Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This message comes from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, whose discovery of bone marrow transplants has saved over a million lives worldwide. Learn how this and other breakthroughs impact the world at fredhutch.org slash look beyond. This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.
In the late 1800s, a new piece of medical equipment made a big splash in Paris. An incubator to keep premature babies warm and to help them grow. But this new equipment didn't end up in hospitals at first. They weren't really interested or set up to try to help preemies. Instead, incubators attracted the interest of showmen and circus owners who thought that having these babies on display would net big bucks.
Bailey of Barnum & Bailey had an incubator sideshow in London. The London Royal Aquarium had a sideshow. That's writer Dawn Ruffell. She says desperate parents with no other options would give their tiny babies to these businessmen so they would at least have a chance of survival.
Crowds paid good money to see these babies, and incubator sideshows became a fad. But over time, these showmen realized this was really a pain in the neck because it's a huge amount of work to keep preemies alive in incubators. This isn't a toaster oven. You need very, very skilled nursing, and you need round-the-clock care.
But one entrepreneur prevailed in this strange line of business. He called himself Dr. Martin Cooney, and he said he had a medical degree from Germany and extensive training, none of which was true. He was really a showman through and through, but he was just decades ahead of the medical establishment. Don wrote a book about this maverick. It's called The Strange Case of Dr. Cooney.
Cooney set up sideshows in Atlantic City, at different world's fairs, and at Coney Island. Infants in incubators next to Under the Sea, which was the aquarium, and next to, in Chicago, the strippers, and
next to the freak shows. Cooney never charged his patients, but he made lots of money from all the visitors. People couldn't believe a baby that small could be alive. So literally, sometimes he had to stop people from trying to poke their fingers into the machines because they thought the babies weren't real. They thought, oh, they must be wax babies.
But Cooney was really good at keeping these tiny babies alive. At the time, most American hospitals didn't treat preemies at all. So doctors would tell parents, Your child's only chance is to send it to this sideshow.
Cooney insisted the babies be fed with breast milk. He hired skilled nurses to watch over them. His facilities were meticulously clean. And inadvertently, these babies got even more of what they needed. The nurses would take those babies out of the machines and show them off and, you know, hold them up. Physical contact and touch, which turns out, is crucial. Don says Cooney saved the lives of over 6,500 children.
CUNY ended up working with medical professionals, doctors who brought his sideshow care for preemies to hospital wards. It helped lay the foundation of modern neonatal care and became the origin of the NICU. ♪
Who doesn't love a good origin story, right? Great origin stories aren't just for villains or superheroes in movies and comic books. There are lots of revealing tales that shed light on how places or people got their start. These stories connect us to the past and the struggles of getting to where we are now. On a personal level, they speak to what makes us unique, what challenged us and shaped us into who we are today.
On this special episode of The Pulse, we'll listen back to some of our favorite origin stories. Growing up, Matt Katz didn't see much of his father. There was this guy who I knew to be daddy for the first several years of my life.
who basically disappeared. His father, Warren, had a gambling problem and had stolen money from Matt's mom. She left him when Matt was just a toddler. Warren was then in and out of his life. Matt's mom says he often didn't show up when promised. You knew how to read an analog clock before anybody else of your age because he was always late.
And you would always look at the clock. You would know he's supposed to come at 2 o'clock. But even though Warren wasn't around, he kept taking up a lot of space in Matt's mind. I really longed for that connection and to understand why he went away and who he was and what he was like.
And if I got any traits from him. Matt had a wonderful stepfather in his life, Richard, who adopted Matt when he was nine. But Matt still thought about his birth father. And when he was in his late teens, Matt tracked him down and they resumed a somewhat uneasy relationship.
Matt never knew exactly where his dad lived. He wouldn't give him the address. But he knew a lot about his dad's family history and that he was Ashkenazi Jewish, just like his mother. Fast forward a decade or so. Matt now had a family of his own. I'm married. I have kids. My wife and I just decided to, you know, do an Ancestry.com test. I had always thought about it.
