The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: Skin Tight Genes

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

In this hour, stories from the double helix -- genetic makeup, inherited disease, and family secrets. It's all in the DNA. This hour is hosted by Moth Artistic Director Catherine Burns. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media.Storytellers: Mike Birbiglia works to get healthy and mitigate his bad genes.Carmen Rita Wong uncovers the complicated layers of her family's past.Beth Bucher makes a hard decision to protect her health.When applying for a green card, Paul Nurse discovers a family secret.Podcast: 649

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX, and I'm Catherine Burns. This time, we'll hear stories about genetics. We're learning more and more about our DNA, for better or for worse. Genetics can shed light on mysteries in our lives, but can also sometimes reveal things that folks would rather have kept in the dark. DNA can shake the family tree, settle disputes, stir up old secrets, and pass on traits that are beloved, or maybe feared. That's the case in our first story, told by many-time Moth storyteller and host, Mike

Birbiglia. It concerns the genes that get passed down from grandparents to parents to children. We recorded Mike at a show we did one evening in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Cemeteries are outdoors, obviously, so you can hear the sound of crickets and even a few planes going by. Here's Mike Birbiglia, live at the MAU. Thank you guys so much. This is a really special thing.

I'm really honored to be a part of it. It's a, it is an ominous thing to tell a story in a graveyard. I've never, I've never done it before. And it's particularly timely for me because yesterday I turned 41 years old. And yeah, I celebrated with my wife Jenny and my daughter Una, who's four. But it's gotten me thinking a lot about mortality, you know, because my

dad had a heart attack at 60 and his dad had a heart attack at 60. And so I'm just setting aside that whole year and I'm getting an Airbnb by the hospital and I'm keeping a flexible schedule. And it's not just that. I actually have a lot of medical issues. I have a dangerous sleepwalking disorder. I had a bladder tumor when I was 19. And two years ago, I went for my annual checkup. And my doctor took blood and he called me and he said, "'You have Lyme disease and,' and I was like, "'and diabetes.'

And I was like, one at a time, everybody's gonna get a chance. But it was, it was truly shocking. 39 years old, diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He said, is there anything in your diet that might be spiking your blood sugar? I said, sometimes I eat pizza until I'm unconscious. He said, I think that might be it. I have terrible habits. I travel for my job and I never drink the tiny liquor bottles in the mini fridge, but I'm triple digits on glass jars of peanut M&Ms.

If you suck on a peanut M&M long enough, it's just a peanut. And if you suck on that peanut long enough, you can taste pure shame. But at a certain point, the shame pivots into pride, and you start to think, actually, this is pretty healthy. I've been meaning to eat more nuts. And then you start eating a couple hundred, and you get a sugar high, and you think,

I should run a marathon and then you don't and Then you end up with type 2 diabetes and so that That's unfortunate, but I am my doctor wanted to put me on on medication I really didn't want to do that. I I said let me give it a shot. I'm gonna try to change my diet Drastically said you got to cut red meat and sugar and fries. And as he's continuing, I'm just thinking about sugar fries, which isn't even a thing, but I was singing a song about it and everything.

So I give it a shot for a few months and I lose a few pounds and I go back in and my numbers are lower but he has me take a pulmonary test which is this thing where you're essentially simulating blowing out a candle but it's a little ball and and he goes do it and I go I just did and And he goes, oh wow. I guess do it again. And I go, I just did. And he goes, well if I were going by just this, I would say you're having a heart attack right now.

