In 1906, a rich family vacationing in Oyster Bay, NY started to get sick. Very sick. It turns out they'd come down with typhoid, a disease forever associated with one woman: Typhoid Mary. You think you know this story, and we thought we knew this story too. But as producer Sean Cole explains, the details reveal a troubling, very human story behind the anecdote. Mary Mallon was the first documented "healthy carrier" (someone who, despite being infected, shows no outward signs of being sick) in North America. It's an idea that seems so familiar, even obvious, to us today, that's it hard to imagine how unreal it must have felt to Mary--who was taken from her home by the police, and quarantined on North Brother Island in a tiny cottage separated from Manhattan by the East River. Sean and producer Lynn Levy pay a visit to the hospital where Mary spent her final days, and historians Judith Walzer Leavitt and David Rosner help us relive her story.

Read more:

Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health

The New York City Parks Department would probably want me to start this way: North Brother Island is a ruin. It hasn’t been occupied, nor used for anything by anyone except nesting herons, since the early 70’s. Thus, it’s dangerous.

At best, you’ll probably walk away with a case of poison ivy. (We were spared somehow.) At worst, you could fall down an open utility shaft. The disused hospital where the city used to isolate tuberculosis patients is crumbling and may be rife with asbestos. Same with the other former medical buildings on the north end of the island. Even walking around is a chore. The whole place is choked with kudzu and porcelain berry. North Brother Island is what will happen to the whole of our civilization when humanity is dead.

Sean on North Brother Island

But I’m actually going to start this way: North Brother Island is more fascinating by accident than most intentionally fascinating places are. It feels as though one day, everyone living and working there just dropped everything and left. It feels as much like that day was yesterday as it feels like it was 100 years ago. The hospital smells medicinal, maybe from all of the x-ray film piled up on the floor of the x-ray room. Random fire hydrants and lamp posts stick up through the thickets and weeds – but soon you realize there’s nothing random about it. There are roads under all that thick overgrowth. And curbs. A curb is so urban a thing this place can’t have ever claimed one, but it did. Roofs and basements should never meet each other, but they do here.

A collapsed building on North Brother Island. Mary lived in a cottage near this spot while under quarantine.

We visited this island for our story on Typhoid Mary. She was quarantined here and we wanted to find her cottage. (It doesn’t exist anymore.) North Brother Island is so close to the city I figured you could just canoe to it. And you can. If you want to be arrested. To visit the island you must:

1) Contact the parks department. They don’t even let themselves visit the island most of the time. March to October is off limits. That’s when the herons nest.

2) If the parks department gives you permission, you have to charter a boat, which can be really expensive. To make it more affordable, find other folks who need to visit and split the cost with them.

3) Thing is, a big group requires a big boat and a big boat can’t dock on the island. There’s no dock. We had to tie off on a rotting piling, motor over in a smaller boat, three by three, and beach ourselves onto the sand. In short, to get to North Brother Island, you have to mildly shipwreck yourself.

We think these quarters were used by nurses on the island.

What to do first:

If you’re pressed for time, explore the buildings first. From the spot where you beach, the hospital is straight ahead and to the left. (Ignore the broken, tilted awning above the entrance that says “Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope.” It’s a practical joke/art project.) But the hospital isn’t even the creepiest place. The creepiest place is (what we think was) the “Nurse’s Home.” Bullet holes perforate an outer door – all exit wounds. All the theater seats in the entertainment hall have collapsed. The curtain runner above the stage would still work were there a curtain. The wall switches still move up and down, with that loud, mid-20th century “tock.” 

The abandoned theater.

A porch in disrepair.

Still, the hospital is pretty incredible. We walked through the wards where TB patients were quarantined. Private rooms were available too, including one with bars on the windows and a door slot through which maybe food was delivered. Whoever was treated in there can’t have been very stable. In one of the offices, there are mimeographed handouts strewn across the floor as though a receptionist had an apoplectic fit and quit on the spot. “STUDIES ON ADDICTION FROM RIVERSIDE HOSPITAL,” they say. After this was (in essence) a leper island, it was a drug rehab facility.

