[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SOREN WHEELER: Give everybody a level check.

JAD ABUMRAD: We're gonna start the show with this fellow. His name's Ben Zimmer. He's the On Language columnist.

BEN ZIMMER: For the New York Times Magazine.

JAD: 'Cause we figured since we wanted to do a show called ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Oops!

JAD: Right. We thought we should call Ben. And so he came into the studio, and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite oopses.

BEN ZIMMER: As an example, I just wanted to give one of my favorite examples of ...

JAD: The first one that he hit us with began its life ...

JAD: Was it in an AP news article?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, it was an AP story, but the AP story was fine. When the AP story appeared on a news site from the American Family Association ...

JAD: Which, by the way ...

BEN ZIMMER: ... is a conservative Christian group. The headline, first of all, said "Homosexual eases into the 100 final at Olympic trials."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Was it kissing guys, or something that they would be good at?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, if you read on, if you're confused by that headline ...

JAD: Very.

BEN ZIMMER: Here's how it starts. "Tyson homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the US Olympic track and field trials." And it goes on to say, you know, throughout the entire article, you know, "On Saturday, homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat." The entire article had the word 'homosexual' in place of 'gay.' The sprinter's name is Tyson Gay.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

JAD: According to Ben, this is a classic ...

BEN ZIMMER: Classic example of ...

JAD: ... of a search and replace oops. This group apparently did not like the word 'gay?'

ROBERT: Because 'gay' makes homosexuality sound very nice and ...

JAD: Very gay.

ROBERT: Very gay. Right.

JAD: So what they did was they ran a search and replaced every instance of the word 'gay' with the word 'homosexual.' But then you get Tyson Gay becoming Tyson Homosexual.

BEN ZIMMER: This was just one that they were a little careless with.

ROBERT: Just to be fair, here's a contrasting example. In 1990, the Fresno Bee ran an article ...

BEN ZIMMER: About the Massachusetts budget crisis, and it made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts, quote, "Back into the African American."

JAD: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And they had to issue a correction saying it should have said 'back in the black.'

JAD: Now this one might have been a newsroom prank, we're not sure.

ROBERT: But it did get into the paper.

JAD: Right. Just for the hell of it, here's one last one. This one happened after the famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite died.

BEN ZIMMER: When the Chicago Tribune did their online obituary for Cronkite, what happened was every instance of 'Cronkite' got replaced by 'Mr. Cronkite.' You can understand the thinking behind that. They're deciding okay, for deceased males, they should be referred to with the title 'Mr.' But then what this turns into is an obituary where it says 'He was born Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite Jr.'

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And it refers to his radio show, 'Walter Mr. Cronkite's 20th Century.' It's got things about his family. His son, Walter Mr. Cronkite III. His daughter—his daughter Kathy Mr. Cronkite.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Oops. My heart went oops.]

JAD: I'm Jad.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] The moment that we met, my heart went oops.]

ROBERT: And I'm Robert.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] I never will forget ...]

JAD: On this episode of Radiolab ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] ... the moment that I met you.]

JAD: Four oopses, starting with a tree that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

ROBERT: Then we've got a goose that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

JAD: And an entire town that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

ROBERT: And a Harvard professor.

JAD: That really went oops. Now we should just say before we start, oops—oops is—oops can be a misleading term. Really, what we're talking about here is something Greek.

ROBERT: [laughs] You try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you.

JAD: Right. And our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception, and we ended up talking with a professor.

RUBEN GUR: Yes?

JAD: Named Ruben Gur.

RUBEN GUR: Hello?

JAD: Hi, is this Professor Gur?

RUBEN GUR: Yes, speaking.

JAD: He's a psychiatrist who works at the University of Pennsylvania. And I'd called him to talk about his research on self deception.

RUBEN GUR: Self deception.

JAD: It's fascinating stuff, and I'm not gonna go into it now because somewhere along the way, the conversation took a really weird turn.

JAD: No!

RUBEN GUR: Oh, yeah.

JAD: Get out!

RUBEN GUR: Yeah. Yeah.

JAD: And it happened when he began to tell me about some studies.

