Retro Report on PBS

[ Suspenseful music plays ] [ Clock ticking ] -Ow.

-Tonight on "Retro Report," understanding the present by revealing the past.

First, forensic experts now have a new tool for solving cold cases.

-Genetic genealogy.

-I found a body.

It was dismembered.

-That kicks off this revolution into how we use DNA to solve crimes.

-And, a game that is being heralded as an alternative to screen time... -It's called "Dungeons & Dragons."

-...was itself at the center of a moral panic in the '70s.

-The witchcraft, the demonism, the spells.

-It is not fun and games.

-Then, the promise, and peril, of artificial intelligence.

-This was the Terminator come to potentially take down the humans.

-And, the latest chapter in one of the most horrifying episodes in medical history.

-I had used up every other alternative when I took thalidomide.

[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] -Plus, Andy Borowitz, humorist for The New Yorker magazine, on news that wasn't.

-A vault that might, or might not, have been Al Capone's.

-Who knows?

I don't.

-I'm Celeste Headlee.

-And I'm Masud Olufani.

This is "Retro Report" on PBS.

-They have stunned the world.

-Oh, my God!

-Unusual.

-More secrets exposed.

-Today, with a swab of your cheek, do-it-yourself DNA kits promise to unlock everything, from your future health risk to a map of your ancestry.

But the biggest breakthrough may well be for law enforcement.

A growing number of cold cases are being solved using DNA data that private citizens have submitted to genealogy websites, and that's opening up a whole new range of concerns about the power of DNA and the perils to our privacy.

-This story really begins in the 1980s, not in a high-tech DNA lab, but when police in a sleepy New Hampshire town found a mysterious barrel in the woods.

Little did they know that it would put them in the middle of today's DNA controversy.

-We've called this press briefing today because we have additional information regarding the Allenstown, New Hampshire, murder case.

-This case, I don't know what to call it but was really a one-in-a-million chance.

I don't know if it was meant to be or if it's just happenstance, but it was certainly not something that was foreseen by anyone.

-Based on DNA testing and genealogical research, we've identified three of the Allenstown murder victims.

-And, now, with the use of genetic genealogy for law enforcement purposes, I think we've seen the next big breakthrough.

-Genetic genealogy.

-Genetic genealogy.

-Genetic genealogy.

-Thanks to the rise in personal genetic testing kits, a big break has led to an arrest in an infamous cold case.

-Law enforcement agencies used the technique in at least 11 -- -15 -- -43 cases nationwide.

-This is the most significant happening in criminal investigations in decades.

-The promise is real; and the technology, cutting-edge, but today's use of DNA science and genealogy research to solve crimes arose out of a tangled cross-country police investigation sparked by a curious telephone call made nearly 20 years ago.

-In September 2002, a friend contacted our sheriff's dispatch to report that her friend Eunsoon had been missing.

The deputy went out to the residence and contacted Eunsoon Jun's common-law husband, a gentleman by the name of Lawrence William Vanner.

-Vanner acted suspiciously, and police brought him in for questioning.

-You're not my priest.

-No.

-And you're not my doctor.

But I'm just not gonna say any more about Eunsoon, or myself right now.

-Maybe she hurt herself and you're concerned about that getting out, that she's harmed herself.

-No.

-Vanner was a complete enigma.

-There was no driver's license.

There was no criminal history and that's really unusual.

That's like a ghost person.

-On the ride to the Records Bureau for fingerprinting, Detective Gruenheid struck up a conversation in the backseat.

-Whenever you're interviewing somebody, you always wanna try to find some sort of common thread and I said something, you know, "Where'd you grow up?"

And all of a sudden, he stopped and he looked at me.

He had these bright, piercing blue eyes.

And he kinda like leaned in a little bit and he said, "That's none of your damn business."

[ Clicking ] -Alright, Larry.

Your prints came back.

-Or... -You know your other name, right?

-Curtis or Gerald or Gerry, or whatever name you're goin' by this week.

-Curtis Kimball.

-Curtis Kimball.

– Curtis Kimball: That's how his fingerprints identified him.

He'd jumped parole and had been on the run for 12 years.

Gruenheid went back to search Jun's house.

-My partner and I went around to the garage.

My partner took a few steps in and he told me, "You need to come in here and take a look at this."

-Inside was an enormous mound of cat litter.

Scraping some of it aside revealed a human foot, with a flip-flop still on it.

Eunsoon Jun was no longer missing.

Vanner, charged with Jun's murder, was soon connected to another alias: Gordon Jenson.

Jenson had abandoned a five-year-old girl named Lisa, believed to be his daughter, 16 years earlier at a Northern California RV park.

Gruenheid tracked down information about Lisa, now an adult, and a DNA test revealed that Lisa wasn't his daughter, after all.

-I'm reading all through this and my mind is goin', "Where did he get this girl?"

-Investigators do not know her identity and so Lisa becomes a sort of living Jane Doe.

-And, because of all his aliases, police had no idea who the man really was.

-It became a quest of mine to try to identify her and identify him.

-It was 1985 and there were a group of kids who lived in the Bear Brook Gardens trailer park.

