[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.]

JAD ABUMRAD: June 26, 2000, 10:19 a.m., at the White House. This is the moment that race died.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: Good morning. We're here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome—of the entire human genome—of the entire human genome ...]

JAD: See, for a hundred years, scientists—or at least a certain group of scientists—had been trying to prove that race is real. That it's not just something that we see with our eyes, that in fact there is something fundamentally different between a person who is white and a person who is Black.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Or Asian. And they looked at blood differences.

JAD: Nothing.

ROBERT: They looked at differences in musculature.

JAD: The size of our heads, nothing.

ROBERT: They couldn't really say this is this and that is that.

JAD: Then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: ... of the entire human genome.]

JAD: ... in 2000 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: It is my great pleasure ...]

JAD: ... Bill Clinton introduces two of the most important scientists in the world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: Dr. Francis Collins and Craig Venter.]

JAD: Both of whom get up to the podium and say, "Look, we have searched all the way down to our DNA. Can't get any deeper than that. And when it comes to race ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Craig Venter: The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.]

JAD: ... it's just not there."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: What that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient faiths: the most important fact of life on this Earth is our common humanity.]

JAD: But couple years down the road, if you fast forward, we began to look more closely and we began to notice ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Some subtle differences based on ethnic background.]

JAD: ... differences.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Craig Venter: Differences in people's health and race.]

JAD: And the differences seemed like they could be important.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That some genetic diseases target racial or ethnic groups more than others.]

JAD: So that now just a couple of years later, even some of the scientists who were on the podium that day saying it was all over, even they had started to rethink.

FRANCIS COLLINS: Are we rolling?

WOMAN: Yes, we're rolling.

FRANCIS COLLINS: We are rolling.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: All right.

JAD: That's Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project.

JAD: Now in 2000, you were standing with Bill Clinton and Craig Venter. Do you remember this day?

FRANCIS COLLINS: I do remember June 26, 2000, yes. It would be hard to forget that one.

JAD: What was the weather like, out of curiosity?

FRANCIS COLLINS: It was really hot that morning.

JAD: But really, we didn't want to talk to Francis about that day. We actually wanted to ask him about something he said a couple years afterwards, something he wrote in a medical journal.

ROBERT: Jad, could you read the not—the Francis saying not ...

JAD: Oh. Well ...

ROBERT: Well, I'll just read it to you. This is you talking.

JAD: Okay. Here it is. "Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins. It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection."

ROBERT: So that's what we're kind of wondering. "It's not strictly true that it has no biological connection." [laughs] That's a careful tiptoe.

FRANCIS COLLINS: I won't defend that as being the world's best sentence construction.

ROBERT: [laughs] But there's something that you want to say that you didn't quite pass through your lips, it sounds like. But ...

FRANCIS COLLINS: [laughs] Well, let me try again here. I think there are two points you can make about race and genetics. One is we're really all very much alike, incredibly alike. But you can also say even that small amount of difference turns out to be revealing.

JAD: So that's our show today. What exactly can science reveal about race? Does it exist? Does it not exist?

ROBERT: What really can you say about it?

JAD: Yes. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Okay, ready?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm. Three, two, one. So let's go back and consider Francis Collins's statement.

JAD: "It is not strictly ..."

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Okay, stop. Stop. So it's not strictly speaking true that race has no biological connection.

JAD: Who are you?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I'm Nell Greenfieldboyce. I'm a science reporter with National Public Radio. But for the moment, I'm your—I'm your grammar instructor.

JAD: [laughs] Okay.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So take this double negative and make it into a sentence that is without the double negative.

JAD: It is sort of true.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's sort of true that race has something to do with biology, right?

JAD: Right, right, right.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: But while he is tiptoeing around with his fancy double negatives, some people out in the real world ...

KIP JUDICE: It sounds like a cell phone, and I'm getting rid of that right now.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... are taking that concept ...

KIP JUDICE: Get closer to the mic.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... and they're just running with it.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Hello, can you hear me?

KIP JUDICE: Hello, hello.

JAD: Who's—who's running with it exactly and how?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, I talked with one detective in Louisiana.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Let me just make sure I have your name pronounced correctly.