I'm interested in history. His wife's test came back 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, just as she had expected. But Matt's result was a total shock. He was not 100% Jewish. I was half something else. Half Irish. More DNA tests revealed that Matt's mom was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish and that she was definitely his mom.
So what did all of this mean? Where did the Irish come from? Had his birth father been adopted? Was he not who he said he was? Matt spent the next few years searching for answers. Who I am and what makes me tick and where I come from.
Matt is a reporter, and he's made a podcast about his quest to uncover his origin story, how he came to be half Irish. The podcast is called Inconceivable Truth. So the DNA tests send Matt on a search for his true identity. But the answers he found were far more complicated than he could have imagined.
He joined a Facebook group for Jewish genealogy enthusiasts, and a woman in this group, a so-called search angel, offered to help him find out more about his ancestry.
Matt gave her access to his account, and within minutes, she wrote back to Matt with some shocking news. Yeah, this woman, her name is Tara. She lives in California. She's your half-sister. And I'm like, what? Half-sister? I don't have any siblings. You know, my parents got divorced when I was young. They had no other kids. My birth father, as far as I knew, had no other children. So I was just trying to figure out why I wasn't fully divorced.
and now I have a half-sister. Matt tried to get in touch with her, but didn't hear back at first. He took another DNA test and found another half-sister, Helena. I reach out to Helena, we start talking, and she reveals this thing to me that really upended my world. And that is, she said she had recently learned through her aunt and then through her mother that
that she was conceived via sperm donor in the 70s and that she had found out her man she thought was her birth father was not her birth father and her parents had trouble conceiving and they went to a fertility doctor who inseminated her mother with the sperm of a donor, of an anonymous donor, and there were no records of who this person was. And Helena says that means you and I have the same DNA
anonymous sperm donor father. Matt asked his mother about what had happened, and he recorded the conversation for the podcast. I'll preface by saying that, like, I love you very much for being my mom, obviously, and in, you know, in reality, and then just going above and beyond being a mom for the last 48 years and two months. So this is my question for you. Did you and Warren get any fertility help? Yeah, we did.
We had trouble. I had to have what was, my ovaries were blocked. I had to open up my ovaries. Is it possible there was a sperm donor? Not to my knowledge, but I can't even tell you the name of the doctor. I don't think he's alive anymore. This was in the 70s, the early days of artificial insemination. Doctors would usually try to use the husband's sperm first.
but do it using an instrument in order to get closer to the uterus and maybe sperm that had weak motility or if there wasn't much semen there, the woman could get pregnant in that way. And that was the process my mother remembers. That's what she thought happened. In fact, that wasn't what happened at all. And I did a lot of research about what insemination was
What was like in the 70s and what would happen with couples who could not get pregnant? And one of the main things doctors did, and this is documented in medical journals and papers written at the time by doctors, is they would mix drugs.
the sperm of the husband. And this sperm they knew didn't work very well, right? They would take it and they would mix it with the sperm of an anonymous donor that the couple would have no idea about who this person was.
And they would inseminate the woman that way. And in some cases, like in the case of my sister, the doctor told her mother, yes, we are mixing this. We are doing it this way. My mother doesn't remember that. As you found piece by piece of this puzzle and you put it together, what did this do for your sense of you? Like who is Matt? Who am I?
Did it feel completely undermined at some point, your sense of self, your sense of identity? It's something I'm still working through. It's still new. There were some things that happened very quickly. I immediately started seeing myself physically different. So I grew up
going to synagogue every week. And I did not look really fully like the other Jews at synagogue, the other kids at Hebrew school. I had lighter skin. My skin has a redder tint. I have fairer hair. You know, sometimes the old folks at synagogue would say, "Oh, you look like a goy," which is Yiddish for non-Jewish.
And even my wife's grandmother had told me years ago, before I took the DNA test, oh, you look Irish, you don't look Jewish. And now when I look at myself in the mirror, I do see a half Irish, half Jewish guy. I sort of make sense to myself physically more than ever. ♪
Matt spent a long time trying to track down the sperm donor, his actual biological father. And I wanted to know what this quest has meant to him. It's helped me certainly begin to understand more about myself and to even have that time in the process of this search to just think more about who I am and what makes me tick and where I come from.
