cc  >> Dominique Broussard:  So welcome everybody.  As you know, this is the first  lecture in our series for  University Forum, Summer 2009.  This is actually a forum  sponsored by the Division of  Continuing Studies.  And this year, organized by the  Department of Life Science  Communication here at the  University.  I'm a professor in Life Science  Communication.  And it's my pleasure to  introduce to you the guest of  tonight, Deborah Blum.  Deborah will talk about  the following topic,  "Shoot The Messenger:  Tales From Investigative  Science Journalism."  Deb, as a science writer for the  Sacramento Bee, wrote a series  of articles examining the  professional ethical and  emotional conflicts between  scientists who use animals in  their research and animal rights  activists who oppose that  research.  Titled "The Monkey Wars," the  series won the 1992 Pulitzer  Prize for Beat Reporting.  But Blum has published numerous  books, which have won  several awards.  She has also written for several  publications, including among  others, and I'll let Deb talk  maybe a little more about her  professional experience,  the Los Angeles Times,  the Boston Globe,  the New York Times,  the Washington Post,  among many others,  and particularly popularization  of science type of magazines. 

 She was president of the  National Association of Science  Writers from 2002-2004, and  currently serves as an advisor  to both the Council on  Advancement of Science and the  World Federation of Science  Journalists.  So please join me to welcome  Deb Blum here tonight.  (applause)  >> Deborah Blum: Thank you.  It's a pleasure to be here.  I thought that I would talk to  you some about investigative  reporting.  So my talk is about science  reporting, but it's framed in  the context of investigative  journalism.  And I wanted to start by saying  to you that investigative  journalism is in my opinion, the  most important thing that  journalists do.  There is no democracy, in fact,  without a watchdog press, to use  an old phrase.  And as the journalism community  struggles to invent itself--  Hi, Suzanne.  As the journalistic community  works to invent itself in a new  generation, as the Internet and  many other forces change  journalism entirely, the one  thing that you will find is that  everyone is investing to keep  investigative reporting. 

 So for instance, Andy Hall from  the Wisconsin State Journal,  quit to start the Wisconsin  Center for Investigative  Journalism, which is now based  in the Journalism School here at  UW.  And within about two weeks,  had gotten a $100,000 grant  toward that.  And he just told me recently  that another foundation is also  investigating in it.  Another family on the west coast  created ProPublica, which is a  non-profit investigative  journalism center.  And they got $20 million for  that.  The Knight Foundation  gave millions for investigative  journalism.  So when you think about how  journalism is changing, one of  the things you think about is  what do we want to keep.  We're going to lose a lot of the  traditional journalism.  But it's worth, as we do that,  thinking about what we want to  keep.  And so, what I want to begin  by saying is I think  that the top of that list is  a watchdog press, an unbiased,  investigative, unimpressed,  tough, questioning, curious  press, willing to ask  tough questions of anything,  including science. 

 And for a long time, science  journalism, which is my  specialty, was not investigative  at all.  People used to call us  stenographers.  We would go, we would write down  whatever the scientist said, and  we would then report it back as  if somehow a genius had stepped  down from a mountain and said  something, where it was right  off a stone tablet.  So if a scientist said it, he  was smarter than you, the reader  or listener, and it had to be  true.  And that was largely true.  If you go back and you look at  the science journalism of the  past, and particularly for  instance, if you look at the  science journalism of the early  20th century, it gets better,  but it stayed bad for a long  time.  One of the things, it was so  phenomenal, in the '30s for  instance.  In the 1930s, and here's  controversial journalism.  One of the big Zeitgeists in  biologists of the time was the  idea that there was a  genetically superior strain in  humanity.  And that the way to improve the  human condition was to weed out  the inferior. 