And they were basically playing hide-and-seek.

And they found a barrel.

They didn't realize what they had actually found until later that fall, when a hunter came across the same barrel.

-I was on routine patrol.

I was dispatched to the area of Bear Brook Gardens number 1 and that's when I found a body that was decomposed and, um, it was dismembered.

– There are human remains of two people: one, an adult female; the other is a female child.

-But the case went cold until 2000, when a state trooper stumbled upon a second barrel, just 100 yards away from the first one.

-In the second barrel were the remains of two more victims.

These were both young girls.

They had been out there just as long as the victims in the first barrel.

-In 1985, DNA wasn't scientifically accepted in law enforcement.

We didn't even have computers.

My report was done on an IBM electric typewriter with carbon paper.

-Crime scene DNA technology burst into use shortly after the first barrel was found.

-Today, police can get what they call a DNA fingerprint.

-But, in this case, the bodies had deteriorated so badly, the samples were useless for DNA forensics of the time.

-When you don't have the identity of the victims, it's almost impossible to learn anything about who might have killed them.

-Your DNA plays a big part in defining who you are.

-But, by 2015, DNA testing had become mainstream.

-It can even unlock family mysteries from your distant past.

-And Lisa, the girl who had been abandoned at the California trailer park years earlier, still didn't know who she was, but she had an idea.

Was there a way to use the genealogy test that had become so popular to find her own family?

So police reached out to Barbara Rae-Venter, an expert in helping adoptees find their birth parents.

-I'd never worked on a Jane Doe case like this before.

She's the ultimate test of how this technique works because we quite literally knew nothing about her.

-Lisa submitted her DNA and Rae-Venter and her team began constructing her family tree.

-She had two fairly close matches.

One was on Ancestry, and then she had another match on 23andMe.

We know from matching DNA that one of Lisa's parents has to be a first cousin once removed to the matches.

-The team then used public records to build out the family trees of those matches, while police asked the newly ID'd relatives if they would submit to a DNA test, to see if they were even more closely related to Lisa.

The case would become a proof of concept for law enforcement.

-It took upwards of 10,000 hours to do this, but, eventually, they did narrow down Lisa's family tree to a family in New Hampshire.

-In July of 2016, Rae-Venter and police felt they finally could tell Lisa who she was.

Her name was Dawn Beaudin and, as an infant, she and her mother, Denise, had gone missing from Manchester, New Hampshire.

-One Thanksgiving, Denise's family comes over to visit and she's gone.

The house is empty and that was the last that they had seen of her.

And, at the time, she had a boyfriend who was going by the name Bob Evans.

-So, who the heck is Bob Evans?

-To answer that question, New Hampshire authorities turn to a photo sent to them by police in California.

-They sent a picture of the guy who had been Lisa's abductor, who had a whole string of aliases.

He used the name Larry Vanner.

-The state police came to my house.

They took a picture, threw it on the table and said, "You know who that is?"

And I said, "Yeah.

That's Bob Evans."

-Mark Gelinas knew this man.

They worked at the same New Hampshire mill in the '80s.

After 30 years, authorities announced they knew who the Bear Brook murderer was, after DNA tests revealed that his biological daughter had been inside one of the barrels.

-In New Hampshire, he was known as Bob Evans.

[ Camera shutters clicking continuously ] -He's a serial killer: Eunsoon Jun and the Bear Brook victims.

Lisa's kidnapping, he was the same guy.

And what happened to Denise?

We don't know.

-Bob Evans never answered for his Bear Brook victims.

He died in prison in 2010 after pleading guilty to the murder of Eunsoon Jun.

-But the investigation into the identity of Lisa kicks off this, you know, revolution into how we use DNA to solve crimes.

-After Bear Brook, detectives in California wondered if the same DNA techniques could be used to help solve one of America's biggest mysteries.

[ Exhaling forcefully ] -[whispering] Gonna kill you.

-The Golden State Killer.

-The Golden State Killer.

-Violent and ruthless rampage started in the 1970s.

-I was pretty confident that we could solve it.

It's exactly the same technique.

-Commercial genealogy websites, like ancestry.com and 23andMe, say it's their policy not to allow law enforcement to search their databases, so Rae-Venter used GEDmatch, an open-source database where people voluntarily upload their DNA profiles.

Sixty-three days later, she had a match.

-Tonight, a four-decade-old search for one of history's most infamous serial killers may be over: the elusive Golden State Killer.

-The Golden State Killer changed everything.

-After that arrest in 2018, genetic genealogist CeCe Moore began working with law enforcement, after GEDmatch clarified its policy.

-That meant people now knew, and had the choice, to have their DNA used in this way or not.

I had received dozens and dozens of inquiries asking if I could use my techniques.

-In the past year alone, Moore and her team at Parabon NanoLabs have used genetic genealogy to unearth new information about more than 50 cold cases.

-The suspect's DNA, collected at the scene, was used to identify his ancestors, which, in turn, led us to the identification of Talbott.

-With detectives narrowing in on people, based on the DNA of their genetic relatives, privacy concerns are growing.