KIP JUDICE: Sure. My name is Kip Judice. I am the patrol commander of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office with the rank of captain.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Who says that he actually used DNA to say something about race.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: When was this all going down?

KIP JUDICE: Let's see 2002, 2003.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And that that helped him catch a serial killer.

KIP JUDICE: We had a victim who had been bludgeoned into death.

[NEWS CLIP: Trineisha Colomb was only 23 years old.]

KIP JUDICE: She was left in a field and found by some hunters.

[NEWS CLIP: It is believed her final moments alive were spent visiting her mother's grave. Her abandoned car discovered ...]

KIP JUDICE: Her vehicle was found abandoned ...

[NEWS CLIP: ... in the cemetery.]

KIP JUDICE: ... right near her mother's gravesite.

[NEWS CLIP: In just over a year, four women have been murdered in Louisiana. Their deaths linked by DNA evidence.]

[NEWS CLIP: DNA evidence at all of the crime scenes that point to a single killer.]

[NEWS CLIP: A serial killer.]

KIP JUDICE: The media dubbed him the Baton Rouge Serial Killer. It was in the news almost daily.

[NEWS CLIP: Self-defense classes are filling with frightened women.]

[NEWS CLIP: Where will he strike next?]

KIP JUDICE: Based on some witness information ...

[NEWS CLIP: The suspected killer is believed to be a white male.]

[NEWS CLIP: He is described as a white male.]

KIP JUDICE: White male in a white truck.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Everything at that point they had ...

[NEWS CLIP: Between 30 ...]

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... made it seem like it was probably a white guy.

KIP JUDICE: Yes.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I mean, they had this eyewitness report. The fact that there seemed to be a serial killer, and most serial killers are thought to be white guys. And they started testing hundreds of white men.

[NEWS CLIP: Police have launched an extraordinary effort to take DNA samples.]

[NEWS CLIP: DNA samples from nearly a thousand men.]

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: They were doing kind of a genetic dragnet.

[NEWS CLIP: A dragnet for a serial killer in an area where crime tape is becoming part of the landscape. Bob McNamara, CBS News, Baton Rouge.]

KIP JUDICE: It wasn't looking very—very promising.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So they went and they asked, you know, their crime lab ...

KIP JUDICE: Is there anything in a DNA profile that identifies race?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I mean, we have the perpetrator's DNA. Can we look at that and say whether it's a white guy or a Black guy?

KIP JUDICE: The immediate answer we had was no, there's not.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: No. You can't do that.

KIP JUDICE: Not a—there's not a marker, there's not a gene that ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Because, you know, race is not biological, right?

KIP JUDICE: However, there was some technology out there that was looking into it.

TONY FRUDAKIS: We're the first company I think in the world to infer phenotypes for forensics cases.

JAD: Who's this?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's Tony Frudakis. He owns a company in Florida that sells tests, genetic tests, that he claims can be like an eyewitness and tell you something about a person, what they look like.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Characteristics like eye colors and hair colors and skin color.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And the cops in Louisiana took him up on it.

KIP JUDICE: We submitted the suspect profile to them. And ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And when the test came back ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: This particular case, the individual was primarily of African ancestry.

JAD: A Black guy?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yes.

KIP JUDICE: Over 90 percent likely that it was a Black male.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I do think it's important to note that there were other lines of evidence that had been developing that made them think a Black guy was likely. But the DNA result? I mean, that was science.

KIP JUDICE: Within three or four days after that, state police called and said, "We have a match."

TONY FRUDAKIS: The rest is history. He's since been convicted of two of the murders.

JAD: So wait, they caught the guy and he was, in fact, Black?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yes.

JAD: So does that mean that Tony Fru—what is it?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Frudakis.

JAD: Tony Frudakis has somehow found the gene for race? That there is a race gene?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's much more complicated in that, and it all boils down to this idea of ancestry.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: Ancestry by DNA.com.]

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now you can go online to his company DNA Print, and they will send you a kit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: With just a simple mouth swab you do at home, you can discover your unique genetic ancestry.]

JAD: Okay. My kit.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And it's like a little science kit.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: [whispering] We're listening to Jad Abumrad taking a DNA test while being interrupted by his wife.

JAD: I'm taking a DNA test.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And it's got these, like, swabs.