 And this was actually started by  a cousin of Charles Darwin,  Francis Galton, and it's called  eugenics.  And in fact, during the 1930s,  biologists in the United States  were so sure that they had the  formula for the perfect human  being, and it wasn't female.  And it was definitely white.  Many states in this country  passed laws to unvoluntarily  sterilize people that they  thought should not reproduce.  And in fact, this particular  law, the Virginia Law for  Involuntary Sterilization was  upheld by the US Supreme Court,  on the principle that we  shouldn't continue to reproduce  imbeciles.  And it was the model for the  Nazi sterilization program that  followed in the late '30s.  And in fact, the US scientists  who developed those laws, or  contributed to those laws, were  given awards by Hitler's  administration for their service  to mankind.  And under the Americans Eugenics  laws, between 60,000 and 80,000  Americans were sterilized  without their permission and  often without their knowledge.  Mostly women, right?  A huge number of Native  Americans were sterilized as  being inferior.  A fair number of blacks, as you  might imagine, and poor white  men. 

 And this program was  unquestionably accepted by the  science writing stenographers of  the 1930s.  So that if you actually go and  you look at Time Magazine, for  instance, it is embracing the  idea of eugenics.  It is embracing the brilliant  scientists who know, who are  smarter than you, by the way,  and who know that the only way  to create the perfect race is to  eliminate the idiots among us.  And so that would be my example  of stenography and science  journalism.  It actually didn't get too much  worse than that.  But you will see it perpetually  throughout.  And this really didn't begin to  change, I'm going to argue until  about the 1980s, even.  If you looked at the coverage of  let's say, the space program,  you would see that there was  unquestioning acceptance that  NASA was populated by gods,  basically.  You know, our heroes.  There was no understanding of  science as a really human  enterprise. 

 And we all know, because we're  all people, that if it's a human  enterprise, it's a complicated  enterprise, populated by egos,  and agendas, and people who  sometimes make mistakes and  sometimes cover them up.  And I'll tell you that my  background in science  journalism, I started out as an  investigative reporter in the  purest sense.  I got my graduate degree here in  the science reporting program,  and then went off to California  to work for, almost 17 years, as  a science journalist.  But I'm the daughter of a  biologist.  And so, I grew up in the  community of science, and I knew  it wasn't perfect.  I grew up in the south, which is  often unusually exciting in  terms of the way people react to  things.  So in my father's department,  there were two feuding  scientists.  And one of them snuck into the  other's lab in the middle of the  night and turned off his  equipment and destroyed several  years of work, and tanked a  several million dollar grant.  And the interesting thing about  that was that everyone in my  father's department knew it, and  my father's children knew it,  because he came home and talked  loudly about it to my mother.  But the journalists didn't know  it, because the scientific  community is also very good at  keeping its secrets. 

 So some time, I'm going to say  in the 1990s, you start getting  a more skeptical group of  science journalists, ones who  are willing to say, let's cover  science like we cover everything  else, like a human enterprise,  like these are people making  decisions and we need to  understand them, like maybe  everyone in the world has their  own kind of intelligence, and  you don't have to talk down to  them and ask as if they're too  stupid.  And I'm not going to say that in  an argument that somehow then  journalists are perfect, because  we all know they're not either.  But at this point, you start  seeing some really interesting,  and questioning scientific  journalism.  So I was a science journalist in  California through the '80s.  And among the things that I  looked at was AIDS.  And all the scientists in  California at the time were  talking about the fact that  Robert Gallo at the National  Institutes of Health had stolen  the human deficiency virus from  Luc Montagnier of France.  And this was actually a time  when journalism had money, which  it doesn't now.  My little paper in Sacramento  sent me to Paris so I could hunt  down this rumor.  It actually was a great job.  And I spent about two years  looking at nuclear weapons  development. 

 And I was really fortunate,  because I was hanging out at the  big nuclear weapons lab in  California.  And to give you a little bit of  background on this, the nuclear  weapons program in the United  States is federal.  But the federal government  essentially hires contractors to  run its research labs.  And the three primary research  labs in the western United  States are Sandia, in  Albuquerque, which develops  delivery system missiles ICBMs;  Los Alamos, which works on  warheads; and Livermore, which  works on also on warheads and on  uses of nuclear energy in other  kind of senses.  That was it at the time.  They've all become a little more  peaceful.  But at that time, Ronald Reagan  was president.  And one of the things that was  going on was that they were  trying to develop a space based  missile system.  Does anyone know this?  The Star Wars Strategic Defense  Initiative.  And I was hanging out at the  nuclear weapons lab when one of  the scientists there called me  up and he said, well, I wasn't  at the lab at the time, but I'd  been writing stories, and I'd  been there a lot. 

