Brave New Planet
Pushkin Industries
Recent Episodes
The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos brings together other Pushkin hosts to mark the International Day of Happiness. Revisionist History’s Malcolm Gladwell talks about the benefits of the misery of running in a Canadian winter. Dr. Maya Shankar from A Slight Change of Plans talks about quieting her mental chatter. And Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford surprises everyone with the happiness lessons to be learned from a colonoscopy.
Hear more of The Happiness Lab HERE.
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While Andrea Rubin lay unconscious and severely burned after a car fire, her father told doctors to do everything they could to keep her alive. She would need many surgeries. Her quality of life wouldn’t be the same. Her friends were outraged. They told doctors that Andrea would not want to live that way. While Andrea was being kept alive on a ventilator, her loved ones fought about what would be best for her. In this episode, we explore how medical decisions are made for patients who are incapable of deciding for themselves. Enjoy this episode from playing god?
Show notes:
In addition to Andrea Rubin, this episode features interviews with:
Jeffrey Kahn, Andreas C. Dracopolous Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
Monica Gerrek, Co-director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at MetroHealth System (where Andrea was treated)
You can learn more about Andrea’s case here.
A similar case to Andrea’s happened in the 1970s. A man named Dax Cowart repeatedly asked doctors to let him die after suffering severe burns. But the doctors continued to treat him against his wishes. Here’s an interview with Mr. Cowart ten years after his accident, where he talks about his experience with the Washington Post. Dr. Gerrek wrote a paper comparing the two cases, and showing how medical decision making for severe burn patients has evolved over the past 50 years.
For further reading about medical decision making and patient autonomy, visit the Berman Institute’s episode guide.
The Greenwall Foundation. Making bioethics integral to decisions in healthcare, policy and research. Learn more at greenwall.org.
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Open-source innovation is the future of AI. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Harford discuss the open-source AI community with Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face. They chat about the history and future of open-source AI, its critical importance to AI progress, the IBM watsonx partnership with Hugging Face, and how businesses can leverage open-source AI for their specific needs.
Visit us at: https://www.ibm.com/smarttalks/
Learn more about the Hugging Face partnership: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-08-24-IBM-to-Participate-in-235M-Series-D-Funding-Round-of-Hugging-Face
Learn more about the Google DeepMind paper referenced in this episode: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf
This is a paid advertisement from IBM.
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What is ‘structure-based’ vaccine design? Before scientists used these techniques to design vaccines against Covid, they were testing them in the lab to combat RSV. Keren Landman joins the show to talk about how this respiratory virus endangers the lives of babies and the elderly. Then, we hear about an early RSV vaccine trial that cast a shadow over modern research, and how scientists, including our guests Jason McLellan and Barney Graham, later figured out how to create and stabilize a viral antigen’s spike protein to fight RSV.
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What can we learn from the centuries-long quest to eradicate smallpox, once the scourge of humanity? And how did it set the stage for all vaccines to come? First we meet Edward Jenner, a doctor in 18th century Britain who learned about the folk practice of “variolation” and found a safer way to inoculate people against smallpox. Then, Donald Hopkins of the Carter Center takes us back to the 1960s in Sierra Leone, where he discovered that successfully eradicating smallpox could be a feasible goal worldwide. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast.
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