LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif here. Before we start the show, I'd like you to meet ...

RECORDER: Yeah, I'm recording now.

DIANE KELLY: Oh, he's recording.

LATIF: All right! Appreciate it. Okay.

LATIF: Diane.

DIANE: Diane Kelly. And I'm part of your team of fact-checkers.

LATIF: Diane, do you—I think you know what we're doing, but do you want me to just tell you what we're doing?

DIANE: Please do. Tell me what I'm—tell me what we're doing.

LATIF: So we're here because I used to be a fact-checker on this show, and I don't think people really understand how important this job is.

DIANE: Yes. Most people don't think about fact-checking at all.

LATIF: Like, at all.

DIANE: Because I am completely invisible.

LATIF: On the air, that is. She's not invisible in real life. That wouldn't pass fact check, obviously.

DIANE: But in real life ...

LATIF: You know, behind the scenes ...

DIANE: ... I am absolutely on a team with the reporter and the producers. I am there to literally check your work.

LATIF: Diane's checking the accuracy of things like ...

DIANE: Proper names, company names, university names, distances, numbers, dates, random facts.

LATIF: Superlatives I feel like is a big one, right?

DIANE: Oh, superlatives! Agh!

LATIF: [laughs] They're the worst!

LATIF: Even the tiniest mistake ...

DIANE: Misattribution, misunderstanding ...

LATIF: ... that you could imagine ...

DIANE: I'm the one who's supposed to, like, catch it and make sure it doesn't get through.

LATIF: Right.

DIANE: And the thing is that 90 percent of the time ...

LATIF: Yeah?

DIANE: ... as we check? Everything's fine.

LATIF: Right.

DIANE: But sometimes things get weird.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie McEwen: Where should I begin?]

LATIF: For example, when Diane was fact-checking ...

DIANE: The Humpback and the Killer.

LATIF: Reported by Annie McEwen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie McEwen: We're heading out into the Antarctic Peninsula.]

DIANE: So I'm reading through the transcript, and everything's great.

LATIF: All the facts are checking out.

DIANE: That is right.

LATIF: Until Diane sees this fact about ...

DIANE: Whale milk. That it tastes like butter.

LATIF: This tiny, innocuous line, Right? Three words.

DIANE: "Tastes like butter."

LATIF: She's like, "Hmm. How do we know that?"

DIANE: Then it's like going on a treasure hunt through the entire internet.

LATIF: For first-hand evidence ...

DIANE: About whale milk mouthfeel and flavor.

LATIF: She's going to whale experts ...

DIANE: Whales, dolphins and porpoises.

LATIF: ... livestock experts ...

DIANE: Food and agriculture organization for the UN

LATIF: ... and milk experts.

DIANE: ... all the way to the US Dairy Export Councils.

LATIF: She's also looking through books.

DIANE: A book called Whales of the Southern Ocean. My copy of On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.

LATIF: Okay.

DIANE: A great reference source.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: Along the way, she learned ...

DIANE: It is very creamy.

LATIF: Good to know.

DIANE: Good to know. But it still doesn't tell me anything about what it tastes like.

LATIF: [laughs] Don't tell me you drank whale milk for this story.

DIANE: [laughs] I did not drink whale milk.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: But she did have to find someone who did.

DIANE: So I kept looking.

LATIF: Until she found ...

DIANE: The Japanese Institute for ...

LATIF: ... a scientific, peer-reviewed paper ...

DIANE: Where someone had actually tasted whale milk.

LATIF: No, you didn't!

DIANE: I did! Bingo!

LATIF: Okay, and what did it say?

DIANE: Mouthfeel like butter, taste like fish.

LATIF: Did you recommend Annie change that, or what do you ...?

DIANE: So I recommended ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie McEwen: Their milk apparently tastes like fishy butter.]

DIANE: ... "fishy butter."

LATIF: Well done!

DIANE: [laughs]

LATIF: How long approximately were you chasing ...

DIANE: That weird little fact?

LATIF: Yeah.

DIANE: That's probably about a 45-minute question.

LATIF: It took her more time to fact-check those three words than it does to listen to the entire episode we put into the feed.

DIANE: Yes.

LATIF: And that's like so much work.

DIANE: Yeah.

LATIF: I know, you're probably thinking this sounds like a big waste of time. Is it really worth it?

DIANE: Well ...

LATIF: And to that we say ...

DIANE: Hell, yeah. Because we're asking the audience to trust us.

LATIF: Even though you're probably never gonna drink whale milk, having a fact-checker means that you can trust that this, you know, neato science factoid is legit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Simon Adler: Ukraine is sending at least 10,000 of these drones up into the sky.]

LATIF: And that means that you can also trust us when we're covering ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Simon Adler: Predator drones fly up at, like, 30,000 feet.]

LATIF: ... wars ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Soren Wheeler: You just take the votes for Donald Trump in each of those precincts.]

