[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Uh, hi. This is Jad.

ELIZABETH MASON: Hi.

JAD: Hey. It's me, Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert.

JAD: And this first story started when we bumped into an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

JAD: Were you a little bit weirded out as to why we are calling you?

ELIZABETH MASON: Yes. [laughs] You know me, I just don't understand the whole thing.

JAD: The story really gets going with a phone call to this woman, Elizabeth Mason.

ELIZABETH MASON: I'm a receptionist/switchboard operator.

JAD: She works at a research lab in Boston. And one day, she's sitting at her desk and she gets a call from a woman who says that she has donated some eyes to them and she wants to know what happened to them.

ROBERT: [laughs] That's not a call you get every day.

ELIZABETH MASON: I just remember it was just very unusual, right? And just I didn't know what to do with it. I just felt like I gotta find somebody to help this woman.

JAD: Today we're gonna tell you the story of the—of the woman on the other end of that phone call. This is her story. You might say their story.

SARAH GRAY: So for my title should I say, "I'm Sarah Gray. I'm the mom?"

ROSS GRAY: I'm Ross Gray. I'm Thomas's dad.

JAD: And how did you guys meet? While we're—while we're ...

ROSS GRAY: We met in a bar in Glasgow.

JAD: Really?

SARAH GRAY: Yeah. I was on vacation with a girlfriend.

JAD: And—and was it a—was it a—what happened? Without getting into too many ...

ROSS GRAY: [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: [laughs]

ROSS GRAY: I don't know. I think we've got different ideas and different recollections of what happened.

SARAH GRAY: Well, we started dating across the ocean for a year and a half, and then he moved to America.

JAD: Five days after he arrived they were married. A few years after that, they were pregnant with twins.

SARAH GRAY: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And when did you first know that something was up?

SARAH GRAY: It was at the 12-week screening. They call it the first trimester screening, and they're checking for birth defects. I think the most common one is Down syndrome. But it was September 30, 2009.

JAD: They went in for the screening, the ultrasound tech took a scan of the two fetuses. And shortly after, the doc came into the room.

SARAH GRAY: And said that only one of the twins would make it, and one of the twins had anencephaly and would die within a few minutes or hours of being born. And he said he could see that because one of the twins had a round skull and the other one had a bumpy skull.

JAD: Huh.

SARAH GRAY: The bumpy skull showed him that the skull wasn't correct, wasn't round enough.

JAD: The brain and skull weren't forming properly, which is what anencephaly is.

ROSS GRAY: It was a bit of a shock, obviously.

JAD: Yeah.

SARAH GRAY: I couldn't believe it.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah, you just kinda—it's difficult to process it, I think, because you think, "No, that can't be right. They've just told us it's identical twins, but one of them's completely different from the other." It's difficult.

SARAH GRAY: It sounded fictional to me.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah.

JAD: Making matters worse ...

SARAH GRAY: The doctor said that the unhealthy twin was posing a threat to the healthy twin. And if we were to be safe, we would do a selective termination to save the life of the healthy twin.

JAD: Hmm.

JAD: So Sarah says they were suddenly faced with this choice.

SARAH GRAY: I actually talked to two priests on the phone about it.

JAD: Really?

SARAH GRAY: Yeah.

JAD: Her family's Catholic. She was raised Catholic.

SARAH GRAY: I don't know. I guess I wanted to see what—what their take was on this.

JAD: Yeah.

SARAH GRAY: This is probably not the direction we want to go to for this radio story, but ...

JAD: No. I mean, I'm suddenly interested in it.

SARAH GRAY: Basically what I was saying is, "Would you come and do a blessing over this selective termination?"

JAD: And what'd they say?

SARAH GRAY: One priest said no. He just said he wouldn't do a blessing over a selective termination. And then the other priest said that because of a Thomas Aquinas rule of—like, I think it was called "double account" or something? Basically like the rule that if you—if a train is coming and you—like, you want to save the life of someone on the train tracks and you shoot the driver, that's the right thing to do.