Sean inspects a hospital room.

The view from the hospital room.

What to do next:

Walk south toward the lighthouse, past the smooshed chapel that looks like the house that landed on the witch in the Wizard of Oz. Keep an eye on the water until a sparkling view of Manhattan emerges. Seeing the city from this remove is a little like seeing Earth from the moon – especially if you imagine you’re Mary Mallon and aren’t allowed to go home, no matter how much you plead or cajole the doctors who are constantly testing your stool. It doesn’t feel like any place in the East River should ever have been so built up and inhabited, let alone so abandoned and allowed to melt down like this.

View of Manhattan through a broken fence.

Whatever you do, remember you’re one of a rare breed of people who have seen North Brother Island. So count yourself lucky. Oh, and take lots of pictures. Like our producer Lynn Levy did. This is Lynn:

Lynn Levy braving the ruins.

Thanks Lynn.

Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You'd probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even touched it.

Radiolabber Sean Cole explains that, long ago, death masks were a common way of preserving the faces of famous people--clay moulds were made of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and so on. But one of the most famous death masks was of a woman who wasn't famous at all when she was alive. BBC producer Jeremy Grange tells the story of this face, known simply as "L'inconnue de la Seine" (the unknown woman of the Seine), and how it found its way into living rooms across Europe.

Fast forward to 1960. An Austrian doctor named Peter Safar was developing the basics of CPR, and he needed a way for people to practice his new method. He tracked down a toy maker in Norway, Asmund Laerdal, who had constructed prosthetic wounds for use in military training. Little did Safar know that Laerdal had a compelling, personal reason for getting involved. Ultimately, Laerdal decided the best way to learn artificial resuscitation would to practice on a dummy. All he needed was the perfect face. 

Asmund Laerdal with the CPR doll Resusci Anne.

Sean tells Jad & Robert how the dummy got her face, and about the real woman behind the mask.

L'inconnue (wiki commons) and Resusci Anne (Phil_Parker/flickrCC-BY-2.0)

A listener named "Ovid" posted an intriguing comment on our Death Mask podcast--about yet another l'inconnue sighting. She lives! (And dies. And lives. Over and over again. And that's why we love her.) 

Ovid writes:

I live in Bagnolet, a Paris suburb.

After listening to the story this past week, I went on one of my regular Sunday strolls at one of the Paris flea markets (Montreuil) near my house. At one of the few stands worth stopping, I stumbled upon a yellow glazed plaster of the "l'Inconnue." It was too weird. I had to buy it!  Scotch-taped on its back was a old Figaro newspaper article from 1988. A review of a "new" book by Didier Blonde about this mysterious woman. The article was titled: "Quete et enquete autour de l'Inconnue de la Seine" signed, Jean-Rene Van Der Plaetsen. (He still writes for the Figaro.) Add to that the fact that the sweet old lady - the vendor - wrapped it in a white cloth and placed it in double plastic bags and you have the full picture of my experience.

Ovid's plaster cast:

And a view from the side:

A shot of the back:

The l'Inconnue, is now part of my modest museum of oddities. The more we read about the mystery surrounding this enigmatic figure, the more skeptical we become about the myth that developed around her. From all the conflicting accounts one thing seems to emerge as the more plausible subject of the "mask"- that she was in all likeliness a living person at the time of the cast. But we all love the more nuanced version anyway.

Thank you Radiolab.

Thanks Ovid!

In the mid-1950's, a blind seven-year-old boy named Joe Engressia Jr. made a discovery that changed his own life and many others. While idly dialing information on the family telephone, he heard a high-pitched tone in the background and started whistling along with it. Slowly, he learned to recognize all kinds of tones, pulses, clicks and beeps that the phone system used to talk to itself. And when he got good at decoding those sounds, he became the grandaddy of a whole movement of like-minded obsessives known as "phone phreaks." Phreaking-historian Phil Lapsley explains how Joe and his phreak-brothers explored the hidden arteries of Ma Bell. And Joe's friend Steven Gibb helps us understand how telephony was the key to Joe's great escape--out of the adult world and into an idyllic childhood he never had, complete with a new name.

