681: Escape From the Lab
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. I think probably every two years I read an article about some scientists who thinks there might be a way building off chicken DNA or whatever to figure out the DNA of dinosaurs and bring one to life. I feel like I run into these stories all the time, there were those scientists a couple years ago who were talking about how you could take Neanderthal DNA and use it to create new Neanderthals or this is, I think the real is one going, I think this is an actual thing. There's a team led by a Harvard scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. That's right. The woolly mammoth and I've heard of them, tromping through the Siberian tundra. That's the actual plan and can I just say, I know you scientists, you have your reasons, but whenever I read this stuff, I think, did you guys not see Jurassic Park? Have we learned nothing from the movies? Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop the thing if they should. Thank you, Jeff Goldboom. Dr. Frankenstein clicks the body parts of dead people, sows them together on a lab table, jolts them with some electricity, very showy electricity, dare I say. The creature comes to life and then does things the scientists did not anticipate at all. Unintended consequences my friends, it's not just in the movies by the way, of course, as we all know, discoveries in subatomic physics left the lab decades later, we got nuclear bombs, scientists constructed ways to computers and network with each other in the 60s, now half century later, we end up with Russians trolling our elections through social media, silons returned to Caprica to kill all the humans who invented them. Okay, that one's not real. But my point is the same, unintended consequences, they happen. When the experiment leaves the lab, and today on our show, we have three examples, three telling examples from three very different kinds of labs, one of them, okay, one of those labs is actually just a laboratory of human feelings, but still, from WBEC, Chicago, it's this American life, I'm out of glass, stay with us. At one, breakout star, okay, so we begin with this experiment gone wrong. Like I said, this is not a traditional experiment, not a traditional laboratory, but a laboratory of human emotion, one very familiar to lots of people, I'm talking about the reality TV show, The Bachelor, been around for 23 seasons, every season, of course, is romance made in a Petri dish, they throw in one guy, dozens of women, each week, the guy ejects a few women from the Petri dish, until there is just one left. And that's how it went, until last season, when for the first time, one of the lab subjects, a very important one, escaped the lab with yes, unintended consequences, one of our producers Emmanuel Berry, tells what happened. I've been watching The Bachelor for years, and I've never seen anything like what happened on episode nine of season 23, there's this one moment that felt so real, that I haven't shut up about it, okay, so it's almost the last episode of the season, it's The Bachelor, so of course, they're filming in a romantic location, a beautiful property in Portugal, The Bachelor, this time around, is Colton Underwood, he's 26, tall, sandy hair, handsome, a former football player, and as the show has mentioned a million times, he's a virgin, I could care less. Online I saw fans of the show describe him as sweet and sincere, my roommate once called him America's Chicken Nugget, the show is a Monday night tradition in my apartment,
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