 He called me at my office  and he said, "Do you want  to come have dinner?"  And so I went to his house to  have dinner.  He lived way down in the  Sacramento River delta.  And gave me about 200 pages of  classified documents, which  showed that the Lawrence  Livermore National Laboratory  had been lying about one of  their programs.  And the program was this.  It was called an X-ray laser.  It was promoted by a fairly high  ranking physicist called Edward  Teller.  And Edward Teller was famous  because he developed the  thermonuclear bomb.  And so if you know anything  about nuclear weapons, you know  that the bombs that we dropped  in Japan were primaries.  They were straightforward  fission bombs.  And they had, I'm trying to  think, they had a kiloton  explosion rate of 40 kilotons. 

 They were right in the 40  kiloton range.  If you use a fission bomb,  essentially what Teller  developed was this.  You could take the bomb that  they dropped in Japan, and you  could use it as a trigger for a  fusion explosion.  And the fusion is the secondary.  So if you take a bomb like the  kind we dropped in Japan, and  you use it to ignite fusion in  your secondary, then you get  a thermonuclear explosion,  and then your kiloton--  The amount of dynamite,  essentially equivalent to  dynamite.  Your kilotonnage weight goes up  to 500, 600, 700, 1,000 times,  right, 2,000, 3,000,  depending on how you're able  to do this.  Now your rinky bomb that you  dropped in Japan, and they're  rinky compared to the ones we  have in the stockpile now,  becomes a huge deal.  So you wouldn't just take out  one city, you could take out ten  cities with some of these bombs.  They're really potent.  And so, Teller developed that  technology. 

 So he was like a god of the  nuclear weapons program.  He was still working at  Livermore.  And he proposed, as part of our  protective program, that we  develop an X-ray laser, which we  detonate a nuclear weapon in  space, that bomb would go off,  we would concentrate its energy  into a single beam, and then  when the Soviets launched their  anti-ballistic missiles, we  would take them out with this  laser.  And if we missed, we'd just take  out another country.  But that was okay.  And there have been, boy, I'm  thinking the government, the  Department of Defense had put  maybe $30 million to $40 million  into this.  And the big secret that  Livermore was keeping was that  it didn't work.  They had never been able to get  it to work.  And so, these documents that was  leaked were memos, internal  memos, documenting the failure  of this weapon, at a cost of $40  million.  And this is classic. 

 Let me back up and say this is  classic investigative reporting.  You go and you're kind of  fishing.  And when I started this  particular series on nuclear  weapons, I had just said to my  editors, look, there's billions  of dollars here; and nuclear  weapons designers are really  interesting; and I'm just going  to go hangout for a while.  And they said, well, no, you're  not, actually.  Because we're paying you a lot  of money, and we just don't want  you, you know, hanging out and  drinking at Livermore and never  coming back.  So I had to actually work out an  agreement that I would a story  every two weeks.  So I'm writing these stories  every two weeks, and I'm hanging  out and drinking with the  physicists.  And eventually, I get this leak.  This is classic investigative  reporting.  Because investigative  journalists are a court of last  resorts for people who have  nowhere to go. 

 And in this case, the particular  scientist who leaked me the  documents had been trying to get  the University of California to  fix the problem for almost a  year.  And they had responded by  demoting him, and moving him  from his office into a basement  office.  So he was so angry and so  frustrated.  And he got to the point that he  just said, okay, I'm going to  deal with it this way, and he  leaked me this document.  I was completely neurotic about  those documents.  And I drove them, I took them  home in the trunk of my car, and  I moved them every day during  this entire investigation.  It's like, where are the  documents.  I don't know.  I don't remember.  I was so worried about anyone  finding these, or anyone knowing  where they were. 

 I wasn't really worried, you  know, a lot of people came out  later and said, How could you do  that?  You released classified  documents.  But my husband, who actually  used to be an Army journalist,  he goes, they're only "Top  Secret," that's not very  classified.  (laughter)  He wasn't impressed at all.  There's layers of  classification, and Top Secret  was like the wuss  classification.  So, I never do impress him  anyway.  Anyway, the upshot of the  investigation I did, I took  these documents, I called every  person in them.  I called, there was a guy named  George Keyworth, who was  Reagan's White House Science  Advisor.  And I called him.  I just kept calling people and  checking the documents.  The upshot of this investigation  is they shut down the program. 

