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Hey, it's Latif here. Before we start the show, I'd like you to meet... Yeah, I'm recording now. Oh, he's recording. All right. Appreciate it. Okay. Diane. Diane Kelly. And I'm part of your team of fact checkers. Diane, do you... I think you know what we're doing, but do you want me to just tell you what we're doing? Please do. Tell me what... Tell me what we're doing.

So we're here because I used to be a fact checker on this show, and I don't think people really understand how important this job is. Yeah, most people don't think about fact checking at all. Like, at all. Because I am completely invisible. On the air, then.

That is. She's not invisible in real life. That wouldn't pass fact check, obviously. But in real life. You know, behind the scenes. I am absolutely on a team with the reporter and the producers. I am there to literally check your work. Diane's checking the accuracy of things like. Proper names, company names, university names, distances, numbers, dates, random facts. Superlatives, I feel like is a big one, right? Oh, superlatives. They're the worst. Worst.

Even the tiniest mistake. Misattribution. Misunderstandings. That you could imagine. I'm the one who's supposed to, like, catch it and make sure it doesn't get through. Right. And the thing is that 90% of the time, as we check, everything's fine. Right. But sometimes things get weird. Where should I begin?

For example, when Diane was fact-checking... The humpback and the killer. Reported by Annie McEwen. We're heading out into the Antarctic Peninsula. So I'm reading through the transcript and everything's great. All the facts are checking out. That is right. Until Diane sees this fact about... Whale milk, that it tastes like butter. This tiny, innocuous line, right? Three words. Tastes like butter. She's like, hmm, how do we know that?

Then it's like going on a treasure hunt through the entire Internet for firsthand evidence about whale milk, mouthfeel and flavor. She's going to whale expert whales, dolphins and porpoises, livestock experts, food and agriculture organization for the U.N. and milk expert to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. She's also looking through books, a book called Whales of the Southern Ocean, my copy of Aquarium.

on food and cooking by Harold McGee. Okay. A great reference source. Okay. Along the way, she learned. It is very creamy. Good to know. Good to know. But it still doesn't tell me anything about what it tastes like. Don't tell me you drank whale milk for this story.

I did not drink whale milk. Okay, but she did have to find someone who did. So I kept looking. Until she found... The Japanese Institute for... A scientific, peer-reviewed paper... Where someone had actually tasted whale milk. No, you didn't. I didn't. Bingo!

Okay. And what did it say? Mouth feel like butter, taste like fish. Did you recommend any change that or what do you? I recommended their milk. Apparently tastes like fishy butter. Fishy butter. Well done. Um, how long approximately were you chasing? Weird little fact. Yeah. Uh,

Um, that's probably about a 45 minute question. It took her more time to fact check those three words than it does to listen to the entire episode we put into the feed. Yes. That's like so much work. Yeah. I know. You're probably thinking, this sounds like a big waste of time. Is it really worth it? Well. And to that we say. Hell yeah. Because we're asking the audience to trust us. Even though you're probably.

never going to drink whale milk. Having a fact checker means that you can trust that this, you know, neato science factoid is legit. Ukraine is sending at least 10,000 of these drones up into the sky. And that means that you can also trust us when we're covering... Predator drones fly up at like

You just take the votes for Donald Trump in each of those presidential elections. Here we got 462. Andrew, there have been about 50. That's five zero. Climate change. Tropical storms. And judges have this power. The Supreme Court. To keep experts out of the court. This is where I ask for your support.

So that we can continue bringing you stories that are not just lovingly reported, but also thoroughly fact-checked. Because Diane's work, and not just Diane's work, Emily's work, Natalie's work, all our fact-checkers work, it costs a lot of money. Which is why the vast majority of podcasts out there do not fact-check. We do. Because we believe in it.

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Diane fact-checked. Enjoy. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser here again, still. And I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. So where should we start this thing? So the story I want to tell you is

It is a coming-of-age story, but it's a poorly timed one. Okay. What is that? It's a coming-of-age story. What does that mean? But just at the wrong time. That's what it means. Although, to be fair, is coming-of-age ever at the right time? Well, I think you will have a completely different answer to that question after you hear this story. Okay. So basically, I don't remember this, but...

