[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today we're in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of mood, so we figure where better to start ...

LAUREL KENDALL: Test, test.

JAD: ... than at the Museum ...

LAUREL KENDALL: American Museum of Natural History.

JAD: ... where they have on a kind of Frankenstein-y exhibit.

LAUREL KENDALL: Okay, I'm Laurel Kendall. I curate the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit "Mythic Creatures." We're standing in front of a dragon.

JAD: Now why would there be a dragon at the Museum of Natural History? Well, according to curator Laurel Kendall ...

LAUREL KENDALL: Yeah.

JAD: ... why not?

LAUREL KENDALL: The human mind loves to wonder well, what would happen if we put wings on a horse, or put a tail on a beautiful woman. That is human.

JAD: Justify it however you want ...

LAUREL KENDALL: That belongs in the museum.

JAD: ... what you see before you ...

LAUREL KENDALL: We begin the exhibit ...

JAD: ... is a hall of strange, twisting creatures, dimly lit. And when you look more closely, you realize that they're all mash-ups ...

LAUREL KENDALL: From the natural world. For example ...

JAD: She takes us over to one corner, points at a glass case where inside ...

LAUREL KENDALL: What you're seeing is ...

JAD: ... is this creepy little hybrid skeleton thing.

LAUREL KENDALL: Look at this beast and see how it really is a composite.

JAD: Half of it is a monkey, the upper half.

LAUREL KENDALL: The monkey's skull ...

JAD: And the lower half?

LAUREL KENDALL: Is a fish tail.

JAD: Like some kind of trout.

LAUREL KENDALL: With some scales.

JAD: The place is full of stuff like this: A lion with an eagle head, humans with snake tails. Just about anything you can imagine.

LAUREL KENDALL: Very operatic.

JAD: Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important part: kids.

[kids yelling]

JAD: Tons and tons of kids completely in awe.

CHILD: Oh my God, a unicorn!

CHILD: Oh!

LULU MILLER: What are we standing under here?

GIRL: Pegasus.

LULU: Can you describe what we're seeing here?

GIRL: It's a horse.

GIRL: The body's like a horse. It has these really big wings. Wings like birds, like an eagle. Maybe somehow its parents were a horse and a bird, and their—their genes formed together to make a Pegasus.

GIRL: It's just what I see—what I see just looks so exciting.

JAD: And when you ask these kids, as our producer Lulu Miller did ...

LULU: Why's it cool? Like, why is it fun to see two animals mashed together?

GIRL: Um ...

JAD: ... well, they just look at you like you're dumb.

BOY: It's a horse with wings!

LULU: Birds have wings.

BOY: Yes. Birds, they're not mythical.

GIRL: They're like regular.

BOY: Yeah.

GIRL: Every day you see them. Every time you just see a pigeon, you're like, "Oh, whatever."

JAD: Maybe it's that simple.

BOY: Yeah.

JAD: In any case, the kids ...

BOY: Have a good day.

JAD: ... sick of us and our dumb questions, ran off to this kiosk that the museum had set up around the corner.

BOY: Over here.

JAD: Where they could actually build their own creatures.

LULU: Okay, now can you describe your guy here?

GIRL: Well, he has seven heads, and ...

BOY: He has a tail with fire on it.

GIRL: Four legs.

BOY: And he has a long body.

JAD: And the thing is ...

LULU: What kind of legs are those?

JAD: ... you can't help but wonder ...

LULU: Chicken legs!

JAD: ... if these same kids in about 30 or 40 years might actually be able to do this for real.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: When they're grown up, those kids will be at home in the new world of biotechnology. They will be ready to put their skills to use. There will be do-it-yourself kits to breed new varieties of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes.]

GIRL: The body of a snake rather than, like, a bird.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freeman Dyson: Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.]

JAD: That is physicist Freeman Dyson. We'll hear more from him later. Now whether it's true or not what he's saying, it does seem to be the case that we are at this pivotal point now where the stuff that we used to only imagine might actually turn into reality. Which is why maybe you get an exhibit of fantasy creatures at the Museum of Natural History.

LAUREL KENDALL: This is a celebration of the human imagination, human ingenuity, human art.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! In the name of God now I know what it feels like to be one.]

JAD: That's our show today: life, but not as we know it. Life as we might invent it, tweak it, augment it.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yes, but if you augment, tweak and remake, people will quickly come to you and say, "Hey, don't fuss with this. It's not natural, it's not right."

JAD: Speaking of right, natural and fussing, who are you?

ROBERT: Oh, sorry! [laughs] I'm Robert Krulwich, who is always right, always natural.