A couple of weeks ago, we aired a story by Ari Daniel Shapiro about a type of single-celled sea plankton called coccolithophores (or as we’ve been calling them around the office, “coccos.”)

We love coccos.

1. They’re pretty – covered in little, white, chalky shields.

2. They’re underdogs – always getting the tar kicked out of them by particularly virulent viruses. (That’s what the shields are for. Protection. It doesn’t work.)

3. Spoiler alert here: you can see carnage of the Cocco vs. Virus war from space, reminding us once again that science is really, really cool.

A massive bloom of phytoplankton in the Barents Sea. The milky blue color strongly suggests that it contains coccolithophores. [Image and caption via NASA Earth Observatory]

Anyhow, at a certain point in the story, we learn that the viruses that attack the coccos are the virus version of huge. They’re “the leviathans of the virus world,” says our expert. Of course, in the scope of things, that’s still extremely small – smaller even than coccolithophores, which are microscopic.

Scanning electron micrograph of a virus attached to the surface of an Emiliania huxleyi cell. The virus particle on the right hand cell is approx. 180 nm in diameter. [Dr Keith Ryan, Marine Biological Association & Dr Willie Wilson, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, via Genome Research Limited /CC-BY-3.0]

It’s a hard thing to wrap your brain around: a giant thing that’s also a teensy thing ... but still massive next to a larger teensy thing. Luckily, we found possibly the greatest visual aid for this ever. It’s called “The Scale of the Universe.” Click that link right now to load it up, because it takes a while. True to its name, it's a scalable chart of various animals, vegetables, and minerals in the known universe, i.e. what they look like and how big they look next to similarly-sized things. For example, if you zoom in past dust mite, past paramecium, all the way down to the cell nucleus range, you’re in the arena of Cocco vs. Virus. Look beyond the cell nucleus to the middle of the frame. See that black dot? That’s the largest known virus. Zoom in further. It looks scary right? Up close like that? Now zoom out and look around. You’ll notice things you may not have known. “Smallest Thing Visible to Human Eye” is actually smaller than “Human Egg,” which in turn is smaller than “Thickness of Paper.” Now keep zooming, in and out, however you choose. You’ll meet beings you may have never heard of. You'll imagine this place we all inhabit, the world, the universe, in ways you never have before. It’s amazing.

What makes “The Scale of the Universe” even more amazing is that it was built by two 14-year-old boys in California, Cary and Michael Huang. Cary got the idea after learning about the relative sizes of cells in school. But the chart wasn’t built for school. He and his brother did it just for fun. Cary says it took a year and a half. We’re pointing this out because it shows a dedication and attention to detail, for zero reward other than pure satisfaction, that you almost never see. And we just wanted to thank the Huangs for that.

In our most recent short The Turing Problem, we spend a fair amount of time talking about Alan Turing's “universal machine.” It was wholly imaginary: a contraption comprised of an infinitely long strip of tape, a little nubbin that reads and writes numbers on the tape, and a set of instructions. (Hypothetically: “if 1 is present move to the left and write another 1.” Something like that.) Those three ingredients were the nascent seeds of the modern computer. Real computers. With real working parts. A thought made metal.

Well, after our centennial celebration of Turing ran, an observant listener named “Steve” (thank you Steve) sent us to the website of a REAL Turing Machine– not computer born out of Turing's initial idea, but an actual physical manifestation of the whole tape-stylus-instructions formula. A total madman named Mike Davey actually built one of these things. Here's a video of it in action (and thank you to Mike Davey for such an fitting tribute to Turing’s work):

To get things started, Jad ris fascinated by the first paragraph of an article by Mary Roach, in which she makes a bold claim about a daring attempt to provide proof that there is life after death. She tells us the story of Thomas Lynn Bradford and his journey to the other side.

