If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever?
Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. That is, until a young scientist named Edward F. Knipling discovered a crucial screwworm weakness and hatched a sweeping project to wipe them out. Knipling’s seemingly zany plan to spray screwworms out of planes all over the continent— with US taxpayer money— succeeded, becoming one of humanity’s biggest environmental interventions ever.
Today, screwworms have been gone so long that none of us in North America even remember them. But now, they’re coming back. And they’re forcing us to ask: in an era of climate change and rapid mass extinction— should we kill off a species on purpose?
Special thanks to James P. Collins, Max Scott, Amy Murillo, Daniel Griffin, Phil Kaufman, Katie Barnhill, Arthur Caplan, Ron Sandler, Yasha Rohwer, Aaron Keefe, Gwendolyn Bogard, Maria Sabate, Meredith Asbury, and Joanne Padrón CarneyEPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Sarah Qari
with help from - Latif Nasser
Produced by - Sarah Qari
Sound design contributed by - Sarah Qari
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger
EPISODE CITATIONS:
**The latest information on screwworm outbreaks and precautions: screwworm.gov
Videos:
Oral history interviews of Edward F. Knipling: here (https://zpr.io/njhMedFN5jsZ) and here (https://zpr.io/VQReQbfznCrq)
Podcasts:
Here’s a Spotify playlist (https://zpr.io/PNMEM274G7vh) of all of our Golden Goose-inspired episodes!
Sam Kean’s podcast The Disappearing Spoon – his episode about screwworms is called The Screwiest and Perhaps Most Original Idea of the 20th Century (https://zpr.io/UYf6dR2yG3eN)
Our episode on CRISPR & gene drives (https://zpr.io/UYf6dR2yG3eN)
New to Radiolab? Check out our Radiolab Starter Kit (https://zpr.io/QpPnrHAZVQLR) playlist of all-time favorite episodes!
Articles:
Sarah Zhang’s latest piece in The Atlantic: American Milk Has Changed (https://zpr.io/xebbdq2MWV4L)
Her most recent piece on screwworms: The ‘Man-Eater’ Screwworm Is Coming (https://zpr.io/ECmjCs7ScbS4)
Her initial reporting on screwworms: America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms (https://zpr.io/PNMEM274G7vh)
Gregory Kaebnick’s paper (https://zpr.io/yqNC3q5FbCcq) about screwworm eradication in Science
Archival materials:
The USDA’s Screwworm Eradication Records (https://zpr.io/dY7zuVdGYKjf) contain lots of cool images and letters
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A ruthless (and ruthlessly efficient) industry is using digital tools to supercharge one of the world’s oldest behaviors. We look at how the industry works, and ask the scam-fighters what they’re doing about it.
SOURCES:
Kati Daffan, former assistant director at the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Marketing Practices.
Marti DeLiema, assistant professor of social work at the University of Minnesota.
Mark Frank, professor of communications at the University at Buffalo.
RESOURCES:
"Cambodian Scam Tycoon Wanted by U.S. Extradited to China," by Gabriele Steinhauser (Wall Street Journal, 2026).
"The Rise and Fall Of Accused Cambodian Scam Kingpin Chen Zhi," by Low De Wei (Bloomberg, 2026).
"Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025," by the Federal Trade Commission (2025).
"Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show," by Jeff Horwitz (Reuters, 2025).
"Exposed to Scams: What Separates Victims from Non-victims?," by Marti DeLiema, Emma Fletcher, Christine Kieffer, Gary Mottola, Rubens Pessanha, and Melissa Trumpower (Stanford Center on Longevity, 2019).
"Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?," by Cormac Herley (Microsoft Research, 2016).
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (2013).
FTC Fraud Reporting Portal.
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First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Evan Howell traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove of glacial ice that may have survived for 350,000 years—making it the oldest ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Now researchers just need to figure out how to date it.