JAD: And always fussing.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: In any case, that word you mentioned ...

ROBERT: Natural?

JAD: Yeah, that one. Natural. What does it mean, exactly? Let's just think about that.

ROBERT: It usually means—it means what's familiar.

JAD: What we know.

ROBERT: What we know.

JAD: Let's—let's just muck that up a bit.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Because it turns out when you look in nature, you will find things that are frankly very strange and not familiar.

ROBERT: Like?

JAD: Well, let me tell you a story. It's an amazing story about a woman. Heard about it from a reporter, Soren Wheeler. Hi, Soren.

SOREN WHEELER: Right. Hey.

JAD: Right. So Soren, tell me about Karen.

SOREN: Well, Karen is a mother of three, a middle-aged woman living outside of Boston, in the suburbs of Boston. And she lives there with her husband Pete. The kids are out of the house now.

JAD: Tell me what you were thinking when you walked up to her door.

SOREN: Well, I—I was nervous. I was kind of strangely nervous about meeting her.

KAREN KEEGAN: Soren!

SOREN: Hi, Karen.

KAREN KEEGAN: Hi.

SOREN: But I got there and she was as friendly as can be.

KAREN KEEGAN: So come on in. I'll bring in a couple cups of tea.

SOREN: She made me tea. We sat in the living room and talked. And she was just normal, which is kind of weird given the story that she was about to tell me.

SOREN: So let's start at the very beginning.

KAREN KEEGAN: Uh-huh. Well, in 1995 I was told that I needed a kidney transplant immediately.

SOREN: What's that like? Like, what are you going through?

KAREN KEEGAN: It was frightening.

SOREN: The doctors told Karen they needed to act fast.

KAREN KEEGAN: They asked me who in my family might be willing to donate a kidney.

SOREN: So the two older boys, that's Matt and Jess, and Karen's husband Pete, they all went in to get what should have been a pretty routine DNA test.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah, they had the bloodwork done.

SOREN: And they waited.

KAREN KEEGAN: A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from the hospital and they said, "Mrs. Keegan, this is a very unusual situation that we're going to explain to you. It's something that we've never seen before, but when the DNA testing was done on your sons we found that they didn't match your DNA."

SOREN: Is that how they said it?

KAREN KEEGAN: Mm-hmm. They said they matched the father but they're not a match for you.

JAD: What does that mean that they didn't match her DNA?

SOREN: She's not their mother.

JAD: Oh!

KAREN KEEGAN: Pretty much.

SOREN: To Karen this was crazy.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah

SOREN: I mean, she told them ...

KAREN KEEGAN: Well ...

SOREN: "I was there."

KAREN KEEGAN: This could not possibly be.

SOREN: "I gave birth to these kids, I felt the pain."

KAREN KEEGAN: You know, you better do the test again because you're obviously wrong.

SOREN: And so they did do the tests again. Same result.

LYNNE UHL: The read was correct. There was not a laboratory error.

SOREN: This is one of her doctors, Lynne Uhl.

LYNNE UHL: We—we felt, particularly after the second time, that it was real.

KAREN KEEGAN: And then they said, "Now we have had situations where the husband's DNA didn't match, but we've never had a mother whose DNA didn't match their children."

JAD: So wait, if the DNA's saying she's not the mom, then what would explain that?

SOREN: Well, the first thought was that there was some kind of mix up.

KAREN KEEGAN: Some switch of babies or something.

JAD: Oh, like a baby switch right after birth kind of a thing.

SOREN: Yeah, but the problem with that is that the dad is the dad. The father's right.

JAD: Ah, yeah.

SOREN: So you have to figure, like, how could they have gotten the wrong kid but the right dad?

JAD: So then what? If that's the case ...

SOREN: Here's the thing: at this point ...

KAREN KEEGAN: As we got further involved with this ...

SOREN: ... people are thinking maybe Karen's done something kind of fishy.

KAREN KEEGAN: Yeah.

LYNNE UHL: There must be something that you're not being told.

SOREN: Like maybe she implanted her womb with another woman's baby.

SOREN: And then she just kind of lied about it?

LYNNE UHL: Yeah, that she lied about it.

KAREN KEEGAN: They said, "Well, could you tell us what hospital you had these children in?"

JAD: Wait, exactly how—what would—I'm still confused.

SOREN: She's being accused of being some kind of monster.

KAREN KEEGAN: Somebody who maybe wished they had children. Or stolen a child, or something had to be because obviously DNA's never wrong. It's never wrong.

JAD: Wow. So how does she talk to her family about this?

SOREN: What are those conversations like?

KAREN KEEGAN: I do remember some very sort of sad moments with my sons.

