Robert Sapolsky
Appearances
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
So that's your explanation. No, that may look like the explanation. I mean, sure, radiation played a role, but if you would have let me say what I was going to say, I would have told you the real explanation preceded the radiation by like a couple hundred years. I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm going to tell you. Back in the 1700s, okay? That far back. That far back.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Before radiation, before your grandpa. Before the Civil War or the Eiffel Tower or Napoleon. I'm talking when the redcoats. We're still wearing red.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Right about this time, says Cebulski, the first med schools started to pop up in America. And a supply and demand issue came into effect. Because with these med schools came med students. Medical students. Who needed to learn about anatomy. And of course, in order to do that, they needed bodies.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Now here's the key point. Since demand was so high, the resurrectionists had to go where the bodies were easiest to get. Which meant, you know, avoiding the fancy graveyards.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
But if you were not wealthy, no fancy coffin for you. You'd probably just be buried in a sack in some pauper's field just a few inches under the soil. Very accessible for these resurrectionists.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Are you explaining why children die? Yes, yes, yes. Bear with me. All right. What I'm trying to make is that the grave robbers targeted the poor. So much so that sometimes when people would catch these resurrectionists in the act and see, like, oh, my God, that's my dad you're digging up, there'd be riots.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
All right, let me bring it home. Not that it hasn't been interesting, but bring it home. Okay. As a result of all of this hubbub over grave robbing, country after country throughout Europe decided... Well, let's standardize how science gets its cadavers. Forget all this grave robbing. So they passed laws.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
This was like the cadaver version of direct deposit. Okay, so grave robbing was gone, but now all the bodies used by medicine, not just some, but nearly all,
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
actually warps your body. And now, Robert, now we come back to the case of the mysteriously enlarged thymus. Because if you're poor, you're worried about your job. You're worried about feeding your family. You're worried about the bills. In other words, you are stressed out.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
For 150 years, doctors had been dissecting cadavers, pointing at organs which they thought were normal, but which were in fact shrunken from a life of poverty and stress, and saying, that's normal! So that when these SIDS babies show up with these gigantic thymuses, oh my god! In fact, that was the first time they'd ever seen a normal one.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
You're going to tell me I'm depressed just from looking at a picture of my brain? Yes.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
I still don't believe you. What, just because he's got a Nobel Prize, I'm going to suddenly turn around? No, no, no, you're not. So let's do this step by step, okay?
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Every time you see a face, same area? Yep. Hmm. But you haven't told me anything about emotions yet. That's true. So let's move on to step two.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Absolutely. You mean to tell me that they're going to put people in machines and just go, boop, OCD, boop, schizophrenic.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
So that's all that's happening here is now the mental doctor will say, I have a test. There's nothing in this that feels invasive to you? Well, obviously tunneling into the deep depths of your personhood.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
So it's like the broken arm thing you started off with. So you would put the two side by side? I think I would. And then, of course, you get to the next. No, come on, Robert. I mean, human beings are way too messy for that. You're too messy for it to be that easy.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
It's just too... There's a part of me that does think it is out of science's reach.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
I do. I mean, don't get me wrong. I find brain scans fascinating when it comes to questions like, where is the soul? What is consciousness? That kind of stuff. But don't kind of get in my head and tell me what's right and what's wrong.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Yes, but I enjoy the comfortable ambiguity that would come from a situation like sitting in a therapist's office and saying, well, how am I feeling? I'm feeling this way or that way. And in the messiness of trying to describe how you're feeling. There's a vast landscape of things that can happen, choices you can make, therapies you can pursue.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
I think I'm a little bit on board. I can give you 10% buy-in now. Okay. So how far off is this stuff? Is it going to come soon?
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Or in 20 years, it'll be obvious that we were wrong. Okay? That's a real possibility because what we don't know is vast. And I want to tell you a story now about just how wrong people can be.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. This hour we're talking about diagnosis.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
And I want to tell you a story now about just how wrong people can be. It begins with a mystery. Sudden infant death syndrome.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
It's about the worst thing that can happen to a parent. And each year, it does happen about 7,000 times. Still no one knows why. Oh, and by the way, that was Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. And Sapolsky tells this story of the moment SIDS was diagnosed for the first time, or at least classified, and a terrible mistake that was made.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
They'd measure the size of the baby's lungs. That looked normal. They'd measure the size of the heart. Nothing strange there. Stomach, kidney, liver. Those are all fine. Then they would look in the throat.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
What is the thymus? Yeah, what is a thymus? Well, it is a little tiny pink gland that is right here, right behind your collarbone, at the base of your throat. And its job is to help you fight disease.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Hmm. In any case, normally this little organ is about the size of a tiny tube of toothpaste, like the tribal kind. But in these sitz kids, it was huge. Humongous. Enormous. Twice the size. Exactly. And since the thymus is dangerously close to the windpipe, doctors came up with a hypothesis. A perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Which was that maybe if you're one of these babies with an enlarged thymus and you're asleep and somehow you roll over wrong...
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Which is that if we're going to help these babies, we've got to shrink their thymus glands. And to do that, the best solution, obviously, is to...
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Zap the child's throat with trillions of radioactive particles. Really? Literally? You betcha. And this was considered like something every good loving parent should do?
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
Yeah, that's a fairly big one. So here's my question. How could these doctors have gotten it so, so, so, so, so wrong? Do you know what I mean?
Radiolab
How to Cure What Ails You
It was a brand new technology. But that's not what I was going to say. Oh, no.