The Cancer 'Curse,' A Village Away from Home, and Surviving Air Combat

Megan Sukys
01/13/2009

Doctors try to solve the mystery of a family that keeps losing young men to pancreatic cancer. We also get a tour of WWII fighter planes from a man who survived 50 missions. Then, the migration of Mexico's Purepecha to Seattle and Gavin Borchert's classical music reviews.

At 2:00 p.m. – Eastern Washington Diagnosis from Radio Lab

Family X has suffered for generations from a deadly "curse." Most of the men in the family died, some at very young ages, from a particularly lethal form of pancreatic cancer. Seeking to break the pattern, a father comes to Dr. Teri Brentnall and her research partner Dr. Mary Bronner for answers. Reporter Lu Olkowski follows their decade–long race to find the source of the disease, in which Teri and Mary find themselves drawing blood samples in the bathroom of a sandwich shop and pulling in other researchers to ferret out answers. A dream team of researchers, including Drs. Brentnall and Bronner, Dr. Ru Chen, Dr. Tatjana Crnogorac–Jurcevic, Dr. Sally Down, Dr. Carol Otey, Dr. Kay Pogue–Geile, and Dr. Kara White Moyes, toiled until they could announce a powerful discovery.

At 2:20 p.m. – Flying Heritage Collection

At one point during WWII, the odds of surviving 25 missions in a B–17 bomber were one in four. Art Unruh flew 50 missions and survived to tell the tale. Now he serves as a docent at the Flying Heritage Collection at the corner of Paine Field in Everett. The collection specializes in restored WWII aircraft, many of which still fly. For Art, the planes are a more than historic artifacts. In an archive interview from November 5, 2008, he talks with Dave Beck about what it was like to fly into battle.

At 2:40 p.m. – Gavin Borchert Classical Music Review

Our classical critic Gavin Borchert joins us with a review.
Geirr Tveitt: Music for Winds
The Royal Norwegian Navy Band, Bjarte Engeset, cond.
Naxos 8.572095
The rhythms and harmonies of Norwegian folk music color the music of Geirr Tveitt (1908–81), with an astringency that makes him sort of a Nordic Bartok. This disc includes a Sinfonia and Sinfonietta for band (the former, from 1974, was premiered by Minnesota's St. Olaf College band), three shorter pieces, and a selection of arrangements from Tveitt's One Hundred Hardanger Tunes for orchestra.

At 2:50 p.m. – A Village Away from Home, Part 2: Follow the Money

About three thousand miles south is a place some call 'The Mexican Dustbowl.' It's an area high in the mountains of central Mexico, and home to the indigenous Purepecha people. And like the dustbowl refugees of the thirties, they leave behind deforested hillsides and shriveled crops...and their traditional way of life to look for work. That search leads many North, and increasingly to the Seattle area. In part two of our weeklong series on the Purepecha migrants, KUOW's Liz Jones follows this workforce from the Mexican countryside to the shores of the Duwamish.