew places a white box about the size of a microwave oven that contains the pig's two kidneys on a wheelchair and rushes it into the operating room.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Exactly. While one team of surgeons was flying back with the pig kidneys, Robert Montgomery, the surgeon, and his team were preparing Tawana to get the transplant. When the chopper arrived with the pig kidneys, they had both the left and right kidneys from the pig, just in case something went wrong with one.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Robert removed them from their plastic bags and then meticulously started preparing one of them. Let's sew this thing in.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, this is a big moment. They check to see if blood from Tawana's body is flowing into the pig kidney for the first time.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, it was very dramatic. They then checked to make sure the kidney was doing its job, which was producing urine. And then she was discharged from the hospital less than two weeks after the surgery, which is earlier than they expected. And yeah, and then I went to visit her at an apartment where she's staying for, you know, probably about three months, not far from the hospital.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
So the doctors can keep an eye on her. And I have to say, she is in amazing spirits. Most of the symptoms that had limited her before the surgery had disappeared.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
They're really careful to make sure visitors don't bring in any pathogens that could infect the pigs. When we went into the buildings, we stepped into these tubs of disinfecting fluid to sterilize our boots. And then I got to see these cloned, genetically modified adult female pigs.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yet, Juana says she'll never forget the first time she peed after the surgery. It was the first time she'd been able to do that in almost eight years.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And she's really looking forward to spending more time with her daughters and grandchildren once she can go home and returning to her job as a cashier at Dollar General, an activity she just couldn't do before.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Oh, absolutely. You know, I talked to other scientists and bioethicists who said there's not a ton of scientific evidence to support these kinds of surgeries. Elsa Johnson is a bioethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. And she told me she's worried about the health of the pigs and about people getting these treatments.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And she says the way it's happening now with individual experiments, all different teams and protocols and organs and different genetic modifications is not the best way to do science. Hmm. Plus, she worries that these operations might be exploiting patients who are desperate for anything that could help them.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
She's also concerned about the possibility of transmitting viruses from animals to patients, even something that could potentially be transmitted from person to person. The fear is another pandemic. In fact, everyone in the operating room that day, including me, is being tested to make sure we didn't catch a big virus.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, tell me about it. But on the other hand, patients like Tawana are out of other options.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
That's the big question. And, you know, Gina, we're in uncharted territory here. No one really knows what's going to happen. In fact, after being discharged early to an apartment near the hospital, Kawana was back in the hospital for a few days because she had to get an additional anti-rejection drug. Yeah, that was a little worrisome. But her pig kidney is still working well, it seems.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And doctors remain optimistic. And that's because, you know, she's a lot healthier than the other patients who had received other kinds of genetically modified organs before this. And also, even if this pig organ does fail, she still has the option to go back on dialysis, despite how unpleasant that would be.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And, you know, Tawana, who's very religious, says she's happy with the decision, despite what she's heard from some of her friends.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Oh, absolutely. I'll definitely be following this one.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And some of them were pregnant with cloned pig embryos that were also genetically modified.
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The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
That's the idea. That's right. They clone these pigs. They all have these 10 identical genetic modifications, and they're designed to make sure their organs, these piglets that are born, don't grow too big, won't cause complications like blood clots, and won't be rejected by the human immune system.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
You know, Michelle, people love to travel and get together with family and friends over the holidays. The bad news is that often means they come home with some nasty bug. I talked about this with Dr. Brendan Jackson from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
And you know, Michelle, the flu in particular is spiking right now. Here's Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
And it's not just the flu. RSV is still spreading at very high levels. So is whooping cough, a bacterium called mycoplasma that can cause walking pneumonia. And let's not forget COVID, which is starting to shoot up yet again.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
Well, you know, no one ever really knows what these viruses. The CDC says that unless some new COVID variant emerges, it still looks like this winter will probably be kind of like last year. But that's not great. It still means lots of kids missing school, parents missing work, grandparents and other vulnerable people ending up in the hospital and even dying.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
Dr. Andrew Pavia studies infectious disease at the University of Utah.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
But even then, a long tail, according to Caitlin Rivers, she's an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.
Up First from NPR
Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
So Rivers and others are recommending people should do all the, you know, usual stuff. Wash their hands a lot, mask up in crowded places, open windows if they can, and of course, get vaccinated. It's not too late.
