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Radiolab / December 05, 2008

Radiolab

Friday, December 05, 2008
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    Diagnosis

    Humans love to solve problems. In this day and age, we have astonishing technology available as tools to help us---chemicals and computers and machines that can pinpoint things imperceptible to humans. But humans aren't quite obsolete. Intuition and creativity still lead the way both in discovering that nature of the problem, and in dealing with that knowledge.

Putting Together the Puzzle

A young woman's apartment goes up in flames and a dashing young man saves the day! But to firefighter Louis Garcia, evidence at the scene didn't quite add up....at least, they didn't quite add up to that. He hunts down the source of the blaze.

Family X has suffered for generations from a deadly "curse." Most of the men in the family died, some at very young ages, from a particularly lethal form of pancreatic cancer. Seeking to break the pattern, a father comes to Dr. Teri Brentnall and her research partner Dr. Mary Bronner for answers. Reporter Lu Olkowski follows their decade-long race to find the source of the disease, in which Teri and Mary find themselves drawing blood samples in the bathroom of a sandwich shop and pulling in other researchers to ferret out answers. A dream team of researchers, including Drs. Brentnall and Bronner , Dr. Ru Chen, Dr. Tatjana Crnogorac-Jurcevic, Dr. Sally Down, Dr. Carol Otey, Dr. Kay Pogue-Geile, and Dr. Kara White Moyes, toiled until they could announce a powerful discovery.

The Frowners

Meet Emanuel Frowner. Ever since he was a little boy, Emanuel was... different. He had trouble making friends. He had trouble looking you in the eye. His brother thought he needed psychological help, but his dad didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong, and worried that a diagnosis would hold him back. Flash forward 25 years, Emanuel’s now a grown man who’s sought a psychological diagnosis. What he finds out will change everything. But the tough question remains, did his dad’s attitude end up helping or hurting him in the end? Reporter Gregory Warner takes us on a search for answers.

How To Cure What Ails You

Now that we have the ability to see inside the brain without opening anyone's skull, we'll be able to map and define brain activity and peg it to behavior and feelings. Right? Well, maybe not, or maybe not just yet. It seems the workings of our brains are rather too complex and diverse across individuals to really say for certain what a brain scan says about a person. But Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel and researcher Cynthia Fu tell us about groundbreaking work in the field of depression that just may help us toward better diagnosis and treatment.

Anything that helps us treat a disease better is welcome. Doctors have been led astray before by misunderstanding a disease and what makes it better. Neurologist Robert Sapolsky tells us about the turn of the last century, when doctors discovered that babies who died inexplicably in their sleep has thymus glands that seemed far too large. Blasting them with radiation shrank them effectively, and so was administered to perfectly healthy children to prevent this sudden infant death syndrome...