Then, producer Sean Coleintroduces us to a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile who turned up in Paris near the end of the 19th century. She became a huge sensation--even though she happened to be dead. You'd probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even touched it.

BBC producer Jeremy Grange tells the story of this face, known simply as "L'inconnue de la Seine" (the unknown woman of the Seine), and how it found its way into living rooms across Europe...until a toy maker in Norway realized it would be the perfect face for a new dummy he creating to help a doctor teach his new method for saving lives: CPR.

Asmund Laerdal, a toy maker in Norway who developed a dummy to help doctor Peter Safar teach CPR, with the doll Resusci Anne.

L'inconnue (wiki commons) and Resusci Anne (Phil_Parker/flickrCC-BY-2.0)

Read more:

Mary Roach,   Spook

Mel Blanc was known as "the man of 1,000 voices," but the actual number may have been closer to 1,500. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety, Barney Rubble -- all Mel. His characters made him one of the most beloved men in America. And in 1961, when a car crash left him in a coma, these characters may have saved him.

Mel Blanc wasn't just a voice man. He created entire personalities, each with its own nuances and hilarious quirks. His son Noel Blanc says his dad invested so much into Bugs, Porky, Daffy, Tweety et al that Mel's face and body would transform with every cartoon animal that spoke through him. This summer, our producer Sean Cole interviewed Noel at the Blanc family house on Big Bear Lake outside of LA. Sean had heard a crazy story about Mel nearly dying in a crash on Dead Man's Curve on Hollywood Boulevard -- and about the moment two weeks later when Bugs Bunny emerged from Mel's coma before Mel did. In fact, according to neurosurgeon Louis Conway who attended to Mel at the time, it seemed as though Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life.

Sean, Noel, Dr. Conway and NYU brain scientist Orrin Devinsky weigh over what it might mean to be rescued by a figment of your own imagination, and whether one self can win out over another in a moment of crisis.

"Dead's Man Curve," which Jan and Dean immortalized in song, is just north of UCLA's Drake Stadium on Sunset Boulevard. According to Mel Blanc's autobiography "That's Not All Folks," age-old plans to straighten the curve were finally approved after his accident.

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Mel Blanc's mountain respite still sits on Big Bear Lake -- a town he made famous in song and which deemed him honorary mayor for more than 30 years. His son Noel and Noel's wife Katherine live there now. I visited them on their wedding anniversary last June. Parts of the house pay museum-y tribute to Mel's genius.

I wish I'd brought a better camera to Big Bear Lake. The majestic vistas in the distance, as you drive east from LA, are enough to make you gasp (as is the altitude --  Big Bear sits at 6,750 feet). Sadly, I only had my puny camera phone. The phone part was vastly more important though. Even with GPS, it's easy to get lost on the way to the house that Mel Blanc built here in 1936. So Noel, Mel's son and keeper of his legacy, "talked me in" once the serpentine mountain highway spat me onto a local road. Chez Blanc sits on the lake proper. Mel used to yank fish out of that water. Once upon a time, Mel, Noel and Elvis Presley motored out in a boat together and happened upon Roy Rogers motoring toward them. Needless to say, there's a pile of history in that spot. And much of it is immortalized in photos, in trinkets...even in a mural in Noel and Katherine's bedroom, depicting a cartoon Mel posing with the bunny that brought him into nearly every American household.

Toward the back of the house is the presidential wall, replete with pictures and letters from Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bush the Elder. But, for whatever reason, Mel liked to keep most of his photos in a tiny bathroom near the entrance. They're still there, including this immortalization of his zany grin beside an NBC microphone.  

But to get a true appreciation of Mel Blanc's versatility, check out this interview with David Letterman (embedded here from YouTube) circa 1981. Mel was about the same age that Noel is now.

That's all folks!

We turn to doctors to save our lives -- to heal us, repair us, and keep us healthy. But when it comes to the critical question of what to do when death is at hand, there seems to be a gap between what we want doctors to do for us, and what doctors want done for themselves.