And that has been something of a spiritual experience for me. The way it's all unfolded, the way I've, over the course of this, pieced together clues who my father is and who my real father is and how I've put the pieces together and how I've learned things at a steady clip together.
has made me feel and think that there's other forces out there, energies out there, maybe ancestors out there that...
are looking out for me and maybe guiding me along this journey. The experience has unfolded in such an extraordinary way, which I try to explain in the podcast as I've narrowed down and tried to identify who my real father is. The way it's unfolded has been so powerful for me that it's made me believe in God
larger ancestral forces out there. And I think that's my, what has been my biggest takeaway. Matt Katz is a journalist and the writer and host of the podcast Inconceivable Truth, produced by Rococo Punch and Waveland.
We're listening to some of our favorite origin stories. Coming up, how the modern-day ICU emerged from a time of crisis. The ambulances were coming so often, so it was just a lot of children, very ill children. That's next on The Pulse.
This message comes from Carvana. Finance your next car the convenient way with customizable, transparent terms all online. Make your budget work for you and swap hassle for convenience with Carvana. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Sotva. Founder and CEO, Ron Rudson, shares why Sotva sales associates are focused on finding the perfect mattress for their customers.
It's hard to have a 365-day home trial. Why would we want to rush you or try to push you into something that's not right for you? We want to make sure that we guide you to the right mattress. Our team is always available to be helpful, to make sure you make the right choice. Save up to $600 through President's Day at saatva.com slash NPR.
This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're listening to some of our favorite origin stories. ICUs take care of very sick patients who are in crisis, and these units themselves were born during a time of crisis, more than 70 years ago, when one doctor's brilliant idea changed how care was approached. Daniel Simo reported this story on the origins of the ICU in 2022.
In the summer of 1952, polio was raging in many places, with Denmark going through a particularly serious outbreak. There were a lot of cases elsewhere in the world. There were some spots in the United States that were truly terrible that summer as well. But in Denmark, they had this kind of one hospital that was the focus for the entire country for care of these patients. That's Hannah Wunsch, a critical care physician at the University of Denmark.
And at one point they had 50 patients a day coming into their hospital and they were completely overwhelmed. The hospital that took in the most serious polio cases was Bladam Hospital in Copenhagen. And there were an enormous number of what are called bulbar polio cases. Polio is an infectious disease caused by a virus which can affect a person's central nervous system.
Any part of the body can become paralyzed, but with bulbar polio cases, the virus attacks the bulbar part of the brainstem. Where it's difficult to breathe, difficult to swallow, and the mortality rate was very, very high. They'd never seen anything like it. And so they knew if they didn't do something, they were going to see catastrophic numbers of deaths. Polio was known to strike in the warmer weather, especially in summer, and it affected people of all ages.
A vaccine was being developed, but it wouldn't be widely available for another three or four years. Until then, treatment options were limited. For people with breathing problems, the main option was the iron lung. Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at the business end of an iron lung. And that sound that you hear is the air being forced into the lung so that the patient can breathe.
The iron lung, it was invented in 1928. And it was a way, it was really the first way to try to use machinery to help support someone who was having trouble breathing. It basically looks like a giant tin can that someone's head sticks out of. The concept behind the iron lung was to apply negative pressure around a person's chest by
by sucking the air out of a large metal cylinder. And the idea was that it would make a seal around someone's neck and then it would literally create a vacuum in the iron lung that would force the lungs to expand in that vacuum and therefore someone would be forced to take a breath in. The problem though? The iron lung wasn't very effective.
And so, in fact, with that type of polio, people often reported still 80% mortality, even with the use of the iron lung. Iron lungs were also large, difficult to operate, and very expensive. And at Bladam, they only had one iron lung in the entire hospital. So something else needed to be done. And the person to do it was a somewhat unorthodox anesthesiologist. Bjorn Ibsen was born in Denmark in 1915.