JAD: Open one of these sterile swabs.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And you, like, rub your cheek with it.

JAD: Ah, ah, ah, ah.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You literally just send this through the mail to the DNA Print corporate headquarters in Sarasota, Florida. And I went there.

RECEPTIONIST: Hi.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Hi.

RECEPTIONIST: How are you?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Good. I'm Nell Greenfieldboyce.

RECEPTIONIST: Oh, yeah.

JAD: Okay, so after the cheek cells arrive in Florida ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: And this is where items of evidence come.

JAD: ... and I guess they run it through a bunch of machines. What exactly in the end are they looking at that gives them, like, some sense of my race?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, in your DNA there's lots of information. There's billions of different little DNA letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, letters.

ROBERT: Can we play with this just for a second? If I were to have you recite all the letters in your DNA at one letter per second, you know how long it would take you to spell yourself?

JAD: An hour.

ROBERT: No, no. It would take you ...

JAD: Six months.

ROBERT: A century.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: It would take you a century.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: To make it even more interesting, instead of just you, let's have you compared to me.

JAD: You mean, like, if we both read it at one per second?

ROBERT: Yeah. We would be absolutely identical for about 17 minutes before there'd be any difference between us.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: And every difference that there is ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Whether it's like a little chemical T or a little chemical G or whatever ...

ROBERT: Has a story behind it.

JAD: How do you mean?

ROBERT: Well, we all started in the same place together.

FRANCIS COLLINS: Well, the evidence is very good that the human race, as we currently know it, had its origins in Africa.

ROBERT: According to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project.

FRANCIS COLLINS: In the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years ago with as few as 10,000 people.

ROBERT: But soon after that, humans began to fan out across the globe. Some of us went east into Arabia, some of us went up north across the Sahara into the Mediterranean area. All the while, all these people are having babies. And in the process, the DNA is getting copied over and over and over, parent to kid, parent to kid. But sometimes the copying isn't exactly perfect. So every so often you'll find the copying error.

WOMAN: C.

CHILD: C.

WOMAN: A.

CHILD: A.

WOMAN: T.

CHILD: T.

WOMAN: A.

CHILD: C.

WOMAN: No!

ROBERT: Yes, that one right there. Let's imagine that error ...

WOMAN: A.

CHILD: C.

WOMAN: No!

ROBERT: ... occurred in Asia about 25,000 years ago. Imagine a Chinese woman had a baby, and the baby was one letter different from the mommy. An accident. The A and the mom became a ...

CHILD: C.

ROBERT: ... in the baby. And then that C was handed down. And you get another C. And you get another C. And a thousand years down the road, I look into your DNA and I see that same mistake in the same spot. You know what I know?

JAD: What?

ROBERT: I now have a hunch that if I shook your family tree really hard, some Chinese ancestors would pop out.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: It's sort of like a souvenir that your ancestors handed you down in your blood that you carry with you in every cell in your body.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So they've identified about 180 little variations in the DNA.

ROBERT: Little souvenirs.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: That people who share ancestry share, I guess, is the way to put it.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Whose sample did you send him? Was It yours?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Oh, I'm not gonna tell you.

TONY FRUDAKIS: That's all right.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You tell me.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Yeah, we'll show you. We got it on a CD.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So we leave the lab, and we go down this hallway to his office.

TONY FRUDAKIS: We've determined that it is of alien origin. No, I'm just kidding.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: [laughs] That would explain a lot, actually.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: He pulls these things up on his computer screen.

TONY FRUDAKIS: I'll show you what your results were.

JAD: So what does it say? I'm dying here.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, I guess before I tell you ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: Okay. That sample was determined to be ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... I want to know what you think. What do you think it's gonna be?

JAD: Well, my folks are Arab. Light skin both of them. My dad's got some darker skin people on his side of the family. So if I had to guess, probably some European in there. And then my dad's side I was thinking, well, they're probably like Greek or Turkish way back when. I wasn't really sure, and I consciously didn't sort of look into it.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Okay, well let me just tell you that this test you took is not gonna tell you countries.

JAD: [laughs] Right, right.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Okay.

JAD: I'm oddly kind of nervous, weirdly.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Really?

JAD: Yeah, just a little bit.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So your sub-Saharan African ancestry, what percentage are you thinking?