And I said, well am I? Because if I were having a heart attack, I would ask you. I wasn't having a heart attack. I want to make that clear. But he was worried. He sent me to the cardiologist, and they both agreed that I should be doing cardio five days a week. And as a matter of fact,

they both suggested that I start swimming at the YMCA. matter of fact they both suggested that I start swimming at the YMCA. This was a source subject for me. I spent a lot of my childhood at the YMCA in Worcester Massachusetts. I went to the nursery school. I you know spent hundreds of hours with the half blown up basketballs and the rowing machine that's also a fan and the vending machine room that has a coffee maker that also makes soup and that. So two years ago I walked in my Brooklyn YMCA and I don't need directions you know you just follow the chlorine smell. They are not shy about their use of chlorine in the YMCA pool. And I go up to the front

desk and I had made an arrangement for a lesson with the woman named Vanessa and and she said, where's your swim cap? And I go, oh I don't wear the, I don't wear a swim cap. And she said, well't wear the I don't wear a swim cap and she said well it's mandatory unless you're completely bald and I said I don't like how you leaned on the word completely I'm not I'm not actually bald at all I have four distinct tufts of hair that form this Voltron that is my hair. And she said, you can borrow my extra. And so I put on Vanessa's swim cap, and I looked like a condom.

And we walk into the pool area, which is basically pure chlorine. And she says, hop into the instructional lane. Now, the instructional lane is also the walkers and joggers lane. And so she asked me to do the crawl to show her what I got and I try but I'm just these aggressive elderly walkers are just blowing past me. One of them drops an elbow on my head and I'm like Vanessa like is it always this crowded and and she goes no it's it's because it's the spring and

everyone's getting ready for the summer and I go oh they want a body like this which is a joke it's not a great joke it's not stage worthy but it's sort of the kind of conversational witty repartee you might have to forge a bond with a swimming instructor. She didn't hear it and she just goes what? And they go they want a body like this! And everybody in the pool looks over, all the elderly walkers and toddlers and the lifeguard, and they're like, has this guy seen his own body? There are mirrors everywhere at the YMCA.

And for the people only listening to this and not seeing me, I don't have a swimmer's body. I have what I call a drowner's body, where it seems like I'm drowning at all times, even when I'm not in water. So after about a half hour of this, I get out of the pool and I dry myself off with 15 or 20 of those YMCA dish rag towels

and I even put two on my feet because Vanessa explains that there's fungus in the puddles. And I was like, this place is a death trap. I have to get out of here. But she says something significant to me. She says, you know, you can take the lessons, but really, you're going to have to come back on your own and practice.

And so that's what I did. For the next two years, I went swimming at the YMCA, and I also did Pilates, and I did yoga, and I even did, believe it or not, kickboxing. And a month ago, I went to my doctor, and he took blood, and he called me, and he said, you reversed the diabetes. Woo!

And I was, thanks. I was quite shocked by this. And I thought, I'm thinking to myself, like, what was it? Like, was it the diet or the exercise? And so the next time I saw my doctor, I said to him, I go, what do you think it was that reversed the thing? And he said this really simple phrase that stuck with me. He said, you chose to live. And he said this really simple phrase that stuck with me.

He said, you chose to live. And I think that's true. I think I really did. I think I chose to live. I think I really want to see my daughter grow up and go to high school and maybe college and in 19 years from now, she'll be 23 and she'll be out of school and and and maybe out of the house and and I will be 60 years old and like my father and his father, I will have a heart attack.

But there will be a difference because I will be say in it, I will choose to live. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! That was Mike Verbigrada. Mike is a comedian and storyteller. His show, The New One, went all the way to Broadway and won the Drama Desk Award.

He expanded on the show in his book, The New One, went all the way to Broadway, and won the Drama Desk Award. He expanded on the show in his book, The New One, painfully true stories from a reluctant dad. The show was also taped for Netflix, and is available along with his last two shows, Thank God for Jokes and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend. Mike is now a well-known writer and comedian, but he told his first story way back in 2003 at a moth show we produced for the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. I got to work with Mike on the story, and it was actually the first moth story I ever directed, so we got our start together.

Here's Mike talking about his history with a moth. I had always thought about storytelling as something I wanted to do, but whenever I would try to tell stories as standup, I was a standup comedian at the time, I really felt insecure or that I was losing the audience's attention. So when the folks at the moth asked me to perform at Aspen, it seemed like a really exciting opportunity. And what I didn't realize was that it would change the way

that I Perform the rest of my career. So I told a story in Aspen Which was an early version of a story that would end up in my my solo show my girlfriend's boyfriend And it was about my first girlfriend in high school and how I was so excited But that she told me not to tell anyone that she was my girlfriend because she actually had another boyfriend. And that was a pride swallowing event in my life. And I had literally never told people, never mind a group of strangers.