He was studying medicine at the University of Copenhagen and by 1940 decided when he finished his studies to become a surgeon. That's Louise Reisner-Sennelaar, an anesthesiologist from Copenhagen whose postgraduate research focused on Ibsen's work.
She says that Ibsen soon realized that it would be hard for him to rise up the hierarchy of the Department of Surgery at the university hospital. He then looked around him and saw that his career opportunities were rather dim. He could see that it would take him many, many years before he would be able to advance within the system. So instead, he chose to focus on a field that was still relatively new in those days. Anesthesiology.
It wasn't a specialty in Denmark at the time, so in order to learn about the discipline, he moved to the US and trained and worked at Mass General Hospital in Boston. The skills that Ibsen learned there would prove invaluable in 1952. He had returned to Denmark and was working as an anesthesiologist at various hospitals.
But he was asked to come into Bladam to see if he could put his new skills to use with their polio patients. He was just a very observant man and had a lot of expertise in looking at how people breathe and understanding what was going on with them in the operating room when they were breathing under anesthetic. And it was this training and background, this kind of unique combination of having seen what was going on in the United States and clearly being an inquisitive person that...
that led him to propose something that was considered quite radical. Ibsen was going to attempt a risky experiment. Instead of using negative pressure on a patient, like in the iron lung, he wanted to apply positive pressure.
Essentially, pushing air into the lungs with a bag of air and oxygen and breathing for them. To do this, he first had to do a procedure called a tracheostomy. Putting a hole into the neck and a tube into the lungs to help someone to breathe.
This seemed like a counterintuitive way to do things. After all, the way that we breathe naturally is through negative pressure. We contract our diaphragm, expanding the space in our chest and drawing air into our lungs. Using positive pressure seemed odd, even dangerous. And people were actually kind of afraid that if you pushed air into the lungs that you might cause damage. But at that point, they had no other option but to take that risk.
The very first patient chosen for this experimental procedure was a girl named Vivi Ebert. She was just 12 years old at the time. People described her as a sweet, vivacious girl. But on August 26th, 1952, she was taken to Bladam Hospital. She was suffering from a severe case of polio, with both arms and both legs partially paralyzed. She had mucus in her lung and could barely swallow. ♪
Ibsen prepared to do the tracheostomy, but things did not start off very well.
As Louise explains: "One must just try to imagine being 12 years old, not able to breathe, not able to swallow, and then somebody comes and makes an incision in your throat. She was not laying still and it was not easy. Neither for the doctor nor for Vivi." Vivi resisted. She gasped for breath and turned blue.
She goes into what's called bronchospasm, meaning her kind of lungs constrict and they can't actually ventilate her. So Ibsen had no option but to give her more anesthetic and put her under. Everybody kind of gets nervous that he's not going to be successful and walks out of the room to go to lunch. Louise interviewed Bjorn Ibsen as part of her research in 2006. He was 90 years old then. This is me, a CO2 analyzer.
And Ibsen told me that at that moment, many of his colleagues who did not realize what was happening, they thought Vivi were about to die. They thought she had stopped struggling because she was dying. So they left the room and said, well, it didn't work. It was at this point, with everyone out of the room,
that Ibsen started putting to work all the knowledge he had gained as an anesthesiologist in the operating theatre. He knew that it would be difficult to provide treatment to a patient who was thrashing around in clear pain and distress. So the only way he could try out his new method was with Vivi properly sedated. And that gave Ibsen the time to now...
suck out all the fluids that had collected in the lungs. This was a very simple but crucial part of the treatment. Ibsen realized it was not only about pumping oxygen into Vivi's lungs, but also about removing all the byproducts that had accumulated in her system, like mucus and carbon dioxide. And Vivi was quiet, she was relaxed, and now he could start ventilating her. So Ibsen sat there by Vivi's side,
with a rubber bag connected to a tube manually blowing air into her lungs one breath at a time. And gradually, as Vivi regained consciousness, there was a noticeable change with her.
