Episode Details

Paul Farmer, Global Health Leader, Dies At 62

Paul Farmer, physician and co-founder of the humanitarian medical organization Partners in Health died unexpectedly this week in Rwanda at the age of 62. Farmer was widely known for his compassion, and his conviction that all people around the world, regardless of their means, deserved access to quality medical treatments and interventions.

Sarah Zhang, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins John Dankosky to remember Paul Farmer and his work around the world, from Haiti to Peru to Russia.

They also discuss concern over a possible re-emergence of wild polio in Malawi, a new U.N. report linking climate change to a potential increase in wildfires around the world, and the case of Hank the Tank—a burly bear troubling Lake Tahoe.

We’ll also get an update on the tale of a wayward piece of space junk soon to impact the moon, and dive into the link between Epstein-Barr virus and multiple sclerosis. We recently discussed research establishing the link between the two conditions—and now there is new work looking at the possible mechanism of the connection.

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.’”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004, and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Teams of sled dogs and mushers from across the United States and Canada visited Laconia this weekend for the 93rd annual World Championship Sled Dog Derby. Racers were in good spirits, though they faced slushy conditions on Friday and Saturday—a situation that has become more common, many mushers said, as climate change causes winters to warm. Vince Buoniello was the chief judge for the Laconia race, which has a deep and prestigious history in the sled dog world. He likened it to the Super Bowl.