RUBEN GUR: Strange studies.

JAD: Done by a ...

JAD: What was the guy's name?

RUBEN GUR: His name is hanging on—I don't remember. Just a second. Murray was his name.

JAD: Henry Murray.

ROBERT: And the reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what?

JAD: What? I built it up. Don't you want to know more?

ROBERT: Not yet, no. [laughs] Tell me more.

JAD: Okay, I'm gonna let it unfold because we were so interested in what Ruben Gur told us that we found the guy.

ALSTON CHASE: Hi, how's it going?

JAD: Who knows a whole lot about. Professor Murray's name is Alston Chase.

ALSTON CHASE: Very windy day today, isn't it?

JAD: And he lives in a remote cabin in Montana.

ROBERT: In the woods?

JAD: In the foothills.

ALSTON CHASE: Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the Second World War. During the war, he went to work for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

JAD: And a couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country.

ALSTON CHASE: During the Korean War ...

JAD: There were some gis, he said, who'd been captured in Korea. And afterwards ...

ALSTON CHASE: After the Korean War ...

JAD: ... they refused to come home.

ALSTON CHASE: They appeared to have betrayed their country.

[NEWS CLIP: Renounced their own country, and disappeared behind Red China's bamboo curtain.]

[NEWS CLIP: Does anybody want to go home? No!]

ALSTON CHASE: The CIA and their military establishment was very much concerned that the Communists had found techniques for brainwashing.

JAD: And so Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. And Murray himself developed a style of interrogation ...

ALSTON CHASE: 'Stressful interrogation' was the term used.

JAD: ... that the army could use on its pilots.

RUBEN GUR: Yeah. They developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent on the mission.

JAD: And then, says Rubin Gur, he'd run them through a battery of tests.

RUBEN GUR: To see if they'd break. And if they didn't break, then they were fine to fly.

JAD: This kind of psychological training was kind of a new front in the Cold War. And in the 1950s, Murray's back at Harvard, and he's thinking of ways to fine tune his techniques. And this is where things get interesting.

ALSTON CHASE: He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20-some-odd.

JAD: Sophomores, mostly.

ALSTON CHASE: Students were told to write an autobiographical essay.

JAD: Like a diary. And he told them, "You know what?"

ALSTON CHASE: "Make it very personal."

JAD: "Write your deepest thoughts in there."

ALSTON CHASE: "Highest aspirations and hopes."

JAD: "And while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: "Go ahead."

ROBERT: Quite a class.

JAD: And after the students were done he said to them, "Now I'm gonna pair you up into groups of two."

ALSTON CHASE: To debate or discuss what they'd written.

JAD: And students were like, "Okay, we'll share. No big deal." But ...

ALSTON CHASE: They were duped. They were walked into this very brightly-lit room.

JAD: Which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one-way mirror in it.

ALSTON CHASE: Put in a chair, strapped in. Electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart.

JAD: To measure stress, basically.

ALSTON CHASE: And they were also filming through the mirror.

JAD: And then instead of a classmate, in walked a total stranger.

ALSTON CHASE: Older man.

JAD: This guy was holding their essay. They didn't know it, but Murray had trained him ...

ALSTON CHASE: To do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate.

JAD: And he just tore them apart piece by piece.

ALSTON CHASE: Using the essay to mock the students' aspirations and thoughts. Then after this was done, these students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated.

JAD: That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over.

RUBEN GUR: People became tearful and miserable. And he was proud how he destroyed people.

ROBERT: What kind of a person is this?

JAD: Like, why did he do it?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ALSTON CHASE: Why Murray did it? There are any one of a number of explanations, and they all could be true. One is it was grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things.

JAD: Also, you know, this was the Cold War. He was fighting Communism. He may have thought it was justified.

ROBERT: Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this.

JAD: Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair.

ALSTON CHASE: For about 30 years with a woman, not his wife. And they had a sexual relationship that bordered on the sado-mas—in fact, was sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interest in these was intensely personal.

JAD: Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments, there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it.

RUBEN GUR: His codename was Lawful.

ALSTON CHASE: Lawful. They gave each of these students a code name.

RUBEN GUR: Because he was considered so conventional.