Producer Sean Cole introduces us to Joseph Gallo, a doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins University who discovered something striking about what doctors were not willing to do to save their own lives. As part of the decades-long Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, Gallo found himself asking the study's aging doctor-subjects questions about death. Their answers, it turns out, don't sync up with the answers most of us give.

Ken Murray, a doctor who's written several articles about how doctors think about death, explains that there's a huge gap between what patients expect from life-saving interventions (such as CPR, ventilation, and feeding tubes), and what doctors think of these very same procedures.

Jad attempts to bridge the gap with a difficult conversation -- he asks his father, a doctor, why he's made the decisions he has about his own end-of-life care... and whether it was different when he had to answer the same questions for his father and mother.

A chart of doctor responses from the Precursors Study:

Preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness. Percentage of physicians shown on the vertical axis. For cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), surgery, and invasive diagnostic testing, no choice for a trial of treatment was given. Data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, 1998. Courtesy of Joseph Gallo, "Life-Sustaining Treatments: What Do Physicians Want and Do They Express Their Wishes to Others?"

Jad and Robert wonder if maybe they could add to their color pallet. Jay Neitz wondered the same thing, sort of. Take a monkey that can't see red, for example. Couldn't you just give them the red cones they were missing? So he took the human gene for red cones, figured out a way to inject it into the eyes of a group of squirrel monkeys, and he started doing vision tests. Day after a day for weeks. Until something remarkable happened.

And that got us thinking. Could you take Jay's experiment even further? Could add whole new cones to see a whole new universe of wavelenghts? According to Jay, we might not need to. Because it just so happens, there are already people walking around with an extra cone. Producer Tim Howard tracked down a real-life tetrachromat named Susan Hogan, then drove out to Pittsburgh to meet her and Jason LaCroix ...and administer a quick vision test that made it clear that who sees what is anything but black and white.

Next, Victoria Finlay introduces us to special strain of yellow goop: Gamboge. It's a particular kind of tree sap, from the border area between Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand.  It takes years to collect a big enough blob to sell to paint suppliers. And in the course of those years, the sap collects a souvenirs of the things happening around it. Robert and producer Sean Cole headed to Kremer Pigments in NYC to take a look at a lump of the stuff, and Ian Garrett, the former technical director of the art supply store Winsor & Newton, tells us how the sap revealed the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields.

Photo courtesy of Ian Garrett, Winsor & Newton.

A squirrel monkey named Dalton performing a vision test after receiving Jay Neitz's gene therapy:

Some things are simply unknowable, from the pain another person feels to the reasons why they commit horrible acts. In this hour, we meet people who are trying to measure and make sense of things they can’t quite grasp -- from the quest to pin down a standard measurement for pain, to a pair of performers who, night after night, step on stage with absolutely no plan.

When TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi get on stage they introduce themselves, work the crowd a bit ... and then, the lights go off. And when the lights come back on, they're just standing there, staring at each other. The audience is waiting, wondering what's going to happen. And so are TJ and Dave. There are no audience suggestions to kick off the show, there’s no plan -- TJ and Dave begin each night as a complete blank, without even a glimmer of an idea about who they're going to be for the next hour, where they'll find themselves, or what might happen with all those eyes on them. And yet, so far without fail, an elaborate, operatic, two-person play filled with incredibly rich characters and situations emerges. Robert and producer Sean Cole talk to TJ and Dave about stepping into the unknown, take a peek into one of their performances, and discover a very unusual strategy for dealing with the stress of having no idea what's going to happen.

From a duel with the world's deadliest disease to a surprising peek into the way doctors think about death, in this hour Radiolab tries to reckon with the grim reaper. And, in the end, we confront the question at the heart of it all — when the time comes to finally leave, how do we want to go?   

We turn to doctors to save our lives -- to heal us, repair us, and keep us healthy. But when it comes to the critical question of what to do when death is at hand, there seems to be a gap between what we want doctors to do for us, and what doctors want done for themselves.