 The General Accounting Office of  Congress launched an  investigation.  They concluded that this had in  fact been a scam of some sort.  They shut it down.  Edward Teller, who I had  interviewed once, never spoke to  me again.  The one time that I did  interview him after I started  running this series, he was at a  laser convention up in Tahoe at  a casino.  And so, it was the middle of  winter, and it was snowing like  crazy.  So I bought a $14 gambler's  special bus ticket to the  casino, because I didn't want to  put chains on my tires in the  Sierra.  And then when I went, Greyhound  gave me money to spend in the  casino.  So I sat around in the casino.  I lost everything I had waiting  for this conference. 

 When I went to the conference,  he was there talking about how  wonderful lasers were.  And I stood up, and I asked my  questions about this sucky  laser.  And the thing you had to know  about Teller, and again this is  something you need to know about  investigative reporting, every  investigative reporter--  This is your don't trust  journalists lecture.  But investigative reporters have  to figure out ways to make  people say things that they  don't want to say.  And every single one of us is  strategic about doing this.  So for someone like me, you  know, who's fairly friendly and  chatty, that's my initial  approach.  I'm just a nice person.  Trust me.  Let's go out for coffee.  You'll really enjoy spending  time with me. 

 And my hope is that you'll  forget you're talking to a  journalist, right?  That's my play.  There are others who go at this  entirely differently.  And when I've teamed with other  reporters on stories, we'll do  good cop/bad cop.  And I'm always the good cop,  because I'm so sweet.  But with Teller, what you had to  know, was that the only way to  get anything out of him was to  totally tick him off.  Because if you could bait him  enough, he lost all self control  instantly.  And he'd just go into a frenzy  of trying to, you know, shut you  down and get you in your place.  So I knew what I needed to do,  because I was going to have the  one question, was really tick  him off.  So I stood up, and I asked him a  question that involved the word  stupid.  And he leaped to his feet,  started shouting to me about the  program. 

 And then he stormed out of the  auditorium, refused to do  anything again with anyone at  the laser conference.  So they were really happy with  me.  And so, this is the other thing  you need to know about  investigative reporting.  You grow a really thick skin.  I make so many people angry.  I started making people angry in  my first job when I was 20, in  which, like I brought about the  downfall of a very crooked and  horrible police chief, actually.  My opinion, not his.  And the police in the department  would actually park their  cruisers outside my little  apartment in North Georgia,  because they were so afraid that  he was going to order a hit.  I mean, he was a bad guy.  And so, you get to the point  where you just don't care,  right, if you make people mad. 

 You have to do that.  And at the same time, and I'll  say this to my students when I'm  teaching journalism, you also  have to remember if you're  talking to a journalist, that  journalists are not your friend.  I'm going to come up and I'm  going to be your best buddy, and  I'm going to take you out for  coffee, and I'm going to, you  know, try to charm your socks  off you, and make you forget  that you're talking to someone  and on the record.  But I'm really not your friend.  My total focus is on, and I'm a  print journalist, so I'm going  to say reader.  But that's who my loyalty is to.  My loyalty is not to my  newspaper, even.  My loyalty is to my readers, or  my listeners, or my viewers.  That's who I work for.  And when I'm writing a story,  I'm writing for them. 

 I'm not writing for you, if I'm  interviewing you.  I'm not writing to make my  editor happy, and often haven't.  I'm writing for the people who  are going to read my work or see  my work, because they're the  people I'm trying make think,  right?  And you learn, if you're an  investigative journalist, that  you know, you can do a story, an  amazing story, and you don't  always get your laser shutdown.  You investigate things that  you're so sure will change the  way people think, and they don't  change at all.  And you really have to learn to  believe, in a kind of revolution  by inch, right, which is what I  finally said to myself.  It's not going to change, but  I'm going to change a few minds.  And we're going to keep pushing  it in this direction.  And that's part of what I do.  Because sometimes it's really  frustrating.  So the example I'm going to give  you, really quickly, has to do  with animal research, which is  what I won the Pulitzer for. 