ALSTON CHASE: He was ...

JAD: Really still just a boy.

RUBEN GUR: Graduated high school at 16.

ALSTON CHASE: Was living a thousand miles from home. Two shirts and two trousers to his name.

JAD: And Lawful apparently was an especially lonely kid.

ALSTON CHASE: The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lawful's essay, which he saw as highly alienated.

JAD: So when Lawful walked into that room, sat across from that stranger ...

RUBEN GUR: The guy really did a job on him. He was young, so he was barely growing a beard. So the first thing that the guy tells him is, "What is this on your chin? Something trying to look like a beard?"

JAD: Then the guy opens up Lawful's essay and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all the students, Lawful had been hooked up to all these stress monitors.

RUBEN GUR: I analyzed his data compared to all the other participants, and he had far and away the strongest response physiologically.

JAD: You mean, like, his heart beat the fastest and all that?

RUBEN GUR: Heartbeat. Everything. Through the roof.

JAD: Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years. And decades later, a lot of the subjects were still upset.

ALSTON CHASE: And considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their 20s.

JAD: Lawful never forgot it.

ALSTON CHASE: That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about Professor Murray after he left Harvard.

ROBERT: So what happened to this guy?

JAD: Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math, and then he became a household name.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well, I mean this.

[NEWS CLIP: The FBI raid began just after noon in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana.]

JAD: Turns out that Lawful's real name.

RUBEN GUR: Theodore Kaczynski.

JAD: No!

RUBEN GUR: Oh, yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: Kaczynski was known ...]

JAD: Get out!

RUBEN GUR: Yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: The FBI dubbed him the Unabomber. In nearly 18 years, he found targets all over the country.]

[NEWS CLIP: His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23.]

[NEWS CLIP: Blew my arm off to the side like this, and the first thing I thought was, "Why did they do that?"]

JAD: Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent, very infamous acts?

RUBEN GUR: Well, I think he probably would have—if it hadn't been for that experiment, he still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana, regardless. But I think the evil twist was—was done there.

JAD: Years later, while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski.

ALSTON CHASE: In one of his letters, he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by Professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious, and I wrote him back to tell me a little bit more about it, and he said, "Well, you really don't—I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms."

JAD: Ruben Gur is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Alston Chase is the author of the book Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Oops. My heart went oops.]

JAD: Here's one more from Ben Zimmer.

JAD: What is the Cupertino Effect?

BEN ZIMMER: The Cupertino Effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spell checker too much, it will give you a suggestion, and very often it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And why is it called the Cupertino Effect?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, in early spell checkers, if you wrote 'cooperation,' the word 'cooperation,' C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N, a perfectly typical spelling of the word 'cooperation,' In early spell checkers, that word was not there because it expected you to spell it C-O-hyphen. And so what it would do is it would give you a suggestion, and the suggestion was Cupertino, the name of the town in California. So if you look at documents that are still online from the UN, from the EU, from NATO, you'll find dozens and dozens of Cupertinos that have found their way in there.

BEN ZIMMER: For instance, here's a German NATO officer was quoted as saying, "The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful."

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And then there was a proposal from the EU Scientific and Technical Research Committee. They proposed quote, "Stimulating cross-border Cupertino."

JAD: [laughs] Oops number two. You go.

ROBERT: The next—the next one is just a different flavor entirely. We're going to meet someone—I don't know. I can't really say that he did anything wrong.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, this one is more like, would you say, luck?

ROBERT: I mean, suppose you just picked up a toothbrush, and it was connected to a snake that was connected to a monster that was connected to the devil himself? You wouldn't—you're just picking up a toothbrush. So this is a case where really bad things happen. The story comes from our own reporter, Pat Walters.

PAT WALTERS: Yes.

ROBERT: It concerns. Go ahead.

PAT: Okay, so just to start, I want you to imagine you're on a mountaintop.

ROBERT: Okay.

PAT: This mountain is in western Nevada.

MICHAEL COHEN: The second highest peak in the state of Nevada.

ROBERT: Got a name?

PAT: It's called Wheeler Peak.

MICHAEL COHEN: And ...