JAD: After looking it up, it's actually called the doctrine of double effect. And she's basically right, maybe not the part about shooting the driver, but the overall idea is that if you're trying to do good and on the way to doing good you must inadvertently do some harm, it's okay in certain circumstances as long as your intentions are good.

SARAH GRAY: Anyways, those priests said because you're doing this with the intent of saving the healthy twin, that he would be there and he would do a blessing.

JAD: Fast forward a few weeks ...

SARAH GRAY: We booked a hotel and we'd packed our bags. And the night before was really terrible for both of us because, I don't know, we had seen him on the screen and we sort of were attached to this little kid.

JAD: Next day they go in for the procedure.

SARAH GRAY: We go into the room, and the doctor puts the sonogram on me and start getting ready, and he said, "Your placenta has moved since the last time you were here. And the location where it is right now, I don't think we should do this." He said, "If I nick it, if I even just nick it a little bit, like, you're gonna bleed uncontrollably, and this is not safe to do."

ROSS GRAY: He said that he wouldn't do it on his wife either.

JAD: And what was that like to be on the—on the table? You've gone to the ...

SARAH GRAY: A relief.

JAD: Was it relief? Really?

ROSS GRAY: Yeah. It was a relief, yeah.

SARAH GRAY: Oh my God we, like, got in the elevator, we just hugged and we were like, "Oh!"

ROSS GRAY: Like, the decision's taken out of your hand, you know? So it's ...

SARAH GRAY: Not our fault.

JAD: But then your healthy twin is more at risk maybe.

SARAH GRAY: Yes.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah.

SARAH GRAY: It was like a nail-biter for the rest of the six months.

JAD: And according to Ross, those six months were deeply strange.

ROSS GRAY: Just buying one of everything when you know there's two babies coming. And we knew we were gonna be having a funeral as well. So, you know, I called the—what do you call it?—the funeral director and told him, you know, we're gonna be having a funeral. And, like, well when was the death? Like, I don't know. The guy's not even born yet, you know? [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: That's very weird!

JAD: All right, so they get to the day of ...

JAD: March ...

SARAH GRAY: 23rd.

JAD: 23rd.

ROSS GRAY: 23rd.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: 2010.

ROSS GRAY: 10:30 a.m.

SARAH GRAY: Thomas came out first, and he's the sick one that had anencephaly.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah.

SARAH GRAY: And then a minute later Callum came out. And I wasn't sure if Thomas was gonna be born alive. I sort of expected him to die within a few minutes, but ...

ROSS GRAY: He was—he was struggling at first when he came out. They didn't think he was gonna last too long, but then he kinda ...

SARAH GRAY: He rallied.

ROSS GRAY: He rallied, and he was doing pretty good. And then ...

JAD: Oddly, it was then Callum, the healthy twin, who started to have some trouble at the beginning. And so he and Sarah went off to the infant ICU. And so Ross says in the delivery room ...

ROSS GRAY: It was just me and Thomas for quite a while, actually. We were just sitting together.

JAD: What was that like, Ross?

ROSS GRAY: It was—it was cute, you know? He was a little ... [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: [laughs]

ROSS GRAY: He was a brand new baby, you know what I mean? They cry. But he was, like, grabbing onto my finger, and I don't know, doing the kind of things that babies do, you know? There's nothing you can do but just kind of give him a cuddle, you know? And try—try to stop him crying and cheer him up.

SARAH GRAY: I—and I remember coming to the recovery room, and Ross had this little bundle in his arms. And I said, "Who's that?" And he said, "Thomas." And I said, "He's alive?" And I'm like, "Oh, let me hold him." And so I held him and yeah, he was cute. Like, he breast fed, and we could feed him with the bottle.

JAD: They ended up taking him home.

SARAH GRAY: I hadn't really planned on that. Like, we didn't have another car seat. We just didn't think of that. And I remember thinking, like, "What if he's gonna beat the odds? Like, do we need to arrange daycare? And, like, you know, we hadn't thought of that.

ROSS GRAY: He seems all right. You know, he could hang in here for a while, you know?

JAD: But then soon after, Thomas started having seizures, started having trouble breathing. Stopped eating.