She goes from looking blue and gasping for breath to sort of being awake and pink and smiling. So half an hour later, some of the colleagues came back. And they're amazed. They can't believe that she's doing so well. And so that was enough to convince them. From that point, the hospital leaders believed in Ibsen and his new method.
And they decided to apply it throughout the hospital. It would be cheaper and simpler and wouldn't require any complicated machinery like the iron lung. This was something that every nurse or every doctor could sit down and do with very, very little training. Within days, the mortality rate for polio patients plummeted from as high as 90% with the iron lung to around 20%.
The problem now was that the hospital had so many polio patients coming in that there weren't enough doctors and nurses available for the new treatment. So they began recruiting anyone they could find. Retired nurses, medical trainees, even dental students. They would each be in charge of one patient. They would literally sit next to the patient in their bed and they had a rubber bag that
and they had to compress this rubber bag somewhere between 20 and 30 times a minute to breathe for the patient. They would do this in six to eight hour shifts every day. It was exhausting work. I was able to connect with one of the medical students they recruited. My name is Anne Holzen Jensen and I am a senior doctor
And I am 90 years old. By the way, you look very well for 90. Thank you. Thank you. I do what I can. Anne was just 20 years old during the polio outbreak. In her second year of medical school, she had a friend who worked in the pediatric department of the hospital. And she was shaken because of the work she had to do. It was like a war, she said.
The ambulances were coming so often. So it was just a lot of children coming in, very ill children. They were gasping and they were blue to look at. It was awful. So Anne went to the hospital one evening to see if she could help. There were two elder students there.
who told me that I was very welcome to start immediately. So I did, and they told me in a few minutes what to do. And then I was put to a patient who died the same evening, and it was awful. The other students eventually came to relieve Anne and pleaded for her to come back the following morning. After the experience of the first evening, she wasn't sure if she could go back.
The little boy was called Paul. He was five years old and had paralysis in his arms. But he was very alert and precocious.
It is fantastic how children can just accept what is going on. And he was a little clever boy. Anne stayed with Paul day in and day out, sitting next to his bed and compressing that little rubber bag between 20 and 30 times a minute. She read him stories. Winnie the Pooh was his favorite. She supported him during very painful sessions of physiotherapy.
and she even broke some hospital rules with him. He tried to make some agreement with me. Because a patient who'd had a tracheostomy couldn't speak, they had to communicate in other ways, by blinking their eyes, or pointing, or using special boards. But Paul and Anne discovered a way around it. They found that if they released a little pressure near the tube going into his neck,
Small amount of air could pass and it passed through his vocal cords and then he could speak and say something to me. He really loved when we did this experiment. We only did it when there were no one else in the room. Then, after three months of sitting by Paul's side, compressing that little bag for hours at a time. Suddenly one day, I felt there was some resistance in the balloon.
And I said to him, what are you doing, Paul? Are you trying to breathe? And he was smiling. Anne started letting Paul try to breathe by himself. And after a short while, he could breathe himself completely. Eventually, Paul was able to leave the ward and move to the pediatric department, where he began his rehabilitation. So I lost contact with him, unfortunately.
At the time, none of what she was doing seemed particularly out of the ordinary for her. We didn't feel that we had been doing something special. No. Even if it didn't feel special to her at the time, her work in 1952 and the method that Bjorn Ibsen pioneered gave rise to modern intensive care units.
So Ibsen's idea was to create a ward where people with respiratory insufficiency, no matter what reason, can come and be treated. That's Louise Reisner again. And this is what he did a year later. He opened in December 1953, he opened the first intensive care unit of the world.
And soon, this idea of positive pressure ventilation would gain recognition and come to be replicated around the world. They published widely in highly respected journals, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal. Within a few years, they had people visiting to see their approach. And so it really was influential in convincing people that this was an approach that could be used for care, not only of polio patients, but then of other patients who had respiratory failure for other causes.