And so I was so nervous when I told the story on stage in Aspen that I was literally trembling. And sometimes I'll tell people who want to try storytelling that I think if they're nervous about telling a story that it's actually a good sign. So as a fan of the Moth, that's what I've always found the most compelling and exciting about their shows. When people tell their most embarrassing

and gut wrenching confessions in a way that we can all relate to, I think that's really special. I mean, I remember after performing at the Moth for the first time, I thought, I think I'm better at this than just traditional stand-up comedy. I think this is what I'm supposed to do. So now it's, I think, more than 15 years later, and this is what I do. That was Mike Rebiglia. Coming up, a family takes a DNA test just for fun, but then, that's when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts

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Seeking a storage solution that feels better? Explore Big Steel Box today. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. In this show, we're talking about genetics. DNA doesn't lie, and having access to our own genetic histories has fundamentally shifted the world. That was the case with our next storyteller, Carmen Rita Wong. She told her story at the Terrytown Music Hall in the Hudson Valley, where we partnered

with Music Without Borders. Here's Carmen. So I was born in uptown Manhattan in the 1970s to a Chinese father and a Dominican mother. Now there was no mistaking that my mother was my mother. Guadalupe Altagracias Gomez de Reyes, aka Lupe. She was the constant in my life and very much my Latin mama. Now when I was a toddler though, she divorced my Chinese father, Papi Wong, as I call him. But my older brother and I still saw him on the weekends and here and there and we loved

it because he'd take us to Chinatown shopping or to our favorite restaurants. I loved the ones that had the fancy chopsticks that went click click. And even though he didn't live with us, I was raised as his daughter. I was raised as a Wong. Now my mother didn't stay with us, I was raised as his daughter. I was raised as a Wong. Now my mother didn't stay single long. She remarried and we picked up and moved from Harlem to New Hampshire. Now I gotta say my stepfather, my new dad Charlie, he was like a dad out of the Golden Books when you were kids, right? He was a white guy, wore a suit and tie,

carried a briefcase to work every day, and came home at the same time, Monday through Friday, to dinner on the table. Well, little Carmen thought she had hit the American daddy jackpot. But here's the thing, the best thing he gave me were my four little sisters, who I loved and adored. Pains in the butts, but I loved them so much.

And I wanted to be a part of that family. I wanted him to be my daddy too. But he wasn't. And so I grew up always feeling like an outsider, like an other. And you better believe, in 1980s New Hampshire, I was an other. I might as well have been an alien that landed there, an unwelcome alien in a place that was supposed to be my home.

The little kids would make fun of me pulling up their eyes, or bucking their teeth, or all these new creative slurs were thrown my way for being brown and every once in a while the grown-ups would get on that train. When I was in fourth graded parent-teacher conference sister Rachel said to my mother, my Latin mother mind you, that the reason why I was getting all these straight A's well well, it was because, you know, it's Carmen's Chinese side. Now, I may have been only nine years old, but I knew enough to be insulted and embarrassed for my mother

and me. I liked Sister Rachel a lot less after that. Because here's the thing, even though my mother wasn't the Asian parent, she was what some people would call a tiger mom, right? Lupe expected excellence from me at all times. If I dared to bring home anything but an A, she would say, well, are you an A or are you a B? Well, are you an A or are you a B?

Lupe saw education as a way of escaping her fate. Working full-time at 15 years old to help support her family, married off by her father at 19, and there at that conference night in her 30s pregnant with her fifth child. She wanted more from me. So in the car ride home from that parent teacher conference though, I was still pissed. And I just had to ask, I just had to say, Mommy, Mommy, Sister Rachel said I'm smart because of Poppy, because I'm Chinese.