SARAH GRAY: And at the time, I remember thinking, you know, like, "Come on little guy! Like, just eat some more! Like, if you eat some more, then you'll be stronger." I was like, "Just eat. Just eat."

JAD: Well, so how—how—how long did Thomas live in the end?

ROSS GRAY: Six days.

JAD: Six days.

SARAH GRAY: He died in Ross's arms, and he was surrounded by all of the people that loved him. And then right then we called the Washington Regional Transplant Community and they sent a van over to our house. And they picked up his body and took him to DC Children's National Medical Center.

JAD: Okay, so this is where the story really gets going, I guess.

SARAH GRAY: Yeah.

JAD: So how did that idea of donating his organs get in—come into your head?

ROSS GRAY: Did you see an article in the paper, a newspaper article or something that ...?

SARAH GRAY: Yeah, my mom saw an article about a baby who had anencephaly who donated his liver cells. And most major religions support organ donation.

JAD: Oh, okay.

JAD: So the van came, picked up Thomas.

JAD: What happened next?

ROSS GRAY: Nothing happened.

JAD: Nothing happened.

ROSS GRAY: After that. For a long—for a long time. You know, you—I think ...

SARAH GRAY: We got some letters.

ROSS GRAY: We got a letter in the mail, I guess.

JAD: A sort of form letter that basically said, "Thank you for your generous donation. Thomas's corneas have been sent to this place in Boston where they study a potential cure for blindness. And his liver has been sent to this place in Durham, North Carolina, where they study ways to treat liver disease."

SARAH GRAY: It seemed generic to me because I thought, "I want to know, like, who ordered it? Which researcher got it and what study are they working on?"

JAD: But, you know, they went on with their lives because they had this new baby Callum to raise. So they put it behind them for the most part. But then Sarah says they got to the one-year anniversary.

SARAH GRAY: The one-year anniversary felt like a big moment to me. Like, that's when I can—that's when it stops being in the present and it can start being in the past. You know, just explaining it to people, at least I can say it was a year ago so they don't have to feel stressed out when they talk to me. And it felt like a big deal. Like, I think we were gonna go to the cemetery and put some flowers on his grave. And I wanted to tell my family what were the results of his donations.

JAD: So she called the donor family services person at the place that picked up Thomas's body, and she basically asked them ...

SARAH GRAY: Like, is there any more information you can give us about the specific study or the research, or if something was published? And they didn't have any. So I just thought, "Okay, well I tried." You know?

JAD: But she couldn't quite let it go.

ROBERT: You mean—what do you mean, she couldn't quite let it go?

JAD: You know, it was curiosity, but also I think she was having on some level like a big conversation with the universe. They both were. Like, this terrible thing happened, how do you explain it to yourself?

ROSS GRAY: I don't know. [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: I mean, I think honestly, it sort of—it sort of shook my faith in God and how the universe works. I thought that karma worked, or if I was basically a good person and I obeyed the rules that things would happen to me.

JAD: Whatever the reason, these thoughts about Thomas and where he ended up, they were just there. She had no real opportunity to act on it, so they would just kind of come in and out of her mind. But then around the two-year anniversary, so this is now a year later ...

SARAH GRAY: I had a business trip to Boston, and I was exhibiting at a conference at Hynes Convention Center. And I Googled it and I saw that Schepens Eye Research Institute was just a few miles away.

JAD: That's where Thomas's corneas had been sent.

JAD: Ah, lunch break!

SARAH GRAY: That's exactly what I did!

JAD: [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: I called Schepens, and I said, "You know, I donated my son's eyes to this lab a couple years ago, and I'm here in town. Is there any chance I can come by for a tour for, like, 10 minutes?"

JAD: That must have been a weird phone call.

SARAH GRAY: Yes.

JAD: [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: I mean—yes.

ELIZABETH MASON: Yeah, that was like a waker-upper. [laughs]

JAD: That's Elizabeth Mason again.

ELIZABETH MASON: It was just very unusual.

SARAH GRAY: I think she was surprised.

ELIZABETH MASON: I just didn't know what to do with it.

JAD: Had you ever gotten a call like that before?

