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 right in front of you? In this episode, first aired back in 2016, 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? 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. Episode Credits: Reported by - Reported by Sheri Fink.Produced by - Produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen. Citations: Articles:You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: www.nytimes.com/triageBooks: The book that inspired this episode about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial, now a series on Apple TV+. Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (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 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Duration: 58m
Broadcast on: 30 Sep 2022
Audio Format: other

In this episode, first aired back in 2016, 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?

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.

Episode Credits:

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

Citations:

Articles:You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: www.nytimes.com/triageBooks: The book that inspired this episode about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial, now a series on Apple TV+.

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (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 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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

Hey there, Lula Miller here with an intense episode. We're gonna play one today that is from the archives. We made it back in 2016 in collaboration with the New York Times, where we take on the concept of triage, a word that at its core means sorting the value of lives. This topic is really tricky. Do you save the oldest, the youngest, the people with the most medical training? Do you pick it randomly? These questions are obviously just as relevant and unanswered today, and we thought it would be a good time to take a listen back, produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen with reporting from Sheri Fink, playing God. By the way, we're gonna start with Kosovo, but when did you as a writer become obsessed with all of this? Well, this this this obsession of about triage came about when I was working on my last book. This is Sheri Fink, reporter from the New York Times. She's the author of the book Five Days at Memorial, which was about triage in an emergency in Hurricane Katrina. We brought Sheri in to tell us a series of stories that grew out of the reporting she did for that book, but we actually are going to start with some tales before she wrote the book when she was at the border of Kosovo and Macedonia. So this was back in 1999. The US and other, I think, NATO allies were involved in a bombing campaign in Serbia. This is 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, Sheri 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. I remember I went to the border of Kosovo and 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 and the Macedonian Red Cross and this one charity had gotten permission to set up a makeshift medical station in that border area. I was there to collect information, but when I got there, the 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. 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 is a French word. It means to sort for quality. And a few hundred years ago, the word began to be applied to sorting different kinds of casualties on a battlefield. And that suddenly was her job. Literally I stood outside of this makeshift medical station and every minute, every couple minutes, there would be another patient brought to the door of our medical tent. And so my job was to stand outside that door and decide who gets in and who doesn't. And like how did you do that? How did you make that choice? Well, I don't remember having guidelines. I remember just having to wing it. She says she just went on instinct. And so the people who seemed like they might be having a heart attack or a seizure. Those were the ones who went into that tent. But you know, people with physical disabilities? No. People who have chronic conditions, psychiatric issues? No.

Everybody else, I had to direct to this other tent. And someone ended up calling it the tent of the damned. I remember appealing for help from the Macedonian health ministry saying, you know, take these people into Macedonia. They're not a threat. Open your board or take them in. They need care. And the health ministry kept refusing. And so they stayed in this tent day after day. Sometimes for four, five, six days. And several of the people in this tent, they died. Cherry says this experience haunted her. And years later, when she was a full-blown reporter and traveling all around the world, looking at triage and different scenarios, she would return to this memory again and again and wonder how do people in that situation make that decision? How should they? This is the scenario that people in New Orleans have been fearing for a long time. A category five hurricane headed right toward the city.

Transcription truncated.