And my mother, the parent who was actually present, the one who would kick my butt if I didn't do well in school, she just kept her eyes straight on the road, and there was a little smile. She shrugged and she said, That's okay. And in that smile, which was more of a smirk, I realized there was a lot of things my mother wasn't telling me.

See, mommy came from a world of secrets. In the 1950s, 1960s, Dominican Republic, this was a place where speaking your mind or telling the truth could get you beaten or killed or kidnapped in the middle of the night like my grandfather who was tortured but then who later escaped the hospital dressed as a woman by his sisters. I mean this is talk about secrets this is cloak and dagger on a family level this was my mother's normal. By the time I was in my 30s, my mother received a devastating cancer diagnosis. And for the first time in her life,

she was about to lose control of the narrative. My stepfather Charlie called me months after we found out that she was sick and said, he needed to see me urgently and alone. A couple weeks later I'm sitting across the kitchen table from him and he says to me, Carmen, Poppy Wong is not your father. I am. The first thing that came to my mind was, I'm not Chinese anymore? And two, damn you two. All these years that I had so much wanted

to be a part of that family, that picture book American family, his family, and they both knew. It was painful. Now I had to confirm this story of course with my mother. Who I then told and she confirmed it pretty much. With a lot more dramatic flair. She was mostly just upset that he had gotten to me before she did. But mommy, you're in stage four colon cancer,

how long were you gonna wait, right? So there was many tears and questions and blame, but I made peace with my mother before she passed the following year. My relationship with Charlie, however, unfortunately, has never been exactly the same. How could it be? Well, years go by and now we're living in a time

when genetic testing is available to everybody, to the public, and affordable. And there's one thing my family loves, it's a sale. So, last holiday season, we all bought up a bunch of 23 and me and took the test at the same time. Now I got my results back first. And I'm opening that app and what I'm expecting to see is I'm expecting to see a confirmation

of this family secret, right? I'm expecting to see that I'm half Charlie, which is Italian, and then half my mother, which would be African and Spanish. Well, that's not what I saw. Portuguese. It says I'm half Portuguese. I frantically texted my sister Nina. She texted right back. She said, don't worry about it, okay, relax. Once we all get our results back and we connect, right? Because once we see our relationships and we connect our data, then we'll know what's right, right? So I pick up the phone and call my brother.

He says pretty much the same thing. He says, don't worry about it. You know what? Maybe it's a mix up. Once we connect and see our relationships and we're all linked up, then you'll see. Plus, Italy and Portugal are kind of close to each other. So no, no, that's not what happened.

Once we all connected. Now remember my sister Nina, my baby sisters, I'm supposed to be the same as her. I'm supposed to be full siblings. And there it was in large, extra large font, half sister. There was a third father, six kids in my family, and I didn't share a father with any of them. I felt so alone. But damn it, I was going to solve this mystery. So I went digging in the past, and I dug up my godmother,

who I hadn't spoken to in 20 years. I tracked her down, and I called her up, and I said, Pimpa, this is her nickname, we called her Pimpa. I said, we all took this genetic test, and we found out that I have a different father from everybody. And she was really surprised because Pimpa, she thought she knew all my mother's secrets. She was my mother's best friend. She lived down the hall from us growing up.

And she was a scholar now. She was a dual PhD. She looked at historical records to find shipwrecks in the Caribbean. My godmother was a treasure hunter. That's what I wanted right now, that's what I needed. But she was surprised. Because even though she knew as well, seems like everybody knew, that Papi Wong was not my father, she also thought that it had been Charlie. I said no, bimba. Says I'm Portuguese.

Oh. The Argentinian optometrist on Delancey Street. What? Well what was his name? I mean how can I remember his name? That was almost 50 years ago. Listen, your mother, don't judge your mother, she was lonely. Poppy was already kicked out of the house and so she was dating, you know, and I was babysitting your brother when the dates would come and pick her up. So yeah there was Charlie and then the optometrist. She had a part-time job at an optician on Delancey Street.