ROBERT: Who's this?

PAT: This is Michael Cohen.

MICHAEL COHEN: I go by Michael P. Cohen.

PAT: He's a nature writer. And he tells me that up on top of this mountain ...

MICHAEL COHEN: There is a grove of old trees. You can see the trees from a distance, and their wood is so bright that it actually glistens in the sun.

ROBERT: What are they called?

PAT: Oh, bristlecone pines.

MICHAEL COHEN: Yes.

PAT: Can you describe what they look like?

MICHAEL COHEN: Sure. They tend to be shorter, broad at the base. They get very, very old, and as they get old, they become tortured or gnarled.

PAT: They sort of twist up towards the sky.

MICHAEL COHEN: The overall effect is sort of electrical.

PAT: They look kind of like what you'd see in a Tim Burton movie.

MICHAEL COHEN: [laughs]

PAT: So you have that picture?

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: On your mind?

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: Okay, so the story is about this scientist named Don Curry.

MICHAEL COHEN: I'm gonna take a drink of water. Wait, I'm gonna take a drink of water. Okay.

PAT: Story starts in 1964.

MICHAEL COHEN: Don Curry was a graduate student from North Carolina. And he was young.

PAT: Do we know how old he was?

MICHAEL COHEN: He was 30 years old.

PAT: And he'd just gotten a big grant from the National Science Foundation to do some climate change research. Not like climate change now, though. Climate change thousands of years ago. Because he learned that you could actually sort of travel back in time.

RON LANNER: Go back into the past using the spacing between tree rings, the annual rings.

PAT: This is Ron Lanner. He's a retired Forest Service scientist. And he says you can use the width of the tree rings ...

RON LANNER: To determine whether it was colder at one time, or rainier at one period in the tree's life or whatever.

PAT: So Curry's up on top of this mountain, up amongst these trees, and he needs to find one that he can look inside and kind of see what the weather was like way back in ...

RON LANNER: The past.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: Five minutes of looking is all that was involved.]

PAT: This is from a Nova documentary. Curry died a few years ago, and this is actually the only time that he ever talked about this story on tape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: Literally ...]

RON LANNER: He found a tree there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: ... the first old tree that we climbed to ...]

RON LANNER: That he described as looking super, super old.

PAT: So Curry takes out this special drill which scientists use to take, like, a core sample to look at the rings.

RON LANNER: Yeah.

PAT: Presses it up ...

RON LANNER: Against the tree. Give it a good push to get it through the bark.

PAT: And he starts twisting it in.

RON LANNER: Clockwise into the tree. But he wasn't having much luck.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: The normal approach to coring the tree wasn't working.]

PAT: It becomes harder and harder for him to turn this thing into the tree.

RON LANNER: And eventually, the bit of his drill broke off in the tree.

ROBERT: Oh!

PAT: This isn't just any drill. He ordered it from Sweden. And the whole time he's thinking, "If I can't get this thing out of the tree ..."

RON LANNER: That would mean the research project would be lost for the year.

PAT: So at this point he kind of lumbers back down the mountain.

RON LANNER: And ...

PAT: Dejected.

RON LANNER: ... he managed to find the district ranger and told him the problem.

PAT: "Guys, my drill, it got stuck in the tree. What should I do?" And they tell him, "Don't worry about it, Don."

RON LANNER: "We'll just cut the tree down."

PAT: This is one tree. There are dozens of these trees all around.

RON LANNER: So ...

PAT: They start slicing into the tree. It takes a while to cut it down, because it's really dense, full of knots and gnarls. And eventually the tree falls over.

RON LANNER: Then they cut some slabs out of the lower part of the tree.

PAT: Curry gets one of these slabs back to his lab, throws it on a big desk, finds a magnifying glass because the rings are really small. And he starts counting. One, two, three. And as he counts, he's making little ...

RON LANNER: Pinholes or pencil marks every 50 or 100 years.

PAT: By the end of the first day, he gets back to a thousand years. Like, the Dark Ages were in Europe eating raw possum. Day two. By the middle of the day, he gets back to like, Jesus, Roman Empire, gladiators and centurions. But even at that point he was only, like, halfway finished. He kept counting.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: We could begin to see that we were getting over 4,000 years, over 4,500, over 4,600. And we ended around 4,900 years.]