LATIF: ... presidential elections ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Soren Wheeler: Here he got 462.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie McEwen: Since Andrew, there have been about 50—that's five-zero ...]

LATIF: ... climate change ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie McEwen: ... tropical storms that have caused ...]

LATIF: ... and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Smith: ... the judges have this power ...]

LATIF: ... the Supreme Court.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Peter Smith: ... to keep experts out of the court.]

LATIF: This is where I ask for your support so that we can continue bringing you stories that are not just lovingly reported but also thoroughly fact-checked. Because Diane's work—and not just Diane's work, Emily's work, Natalie's work, all our fact-checkers' work, it costs a lot of money, which is why the vast majority of podcasts out there do not fact check. We do because we believe in it, and if you believe in it too, and if you like being able to trust what you hear, consider supporting us, consider joining us, join our membership program, The Lab. Super easy to sign up. Go to Radiolab.org/join. And when you join, you get all kinds of perks: access to the members-only, ad-free podcast feed, you get bonus interviews, special invitations to events and things like that. And as a little extra, we just designed a set of stickers for new members this month. We—we weirdly noticed that over the last year we were kind of obsessed with birds, so there are a bunch of stickers of, like, kind of iconic birds that we covered in the last year.

LATIF: Again, if you want to support us, join The Lab. A few bucks a month. Radiolab.org/join. Pick whatever amount is right for you. Thanks for listening. And now to today's episode, which Diane fact-checked. Enjoy!

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. Here again, still. [laughs]

LULU MILLER: And I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. So where should we start this thing?

LATIF: So the story I want to tell you, it is a coming-of-age story.

LULU: Mm-hmm?

LATIF: But it's a poorly-timed one.

LULU: [laughs] Okay. What does that ...

LATIF: It's a coming-of-age story ...

LULU: What does that mean?

LATIF: ... but just at the wrong time. That's what it means.

LULU: Although to be fair, is coming of age ever at the right time?

LATIF: Uh, well I think you will have a completely different answer to that question after you hear this story.

LULU: Okay.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So basically, I don't remember this, but I got my first pubic hair when I was one-and-a-half.

LULU: Whoa! That's so alarming.

LATIF: Yeah. So this is Patrick.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I'm good. Sorry.

LATIF: Patrick Burleigh.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was a couple of minutes late.

LATIF: Nowadays he's a writer in Los Angeles, but this story starts many, many years before that, on the other side of the country, out in New York City. It is the early 1980s. Patrick's parents are both actors, doing their best to take care of this new baby, when they notice this pubic hair. And as he starts to get older ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was like, really aggressive. Like, on the playground, you know, I was constantly, like, punching kids and just losing my temper.

LATIF: So are these—like, how old were—like, these are your first memories?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I'm four. I'm, like three, four. Yeah, this is like—yeah.

LATIF: And this kid is growing like no kid you've ever seen.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was, like, three years old, for instance. But I looked like a seven year old.

LULU: Whoa, that is a big gap!

LATIF: Yeah, and what's happening here—I mean, it might be obvious, but Patrick has a genetic condition ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Called "testotoxicosis."

LATIF: ... where his body started producing testosterone way earlier than normal, which essentially meant that he was going through puberty as a toddler.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Precocious puberty.

LATIF: You know, obviously this is—this is really an extreme story. This is a story about puberty happening earlier and more intensely than it does for the vast majority of us. But hearing him talk about it, I find so relatable because, you know, we all go through puberty, obviously, whether you went through it decades ago or whether you're going through it right now, and we all end up facing a version of these two huge questions: how much of the awkwardness and really the kind of agony of that time comes from inside of us, and then also, to what extent does it make us into the adults we become?

ELLEN LESCHEK: When I came to the NIH, I happened to join a lab focusing on this particular rare type of precocious puberty.

LATIF: This is Ellen Leschek.

ELLEN LESCHEK: I'm a pediatric endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health.

LATIF: She spent decades studying kids like Patrick, so I just asked her, like, what was going on in Patrick's body?

ELLEN LESCHEK: Well ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Puberty is a very important stage in your lives.]

ELLEN LESCHEK: ... normally what happens in puberty is when a kid gets to be about, you know, 11, 12, 13 ...

LATIF: This little part of our brain ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The pituitary gland ...]

ELLEN LESCHEK: The pituitary gland in the brain ...

LATIF: ... wakes up ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: … releases a hormone ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This new hormone ...]

LATIF: And it flows out of the brain.

ELLEN LESCHEK: ... circulates around ...

LATIF: Makes its way to this receptor.

ELLEN LESCHEK: To the testicles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The testes.]

LATIF: Plugs into the receptor ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: And as a result ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The sex glands now increase their own production of hormones.]

ELLEN LESCHEK: ... testosterone is produced.

LATIF: That testosterone swirls all around the body.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Going to your muscles ...

LATIF: Making you grow body hair ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: … pubic hair.

