Radiolab - Playing God

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 standing right in front of you? In this episode, 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? Produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen. Reported by Sheri Fink. In the book that inspired this episode you can find more about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: www.nytimes.com/triage 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. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Duration: 1h 2m
Broadcast on: 21 Aug 2016
Audio Format: other

In this episode, 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?

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

In the book that inspired this episode you can find more about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial

You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: www.nytimes.com/triage

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.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Alright, so for reporter Sherry Fink, who works at the New York Times and is author of the book Five Days of Memorial, you could say it all began with two tents. So this was back in 1999. The US and other NATO allies were involved in a bombing campaign in Serbia. This was basically like the last gasps of war in the former Yugoslavia. You had Serbia attacking ethnic Albanians and Kosovo. NATO was trying to protect them, bombing Serbia, which was creating a huge exodus of refugees. Now Sherry, at the time, was not yet fully a reporter. She was fresh out of med school, volunteering at a human rights organization, working on a book about a war hospital in Bosnia. And since she knew the landscape, she was able to convince this organization to let her go to Macedonia to document what was happening, to document potential war crimes. So I remember I went to the border of Kosovo in Macedonia and like 100,000 refugees had shown up. They were trying to cross the border into Macedonia. But the Macedonian government had closed its border with Kosovo. So people who were fleeing got trapped. They got stuck in this muddy no man's land between the two borders. She said police and riot gear were basically lining the Macedonian side. So he had all of these people crammed into this muddy channel. And the Macedonian Red Cross and this one charity had gotten permission to set up a makeshift medical station in that border area between these two countries. It was a sort of frumpy, brown medical tent. Now Sherry was there to conduct interviews, nothing to do with medicine. I was there to collect information, but when I got there, I literally remember walking up to this border. And a doctor who I had interviewed previously, this really tall Albanian, Kosovo Albanian doctor looked out and he told the Macedonian border guard, "Let her in, we need her. She's a doctor." They just grabbed you and pulled you into this tent? Yes. What? So you're just out of med school when this happened? I had just finished med school. Yeah. But suddenly she says she was tossed in with all these war doctors. And here's the key, eventually she gets posted at the door of the tent. And what I ended up doing, or what they put me in charge of, was triage. Now triage, it's a French word. Nice. Excellent.

Transcription truncated.