Next on the show, tracking wolves and ravens in Yellowstone National Park shows the birds don’t follow the wolves in hope of a meal, but instead remember and revisit frequent wolf kill sites. Matthias-Claudio Loretto, assistant professor in the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, discusses how this might change the way we think about scavengers’ strategies for finding their ephemeral food sources.
Finally, Claire Bedbrook, the Helen Hay Whitney and Wu Tsai neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, discusses her work tracking African turquoise killifish over their life span. By capturing behaviors over the course of the fish’s entire lives, her team was able to observe behaviors that could be used to predict whether a fish would live a short or long life.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
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Disgust is a strong emotion, one designed by evolution to protect us from danger and diseases. But disgust also spills into other areas of our lives, influencing our morals, our intuitions about right and wrong, even our politics. We talk with psychologist David Pizarro about how disgust is used to persuade and divide us, and why it remains such a potent force in public life today. Then, in our latest installment of “Your Questions Answered,” Huggy Rao returns to respond to listeners’ thoughts and questions about why big ideas fail.
There's still time to join Shankar at one of our upcoming stops on Hidden Brain's live tour! Join us in Philadelphia on March 21 or New York City on March 25. And stay tuned for more tour dates to be announced soon!
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AI is no longer theoretical; it's in the boardroom, it's on the battlefield, and it's reshaping everyday life across Canada. Reports suggest Anthropic's AI platform, Claude, may have been used in recent US strikes on Iran. Closer to home, companies are increasingly citing AI as the reason for layoffs as they realize new efficiencies. As this technology accelerates, Canadians are asking a simple but urgent question: Is AI helping us ...or quietly taking over? With Canada set to unveil a new national AI strategy in the coming weeks the answers to those questions are more pressing now than ever.
After the US-Israel strikes on Iran, Prime Minister Mark Carney initially backed efforts to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Days later, he added that all sides...including the US and Israel....must follow international law and work toward de-escalation. His comments come as questions grow about whether Canada's military could be pulled into the widening conflict, especially with attacks reaching countries beyond Iran, including a NATO ally. So how do you grade Mark Carney's stance on the crisis? And what should Canada's response be as the conflict expands?
In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of making tiny arrows (actually!) and stabbing each other with them. Known as a “love dart,” these limestone daggers aren’t just a strange trick of nature—they have a deep evolutionary purpose.
Special thanks to Menno Schilthuizen and Aaron Chase.EPISODE CREDITS:
Hosted by - Molly Webster
Reported by - Molly Webster
Produced by - Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Molly Webster
Sound design contributed by - Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen
Fact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly
and Edited by - Alex Neason
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Videos - A love dart being DARTED! (https://zpr.io/rYhLwXhaxQQP) – Molly has watched this video so many times
Articles -
Changes in the reproductive system of the snail Helix aspersa caused by mucus from the love dart. (https://zpr.io/xxjuCcTyiVJV) by Koene JM, Chase R. J Exp Biol.
The snail's love-dart delivers mucus to increase paternity. By Chase R, Blanchard KC. Proc Biol Sci.
A love-dart at the heart of sexual conflict in snails (https://zpr.io/X2ANHPaEg5sr) by Foote C
** This article has an image of eight different love darts, and it’s what Molly shows to Soren in the episode (this image is one of her favorite research finds!)
Books -
“Nature’s Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves” (https://zpr.io/ktMvJbZciCdD) by evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen.
Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!
Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.
Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Economists don’t usually talk about “culture.” But Joel Mokyr argues that it’s the engine of innovation — and the Nobel Prize committee agreed. Stephen Dubner sits down for a thousand-year conversation (including advice!) with the new Nobel laureate.
SOURCES:
Joel Mokyr, economic historian at Northwestern University.
RESOURCES:
Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000, by Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and, Guido Tabellini (2025).
"The Outsize Role of Immigrants in US Innovation," by Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade, and Beatriz Pousada (NBER, 2023).
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, by Joel Mokyr (2016).
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012).
"The Economics of Being Jewish," by Joel Mokyr (Critical Review, 2011).
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