LATIF: But also ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: … changing all sorts of stuff in your brain.

LATIF: This is friend of the show Robert Sapolsky.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University.

LATIF: And he says when the testosterone makes its way back up to the brain, it takes certain impulses ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: ... sexuality ...

LATIF: ... and aggression.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It ups the volume.

LATIF: Ramps them up.

ELLEN LESCHEK: So that's the normal. That's a normal. Now ...

LATIF: For Patrick ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: ... with this particular disorder ...

LATIF: The body sort of gets ahead of the brain.

LULU: What do you mean?

LATIF: Well, the receptor in Patrick's testes, the one that's typically activated by the pituitary gland in the brain ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: Has a mutation. And that mutation, it's just a tiny little mutation, it causes that testosterone production to start ...

LATIF: Before it hears from the brain.

ELLEN LESCHEK: From day one.

LATIF: So in other words, like, as soon as Patrick had testicles ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: ... even in utero ...

LATIF: ... they were producing testosterone.

ELLEN LESCHEK: Unregulated.

LATIF: And so the physical effects of testosterone hit Patrick right away.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I would get these erections. And, like, toddlers get these but, like, these were like erections that were like, "Go have sex."

LATIF: And when the testosterone doubled back to his brain, it wasn't coming back to the brain of a teenager, it was coming back to the brain of a toddler.

LATIF: I mean, at that point did you even know what sex was?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: No. I didn't understand sex. All I knew, it was like the most primal impulse. It was just like this thing's happening in my body and, like, it wants me to have some kind of, like, physical interaction with a girl.

LATIF: Now precocious puberty, this specific version that Patrick had, is super rare.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It affects about one in a million people. So guys, I'm actually one in a million. I mean—yeah, I know.

LATIF: That's the silver lining of this all is you can say that.

LATIF: But also ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It's hereditary. So my father had had this.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: As had my grandfather and my great grandfather. And we've traced it back to my great-great-grandfather.

LATIF: So your mom knew this was coming?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Well, they—they knew that it could happen.

LATIF: But now it was happening. They have a toddler who's going through puberty.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, they didn't know what to do. They didn't—there was no—my father hadn't been treated, and ...

LATIF: They were totally overwhelmed. And then one day ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: One of my mom's friends—like, this is an incredible coincidence, that she saw in the paper, like, the National Institute of Health is, you know, looking for test subjects that have, like, exactly what I had.

LATIF: So when Patrick was three years old, he and his mom got on a train and went down to the NIH.

ELLEN LESCHEK: One of the things that I remember about Patrick is that he was tall.

LATIF: This is Ellen again. She was one of the doctors who helped treat Patrick's puberty.

ELLEN LESCHEK: We were trying to stop it.

LATIF: Stop! Freeze!

ELLEN LESCHEK: Stop puberty. But a lot of times you're not able to fully stop it and you're really just slowing.

LATIF: She says when Patrick showed up, the scientists at the NIH were just starting ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: It was in the early days.

LATIF: ... to learn how to do this in kids like him.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was, like, their lab rat, you know? And in exchange, for free, I received treatment.

LATIF: They tried lots of different stuff. Like, Ellen said there was one drug ...

ELLEN LESCHEK: Called spironolactone.

LATIF: ... which had been developed as a blood pressure medicine.

ELLEN LESCHEK: But when they started using it for blood pressure, men started complaining about impotence, and it turned out it was because a side effect of this drug was that it blocked testos—the effects of testosterone.

LATIF: And so you guys were like, "This could be a feature, not a bug."

ELLEN LESCHEK: Yes.

LATIF: And Patrick says it kind of worked.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It slowed it down. It slowed it down a little bit.

LATIF: But it wasn't perfect. Like, some of the testosterone was almost like sneaking around the edges, causing his body to keep changing. And so by the time he was in third grade ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was like this eight-year-old, you know, like, trapped in, like, a sixteen-year-old's body.

LATIF: Like, he had a mustache. He looked like he should be in high school—which sometimes was cool.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, I was the first one hitting the ball over the fence in Little League.

LATIF: But mostly was not.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was like a freak, because I looked so strange. I was so big. You know, I got picked on a lot.

LATIF: Like, what would they do? What would they say? Like, what were ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Um, yeah. So I—you know, I remember when I was in, like, fifth grade, I would walk home every day. We didn't live very far from my elementary school. And ...

LATIF: In New York still. You were in ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: No, no, no. We had moved to LA, yeah.

LATIF: LA, okay.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: When I was about seven. You know, my dad, he'd been, like, a theater actor in New York, and I was, like, a New York City kid. And then we moved to Santa Monica, and I went to elementary school in Santa Monica.

LATIF: That's a pretty big change for any kid.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah. Yeah, it was—it was a big change. It was always hard for me to sort of enter a new social environment because of, like, how I looked.

