Radiolab - Everybody's Got One

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta.In this episode, which we originally released in 2021, we take you on a journey through the 270-day life of this weird, squishy, gelatinous orb, and discover that it is so much more than an organ. It’s a foreign invader. A piece of meat. A friend and parent. And it’s perhaps the most essential piece in the survival of our kind.This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Becca Bressler, and produced by Becca Bressler and Pat Walters, with help from Matt Kielty and Maria Paz Gutierrez. Additional reporting by Molly Webster.Special thanks to Diana Bianchi, Julia Katz, Sam Behjati, Celia Bardwell-Jones, Mathilde Cohen, Hannah Ingraham, Pip Lipkin, and Molly Fassler.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Heather Radke and Becca Bresslerwith help from - Molly WebsterProduced by - Becca Bresslerwith help from - Pat Walters, Maria Paz GutierrezEPISODE CITATIONS:Articles:Check out Harvey’s latest paper published with Julia Katz.Sam Behjati's latest paper on the placenta as a "genetic dumping ground". Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, Lulu here. So a few months back, our illustrator Jared Bartman got a difficult prompt. We asked him to design a cute tote bag based on our incredibly morbid episode, Cheating Death, and Jared was stumped. How do you create something plucky and cheerful and design forward about the inevitability of dying? So he brooded and he doodled and then one day it hit him. It is easily my favorite design ever and because it's sort of this secret code about death it has the effect that it's kind of like

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Whether you support us or not, we are so grateful for you. But if you've ever been on the fence, I would say that now is a really good time because not only does the tote bag have a very cool surrealist design, it also has a zipper. So go take a peek at radiolab.org slash join. That's radiolab.org slash join. And that's all. Thank you.

On with the show. You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. Rewind. Oh my god. Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. And I'm Molly Webster. This is Radiolab. And today... It's like red velvet bread. Look at that.

It does look like a loaf of bread. We are dredging up an episode from the archives. It's called Everybody's Got One. And I really love this story so very much. I hope you enjoy. A round loaf of homemade bread. With veins that's purple and red. We have a story about a thing.

But also like bloodsuckers. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. And I'm going to be talking about a thing. I hope you enjoy. A round loaf of homemade bread. With veins that's purple and red.

We have a story about a thing. But also like blood sausage bread. A thing that we've all had at some point. It is patty like. Yeah, it's a patty. But most of us, we never even knew it. And it comes to us from our contributing editor, Heather Radke. Yeah.

I'm not even on staff. And I wish you were, producer Becca Pressler. Well, I think I can… You take it. Okay. I was thinking about getting pregnant and I started to do a bunch of research. And you know, pregnancy is this thing, at least for me, where I was like, I know about that. You know, I took like 14 years of sex ed in my public high school.

But I'll just say the more I learn about it, the more I realize how little I know and maybe like how little anyone knows about pregnancy. And one of the very first things I discovered was that when you're pregnant, you don't just grow a baby. You grow an entirely new organ. Ba ba ba, let me turn it down. Your whole life, you've got your heart, your lungs, your bone, your skin, your eyes, et cetera. So this is the main hospital.

But then all of a sudden during pregnancy, a whole new organ shows up. Here is our cabinet of placentas. And that organ is the placenta. Whole placentas, pieces of placentas. I had heard of the placenta before, but I really didn't know anything about it. It's called the afterbirth for a reason.

It's an afterthought that no one thinks about. I think I thought a thing a lot of people think, which is that the baby grows inside the placenta. I definitely thought balloon baby was inside of. I mean, okay, I was pregnant, and I think I thought it was just like extra lining on my uterus, but it's not. It's not even yours.

The placenta belongs to the embryo, to the fetus, to the baby. Huh. So it's actually grown by the fetus, which means that every single one of us has had a placenta. I was kind of like you. I literally had no idea what it did, what its purpose was. This is Harvey. Harvey Kleinman. He studies the placenta.

MD, PhD, physician scientist at Yale University. Where he has a cabinet of placentas. We're sort of running out of room. Which we visited. We'll come back to that. Kristin, I think we need another cabinet. But before we do. I'm interested in how you got interested in the placenta.

