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

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

First... -The world of the people who lived here bears very little resemblance to the American dream.

-...as today's wealth gap grows, surprising lessons from a little-known public housing program.

-Mothers got jobs.

Children went on to college.

-All of the other forms of segregation that exist in our society begin with, "Where do you live?"

[ Explosions ] ♪♪ -As the controversy over concussions plagues football, what can we learn from the fate of another sport associated with violence?

[ Bell dings ] Boxing.

-Anyone who continues to believe that professional football players aren't potentially shortening their life-span by playing this game is sort of living on another planet.

♪♪ -The surprising legacy of a medical case that captivated the public.

-This three-year-old boy has spent his entire life in a plastic bubble.

-And...did we overreact to fears of overpopulation?

-Panic is not too strong a word to use.

-Plus, Andy Borowitz, humorist for The New Yorker magazine, with tips on how to promote science.

-There are variations in the Earth's orbital elements.

♪♪ -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.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Congress recently approved funding for a pilot program that would help poor families who receive public housing vouchers move to new neighborhoods.

That's because of new research showing that moving to a new address, sometimes just a mile or two away, can alter the course of a child's life.

-This modern approach is actually rooted in an idea from a little-known experiment in public housing from 40 years ago.

It grew out of the struggle for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement.

[ Indistinct conversations ] [ Horns blaring ] 1966.

Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders took their fight for equality north, to one of the most segregated cities in America: Chicago.

-Clean your face the next time before ya come here!

-On top of their agenda?

Improving housing conditions and ending housing discrimination.

-Back to the jungle, you guys!

Back to the jungle!

Go, will you?!

-They're all awful.

They're all Black bastards.

-Don't ever come back!

-I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, a mob as hostile and as hate-filled as I have seen here in Chicago.

♪♪ -Many Black residents were concentrated in the worst neighborhoods, with the poorest in vast government housing projects.

-The world of the people who live here bears very little resemblance to the American dream.

-Valencia Morris and her three daughters would eventually live in one of them.

-There was garbage, junk, on the outside of the buildings.

Even in kindergarten, first grade, my daughters would get beat up on the way home from school.

They were becoming, not violent, but, on the defense.

-She said, "Listen.

Either you're gonna learn how to fight back or you're gonna keep getting beat up.

I can't help you."

My mom was starting to see how the environment was beginning to change us and so she was desperately looking to leave.

-A group of public housing residents who wanted to live in better neighborhoods with more resources turned to Alex Polikoff, a volunteer lawyer for the ACLU.

-You had virtually no options.

We'd had some 18,000 public housing apartments built almost exclusively in Black neighborhoods.

There was pervasive housing discrimination in the private market.

Realtors would not show you white neighborhoods.

If you got to a white neighborhood, a landlord wouldn't rent to you.

-Polikoff filed one of the country's first public housing segregation lawsuits, named Gautreaux.

-The suit asks the court to order that public housing be built in white neighborhoods, like this one.

-I was pessimistic about the chances.

Everybody knew why the projects were being built in the Black neighborhoods, but very few people would say so.

This was the way things were.

-The mere suggestion that residents of these buildings be dispersed has been bitterly resisted by white neighborhoods.

-Well, it's gonna bring down the value of everybody's property.

-Why do you think that?

-Well, [laughing] I don't know why.

-Yeah.

-I just, um -- You see those other projects they have and they don't take care of 'em.

-But the lawsuit came at a time when the problems and inequality in the inner cities were becoming national priorities.

And then... -Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

-One hundred cities rage wi th riot.

Thirty-nine die.

Twenty thousand are arrested.

-Seven days after King's assassination, the government banned racial discrimination in housing and, when the Supreme Court ruled in Polikoff's favor eight years later, the government would have to start providing public housing in white Chicago neighborhoods, including the suburbs.

-The effect of the case will be far-reaching, even beyond busing, perhaps even changing the structure of America as we know it.

[ Ring ] [ Indistinct conversations ] -Leadership council.

-One part of the solution was an experiment in integration that had never been tried before: giving vouchers to a few thousand families from the Chicago projects and helping them rent apartments in the suburbs.

-You had to use your voucher to move to a predominantly white, middle-class community and such communities have good schools.

They have low crime.

They're close to job opportunities.

This was a hopeful moment because a new doorway had opened up, in terms of how to deal with segregated neighborhoods.

-The Morrises were one of the first families to move.

-I immediately called and asked them to put my name on the list.

♪♪ I couldn't believe how beautiful it was, how quiet it was.

When I saw the apartments, it was unbelievable because I had never seen a dishwasher before.

-But life as one of the town's only Black families wasn't always easy.

-I would go out in the morning to get in my car and there would be rotten eggs thrown on the windshield and all over the car.

The girls would tell me that people would call them names.

They would call them nigger, baboon.

-My mom's advice was, "You have to win, period.

Keep your head up, keep your mouth shut, and win.

-My mom would insist that we had the top grades.

Whatever we did, she would talk to us as if we were going to succeed.

