60 Minutes - 5/6/2018: The Rockford File, The Orphans of War, Into the Wild

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

One U.S city is fighting back against the pharmaceutical industry -- as prescription drug prices continue to rise. Lesley Stahl reports. The ongoing conflict in Syria has left thousands of children orphaned. Scott Pelley introduces us to the humanitarians who are lending a hand. Plus -- Anderson Cooper showcases the work of renowned wildlife photographer Thomas D.Mangelsen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Everybody's asking the question, why is health care so expensive? Because the fix is in. That's the answer. That's the short answer. The former mayor of Rockford, Illinois, says the cost of just one drug threatened to cripple his entire city's budget. In 2001, it sold for about $40 a vial. Today, more than $40,000 a vial. In the entire city, just two babies needed it. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for these sick baby cases.

Close to $500,000 is what we heard combined. Serious orphans are often children who have been brought into the world a second time. They're rescued after attacks that killed brothers, sisters, and parents. No one knows how many orphans there are. Conservative estimates start at 100,000. They've lost their homes, they've lost their families, and they've lost their dignity in this war. They lost everything. They lost even their identity. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Tom

Mangelson's photographs tells a story. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid. Stupid? Yeah. Have you learned anything with all that waiting? You wait long enough, it does pay off. And at 72, he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. What he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals that you'll ever see. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The Rockford File is the story of how one very expensive prescription drug threatened to financially cripple an entire city. That city is Rockford, Illinois, an old industrial town outside of Chicago. Rather than using a health insurance company, Rockford has for years paid its own health care costs for its 1,000 employees and their dependents. When Rockford got hit with the drug bill, it was so enormous. The mayor at the time set out to understand why.

Everybody's asking the question, why is health care so expensive? Because the fix is in. That's the answer. That's the short answer. When Larry Morrissey was mayor of Rockford, he was hit with a crisis. The city was bleeding money. You found out that the health care budget was going bust. Yeah, the budget was out of control.

And you had to squeeze other things like what? Hiring police and firefighters, keeping fire trucks and other equipment on the streets. We started realizing that pharmaceutical costs were skyrocketing. And I heard that it was just one drug. One particular drug called Actar. In 2015, two small children of Rockford employees were treated with Actar, a drug that's been on the market since 1952. It's used to treat a rare and potentially fatal condition called infantile

spasms that afflicts about 2,000 babies a year. Do you remember how much was on the budget for those two babies? We were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for these sick baby cases. Close to $500,000 is what we heard combined. The drug works. It's considered the gold standard for infantile spasms. But as he discovered, it wasn't always so expensive. In 2001, Akhtar sold for about $40 a vial. Today, more than $40,000, an increase of 100,000%.

He wanted to know how that could have happened, but for two years, he kept running into a brick wall. Why was it so hard to find out what was going on and why? It's absolute secrecy. There's an absolute opaque system of pricing for drugs in our country. That's part of the problem. His investigation got nowhere until last year, when the Federal Trade Commission charged the drug manufacturer Malincroft with violating antitrust laws in order to maintain extremely high prices for Acthar. And that was the big aha. That's the only way you learned. Otherwise, you wouldn't know.

We may very well not have known. And what they now know infuriates them. So they have hired attorney Don Haviland to sue Malincrot for what they say is price-fixing, a charge the company denies. Every company can make profits, but this is profiteering. This is gouging. As he dug into the case, he found out that Actar's biggest price increases came under the drug's previous owner, Questcor,

which Malincrot bought in 2014. When Questcor started raising the price, were they doing any research and development, anything to make the product better, to tweak it? Absolutely nothing. There was no R&D. There was no improvement in the product. There was no improvement in the company.

All they did was raise the price. To keep the price high, the FTC found that they did something else. They bought another drug that was Actar's main competitor, a drug called Senactin, that's been sold in Europe and Canada for years. For how much? Senactin cost $33 in Canada. $33. The Actar company bought the other drug? The competitor drug, yes. That's antitrust. And they put it on the shelf. The Actar company? Yes. Bought the other drug? The competitor drug, yes. That's antitrust. And that's why the Federal Trade Commission went after them. Because they took the only competitive product, paid a lot of money for it, and put it on the shelf.