But he's dead. My heart could barely take it. Have people really thought about the fact that with genetic testing, we're looking at the end of family secrets. You're looking at the member of probably the last generation whose parents could futz around about their futzing around. Really?

Here's the thing. My origin story, as I like to call it, or mystery, is still happening to this day. But here's what I do know. I know that Lupe did everything she could and came so far and did so much to give me options. I know that Charlie, I used to talk with him about the stock market to bond, and I ended up hosting my own finance daily TV show on CNBC.

And Pabie Wong, well he taught me the street hustle that helped get me there. I got a good deal, but I rail at my mother's ghost sometimes, Lupe, for leaving out this incredibly important little detail of my life. And I ask her to visit me in my dreams to drop me a hint or a clue as to who it is I'm looking at when I look in the mirror. The morning after I talked to Pimpa, I called my sister Nina. I said, Nina, what if I never find out who this man is? And Nina, who's super Zen, said, you know, does it really matter, girl?

Because you know who you are. You know who you are. She's right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Carmen Rita Wong is a former national TV host, advice columnist, and professor, currently working on her fifth book, A Memoir. We recently sat down to discuss how this story came about and what's happened in the aftermath of all these revelations. So I was having breakfast with you, and at the end of the breakfast, you ended up telling me this story. But at the time the story ended with you finding out that Charlie was your father. Oh. So you agreed to tell the story and then you came to the office like what

like a month later. Mm-hmm. We had the meeting scheduled and the night before I had gotten the results with my family that it actually was a third man. Daddy number three. I remember you saying before we start I have something to tell you. I said plot twist. Yes you did. The mystery continues. At the end of the story You're searching for the daddy who's the optometrist until an C Street, but then Yesterday you send me your bio and I read it and done done It was not the optometrist on the land. It's really um not Argentinian at all I did speak with my stepfather with Charlie

and finally kind of broke the news to him and new revelations came out. And here's the funny thing is that I was so concerned about his reaction because he had been, I'd been living with him as my father, stepfather for so many years. I didn't want to hurt, break his heart. But instead I was the one who fell apart, and he was holding me together. But then I picked myself up and said, OK, Dad, so do you know who the hell this is? Can you tell me anything? And he said, you know, I used to pick up your mother

from this clinic in the Bronx. She was working there, and I'd go and drive and pick her up. And you know, there was this Cuban doctor. I was little. I had bad feelings about this Cuban doctor and I was like, okay. And then of course, just like the optometrist, I was like, well, at least he was a doctor. And then 23andMe had an update on its system. So, you know, they sent me a notice and said, we have a more specialized report for you. And there it was.

It had the origins, the most direct origins outside the US of my family. And half of it was Havana, Cuba. Wow. So that's where we're heading. And I hired a genealogist and we're tracking down my mother's work records because no one can remember who this man is.

And we're just gonna try to figure it out. That was Carmen Rita Wong. To see a photo of Carmen's mother and Peppy Wong at their engagement party, go to themoth.org. While there, you can call our pitch line and leave us a two-minute version of a story you'd like to tell. By the way, for a future show, we're looking for stories about animals. Dogs, cats, tarantulas, llamas, geese? Bring them on. The number to call is 877-799-MOTH, or you can pitch us your own story at themoth.org.

Coming up, a woman must make a difficult decision when faced with her family's genetic history. And later, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist has to scramble to get his green card renewed. The The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Kath'm Katherine Burns. Our next story was told at one of our Open Mic Story Slam competitions here in New York City where we partner with public radio station WNYC. Here's Beth Buecher live at the Moth. So ten years ago I underwent genetic testing for the breast cancer gene.

And I did this because when I was five years old, I watched my mother die of breast cancer. She was 26 when she was diagnosed and she was 30 when she passed away. And her mother had also died when she was five years old. And my older sister died of a rare genetic liver disorder when she was only nine months old. And my older sister died of a rare genetic liver disorder when she was only nine months old. So it really only felt natural to me to try to figure out why this kept happening to people in my family.