-Everyone wants to catch the bad guy.

My question is, though, "At what cost?"

-Delegate Sydnor with House Bill 30.

-My DNA is my DNA and my DNA will be my children's DNA and their children and their children's children, so, when you allow government to begin usin' these techniques, you're essentially creatin' a huge genealogical dragnet that, even if I consented, my children, their children, their children's children, they never consented to.

-In May 2019, GEDmatch changed its policy, so users have to opt in to allow for law enforcement searches.

-Most people would agree that solving cold cases and identifying remains are worthy and noble causes, but, you start talking about a big database full of everyone's DNA, you know, I think people start to get a little nervous.

-Today, an estimated 29 million people have added their DNA to the leading databases and, while those are private, people still continue to upload their profiles to publicly available databases.

-Essentially, we're chasin' after a genie that's already been let out of the bottle and tryin' to figure out how to contain it, how to regulate it.

-In the Bear Brook case, Rae-Venter used genetic genealogy to discover one final detail about the murderer.

-In New Hampshire, he called himself Bob Evans.

[ Camera shutter clicking continuously ] That man's real name was Terry Rasmussen.

-And, after an amateur genealogist heard Jason Moon report Rasmussen's identity in his podcast, she helped police identify the other three Bear Brook victims.

But Lisa's mother, Denise Beaudin, remains missing, and no one knows how many other victims Rasmussen may have claimed.

-I've always tried to live by the motto that there's no defense against the truth.

But sometimes it's hard to find out what the truth is.

-Genetic genealogy raises really interesting questions about who owns genetic information.

It's really hard to find analogies to it in other areas of science and the law because your DNA is simultaneously the most personal thing about you, but it's also shared amongst all of us.

-Drug company executives are under pressure to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

They've even been called to testify before Congress.

But it's not the first time.

-In the late 1950s, a similar conversation over drug pricing was soon overtaken by one about safety when a tragedy began to unfold.

A pill given to pregnant mothers was leading to devastating birth defects worldwide.

-That pill was thalidomide and it's largely responsible for the drug safety system we currently rely on.

-Pharma executives, all of you that are here today are here because the way you've been doing business is unacceptable.

-Drug company executives were recently called to testify about what has led to America's skyrocketing prescription drug costs.

-Let me just say I think that you charge more here because you can.

-One drug they focused on was Revlimid.

-Today, it sells for about $18,000 for a 21-day supply.

-Revlimid is a derivative of a drug called thalidomide and, long before it became a poster child for rising drug costs, thalidomide was a cautionary tale for drug safety.

That story begins in the 1960s, with a warning from the president.

-Every doctor, every hospital, every nurse, have been notified.

Every woman in this country, I think, must be aware that it's most important that they check their medicine cabinet and that they do not take this drug.

-Only two years earlier, thalidomide, a sedative billed as the latest pharmaceutical marvel, had been set to arrive on American shores.

-A hypnotic, as the doctors call it, that was the answer to a prayer.

-The hallmark, defining quality of thalidomide was its safety.

So safe that, in Germany, there was no prescription needed.

-The German company that developed thalidomide, Chemie Grunenthal, claimed that even pregnant women could take it.

-The drug company had handed out samples of this drug all over the place, starting with employees of its own company.

On Christmas Day in 1956, a baby girl was born in Germany without ears.

And she was the daughter of an employee of the drug company Grunenthal.

-No immediate connection was made to thalidomide, which soon sold almost as well as aspirin in some European countries.

-We received it in quantities of like 1,000 pills.

There was tremendous pressure all over the world to get this wonderful new drug on the market.

-They had two million tablets ready to go the moment the FDA approved the drug, which was almost a foregone conclusion, until one doctor came along and began working at the FDA.

-It just so happened that my first application was for the drug thalidomide.

I got this because I was new and they thought I should have an easy one to start on.

-But Dr. Kelsey was uneasy with what she saw as the lack of rigorous scientific studies.

-The best thing that could be said about thalidomide at the time was simply that you could not kill a rat, no matter how much thalidomide the rat ate.

-With thalidomide being prescribed for morning sickness in other countries, Kelsey became particularly concerned with what effect it might have on a developing fetus.

In June of 1961, an article appeared, promoting its safety during late pregnancy.

-It was allegedly written by a Dr. Ray Nulsen, but, in fact, the article was written by the medical director of the drug company.

-About six months later, long ignored evidence became public in Germany, linking thalidomide to a rash of birth defects.

Although hundreds of thousands of pre-market samples had been provided to American doctors, Dr. Kelsey's stubborn delay of the drug's approval for more than a year had prevented a similar scale of tragedy from unfolding in the United States.

-Dr. Kelsey was absolutely a unique hero in American history.

-But thalidomide's reach continued to be felt across the rest of the world, including in Trinidad and Tobago, where Giselle Cole was born.

-When I came along, I'm a firstborn, and they were a young, married couple.

I mean, I was never unloved or not wanted or anything like that, but I would be foolish to think that it was easy for them.

My disability is, uh -- the official term is phocomelia, coming from the Greek, meaning "shorter arms" or "flipper-like."