LATIF: Like, he was big on the outside but, you know, inside he was still small.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So anyway, I would—I would walk home from school every day, and I would, like, jump this fence and walk home. And every day, there were these kids who were oh, they were probably, like, four years older, and they would, like, wait and, you know, and they would, like, push me around and punch me or whatever.

LATIF: Like, they knew, despite what he looked like, he was really just a little kid you could push around. And then there was kind of the reverse when other people who should have known how little he was treated him like he was much bigger.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So one day I'm driving with my dad, and on the bus stop is one of the kids who—who picks on me. And I sort of like tell my dad. And my dad, he—he, like, pulls over and he, like, jumps out of the car. And he's like, "You wanna fight my son?" Like, "You think you can fight my son?" And I'm, like, sitting in the passenger seat. And I'm like, "No! Please!" And he's like, "Look at this, like, marshmallow-y kid. Like, you—like, you'll kick the shit out of this kid." You know, I'm, like, crying and I'm like, "No, Dad! Like, no, that's not—don't. Please!" And he's like, "Patrick, get out here! Like, you can take this kid!"

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I don't want to, like, vilify my dad because he was like a very supportive and loving father.

LATIF: But at that moment, Patrick says ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I felt—I felt that he absolutely had no idea what I was going through. And this is so ironic, because he's, like, the only other person in the world whom I've ever met who had this condition.

LATIF: Like, if anybody should get it, it would be his dad, who also had been a little boy who looked like and was forced to act like a man.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, like, by the time he was 10 he looked like he was, like, 18 years old. He was like a fully grown man at, like, 10 years old. And he also—his dad, my grandfather who—he had had precocious puberty as well, he kind of—he—he left. And so my dad, who looked much older, at, like, 12, like, he had to—you know, he, like, went and, like, worked in a cannery and, like, supported his mom and, like, his two sisters, you know?

LATIF: Oh wow! So he was the—he was the man of the house.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: He was the breadwinner, yeah. And, yet, like, growing up, we never had that kind of heart-to-heart. He was never like, "Patrick, like, I know this is really hard. Like, you're going through this, and I went through this." What I've just told you about my dad and his dad, like, that's—like, my mom, like, told me that.

LATIF: And only when Patrick got older, did he learn other stories, too.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: My great grandfather had been the youngest US soldier in World War I. When he was 12 years old, he ran away from home and joined the Navy and fought in Europe.

LATIF: Because he looked—because he looked ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: ... on the—yeah. No, he looked like he was 19. And nobody figured out how old he really was until he was getting drunk with some other soldiers, and they, like, hijacked a cargo plane. There are news articles about this.

LATIF: [laughs]

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And they hijacked a cargo plane and, like, took it up joyriding.

LATIF: What?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And—yeah. And they were all just wasted. And—and they grounded the plane, and they court-martialed my great grandfather, and only then—only then did they discover that he was 13 years old.

LATIF: They're like, "Son, you're acting like you're 13 years old!"

PATRICK BURLEIGH: [laughs] Right! Right!

LATIF: And then he was like, "Well, I have something to tell you."

PATRICK BURLEIGH: "That's because I am." Yeah.

LATIF: But when Patrick was a little kid ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It was just like a big mystery.

LATIF: ... he didn't know these stories.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So—so in some ways I was kind of on my own.

LATIF: As Patrick got older, he kept going in for treatments.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I would spend two weeks every year as an inpatient at the NIH.

LATIF: They tried all kinds of drugs on him.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Like, there were periods when I was taking 32 pills a day. Like, I would take 16 in the morning and 16 at night.

LATIF: But none of it worked completely.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It was very frustrating.

LATIF: And often, he'd take that frustration out physically.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I would break things, I would punch things, punch people. You know, I felt constantly misunderstood because I looked like a normal child, just much, much older. All of this surface tension had built up and built up and built up over years, really, of having had precocious puberty, you know, and not knowing how to deal with it. And lying about my age, and acting out because I was hormonal, and getting into a cycle of being in trouble, and then sort of just embracing this kind of bad kid persona that, you know, in many ways had been foisted on me from an early age because of my behavioral issues as a result of precocious puberty.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was, like, on the edge of, like, going from being just, like, sort of a—a bad kid, but on the level of like a class clown to—to, like, being, like, a delinquent. And, like, really getting into stuff like drugs and, like, other things that, like—okay, like, now it's like not just, like, getting into a scuffle in the hallway. It's like, you know, more severe.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And—and so right around 12, my doctors, they took—they were like, "Okay, like, he's 12. And we've, like, sort of stemmed the flood for a while now, and we think we're gonna take him off his medicine and, like, see—see how he does, and sort of let him, like, finish puberty, you know, finish—finish puberty."

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And, you know, so it had been almost—it had been nine, almost ten years that I had, you know, been on these drugs that had done, you know, sort of a halfway decent job of—of, like, keeping, you know, the testosterone really, at bay. And then all of a sudden I wasn't.

LATIF: When we come back, Patrick finishes puberty, and things get worse before they get better.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Radiolab.