I got my first pubic hair when I was one and a half. Whoa. That's so alarming. Yeah.

So this is Patrick. I'm good, sorry. Patrick Burley. A couple minutes late. Nowadays, he's a writer in Los Angeles. But this story starts many, many years before that on the other side of the country out in New York City. It is the early 1980s. Patrick's parents are both actors doing their best to take care of this new baby when they notice this pubic hair.

And as he starts to get older... I was, like, really aggressive. Like, on the playground, you know, I was constantly, like, punching kids and just losing my temper. So are these, like, how old are... Like, these are your first memories? I'm four. I'm, like, three, four. Yeah, this is, like, yeah. And this kid is growing like no kid you've ever seen. You know, I was, like, three years old, for instance, but I looked like a seven-year-old.

Whoa. That is a big gap. And what's happening here, I mean, it might be obvious, but Patrick has a genetic condition called testotoxicosis, where his body started producing testosterone way earlier than normal, which essentially meant that he was going through puberty as a toddler. Precocious puberty. Yeah.

You know, obviously, this is really an extreme story. This is a story about puberty happening earlier and more intensely than it does for the vast majority of us. But hearing him talk about it, I find so relatable. Because, you know, we all go through puberty, obviously, whether you went through it decades ago, whether you're going through it right now.

And we all end up facing a version of these two huge questions. How much of the awkwardness and really the kind of agony of that time comes from inside of us? And then also, to what extent does it make us into the adults we become?

When I came to the NIH, I happened to join a lab focusing on this particular rare type of precocious puberty. This is Ellen Leschek. I'm a pediatric endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health. She spent decades studying kids like Patrick. So I just asked her, like, what was going on in Patrick's body? Well...

Puberty is a very important stage in your lives. Normally, what happens in puberty is when a kid gets to be about, you know, 11, 12, 13, this little part of our brain, the pituitary gland, the pituitary gland in the brain, wakes up, releases a hormone, this new hormone, and it flows out of the brain, circulates around, makes its way to this receptor, the testicle, the testes, plugs into the receptor, and as a result, the sex glands now increase their own production of hormones. Testosterone is produced.

That testosterone swirls all around the body. Going to your muscles. Making you grow body hair. Cubic hair. But also... Changing all sorts of stuff in your brain. This is friend of the show, Robert Sapolsky. Neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University. And he says when the testosterone makes its way back up to the brain, it takes certain impulses. Sexuality. And aggression. It ups the volume. Ramps them up.

So that's the normal. That's a normal. Now, for Patrick, with this particular disorder, the body sort of gets ahead of the brain. What do you mean? Well, the receptor in Patrick's testes, the one that's typically activated by the pituitary gland in the brain, has a mutation.

And that mutation, it's a tiny little mutation. Yeah. It causes that testosterone production to start... Before it hears from the brain. From day one. So in other words, like as soon as Patrick had testicles... Even in utero... They were producing testosterone. Unregulated. And so the physical effects of testosterone hit Patrick right away. I would get these erections. And like toddlers get these, but like these were like...

erections that were like, go have sex. And when the testosterone doubled back to his brain, it wasn't coming back to the brain of a teenager. It was coming back to the brain of a toddler.

I mean, at that point, did you even know what sex was? No, I didn't understand sex. All I knew, it was like the most primal impulse. It was just like this thing is happening in my body and like it wants me to have some kind of like physical interaction with a girl.

Now, precocious puberty, the specific version that Patrick had, is super rare. That's about one in a million people. So, guys, I'm actually one in a million. I mean, I know. That's the silver lining of this all. You can say that. But also, it's hereditary. So my father had had this, as had my grandfather and my great-grandfather. And we've traced it back to my great-great-grandfather. So your mom knew this was coming.