 And it was in fact, the series I  did that followed my nuclear  weapons work.  And when I first came up with  the idea of writing about  monkeys, my editors were  horrified, right?  It was like she had gone from  Miss Jock Science takes on the  nuclear weapons establishment,  to Miss Fuzzy Animal.  And  I actually had people  kind of going, "What?"  But here's basically,  and this will give you a good  example of how an investigative  story comes about anyway.  This was, when did I start on  this?  I worked on it a couple of  years.  Right about 1990.  The CDC sent out an  announcement.  Everyone here know what Ebola  is?  Anyone read "The Hot Zone," the  Richard Preston book?  So, about 1990, a variant of  Ebola showed up in the United  States.  It's called Ebola Reston.  And it popped in primate  centers.  And in particular, it popped at  a little primate center. 

 It was a quarantine facility in  Reston, Virginia.  And Ebola is a classic  hemorrhagic fever virus.  It's a contact borne virus.  But you can cough, get the  particles on your skin.  But it's mostly blood to blood.  It's a hemorrhagic fever virus.  What it does, you have a high  fever, and it basically destroys  your circulation system.  It chews apart veins, heart,  vascular system.  You actually end up bleeding out  through your skin, as much as  anything else.  And the problem with it is, the  fatality rate for classic Ebola  is about in the 80%-90% range. 

 And so, people are really afraid  of it.  You get a sick person in the  hospital, blood spilling  everywhere.  It touches people.  It touches doctors.  It touches doctors, nurses  alike.  But it's a virus that's very    unsuccessful, because it  essentially destroys its host  and can't travel.  Something like Swine Flu, that  everyone was so freaked out  about in the fall, you know.  It has a low fatality rate.  Classic flu fatality rate, it  was pretty close to the  classic flu fatality rate.  It's like less than what, 5%?  Less than 1%?  It's very low. 

 But Ebola is like at the 90%  range.  So it can't go anywhere.  It kills everyone.  They're all dead.  And there's no one to carry it  somewhere else.  And in that case, we're really  lucky about some of these super  lethal viruses.  Nevertheless, you have a classic  Ebola in this primate center in  Reston, Virginia.  Monkeys were bleeding out all  over the floor.  Everyone was freaked.  And CDC rushed out, and they  started taking blood samples of  the handlers of all the primates  centers in the country, to try  to find out if anyone was Ebola  positive. 

 And their test was really bad,  and people popped false  positives all over the country.  And eventually, they had to come  back.  You can imagine how these people  felt.  They're all being told they're  antibody positive for Ebola when  they actually weren't.  And at UC Davis, which was very  close to where I worked, they  had to issue a press release  saying they had two handlers  positive for Ebola.  So I did that initial news  story.  And I was talking to the people  in the California Health  Services Department.  And they were ranting about the  federal government, right?  The federal government  quarantine sucks.  They never really looked.  They don't have any time to do  it. 

 Any sick monkey in the world  comes in.  It's so bad that California has  to set up its own quarantine  system.  And they are in fact the only  state in the country that has  it.  And so, I write my story.  I go home.  And it was just one of those  ah-ha moments.  I was sitting around and I  thought, wait a minute, if  California tracks every monkey  that comes into the state, and  they're the only state that does  this, then they are the only  state in the country that has a  map of primates that have gone  everywhere in the state.  And I had been kicking around  the idea of animal research in  this sense.  If you spend any time as a  science journalist, you know  that people who work with  animals, speaking of scientists  who are secretive, no one is  more secretive than animal  researchers.  No one. 

 They really do not want people  to know what they do, because  people who don't work with  animal research have a really  strong and a really visceral  reaction to it, because it's  often really brutal in what's  done.  And so for instance,  I have done a story, it was on  early development of--  I was looking at early  development of fetuses.  And one of the people I talked  to was a cat researcher at  Stanford.  So, cats are the model for human  vision in animals.  And she was looking at pre-natal  and basically, pre-natal  development in the vision  system, when do things wire up.  So she would get cats pregnant.  She'd take these kittens, and  she just chopped them apart, and  slice up their brains, and take  a look at the developing vision  system.  She did want anyone to know  that, right?  It's not a beautiful image.  And if you look at it as how  many kittens had she killed, and  she was president for the  American Society for  Neuroscience.  And I didn't tell anyone, right?  It was a condition of the  interview. 