SOREN: Yeah.

KAREN KEEGAN: You know, I told them. I don't think they maybe even completely realized what I was saying.

SOREN: Lynne, Karen's doctor, couldn't get this out of her head. Something wasn't adding up.

LYNNE UHL: Didn't make sense.

SOREN: And so she thought about the fact that they'd done all the tests on Karen's blood.

LYNNE UHL: Only in her blood cells.

SOREN: So Lynne started thinking maybe ...

LYNNE UHL: The next step ...

SOREN: ... they oughta look at some other parts.

LYNNE UHL: And to do that, we would need to test other tissues. Scrape the inside of your mouth, and get a little saliva and maybe a hair or two. Thyroid, bladder and a skin biopsy.

SOREN: They're getting all sorts of parts.

KAREN KEEGAN: They're getting a lot of parts. All kinds of parts from me.

SOREN: And that's when things started to get strange.

LYNNE UHL: When we got the results of the tissue studies, we identified two sets of DNA.

SOREN: Two people.

JAD: Two—two what?

SOREN: Another person in Karen.

JAD: She had another person inside her?

SOREN: Well, sort of. She did have a separate set of DNA, so it was like she had another person with its own genetic identity in her body.

JAD: Whoa!

SOREN: And the thing is Jad, that other person? That was the mother of the boys.

JAD: Well, how did it get there?

SOREN: I mean, that's what the doctors were wondering. So they all sit down, put their heads together, try to figure it out. And then it hit them.

LYNNE UHL: You were a twin.

KAREN KEEGAN: You are a twin.

JAD: She—I mean, she had a twin.

SOREN: No. She's both twins. Here's what happened. In Karen's mother's womb, originally there were two eggs.

LYNNE UHL: Two fertilized eggs.

SOREN: Twin girls side by side.

LYNNE UHL: Developing in their own separate sacs.

SOREN: Then after a couple days something strange happened. Somehow the two embryos bump into each other and they fuse.

LYNNE UHL: Into one unit.

SOREN: And that one became Karen.

JAD: Like a mixture of the two of them?

SOREN: Well, no. They didn't blend. According to Lynne, what happened is they kind of claimed different parts of her.

LYNNE UHL: They still had their own—what do I want to say, boundaries?

SOREN: One twin claimed her blood, and the other twin claimed her thyroid and her bladder, and ...

JAD: So Karen is a plural!

SOREN: Yeah.

JAD: Is this—has this happened before?

SOREN: Well, supposedly it's pretty rare, but it does happen. In fact, there's a scientific word for this condition. Karen first heard that word from her doctor, Margot Kruskall.

KAREN KEEGAN: Margot came to my bedside, explained that I was a chimera—a term which I had never heard of before.

SOREN: Did she—did she come and say, "You're a chimera?"

KAREN KEEGAN: Yes. Now that was interesting because I called my son the English major and said, "Matt, I found out I was a chimera." And he said, "Oh! You know what a chimera is, don't you?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, in the ancient Greek myths, a chimera is an animal that has like a lion head, and a donkey's hoof and a goat tail." You know, it's a mixture.

SOREN: In Greek myths, the chimera was a monster ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Get back!]

SOREN: ... that the hero was supposed to slay.

KAREN KEEGAN: That didn't make me feel very good. [laughs]

SOREN: But then Karen learned more about what "chimera" meant medically, and what could've happened to her.

KAREN KEEGAN: If the eggs hadn't fused within four days, I would have become a Siamese twin. When you hear that, you immediately have a more concrete vision of two cells. It brought home the reality that I really was a twin.

SOREN: She is a twin.

KAREN KEEGAN: One doctor said, "Do you think you have two souls?" I think of myself as the union. But there is almost a sort of subtle sadness to think that I would have had a sister.

SOREN: Yeah.

KAREN KEEGAN: And so there is sort of a shadow feeling of loss. There could've been more.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Soren Wheeler for that.

ROBERT: Let's make things a little more disturbing now.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: 'Cause human beings, scientists are now capable of creating chimeras purposely. And we talked to Lee Silver, who's a scientist at Princeton.

ROBERT: Oh, Lee. Okay Lee, you have to say something.

LEE SILVER: Okay. You know, my left ear is receiving more than my right. Is there a way ...

ROBERT: And he told us about an intentional chimera, a creature created by a Danish embryologist named Steen Willadsen.

LEE SILVER: He took a goat embryo and a sheep embryo, and he pushed them together in his Petri dish. Put that mixture of embryo back into a female. I don't remember which species. And then what was born was an animal that was part goat, part sheep. And he called that a "geep."