Well, they knew that it could happen. But now what was happening, they have a toddler who's going through puberty. You know, they didn't know what to do. They didn't, you know, there was no, my father hadn't been treated and... They were totally overwhelmed. And then one day...

One of my mom's friends, like this is an incredible coincidence that she saw in the paper, like the National Institute of Health is, you know, looking for test subjects that have like exactly what I had. So when Patrick was three years old, he and his mom got on a train and went down to the NIH.

One of the things that I remember about Patrick is that he was tall. This is Ellen again. She was one of the doctors who helped treat Patrick's puberty. We were trying to stop it. Stop. Stop puberty. But a lot of times you're not able to fully stop and you're really just slowing. She says when Patrick showed up, the scientists at the NIH were just starting. It was in the early days. To learn how to do this in kids like him. I was like their lab rat, you know, and in exchange...

For free, I received treatment. He tried lots of different stuff. Like Ellen said, there was one drug called spironolactone, which had been developed as a blood pressure medicine. But when they started using it for blood pressure, men started complaining about impotence.

And it turned out it was because a side effect of this drug was that it blocked the effect of testosterone. And so you guys were like, this could be a feature, not a bug. Yes. And Patrick says it kind of worked. It slowed it down. It slowed it down a little bit, but it wasn't perfect. Like some of the testosterone was almost like sneaking around the edges, causing his body to keep changing. And so by the time he was in third grade, I was like,

This eight-year-old, you know, like trapped in like a 16-year-old's body. Like he had a mustache. He looked like he should be in high school, which sometimes was cool. You know, I was the first one hitting the ball over the fence in Little League. But mostly was not. I was like a freak.

Because I looked so strange. I was so big. You know, I got picked on a lot. Like, what would they do? What would they say? Yeah. So I, you know, I remember when I was in like fifth grade, I would walk home every day. We didn't live very far from my elementary school and school.

And in New York still, you were. No, no, no. We had moved to L.A. Yeah. L.A. Yeah. When I was about seven, you know, my dad, he'd been like a theater actor in New York and I was like a New York City kid. And then we moved to Santa Monica and I and I went to elementary school in Santa Monica. That's a pretty big change for any kid. Yeah. Yeah. It was.

It was a big change. It was always hard for me to sort of enter a new social environment because of, like, how I looked. Like, he was big on the outside, but, you know, inside, he was still small. So anyway, I would walk home from school every day, and I would, like, jump this fence and walk home. And every day, there were these kids who were, oh, they were probably, like, four years older and younger.

They would like wait and, you know, and they would like push me around and punch me or whatever. Like they knew despite what he looked like, he was really just a little kid you could push around. And then there was kind of the reverse when other people who should have known how little he was treated him like he was much bigger. So one day I'm driving with my dad and on the bus stop is one of the kids who who picks on me.

And I sort of, like, tell my dad. And my dad, he, like, pulls over. And he, like, jumps out of the car. And he's like, you want to fight my son? Like, you think you can fight my son? And I'm, like, sitting in the passenger seat. And I'm like, oh, please. And he's like, come on, like, look at this, like, marshmallow-y kid. Like, you'll kick the shit out of this kid. You know, I'm, like, crying. And I'm like, no, dad, like, no, it's not...

don't please and he's like come on like Patrick get out here like you can you can take this kid

I don't want to like vilify my dad because he was like a very supportive and loving father. But at that moment, Patrick says. I felt that he absolutely had no idea what I was going through. And this is so ironic because he's like the only other person in the world who

whom I've ever met who had this condition. Like, if anybody should get it, it would be his dad, who also had been a little boy who looked like and was forced to act like a man. You know, like, by the time he was 10, he looked like he was, like, 18 years old. He was, like, a fully grown man at, like, 10 years old. And he also, his dad, my grandfather, who he had had precocious puberty as well, he...

kind of he he's he left. And so my dad, who looked much older at like 12, like he had to, you know, he like went and like worked

in a cannery and like supported his mom and like his two sisters, you know, and like told her, you know. So he was the, he was the man of the house. He was the breadwinner. Yeah. And, and, and yet like growing up, we never had that kind of heart to heart. He was never like, Patrick, like, I know this is really hard. Like you're going through this. And I went through this.

