73. Who Pays for Multimillion-Dollar Mir...

In the newest show from the Freakonomics Radio Network, host Zachary Crockett explores the hidden side of the things around us. This week: One creature’s trash is another’s cash. (Or, how one man found profit in pee.) 

A sneak peek at Bapu's new book, Random Acts of Medicine, available now from Doubleday, and an announcement about the show. 

Couples get divorced for all kinds of reasons. Is having kids one of them? Bapu talks about research that investigates what happens to parents who unexpectedly have twins. Plus, an announcement about the future of the show. 

À partir du 31 mars 2024, les médicaments vont coûter plus cher. En effet, la franchise prélevée sur chaque boîte passe, à partir de cette date de 50 centimes à un euro. Ce qui n'empêche pas la plupart de ces produits pharmaceutiques de rester accessibles. Ce n'est pas le cas de ... Show More

with Andrew Lo (@AndrewWLo) and Jorge Conde (@JorgeCondeBio) The advent of new gene and cell therapies are beginning to approach that holy grail of medicine—that of a possible cure. But they are also more expensive than any medicines ever sold before. In this episode, MIT economi ... Show More

If you had a rare disease and the only drug that could help you suddenly shot up in price how would you feel? What if your health service or insurer decided it was too expensive and they wouldn’t fund it any more? This is the problem facing some patients in the Netherlands.In ord ... Show More

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Venki Ramakrishnan considers both why we might live longer, and the dilemmas this raises. In the last few years, medical advances have led to treatments that really do offer the potential to tackle life-threatening cancers and debilitating diseases s ... Show More

Where does a medical cure come from? 100 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for scientists to test medicines by taking a dose themselves. As medical technologies get cheaper and more accessible, patients and DIY tinkerers are trying something similar—and mainstream medicine is racing ... Show More

During the pandemic, the world witnessed how fast medicine can advance with an abundance of cash and collaboration. Is progress at this speed and cost sustainable? Sandra Kanthal asks if drug development is something which should still take decades, or have we learned how to perm ... Show More

Gilead Sciences announced today that it will charge the U.S. government and other developed countries $390 per vial for its coronavirus-fighting drug remdesivir. That begins to answer a big question as drug companies race to find treatments and develop vaccines for the virus: How ... Show More

ALS is a disease that destroys the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord we need for voluntary movement. There is no cure, but now there is a newly approved medication that may slow down the disease and extend patients' lives. The drug, called Relyvrio, got its start with a co ... Show More

The future is here. Gene silencing medicines - which can fine tune how our DNA works - have held promise for decades. Now hundreds of thousands of people will get them in the UK. James speaks to a surgeon whose life and career have been saved by gene-silencing drugs and to resear ... Show More