 You do enough reporting on  animal research, and you'll find  over and over, it's very  conditional.  I'll give you this interview,  but you can't tell people what I  do.  And I had been doing lung  research.  There was a guy at UC Davis who  had a huge grant from the  American Lung Association, which  you would think was as huggy and  loveable as can be.  He wouldn't talk to me, because  he was doing lung research on  dogs.  And he was really afraid that  people would come out and find  out what he did, and hate what  he did.  So I spent years thinking, how  am I going to get at this.  And then I thought, well, if I  have this exact list of monkeys  and where they've gone, maybe I  can put some hard numbers to  this.  So, I went back to Health  Services.  I said I wanted to get a list of  five years' worth of monkeys. 

 And they said they don't--  We just throw our old records  in the basement.  They were so proud of their  system that they never collated  it or anything.  They had just been tossing those  old files in a cabinet in some  basement.  And they've never actually  looked at the number of monkeys  coming into the state.  And if you really want it, you  have to file a Public Record Act  request.  And as you probably know, states  and the federal government have  Public Record Act requests.  They're marginally useful,  right?  I mean, the federal law is  called FOIA, Freedom of  Information Act.  And then every state has their  own.  Whether or not agencies will  actually give you anything,  depends on who is their Public  Records Act person of the  moment, or whether they care, or  whether they even read your  letter.  So for instance, if the feds,  let's just say that you had an  ancestor and you wanted to know  what happened to them at Ellis  Island. 

 And you wanted to file with the  feds to see like, you know, what  the records were as they came  through.  You file for that.  You send your letter certified,  and you send it return receipt  requested, because the law  spells out that they have 21  days to get back to you.  So you get an actual date that  they received your letter,  right, by sending it certified  return receipt.  Then, theoretically, in 21 days,  they get back to you.  In reality, if you're lucky, six  months.  And the games that these  agencies will play, for the most  part, is they white you out.  Sure, they're getting back to  you, but your deadlines go by.  Your deadline's gone by.  Your deadline's gone by. 

 So with my monkey research, once  I started, it took me a year.  And I spent a year working on  other things, and filing Public  Record Act requests.  And back and forth to the  lawyers at my paper.  Appealing things that were  turned down.  After a year, I had a huge  pile of documents.  I actually had taken over  someone else's desk.  It was covered with my stuff.  I started calling people and  everyone refused to talk to me.  No one wanted to have a  spotlight put on them on animal  research.  No one. 

 And so, I went back to my  editors and I said, give me two  weeks to see if I can set up  some interviews.  And if I can't set up these  interviews, maybe we'll just  call the project, right?  So after two weeks, I had two  interviews set up.  And I went to San Diego to meet  with a guy who's a  neuroscientist who does memory  work in monkeys.  And he would go in, basically,  the research he did--  Now you'll see why people don't  want to talk about it.  He would go in, with a  neurosurgeon, they'd take a  super heated probe and they'd  burn out the structures in the  brain that had to do with  memory.  Then they'd do memory tests.  They'd burn out a different  structure every time, and test  the monkeys to see how they  responded, depending on what was  left of their brain at a given  stage.  And then the other one was  Leonard Bailey, who had done a  baboon to baby heart transplant,  Baby Faye.  And here's that story, which I'm  going to tell you, and then I'm  going to wrap this up pretty  quickly, in case you have some  questions.  If not, of course I can talk  indefinitely. 

 So, I go down to Loma Linda  University, where Leonard Bailey  is.  And the Baby Faye story is this.  There's a lot of premature  babies who are born with  defective hearts.  It's one of the killers of  preemies in the United States.  And it's probably not surprising  to know that there are never  enough hearts.  There's not enough babies who  are dying that they can harvest  the heart from.  So Bailey, who is a pediatric  heart surgeon, gets this idea  that well, maybe they can use a  monkey heart.  And he picks a fairly large  monkey, the African baboon.  And the baboon they used--  So, Baby Faye is the name.  The one child that he  transplanted, he actually got  approval from the feds for  seven. 