What I've just told you about my dad and his dad. And like that, like that's like my mom like told me that. And only when Patrick got older, did he learn other stories, too. My great grandfather had been the youngest U.S. soldier in World War One. When he was 12 years old, he ran away from home and joined the Navy.

and fought in Europe. - 'Cause he looked- - On the way, yeah, no, yeah, he looked like he was 19. And nobody figured out how old he really was until he was getting drunk with some other soldiers and they like hijacked a cargo plane. There are news articles about this. And they hijacked a cargo plane and like took it up joyriding.

What? Yeah, and they were all just wasted. And they grounded the plane and they court-martialed my great-grandfather. And only then...

Only then did they discover that he was 13 years old. They're like, son, you're acting like you're 13 years old. And he was like, well, I have something to tell you. That's because I am. Yeah. But when Patrick was a little kid, it was just like a big mystery. He didn't know these stories. So so in some ways, I was kind of on my own.

As Patrick got older, he kept going in for treatments. I would spend two weeks every year as an inpatient at the NIH. They tried all kinds of drugs on him. Like there were periods when I was taking 32 pills a day. Like I would take 16 in the morning and 16 at night. But none of it worked completely. It was very frustrating. And often he'd take that frustration out physically. I would break things. I would punch things, punch people.

You know, I felt constantly misunderstood because I looked like a normal child, just much, much older. All of this surface tension had built up and built up and built up

over years, really, of having had precocious puberty, you know, and not knowing how to deal with it and lying about my age and acting out because I was hormonal and getting into a cycle of being in trouble and then sort of just embracing this kind of bad kid persona that, you know, in many ways had been foisted on me from an early age because of

my behavioral issues as a result of precocious puberty. I was like on the edge of like going from being just like sort of a bad kid, but on the level of like a class clown to like being like a delinquent and like really getting into stuff like drugs and like other things that like

okay, like now it's like not just like getting into a scuffle in the hallway. It's like, you know, more severe. And so right around 12, my doctors, they took, they were like, okay, like he's 12 and we've like sort of stemmed the flood for him.

And we think we're going to take him off his medicine and like see how he does and sort of let him like finish puberty, you know, finish puberty. And, you know, so it had been almost, it had been nine, almost 10 years that I had, you know, been on these drugs.

that had done, you know, sort of a halfway decent job of, like, keeping, you know, the testosterone really at bay. And then all of a sudden I wasn't. When we come back, Patrick finishes puberty and things get worse before they get better. ♪

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Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has centered on her record as a tough prosecutor with an eye toward justice. But what does her time as California's so-called top cop reveal about her stance on policies that would prevent deaths like Sonia Massey's at the hands of police? I'm Kai Wright. Join me to talk about Harris, the prosecutor, and Harris, the presidential hopeful, on the next Notes from America. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Today we are telling the story of Patrick Burley, who started going through puberty when he was basically when he was born. He was treated at the NIH, which slowed things down a bit. But when he was 12, his doctors there, they took him off the medications.

So he could finish going through puberty on his own. And when they took me off the medication, there was like a precipitous change in my behavior. I like tumbled over that line from like just like the like the troublemaker in class to like like a delinquent kid fighting, writing graffiti, smoking pot.

Did it feel like it was your body carrying you away? Or did you feel like these were choices that you were making at the time? It felt like I was no match for my body. Like it just had its way with me. And that spring, something happened that Patrick would look back on as sort of a culmination of everything that had happened before.

Right. So I met this girl at the mall. Her name was Marianne and she was 17. How old were you? 12. But I told Marianne that I was 16. And she believed me. Pretty soon they started dating. And we didn't have sex. I hadn't lost my virginity yet, but it was like close. And

So anyway, so Marianne, she was living with this drug dealer in Venice. So one night, it's like a Tuesday, it's a school night. So Marianne calls me up and she's like, oh, you know, this guy, this drug dealer that I'm living with, like he just got in like this amazing acid. You got to try something.