Presumably it wasn't because you got pregnant. Serendipity. So about 40 years ago, Harvey's just gotten out of medical school. And I'm now a resident at University of Pennsylvania, and I'm in a laboratory. Studying ovaries. And in the lab, there was somebody else who was working on the placenta, and they were chopping up the placenta and homogenizing the placenta. And these other scientists in the lab ended up with this thing called a gradient, where the different kinds of cells in the placenta were sort of separated out. They can look at them independently.

And they wanted me to take a picture of the gradient. Why? Well, on the side I'm a photographer. I've actually done bar mitzvahs and weddings and things like that. Yeah, I love visual things, I think is what interests me in general. And so I took a picture of the gradient and I asked Jerry, who was running the lab, I said, Jerry, would you mind if I looked at what they are? He said, sure, go for it. And what Harvey saw... ...was something that no one had ever seen before. He saw these cells, sort of a bubbling cauldron of cells.

They were like amoeba. Later, he'd make movies of them. They started moving around and then they came together, they aggregated, then the membranes broke down and they fused to make these multi-nucleated giant cells. They were growing very aggressively in a way that surprised him. I said, that is super cool. What's going on here? Eventually he figured out that what he was looking at were stem cells, placental stem

cells. And over the next few decades, he and a bunch of other scientists would start to piece together the story of the placenta. And that's the story we're going to tell you. Cool. Okay. I'm so excited. Educate me on this organ I have had and know nothing about. All right. So before we start, we just want to say a note on the word mother. Not everyone who gets pregnant or has a baby identifies as a mother, but it's a word a lot of people use when talking about pregnancy, including some of our sources.

And so we're using it in addition to more inclusive language like pregnant person and parent. Got it. So, let's start from the beginning. You have an egg, and then if there's sperm around, the sperm will fertilize that egg. And then it divides. It divides into two. And then four.

Eight. And sixteen, etc., etc. By the time it gets to about 32. The cluster of cells sort of forms into two layers. It's like a tennis ball now. There's a little cluster of cells on the inside. That will become the embryo, that will become the fetus, that will become the baby, those little inside group of cells.

But the cells on the outside. Those cells will become the placenta. So from the very first few days of pregnancy, these placental cells are wrapped around what's going to become the embryo, like a little blanket. And as Harvey explained all this to us, and he walked us deeper into the story of the placenta, Pregnancy isn't a peaceful nursery rhyme kind of a story about a pregnant person nurturing a fetus until it becomes a cute little baby. It's actually more like a struggle. And not like a calm college debate. It's like a cage match, like a knockdown drag out

boxing match or a tiny war maybe even. On one side is the pregnant person, and on the other side is the fetus. And in the middle, or maybe not like actually in the middle, more like actually like in the corner rubbing the shoulders of the fetus is the placenta. So what happens? Well, okay, so Harvey says the first thing you have to understand is that that tiny embryo with its little baby placenta cells wrapped around it like a blanket. It is not welcome in the mother's body.

From the mother's point of view, this is immunologically foreign. You know, the pregnancy is a little bit genetically the mom, but also a little bit the dad. Exactly. Which for the mother's body is not normal. If we took a piece of tissue from whoever the father was of a pregnancy and put it into the mother, she would reject it. Right? Because not-self shouldn't be there. Not-self is a virus. Not-self is a bacteria. Melissa Wilson, geneticist at Arizona State. We need to get rid of not-self. It's a foreign invader.

And so, if an embryo just waltzes into a uterus one day without a little placenta blanket around it, the mother's body would gather up a squad of white blood cells, send them out to find it, shred it apart, and kill it. So that's definitely a problem. But, before the mother's body even has a chance to attack the embryo, the placenta blanket

hides it. The placenta is going to become invisible to the mother. What? Yeah. The mother literally doesn't even see that the pregnancy is there. Mom's still at the bar. She sure is. Okay, so for the first week or so of the pregnancy,

the placenta is pretty much just hiding the embryo from the mother. But then... The next problem that the placenta faces is nutrition. The embryo gets hungry, and the placenta's like, I gotta feed this thing. And this is when the battle lines really start to get drawn. Because essentially this war between the placenta and the pregnant person is a war that's about food. The placenta, Harvey

says, has one mission. To make the biggest baby possible, to suck as much nutrients out of the mother as possible. And the pregnant person's mission not to die. So the placenta is in the uterus looking around for food and it does this thing, something kind of tricky, something that when we heard about it actually feels like it's skipping ahead nine months. Harvey says it produces this hormone. Happens to be the hormone that activates pregnancy tests. But one of its other jobs is that it... Causes the lining of the uterus to secrete a protein...