I think people always expect that I would've been angry and I'm certainly not angry, and never have been.

-Long discussed, but seldom implemented, major regulatory reforms were finally forced on the pharmaceutical industry following the thalidomide scandal.

-For some time, President Kennedy has tried to get Congress to approve new controls, but without much success.

Now, with the thalidomide scare, most of the opposition has melted.

-Largely, the same FDA guidelines that we live under today were created in the immediate wake.

-These regulations were too late for thalidomide's thousands of surviving victims across the world, [ Melancholy tune plays ] who soon became the story.

-Philippa Bradbourne is one example.

Her mother rejected her.

-10-year-old Carl Davies leads a relatively normal life for a boy without arms.

-One other young mother, her husband, her sister, and her doctor are charged with the mercy killing of her deformed infant.

-I'm one of the lucky ones in that my parents were adamant that I was their daughter and their daughter first, before anything else, and it was treated as such.

Many were put in homes because they just didn't know what to do.

Some families battled with doctors to have amputation of fingers and toes or whatnot to accommodate these prosthetics.

Many families were broken, irrevocably.

-Instead of quickly settling, the drug companies dug in, with Grunenthal originally arguing that the children's deformities were caused by everything from nuclear fallout to botched home abortions, anything but thalidomide.

-It was a very long and difficult process.

-British thalidomide children, so far, have not received any compensation from the rich company that made the drug which crippled them so brutally.

-Most cases were eventually settled, but litigation continues, with some survivors saying the original settlements cannot cover the cost of their specialized care.

Grunenthal didn't apologize to its victims until 2012, 50 years after the tragedy unfolded.

-They issued a statement saying that it has taken them the 50 years to come forward, to say anything, because they were shocked.

They don't have a right to be shocked.

The shock doesn't belong to them.

-Despite all that the thalidomide's victims endured over the decades, they could long take solace in one simple fact.

-Thalidomide is now banned everywhere.

-The now banned thalidomide.

-The drug was banned in 1962.

-And I would have liked to have seen it never used again.

-There's a tremendous amount of luck in science.

It's almost like an Easter egg hunt.

-In 1992, while conducting research into macular degeneration, ophthalmologist Robert D'Amato began his own hunt, this one, to find a pill that might restrict blood vessel growth.

-I started searching for drugs that cause some sort of damage to a fetus, a birth defect, and at the top of this list was thalidomide.

-After much trial and error, Dr. D'Amato finally had a breakthrough when he demonstrated that thalidomide could starve blood flow to cells, a discovery that held the potential for treating cancerous tumors.

-The people that really understood the results were excited because we had a tool that we didn't have before.

But the knee-jerk reaction was, "This is a dangerous drug.

No one would ever want to use it."

There's thousands of victims that still remain.

There had been a promise that thalidomide would never be developed again.

– We had to make a decision: what position we were going to take.

Many would have thought and expected that we would have been screaming, "No, no, no, no, no!"

-But, following a surge of reports about promising studies, that's not what happened.

-We are nervous.

We are, of course, frightened and dismayed, but we realize that this is not a perfect world.

-Thalidomide is back.

-The Food and Drug Administration says thalidomide will be the most restricted drug ever distributed.

-Female patients taking the drug will even have to submit to pregnancy tests.

-Since then, thalidomide has gone on to combat a surprising variety of diseases, from tuberculosis and Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis and leprosy.

And D'Amato's hunch about the drug's effect on cancerous tumors paid off in a groundbreaking treatment for certain types of the disease.

-Thalidomide and its derivatives have become the primary treatment for multiple myeloma.

-It's a very fine line that I walk, and many of us walk, when we think about thalidomide in today's world.

Clearly, you can see what it has done to the thousands of us who are still on this Earth.

But if it provides some kind of assistance, help, relief of suffering, then I cannot, in good conscience, be opposed.

-Brynner, who saw thalidomide's curative powers firsthand after being prescribed it for a deadly skin disease, says that the drug's circuitous history tells us a great deal about the accidental nature of drug discovery.

-It's kind of surprising, I think, to most people, to learn that drugs are, in fact, developed and then become, as they're called, a drug in search of a disease.

-But, for all its benefits, the scientific rehabilitation of thalidomide has come with a heavy cost.

-We were told this could never happen again.

-In Brazil, where the drug is used extensively to treat leprosy, researchers have documented that new thalidomide children have been born.

-Alan, who's eight, has been terribly damaged by thalidomide, which his mother took by accident when she was pregnant.

-Fifty years down the road, I would like to think that there's no such thing as thalidomide, that we have created something, we have developed something, that would allow us to bury thalidomide, literally.

Destroy it, get rid of it, so that there are no further discussions, other than a note in history.

[ Theme plays ] -The warnings are familiar.

Kids become so obsessed with gaming, they may lose all sense of reality.

But before today's video games, like "Fortnite," caused parents to panic about how kids were spending time, there was Dungeons & Dragons.

-In the 1980s, D&D players became engrossed, creating a fantasy world that some adults saw as, not only an unhealthy addiction, but a dangerous invitation to devil worship.