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Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
Yeah, it's called the human metapneumovirus or HMPV. It's getting a lot of attention because of a surge of respiratory illnesses in the north of China. But the World Health Organization and the CDC say they aren't too worried about it. The WHO says the increase in respiratory illness cases seen in China is within the range expected for this time of year.
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Facebook And MAGA, Winter Virus Season, LA Palisades Fire
HMPV can cause serious complications, but usually only causes a cold. It's nothing compared to the flu, RSV, and COVID, which according to a new CDC estimate is still killing hundreds of people every week.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
You know, it was quite dramatic. I met the patient at NYU Langone Health in New York City just minutes before she was wheeled to the OR. Her name is Tawana Looney. She's 53 from Gadsden, Alabama. How are you feeling this morning?
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
Why are you excited?
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
Looney's immune system would reject a human kidney, so the FDA let her get a pig kidney that's been genetically engineered so her body could accept it, even though this is all very experimental.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
As one team of surgeons started preparing Looney for the kidney, another team flew to rural Virginia to retrieve two kidneys from a modified pig cloned at a biotech company's research farm. After the chopper returned with the kidneys, the surgeon stitched one of them to Looney's blood supply, then started blood flowing from Looney's body into the pig kidney for the first time.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
Let's give a listen.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
Then, Steve, the next test came. That's when surgeons made sure the kidney was doing its job, which is making urine. Wow, beautiful, gorgeous. It's just pouring out. And here's what Dr. Robert Montgomery, the lead surgeon, said right after the seven-hour operation.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
So far, the pig kidney seems to be working great. In fact, Looney was discharged earlier than expected to an apartment near the hospital where doctors are keeping a close eye on her. I visited her there two weeks after the surgery. So how are you doing? I am doing wonderful.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
Now, Steve, it's important to point out that two other patients who got pig kidneys with different modifications died within weeks of their operations. So did two men who got genetically modified pig hearts. But the pig organs seemed to work well in those cases, and they were much sicker than Looney. So doctors are hopeful this time.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
And the hope is that someday genetically modified pigs could provide an unlimited supply of kidneys, livers, hearts, and other organs to help solve the organ shortage.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
But, you know, it's important to point out that there are worries about all this, about pig organs spreading dangerous viruses to people, about breeding and slaughtering thousands of pigs just for their organs, and about experimenting on desperately ill patients like this. So there's still a lot to be worked out.
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Trump Meets CEOs At Mar-A-Lago, School Shooting In Wisconsin, Pig Kidney Transplant
You bet, Steve.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
Well, this is kind of a good news, bad news story. Let's start with the good news. This winter's COVID surge looks like the mildest since the virus first emerged. Here's Caitlin Rivers. She's an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
There's still plenty of people getting it and even ending up in the hospital or worse. So River says people shouldn't let down their guard. Now, when it comes to COVID, though, I mean, why is this winter's COVID wave so mild? Well, one possible explanation is that we went through an unusually intense summer COVID surge that also started relatively late.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
So lots of people may still have some immunity from when they had COVID this summer, but And no new variant has evolved that's any better at getting around the immunity people have built up. There's also a theory called viral interference. That's when the presence of one virus kind of pushes out other viruses. Here's Aubrey Gordon. She's an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
Now, you probably noticed she said there's a lot of flu out there, and that brings us to the bad news.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
Well, this year's flu season started unusually early and has been pretty intense. And now it looks like we're getting hit by a second winter surge of flu. Here's Caitlin Rivers again from Johns Hopkins.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
So it's looking like the intensity of this year's flu season could have a long tail.
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Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
No, no, which is good news. So far, testing hasn't spotted any signs that the whirring bird flu that's infecting dairy cows and poultry is spreading widely in people. So it's a bit of a mystery. It could just be kind of natural variation that happens with the flu.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Justice Department, Disappearing DEI, Flu Peaks Again
That said, the more people who catch the flu, the greater the chances that people could get infected with both viruses, the regular flu and bird flu. And that could give the bird flu the opportunity to kind of swap genes with the regular flu and evolve into something more dangerous. even potentially cause another pandemic. That's NPR health correspondent Rob Stein.