Mortality: Stories about confronting death
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2018
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week at The Story Collider, we're presenting two stories about confronting death.
Part 1: Science communicator Anthony Morgan receives an invitation to be vacuum-sealed to the bottom of a helicopter -- for science!
Part 2: As a medical student, Elorm Avakame befriends a patient who is dying from alcoholism.
Anthony Morgan is the Creative Director of Science Everywhere!, an organisation devoted to adult science entertainment. The mission is to build science culture through engaging science entertainment for TV, youtube and live events. He's also on the board of a makerspace (Site 3 CoLaboratory) and has a recurring segment on Daily Planet. His background is in neuroscience/psychology and science communication, but he fell in love with science working at the Ontario Science Centre. Since then he’s been finding as many ways and places to "mic drop science" as he can.
Elorm F. Avakame is a Pediatric resident physician at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. He previously earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School and a Master's of Public Policy from the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was also a Sheila C. Johnson Leadership Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership. Elorm is passionate about health issues affecting children in urban communities and wants to make life better for children on the margins.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.8 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.6 | I felt... |
| 0:07.4 | I was so... |
| 0:08.7 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:09.6 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.7 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:27.9 | Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:38.3 | I'm your host, Aaron Barker, and today we're presenting stories about mortality, because we like to keep it light and fun here at the Story Collider, as always. |
| 0:43.8 | This theme makes me think of last September when the Story Clider was traveling through New Zealand. |
| 0:50.2 | And in Christchurch at the Canterbury Museum, they have this whole exhibit dedicated to the explorer Ernest Shackleton, |
| 0:56.0 | because like a lot of Antarctic explorers, he would stop in Christchurch to resupply on his way down there. So while I'm browsing this exhibit, there's this sort of school group there sitting in this big circle around a museum volunteer who's telling them about Shackleton. |
| 1:04.0 | And I'm kind of listening as I browse the exhibits thinking, wow, I hope he's not going into too much detail here with these kids because some of this stuff is pretty grim. |
| 1:13.6 | Like it seems like every other day some member of the crew fell down a crevasse. |
| 1:18.3 | Like there's a real serious crevasse problem in Antarctica, it seems like. |
| 1:23.0 | Next time you're there, look out. |
| 1:25.5 | But then I hear him say to the kids, |
| 1:29.1 | and Shackleton couldn't carry the extra weight of tog food for the sled dogs, so he decided not to bring any, and when a dog |
| 1:34.3 | died of starvation, he would feed it to the other dogs. And I'm like, wow, okay, so he's |
| 1:40.8 | going there. The children took the news, as you might expect. |
| 1:45.3 | And I'm sorry, that was very grim. |
| 1:47.2 | But to be fair, you are listening to a podcast titled Mortality. |
... |
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