Preserving Veterans' Memories

Guest: Timothy McMahon, Director of DNA Operations, Department of Defense Americans are gathering at gravesites to honor those who died in military service to the country. But some servicemembers who made that ultimate sacrifice have never come home to be properly buried and mourned by their families. The Department of Defense has an entire office dedicated to bringing that closure to families using DNA analysis. The office has identified the remains of servicemembers missing in action all the way back to World War II. (Originally aired 1/16/2020)

Guest: Kenneth Foote, PhD, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Connecticut, Author of “Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy” Why is it that, after a tragedy, we build a memorial at the site? Maybe it starts as a makeshift monument – a pile of flowers, cards, stuffed animals and candles. Sometimes it evolves into something more formal where a community chooses to permanently memorialize a traumatic event like a mass shooting or terrorist attack. In the aftermath of a tragedy, there is always a tension between wanting to remember and wanting to forget. (Originally aired 11/13/2017)

Guest: Magdalena and Nathaniel Newman, Authors of "Normal: A Mother and Her Beautiful Son" The book for young readers called Wonder by RJ Palacio–and the movie based on it –gave people a better understanding of Treacher Collins syndrome. It’s a genetic condition that causes severe facial deformities like Auggie has in Wonder. Nathaniel Newman is sometimes called “the real life Auggie,” because he has Treacher Collins, too, but that’s pretty much where the similarities stop. Nathaniel and his mother Magda tell their story in a memoir called Normal: A Mother and Her Beautiful Son. (Originally aired 1/30/2020)

Guest: Mozziyar Etemadi, MD, PhD, Research Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Northwestern University, Physician at Northwestern Medicine Tens of millions of women in the US get a mammogram each year, because it remains the best way we have to catch breast cancer early. But it’s far from fool-proof. The American Cancer Society says mammograms miss one out of every five breast cancers. And on the flip side, half of women getting a yearly mammogram will end up with a false alarm diagnosis over a 10-year period. Could artificially intelligent software do a better job than human doctors analyzing mammograms? (Originally aired 1/30/2020)