That our friend Harvey likens to milk. Wait. What? Like, no. The vitality you get from milk lasts far longer than energy from other drinks. The lining of the uterus makes milk for the embryo. Time to get back to the refills. That is wild.

Yeah. But this milk is like a snack for the placenta. What it really needs is blood. So at this point, about two weeks into the pregnancy, the placenta goes on the offensive. By now it's actually latched onto the side of the uterus and at this point the placenta forms tendrils like long skinny claws that actually try to invade in up through the uterus into the maternal body, into the blood vessels and attack the walls to open them up.

Like, I'm going to suck all your nutrients from you. But the uterus stops them. Basically putting up a brick wall, very dense tissue. To block those claws from getting in. Now the placenta doesn't give up easily. It keeps digging. But then the uterus blocks it. And what you start to see

is this push and pull where the placenta keeps digging, digging, digging. We're talking pretty aggressive here. And the uterus keeps blocking it, blocking, blocking it. Wait, wait, wait, can I just ask like what? Isn't this like, isn't our whole point to carry on? Like isn't that what evolution has built us to do? Why would this moment where it's about to happen be so combative? It's a really good question. And we will get to it after the break. Lulu. Molly.

Heather. Becca. Radiolab. Today we are telling the story of the placenta, a story which has revealed to us just how much pregnancy itself is like a war between the fetus and the parent's body. And what we were just getting around to was why. Right. So you all actually already answered this question on the show.

Oh. Well, this came as a total shock to me because after all, the thing that... So basically the story we told then is that before placentas, all animals that would become mammals laid eggs. And an egg is a special little thing. It's a self-contained little package where the fetus has everything it needs to eat until it's ready to hatch, and all of its waste products stay inside the egg, and nothing comes in and nothing goes out until the animal is ready to leave its egg. But then... Long, long ago, some ancient mammal ancestor got a virus, got infected...

A virus infected an ancient proto-mammal and changed its DNA so that eventually, many generations later, the egg shell transformed from a hard shell that exists outside the body to a sort of permeable layer that exists inside the body, which then becomes the placenta. And this was a huge advantage because it made it possible for the blood of the mother to actually feed the fetus. So it could get tons more nutrients. It wasn't limited to just like whatever yolk was inside the egg from the beginning.

And the individual was so reproductively successful that it spread across all Eutherian mammals. Geneticist Melissa Wilson again. That's mind-blowing. Because it made it possible to actually make a baby with a big giant brain, like a human being or a dolphin. And that was great. But it also had this downside.

This wonky interaction between the pregnant individual and the placenta, because the placenta is not the DNA of the pregnant individual. The placenta is the DNA of the offspring. Okay, and this is how we've ended up four weeks into what's basically a war between the mother and the placenta, with the placenta trying to suck blood out of the mother, and the mother basically trying to box it out. And this fight is just getting started. Week five goes by, then week six, week seven, the embryos growing eyes, ears, bones.

It has a hard kidneys, liver. Meanwhile, the placenta is digging, digging, digging, trying to get to the blood to get this thing more nutrients. But the placenta just can't break through. It's just like, hey, I need to be growing. I need more nutrients for my passenger, the fetus. And the uterus just says, nope, get out. But the placenta has a couple tricks up its sleeve.

