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Worth

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Shahib Al-Masawa Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim HowardFact-checking by - Michelle Soraka EPISODE CITATIONS: Books - Memoir of A Debulked (https://zpr.io/WJz2Ybvq3HmT) Woman by Susan Gubar Being Mortal (https://zpr.io/8J47trRcbjKh) by Atul Gawande Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Duration
1h 17m
Broadcast on
22 May 2026
Audio Format
other

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. 

In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth?

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kielty
with help from - Shahib Al-Masawa 
Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim Howard
Fact-checking by - Michelle Soraka

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Books - 

Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.


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WNYC Studios is supported by WISE. WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a WISE account, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Terms and conditions apply. WNYC Studios is supported by Odo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odo at ODOO.com. That's ODOO.com. Radio Lab supporters include the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Picture this, years of guarantee research support in a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you're a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. Find your program at HHMI.org/radiolab. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm La Tifnasar and today we're resurfacing a quite provocative episode. We originally reported in 2014. Now, that sounds like a long time ago until you start listening and you start to realize how many parallels there are between 2014 and this moment right now, outrageous healthcare costs were in the Middle East, climate change. In every one of these cases, the specifics that they're referring to have changed, but the overall picture remains depressingly the same. Honestly, since it came out, I still think about these stories. I still remember them all the time, especially the last one. I would say this episode is one of my all-time top 10 radio lab episodes. I hope you feel the same way, whether you are hearing it for the first time or hearing it for the tenth time, here it goes. Worth listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Are you ready? Yes. I'm feeling full of worth. I'm feeling full of value. Well, in that spirit, I'm Jad Abumruh. I'm Robert Colvitch. This is Radio Lab and today. Three very different stories that try to put a dollar value. Mugen is okay. One million dollar. Seven dollars. Ten thousand dollars. Yeah, I would say five bucks. One things that seem priceless. Priceless. Priceless. Is it really? Okay, so start at the top. Bring on the pressure. We're going to start the show with a story from our producer, Molly Webster. I don't remember any of it. We might actually want to rename Molly Wongster because she recently got ourselves to some serious new maricizing. Actually, it didn't start as a wonky thing. It started actually with some medical journals. That was interesting because it was some of the most poetic writing I've seen out of doctors ever. One journal article said like, "What would one more month mean to a 37-year-old mother who has four children? Or what would one more month mean if you are a 67-year-old who's about to go traveling around the world? People were just kind of like drifting these questions out there." All these questions seem to circle around a seemingly simple story of the pricing of a drug, a cancer drug. And the story, if you really want to tell it from the beginning, it begins with this guy named Leonard. Leonard Saltz, I'm a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Which is here in New York, and it's one of the largest cancer centers in the country. We have 17 doctors here who treat colon cancer. Just for colon cancer. We treat a very large number of patients. It's a huge hospital, and one of the things Leonard's been noticing in the last, I don't know, decade is cancer drug prices have just gone through the roof.

Transcription truncated.

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Shahib Al-Masawa Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim HowardFact-checking by - Michelle Soraka EPISODE CITATIONS: Books - Memoir of A Debulked (https://zpr.io/WJz2Ybvq3HmT) Woman by Susan Gubar Being Mortal (https://zpr.io/8J47trRcbjKh) by Atul Gawande Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.