LATIF: Today we are telling the story of Patrick Burleigh, who started going through puberty when he was—basically when he was born. He was treated at the NIH, which slowed things down a bit, but when he was 12, his doctors there, they took him off the medications so he could finish going through puberty on his own.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And when they took me off the medication, there was like a precipitous change in my behavior. I, like, tumbled over that line from, like, just, like—like, the troublemaker in class to, like—like a delinquent kid. Fighting, writing graffiti, smoking pot.

LATIF: Did it feel like it was your—it was your body carrying you away, or did you feel like these were choices that you were making at the time?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It felt like I was no match for my body. [laughs] Like, it just had its way with me.

LATIF: And that spring, something happened that Patrick would look back on as sort of a culmination of everything that had happened before.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Right, So I met this girl at the mall. Her name was Maryanne, and she was 17.

LATIF: How old were you?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Twelve. But I told Maryanne that I was 16.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And she believed me.

LATIF: Pretty soon they started dating.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And we didn't have sex. I hadn't lost my virginity yet, but—but it was, like, close. And—so anyway, so Maryanne, she was living with this drug dealer in Venice. So one night, it's like a Tuesday, it's a school night. So Maryanne calls me up and she's like, "Oh, you know, this guy, this drug dealer that I'm living with, like, he just got in, like, this amazing acid."

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: "You gotta try some."

LATIF: Did you know what that was? Like ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: No, no, no. But I—but I was, like, maintaining this persona, this 16-year-old persona. And, like, in my persona, like, yeah, I knew all about acid. Like, cool. Oh yeah, white unicorns? Like, totally. Those are awesome. So, you know, I, like, snuck out. It was, like, nine o'clock at night. I, like, snuck out. And like, this guy's, you know, car pulled up and, like, she got out and she, like, gave me three tabs of acid. And I, like, paid whatever, $9 or whatever it was, that I, like—my allowance.

LATIF: [laughs] Your milk money or something.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

LATIF: Yeah.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And I—and then—and then they left and I, like, snuck back in. I waited for my parents to go to bed and, like, I took a tab of acid. I just—I don't know. I thought it was just gonna make me feel really great. So I'm, like, lying in my bed and I'm, like, waiting, you know? And I'm, like—I'm, like, getting impatient. Like, nothing's happening. I'm like, "This sucks. Like, does this stuff even work?" You know? So I take another tab. And I fall asleep.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: 45 minutes later I wake up, and there are, like, stalactites coming down from the ceiling. There are, like, bugs all over me. Like, all the worst things are happening to me. And I’m, like, up all night, like, having, like, the worst trip imaginable. And I'm 12. It's terrible. The next morning, I'm like—all right, I'm gonna go—like, there's no way I can go to school. There's absolutely no way. So I went to my parents and I was, like, "You know, I'm sick. Like, I really need to not go to school." And they're like—but I was trying not to act—I was trying to act like I wasn't on acid.

LATIF: [laughs]

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So that was, like, counteracting me trying to act sick.

LATIF: Oh God!

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Like, I didn't seem sick because I was trying to act normal, you know? And they were, like, "You're not sick. You seem fine.

LATIF: Right. They were—this is exactly the kind of thing they would expect from you.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Right. It was a total boy-who-cried-wolf scenario.

LATIF: Yeah.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So—so they sent me to school and I, like, managed to, like, stay in the nurse's office for the morning.

LATIF: Oh, smart.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: But she was really skeptical of me being sick also, and I didn't, like, have a temperature. And so finally at lunch she was, like, "You can't stay here anymore. Like, you have to go out to lunch." And I had stupidly—I had brought the third tab of acid with me to school. Because I was so paranoid. My parents—they were very—they didn't trust me and I was afraid that they would find it.

LATIF: Sure, of course.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And I was also—I was on acid, still. I was still tripping.

LATIF: [laughs]

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So I went out onto, like, the schoolyard where my friends were having lunch and I, like, joined them. And they were also, like, amateur delinquents, and I, like, went up to them and—and then I was like—"Oh—" instead of saying, like, "I had the worst experience of my life last night. Like, never do acid," I was like, "Oh my—dude! I did acid last night! It was the best thing, man! Like, I had this incredible ..."

LATIF: Oh, man!

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Because, like, just, I wanted to seem cool.

LATIF: Yeah!

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And—and I was like, "I have one more tab. One of you guys want it?" And they were all—they were all—like, had the sense to be like, "Oh, no thanks. You know, maybe another time." But one of my friends who was, like, sort of the instigator of our group, he was like, "I have an idea. You should take the acid, the tab of acid, and you should, like, put it in someone's drink, and, like—and, like, see what's gonna happen." Before I could say anything, like, he had turned to our friend, this girl, and he had said, like, "Oh hey, can I have a sip of your Coke?" And he, like, turned around and we, like, put the tab of acid in her Coke. And she drank the Coke. And so there were two periods after lunch, fifth and sixth period, and sixth period was a computer class. And I had it with this girl, who was our friend. She was, like—you know, we hung out with her a lot. So we're sitting at these long rows and, you know, practicing, like, how many words a minute we can type.