Did you know what that was? No, no, no. But I was, like, maintaining this persona, this 16-year-old persona. And, like, in my persona, like, yeah, I knew all about acid. Like, cool. Oh, yeah, white unicorns. Totally. Those are awesome. So, you know, I, like, snuck out. It was, like, 9 o'clock at night. I, like, snuck out. And, like, this guy's, you know, car pulled up. And, like, she got out. And she, like, gave me...

three tabs of acid and I like paid whatever, $9 or whatever it was that I had like. Your milk money or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then they left and I like snuck back in. I waited for my parents to go to bed and like I took a tab of acid. I just, I don't know. I thought it was just going to make me feel really great.

So I'm like lying in my bed and I'm like waiting, you know, and I'm like, I'm like getting impatient, like nothing's happening. And I'm like, this sucks. Like is this stuff like even work, you know? And so I take another tap and I fall asleep. 45 minutes later, I wake up and there are like stalactites coming down from the ceiling. There are like bugs all over me, like all the worst things are happening to me.

And I'm like up all night, like having like the worst trip imaginable. And I'm 12. It's terrible. The next morning, I'm like, all right, I'm going to go. Like, there's no way I can go to school. There's absolutely no way. So I went into my parents and I was like, you know, I'm sick. Like, I really need to not go to school.

And they were like, but I was trying not to act. I was trying to act like I wasn't on acid. You know, so that was like counteracting me trying to act sick. Like I didn't seem sick because I was trying to act normal, you know. And they were like, you're not sick. You seem fine. You know, they were like. This is exactly the kind of thing they would expect from you. Right. I was like, there's a total boy who cried wolf scenario. Yeah. And so.

So they sent me to school and I managed to stay in the nurse's office for the morning. Smart. But she was really skeptical of me being sick also and I didn't have temperature. So finally at lunch, she was like, "You can't stay here anymore. You have to go out to lunch." I had brought the third tab of acid with me to school,

Because I was so paranoid. You know, my parents were, they were very, they didn't trust me. And I was afraid that they would find it. Sure, of course. And I was also, I was on acid. I was still tripping. Yeah.

So I went out onto the schoolyard where my friends were having lunch and I joined them. They were also amateur delinquents and I went up to them and I was like, "Instead of saying I had the worst experience of my life last night, never do acid."

I was like, oh, my God. Dude, I did acid last night. It was the best thing, man. Like, I had this incredible, you know, because, like, you just, I wanted to seem cool. Yeah. And I was like, you know, I have one more tab. One of you guys want it? And they were all, like, had this sense to be like, oh, no, thanks. You know, yeah, maybe another time. But one of my friends who was, like, sort of the instigator of our group was,

He was like, "I have an idea. You should take the acid, the tab of acid, and you should put it in someone's drink and see what's going to happen." Before I could say anything, he had turned to our friend, this girl, and he had said like, "Okay, can I have a sip of your Coke?" He turned around and we put the tab of acid in her Coke.

And she drank the Coke. And so there were two periods after lunch, fifth and sixth period. And sixth period was like computer class. And I had it with this girl who was our friend. She was like, you know, we hung out with her a lot. So we're sitting at these long rows and, you know, practicing like how many words a minute we can type. And like I look down the row and I'm like watching her.

And all of a sudden, like, she starts just, like, laughing. Like, maniacal. Like, maniacal, like, joker laugh. And then she, like, jumps up and she, like, runs over to me. Because I'm, like, her friend in the class. And she starts just bawling. And the teacher comes over and, like, takes her down to the nurse's office.

And I like freak out and I run down there and I just, I like confess everything. Wow. Because I'm like worried about her. An ambulance comes. Oh my God. And they call the police and they march me out, you know, and they put me in the cruiser and they take me to the station, you know, and they book me.

So what are you thinking when, I mean, what is going through your mind this whole time? I feel, I mean, I'm mostly worried about my friend who's in the hospital, like having her stomach pumped. I mostly feel like overwhelming remorse.