ELIZABETH MASON: Never have gotten a call.

JAD: And she's been working there for 25 years.

SARAH GRAY: She said, "Hold on. Let me connect you to the right person. Don't hang up."

ELIZABETH MASON: A lot of times when I say something they hang up on me, so I said, "Please hold the line," while I started searching for someone to speak with her.

SARAH GRAY: "It's gonna take me a while because I gotta figure out who that is. Don't hang up."

ELIZABETH MASON: [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: And they connected me with someone in donor relations, but it was financial donor relations.

JAD: Oh, like—the development department?

SARAH GRAY: Money. Yeah.

ROSS GRAY: Not—not an organ donor. [laughs]

SARAH GRAY: But they—because they don't have any other donor relations. That—you know, like, that was the person that gives the tours and deals with the public, so she got to talk to me.

JAD: Sarah says the woman was a little bit flustered but super nice, and said, "You know, we've never done this before but yeah, come on down. We'll give you a tour."

SARAH GRAY: I was so excited. I took pictures of the outside of the building. And I stood in the lobby and I put one of the brochures in my purse. And I just felt like I can't believe I'm here. This is like being in Santa's workshop or something. Like, I didn't think this was a place you could actually visit.

JAD: She was taken around, and eventually she got taken to the lab where Thomas's corneas went.

SARAH GRAY: And there were refrigerators with signs that said, "No Food." And then she introduced me to this guy called Dr. James Zisky, who's a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Med School, and he was eating his lunch at his desk. And she explained who I was, and he said, "You know, thank you for the donation, and do you have any questions for me?"

JAD: And of course, she did.

SARAH GRAY: I wanted to know how valuable the eyes were. Like, if they get thousands and thousands, or if they get one or two. Or, like, when the delivery came, was everyone excited, or was it no big deal? Like, was it sitting on a shelf collecting dust, or were people doing stuff with it?

JAD: He put down his lunch ...

SARAH GRAY: And he said, "Most of the eyes that we get are from people who are older, just because most people are older when they die. And infants' eyes are worth their weight in gold."

JAD: Wow!

SARAH GRAY: I was like—I could barely speak. It's like, "Could you tell me why?" He said, "Because they regenerate. The regenerative properties." And he said, "If you don't mind me asking, how long ago did your son die?" And I said, "About two years ago." And he said, "Well, we're likely still using your son's cells right now." Because that's how long they last.

JAD: Wow!

SARAH GRAY: I know!

JAD: So at that point, Sarah was like, okay, since that worked out so well, why not just keep going with it and visit all of the places where bits and pieces of Thomas ended up? So, you know, chase down his liver, his retina, his cord blood.

ROBERT: Well, how many doctors might that be? Do you have any idea?

JAD: Well, there's the Boston one, there's two in North Carolina. She would ultimately discover one in Richmond, Virginia, one in Philly.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. What if—what if it turns out that these people, you know, didn't find anything? You know, research is research. You don't always have a hit.

JAD: That's true.

ROBERT: She's not heading for validation necessarily here. She might find—she might get further lost.

JAD: Well, yeah.

ROBERT: But she's gonna go?

JAD: She's gonna go, and she's not gonna stop. Cross your fingers. That's coming up.

[LISTENER: Hi. This is Shareen from Sunrise, Florida. Radiolab is supported in part 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]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: Where are we at this point?

JAD: Okay. Yeah, so Sarah Gray when we left her, she was standing in a research office in Boston and feeling good.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: She's gotten this rose of a success. So after that her and Ross get in a car and head down south ...

SARAH GRAY: To Durham, North Carolina.

JAD: ... to track down Thomas's liver and a bit of his blood.

SARAH GRAY: Cord blood.

JAD: Because it turns out that in the delivery room right after both twins were born, nurses had withdrawn a little bit of cord blood from both twins, sent it off to Duke where researchers were studying the disease that killed Thomas, anencephaly.

SARAH GRAY: Mm-hmm.

JAD: She says they walked in ...

SARAH GRAY: We met the study coordinator, this guy who worked on the Human Genome Project as a grad student.