JAD: I'm gonna guess 12?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Zero percent.

JAD: Zero?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Zero percent.

JAD: Huh. All right.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Native American ancestry, one percent.

JAD: One?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: East Asian, five percent.

JAD: Wow!

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: European, 94 percent.

JAD: Really?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: 94 percent.

JAD: 94 percent European?

ROBERT: No, 94 percent pansy.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Note that the words that we're using here are pretty arbitrary.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You should understand that his definition of quote-unquote "European" includes ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: The Fertile Crescent or the Middle East.

ROBERT: What? So wait a second. If I'm a policeman—remember, we started this conversation and a cop was looking to describe a perpetrator.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So if I find out that Jad Abumrad is European, then I'm looking for someone who could be—it's a huge range.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: We're looking at the computer screen now.

JAD: For example ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You've pulled up a bunch of digital photos.

JAD: ... when Tony Frudakis pulled up pictures of people with my exact ancestral mix ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: ... you know, from this database ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: Okay, database. Here's some males, here's a female.

JAD: ... he brought up people with blonde hair, blue eyes.

TONY FRUDAKIS: These are all people that had this sort of mix.

JAD: Even people from Poland who had, like, really red cheeks.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So these folks just look like pretty much like white folks to me.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Run of the mill.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Because I gotta tell—let me show you the picture of the guy who actually gave the sample.

ROBERT: Now Mr. Frudakis does not know that Jad is a dark, curly-haired, swarthy man.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So this is the guy. And he doesn't really know anything about his ancestry, but his mother and father I believe are from Lebanon.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Although in this sample of maybe 20 people, it's just we don't have any samples of Lebanese in this particular ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: But I guess I'm saying is for a cop, someone who describes themselves as Lebanese versus Polish, I mean, that would be a really big difference.

TONY FRUDAKIS: Oh, yeah. And to make that sort of distinction you need different markers.

ROBERT: So then what does DNA actually tell you then?

JAD: Well, not a lot that's direct. What he's doing basically is playing a guessing game based on ancestral percentages. Like, for instance, I'm 94 percent European, zero percent sub-Saharan. He can plug that into his database, pull up the pictures, and he will notice that nobody with those percentages is Black. So he can tell—he'll tell police, this guy? Probably not Black.

ROBERT: Just like at the beginning we said that the perpetrator there was pretty much not white.

JAD: Yeah. Now there is one thing that he can read directly in our DNA.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Eye color.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: So at the end of the day he can say I am not Black and I have brown eyes.

ROBERT: [laughs] That's it? That's as far as he can go?

JAD: That's all he can tell you as a scientist. He does take it further.

ROBERT: What did he do?

JAD: Well, if he's got a DNA sample of a perp, he can go to his computer database and he can say ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: Okay, database.

JAD: "Show me everybody who's got these exact same percentages. Show me their pictures. Now tell me what all of these faces have in common visually. Like, what's their average ..."

TONY FRUDAKIS: Nose width.

JAD: What's their average ...

TONY FRUDAKIS: Shape of the ears.

JAD: How big are their skulls?

TONY FRUDAKIS: Skull shape.

JAD: You see where this is going?

ROBERT: And then what he tells the police to look for ...

JAD: Look for people who have, you know, this type of head, kind of ear.

ROBERT: But this isn't genetics now. This is just photo averaging.

JAD: Photo averaging, yeah.

ROBERT: So this isn't science. This is something else.

JAD: Right, but when you hear things like measuring skulls, measuring ears, it's hard not to think back to pretty nasty periods of our history. Like the eugenicists, they tried to composite pictures into one face. They measured skulls, and they ended up inspiring the Nazis.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Have people called you a racist?

TONY FRUDAKIS: Not once. Not once have I been called a racist. Not once.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And that kind of surprises me. I'm just sort of wondering how do you think you've escaped that?

TONY FRUDAKIS: Hmm, are people critical of this? Yeah, I think a lot of scientists their first knee-jerk reaction is—is that the poor masses out there aren't intelligent enough to handle this sort of information. They'll start climbing over one another and killing themselves so that we either, you know, the smart ones need to sort of obfuscate. And I don't think that works very well. People may be a lot smarter than we might give them credit for being.