In time, the ventilation was done with mechanical ventilators, like the ones we might see in a hospital today. But the principles were still the same. Ibsen, however, was not given recognition for his innovations at the time. He did not get the credit that he deserved. The director of Bladam Hospital, Dr. Henry Lassen, told Ibsen not to forget that it was the generals who won the wars, not the soldiers.
And Lassen considered himself as a general and Ibsen as a soldier. And when I spoke to Ibsen, he was still bitter about that. You could still hear it in his voice. Eventually, Ibsen did gain the recognition he deserved, at least within his medical specialty.
These days, some anesthesiologists and intensive care physicians mark August 27th, the anniversary of Vivi Ebert's procedure, as Bjorn Ibsen Day in his honour. Vivi survived her treatment and was able to live for many years afterwards. Unfortunately, she was one of the few patients who never died.
recovered enough to be completely independent from the ventilator and live the rest of her life needing the support of a mechanical ventilator on and off. She did, however, eventually leave the hospital, as did Paul and hundreds of other patients. Patients who may not have been so lucky if it hadn't been for one doctor who decided to take a risk on an experimental procedure and for countless volunteers who followed his lead.
That was Daniel Simo reporting. Ann Jensen, who volunteered to ventilate patients during the polio crisis when she was a medical student, has since passed away. You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, when great origin stories turn out to be more myth than truth. I just thought, well, let me look into it a little bit. And nothing was adding up. That's next on The Pulse.
This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We've probably all heard the origin story of Facebook, a small group of ambitious Harvard undergrads creating a new social network from their dorm room. But there is a different origin story out there about how this site came to be. This one has been tied to government activities and attempts to spy on citizens.
Grant Hill dug deeper into a very interesting coincidence. In the 1980s, Chester Gordon Bell was one of the architects of the Internet. I'll say I'm one of the computing pioneers. And that's just one of his achievements. Over the years, Gordon has made many other important contributions to the field of computing.
So it wasn't all that surprising when, in 1997, one of his colleagues asked if he could preserve Gordon's work, scan all of his books into an archive about computer science history. The request gave Gordon an idea. Why stop at books and research papers? So I said, why don't I see what it's like if you scanned everything in your life and put it online?
Information about his life that before would have been impossible to collect without the kind of emerging technology now at his disposal. He brought the idea to Microsoft and hired an assistant. And we started scanning, scanning everything. Emails, meetings, his online browsing history.
It wasn't long before Gordon started to wear a camera around his neck that regularly snapped photos on a timer. He wore a GPS receiver that tracked his location, even an altimeter.
The idea was to create a surrogate memory, a trove of stored data to supplement the flawed recall of his human mind. It's really how I can go back and pinpoint something. In 2002, Gordon and his team wrote their first paper about his experience documenting everything.
and the novel problems that came with organizing human life and all this new data electronically in a searchable and coherent way. The main display line that I like to think of is really a timeline. I mean, I love timelines. What may seem obvious now was anything but back then. He was blazing a new frontier.
His team estimated that, minus video, an 80-year-old could jam all their data into just a terabyte of storage, a lifetime of memories on a thumb drive in your pocket. It wasn't long before people started paying attention to this new thing Gordon was up to, blending computing with cameras and sensors and memories. The practice became known as lifelogging. And eventually, the U.S. military came calling. We.
We talked about what they could do in the project. Specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, researchers who develop innovative and often secret technology for the U.S. military.
In 2003, DARPA sought proposals for its own LifeLog program to research the potential applications of this new way of collecting, storing, and organizing memories. Gordon says he discussed ideas about LifeLogging with Google Glass developer Thad Starner, who conducted DARPA-funded research on body-worn sensors for soldiers.
He couldn't tell us exactly all the things it was doing, but troops would wear it, go out on patrol and gather information about different sites and things like that.
Researchers at DARPA believed that the library of data gathered via lifelogging could eventually be fed into AI models that could then predict human decision-making. But soon, word got out about the agency's ideas. Then it became, I think, kind of a hot potato. Privacy advocates and lawmakers worried that the lifelog program could be used for purposes other than tracking troop locations —
Maybe all American lives would get logged, whether we wanted it or not. After 9-11, clandestine surveillance programs were being uncovered and stomped out left and right, causing a panic over privacy. I just want to share with you some of the privacy concerns that I think have already been mentioned by our chairman. One of those programs was called Total Information Awareness. Its existence was revealed by The New York Times in 2002.