RON LANNER: It had 4,844 annual rings in it.

PAT: And at that point the oldest tree that anyone had ever found was 4,600 years old. In other words ...

RON LANNER: He had himself the oldest tree ever.

PAT: But he had killed it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: And you gotta think, I've got to have done something wrong. I better recount. I better recount again.]

PAT: But no matter how many times he counted the rings, the number never went down. The world's oldest tree was dead.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: It was—it was truly—it was horrifying. It was a—it was like a family tragedy.]

PAT: People had given these trees names.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: There was Buddha and Socrates and Methuselah.]

PAT: They called Curry's tree ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: The Prometheus tree.]

PAT: And the guy who named that particular tree was so angry that he wrote a magazine article where he called Don Curry a murderer.

MICHAEL COHEN: All across the country there's a tremendous uproar, saying what about killing the world's oldest living organism?

ROBERT: What? I thought we were just saying—I think it was the oldest living tree.

PAT: It's both. It's the oldest tree and it's the oldest organism.

ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. You mean that the oldest continuously living animal, shrub, mushroom—are you making—are you sure about this? What you just said was this is the oldest living continuous individual alive on the planet.

PAT: I know what I said. This tree was older than any other tree on the planet. Older than the oldest sponge, which is like 1,500 years old. Older than the oldest animal, just some sort of oyster which is 405 years old. Older than any other living thing on the entire planet.

ROBERT: Oh God.

JAD: [laughs]

PAT: Where do we go there?

ROBERT: So where does that leave Mr. Curry? So what happened to him?

PAT: Well, right after this happened, Curry pretty much stopped doing research on trees. He basically studied salt flats for the rest of his career—big treeless salt flats. And aside from that little Nova clip that we played before, he hasn't really ever gone on record talking about this, so it's hard for us to say how he really felt about it. But there was this one moment. He was being interviewed by a TV reporter, like, about his salt flats research.

MICHAEL COHEN: And this would have been in the 19—probably the late '80s, early '90s.

PAT: Years and years after the whole tree incident.

MICHAEL COHEN: All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the television reporter asked him, "Oh, aren't you the Curry who killed the world's oldest tree?" He was completely ambushed, and Curry just turned his back and ran away.

ROBERT: Oof! So that's a stain that's just never gonna wear off somebody. On the other hand, he did have the incredible misfortune to kill the oldest living organism on our planet.

PAT: Yeah, but this is 25 years later, and he's still getting hassled about this tree.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

PAT: We're talking about one tree here.

ROBERT: Well, no. We're talking about the tree here.

PAT: Right.

ROBERT: But the thing about a tree that lasts for almost 4,000 ...

PAT: More than that.

ROBERT: ... 5,000 years ...

PAT: Almost 5,000 years. Sure.

ROBERT: ... is that it is a repository. It is a talisman for 5,000 years of Earth's history

PAT: But I mean, would it be any less bad if the tree were three and a half thousand years old? This is just one more old thing.

ROBERT: No, it's the oldest of all.

PAT: You're taking, like, the Guinness Book of World Records perspective.

ROBERT: Oh, you keep making me into like a Ripley's Believe It Or Not guy, but no.

PAT: That's exactly where you're being.

ROBERT: No, no, no. There's a—when you've been around longer than everybody else, there's a sort of ...

PAT: Which I've never experienced.

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: Have you?

ROBERT: Well, I'm a lot older than you. [laughs] I walk in here and I look at you and I feel pity for all the things you don't know.

PAT: [laughs]

ROBERT: Consider what the tree must have felt.

JAD: Reporter Pat Walters. And we're happy to say that since our original broadcast of the story, a new oldest living tree has been found. It's also a bristlecone pine, also in the White Mountains. And its current age, according to Dr. Peter Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research Group, is just about 5,060 years old, which makes it actually older than Don Curry's tree when it was cut down. So Don Curry, if you're out there listening from the afterlife, you can now rest in peace. We'll continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Chuck from Albany, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.