ROBERT: Was it visibly kind of goat-y and kind of sheep-y?

LEE SILVER: Well, it was actually—yeah, so it was very visible. And what happened, because of the way development occurs, parts of its body looked sheep-like and parts of its body looked goat-like.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Which parts?

ROBERT: Yeah.

LEE SILVER: Well, he did this multiple times, and so he actually got multiple geeps. And sometimes the animal would have a goat head but then parts of its body would be sheep-like with wool. Other times it would have a sheep head.

ROBERT: How confusing it would be at the geep dance!

JAD: Oh, wow!

ROBERT: You wouldn't know, like, who was supposed to dance with whom!

JAD: [laughs] Could geeps relate with one another in that way?

LEE SILVER: [laughs] I don't remember.

ROBERT: He's not a geep, odd as he may look with that little beard and everything and the hooves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, goat: Baaa.]

JAD: Now just to give you a visual, we've got a picture here of three geeps hanging out near a tree. It's—do you want to describe it?

ROBERT: Well, the geep, one of them looks like a naked animal wearing a coat of shaggy hair.

JAD: It's got this streak of sheep wool running down its back, but the rest of it looks kind of goat-y.

ROBERT: Which—do you find it cute?

JAD: I kinda do find it cute.

ROBERT: Well, but now let's kind of uncute a bit. Suppose instead of talking about mixing sheep with goats.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Since you're not a sheep or a goat.

JAD: Mm-mm.

ROBERT: Let's make it more personal.

LEE SILVER: People are most worried about combining human embryonic cells and monkey or chimp embryonic cells. And so the idea is if you took a chimp embryo and a human embryo and you pushed them together, based on the geep results, based on lots of other data that scientists have accumulated, it's very likely that you'd have an organism born that was part chimp, part human.

ROBERT: Well, there once was a creature like that, because if you believe in evolution you believe that chimps eventually became humans, so somewhere in history there's someone who is 10 percent chimp and 90 percent human.

LEE SILVER: And that common ancestor evolved continuously and slowly from a chimplike individual to a human. And at every point along the hundred thousand generations, the children didn't look very different from their parents.

ROBERT: But here's the—here's the very sad Hollywood movie. I go and I go and I create a creature, a geep-like, you know, amalgamation which is 50 percent chimpanzee ape and 50 percent human Homo sapien. And he's the only one. That's like creating a tragedy, it seems like, because you'd be creating someone who is isolated in his physiology.

LEE SILVER: Yeah. I mean, this is ...

ROBERT: No one could breed with him, or maybe they could.

LEE SILVER: I'm gonna—because you're taping this.

ROBERT: Yeah. And you're opening something.

LEE SILVER: I'm opening something for you. This is actually a play. Here, you can look at this. It's going to be performed next week.

ROBERT: Sweet Sweet Motherhood. Is that it?

LEE SILVER: Yes, that's it.

ROBERT: So is a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. "Shelley McCann wants a baby, a human-chimpanzee baby."

JAD: Oh!

ROBERT: Oh! "Shelley's been spending too much time partying to build up a respectable grade point average, so she proposes the following senior thesis: fertilize one of her eggs with the sperm from a chimpanzee in her womb." Interesting term paper. "So Professor Harry Stein must do everything he can to stop her. The play is inspired by a true event." Really? This is your play.

LEE SILVER: Yes.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

LEE SILVER: Jeremy Kareken is the main playwright, and I collaborated with him.

ROBERT: What is the true event on which this is based?

LEE SILVER: The true event is that about 10-12 years ago now, I was talking in my usual flippant way to a bunch of students, and a sequence information had just come out showing that chimps and humans were almost 90 percent the same at the DNA level. And so I just threw out the idea, "Well, based on what we know about goats and sheep and everything else, you probably could have a hybrid develop between a chimpanzee and a human being." It was a thought experiment. What would it be? How would it develop? Which of its characteristics would be human and which would be chimpanzee?

LEE SILVER: The next day, a student, a junior, came to my office and said she wanted to do the experiment inside her own womb.

ROBERT: [gasps]

LEE SILVER: And so then yes ...

ROBERT: [laughs] In real life, what did you do? Hit her on the head with a baseball bat or what?

LEE SILVER: No, I had long—I was flabbergasted. She was absolutely serious. Because she—it's actually true. She—she was this student who partied a lot, and she needed—and the senior thesis at Princeton counts an enormous amount towards your final GPA. So she wanted to do this unique experiment hoping she'd get an A-plus on her senior thesis. And she was very naïve, obviously.

JAD: Whoa!

LEE SILVER: That was the last time I saw her.