Producer Sean Cole introduces us to Joseph Gallo, a doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins University who discovered something striking about what doctors were not willing to do to save their own lives. As part of the decades-long Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, Gallo found himself asking the study's aging doctor-subjects questions about death. Their answers, it turns out, don't sync up with the answers most of us give.

Ken Murray, a doctor who's written several articles about how doctors think about death, explains that there's a huge gap between what patients expect from life-saving interventions (such as CPR, ventilation, and feeding tubes), and what doctors think of these very same procedures.

Jad attempts to bridge the gap with a difficult conversation -- he asks his father, a doctor, why he's made the decisions he has about his own end-of-life care... and whether it was different when he had to answer the same questions for his father and mother.

A chart of doctor responses from the Precursors Study:

Preferences of physician-participants for treatment given a scenario of irreversible brain injury without terminal illness. Percentage of physicians shown on the vertical axis. For cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), surgery, and invasive diagnostic testing, no choice for a trial of treatment was given. Data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, 1998. Courtesy of Joseph Gallo, "Life-Sustaining Treatments: What Do Physicians Want and Do They Express Their Wishes to Others?"

Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? This hour, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a way inside us, shaping not just our hearts and minds, but the basic biological blueprint that we pass on to future generations.

In this short, costumed scientists create a carefully choreographed childhood for a flock of whooping cranes to save them from extinction. It's the ultimate feel-good story, but it also raises some troubling questions about what it takes to get a species back to being wild.

Perched in a duck blind in a wildlife research center outside of Washington, D.C., Andrea Seabrook gets a glimpse of her first whooping crane: a tall, snowy-white bird on stalky legs with a bright red-crested head. It's no surprise she had to drive to Maryland and hide in a tiny shack to see one -- less than a hundred years ago, there were just 16 whooping cranes left, and only 4 breeding females. 

Now scientists like John B. French are taking these cranes under their wings to keep them from dying out. It's no easy task -- the scientists go to ludicrous lengths to teach these cranes how to survive in the wild, while making sure the cranes never know they're interacting with humans. Chicks nestle with taxidermied moms, are taught the basics of crane life by puppet-wielding researchers wearing white cloth suits, and are led across the country by ultralight planes (piloted, of course, by a crane-suited human).

Crazily enough, it seems to be working -- there are now somewhere around 500 whooping cranes in the wild, 30 times more than there were in the 1930s.

But that's not quite the whole story. Andrea tells us about a sad mystery in the middle of this monumental effort -- one very crucial moment where things go terribly wrong. She and John French explain the strange behavior that has crane champions worried, and what might be causing it.

*Image of whooping crane at Patokah River National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana on its migration south. Steve Gifford/USFWS/flickrCC-BY-2.0.

For more on whooping cranes, check out Operation Migration's site for tons of amazing photos and info. And take a look at their YouTube channel, where we found this video of a friendly puppet teaching a whooping crane chick how to eat and drink:

Flip through this slideshow of whooping crane photos from the US Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters:

Moments of total, world-shaking bliss are not easy to come by. Maybe that's what makes them feel so life-altering when they strike. And so worth chasing. This hour: stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and ideals.

Is reality an ethereal, mathematical poem... or is it made up of solid, physical stuff? In this short, we kick rocks, slap tables, and argue about the nature of the universe with Jim Holt.

It's comforting to think that if you take an object -- a rock, let's say -- and break it down into tinier and tinier more elemental parts, that that's exactly what you end up with: smaller and smaller particles until you reach the smallest. And voila! Those are the building blocks of everything around us.

But as Jim Holt, author of Why Does the World Exist? points out... that's an old worldview that no longer jives with modern-day science. If you start slicing and sleuthing in subatomic particle land -- trying to get to the bottom of what makes matter -- you mostly find empty space. Your hand, your chair, the floor...it's all made up of mostly of nothing. So what makes it all take shape?

Robert and Jim go toe-to-toe for a friendly dust-up over whether, at its very base, the universe is made up of solid bits and pieces of stuff...or a cloudy foundation that, more than anything else we can put our fingers on, resembles thoughts and ideas.