The twist is that, today, the imaginative role-playing in D&D may seem like an antidote to the modern obsession with screen time, and that's a far cry from the fear it once inspired.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] On a summer day in August 1979, the family of a missing teenager called a Texas investigator named William Dear with some startling information.

-Dallas Egbert had disappeared from Michigan State University during the summer session.

-James Dallas Egbert III was a 16-year-old sophomore and his family hired Dear to help find him.

-He was a computer nerd and he had a large amount of hair and carries this little briefcase.

I wasn't sure that I was being told exactly what precipitated his disappearance, so I said, "Well, I guess the best thing we can do is I'll go to Michigan State University and I'll find out for myself exactly what was going on."

When I went to his room, there was a corkboard with a series of tacks.

-In what might look like a random pattern of thumbtacks, the investigator saw what he thought could be a clue.

The shape resembled a building that was part of a network of underground campus steam tunnels, which students told him they sometimes explored.

-We set out with maps and we started going into the tunnels one morning, with press everywhere.

I entered with the idea that I did not know what I was getting into.

-But he had a hunch that it had something to do with a game that was growing in popularity.

-This is a quest in a fantasy world of castles and dungeons, monsters and dragons.

This world has become real to these people.

It's all part of a game called Dungeons & Dragons.

-Dungeons & Dragons, also known as D&D, was created by the late Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the early 1970s.

It was born out of their love for military war games, and they devised scenarios with made-up characters that incorporated their interest in history and fantasy fiction.

Gygax said it provided an escape.

-All of us, at times, feel a little inadequate, in dealing with the modern world.

It would feel much better if we knew that we were a superhero or a mighty wizard.

-The game is played in a group and the guide, or dungeon master... -You enter a very small room.

-...talks the players through the fictional, sometimes violent, adventures they will go on.

-A throw of these special dice decide the outcome of battles in an intricate scoring system.

Nothing is acted out.

The real action is in the mind.

-Okay.

Now, you guys are entering the castle.

-But some, including private investigator William Dear, worried that, while the action was imaginary, some kids might take it too far.

-You're leaving the world of reality into the world of fantasy.

It advocated murder, decapitation.

And I'm going, "This isn't a healthy game.

How can it be a healthy game?"

-That game, and Dear's hunch that Egbert was playing it in the tunnels, made great fodder for headlines.

But it was a dead end, and Dear went back to Texas empty-handed.

-It wasn't within a day or two that the phone call came in and he was still alive.

-Egbert was a complicated teenager whose disappearance was never fully explained and who later committed suicide.

-There was speculation he was the victim of a campus game called Dungeons & Dragons, but, after a month-long, nationwide search, he was found unharmed!

-Dear fed into the growing suspicions about D&D in a book that pointed to the game as a culprit in Egbert's disappearance.

But Tim Kask, who'd helped develop D&D with Gary Gygax, says Dear was just hyping the story for personal gain.

-He was a publicity hound and he knew that he could hang it on D&D and gather a lotta media frenzy, and he did!

Dallas Egbert, it's a tragic story.

Brilliant young man, sent off to university at 15.

It had nothing to do with D&D and the steam tunnels.

-Still, that attention set off an unexpected chain of events.

-Our stock took off, literally.

We sold thousands of more copies within 90 days of all that stuff happenin' and we were uppin' print runs.

That's when we took off.

-Sales nearly quadrupled the year after Egbert disappeared.

As the cult game was going mainstream, Dungeons & Dragons generated interest in two conflicting groups: people who wanted to buy it and those who wanted to ban it, and televangelists took on a new crusade.

-They are kids like yours, like the ones in your neighborhood, kids who are turning to darkness because society has shut God out.

-A conservative fundamentalist Christian group would see a game that involved satanic figures, evil figures.

That would be a source of concern.

-Dungeons & Dragons has been called the most effective introduction to the occult in the history of man.

It is a fantasy role-playing game that teaches demonology, witchcraft -- -Gygax, a religious man himself, was put on the defensive.

The company hired psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers to fend off criticism.

-There is good and evil in life and the way Dungeons & Dragons is set up is that good triumphs over evil.

-Tim Kask says that, in private, he and Gygax couldn't believe the game was being linked to devil worship.

-Without sounding disrespectful at all, we laughed our butts off most of the time.

Because it was like, "Are you kidding me?

You really think we're teaching your children demonology?"

-But the controversy grew after the news media reported that a string of teen murders and suicides had one thing in common: the killers or victims were D&D players.

– Mary Towey was killed by two friends: Ron Adcox and Darren Molitor.

The crucial point is: Can a game create psychosis, or is someone like Darren Molitor an accident waiting to happen, with or without the game?

-And that's all people are doing.

-But many grieving parents believed there was a connection.

Pat Pulling's teenage son committed suicide and she spoke publicly, claiming that his game-playing contributed to his death.

-It has been linked in suicide notes, police reports, and coroner's reports.

-Young people commit suicide for a whole variety of reasons.

In my research, I saw nothing that led anyone towards depression or suicide.

-Northwestern University professor of sociology Gary Alan Fine wrote a book called "Shared Fantasy" and studied the D&D subculture.