LATIF: Yeah.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And—and, like, I look down the row and I'm, like, watching her. And all of a sudden, like, she starts just, like, laughing. Like, maniacal. Like, maniacal, like, Joker laugh. And then she, like—she, like, jumps up and she, like, runs over to me, because I'm, like, her friend in the class. And she starts just bawling. And the teacher comes over and, like, takes her down to the nurse's office. And I, like, freak out and I run down there and I just—I, like, confess everything.

LATIF: Wow! Wow!

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Because I'm, like, worried about her. An ambulance comes.

LATIF: Oh my God!

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And they call the police. And they march me out, you know, and they put me in the cruiser, and they take me to the station, you know, and they book me.

LATIF: So what are you thinking when—when—I mean, what is going through your mind this whole time?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I feel—I mean, I'm mostly worried about my friend, who's in the hospital, like, having her stomach pumped. I mostly feel, like, overwhelming remorse.

LATIF: And how long after you had gone off your medications was this?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Like, a couple of months, yeah.

LATIF: And I don't know, like, do you think, like is precocious puberty, or is it—or to what degree is it responsible for what happened?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah. That's a good—that's a valid question, one that I have often asked myself. And I think—listen, I don't mean to, like, absolve my 12-year-old self of responsibility. It's unquestionably the worst thing that I have ever done. What I will say is that I was this incredible mixture of naivité and, you know, 12-year-old-ness, and also just, you know, being advanced, and really not entirely in control of my impulses. I mean, I had this testosterone just coursing through my body at an age before, like, I knew how to reason.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

LATIF: This is Sapolsky again. And when I told him about this, he said that the reasoning part of Patrick's brain ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's this area called the frontal cortex.

LATIF: ... whose job it is to tell you, like, "Hey, maybe let's not put acid in our classmate's drink ..."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do.

LATIF: That part of his brain was not really online yet.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's the last part of our brain to fully mature. Not until you're about 25 years old. There is this lag time.

LATIF: Between when Patrick's body matured and when his brain did. And the fact is, we all experience some version of this lag time. Like, even if you go through puberty at a typical age, it's still gonna be way before you turn 25.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And this is why juveniles behave in juvenile ways.

LULU: It's so weird to see it spelled out so clearly. Like, we have—humans have this built-in decade at least where they have a fully mature body full of fully mature impulses and a little pea brain that doesn't know how to wrangle with them? Like, that—that feels like a glitch in the design. Like, that feels like a problem.

LATIF: [laughs] Yes. But according to Sapolsky, there's a reason that we're set up this way.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: If you're trying to get this part of the brain that tells you to do the right thing even though it's the harder thing, it takes a hell of a long time for you to learn what counts as the right thing.

LATIF: It's complicated.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Thou shall not kill. On the other hand, if you kill one of "them," we're gonna be really nice to you. Never ever lie, but if you're, like, harboring refugees in your attic and the guys in the brown suits are there coming for them, you should lie to them. That's messy stuff.

LATIF: And over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: There's been selection to delay frontal maturation.

LATIF: To give the brain time to learn the rules.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: But the downside is you come up with adolescence and adolescent behavior because there's this mismatch for quite a few years.

LATIF: For all of us, that gap is big, but for Patrick it was enormous.

LATIF: Wait, so when you went to—I mean, they booked you, the police did. Did they file any charges or anything?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: They didn't file charges. They didn't file charges luckily, you know?

LATIF: I should say we reached out to the girl whose drink Patrick and his friends put the LSD in. She's grown up, she has a successful career. She did not want to do an interview with us, and because of that we don't really know what the aftermath of that event was like for her. But Patrick, after this incident, he did not go to jail, but he did get expelled.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: From the entire school district.

LATIF: And in 1993, his parents decided to send him off to a military school in Indiana.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Thinking that separating me from my friends in LA, and from the things I was doing in LA and that world would—you know, would help me.

LATIF: But it didn't.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: They told me that I had amassed more infractions in, like, the six months that I was there than any cadet in the history of the school.

LATIF: Things didn't really turn around for Patrick until, weirdly, he went back to where he kind of bottomed out.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah, so then I came back to Santa Monica, and they let me back in.

LATIF: When Patrick was in the ninth grade, so he's 15 years old now, his parents convinced the school district to take him back, and he transferred to this big public high school.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And when I came back from Indiana, like, I was still smoking pot every day. I was still hanging out on the street, but I was—I was older now and there was a different feeling about it. And I started to, like, have these glimpses of what it looked like, you know, down the road because I would, like, hang out with these people, you know, like on Venice Beach or, like, you know, I would encounter these people. I would, like, get high with them or skateboard with them or whatever. And I just had this moment, like, where I remember coming home from school, and I had Spanish homework to do. And I was too stoned to do my Spanish—like, there was just no way that I—I couldn't—I could barely read. I was like—and I had, like, a minor panic attack. And I was like—like, I'm gonna end up homeless. Like, I'm gonna end up, you know, on the street, if I don't—if I don't make a change, you know? And—and so it almost was overnight.

