Engineering Pharmaceuticals explores one of the major causes of rising health care costs – development of new drugs.  It can cost up to a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. This program goes behind the curtain and shows how drugs are created and looks at efforts to bring down the cost.

Engineering Pharmaceuticals takes a step back and explains what, exactly, drugs do; how they actually act to attack diseases.  We hear the sound of pharmaceutical scientists making new drug compounds as they explain the process and where its costs lie.  And we learn how engineers are helping redesign the drug manufacturing process to try and bring costs down.  We also learn the ramifications of these high costs in places where people can barely afford food, let alone much-needed pharmaceuticals.

We hear the story of a college freshman who suffered a rare brain tumor at age 13 and is now living with the consequences of his treatment.  We hear about his struggles and triumphs as he lives every day with the after-effects of his adventure in the world of pharmaceuticals.

WHEN MEDICINE KILLS    part 1      Today’s edition of Voices of Our World is not intended to get you to stop taking your medicine.  To the contrary, we simply hope to help you be a better steward of your health and a more vigilant consumer.  The pharmaceutical industry is just that, an industry, a business.  And as often occurs in business, when the choice is between acting ethically or generating higher profit, usually profit wins.  Today we bring you a real-life cautionary tale that includes: a blood-building drug, 2 major drug companies, 2 whistleblowers, fraud, bribery and patient deaths.  Listen to our interview with journalist, Kathleen Sharp, author of Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever.    

I put this story together after meeting a guy named Frank Warren. He?s an interactive artist who created a project called Post Secret. About a year ago, he started slipping little homemade postcards into library books. The cards had his home address pre-printed on them, along with an invitation for the finder to anonymously mail a secret that he or she had never told anyone before. The response was huge. Over the past year, Warren has received over twelve thousand secrets in his mailbox. If you?re interested in broadcasting this story, here?s an intro that might work for your announcer / host: ?On any given day, we all try our best to be compassionate, benevolent, and charitable --- but we?re also human, and that means that we can?t help but harbor certain thoughts that we try very hard to keep from the people around us, and even from our own selves. Today, Baltimore radio producer Aaron Henkin brings us a story about secrets --- what happens when we hold on to them, and what can happen when we?re given a chance to let them go??

BULLYING: K thru LIFE    part 1     From grade school through college and beyond, bullying has been allowed to go way too far, far too often.  The rate of child and teen suicides, often related to bullying and depression, has tripled in the last 60 years.  In the U.S. we are now averaging 28 such deaths a week, 4 a day!  Today we’ll talk with a high school student, we’ll call Cara.  And then we talk with an expert in the field of relational aggression, Dr. Cheryl Dellasega, Professor of Humanities in the College of Medicine and Professor of Women’s Studies at Penn State University     

BULLYING: K thru LIFE    part 2     Today 43% of all teens have experienced online harassment and 1 in 7 high school students have reported considering suicide.  Dr. Dellasega notes that Relational Aggression (RA) is often dismissed by school personnel as teasing or they may feel anything short of physical violence is non-threatening.  But all forms of Relational Aggression is bullying, a form of violence with both short and long-term consequences.  We return to our discussion with Dr. Cheryl Dellasega.

Part 1    47 U.S. States have now enacted anti-bullying laws.     Whether these laws will be enforceable remains to be seen.   There are also many private initiatives, such as the "It Gets Better" ad campaign, intended to empower teens struggling with sexual identity issues, as they are so frequently targeted by bullies.  14-year-old Jamie Rodemeyer of Buffalo, N.Y. commended the "It Gets Better" ads, but just couldn’t follow the advice to wait it out.  He read an anonymous post on his Formspring page, "Jamie is stupid, gay, fat and ugly. He must die."  Tragically, that was the direction he chose to take.   Our guest today has a lot to offer on the subject of kid on kid cruelty.  He is a Martial Arts Instructor and a school lecturer on his counter-cruelty movement, www.TheKidsAreUnited.com.   Adam Mitchell is next on Voices.

Part 2    It's a safe bet that not one person listening to this show today can say they were never teased, hurt, never feigned illness to stay home, never closed the bedroom door to cry it out.  Joel Burns, an openly gay city councilman in Fort Worth, Texas, in an impromptu and very emotional address, which went viral immediately, began by saying, "I've never told this before tonight".  He proceeded to relive the names he'd been called and the moment the incessant harassment had driven him to the edge of suicide.  He urged kids going through what he had, to endure and outgrow their tormentors.  "You'll get out of that high school and never deal with those jerks again!"   We now have a new verb, bullycide. But parents, teachers and as Adam Mitchell encourages, student leaders in particular can be the 1^st line of defense.  We return to our conversation with Adam Mitchell.

So, let me ask you, how many times have you said "thank you" today? Maybe 10 times or
more?  Has "thank you" become a hollow phrase in our lexicon that's overused and undervalued?  Today on the program, we present an award-winning episode of the CBC Radio program "Definitely Not the Opera" that considers if thank you has lost its meaning.

Robert Schumann was perhaps the archetypal moody artist, alternating between blazing bouts of creativity and periods of antisocial depression.

It’s a common cliché that has, all too often, been sustained by sad life stories punctuated by tragic endings. Schumann died a broken man in an insane asylum. More recently, we’ve seen gifted musicians like Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith take their own lives after struggling with depression.

There are many, many others who fit the cliché (Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis…the list goes on and on). Why are there so many artists and musicians that struggle with depression and other forms of mental illness?

Anthony Storr was a British psychiatrist who wrote about music and mental illness in his book Music and the Mind. He suggested that there might be a link between mental illness and creativity – he wrote: “The ability to think creatively, to make new links between concepts, is more often found in families which include a member who is diagnosable as mentally ill.”

"Music and Mental Illness" is a short radio essay featuring music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Cobain, Smith and others.

Maine has a higher than average youth suicide rate. This show takes a look at mental health and suicide through two highly experiential features. The show features two PRX licensed pieces from WMPG's Blunt Youth Radio Project and from Jake Warga. License those pieces here: And How Does That Make You Feel?: http://www.prx.org/pieces/2342 Four Seconds, Suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge: http://www.prx.org/pieces/7533 This show is for *SAMPLE ONLY*.

In Terrence Rattigan's powerful play, an aging schoolmaster faces the harsh judgments of his students, his fellow teachers, and his adulterous wife. Can a lone act of kindness from a sympathetic student change his heart? The Browning Version stars Martin Jarvis, Steven Brand, and Kate Steele. 

The broadcast includes a conversation with Rattigan biographer Michael Darlow, and a profile of Peter Glenville, who directed the original production of The Browning Version. 

Because, contrary to all human experience, we just don’t want to believe death will happen to us. A growing body of evidence suggests that the fear of death influences how we vote, shop, and even how we judge our mothers. Does the fear of death shape how we live? NPR’s Lynn Neary poses these questions to leading researchers in an engaging conversation about how we handle life and death.
The broadcast window for the series is October 15, 2009 - March 31, 2010. Go deeper http://www.stations.trbq.org
Station Contact: Ms Stevie Beck, stevie@SchardtMEDIA.org 612.825.6363