So they bought their only competitor and then never sold it? Correct. Malincrod admitted no wrongdoing. But in settling the case, the Federal Trade Commission forced the company to pay $100 million. Not that much, he says, for a company that makes more than a billion dollars a year on ACTHAR alone. It's a drop in the bucket in this case. $100 million? It's nothing. In an email to us, Mallinckrodt said that when the big price increase came, they didn't own the company. It was QuestCorp, not them.

Should they be responsible? Absolutely. It's their company. They own QuestCorp. They own the business model, and they're not lowering the price. In fact, Malincroft has raised the price by about $8,000 a vial since acquiring the company. Malincroft, which declined our request for an interview, sent us this email saying that it has invested in new research and development into the drug. When we asked them how much, they told us this information is confidential and proprietary. In our own investigation, we found that with only about 2,000 cases of infantile spasms a year nationwide, the company made a strategic decision in 2010 to sell ACTHAR for

other diseases. We were able to find an old press release that said as much. The company was going to expand our existing markets and find new therapeutic uses for ACTHAR. And so the company began to market the drug for several chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis that affect adults. What's shocking to me is half a billion dollars spent on this drug for seniors, where there's no evidence that it's the right drug for any of them. We asked Dr. Peter Bach, who studies the cost and value of drugs at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, to look into ACTHAR for us. What got his attention is that by 2015, Medicare was spending half a billion dollars a year on ACar. Tens of thousands of dollars per vial,

not for weeks, as with babies, but for years. Is there any evidence that these drugs are effective for the diseases that seniors are taking it? I mean, none that the Food and Drug Administration would consider convincing. So the Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drugs for these diseases. So the approval and Drug Administration has not approved the drugs for these diseases. So the approval for these drugs predate any standard of evidence that we use today.

The FDA approved the use of ACTHAR to treat these chronic conditions in 1952, when drug companies were only required to demonstrate a drug's safety, not its efficacy. And more important, there's many other drugs that work that are really quite inexpensive. Why do doctors prescribe ACTAR for these diseases, if there's something cheaper? Many of the doctors who prescribed a lot of ACTAR also were getting money from the company that makes ACTAR for speaking, for consulting, for running research studies for the company, adding up to huge sums. And those doctors appear to be the ones who are most likely to also prescribe ACTAR. According to ProPublica,

an investigative reporting group that tracks how much physicians earn from drug companies, Malincrot paid doctors millions over a nearly two-year period, with the top earner getting more than $350,000. They're using a time-tested strategy. They raise the price to a very high level, and they concentrate their energies on a few doctors whom they can get to prescribe the drug. And it works great for their revenue. It doesn't help patients. And in 2015, it added up to half a billion dollars of expenses for Medicare. Whether or not it's effective for these conditions, and the company says it is, Medicare is not allowed to negotiate

the price of drugs because of a law passed by Congress. Instead, Medicare largely relies on a little-known business to do the negotiating for them, called Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs. And it isn't just Medicare. It's also cities like Rockford that hire them to negotiate down the price of drugs. But as you'll see, even pharmacy benefit managers can benefit when drug prices are high. The company negotiating prices for Rockford is Express Scripts, the nation's largest, representing tens of millions of patients. Rockford is also suing that company. Express Scripts today is the 22nd largest company in America, bigger than Home Depot, Microsoft, Comcast, household names.

So what are you saying about the role that Express Scripts played in this particular case? So they didn't use their buying power. They didn't use their clout. Their job was to go out and negotiate a lower price from the manufacturer. They didn't do it. How would they get the price down? What would they do? Well, I can give you an example. This is where you've got a high-priced medication. One in particular, the drug was $13.50. It was raised one day 5,000% to $750. One day. Express Script says, we're not going to pay it. The company refused to lower the price. They went out and got another manufacturer to manufacture it for $1.