And the person that had a front row seat for all of this pain and death was my Aunt Anna. Now my Aunt Anna, she took my mother in after their mother died and she raised her along with her eight children. Eight children. Just let that sink in. And then when my mother died she took in me and my brother and she became a mother all over again. And she raised us with her brood of eight adult children. And man, she just did it. And she did it well.

And she did it in that Irish Catholic blue collar way. You just, you put your head down and you do what you need to do to take care of your family. And she did it with quiet strength. But when I say quiet, I mean quiet. We didn't talk about death. We didn't talk about death. We didn't talk about cancer. She never talked about what she had seen in her life.

Until I was older and in college and on breaks, I would drive down to see her in Southwest Philly and we would sit around the table and drink bad coffee and talk about life and family, you know, juicy stuff. And then after enough of that, she started to actually open up about that time. And she told me this story about my mom when she was in the hospital, which was a lot. My mother died a blind quadriplegic with steel rods holding up her skull. She suffered unimaginably. But that day when Anna went

to see her, she went in and my mom was so happy and she was smiling and she was excited and she grabbed Anna's hand and she said, Ann, Ann, you'll never believe what the nurses told me this morning. They're doing liver transplants. They're doing it. They're doing it That was the thing that would have saved my sister's life and in 1975 they were not doing that and It is really always amazed me that my mother was able to find this joy and this happiness despite being trapped in total hell and I tried to remember that when my own genetic test results came back and they were positive

for the BRCA1 mutation, which was not a surprise. But it took my risk from 12% to somewhere around 60 to 87% risk of getting the disease that seemed to get everyone. And then around that time, we buried Anna. Because she got cancer, and she didn't tell anyone. Because she didn't want everyone to go through the same thing that she had gone through, and she didn't want anyone to see what she saw. And so quietly, she died.

And at that point, I had enough. I was really done. So I elected to have a prophylactic mastectomy. And I made that decision ferociously, and I made every decision after that fearlessly and with strength, and I was resolute, right up until I was alone in a very small room in the hospital that morning with my plastic surgeon and bare ass naked with my hospital gown around my waist and he was making all these marks on my breasts with this dark blue grease pen

and I got so scared. I was so scared. I was so alone and then in that same instant when I got so scared I felt over on the right hand side of the room that there were people there as much as you all are here right now they were there and it was my grandmother and I was my mother and it was Anna and it was my grandmother and I was my mother and it was Anna and it was my sister and I was calm and warm and happy and excited and I thought about my mother and I looked over in the corner and I went look mom they're doing it they're doing this and that that really is the spirit with which I've moved forward after this is every time I'm walking through this

world and I see something awesome or amazing or just beautiful I look up at the sky and I I share it with them and then I tell them, look guys, I'm doing it. Thank you. That was Beth Buecher. Beth is a passionate educator of students with learning disabilities and ADHD. Having ADHD herself, her mission is to show her students what they're really made of and prove to them that no matter what label life throws at us, we can learn to live beyond it. Since this story aired, Beth celebrated her 40th birthday and underwent her final risk-reducing surgery. She's now considered to have the same cancer risk as the general population. She says that

she's never been more thrilled to be average. To get a link to Beth's website and to see pictures of Beth and her family, go to themoth.org. Our final story is a classic moth tale that came out of our many year-long collaboration with the World Science Festival. As part of this annual event we'd asked some of the greatest minds in the world to stand on stage and talk about themselves. In our experience most scientists would rather be in a lecture hall talking about anything but themselves, But every year, a few step up. One year, we're thrilled to have not one but two Nobel laureates on stage.

Here's one of them, the geneticist Paul Nurse, live at the Moth. I'm a geneticist. I study how chromosomes are inherited in dividing cells. But my story tonight will be more to do with my own genetics. You probably gathered I'm English. I was brought up in the 50s and 60s in London. My family wasn't very rich.