JAD: They met all these different researchers who all seemed really excited about her twins' blood samples.

SARAH GRAY: I think it was just weird that one of them had anencephaly and one of them didn't, and they were genetically identical.

JAD: Oh.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah, so it's a good control study for them to compare.

JAD: After they all took the tour, one of the researchers even told them that they had compared Thomas's blood to Callum's.

SARAH GRAY: And they found there were a thousand differences in epigenetics between both twins.

JAD: Huh.

SARAH GRAY: They're called epigenetic differences. I think their genes are the same, but the things that control the genes were different.

JAD: That's so interesting. So they began identical, but then somehow in utero a thousand little changes crept up between them.

SARAH GRAY: Yes.

ROSS GRAY: Yeah.

SARAH GRAY: Yeah.

JAD: And it's possible that a few of those changes might one day explain the disease.

SARAH GRAY: In fact, I even asked the grad student who worked on it most closely, Deidre Krupp, I said, "Were you surprised by what you saw?" And she said, "For me to be surprised, that implies that I knew what to expect." She said, "We're just at the beginning of us trying to learn about this."

ROBERT: So that's two roses. Like, this is—this is amazing!

JAD: Yeah. This is two sort of kick butts.

ROBERT: She's on a roll here.

JAD: So after visit two, they got in the car, drove down the street to this place called Cytonet, which is where Thomas's liver ended up.

SARAH GRAY: Basically, Cytonet will take a solid liver and they liquify it. And then they inject the liquid liver into a baby that's waiting on a liver transplant as a bridge therapy.

JAD: Liquid liver?

ROSS GRAY: Liver in a tube.

SARAH GRAY: Yeah.

JAD: They went in, again got a tour.

SARAH GRAY: Refrigerators, Petri dishes.

JAD: The whole thing. The researchers then tell her that they had a little issue with Thomas's liver.

SARAH GRAY: His liver was bruised when they got it, so they couldn't inject it into a baby.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: But then they told her that they were able to use it in an experiment.

SARAH GRAY: To determine what was the best temperature to freeze infant liver cells, which is -150° Celsius. As you already know.

JAD: I ...

ROSS GRAY: Common knowledge. [laughs]

ROBERT: Okay, half a rose there.

JAD: Half a rose.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And she says at one point, as they were being walked around the place ...

SARAH GRAY: We walked through the break room, and someone had taken a picture of Thomas that we had handed out. And they took the photograph and they taped it up in the break room with a little sign that they wrote on it saying, "Thomas Gray was a donor here. March 29, 2010." And I was so excited to see that because I thought they're just as curious about us as we are about them. Like, I always wonder who—what kind of person goes to work and opens up a box with a liver in it? And they're probably wondering what kind of person takes their loved one's liver and puts it in a box and mails it over here?

ARUPA GANGULY: So my name is Arupa Ganguly. I'm a professor in the department of genetics at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

JAD: Now Arupa Ganguly, just to switch to her for a second, she studies a kind of cancer of the eye called "retinoblastoma."

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Which happens almost exclusively in children. And at this point, she doesn't know Sarah, She has no concept of this whole search that's happening. She is just studying eyes.

ROBERT: Where are we, by the way?

JAD: Philly.

ROBERT: Philly. Philadelphia.

JAD: Now she studies tumors, but she also needs healthy retinas in order to do her work.

ARUPA GANGULY: Now you can imagine that getting a normal retina is not a very easy task, because why would you get a normal retina from a baby? I must tell you that if and when an eyeball comes, it is not a pleasant experience, right?

JAD: Sure.

ARUPA GANGULY: Because for a moment you have to think the origin, the sources of this eyeball. And it's sad. In every possible setting it's sad.

JAD: Sad and frustrating, she says.

ARUPA GANGULY: Because it's only when a normal child dies that's when I can get this retina. So it's a horrible set up in my mind.

JAD: So she says often when the retinas arrive, which happens maybe once a year, and you pull them out of their packaging ...

ARUPA GANGULY: You—right away you feel like ...

JAD: ... like maybe you're trading on other people's misery.

ARUPA GANGULY: And I mean, it's so bad when a child dies, but I am asking for his or her retina.