And how long after you had gone off your medications was this? Like a couple months. Yeah. And I don't know, like, do you think, like, is precocious puberty or is it or to what degree is it responsible for what happened? Yeah, that's a good, that's a valid question. One that I have often asked myself. Yeah.

And I think that, listen, I don't mean to, like, absolve my 12-year-old self of responsibility. It's unquestionably the worst thing that I have ever done. What I will say is that I was this incredible mixture of naivete and, you know, 12-year-oldness and also just, you know, being...

advanced and really not entirely in control of my impulses. I mean, you know, I had this testosterone just coursing through my body at an age before, like, I knew how to reason.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. This is Sapolsky again. And when I told him about this, he said that the reasoning part of Patrick's brain... It's this area called the frontal cortex. Whose job it is to tell you like, hey, maybe let's not put acid in our classmates' drink. It makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do. That part of his brain was not really online yet. It's the last part of our brain to fully mature. Not until you're about 25 years old.

There's this lag time between when Patrick's body matured and when his brain did. And the fact is, we all experience some version of this lag time. Like, even if you go through puberty at a typical age, it's still going to be way before you turn 25. And this is why juveniles behave in juvenile ways.

It's so weird to see it spelled out so clearly. Like we have humans have this built-in decade at least where they have a fully mature body and

full of fully mature impulses and a little pea brain that doesn't know how to wrangle with them. Like that, that feels like a glitch in the design. Like that feels like a problem. Yes. But according to Sapolsky, there's a reason that we're set up this way. If you're trying to get this part of the brain that tells you to do the right thing, even though it's the harder thing, it takes a hell of a long time for you to learn what counts as the right thing.

It's complicated. "Thou shall not kill. On the other hand, if you kill one of them, we're going to be really nice to you. Never ever lie, but if you're harboring refugees in your attic and the guys in the brown suits are there coming for them, you should lie to them. That's messy stuff." And over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, "There's been selection to delay frontal maturation." to give the brain time to learn the rules.

But the downside is you come up with adolescence and adolescent behavior because there's this mismatch for quite a few years. For all of us, that gap is big. But for Patrick, it was enormous.

Wait, so when you went to, they took you to, I mean, they booked you. The police did. Did they, did they file any charges or anything? They didn't file charges. They didn't file charges, luckily. I should say we reached out to the girl whose drink Patrick and his friends put the LSD in. She's grown up. She has a successful career. She did not want to do an interview with us. And because of that, we don't really know what the aftermath of that event was like for her. But-

Patrick, after this incident, he did not go to jail, but he did get expelled. From the entire school district. And in 1993, his parents decided to send him off to a military school in Indiana. Thinking that separating me from my friends in L.A. and from the things I was doing in L.A. and that world would, you know, would help me. But...

It didn't. They told me that I had amassed more infractions in the six months that I was there

than any cadet in the history of the school. Things didn't really turn around for Patrick until... Weirdly, he went back to where he kind of bottomed out. Yeah, so then I came back to Santa Monica, and they let me back in. When Patrick was in the ninth grade, so he's 15 years old now, his parents convinced the school district to take him back, and he transferred to this big public high school. And when I came back...

from Indiana, like I was still smoking pot every day. I was still hanging out on the street. But I was older now and there was a different feeling about it. And I started to like have these glimpses of what it looked like, you know, down the road. Because I would like hang out with these people.

you know, like on Venice Beach or like, you know, like I wouldn't encounter these people. I would like get high with them or skateboard with them or whatever. And I just had this moment like where I remember coming home from school and I had Spanish homework to do and I was too stoned to do my Spanish. Like there was just no way that I couldn't, I could barely read. I was like, and I had like a minor panic attack and I was like,

Like, I'm going to end up homeless. Like, I'm going to end up, you know, on the street if I don't make a change, you know? And so it almost was overnight. He stopped cutting class, started going to school. And when he did, he noticed something. The other kids were catching up physically to me. I no longer stuck out. And I just...

