All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 in total
A World Without Nurses
playing god? presents… "A World Without Nurses"—it’s a future no one wants to imagine, but doing so brings into sharp focus just how essential nurses are today. Prepar...
playing god? presents...
The iDeas Lab team is hard at work on playing god? Season 3, but we have some special things to share with you in the meantime. Listen for a preview of what’s coming n...
Two Bodies, One Prescription
When Ashley Womble decides she wants to start a family, she worries she'll need to stop taking her antidepressant medication. Instead of finding clear guidance, she ru...
A Shot at Weight Loss: Should I Take It?
Rebecca Morrison is healthy by many measures. But like millions of people today, she finds herself wondering whether or not she should be taking a GLP-1 drug. What's t...
How Far Would You Go to Have a Healthy Baby?
After losing their son Noahto to mitochondrial disease, Kristelle and Evan Shulman are determined that his death will not be in vain, holding fast to their dream of ha...
Losing Noah
When Kristelle and Evan Shulman lose their young son Noah to a rare mitochondrial disease, they are told they may never be able to have a healthy biologically related ...
To Infinity and Beyond—At What Cost?
Humanity is actively working towards a mission to Mars. When astronauts like Bernard Harris leave Earth, they accept risk as part of the mission. But a journey to Mars...
I Need You To Help Me Die
When journalist Esmé Deprez receives a text from her father, Ron Deprez, asking for help to die, she enters one of the most ethically fraught spaces in modern medicine...
Coming soon: playing god? Season 2
Life and death decisions. Difficult tradeoffs. “playing god?” explores ethical dilemmas in health and medicine through the first-person stories of people who have live...
Prequel: The God Squad
Back in the 1960s, a committee of seven Seattle residents met regularly to decide which patients with chronic kidney disease were “worthy” of life-saving dialysis. Wh...
The Future of Baby-Making
In this episode we head into the future to learn about a controversial technology that could change the face of reproduction. Researchers are developing a technology c...
Miracle Drugs, Million Dollar Price Tags
Cheryl Yoder’s son Jase, was born with an incurable rare disease called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which meant he was unlikely to live beyond two years old. Jase m...
An Off Switch For Depression?
For years Brandy Ellis had tried everything to treat depression but nothing worked. Then one day she heard about something called deep brain stimulation, a brain impla...
Creating One Life to Save Another
When Laurie Strongin’s son Henry was born with the rare, often fatal disease of Fanconi anemia, doctors told her that the best way to save his life was with an umbilic...
A Womb of One’s Own?
Jen Dingle yearned to get pregnant and have children, but there was one problem: she was born without a uterus. So when she was ready to have children she was desperat...
Why Can’t I Buy a Kidney?
It can take years to get to the top of the waiting list for a donated kidney in the U.S. So when Sally Satel found out she’d need a kidney transplant, she wondered why...
Need a new Liver? Drinkers to the back of the Line.
One day, when she was only 39, bar manager Jamie Imhof collapsed. While she lay in a coma, doctors told her family that they knew how to save her life: she needed an i...
The Girl Who Died Twice
When a 13 year-old girl from Oakland named Jahi McMath was pronounced brain dead after a surgical complication in 2013, California issued her a death certificate. Five...
I Would’ve Let You Die, Too
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 sur...
Introducing: playing god?
A new podcast about the complex ethical questions that get raised with groundbreaking medical innovations. Brought to you by Pushkin Industries and the Johns Hopkins B...