-They were the kind of kids and young people who didn't [laughs] go to dances or date on the weekends.

It was part of a nerd culture, I guess you would say.

-I can still throw death spells, huh, Steve?

-The D&D culture intrigued filmmakers and fiction writers.

Rona Jaffe's book "Mazes and Monsters" was loosely based on what people thought had happened to Dallas Egbert.

It was made into a movie starring a young Tom Hanks.

-Let the journey begin.

[ Eerie music plays ] -[scoff] But which way do we go?!

-They went down the storm tunnels and got to play D&D in the tunnels!

We had to like sit around a table like, like, "How awesome would it have been, if it turned out that D&D was like what they did?"

-Cory Doctorow is a writer and activist who, early on, was profiled as an avid D&D player, in this story from 1985.

-[Speaks indistinctly] The moral panic was mostly laughable.

The idea that there were people who were fundamentalist Christians, for whom Dungeons & Dragons represented some kind of existential threat to my soul was silly.

You could go around and have really satisfying arguments with, like, profoundly ignorant grown-ups.

-Over time, the Dungeons & Dragons controversy lost steam, and today, the common thread between D&D players is less likely to include any reported links to violence and more likely to involve Emmy awards and literary prizes.

Stephen Colbert and writers Ta-Nehesi Coates and Junot Daz are among the millions of smart, bookish kids who played D&D and shrugged off any sense of panic.

-People went bananas!

My mom, moral panic?

She was way more worried about us gettin' shanked, you know, or getting caught up in some nonsense.

-It was a lot of fun.

It also provided them a variety of other skills: leadership skills, negotiation skills.

-And, for Daz, as a young immigrant from the Dominican Republic, the game had special meaning.

-This was a revolution.

Being a bunch of kids of color in a society that tells us we're nothing, being permitted, under our own power, to be heroic, to have agency, to do the hero stuff, to take and be on adventures.

There was nothing like it for us.

It was very, very, very, very impactful.

-While some parents used to worry about what kids were playing, now, they're more likely to be worried about how they're playing.

– Screen time: What's the right amount for modern kids?

-Cellphones and social media have revolutionized the way we live, but how has plugging in changed the way your kids are growing up?

-This is the biggest parenting issue of our time.

-Through the 20th century, you have this tension between free play and controlled media.

I mean, we were concerned about what sitting in darkened movie theaters would do to our children.

Just wait 30 years, and they will be worried about what their children are doing and it will no doubt be something different than sexting and bullying, as we know it today.

This is not a new phenomenon.

It just changes with each new technology.

-The American Academy of Pediatrics says that, in this media-saturated age, it's important for kids to use their imaginations in free play.

-14!

-And, in a twist, the role-playing games that set off a moral panic in the past may look more like a solution to getting kids off screens and encouraging them to spend time playing face to face.

-I just catch four fireballs.

-It's a great thing, to dream yourself in other places, and it helps understand who you are.

It's just nice to spend a lotta time thinking, imagining, in a group, collaborating.

-Yeah, Bobby is awesome!

-Imagination is a good thing, man, very powerful.

[ Gong crashes ] -Whoa!

[ Applause ] [ Theme plays ] -Where would science fiction be without visions of supermachines?

Faster, smarter, and stronger than humans, and always posing a looming threat to completely wipe us out.

But it isn't just in movies.

Some tech moguls have been warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, that the machines we humans create could soon surpass us.

So, how worried should we really be?

-Some answers can be found in the legendary and widely misunderstood battle between a supercomputer and a chess Grandmaster.

[ Ethereal tune plays ] -Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

-I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

-If you had to pick our favorite fictional story about robots, the one where they wi pe out humans keeps on delivering at the box office.

[ Gunshot ] -Oh!

-"The Terminator."

-Human beings are a disease.

-Ava, I said, "Stop!"

Whoa whoa, whoa whoa whoa!

-And, recently, similar fears about artificial intelligence seem to be spilling into the news.

-The robot apocalypse could be closer than you think.

-Futuristic as all this sounds, history has some insights to offer us here because, even on the news, we've seen a version of this movie before.

In the 1990s, the media was fixated on a real-life high-stakes battle between chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov and IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.

-Everybody billed it like this was the Terminator come to potentially take down the humans.

-IBM's 3,000-pound supercomputer, which can calculate 200 million chess positions per second.

-All the major TV networks have covered it and it's been beamed to 20 countries around the world.

-I was rooting for Kasparov to kick its ass.

There's no question about it.

-While chess Grandmaster Maurice Ashley was giving live commentary on the match, Murray Campbell was rooting for Deep Blue.

He helped design it.

-Chess was commonly considered to be a grand challenge for computer science.

The earliest computer scientists said, "If we can get a computer to play chess, we've really done something."

-And, in the first round, Kasparov had the upper hand.

-He won game 1 versus the Deep Blue supercomputer.

[ Whistling and applause ] -The rematch in fantastic style.

-But game 2 changed everything.

About 35 moves in, Kasparov set a trap, but Deep Blue refused the bait.

