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Radiolab

Everybody’s Got One

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. But this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta. In this episode we take you on a journey through the 270-day life of this weird, squishy, gelatinous orb, and discover that it is so much more than an organ. It’s a foreign invader. A piece of meat. A friend and parent. And it’s perhaps the most essential piece in the survival of our kind. This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Becca Bressler, and produced by Becca Bressler and Pat Walters, with help from Matt Kielty and Maria Paz Gutierrez. Additional reporting by Molly Webster. Special thanks to Diana Bianchi, Julia Katz, Sam Behjati, Celia Bardwell-Jones, Mathilde Cohen, Hannah Ingraham, Pip Lipkin, and Molly Fassler.   Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.     For cool new research on the placenta: Check out Harvey’s latest paper published with Julia Katz. Sam Behjati's latest paper on the placenta as a "genetic dumping ground". 
Duration
33m
Broadcast on
20 Aug 2021
Audio Format
other

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. But this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta.

In this episode we take you on a journey through the 270-day life of this weird, squishy, gelatinous orb, and discover that it is so much more than an organ. It’s a foreign invader. A piece of meat. A friend and parent. And it’s perhaps the most essential piece in the survival of our kind.

This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Becca Bressler, and produced by Becca Bressler and Pat Walters, with help from Matt Kielty and Maria Paz Gutierrez. Additional reporting by Molly Webster.

Special thanks to Diana Bianchi, Julia Katz, Sam Behjati, Celia Bardwell-Jones, Mathilde Cohen, Hannah Ingraham, Pip Lipkin, and Molly Fassler.

 

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

 

For cool new research on the placenta:

Check out Harvey’s latest paper published with Julia Katz.

Sam Behjati's latest paper on the placenta as a "genetic dumping ground". 


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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. Hey, I'm Lula Miller and I'm Molly Webster. This is Radiolab. It's like red velvet bread. Look at that. It does look like a loaf of bread. And today on the show, a round loaf of homemade bread with veins that's purple and red. We have a story about a thing, but also like blood sausage bread. I think that we've all had at some point. It is patty like, but most of us, we never even knew it. And it comes to us from our contributing editor, Heather Radke. Yeah, I'm not even on staff. And I wish you were producer, Becca Presler. Well, I think, I think I can- You take it. Okay. I was thinking about getting pregnant and I started to do a bunch of research. And pregnancy is this thing, at least for me, where I was like, I know about that. I took like 14 years of sex ed in my public high school, but I'll just say the more I learn about it, the more I realize how little I know and maybe like how little anyone knows about pregnancy. And one of the very first things I discovered was that when you're pregnant, you don't just grow a baby. You grow an entirely new organ. Let me turn it down. Your whole life. You've got your heart, your lungs, your bone, your skin, your eyes, et cetera. So this is the main hospital, but then all of a sudden, during pregnancy, a whole new organ shows up. Here is our cabinet of placentas. And that organ is the placenta. Whole placentas, pieces of placentas. I had heard of the placenta before, but I really didn't know anything about it. It's called the after birth for a reason. It's an afterthought that no one thinks about. I think I thought a thing a lot of people think, which is that the baby grows inside the placenta. I definitely thought balloon baby was inside of. I mean, okay, I was pregnant. And I think I thought it was just like extra lining on my uterus, but it's not, it's not even yours. The placenta belongs to the embryo, to the fetus, to the baby.

Transcription truncated.

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. But this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta. In this episode we take you on a journey through the 270-day life of this weird, squishy, gelatinous orb, and discover that it is so much more than an organ. It’s a foreign invader. A piece of meat. A friend and parent. And it’s perhaps the most essential piece in the survival of our kind. This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Becca Bressler, and produced by Becca Bressler and Pat Walters, with help from Matt Kielty and Maria Paz Gutierrez. Additional reporting by Molly Webster. Special thanks to Diana Bianchi, Julia Katz, Sam Behjati, Celia Bardwell-Jones, Mathilde Cohen, Hannah Ingraham, Pip Lipkin, and Molly Fassler.   Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.     For cool new research on the placenta: Check out Harvey’s latest paper published with Julia Katz. Sam Behjati's latest paper on the placenta as a "genetic dumping ground".