 And he did one in the early  '80s, and he's never done one  since.  And I'm going to tell you why.  So this baby came in.  She had a horribly defective  heart.  And they had this colony of  baboons.  And they took one, a female  baboon.  Her name was Peanut.  And they took Baby Faye's heart  out.  And then they killed Peanut and  cut out her heart and put it in  the baby.  And the baby lived, she was  about three months old, she  lived about maybe another ten  days. 

 And the reason it didn't take  was this.  They were loading here up with  anti-rejection drugs.  Their biggest fear was, this was  a cross-species transplant, they  were worried about, you know,  would the anti-rejection drugs  work.  What they didn't actually do,  and when you look at this in  hindsight, you think what were  they thinking, was match the  blood type.  So the baboon was an A, and Baby  Faye was an O.  And the heart just clotted shut.  I mean, literally, over this  period of weeks, this things was  so full of clots, it couldn't  function right, and the baby  died.  And at that point, the feds  said, no, no, no, no, no.  You have to have this perfect  before you do your next one.  And obviously, it's not been  perfect since. 

 When we went down, it had been  maybe five or six years since  the Baby Faye thing.  And Bailey is one of these, if  you deal with surgeons, you know  they're like the jock stars of  the medical field.  People are rolling out red  carpets in front of them,  bringing them glasses  and golden cups.  And that's they way they expect  it to be.  So Bailey was like, running  around, I'm too busy to see you.  Even though you came all the way  down, I'm too busy to see you.  You'll just have to wait.  So, we were sitting in his  office.  I look over and there's this  glass jar on his desk.  And it's got this horrible,  rotting oyster thing floating  around in it. 

 And I'm sitting there.  We're sitting there, sitting  there.  And you know, what is this  disgusting thing?  And his secretary goes, "That's  Baby Faye's original heart."  And I went, "Yuck!"  So, I made a huge positive  impression on the entire staff.  It was really horrible looking.  We sat there, and then he  finally came back.  And this is what they were  doing.  They had a colony of monkeys  in the basement.  And so, down in the basement of  Loma Linda hospital, it was  really this dark, grungy thing.  They had about 30 monkeys.  The guy who they'd hired, and  this is classic animal research. 

 Well, it's not classic, but it's  certainly typical of some of the  stuff we saw.  He hated monkeys.  Hated them.  Spent the whole time giving us  the tour, and telling us how  much he liked goats.  All about how goats are so  great.  So, monkeys suck.  And they've got all these  monkeys in these little cages.  And they've got like beach  balls, and stuff.  And the surgery they were doing  was to take a heart out of an  African green monkey and put it  into a baboon.  And so, when we went in there,  they were moving the heart into  the baboon, and they stitched up  the baboon. 

 And then, Bailey came in and he  said, "Now you can take this  picture."  And here's a good ethical  question.  So, my photographer is standing  there, and she holds the camera  to take the picture.  The baboon is all stitched up.  And he goes, "Wait."  And he comes around and he says,  "Let me look through your  camera."  And he looks, and he goes,  "There's way too much blood  on that monkey."  And so, stop everything.  They sponge all the blood off  the monkey.  And then he lets us  take the picture.  That picture was everywhere.  They actually had it in  a pavilion at Disney World  at one point.  It was like the--  And I just hated that picture.  I wanted to put on there--  And Leonard Bailey is in this  picture, standing over the  monkey. 

 And he looks like  St. Francis Assisi.  I don't know how they guy did  the look.  But he's just beaming in the  most, I'm a loving doctor who  adores all monkeys, kind of  face.  It's just amazing.  And I really hadn't wanted,  I said to myself, if we were  honest, right, we would have  put under this,  "sanitized by Leonard Bailey."  To me, mentally, every time I  saw the picture, I saw that.  I'll tell you of one other  photo, then I'll let you ask  questions.  One of the other things we went  to, and this was actually the  surgery that I did my main story  about.  It was an experiment in which  they were looking at preemies  again, which is a big driver in  animal research.  In human development, the lungs  are one of the last things to  develop.  And one of the last things to  develop is surfactant, which is  essentially the grease for your  lungs. 

