Medicine And The Horseshoe Crab

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

Horseshoe crabs have been around for 450 million years — nearly unchanged. And their blood has helped the medical world make some fascinating discoveries. Emily Kwong talks with Ariela Zebede about these living fossils and their role in making medicine safer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.0	Well, hello there, Ariel is Beady.
0:08.0	What shortwave intern, forever shortwave legend.
0:12.0	Welcome back.
0:13.0	Hi, Emily. I'm so happy to see you.
0:15.0	Same.
0:16.0	And I'm actually coming with some big news today.
0:19.0	Oh, I got vaccinated.
0:21.0	Yay!
0:22.0	Oh, congratulations.
0:25.0	Yeah, they opened it up to all adults in Florida a couple of weeks ago.
0:28.0	So I got a lucky shot.
0:30.0	Amazing.
0:31.0	And you know that I've been waiting for this moment for months.
0:34.0	But once I was actually in the room, the rest was easy.
0:38.0	I got jabbed, I waited 15 minutes, and I left.
0:41.0	But sticking needles in our arms wasn't always such an easy thing.
0:45.0	I talked to Alan Berginson.
0:47.0	He works for the biotech company, Lonza, and he told me...
0:51.0	In the early days of injection, your doctor was literally
0:54.0	taking your life into his hands. He had to decide whether the risk of injection
0:59.0	was worth risking your life.
	...

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