LATIF: He stopped cutting class, started going to school. And when he did he noticed something.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: The other kids were catching up physically to me. I no longer stuck out. And—and I just—like the—you know, for my entire life I had been under a microscope, and so when I finally ended up at this big, anonymous just kind of factory of a school, like, I was like in the pond with everyone else and sort of swimming at the same pace, you know? And it was very—it was liberating.

LATIF: And in that last stretch of high school, he did a complete 180°.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Like, I really sort of lost myself in—in books and reading. Like, that was, like, my escape.

LATIF: Got his grades up.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I, like, started playing sports again, which I hadn't done for years.

LATIF: Made new friends.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Who were just more conventional—not in a bad way. They were just—they were, like, gonna go to college.

LATIF: And eventually Patrick does that too. He applies to and manages to get into Dartmouth College. He goes to an ivy league school. And he says once he got there, he would walk around on campus, just kind of marveling at how unremarkable he felt there.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, just like, "Oh, I'm, like, a high-achieving, like, Dartmouth student, you know, who's, like—you know, I'm just like a normal male."

LATIF: This precocious puberty, this thing that had defined his whole life to that point, just felt like it was gone.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, because it's not like I have, like, a deformity on my face because of what I went through as a child. There's no outward sign that I had this very unusual childhood.

LULU: It's interesting because, like, so many disability stories I've heard don't work this way. Like, you're—you're—like it usually goes like, either you come out and you are disabled and you come to some form of acceptance or whatever, or, like, you are non-disabled and then you become disabled. And this is a story where it's like early, early someone becomes—or, like, has a kind of disability or a difference.

LATIF: You're so right. Usually the story is, like, "And then I came to terms with my disability, and I learned to find a way to live my life in my way." And this is like no, he gets a free pass back to normie-land, you know?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah, I think that's very astute, you know? I could kind of, like, go under the radar.

LATIF: And that's how it stayed, a secret about his past. Until many years later, almost by surprise, Patrick was confronted with a decision that forced him to dredge it all back up.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Radiolab. So where else do we go? It feels like your protagonist, your guy, Patrick, came of age. What—where are we going?

LATIF: Okay, so there's one more part of the story. So—okay, so let's fast forward to several years ago, Patrick is an adult at this point, he's become—he's a writer. He's a successful screenwriter, has even written on a Marvel movie or two.

LULU: Which one?

LATIF: The one that I know is Eternals.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Which was the movie that Chloé Zhao directed for Marvel.

LATIF: He says it actually had this one character ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: There's a character named Sprite.

LATIF: Who in a weird way, sort of reminded him of himself.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: She is—you know, there are these immortal creatures who have come to Earth and Sprite is trapped as a teenager, but she's 7,000 years old. And so in many ways it's the inverse, you know, of sort of what I went through, you know? But I always—like, her plight ...

LATIF: Made sense to him given what he'd been through.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I'm not saying that I was a superhero as a kid, you know? But I—I definitely bring my experience of—of feeling different and feeling other, and yet also sort of having, you know, abilities that—that my peers didn't have.

LATIF: So, you know, Patrick wrote some of that into the movie, but for most of his adult life ...

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I didn't talk about precocious puberty. I didn't want people to think of me as different.

LATIF: And that's how it was as he finished college, started his career, met his future wife.

MEREDITH BROWER: My name is Meredith Brower.

LATIF: Was there a thing that drew you to him, that you felt like that was like—this was the—this was the guy?

MEREDITH BROWER: I mean, Patrick is obviously very handsome.

LATIF: I can objectively say he's—and this is for radio. I can objectively say he's a very handsome guy.

MEREDITH BROWER: [laughs]

LULU: So he's, like, hot?

LATIF: Yes. But also, as he and Meredith fell in love and got married and started to build the life they wanted to have together, it gradually became clear to Patrick that that thing that made him different wasn't actually gone.

MEREDITH BROWER: Interestingly, when we started to try to get pregnant on our own, we didn't have many frank conversations about the possibility of having a son with precocious puberty. But we ended up having a really hard time getting pregnant.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: My wife and I, we had to do in vitro fertilization.

MEREDITH BROWER: And it was at that moment ...

LATIF: Where they were like, "Oh, wait a second."

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Maybe, like, we should go in and, like, biopsy these suckers to, like, see if—which ones have precocious puberty.

LATIF: So the thing about IVF, which you may already know and which they definitely knew because by coincidence Meredith herself is an IVF doctor, but so the thing is that when you do IVF, doctors typically create several embryos. And ...