I had two brothers. I had a sister. My dad was a blue collar worker. My mom was a cleaner. My siblings all left school at 15. And I was a blue collar worker, my mum was a cleaner, my siblings all left school at 15, and I was a little bit different. I sort of did quite well at school, and I passed exams, and then I somehow got into university,

got a scholarship, and then did a PhD. But I wondered, why am I different to the rest of my family? Why did they all leave school at 15, which is in fact what happened? Well, I didn't really have much of an answer, but I felt a bit unsettled about that. You know, I wondered about it occasionally, but I carried on with my life. I got a job in a university, I got married, I had two children, Emily and Sarah, and you know, just got on with things.

Then my parents, who are living in London, they retired to the country. And we used to visit them regularly. But the truth was, it was a bit boring. They lived in the middle of nowhere. Nothing much happened there. And my kids, who were perhaps nine or 10 or 11, got a bit bored when they went there. And Sarah, my 11-year-old, had a project at school.

And the project was family trees. I have to tell you, family trees are very bad projects to have at school. And I said, I got a great idea. You know, I know you get a bit bored at grandma's. Why don't you talk to grandma about her family tree? So we get there, you know, we have dinner and then off Sarah trots, takes Grandma next door to talk about her family tree. Five minutes later, in comes my mum, absolutely white, absolutely white. And she comes over to me and she said, Sarah's been asking me about my family tree and I have to tell you something that I've never told you. I was in my 30s by this time. I was in my 30s.

She said, I never told you. But what my mom said is she said, actually, I'm illegitimate. This is what my mom said. I'm illegitimate. She'd been born in 1910. Her mom wasn't married. She'd been born in the poor house. She wasn't very from a wealthy family.

And she was brought up by her grandmother. And her mother had married somebody else who I thought was my grandfather. But that wasn't the case. My grandfather was unknown. So I'd lost a grandfather. Then she turned to me and said, and actually, it's the same for your father, too.

So in two sentences, I'd lost two grandfathers. Well, this was a bit of a shock. And then I began to think about it and I thought, well, maybe this is where I got some exotic genes from somewhere and they sort of recombined and that's why I'm a bit different. And then I remembered that my middle name was Maxime, and I got it from my dad, who was called Maxime William John. And he was a sort of farm worker in the country. That's where he came from, in Norfolk.

And I tell you, in Norfolk, farm workers are not called Maxime, usually. This is a French-Russian aristocratic sort of name. And it did seem a little odd, so I began to sort of imagine that perhaps I had an exotic grandfather's French, Russian aristocrat, and blah, blah, blah. And that was why I ended up how I was.

And so that seemed all OK. That seemed a reasonable explanation. And I forgot about things. And I got on with my career. And I became an Oxford professor, then a departmental chair. then they knighted me, and then I got a Nobel Prize a few years ago. So that's all hunky dory and then in...

In... In 2000, in 2003, I decided to come to New York City. Both my parents had died, they lived to come to New York City. Both my parents had died, they lived to the 80s and 90s, and so I came with my family to New York City to be president of Rockefeller University in Upper East Side. And a couple of years ago, 2007, I thought I should try and get a green card.

Have you ever seen those poor bastards, all there queuing up when you come into immigration? They're all people like me, who have to wait there for an hour and a half and have their fingerprints all done. Anyway, and so if you have a green card, residence card, you avoid that, okay? So I applied for a green card,

huge amount of paperwork, you have no idea how complicated it is, sent the thing off, waited a number of months, came back, and I was rejected. And I thought, how come I'm rejected? I'm a knight, I've got a Nobel Prize and I'm president of Rockefeller University and they reject me for a green card.

I know Homeland Security has high standards, but I mean, this did seem more than a little ridiculous. So I looked through all the paperwork, and I eventually found out they did not like the documentation I'd sent with my application. So I went through it, and I picked out, they particularly didn't like my birth certificate. So I got my birth certificate out.

