I suspected his health had declined when WWDTM changed to having the voice of anyone currently on the show as a prize, but as good as Bill Kurtis is sometimes I miss Carl Kassell's voice.
I see that they fixed the URL. Original URL ended with "npr-newscaster-carl-kasell-dies-at-XX-after-a-lifelong-career-on-air", I assume because NPR of course knew of his condition and had an obituary prepared and ready-to-go in a celebrity file; they updated the headline but forgot to update the URL.
... Oddly, that makes me smile. I had the privilege and pleasure of volunteering with public broadcasters in my hometown as a kid; it was an amazing bunch of people. Talented, smart, and always finding ways to do more with less and skin-of-their-teeth their way into quality productions (live and pre-taped) with a dozen SNAFUs the public almost never saw. I like to imagine Carl would have smiled to see that error sneak through in his sendoff story.
Yes, almost certainly they had his obituary prepared years ago. I was an intern at NPR HQ and was once tasked with updating prepared obits with additional news.
Later, as a production assistant, I wrote an obit for Billy Graham. This was in 2008. No idea if this ended up being the one that would eventually air 10 years later.
I’ve lost people to slow deaths from cancer, and Alzheimer’s, and while both are horrendous, Alzheimer’s scares me more. Nobody should go through that, and no one should have to see someone else lose everything they ever were. It is a total nightmare, and yes as you say, very costly. The person I knew lingered for the better part of a decade, and in addition to being emotionally devastating, it was financially difficult as well. Most people are not going to be able to afford decent care, and even with money it’s hard to find good care. You have to make a lot of surprise visits even on the best places to make sure the person you love is being properly taken care of. In the average care facilities it’s grim, and the below-average ones are hell on earth.
If I developed dementia, while I still could I’d kill myself.
I couldn't believe the numbers when I read them. I fully expected that we were doing more. Breast cancer is over funded, and Viagra is about $70/pill but this debilitating disease is forgotten about until individuals are themselves forgetting.
it is not for want of trying. Eli Lily bet the farm and lost, and they aren’t alone.
At this point, we’re beginning to think previously unthinkable thoughts like “what if the hypothesis the last 20 years of research was based on (beta amyloid plaques)is just totally wrong”.
we’ve made drugs that reduce plaques. they don’t ameliorate the disease.
And even if said amyloid hypothesis was correct; I suspect by the time you see plaques, a lot of neurons have already died, i.e. horses have left the barn.
The resources and money that was wasted on some of those studies is tragic, and it was facilitated by an attitude in both industry and academia that the few scientists throwing rocks at the amyloid hypothesis were wing nuts. Tragic, and there is great amount of work to do even as some big Pharma are walking away from this area of research.
I know we all see at least half a dozen of these a year, but nobody can say in advance how they'll turn out (unless it's just obviously badly designed research). This line of inquiry certainly seems to have some promise.
Always worth looking into. To my knowledge, previous studies have produced things like "these 600 genes are regulated in a particular way in patients who were diagnosed with Alzheimers", which is much less persuasive of an argument; the contribution power per gene is quite low in that case.
If you can conclusively say "these n<5 genes are exactly the things that make people 50% more likely to develop a disease", you're cooking with gas.
Bummer. I loved his read of the news segments during Morning Edition. So much so that I asked he record the voicemail message doing a similarly styled opening.
I wonder why the title has been edited away from the actual title "NPR Newscaster Carl Kasell Dies At 84, After A Lifelong Career On-Air"? Normally titles get edited to the original on HN and not everyone is going to know who he was (I didn't) :-)
I would ask dang. It seems somewhat like the style here is now to title the post "Firstname Lastname Has Died" to be as neutral as possible, but I could be wrong.