Specifically one trick called PP13. It's a protein that Harvey says creates a diversion. Here's an analogy. If we wanted to rob a bank, I don't want the police to be near there. So what I'm gonna do is blow up a grocery store, wait for all the police to sort of go around the grocery store, and while they're busy doing that, I'm gonna sneak into the bank. So in the world of Harvey's analogy here, PP13 is blowing up the grocery store. The placenta produces it. It goes

off to some other part of the uterus that the placenta isn't trying to invade. And there... The PP13 attracts the entire police force, SWAT team, everybody of the mother's immune system. And while the whole police force is over there dealing with the PP13, the placenta's digging claws bust through. And... Blood fountains into the placenta. It's bathed in all these nutrients and goes,

buffet time, let me see what I need. As the mother's blood starts rushing into the placenta, the fetus just starts growing and growing. It's the size of a grapefruit by week 15, a pineapple by 24, a watermelon by 36. And that fetus is demanding more and more horsepower, more and more nutrients to actually grow. So the placenta starts releasing more and more

of this hormone. Called human placental lactogen. Which sort of hijacks the mother's digestive system says okay you're eating I get that but none of that actually is for you you're not gonna get to store it all those nutrients are gonna stay in your blood so I the placenta can suck up those nutrients and all the while the placenta is gobbling up more and more of the mother's blood and by the third trimester, Harvey says, 20 to 25% of all the blood flow of the mother

is going into the placenta. And this is where things can get dangerous for the mother. If the placenta and the fetus together say, hey, I'm not getting enough blood, I'm just going to force her body to start pumping more blood into me, into the fountaining system. And this is a condition we call preeclampsia. Preeclampsia is very, very scary.

And it's basically when the mother's blood pressure spikes so high that she can actually die. Whoa. And it's really serious. It's one of the leading causes of maternal death. And I think it's easy to sort of think like blood, high blood pressure, you know, not such a big deal, but it's actually the placenta, you know,

sucking so much blood out of the mother's body that she can't continue to survive. And this can also go wrong in the other direction. Mom, of course, doesn't want to die. She doesn't want the fetus to take all her nutrients, but if she is successful and and wins the battle, if you will, the placenta is too small, the fetus is too small, and the pregnancy may not survive. But if neither side wins the war, then after nine months, give or take a few weeks, poof, you have a baby.

And poof is exactly what it feels like. But the placenta is still in there. And so the placenta actually also kind of has to be born. I'm getting the sense that the placenta may be underneath this blue cover. Is that right? Good guess. So we didn't actually see anyone give birth to a placenta. But Harvey did show us one in his lab.

All right, are we ready for the moment? Harvey grabs the blue cloth and he pulls it back. Oh my god. And this is the placenta, which is in the standard Ziploc bag. That's what it's in right now. Oh my god, I mean, it looks so, it looks very organ-y. It's kind of bloody, isn't it?

It's so bloody. And so I'm gonna open the Ziploc bag. Ah! Oh my God! It's so bag-like. It's sort of bluer than I thought. It also kind of looks like raw meat, like you would be making a hamburger or something.

It is raw meat. So I'm gonna pick it up and see how heavy it is. So I grabbed the placenta. It's kind of heavy. Like what? Like a normal term, placenta. It's kind of heavy. Like what? Like a normal term placenta is about 550 grams, which is just about a pound. It's about eight to nine inches in diameter.

About as wide as a volleyball. It's really weird. It's, okay, first of all, it's cold. Maybe slimy is the word. And it's got a lot of texture when you're in the beefy part. You can feel what I imagine are the veins and it has like, it's not all one texture.

It's like hard in spots and soft in spots. It feels sort of like crazy. And then Harvey told us how the placenta, this little alien invader and all its thirsty veins and tendrils and hooks. How it leaves the body. I think this is another miracle. So the baby goes first and...

The uterus is elastic and has, you know, muscle. So it contracts down. And it's that contracting down that actually shears the placenta off the lining of the uterus and the placenta off, the lining of the uterus, and the placenta gets delivered. And then... All those blood vessels that have been supplying blood to the placenta for all those weeks and months have to close down.

And they do. Like, immediately there's this river of blood fountaining into the placenta that just shuts off. And what's kind of cool is it leaves no scar. It's like one of the only things like this in the body, maybe the only thing like this where something sort of gets sheared off and there's no, like no mark remains. Oh, that just makes me think that while from the outside it feels like such a push and pull and like they're competing against each other that like in the scarlessness there is like a camaraderie and a peace of sorts. Yeah, in some sense, I think of it as like the OG parent

for the baby. It's one mission is to help that embryo grow into a healthy fetus and deliver a baby. And it's developed this sort of like incredible way of somehow making sure all of its needs are met in such a selfless sort of way that I've started seeing it as the first parent. Yeah, I don't know.