Here's how the late Senator Carl Levin described the program then. It's a program to develop and integrate information technologies, enabling the intelligence community to sift through multiple databases, sources, passports, visas, work permits, drivers' licenses, credit card transactions.
The description was comically menacing, the vision of a virtual centralized grand database on the actions of countless Americans and foreign nationals. Even the program's logo seemed ripped out of some conspiracy theory fever dream, the image of an all-knowing eye atop a pyramid gazing upon the world.
It caused major concerns about civil liberties. If these tools fell into the wrong hands, say an American dictator, things could go south very quickly. So in 2003, Congress canceled the Total Information Awareness Program. And the whole issue also cast shade on the LifeLog program, which now seemed like just another excuse to pry.
Senators and whoever looked at it and said, oh, we can't be doing this surveillance stuff. The creator of DARPA's LifeLog program later insisted the research had nothing to do with spying. But the damage was done. On February 4th, 2004, DARPA shut down LifeLog.
February 4th, 2004, the very same day that a skinny college student officially launched a strange new website. What is the Facebook exactly? It's an online directory. You sign on, you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions, phone numbers, instant messaging screen names, anything you want to tell, interests, what books you like. To be clear, there is no evidence DARPA had a hand in the creation of Facebook.
When I asked about it, Meta, Facebook's parent company, declined to comment. It sounds like something your weird uncle might post on Facebook.
Gordon Bell says it's no surprise that so many people were interested in lifelogging for different reasons. Memories weren't just valuable to those who created them. The information within them was an untapped resource, fungible data that could be bought, sold, analyzed, or tracked. You know, in fact, I had a meeting at Facebook very early with him, and I said, one of the things you should do is make your timeline. ♪
That story was reported by Grant Hill for our episode about the 20th anniversary of Facebook's launch. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes an origin story sounds maybe just too good to be true, right?
You may be familiar with the story of Frank Abagnale Jr., a self-proclaimed master conman and check forger. His life was dramatized in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Welcome to Miami Mutual Bank. How may I help you? I'd like to cash this check here and then...
I'd like to take you out for a steak dinner. He impersonates Pilot. Are you real life Pilot? I sure am, little lady. The jump seat is open. It's been a while since I've done this. Which one's the jump seat again? Down to Connors to the ER.com.
Frank charms everybody. He flies all over the world. He pretends to be a doctor, a lawyer, all while the FBI is chasing him. The kicker, he says he did all of this while still a teenager. Science writer Alan Logan watched the movie when it came out. And I remember thinking, just having this nagging feeling that,
Alan eventually revisited that nagging feeling. He had been working on another story about another con man, and he decided to do some research on Abagnale.
And I just thought, well, let me look into it a little bit. And nothing was adding up. Nothing was verifiable. Allen says what he found blew his mind. He wrote a book about it called The Greatest Hoax on Earth, Catching Truth While We Can.
Allen says most of Abagnale's great tale, his glamorous life as a faux pilot, his claims to have spent months impersonating a pediatrician, that he passed the Louisiana bar exam, it's just not true. Allen says the truth is out there in plain sight. And yet the lie is everywhere, all over the Internet. And Frank is still out there telling it.
For example, as a speaker for the talks at Google. As you know, I went on to impersonate a doctor in a Georgia hospital for a while. I took the bar exams in Louisiana, passed the bar, went to work. That video has been viewed over 11 million times.
Allen says in this talk, Frank makes claim after claim that's made up. For example, that he was such a gifted forger, the FBI got him out of jail early to be a consultant. Around 50 minutes, Mark, he says that the FBI did a big coffee table book to celebrate their 100th anniversary.