 You know, your lungs are always  flexing in and out.  You need them to be greased.  Well, if they're all dried out,  they flex and rip.  And one of the last things that  develops in human development is  surfactant, the grease.  So that was the number one cause  of premature baby deaths.  They have an artificial  surfactant now, but it doesn't  work that well.  So this guy was trying to  develop new surfactants.  He would take monkeys.  He would get them pregnant.  At 26 weeks, something  comparable to 26 weeks human  gestation, they'd do a  C-section. 

 They'd take these premature  monkeys out.  They'd intubate them, run a tube  in right here, down to their  lungs, keep them alive for 24  hours, spray the artificial  surfactant into the tube.  And at the end of 24 hours,  they'd kill them, chop up their  lungs, and take a look at  whether this was working.  So we watched this whole thing,  from C to death of monkeys.  And the story that leads off the  series is framed around the  beginning of the surgery to the  moment when he kills the last  monkey.  And in fact, he's never spoken  to another reporter since the  story came out.  He had all kinds of death  threats.  Death threats against his  family.  The university was great about  it.  They kept saying to him, this is  a positive thing. 

 But that was it for him.  He got a burglar alarm and moved  his family to a different place.  He was completely terrified.  People were screaming at him on  the phone.  It was actually fairly horrible.  And it wasn't my intention.  And the story wasn't on him, but  people are going to see this and  react to it that way.  When we were looking at the  photographs, one of the  photographs we had was a  photograph of this baby monkey  just as it was cut out of the  mother's uterus.  And basically, the way they do  this operation is it's fairly  similar to a human C.  They make a vertical slice, here  to here. 

 They pull the uterus out.  It's resting on the monkey's  abdomen.  Slice the uterus open and pull  the baby monkey out.  So, it's phenomenally bloody,  right, phenomenally.  And we had this picture of this  baby monkey being pulled out of  this bloody uterus, right?  And we all loved it.  I mean, it sounds so like aren't  journalists the most disgusting,  cold-hearted people in the  world.  It was an amazing photo.  And my editor, the editor of the  paper said no.  No way.  Everyone's going to look at this  photo and be so focused on the  blood, they're going to miss the  point of your story. 

 And I said, but why am I doing  this?  I spent like a year and a half  working on this, and the whole  point of my series is that I  want people to see what animal  research really is, and then  make a decision.  That was what I wanted, right?  You know, know what it is, and  then make a decision about how  you feel about it.  And I can tell you now, that I  am not against animal research.  Never have been.  I think that we're sloppy with  it.  I think that we don't properly,  often, take care of animals.  I think we're wasteful.  I think there's all kinds of  ethical grays in it, which is  why I like the subject.  But I am not anti-animal  research, and I never have been.  But having said that,  and I still feel that way. 

 And I have seen much worse  things in that setting than I'm  telling you now.  We did not run that photo.  And those were the two photos  that bothered me.  The one we did run and the one  we didn't.  So the last thing I want you to  be aware of, not just in animal  research, but in investigative  reporting, is this.  Everything is ethical choices,  right?  You're always making these  choices.  And you make them, even not  knowing that they're the right  ones.  You try to do the right ones.  You try to make people think.  Did I change animal research?  And my basic point, which is not  a particularly, you know,  radical one, was could we just  talk to each other. 

 There's valid points on either  side.  Can we just listen to each other  for a minute, which hasn't  happened yet.  So, I wrote that series.  It was the most professionally  successful series I ever did.  It won the Pulitzer.  It won the award from AAAS.  It got me named an honorary  fellow in the Society of  Neuroscience.  It got me named a lifetime  fellow of Sigma Xi.  You know, just kudos everywhere.  But my other series, won less  awards, but changed something  more, right?  So to me, it's more successful. 

 I love the animal research  series.  But when I write, I want to  change something.  I'm an investigative reporter.  I believe in journalism in the  service of good and change.  And when it doesn't happen, I  know that I'm only partially  successful.  So that concludes my talk, talk,  talk part of this.  Thank you very much.  (applause)