ROBERT: So, of course the folks at the Vivarium asked him. This was a really radical place at the time because you have to remember that people studying animals up till now, they were basically studying preserved specimens, and so on. We neuter them.". After I've gotten to know so many of the women. He thought that you could kind of engineer societies by changing the environment. SAM KEAN: Really slowly, gradually, achingly slowly. Nobody has a right to do that to a baby. In any case, these books tell you when each of these folks died, how they died. DESTINY HARRIS: Honestly, I think it never seemed like she was anything but my real mom, if that makes sense. [1] Radiolab was founded by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich in 2002. BARBARA HARRIS: And I was a waitress, I worked for IHOP for over 30 years. Famine again, and these changes would just bounce back and forth. To any drug-addicted woman who will agree to have no more babies. What's happening during this time is that you're setting aside the stock of cells that you're going to draw on in the future to make sperm cells. MICHAEL MEANEY: I was an undergraduate student. In just two generations, these toads seem to have done something that should have taken, I don't know, 50, 100 generations? But then, a few years would pass, crops would bounce back. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. ], That's their choice, but the babies don't have a choice.]. LATIF: Oh you said it so much more diplomatically. We ended up talking to the guy who did the work. He thought that because theyre swinging hammers all day, they got big bulky muscles, and then theyd pass the muscles to their children. You got your good parents and your bad parents. There were four girls and Barbara and Destiny told me that a few years ago they found three of them and they all either were in college or had finished college. Do you have any theories for how this tongue is tickling the DNA, or whatever it's doing? This week The Science Show introduces Radiolab from WNYC in New York City. MICHAEL MEANEY: Yeah, it drifts into something like a shopping channel. JAD: What's he talking about? As a parent, you are a tiny blip in a very, very, long story. Can you say oh my goodness? PAT: Lynn has become one of Barbara's fiercest critics. Yes. Or is it? Filled with dozens of letters from women that she's paid. He'd fall asleep and just wake up screaming. More brain cells? So, the thought is, when those little boys in verkalix were really, really hungry, their hunger started a chemical process that reached all the way down to the DNA inside the boy's sperm. And when methyl groups stick to that part of the DNA, the maternal instinct is effectively turned off. But according to Kammerer, here's what happened when he heated up the toads little cage. Visit our website. PAT: And she says, one day, this idea just came to her. You know, just take a little peek for themselves, and every time Kammerer said no, they were his specimens. Barbara Harris's solution is simpler than anything else out there. BARBARA HARRIS: "I want to thank you for your support and kindness as always." Females seem to hate laying eggs in the water, but is that the end of the story? JAD: His reputation was that he could get inside the mind of, say, a salamander and know just what it wanted to eat. That's how we ended up with four of them. Putting this into context, you know, you have a rat mom and they have about 16 to 20 babies. Through all the training that we had to do and first aid, fingerprinted and had a background check done. Well, the DNA, the RNA, micro-RNAs, histone. So this whole debate, two totally different ways of seeing life. ], You get them $200 each, which they can spend on crack. ], [ARCHIVAL CLIP, BARBARA HARRIS: That's their choice, but the babies don't have a choice.]. LATIF: And as of 11:01 a.m. on Tuesday, when we're recording this, we have not broken the show. I find myself thinking like, Okay, I know these kids have their genes half from me, half from my wife. And in one day, we can imagine, he gets curious. JAD: And what about the four kids that weren't raised with Barbara? She should be with me. So. Because when a woman uses heroin while she's pregnant, the fetus gets hooked on it too. BARBARA HARRIS: This is 750 and this is 200. CARL ZIMMER: He was mighty skeptical. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record. It's off-limits. And when it came time to mate, the males and the females, they would mate in the water. Isaiah would sleep and he would scream. LULU: Did you know there is a part of this show is gonna be like crazy breaking news, like happened yesterday and we already have a deep take on it? Saying the mother had given birth to a baby girl, did we want her? That's how I've always looked at it. I do mean that. BARBARA HARRIS: I already knew that if I ever got a little girl, I was going to name her Destiny. And the incredible thing is, those marks stick around. PAT: Like shed give the women a choice. I had a little basketball for her. That is a bad way to start a kid's life but that's just the beginning of the kid's life. I decided to have a press conference in my front yard to announce what I was doing. JAD: Thanks to Olov Bygren, reporter Pejk Malinovski and KARIN BORGKVIST LJUNG: Karin Borgkvist Ljung, and I'm a senior archivist at the National Archive in Marieberg in Stockholm. SAM KEAN: And at a time when you're not making the best decisions anyway. PAT: And I told Destiny I was thinking about this and asked her about it. And The other day someone was whistling and I was like, "Stop it", and it just hit me, I was like, "Oh God, I was him", it's never appeared until now. CARL ZIMMER: Kammerer puts on