$1. They actually asked another company to make the same medication. Yep. And that's the one they covered for their patients and payers. And are you alleging that they could have done this in this case? Absolutely. He argues that Express Scripts should have used that same clout to force the cheaper alternative, synacthen, to market, the one that's sold in Canada for $33 a vial.

We wanted to ask Express Scripts why it didn't, but they told us in this email that due to pending litigation, they could not discuss the matter. But Don Haviland thinks he knows why they didn't fight for a lower price. In a word, the money. It's all about the money. They obviously have a divided loyalty. Express Scripts is a big corporation. It also has parts of it that make money when drugs cost more and when more expensive drugs are sold. Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're saying that this PBM, whose function is to keep drugs prices low, makes money when

drug prices are high? Is that what you just said? Yes. So Express Script is many companies, not just the PBM. It also owns a pharmacy that sells expensive drugs. It also owns a company that ships and packs expensive drugs. All of those other parts of Express Script Corporation make more money the more ACTAR goes out the door. The more prescriptions for ACTAR are filled and refilled. The city of Rockford was able to find out one more piece of the puzzle,

that Express Scripts, the company it hired to keep prices down, also had a contract to be the exclusive distributor of ACTAR. Rockford's lawyer, Haviland, accuses Express Scripts of cheating the city. They serve two different constituents. You've got the manufacturers on one side and the cities of Rockford and patients on the other side. So we have an email from Express Scripts, and they say that they don't think there's a conflict of interest

and that Express Scripts does not set the price for medications. That's their response. We contracted with them for cost containment. They didn't do it. But in the Rockford lawsuit, Express Scripts has denied any wrongdoing and in its motion to dismiss argues it was not contractually obligated to contain costs. It is laughable for them to say that. That is their business model. They sell the model of we will contain your costs, we will lower drug prices. I welcome that argument in court before a jury of 12.

I welcome that argument. What do you think about this? This is your world. You work in the area of drug prices and why they go up. The underlying problem we have with prescription drugs in this country is that every single actor has the potential to make money when drug prices go up. Remember that for drugs that doctors give to their patients, they make more money when they give expensive drugs than less expensive drugs. It's true of hospitals, too. It's true of pharmacies as well.

And so this ever-expanding pie is serving everyone. Everyone except those who need the drug and those who pay for it, like Medicare. Mayor Morrissey says it's been a long and difficult journey trying to untangle the web of interests that cost his city so much money. The drug companies don't advertise, hey, we're raping you, we're taking advantage of you, we're exploiting children and abusing taxpayers. They don't talk that way, right? Although that's what the net effect is of what they're doing. You almost sound like you're calling them a bunch of crooks. That's your words. I like those words. I think they're good words. And as long as they can get away with an increase in

price, they're going to do it until somebody pushes back. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400

in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VIPorter to learn more. Imagine a catastrophe that leaves two and a half million homeless children and at least 100,000 orphans. It's happening in what the United Nations calls one of the most dangerous places on earth for children. Young Syrians, many alone, now scavenge the destitute remains of a seven-year civil war. Thousands of others have escaped over borders only to find new dangers.

Major aid organizations are helping the children of Syria, but we found ordinary people, a TV reporter, a businessman from Texas, who have left their homes and careers to rescue the orphans of war. Aleppo, the name of Syria's largest city, is synonymous with suffering. This was the capital of the rebellion against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. And over seven years, he shelled and starved Aleppo to oblivion. In late winter 2016, children in an Aleppo orphanage were forced by bombs to live for five months underground. They begged for help in a smuggled video.

Ten-year-old Yasmin Kanos spoke for the children. This might be the last time you see and hear me, she said. I have been living in an orphanage the past two years. There are 47 children here. We all hope to get out of Aleppo. Syria's orphans are often children who have been brought into the world a second time. They're rescued after attacks that kill brothers, sisters, and parents. No one knows how many orphans there are. Conservative estimates

start at 100,000. They've lost their homes, they've lost their families, and they've lost their dignity in this war. Yeah, they lost everything. They lost even their identity. Alok Yassin has never had a child, but she is the mother to dozens. Yassin is a Syrian correspondent for the Al Jazeera network, but her story was rewritten after she said goodbye to a homeless child she had met in the war. I give him money, and suddenly he has a very shining smile, and he was running after my car for a long, long distance. That time I felt like to be a journalist, it's not to take photos or to do reports and that's it. You have to do something more. Covering the story was not enough for you?