And it was a so-called short birth certificate, which we have in Britain, which names who you are, where you were born, the time you were born, your citizenship, and so on. It doesn't happen to quite name your parents, okay? So perfectly official documents, but that's what I had. And so I thought, well, I can go and get the long certificate. I knew the registry office would have it, so I phoned up London, the registry office,

and said, please send that in the post. I told my secretary in my office, when it arrives, bundle it all up again, send it off to those silly jerks in Homeland Security. I went on holiday for a couple of weeks, went to New Zealand, came back, undoing all the mail, looking at my emails and so on. Several people in my room, I had my secretary, her assistant, my wife who came in,

my lab manager was around, so quite a few people around. And then I remembered that I told my secretary to get this package sent off, so I asked her, did you manage to do that? And she turned to me and she said, well, I didn't do it, she said, because the certificate arrived, I looked at it, and I thought, maybe you got the name of your mother wrong.

And I said, of course I didn't get the name of my mother wrong, don't be absolutely ridiculous. So she handed me the certificate and everybody sort of started to look at me, it's a bit of a strange conversation to have. So I open it, I look at it and there, you know, the name nurse is my mother and I say, well, not a problem there. And then I look at it again and the name was Miriam Nurse.

And that was the name of my sister. It was not the name of my mother at all. It was the name of my sister. So I'm looking at this thinking, oh my God, the registry office have cocked up again. And then I look a bit further, and where it says father, there's just a line. Desta dash, no father. And then my wife comes up and says, you know what this might mean, Paul? And I was a bit slow, actually.

And I really didn't quite realize what it might have meant. And then slowly, the clouds roll away. My sister was 18 years and one month older than me. Now, I haven't told you, but both, not only both my parents had died, who are actually now my grandparents, but also my mother. She died early of multiple sclerosis, three or four years before. So I had nobody, and all that generation had died. I had nobody to confirm if this story was true. However, on the birth certificate was the place where I was born, and it was my great aunt's house,

about 100 miles from London, in a city called Norwich. And my great aunt had a daughter who was 11 years of age when I was born, so I phoned her up and said, do you know anything about this? And she said, yes, I do. She said, your sister became pregnant at 17, and she was sent to her aunt's in Norwich, 100 miles away from home.

This is like a Dickensian novel, as you can see. And she gave birth to you, and her mother, my grandmother, came up and pretended that the baby was hers. And she sent your real mother back home. And several months later later she took you back with pretending that she was your mother. And we all lived together in this two bedroom department for two and a half years and then my real mother

got married and left home. And there's a photograph of me in this wedding. My mother, my real mother, is holding the hand of her husband in one hand and my hand in the other, because you realize this was her leaving me with her parents. She never told her husband, so the whole thing was kept secret for over half a century. Now at the same wedding, I crawled under the table, a gate leg table, which had the wedding cake. And I managed to move the leg and the wedding cake fell off the table and smashed into pieces. I wonder whether I was revolting at the thought of my mother being taken away. Now this was a tragedy, I'm sure, for my mother.

I was brought up happily, a little dully maybe, by my grandparents. But this was, I'm sure, a tragedy for my mother. She had three children, and she kept four photographs of babies by her bed. I only learned this after her death. Three were her legitimate children, and I was her fourth illegitimate child.

Well what's the final irony here really is I'm not a bad geneticist and my rather simple family kept my own genetic secret for over half a century. Thank you. That was Paul Nurse. Dr. Nurse is the former president of the Royal Society and chief executive and director of the Francis Crick Institute. Along with two fellow scientists, he was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle. Dr. Nurse was knighted by the Queen in 1999 in honor of his work in cancer research.

When I wrote to Dr. Nurse and asked if he had any updates on the story, he wrote, The only new thing to add is that I've had a DNA analysis carried out and definitely have close relatives that I don't know and so may be related to my unknown father. At present, I've not had a response from them. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour. Your host this hour was the Moss Artistic Director, Catherine Burns, who also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moss directorial staff include Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Giness, Jennifer

Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Emily Couch. Special thanks to the World Science Festival. Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Karala Dust, Krung Bin, Wolfgang Mutspiel and B Fleischmann. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.