Think Out Loud

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved two new gene therapies to treat sickle cell disease. Roughly 100,000 people in the U.S. live with the debilitating and painful blood disorder, most of whom are African American. One of these “milestone treatments'' is a drug using powerful gene-editing technology never before approved for human use. It can repair a mutation that produces sickle-shaped red blood cells that can lead to stroke, organ damage and premature death.  But the millions of dollars the treatments cost is just one of the barriers facing patients like Jayla Eddins, a high school senior in Salem, and her mother, Jamie Eddins, who helps manage her daughter’s illness. Dr. Trisha Wong is an associate professor of pediatrics in the division of hematology and oncology at Oregon Health & Science University. They join us to talk about the physical and emotional toll of the disease as new breakthroughs emerge to treat it. 

Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor’s new film isn’t about any one person or tree or culture. She tells a series of braided distinct stories, like English Ivy around one of the towering trees in her own backyard. Taylor interweaves her own personal story with the overlapping and intersecting narratives of George Weyerhaeuser, photographer Beth Moon, Oregon bonsai professional Ryan Neil and others, illustrating a variety of relationships between humans and trees. We talk with Taylor about the stories in “Trees and Other Entanglements” and how they come together in the film, now streaming on Max.

A new effort has launched at Oregon State University in Corvallis to specifically address the mental health needs of veterans, active duty service members and students who are dependents of service members. Don Phillips was hired in August as OSU’s new coordinator of veteran and military-connected student mental health and wellness. He served four years as an active duty Army medic, including a deployment to Iraq, and graduated from OSU in 2016 before becoming a licensed counselor. He joins us to talk about working with this specific group of students, and how his own lived experience can help reduce the stigma around talking about mental health among veterans on campus. 

The Washington Secretary of State’s Office is making a new effort to track and address misinformation about voting and elections. It recently hired the British company Logically to scan social media sites for misleading narratives that could threaten election integrity, as well as physical threats to staff, and generate biweekly reports on its findings. The move led to backlash from the state Republican Party, which called the effort “unethical” and “tyranny.” A similar contract between the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office and Logically also received backlash from the Oregon GOP and Republican state lawmakers. Jim Brunner is following these issues as a political reporter at The Seattle Times. He joins us with more details.   

About two dozen environmental organizations and eight elected officials have sent a public letter to Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum calling for her to follow up on misleading and false information put out by NW Natural about the health impacts of gas stoves. The methane-based fossil fuel has been increasingly linked to health problems, particularly asthma in children, and cities in Oregon have attempted to ban new gas hookups in new construction. Calls for greater oversight increased after an expert testified at a 2022 Multnomah County hearing on the issue, without disclosing that she was hired by NW Natural. The company has drawn criticism over its spending to send ratepayers promotional material.Now Rep. Mark Gamba, along with several of his colleagues in the Oregon House and Lane County elected officials, are asking for an investigation into the regional energy company.  They said that NW Natural’s behavior “regarding the air quality risks of its product and service is deeply unconscionable to our constituents, organizations and members, detrimental to public health, and deleterious to the public’s interest in an honest conversation about which energy mix best achieves our [s]tate’s climate and environmental goals.”  Rep. Mark Gamba (D-Milwaukie) joins us in the studio to tell us more about what the group hopes to achieve with the letter and how it fits into his legislative priorities as a new state lawmaker.

For years, conservationists have been at loggerheads about how exactly to decide what land should be preserved. Should the focus be on large contiguous tracts of land, or would it be better to focus on the most valuable, biodiverse plots of land, and save them, no matter the size? This disagreement has had real implications for landowners and conservationists and has led to fights about research, results and strategy. Matthew Betts, a professor in the department of Forest Ecosystems & Society at Oregon State University, is the co-author of a new paper that lays out a strategy for finding agreement.

Drivers license suspensions for unpaid traffic fines is an issue that affects millions of Americans across the country. An Oregon law that went into effect in 2020 halted the practice of automatically suspending driver’s licenses for people who failed to pay traffic fines on time. But the law wasn’t retroactive, so thousands of Oregonians are without licenses for exactly that reason. Last year, then-governor Kate brown made it possible for about 8,000 people to get their licenses back.Last week, Gov. Tina Kotek expanded that list to include 10,000 more Oregonians. We listen back to our 2021 conversations with Kelsey Heilman, a staff attorney with the Oregon Law Center’s Portland regional office and Tracy Chavez, a grandmother with court debt living in Bend.

Portland Rescue Mission receives thousands of pounds of donated clothing every year, which they then redistribute to people in need. Most of that clothing is lightly used and is more about keeping warm than looking flashy. So when one of the workers sorting donations spotted a bright gold pair of new Nike Air Jordan 3 sneakers, they took notice. It turns out those shoes are one of only 4 or 5 custom sneakers made for director Spike Lee and his friends. The auction house Sotheby’s values the shoes at more than $10,000. Erin Holcomb, director of staff ministry at Portland Rescue Mission, joins us to talk about what this shoe donation will mean for the organization.

Before the advent of cardboard boxes, wooden crates were used to pack apples, pears and other iconic fruits of the Northwest to ship across the region and the nation. Up until the 1950s, the crates were adorned with elaborately illustrated labels bearing the name of the orchard that grew the fruit packed inside. These fruit crate labels reflect the histories of the growers, distributors, printers and artists involved with them from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. As such, they’re coveted by collectors across the Northwest and country, as the Capital Press recently reported. Carlos Pelley is an archivist for the Yakima Valley Libraries. Mike Doty is a volunteer curator at the Yakima Valley Museum and a longtime fruit crate label collector. Thomas Hull is also a collector, and a history teacher at Davis High School in Yakima. They join us to talk about the history of the labels, which have fostered a community of collectors in the Pacific Northwest.

The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries has failed to collect nearly $5 million in wage theft claims from employers since 2015 according to a new analysis from InvestigateWest. It also found that employers in industries with more low-wage and undocumented workers, like construction and agriculture, left more wages and penalties unpaid. Kaylee Tornay, investigative reporter with InvestigateWest, joins us to discuss her findings.