Over the last few decades we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies,

ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethicists consider these innovations

they return to the same questions. Just because we can do

something does it mean we should and who gets to make these kinds of decisions?

Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications

they have for our everyday lives.

Listen to playing God. Pushkin.

A strange thing happened to me in the library a while back.

I needed to pick up a few books. This was before

the quarantine. A question was nagging me. It had been nagging me for a long time.

Who killed truth?

This truth problem, it isn't just bad.

It's deadly.

It's also way older than it might seem.

This mystery, it's historical. I'm Jill

LePore and I'm a historian at Harvard and a staff writer at the New Yorker. I spend a

lot of time trying to solve mysteries like this one.

So anyway, I was at the library.

At first, everything seemed normal.

Oh, hum.

I swiped my card, took the elevator down to the basement, and started pulling volumes off the shelves.

And then I saw it, something I never seen before down here.

...