Playing God

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

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

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When people are dying and you can only save some, how do you choose? Maybe you save the youngest. Or the sickest. Maybe you even just put all the names in a hat and pick at random. Would your answer change if a sick person was right in front of you?

In this episode, first aired back in 2016, we follow New York Times reporter Sheri Fink as she searches for the answer. In a warzone, a hurricane, a church basement, and an earthquake, the question remains the same. What happens, what should happen, when humans are forced to play God?

Very special thanks to Lilly Sullivan.

Special thanks also to: Pat Walters and Jim McCutcheon and Todd Menesses from WWL in New Orleans, the researchers for the allocation of scarce resources project in Maryland - Dr. Lee Daugherty Biddison from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Howie Gwon from the Johns Hopkins Medicine Office of Emergency Management, Alan Regenberg of the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Dr. Eric Toner of the UPMC Center for Health Security.

Episode Credits:

Reported by - Reported by Sheri Fink.Produced by - Produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.

Citations:

Articles:You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: www.nytimes.com/triageBooks: The book that inspired this episode about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial, now a series on Apple TV+.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, Lula Miller here with an intense episode. We're going to play one today that is
0:07.2	from the archives. We made it back in 2016 in collaboration with the New York Times,
0:13.2	where we take on the concept of triage, a word that at its core means sorting the value of lives.
0:22.4	This topic is really tricky. Do you save the oldest, the youngest, the people with the most
0:31.6	medical training? Do you pick it randomly? These questions are obviously just as relevant and unanswered
0:39.6	today, and we thought it would be a good time to take a listen back, produced by Simon Adler,
0:46.4	and Annie McEwen with reporting from Sherry Think, playing God.
0:52.1	Wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab.
1:01.7	From WNYC.
1:11.1	By the way, we're going to start with Kosovo, but when did you as a writer become obsessed with all of this?
1:16.4	Well, this obsession about triage came about when I was working on my last book.
1:25.6	This is Sherry Think reporter from the New York Times. She's the author of the book Five Days at
1:30.0	Memorial, which was about triage and an emergency in Hurricane Katrina. We brought Sherry in to tell us
1:35.6	a series of stories that grew out of the reporting she did for that book, but we actually are going to
1:40.3	start with some tales before she wrote the book when she was at the border of Kosovo and Macedonia.
1:46.6	So this was back in 1999.
1:49.4	The US and other, I think, NATO allies were involved in a bombing campaign in Serbia.
2:02.9	This is basically like the last gasp of war in the former Yugoslavia. You had Serbia attacking
2:08.6	ethnic Albanians and Kosovo. NATO was trying to protect them, bombing Serbia, which was creating a
2:14.4	huge exodus of refugees. Now, Sherry, at the time, was not yet fully a reporter. She was
2:21.6	fresh out of med school, volunteering at a human rights organization, working on a book
2:26.4	about a war hospital in Bosnia. And since she knew the landscape, she was able to convince this
	...

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