ROBERT: I think he's onto something there.

JAD: What do you mean?

ROBERT: Well, there is a tendency that people have when this subject comes up to say, "Shh-shh. We don't talk about that." I think people can talk about the real world and real differences respectfully, and even with a certain amount of delicious interest.

JAD: Sure. Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, you say sure, but there are lots of shushers everywhere.

JAD: You're not gonna get me to stand on the side of shushing. It's just—I mean, science complicates things. Even now this whole, you know, definition that science has of race being like ancestry or whatever, it just—it just doesn't jive with how people live race.

ROBERT: You mean how people talk about it really?

JAD: Yeah. Well, look here. Take a look at this photo.

ROBERT: This one here?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: You see the guy there?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: What race do you think he is?

ROBERT: He's Black.

JAD: Definitely Black?

ROBERT: Definitely. Oh, yeah.

JAD: How Black is he?

ROBERT: How Black is he? What kind of a question is that?

JAD: Yeah, just sort of visual.

ROBERT: Black-Black.

JAD: How about Obama Black?

ROBERT: No, he's not. He's blacker than that.

JAD: So he's unequivocally Black, right?

ROBERT: Well, I don't know.

WAYNE JOSEPH: My parents taught us, because they came from a segregated South, you were either Black or you were white. There was no in between.

JAD: So the guy you're looking at, the guy we just heard?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: That's Wayne Joseph. He's an education director in LA, and he also on the side writes essays about race mostly, for national magazines. And one day a couple years back, he was watching TV.

WAYNE JOSEPH: And I happened to see a TV program highlighting the fact that a couple of DNA labs were actually doing racial testing on DNA.

JAD: A light bulb went on.

WAYNE JOSEPH: I said, "Well, this will be perfect for this essay."

JAD: He thought he'd test himself, see what percentage of him was Black versus other stuff, and then write about it.

JAD: But what number did you think you would be?

WAYNE JOSEPH: The number I was thinking was 70 or 75 percent or more.

JAD: 75 percent African and 25 percent who knows what?

WAYNE JOSEPH: So I sent away for the kit.

JAD: Swabbed both cheeks, put it in a vial, sent it back.

WAYNE JOSEPH: And then a few weeks later I get back the results. First thing I did was I checked the kit number to make sure that they hadn't made a mistake and sent me someone else's results. But the kit number matched. I couldn't believe it. 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, four percent Asian and zero percent African.

JAD: Zero percent. As in zero?

WAYNE JOSEPH: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Nothing?

WAYNE JOSEPH: I mean, I've—I've lived 50 years as a Black man, and I have no African genetically.

JAD: How did you make sense of that? Did it sink in all at once?

WAYNE JOSEPH: No. What happened was after a couple of days—I hadn't told my wife anything yet—I went to see my mother. And I said, "Look, there's only one really logical explanation I can live with. It's okay. I love you. Just tell me the truth. I'm adopted." [laughs] She kind of giggled and she said, "Look, I can remember every pain I had having you. I can still remember it." I said, "Well, but then this doesn't make any sense." She said, "Yeah, it's a little surprising, but I'm too old, too tired to be anything else, so that's just the way it is. For my brother, when I told him the results, he said, "Wayne, that's your DNA, that's not my DNA. I'm a Black man." And that's the end of it for him.

JAD: Hmm. What about your wife?

WAYNE JOSEPH: Well, my second wife happens to be Jewish. Her response was, "What do you mean? You're a Black man. I defied my mother to marry you. You've got to be Black."

JAD: Whoa. So she needed you to be Black?

WAYNE JOSEPH: Absolutely. Because she had told her mother at the time, look, I'm marrying Wayne. You're going to have to decide whether you're going to accept him or lose your daughter. It really threw me for a loop. You start thinking about your life. There are certain decisions that are made in life based on who you think you are. Would I have married a Black woman the first time? Would I have decided to go to a Black high school?

JAD: Do you have answers to those questions? Would you have married a Black woman? Would you have gone to a Black high school?

WAYNE JOSEPH: Maybe not. How different would my life have been if I'd have known this 45 years ago?

JAD: Wayne Joseph is the director of alternative education for the Chino Valley School District in California.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.]

 

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