Double-Blasted

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. It’s about a man who experienced maybe one of the most chilling traumas… twice. But then, it leads us to a story of generational repair. On the morning of August 6th, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a work trip. He was walking to the office when the first atomic bomb was dropped about a mile away. He survived, and eventually managed to get himself onto a train back to his hometown... Nagasaki. The very next morning, as he tried to convince his boss that a single bomb could destroy a whole city, the second bomb dropped. Author Sam Kean tells Jad and Robert the incredible story of what happened to Tsutomu, explains how gamma rays shred DNA, and helps us understand how Tsutomu sidestepped a thousand year curse.Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, it's Lathif Nasser. This is Radio Lab.
0:03.6	Now, I'm about to play for you an episode about an event that you know about, that you've read about 100 times in textbooks on Wikipedia pages.
0:16.0	No shortage of accounts of this event.
0:18.4	And yet, the story you are about to hear is one of the most vivid and, in a way, haunting,
0:28.7	in a way beautiful tellings of a singular human experience.
0:33.6	It sort of tells this compelling story on two levels, on a human level, and then on a, literally on a cellular level, even smaller than a cellular level, on a DNA level.
0:46.6	I think it's a tremendous piece of work, and I had nothing to do with making it, so I feel like you can take my word on that.
0:52.5	We first aired it in 2012.
0:54.9	Here it is double blasted.
0:57.0	Wait, wait, you're listening.
0:58.7	Okay.
1:00.0	All right.
1:01.2	Okay.
1:02.5	All right.
1:04.0	You're listening to Radio Lab.
1:06.9	Radio Lab.
1:07.5	From W-N-Y-S.
1:09.6	See?
1:10.7	Yep. Rewind. Radio from W-N-Y-S-A-C.
1:13.1	Rewind.
1:16.9	Sam, are you there?
1:18.0	I'm here.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 22 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.