Instead, the machine made a shrewder choice, that paved the way to a win.

-It was stunning to see a computer play like that.

When you have a choice between an aggressive, sharp, tactical move that is concrete and specific, versus a subtle positional move, that's really where the Grandmaster is shown.

-Those sequence of moves showed Kasparov that Deep Blue was playing at a level beyond what he had imagined it could do.

-A shaken Kasparov resigned about 10 moves later.

In the rest of the games, Kasparov fought to a grueling series of draws, until, in the sixth and final face-off, the exhausted human champ fell apart completely.

-There was no reason for him to play chess like this.

He never plays chess like this!

-He resigned about an hour and three minutes into the game.

-I have to apologize again.

I am ashamed by what I did at the end of this match.

-Media pronouncements on the outcome's gloomy implications were swift.

-We humans are trying to figure out our next move.

-Call it a blow against humanity.

-The victory seemed to raise all those old fears of superhuman machines crushing the human spirit.

-But computer scientists had a different reaction.

-Every time a computer does some narrow thing better than a person, there's a temptation to think that it's all over for us.

But Deep Blue doesn't play chess the way Kasparov plays chess.

Deep Blue processes information much like a bulldozer processes gravel.

-Every slice of capability that we've seen computers become really good at and even superhuman at are actually one small sort of small pieces of the breadth of intelligent behaviors that we exhibit.

-Guru Banavar helped build the digital descendant of Deep Blue: Watson.

It's a talking, self-teaching system, nimble enough to play Jeopardy!

[laughing] In fact, it became very hard to beat.

-Who is Michael Phelps?

-Yes.

Watson?

-What is the Last Judgment?

-So, how close are machines coming to outsmarting mankind?

The people working to solve some of AI's toughest problems may be in a unique position to know.

For example, before smart machines could run amok, they'll need to walk.

At MIT in 2016, Russ Tedrake led a team of engineers designing software [ Camera shutter clicking ] for one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever built.

-The level of complexity that we can deal with is absolutely state-of-the-art and beyond.

-And if machines are going to walk, they'll need to recognize what's in front of them.

A few years ago, at Stanford, Fei-Fei Li taught computer systems to describe objects they see in pictures for the first time.

-We're really on the quest for building machines and computers to have that kind of visual intelligence that eventually can match to humans.

Visual intelligence is about seeing the objects, understanding the scene, reasoning about the visual story.

-At MIT, Patrick Henry Winston has been programming systems to carry out the kind of basic reasoning people use to interpret stories.

-What is it that makes human intelligence different from the intelligence of something like a chimpanzee or a Neanderthal?

And, for me, it's the ability to tell stories.

-Each of these scientists' projects amounts to an engineering moonshot in its own right, yet, each aims to replicate just one facet of the general intelligence humans take for granted.

And, even as the technology improves, none of these researchers see a finish line in view.

-This is absolutely one of those very state-of-the-art machines.

But it is not capable of even some of the things that we'd expect a toddler to be able to do very effectively.

[ Whirring ] [ Poignant tune plays ] -[laughing] I'm not trying to say we didn't work hard and, you know, we have made a lot of progress, but I think it's important to understand we are closer to a washing machine than a Terminator.

-The closer you come to doing research in this area, the more you realize how difficult everything is.

We don't know when those discoveries will come, but they look like there's going to be many of them, not just one.

-And these scientists say it's unlikely we'll see smart machines beget vastly smarter versions of themselves overnight and totally escape human control.

That's because these AI nightmare scenarios fail to grasp a paradox that underlies much of the work in artificial intelligence.

-Things that are easy for humans are hard for computers, and things that are easy for computers are hard for humans.

We underestimate all of the things that we do so easily.

-In some ways, it comes down to common sense.

We see this problem in one of the most visible applications of AI on the street right now.

Cars owned by the Google offshoot Waymo are piloting themselves around a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, as part of an experimental driverless taxi service.

It works in part because Waymo cars follow hyperdetailed maps.

-Our maps have, down to about 15 centimeters, the location of every curb, traffic light, stop sign, driveway, and so, for a car from us to appear on your block, we need to have built a map of your block.

– The question is: What happens in more chaotic situations, that call for more commonsense understanding on the road?

-There's the sort of negotiation which has been called the social ballet of driving.

How do you write the computer code that says, "Always stop at red lights, unless there's a man on the side of the road who's a police officer and is waving you to go through the red light?"

That's a really hard thing to do.

-Obeying a traffic cop is just one commonsense task humans carry out behind the wheel and things like this remain hard for machines.

And that's why Waymos aren't likely to appear soon on your block, if the conditions aren't ideal.

AI works best on problems where there's a structured environment.

While some researchers worry millions of workers could be displaced by automation, others think our jobs will simply be transformed and one of the optimists on this issue may surprise you: Garry Kasparov.

-Human plus machine isn't the future.

It's present.

And, as someone who fought machines and lost, I'm here to tell you this is excellent, excellent news.

-As for the question about Hollywood fears?

-I'm glad you asked that, because I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan.

-...plenty of AI researchers say we're safe from those, for now.

-Alright!