I feel almost like I'm going to cry. It feels sort of like, here's this thing. This is somebody's baby's life thing. I don't know. But so, okay, placenta comes out. It releases. It leaves no trace. It leaves no scar. It knows it's time to let those grappling hooks go, comes out. And then what's the end of the journey? I mean, I guess it goes in the garbage most of the time. I feel really sad that I can't meet mine. I think once you know all that it's done for you,

I just wish I could meet it. And thank it? Yeah, and hold it. Thank you, Placenta, for making me survive and be alive. Put it in my closet, I don't know. But also, a lot of people don't throw it away. Only recently are we beginning to see that scientific discourse is taking the placenta seriously. This is Tina DeLisle. She's a professor of history at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities,

and she's writing a book about the placenta. Indigenous people were understanding the placenta for a long time. She explained to us that this dawning we were having, that the placenta is kind of like a parent, it's something that a lot of people had already been thinking about the placenta for a really long time. In native cultures, the placenta is a friend, a companion, grandmother. And when you think about the placenta that way. As a relation, they're going to treat it very differently. And that explains why throughout

a lot of native cultures, the emphasis is on proper burial of the placenta. Tina explained that you see this practice of burying the placenta all over the world. In various African cultures, in Native American culture. In Hawaii. In French Polynesia, in Aotearoa. Tahiti. Vanuatu. And where she's from.

Born and raised in Guahan, in the Marianas. For Chamorros, the indigenous people of Guam. When you bury the placenta or the Gatsung, it ensures that baby's safety. Even examples like when they're young and they're learning how to walk, it protects them so they don't fall down. It was a way of protecting children into adulthood. Huh. Okay. So you're saying that the placenta isn't just looking after the well-being of the child when it's in the womb, but also into adulthood? Yeah. But also for the well-being of the land.

Because when you plant the placenta, it connects people to place. The idea is that if someone moves away, they always remember, my placenta is buried there and they will take care of that land. Nicole Soule-Northam Did you bury your kids' placentas? Tina Soule-Northam No. I had inquired about the possibility of taking home the placenta. Nicole Soule-Northam This was 2006. Tina was living in Michigan. Tina Soule-Northam When I was there, I was told that, and when I say there, this is when, you know, in the middle of labor, and I was told that they wouldn't let me take home my babies plus Santa.

And why is that? Like, why wouldn't they let you? Because of the law. And I was told that I'd have to go to court to get that. It would be really difficult. How did that make you feel when you heard that? You know, I felt really bad about that. I had my partner, my husband, take pictures and video of the placenta, right? I was like, okay, I need something to remember my baby's placenta with, right?

But things have changed some since Tina gave birth in 2006. In states like Hawaii and Texas and Oregon, now you can legally take your baby's placenta home with you. The only consolation I had really was, maybe this will be different next time around for my daughters. And this placenta was delivered yesterday? Monday, actually. Monday late afternoon. Wow! Monday late afternoon! Yes, so there's a little cute baby someplace

who is happy and alive because of this placenta. We gotta send that family this podcast. I'm sure we can't know who they are, hip-hop. We can't know who they are. That's part of the reason we have the placenta. But let's thank them anyway. Thank you. In a more spiritual way. Yes, we will thank them spiritually. This episode was reported by Heather Radke and Becca Bresler, and produced by Becca Bresler and Pat Walters with help from Matt Kilty and Maria Paz Gutierrez. Special thanks to Diana Bianchi, Julia Katz, Sam Bajadi, Celia Bardwell-Jones, and Hannah Ingraham. Special thanks also to my placenta for getting me here.

Thanks. Thanks to the placentas of all the people who made this program. Thanks for building such talented humans. And finally to the placenta that made you, listener. Thanks for making such a dorky human who likes our program. We really appreciate it. Hi, I'm Parisa and I'm from Ottawa, Canada and here are the staff credits. I really appreciate it. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niana Sambandham, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vitsa, Arian Wax, Pat Wolters, and Molly Webster. Our fact trackers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Evan. I'm a calling from Menlo Park, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.