MEREDITH BROWER: You actually have the choice.

LATIF: You can choose which ones you want to use.

MEREDITH BROWER: The technology is available that you could screen for the mutation in an embryo.

LATIF: And just pick one that doesn't have it.

MEREDITH BROWER: I really did feel like it was his decision to make.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, I was worried about it.

LATIF: Patrick says he was pretty split.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It was, like, gonna cost a bunch of money, and it was—you know, it's like an invasive procedure. Like, you don't know.

LATIF: But on the other hand, his childhood was rough.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, why—why would I roll the dice and sort of chance that it might happen to my child? Like, isn't my job as a parent to kind of prevent hardship for my child?

LATIF: So he's trying to figure out what to do, and then one day he's, like, driving home, pulls up to his house and his dad calls. Now remember, his dad does not like to talk about precocious puberty, which is why he didn't talk to us, to be honest.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: It's like the era of which we do not speak. It's like the dirty war in Argentina or something. You know, it's like—like, he just ...

LATIF: But it's all Patrick can think about right now.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: You know, so I told him. I was like, "Look, you know, I'm concerned about precocious puberty and, you know ..."

LATIF: Explained how because they were doing IVF, they could test the embryos, pick one that doesn't have it.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: And my dad, he was kind of like, "Why the hell are you gonna do that?" He was sort of like, "Like, what the hell's wrong—" it's like a mix of kind of being defensive about, like—or being sort of too proud to admit that, like, this is a difficulty that, like, he had and he passed on to me and that I could pass on. Like, I think there's, like, some shame in there and some denial. But then he also said something to me that kind of resonated, you know, which was that, like, this is—like, this definitely shaped me, like, more than anything else in my life. And he's like, you know—I don't know, he's like, you know, in a way—in a way, you know, testing for precocious puberty, like, testing these embryos for precocious puberty and selecting them out is, you know, in a sense kind of like rejecting my own experience.

LATIF: So your father was saying, "This is the thing that—that formed you."

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Defines you.

LATIF: That defines you.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: That defines you, yeah. And so why would you reject it?

LATIF: Yeah. Why would you deny your child the thing that shaped you?

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Right. And why would you stigmatize the thing that—that is this thing that is, you know, such a part ...

LATIF: That makes you one in a million.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly—and he, you know—and it came—like, him saying this to me, it came out of love. You know, he's like, "I love you so much. Like, why—like, everything about you, like, why would you deny that, as hard as it was?"

LATIF: Yeah.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: So yeah. So we didn't do—you know, we didn't do that test, and we kind of just got, you know—we prepared for the scenario in which our baby would have that and, you know, kind of hoped for the best.

LATIF: A few weeks ago, I went to meet up with Patrick, and his son.

NED BURLEIGH: But I'm wearing Pumas.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: He's eight years old now.

LATIF: Showed off some of his skateboard tricks.

NED BURLEIGH: Sometimes it takes me a while to warm up.

LATIF: And when I asked him about puberty ...

NED BURLEIGH: I would say ...

LATIF: ... he said ...

NED BURLEIGH: I don't know.

LATIF: ... kind of exactly what you would expect an eight year old who is not going through puberty to say.

NED BURLEIGH: Well, I know it's—it's when you get a little older.

LULU: So that means he does not have the mutation? He doesn't—he doesn't have precocious puberty?

LATIF: That's right. He does not have it.

NED BURLEIGH: Precocious puberty.

LATIF: He knows what it is, though.

NED BURLEIGH: It means that you, like—you get—you get puberty when you're, like, really young, like two or three years old.

LATIF: Patrick has talked to him about it.

CLAIRE BURLEIGH: I felt very, very surprised. It's just crazy.

LATIF: He told his daughter about it, too.

CLAIRE BURLEIGH: It's just crazy that that actually happened.

LATIF: She's six, also doesn't have precocious puberty. The condition Patrick has only affects boys.

CLAIRE BURLEIGH: You get like a beard or something.

LATIF: Girls can be carriers, though. And Patrick says there is a test for that. But it feels like doing that might be a bit premature.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: We can go to the skate park in, like, 20 minutes, okay?

NED BURLEIGH: Okay.

PATRICK BURLEIGH: I was thinking maybe we could play a game of go fish?

CLAIRE BURLEIGH: Yeah!

LATIF: This episode was reported by me with help from Kelsey Padgett, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys and Alyssa Jeong Perry. It was produced by Pat Walters, Alex Neason and Alyssa Jeong Perry with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Mixing help from Arianne Wack, fact-checking by Diane Kelly and edited by Pat Walters.

LATIF: Special thanks to Nick Burleigh, Alyssa Voss at the NIH and to Craig Cox who was the one who first introduced me to Patrick and his story. To read Patrick's own writing about his precocious puberty and to see photos of him as a child, check out his article in The Cut, which is linked on our website. That's it from us. Thank you so much.

[LISTENER: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. 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.]

 

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