a suit and he walks off into the mountains SAM KEAN: Outside Vienna on a Rocky mountain trail. ROBERT: Because it's got the thing stuck to it? Anyhow, so you got this guy, Paul Kammerer, who's good with animals. CARL ZIMMER: She carries your kids for nine months and you're like, "That poor male toad.". Well, it was a zoo where there was all sorts of experiments going on. MICHAEL MEANEY: I think the Swedish data are really, really strong, and very reliable. They like to hang out in the water and the females like to lay eggs in the water. She's 20 months old. JAD: [expletive] That was awesome. I'm Sam Kean's dad. PAT: Last I heard she was living on the streets in LA. ROBERT: What a name, you've got to like this guy. ROBERT: But then, a few years would pass, crops would bounce back. She's 22 now and she's never even met her birth mom. So that's fun. Sample Page; ; PAT: Could you just tell us what you are doing now? I have to be creative.". And Barbara is not offering that. Move on to the next cage, yes, no? ROBERT: Or how much humidity it preferred. So she told me Barbara had another baby and Did we want it? I just didn't think. JAD: In any case, what they saw at the end of all this counting wasWell, first of all, what they saw was this pattern that rat pups who got licked a lot as babies, when they grew up, they licked their babies a lot and the rat pups who didn't get licked a lot, when they grew up, they didn't lick their babies. Okay, all right, this is interesting. Three of them ended up in other foster homes and seem to have done pretty well, but one of them DESTINY HARRIS: Okay, well of them, don't really know what happened to her. It's a guided audio tour through cities where Radiolab Ken Burns and others. PAT: Did that scare you at all? Kalia came too. I mean, youre just youre saying a lot of things that are really impressive. SAM KEAN: You feel kind of hemmed in by what your grandfather did? You mean, if you had a starving grandfather, you would be a healthier boy for the because you had a starving grandfather? This is spooky because it's like JAD: It means what if grandpa has a bad day? The bit of DNA that will give this baby when it grows up the instincts to be nice to its baby, and lick that baby. Okay, you want to say bye? Is that a genetic hatred of whistling that I just had? DESTINY HARRIS: Oh my goodness. ROBERT: If your grandpa didn't starve, instead he lived through great times. ", In other words, "Could I pay women who have drug problems to stop having babies?". Or is it? This, of course, is Destiny. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information. Like, "How did this happen? JAD: Turning down a job that they'd offered him. That's what I remember her saying. So here's what you're going to notice. JAD: Thanks to Frances Champagne and Michael Meany and Sam Kean, who writes about Paul Kammerer in his book, The Violinist's Thumb. So that was just funny to me. JAD: Lamarck said, You wanna know how a giraffe got its long neck?, JAD: One day this giraffe, mother giraffe, lets say, was looking up in the tree and saw some fruit, and had to stretch he neck, and stretch again. She and I snuck away from the children into her office. SAM KEAN: He extended this idea to people. If you were a boy in verkalix between the ages of 9 and 12 years old, that's the window, 9 to 12, you're a boy, and then we have one of those terribly rough winters, and you're eating much less than normal. BARBARA HARRIS: Because he couldn't hold formula down. FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: Methyl groups are pretty sticky, they're hard to get off. Kammerer, for one, was sent off to work as a sensor for the Austrian military. Right away, people accused her of targeting women at their weakest moment and enabling their drug abuse. FRANCES CHAMPAGNE: Yes, yes. JAD: I think all parents do this, is that you slip into this Lamarckian delusion that JAD: What you do with your kids can somehow rewrite all of that. Who now works at Columbia University. ROBERT: Instead of dying at 40, I'd live to 70? She is nine. How much of you will echo into the future and how much of you won't? But here's what I did not know about DNA. He thought that you could kind of engineer societies by changing the environment. Because while you might have a lot of influence, you know, genetically speaking, over your kids and their kids, you don't seem to have a lot of control. LULU: A really good radiolab about this called Inheritance. BARBARA HARRIS: I'm not saying that these women are dogs but they're not acting any more responsible than a dog in heat. ROBERT: Are you near the Arctic Circle or OLOV BYGREN: My home village was 10 miles North of polar circle. More of this particular protein. Did that scare you at all? ROBERT: They won't grow much on the outside, but on the inside OLOV BYGREN: That is the time where the sperms are developing. ROBERT: Because the Soviets, they believe in Karl Marx's idea that human beings were an improvable species, that if you can change the conditions around people, you change the people. You're finishing college, right? Although, you know, sometimes that your grandfather's suffering helps you. [ARCHIVAL CLIP, Jad Abumrad: Well lets lets read the book first. I know I've been joking a lot in this interview, but I mean it with all that I am. I mean, yes, I might get a great family, but I might not. PAT: Barbara says they've reached out to her many times but they never heard back. These are women who love their children, who sought help. We'll just be honest. Its something I still think about all the time. JAD: The sneaky idea here is that the blacksmiths, the giraffes, they made it happen. 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