No, it's not enough. You feel guilty because you can go there and you give them hope that maybe if you put their stories on TV, so maybe somebody will help them. But usually nobody will help or no response because people get used to see Syrian kids like have problems or suffering. So they just turn to another channel. But you couldn't turn to another channel. I could not. In 2015, with the help of a wealthy friend, Yasin converted an apartment building in Turkey into an orphanage about 35 miles from Syria. The Turkish government, overwhelmed with refugees, looked the other way. You named the orphanage Karim. Why? It's an Arabic means like a proper place or a place with dignity to live.

Because we wish that those children, they know exactly the meaning of dignity and how they keep it after all the bad things they faced before they arrived to this place. Some have lost both parents. Others were left in Yassin's care after one parent was killed and the other had no way to support them. Yeah, we are family. We sit together, we eat together, we share secrets together, we share tears together. They call you mama? Yeah, they call me mama, mama Elif. And you've got more than 40 of them. Yeah, and I'm very proud. Fatima is one of them. In Aleppo, shrapnel lacerated her liver and broke her back.

Life was never the same, she told us. After a year in the hospital, she is now here with her brothers, Hamza and Abbas. It must have been very hard for you to walk across the border. My uncle carried me on his back, Fatima told us. I was on crutches and I couldn't climb up and down the mountains. She said that they were in the hands of smugglers and walked for hours. It took several tries to get across and once they were fired on by Turkish border guards. Their mother, unable to care for them, gave the children to the orphanage. Her father had been killed in Aleppo.

Some of these children you care for have not only lost a parent, they've seen that parent killed. Yes, many of them actually. How are the children dealing with these horrors? Actually, I think God gives children something we adults don't have, that they have this forgiveness. They get used to tell you their stories without feeling pain every time, like they are creating a barrier between their stories and themselves.

We were playing outside, Ahmed Al-Mohamed told us. A rocket hit the house. We saw smoke and we saw that our mother was dead. His sister's body was also found and later Ahmed came under the control of ISIS fighters. You're 12 years old and the ISIS fighters were trying to train you for the army. Yes. I had training for a week, he said. One day I saw someone running and they shot him in the foot. Then he bled to death. His father took him away but left him El-Af Yassin's orphanage.

Crossing the border can be dangerous. Not every country welcomes the refugees, and escaping Syria does not mean safety. In the streets of neighboring countries, including Turkey, some children are pressed into labor, some are sexually assaulted. This orphaned boy, who El-Af Yassin introduced us to, became an addict. Wael fled the war by himself when he was 10. It was five years ago. He took us to the abandoned store where he lives with no water or power.

Wael was high on glue, which he uses in times of no heroin. When was the last time you were in school? Grade three, he told us. I was like seven years old. How do you survive? How do you eat? Where do you find food? If I have money, I eat, he said. If I don't have money, I don't eat. Wael scavenges for plastic and sells it for pennies on the pound. We asked about his swollen face, and he said he'd been beaten by thugs. What would you like to do with your life?

I'd like to have a house and a job, Wael told us. That's what I wish for. But despite wishes, many lives, many thousands of lives will not be redeemed. It is the last generation, but I will not say only for Syria. I will say for the world. Yaxin Shishakli opened his own orphanage. He owned an air conditioning business in Houston, Texas, where he lived for more than a decade and became a U.S. citizen. He's the grandson of a former Syrian president. When you first came here, did you know what you wanted to do? No, no.

When I first moved here, it was just helping people. I had no experience with the humanitarian work, and I just came just a normal citizen to help. First, Shashakli started a refugee camp, which he says grew to 65,000 residents. Then he built a school and this orphanage that he named My House. Sixty children live here within sight of the Syrian border. Shashakli has done it all with private donations. Have you ever run out of money?