ROBERT: She was gonna put up this little chimpanzee for adoption as soon as it was born, or was she planning to take it to school with her?

LEE SILVER: Well, no, no. Worse—worse than that. She—I asked her what she would do with this individual. I said, "Well, if it's a human being, you have to raise it like a human being. It has rights like a human being. If it's a chimpanzee you put it in a zoo, or you use it for experiments. And what's it gonna be?" And her answer to that question was she would abort right before it came time to go into labor. She'd abort. And so the whole idea of the senior thesis was to study the development of this hybrid inside of her womb.

JAD: She really wanted to do this for real? Not just on paper for a project, but actually for herself?

LEE SILVER: She wanted—yes. Yeah. There are many, many, many, many problems.

ROBERT: [laughs] Yeah. Gives new meaning to "liberal arts education."

LEE SILVER: Right.

ROBERT: You gotta be really liberal here.

LEE SILVER: And we talked for about an hour. I dissuaded her. I never saw her again.

ROBERT: Except in a way in his play, the one he co-wrote. This is the play about the teacher at the fancy university who happens just to be teaching a biology class.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: the human ovary within the ...]

ROBERT: Happens to have this notion about what would it be like if chimps and humans had babies together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: And actually, in a number of ways I am more similar to a male chimp than I am to my sister.]

ROBERT: Happens to have, in the play ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: Can we talk?]

ROBERT: ... a student who comes up after class and says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I want to combine one of my eggs with chimpanzee sperm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I don't want you to do this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: Why not?]

JAD: Except, by the way, in the play she actually goes through with it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sweet, Sweet Motherhood: I'm pregnant!]

ROBERT: But, you know, he—he wrote the play to keep a conversation going that wouldn't get out of his head.

LEE SILVER: And the question is: what is a human being? If you look at it developmentally, evolutionarily, through these hybrids and chimeras, where's the boundary between human being and non-human being? And at the end of my quest, I personally concluded that there is no boundary.

JAD: None at all?

LEE SILVER: No. It's fuzzy. So in other words, if you look at—and the analogy I like to give is look at the color spectrum between green and blue. When you go from green to blue along the color spectrum, it's a continuous, gradual change from one to the other. There's no point at which you say, "Here's the boundary between green and blue." And if you take that analogy, which I did to human beings, you say during development, during evolution, in terms of a chimera there's no boundary.

ROBERT: But the social effect of having staked out that position is that you aren't going to defend our species against all kinds of amendments. There is a consequence to this kind of thinking, right? I mean, you can't do a Cole Porter "Anything Goes," can you?

LEE SILVER: No. No, I believe you can do "anything goes." My purpose is to say not that anything goes, but that in theory, all these outrageous things could happen.

JAD: And actually are happening.

ROBERT: Here's an example.

LEE SILVER: Since 1980, scientists have been taking human genes, genetic information, putting it into mice. I mean, this is sort of a routine procedure in—for people who do mouse molecular genetics. And in fact, the really exciting thing that people are doing now is they're making cows that are engineered to produce human blood.

ROBERT: Whoa!

LEE SILVER: And the idea is is that you want to change all the genes in the cow that normally produce the proteins in cow blood, you want to make them all human.

JAD: Hmm.

LEE SILVER: So you'd have a cow making human blood—I don't think most people would mind that—and then you could use it for blood transfusions.

JAD: Wow! Could you make a cow with human blood and a human kidney so that you could use that too?

LEE SILVER: Well actually, they've—Israeli scientists have already created a mouse that has a tiny little functioning human kidney.

JAD: Get out!

LEE SILVER: Yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LEE SILVER: I could show you the picture. Yeah, so I mean—and, you know, and there are other people who are working with sheep and trying to make human livers inside sheep. And the whole idea is regenerative medicine.

ROBERT: Sacrifice the animals to get a new kidney for you.

LEE SILVER: Now I actually think that as long as you don't play with the external features, I think society will accept it. I mean, you know, people eat pigs, and if you can eat a pig why not grow a pig to have a human liver, kidney or heart?

JAD: As long as it still looks like a pig you're saying?

LEE SILVER: That's right. As long as it still looks like a pig and it still behaves like a pig. You know, if you put a human arm onto a pig I don't think people would like that.

JAD: But you acknowledge that the distinctions you're drawing are emotional distinctions.

LEE SILVER: Yeah.

JAD: And not rational.

LEE SILVER: Absolutely. They're emotional. And I'm saying that sometimes emotional distinctions matter. I mean, I have no solutions. I mean, I don't know where to draw lines. Society has to draw lines.

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[LEE SILVER: Hi, this is Lee Silver. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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