[ Laughter, clapping ] -I think you can't watch this robot without thinking, "Wow, they've got a long way to go."

We like to joke, "His batteries only last an hour, so, you know, even if he ran amok, he couldn't get very far."

– Crowd: Ohhhhh!

-Does the future of journalism lie in its past?

-New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz explains.

-Mass destruction.

-Sexual relations.

-Potato.

-Fear.

-[chanting] USA!

-Aah!

-Hello.

-Aw, damn it.

-None of it makes sense.

-Maybe you guys should get a sense of humor.

-[Laughing] -I knew this is gonna wind up in a crazy place.

[ Rock chords striking ] -We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the first 24-hour news network, so, today, let's celebrate the Peabody Award-winning journalist who's had more impact on the news industry than anyone else.

-"Scarface" Al Capone may have built it, and nobody knows what's in it.

Some say money.

[ Electronic gunfire ] Some say bodies.

[Electronic gunfire] Some say it's booby-trapped.

[ Electronic gunfire ] It may be Scarface Al Capone's biggest secret, and we'll open it on live television.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] -In 1986, Geraldo Rivera changed the course of history.

He promised viewers a look at the contents of a vault that might, or might not, have been Al Capone's.

-Who knows?

I don't.

-Geraldo was prepared to knock America's socks off, a task so simple, this was the sponsor.

-Brought to you by Nice'n Easy.

-After two hours of explosions... -We're gonna blow that wall off.

[chuckle] -...and searching... -That may be significant.

We don't know.

-...all under the expert management of Geraldo... [ Air horn blaring ] ...it was time for the big reveal!

[ Drumroll, cymbals clash ] -When we began opening this vault nearly two hours ago, we had no real idea what we'd find inside.

As it turns out, we haven't found very much.

[ Triumphant music climbs ] -But Geraldo was mistaken.

He did find something in Al Capone's vault.

[ Ringing ] 30 million viewers watched!

Making Geraldo's two hours of content-free TV the highest-rated syndicated special, ever.

-[Chuckle] -Like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the creator of the Snuggie, [ Chime ] Geraldo hit upon a game-changing invention that would save the news media effort and money: replace actual news with the possibility of news.

And, with that, no-news was born.

[ Glass shatters, cash register chimes ] The first step was testing the waters with more prime-time television specials.

-What they saw was not from this world.

-"Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?"

-What we were looking at was a mermaid.

-Tonight, we may find a mummy.

-Millions of Americans tuned in to watch a fake alien, a fake mermaid, and a real Maury Povich.

[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] It was time to send up a no-news trial balloon over on actual news channels... -One of the strangest things in the history of my television career is goin' down.

-...with a story that seemed like real news, that actually wasn't.

-I was really, really worried.

-Say hi to Wolf.

His name's Wolf.

-Hi!

-Hi, guys.

-Say hi?

[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] -Yeah, who the hell is Wolf?

Find out in my new special, "Wolf Blitzer: Fact or Fiction."

[ Sultry jazz plays ] No-news was taking off.

Its long, slow, tantric burn allowed news networks to kill airtime, reporting that they were simply waiting for news to happen, a move inspired by playwright Samuel Beckett.

[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] [ Coins clinking ] But no-news had yet to pass its most daunting task.

In our tribal and divisive times, could no-news be the one thing both conservative and liberal networks agree upon?

-Donald Trump's tax returns have surfaced.

We'll go through it, next.

In just a second -- A full tax return for someone like Donald Trump would be a lot longer, but this is all we've got.

[ slow-motion ] All we've got.

-The big reveal that wasn't.

We can only imagine where Rachel Maddow got the idea.

[ Buzzer ] -I remember watching it.

It was kind of a crazy-genius idea.

One very important and lasting lesson: hype.

works.

[ Suspenseful chords striking ] -There are many hardworking journalists reporting in the Fourth Estate today, but the networks know that it's cheaper and easier to provide 24-hour content that just feels like news.

And, since people don't wanna pa y to support journalism, no-news now has the opportunity to reign supreme forever.

We can only hope that Geraldo finally appreciates just what he found in that vault.

[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] [ Cheering and applause ] -Tonight, we are live and finally going to uncover what is hidden inside Al Capone's vault!

[ Whistling ] [ Suspenseful chord strikes ] [ Cheering and applause ] [ Upbeat chords striking ] [ Suspenseful music plays ] -History is full of surprises, if you know where to look.

-"Retro Report" on PBS.

Thanks for watching.

-Next time, can a decades-old murder shed light on the way we react to violence on the Internet?

-Thirty-eight of her neighbors watched a woman die.

When it was over, they all went back to bed.

-Forty people viewed the Facebook Live video.

Not a single person called police.

-And, a drug that shook up the status quo in the '60s... -Turn on.

Tune in.

[ Cheering and applause ] Drop out.

-...is now upending modern medicine.

Plus, humorist Andy Borowitz.

-I'd like to celebrate a group of brave Americans who haven't gotten their due -- [ Whistle! ]

moon-landing deniers.

-Next time, on "Retro Report."

-This program is available on Amazon Prime Video.