All the time. We always spend money we don't have. Because, again, you cannot just say, I mean, when you have children coming, and you say, I cannot help you. And just like as a human, you cannot. If you had the funds, you could double the size of this place? Of course. Shashakli told us that the children come to him traumatized, sometimes unable to speak. One boy was silent for six months. When the children come in here so traumatized, what do you offer them to try to help them come back into the world?

They're looking for somewhere like what we call safe heaven. It's just like they're looking for a place where they can trust to wake up the next day and there is no airstrike. They can wake up the next day and they find food on the table. They can find somebody who will not leave them behind. And that's what we're trying to offer. The Turkish government is now moving to regulate these emergency orphanages, and after our visit, Shashakli was told that he could provide only daycare.

His children were moved to extended family members or to a sprawling new orphanage that is run by the Turks. Turkey admits the orphans to public schools but insists that the kids learn in Turkish, not their native Arabic. It's a reminder they're not just orphans, but refugees. There's a lot to catch up on. Some of them haven't seen a classroom in five or six years. After school, back at Elif Yassin's place, there are even more lessons. And there's time. Time to be a kid. Time to dream. This morning, one of the children, she told me, she said, Mama, you know, when I start to talk about my previous life,

I feel like I'm talking about somebody else. I feel like that girl is not related to me now. They have like self-defense mechanism. They put their previous lives aside, and then they can carry on. I don't know, it's something related to God. Like a lot of children we met, Hamza is carrying on. I want to be a famous soccer player, he said, and an architect because I want to rebuild Syria. What do you think Syria will need?

We need a lot of buildings, he said. I want to build something famous. Every country has something famous like the Eiffel Tower, something like that. Since our visit, Elah Yassin ran out of money for the apartment building and has moved her orphans to new, less expensive quarters. Yaxan Shashakli told us that he will expand his school now to teach 200 Syrian kids. There are new orphans in Syria every day? Every day. I will not say we lost hope. We still have hope. You still have hope? We still have hope. We cannot

lose it. It's the only thing left for us. It's the only thing we're fighting for. We began our story with 10-year-old Yasmin Kanous among the orphans trapped in a basement in Aleppo. �This might be the last time you see and hear me,� she said. But Yasmin was wrong. We found her months later. All 47 orphans had been evacuated during a brief ceasefire. They're in a new orphanage now, still in Syria, but away from the fighting.

We sent a camera there to record Yasmin's new message to the world. I want to be a doctor for little kids, she said. I am studying so that when I grow up, I'll know where to go, how to get myself together, and find a place to live. We noticed that the exiled children that we met told us that they expect to return one day. For all that they have suffered, the orphans of war don't see themselves as a lost generation, but rather as the only hope there is for Syria. Tonight, we're going to take you into the wild with a remarkable photographer who spent his life on the trail of elusive and endangered animals. His name is Tom Mangelson, and at 72, he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. What he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals you'll ever

see. On most mornings for nearly 50 years, this is what Tom Mangelson has done. He's ventured into the wilderness, camera in hand. Last September in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, he waited in an early autumn snowfall for his subject to appear. As is often the case, it took quite a while. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid. Stupid? Yeah.

Have you learned anything with all that waiting? You wait long enough, it does pay off. For Mangelson, it usually does. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Mangelson's photographs tells a story. His images have documented species like mountain gorillas,

black rhinos, and jaguars, once dominant, now in danger. On every continent, in every season, no matter the conditions, Mangelson has painstakingly built a reputation not on personality, but on patience. Do you have patience with people the same way you have patience with animals? No. No? No, I don't. I wish I did. I don't know. I don't... Do you like animals more than people? No. No? No, I don't. I wish I did. I don't know. Do you like animals more than people?

Yes. Really? Well, not you. Okay. He especially likes the dangerous kind. In a jungle in India, where it would be deadly to be on foot, Mangelson climbed onto an elephant's back for this shot of a Bengal tiger, paws red, fresh from a kill. In the Arctic, where temperatures can be 30 degrees below zero, he spent years documenting the behavior of polar bears. He nicknamed this group the bad boys of the Arctic. He's captured adult male bears play fighting, a mama bear slyly keeping watch as her cubs roughhouse nearby, and a group of bears trying to survive as their world melts away. People often mistake Mangelson's photographs for paintings, and since the 1970s, he's sold them out of galleries, like this one in Jackson, Wyoming. His photo, Catch of the Day, is often called the most famous wildlife photograph in the world.