I don't like the, you know, for my entire life, I had been under a microscope. And so when I finally ended up at this big, anonymous, just kind of factory of a school, like I was like in the pond with everyone else and sort of swimming at the same pace, you know, and it was very, it was liberating. And in that last stretch of high school, he did a complete 180.

Got his grades up. Made new friends. And eventually, Patrick does that too. He applies to and manages to get into Dartmouth College. He goes to an Ivy League school.

And he says once he got there, he would walk around on campus just kind of marveling at how unremarkable he felt there. You know, just like, oh, I'm like a high achieving like Dartmouth student, you know, who's like, you know, I'm just like a normal male. This precocious puberty, this thing that had defined his whole life to that point, just felt like it was gone.

You know, because it's not like I have like a deformity on my face because of what I went through as a child. There's no outward sign that I had this very unusual childhood. It's interesting because like so many disability stories I've heard don't work this way. Like you're...

It's like it usually goes like either you come out and you are disabled and you come to some form of acceptance or whatever, or like you...

are non-disabled and then you become disabled. And this is a story where it's like early, early someone becomes, like has a kind of disability or a difference. You're so right. Usually the story is like, and then I came to terms with my disability and I learned to find a way to live my life in my way. And this is like, no, he gets a free pass back to normie land, you know? Yeah, no, I think that's very astute. You know, I could kind of like go under the radar. ♪

And that's how it stayed, a secret about his past. Until many years later, almost by surprise, Patrick was confronted with a decision that forced him to dredge it all back up.

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It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I've spent the past four years investigating a crime. When you're driving down this road, I'd plan on killing somebody. A rock. A rock.

A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years. Did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. Season three of In the Dark is available now, wherever you get your podcasts. Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. So...

Where else do we go? It feels like your protagonist, your guy, Patrick, came of age. Where are we going? Okay, so there's one more part of the story. So, okay, so let's fast forward to several years ago. Patrick is an adult at this point. He's become, he's a writer. He's a successful screenwriter. Has even written on a Marvel movie or two. Which one? The one that I know is incredible.

Which was the movie that Chloe Zhao directed for Marvel. So it actually had this one character. There's a character named Sprite. Who, in a weird way, sort of reminded him of himself. She is, you know, there are these immortal creatures who have come to Earth and...

Sprite is trapped as a teenager, but she's 7,000 years old. And so, you know, in many ways, it's the inverse, you know, of sort of what I went through, you know, but I always, like, her plight... Made sense to him, given what he had been through. And I'm not saying that...

I was a superhero as a kid, you know, but I, you know, I definitely bring my experience of feeling different and feeling other and yet also sort of having, you know, abilities that my peers didn't have.

So, you know, Patrick wrote some of that into the movie, but for most of his adult life. I didn't talk about precocious puberty and I didn't want people to think of me as different. And that's how it was as he finished college, started his career, met his future wife. My name is Meredith Brower. Was there a thing that

that drew you to him that you felt like that was like, this was the, this was the guy. I mean, Patrick is obviously very handsome. I can objectively say he's, and if it's for radio, I can objectively say he's a very handsome guy. So he's like hot. Yes. Um, but also as, as he and Meredith fell in love and got married and started to build the life they wanted to have together, it gradually became clear to Patrick that that thing that made him different was,

wasn't actually gone. Interestingly, when we started to try to get pregnant on our own, we didn't have many frank conversations about the possibility of having a son with precocious puberty. But we ended up having a really hard time getting pregnant. My wife and I, we had to do in vitro fertilization.

And it was at that moment where they were like, oh, wait a second. Maybe like we should go in and like biopsy these suckers to like see if which ones have precocious puberty.

So the thing about IVF, which you may already know and which they definitely knew because by coincidence, Meredith herself is an IVF doctor. But so the thing is that when you do IVF, doctors typically create several embryos. And you actually have the choice. You can choose which ones you want to use. The technology is available that you could screen for the mutation in an embryo. And just pick one that doesn't have it.