And inside that book, Abagnale claims that there's a section on him as being the only person that was ever sprung out of the federal penitentiary to work for them. The only person they ever did that with. I picked up a copy. There is indeed a beautiful coffee table book printed and published by the FBI. And Mr. Abagnale's name, as you might suspect, is nowhere to be found within it.
Allen says as he started to fact-check the story, it turned out that Frank Abagnale was just a small-time crook. What really happened was that, dressed as a TWA pilot, which he only did for a few weeks, he befriended a flight attendant called Paula Parks. He followed her all over the eastern seaboard, identified her work schedule through deceptive means, and essentially stalked the woman.
She didn't know what to do with him. He showed up at her apartment in New Orleans and she said, look, I'm on my way down to see my parents in Baton Rouge. Drove down to Baton Rouge together. So Frank Avenel meets her parents in Baton Rouge. And a few days later, Frank Avenel shows back up at their house in Baton Rouge and said, hey, I'm Paula's friend. Remember me? I'm on furlough as a TWA pilot.
And they invited him in. He took the mother out to dinner and also bought them flowers and so on. All the while he was doing that with their stolen checks, which he had rifled through.
Allen visited the Parks family. He researched their story. He says he found evidence that Frank stole about $1,200 from the family and then more from local businesses in Baton Rouge. Frank himself claims that he never ripped off individuals, only hotels, airlines, and banks.
Frank was eventually caught and arrested. So Abagnale's narrative is that between the ages of 16 and 20, he was on the run, chased all over the United States and even internationally by the FBI. This is completely fictitious. Public records obtained by me show that he was confined, for the most part, in prison during those years. It completely implodes the narrative that he was an attorney and that he was a doctor. ♪
So how did Frank Abagnale construct this stunning tale? Allen says after he got out of prison, a parole officer encouraged Abagnale to tell his story of being a transformed man.
Abagnale ran with that idea. He started by giving small lectures, telling his story of redemption, and the tale grew larger and larger. He somehow teamed up with a well-connected producer, landing appearances on national television shows of the time. For example, one called To Tell the Truth. Don't miss a word of the various life stories of Frank William Abagnale.
Abagnale. Where celebrity panelists have to identify one person who is not lying out of three people claiming to be the same person. And perhaps for the first time in this show's history, you had three liars on the stage. Two of them were instructed to lie. And then Abagnale told multiple lies about his biography on that show. But that show was a springboard that ultimately put him onto Johnny Carson's couch.
And that's when he just went on to Richter scale fame. As Allen investigated the story of Frank Abagnale, he found the work of others who had tried to do the same decades earlier. There was amazing journalism in 1978. Stephen Hall, who I've been in touch with, is a science journalist, one of the top science journalists in the world now.
Stephen Hall, as a rookie journalist working for the San Francisco Chronicle, saw Abagnale on The Tonight Show in 1978 and started to query some of the claims, including a claim that Abagnale had put a sign over a night deposit drop at Logan Airport and said it was out of order. And Abagnale dressed as a security guard and had everybody put in their cash and receipts into alternative accounts.
deposit receptacle. So when Stephen Hall, the journalist, heard this, he found it difficult to believe. Contacted authorities out there and started to debunk the thing line by line. Other journalists did the same over the years at local papers, but this was before the internet and none of these stories went viral. In
Instead, Frank Abagnale's tale lived on, made it to Hollywood, which Allen says gave the story an even stronger veneer of legitimacy. You have major Hollywood players, the most famous director of all time with A-level Hollywood celebrities playing the roles. So it's got to be true. I mean, you see what I mean? Because there's no way it couldn't be.
Alan Logan is the author of The Greatest Hoax on Earth, Catching Truth While We Can. When we recorded our interview with Alan in 2021, we reached out to Frank Abagnale for comment. Here's what we got back. I have not read the book, nor do I think it's worthy of comment.
That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening. ♪
This message comes from Stamps.com. Stamps.com simplifies your postage needs and adds valuable time back into your workday so you have more flexibility to focus on what only you can do. Go to Stamps.com and sign up with code NPR for a special offer.