It's such an extraordinary image. In this day and age, people would think that this is Photoshop, that you've got a photo of a fish somewhere. I mean, it's so perfect. It was taken in 1988 before Photoshop even existed. People think it's fake. But you don't believe in that, I mean, as a photographer? No. I mean, this is the magic. This is the moment. This is the decisive moment. And this little tiny space right here, I think, is so important. This is a quarter of an inch. It's in its mouth, but it hasn't actually made contact yet with its mouth. One nanosecond later.

Mangelson shuns the use of digital manipulation. What he sees through his lens is what you get. And at a time when many photographers build their portfolios by going to game farms like this one to photograph captive animals, Mangelson insists on only documenting them in their natural habitat. Okay, Anderson. Let's see what we can find. As we saw when we joined him before dawn

outside Jackson Hole. You always get up this early? There's only one way to do it. I just do it every day or be really lucky. He's taking us to a bend he knows on the Snake River. Do you hear the elk? It's a sharp whistle. That's it. That's the sound of the wild deer.

He's been here hundreds of times, trying to get the perfect shot of elk crossing the water. So now it's just a waiting? Yep. A waiting game? Waiting, yeah. What's the longest you've ever spent in any spot, and not here, but anywhere? 42 days. I was at Cougar's.

42 days? I went home at night and slept, and then we'd go back at daybreak. But you would spend all day there? Yeah. So 12 hours a day? 12, 14. 12 or 14 hours a day for 42 days?

Yeah. Did you get the shot? Finally. This was the shot worth waiting for, the elusive cougar coming out of her den at dusk, taken in 1999. It's among the first photographs to document the life of a wild female cougar. It helped launch a movement to protect the cats against human encroachment. Back at the river after a three hour wait

There she comes. Wow, that was pretty cool. That was good. That was worth the wait. Yeah. Just kind of extraordinary. We headed back to his office in Jackson to take a look at an amateur's attempt. I think it's beautiful.

I think it's gorgeous. Yeah, me too, actually. There's nothing wrong with that one at all. It's great. Is she out of focus? Maybe slightly. Let's beautiful. I think it's gorgeous. Yeah, me too, actually. There's nothing wrong with that one at all. It's great. Is she out of focus? Maybe slightly. Let's see. Yeah.

Not quite. I'm sorry. Mangelson's shot was, of course, in perfect focus. And look at what else he's captured at that same river in fall, summer, and winter. Mangelson credits his father with his love of the wild. He grew up on the bank of the Platte River in Nebraska, where he was schooled in hunting and fishing.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Mangelson earned the title World Champion Goose Caller. No small feat, considering this is bird country. Home to 400 species, as well as one of the great migrations on Earth. Every spring, half a million sandhill cranes stop on this stretch of the Platte River. They're fattening up on grain before migrating north, as far as Siberia. It is an awesome and ancient ritual. Fossils show cranes have come here for nearly

10 million years. It's a spectacle of sight and sound Mangelson has shared for 17 years with his friend and ally Jane Goodall, whose life work with chimpanzees has revolutionized our understanding of primates. Today, Goodall and Mangelson team up to raise money and awareness for the protection of cranes, as well as chimpanzees and cougars. He's taught me so much about the Platte River and what goes on here, and what it was like when he was a boy, and how he started off as a hunter, because that's what one did, and then how gradually he realized he loved these creatures much too much,

he couldn't go on being a hunter. And so he hunts with his camera. Here they come. Lots and lots and lots. Look at the light on those up there. What's amazing is this ancient migration still carries on. I think it's completely amazing. I agree.