JAD: Yeah.

ARUPA GANGULY: And in a way, I have this sense of guilt in my head.

JAD: Now Arupa had never spoken to a parent of any of her samples. So when she got that email, and she was sitting at her computer and she read the email from the company that provided her the samples saying the mother of this sample wants to get in contact with you ...

ARUPA GANGULY: I paused. I stopped doing what I was doing, and I thought, "Why does the mother want to talk to me?" That was my first question. So I did not reply right away, but after my conversation with the lab, I took, I think, one day to compose a letter and I sent it back to Sarah Gray.

JAD: And they ended up eventually talking on the phone.

ARUPA GANGULY: I told her I think at the very onset that sorry, you have to understand that I feel awful.

SARAH GRAY: She said she felt kind of guilty because she wished for this sample.

JAD: Like, almost by wishing for it she had made it happen.

ARUPA GANGULY: She said, "Arupa, you should not feel bad about it."

SARAH GRAY: If you didn't use my son's retina I would have buried it in the ground. Like, you're the only one that wanted it.

ARUPA GANGULY: "Bad things happen to children, and so by being able to help you with your work ..."

SARAH GRAY: We added a layer to Thomas's life.

ARUPA GANGULY: That was—I was amazed.

JAD: Eventually, Sarah and Ross visited Arupa's lab. She gave them a tour, and she showed them Thomas's retina.

SARAH GRAY: She still has samples of it in her freezer, tiny little—I don't know.

JAD: Tiny little vials, maybe a third the size of your pinkie, filled with frozen liquid.

ROSS GRAY: Liquified retina.

SARAH GRAY: RNA. It didn't look like much, but it was amazing to think of how many people were involved getting these samples there. Like, we had to approve it, we had to fill out this paperwork, then the doctor had to come and remove his eyes and his eyes had to be processed. And then the eyes had to be shipped up there, then they have to do whatever DNA process they do. And just how, I don't know, valuable—maybe even priceless—the sample is.

JAD: Sarah says that throughout the whole process, you know, of losing a child, and then seeing him reclaimed bit by bit by all of these different people ...

SARAH GRAY: Something shifted in me. I used to think, like, the universe treated people the way it should, and now I don't really believe that. But I do believe that there are really amazing, kind people in the world, and science and medicine has something to do with that. I started feeling that these were Thomas's colleagues and his co-workers, and that he was a valuable partner in this important research that was being done. And I felt an even more fundamental shift, almost like I had felt like I was a boat on an ocean that was, like, rocky and choppy with waves. And I had this feeling that I'm that boat on the ocean, like, the decisions that I make are—are changing other people as opposed to just I'm a boat getting slapped with waves all the time. It has made me feel—powerful.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: I'd like to thank the Philadelphia Inquirer for getting us going on this.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, big thanks to Michael Vitez for his reporting. And to Damiano Marchetti for production support. And to Latif Nasser for all that help with research. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message two.]

[SARAH GRAY: This is Callum Gray reading the Radiolab credits. You say "Radiolab."]

[CALLUM GRAY: Radiolab was produced ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... by Jad Abumrad.]

[CALLUM GRAY: By Jad Abumrad.]

[SARAH GRAY: Our staff includes ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: Staff includes ...]

[SARAH GRAY: Brenna Farrell ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: Brenna Farrell ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Ellen Horne ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Ellen Horne ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... David Gebel ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... David ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Dylan Keefe ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Dylan Keefe ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Matt Kielty ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Matt Kielty ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Andy Mills ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Andy Mills ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Latif Nasser ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Latif Nasser ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Kelsey Padgett ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Kel—Kelsey ...]

[SARAH GRAY: Padgett ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: Padgett ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Arianne Wack ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Arianne Wack ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Molly Webster ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Molly Webster ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... Soren Wheeler ...]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Soren Wheeler ...]

[SARAH GRAY: ... and Jamie York.]

[CALLUM GRAY: ... Jamie York.]

[ROSS GRAY: With help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly McBride Jacobson and Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[ARUPA GANGULY: Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michlle Harris.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 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.