I really did feel like it was his decision to make. You know, I was worried about it. Patrick says he was pretty split. It was like going to cost a bunch of money and it was, you know, it's like an invasive procedure, like you don't know. But on the other hand, his childhood was rough. You know, why would I roll the dice and sort of

chance that it might happen to my child. Like, isn't my job as a parent to kind of prevent, to prevent hardship for my child? So he's trying to figure out what to do. And then one day he's like driving home, pulls up to his house,

And his dad calls. Now, remember, his dad does not like to talk about precocious puberty, which is why he didn't talk to us, to be honest. It's like the era of which we do not speak. It's like the dirty war in Argentina or something. You know, it's like, like they, he just. But it's all Patrick can think about right now. You know, so I told him, I was like, look, you know, I'm concerned about precocious puberty and, you know. Explained how because they were doing IVF, they could test the embryos, pick one that doesn't have it.

And my dad, he was kind of like, why the hell are you going to do that? He was sort of like, like, what the hell's wrong? You know, he it's like a mix of kind of being defensive about like or being sort of too proud to admit that like this is a difficulty that like he had and that he passed on to me and that I could pass on. Like, I think there's like some shame there.

in there and some denial. But then he also said something to me that kind of resonated, you know, which was that, like, this is, like, this definitely shaped me, like, more than anything else in my life. And he's like, you know, I don't know. He's like, you know, in a way, in a way,

You know, testing for precocious puberty, like testing these embryos for precocious puberty and selecting them out is, you know, in a sense, kind of like rejecting experience. So your father was saying this is the thing that.

That formed you that defines you define that defines you. Yeah. And so why would you reject it? Yeah. Why would you deny your child the thing that shaped you? Right. And why and why would you stigmatize the thing that that is this thing that is.

you know, such a part. That makes you one in a million. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly, and he, you know, and it came, like him saying this to me, it came out of love. You know, he's like, I love you so much. Like, why, like everything about you, like, why would you deny that? As hard as it was. Yeah. So. Oh. Yeah.

So we didn't do, you know, we didn't do that test. And we kind of just got, you know, we prepared for the scenario in which our baby would have that. And, you know, kind of hope for the best. A few weeks ago, I went to meet up with Patrick and his son. I'm wearing pumas. He's eight years old now.

Showed off some of his skateboard tricks. Sometimes it takes me a lot of warm-ups. And when I asked him about puberty... I would say... He said... I don't know. Kind of exactly what you would expect an eight-year-old who is not going through puberty to say. I know it's when you get a little older.

Mm-hmm. It happens when you get a little older. So that means he does not have the mutation? He doesn't have precocious puberty? That's right. He does not have it. Precocious puberty. He knows what it is, though. It means that you get...

You get puberty when you're, like, really young, like two or three years old. Patrick has talked to him about it. Well, I felt very, very surprised. It's just crazy. He told his daughter about it, too. It's just crazy that that actually happened. She's six, also doesn't have precocious puberty. The condition Patrick has only affects boys. Girls can be carriers, though. And Patrick says there is a test for that.

But it feels like doing that might be a bit premature. We can go to the skate park in like 20 minutes, okay? I was thinking maybe we could play a game of Go Fish. Yeah! In like 20 minutes. In like 20 minutes, hold on. Where are the carts? Daddy, did you know? Today?

This episode was reported by me, with help from Kelsey Padgett, Akedi Foster-Keys, and Alyssa Jung-Perry. It was produced by Pat Walters, Alex Neeson, and Alyssa Jung-Perry, with help from Akedi Foster-Keys. Mixing help from Arianne Wack, fact-checking by Diane Kelly, and edited by Pat Walters. Special thanks to Nick Burley, Alyssa Voss at the NIH, and to Craig Cox, who...

was the one who first introduced me to Patrick and his story. To read Patrick's own writing about his precocious puberty and to see photos of him as a child, check out his article in The Cut, which is linked on our website. That's it from us. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab 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. ♪

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