It gives me hope that nature will manage in spite of us. Oh, look at this. Beautiful, huh? Next year, do you think you could invest in a silent camera? One of the qualities that I love about Tom is his passion. And it's when you have that kind of passion and that kind of commitment that you're more likely to get other people involved because we can never win an argument by appealing to people's heads. It's got to be in the heart.

And I use the power of storytelling and writing, and Tom uses the power of images. If all artists have a muse, Tom Mangelson's is this 22-year-old female grizzly bear. She doesn't have a proper name, but is known by the research number 399, a creature from America's wild past when 50,000 grizzlies roamed the lower 48. Less than 2,000 grizzlies remain today. For more than a decade, Mangelson has chronicled every facet of 399's life.

Emerging from a long winter's nap, swatting magpies away from a meal. He's watched and worried as she's given birth to three sets of triplets and a set of twins. She's nursed, protected, and taught more than a dozen bear cubs. Mangelson's photographs, including this one he dubbed an icon of motherhood, have made 399 the most famous grizzly in the world. What do you think it is about grizzly bears that so captures people's imagination? I think it's the wildness and the rarity. You see how intelligent they are. It's like 399 will go to the road and she'll look both ways. She'll tell the kids to stay on one side of the road. She'll go across and then she'll

talk to them. Okay, you can come across now. Isn't that smart? There's also something about grizzly bears that there's a grace to it, but ferocity is always lurking there. But I like that idea that we're not at the top of the food chain. In Mangelson's portraits, ferocious grizzlies have personalities too, but sometimes it's easy to miss the details. Notice a leftover piece of grass tucked in the corner of this grizzly's mouth to miss the details. Notice a leftover piece of grass tucked in the corner of this grizzly's mouth like a toothpick.

But it's Mangelson's wide shots that may matter the most. They help people understand animals like 399 can't survive without their habitat. Mangelson took us out to show us why he believes seeing your first grizzly can change your life. It's right there. It's right there. Okay, so it's really close.

It was an adult female grizzly resting just off the road. That's crazy. She's a gorgeous bear. You know, you see how she just, like, just scratched the back of your ear, just like your dog might? Yeah. Isn't that great? Now she's scratching her belly.

It's so incredible to see. It's amazing. A third of 399's offspring have been killed in interactions with humans, hit by cars, or shot by elk hunters out of fear. Last year, the federal government removed grizzly bears around Yellowstone from the endangered species list. Wyoming and Idaho are now deciding whether to open a hunting season on the bears. There's people here who have said that they can't wait for a season

to open so they can shoot 399 because that would be the biggest prize, the biggest trophy. You've had hunters actually say that to you, that they want to shoot 399 because 399 is so famous. Yeah. Hard, hard to believe. While he worries about what will be lost, Tom Mangelson is determined to show us the beauty and fragility of what still survives. And so he sets out once again, patiently making his way alone into the wild. It's my gift in a way that I can give people, hopefully, to preserve what we have left, preserve wilderness, preserve species like goosey bears, and make them think about it,

and make them think that this is what we need to save for our children. 50 seasons of 60 Minutes, from the first Sunday of May 2015. When Bob Simon heard about a magical place where some of the world's finest single malt whiskeys are created, he set off to the island of Isla and shot the story. Bob didn't live to complete writing and editing it. Steve Croft and Bob's team finished it as a tribute to the spirit of Bob Simon as well as the spirits of Isla.

Master distiller Jim McEwen is the one who decides when each barrel is ready to be bottled. He opened a young cask for Bob to sample. I would describe that as mellow yellow. You know, frankly, I never liked this stuff, but the way you're talking me into it. But you've got to check every bottle. I certainly hope so.

On most days, McEwen devotes several hours to quality control, checking up on several hundred casks. But it's a fantastic job, nosing and tasting whiskeys. And you can still walk out of here in the evening. Occasionally I need some help. There's no doubt about that. After that, the only thing left was for Bob to say goodbye to Jim McEwen, and it turned out to be last call for our old pal, Bob Sark. Cheers, Bob. Hope you've enjoyed this little visit here. You're speaking in the past. It's not over. Yeah, I'm going to get you out of here, man. You're costing me a fortune. I'm Leslie Stahl.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.