-There was so much that we were able to do.

Our high school had a full-size professional stage.

We had a music program.

We had all of the state-of-the-art sports equipment you could ever want.

-By the time Kiah Morris was a teenager in the 1990s, the media was taking notice of how new neighborhoods could help families succeed and the Morrises were profiled on national television.

-Are you glad your mother did what your mother did?

-Yes.

-Oh, yes.

-On the American agenda tonight, the power of new surroundings.

-The Gautreaux program was designed to promote racial integration, but it also breaking the welfare cycle.

-The social science research was startling.

Mothers got jobs.

Children who went to school went on to college.

-The residents deserve decent housing.

-Henry Cisneros, the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, hoped programs like Gautreaux could replace government-owned housing across the country, especially the high-rise projects.

-It was as segregated as you could define the word segregation in America: dilapidated buildings, unlivable places.

Some of them were national stories.

-Gang snipers and drug dealers, broken elevators, leaky ceilings, and squalid living conditions.

-And we made people live there.

The juxtaposition of that reality and a solution like Gautreaux made it very clear to me we needed to work at this, precisely at this point.

-Cisneros promoted a pilot program in five cities.

Unlike Gautreaux, it was primarily designed to target poverty, not segregation, but it shared the same concept: moving public housing families to wealthier neighborhoods.

-We're gonna provide you help finding an apartment, getting your children placed in school.

-Soon, moving families from the projects to the suburbs created another public backlash.

-Twice this week, parts of East Baltimore County have gathered to try to stop MTO, Move to Opportunity.

-Let's put a stop to it, folks!

-The people who would be sent out would be those who needed serious counseling, would need to be taught to take baths and not to steal.

-And, 10 years later, when Lawrence Katz studied the nearly 5,000 families in Moving to Opportunity who did move, the results were disappointing.

-We're seeing very little in terms of the economic outcomes for the parents and very little in terms of things like test scores for the kids.

-The early success of Chicago's Gautreaux program looked like a fluke and both Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity came to an end.

No new families would be moved.

-The conventional wisdom became "Mobility doesn't work."

Government was not willing to consider it as a policy.

-By then, the Morris family had already left the suburbs and moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago.

-I needed to just be around a diverse community.

I wasn't necessarily accepted by all of the white friends that I had and I was too white, on some levels, for the Black kids that had moved into the community since then.

-She grew up in the suburbs, so, as far as knowing African Americans, she didn't really know how we are, so I said, "I need to get back into Chicago before she loses her identity."

♪♪ [ Explosions ] -Since then, many of the high-rises have come down and vouchers have became the largest part of the country's public housing program, but the vouchers often don't come with enough money or assistance to help families live in better neighborhoods and, in many cities, racial, and economic, segregation remain a problem.

-All of the other forms of segregation that exist in our society begin with, "Where do you live?

Where do you stay?"

And the effects of that segregation may be harsher than ever.

-In some places, poverty got even more concentrated.

-People don't feel that they have full access to what most Americans and what people here would call the American dream.

♪♪ -In 2014, Lawrence Katz saw new research on the importance of neighborhoods and decided to find out what happened to the children from Moving to Opportunity and, now that the youngest children had grown up, he discovered something policymakers hadn't predicted.

-We're seeing them earning 30% more than a kid who didn't get the opportunity to move to a better neighborhood.

We're seeing college-going rates increase dramatically.

We couldn't see that when the kids weren't old enough.

-It turned out the program wasn't a failure at all.

-Neighborhoods and childhood development are long investments and one has to have some patience.

Most things that are investments take a while to pay off.

-I am publisher and editor of The Brooklyn Reader.

My middle sister, Jamillah, is a professor in Central Illinois.

-And, in 2014, her youngest sister, Kiah, became the second Black woman to be elected to the Vermont legislature.

-I'm proud and honored to be the first person of color, ever, to come out of Bennington County.

I'm the first Black woman to be elected into the House in 25 years.

If we were not given this opportunity, would I be here today?

And there were specific requirements.

There's someone that deserves that chance, to have the energy to do the hard work that it takes to get ahead, and you can't do that when you're under the weight and the oppression of poverty.

You just cannot.

♪♪ -There are a lot of things that I can feel proud about and I know, in the back of my mind, that it has nothing to do with me, necessarily.

It had to do with my circumstances.

When my mother gave me the license to start fighting, that was gonna probably be my life.

I would've been someone completely different.

It would've been a big waste of a person.

♪♪ -But, Kiah Morris says, it'll take more than new neighborhoods to create change.

In late 2018, she resigned from the Vermont legislature after more than a year of racial harassment by a reported white nationalist.

-For two years, [crying] we lived in my husband's childhood home, feeling unsafe.

-She says not enough has been done to fight the problems that led to the Gautreaux housing program, in the first place.

-There's no way that we can look at what's happening in our country right now and say that we've dealt with the issues of racism.

We didn't do the work in the Civil Rights Movement.

That work did not get completed.

We never dealt with the underlying racism that established segregation, to begin with.

-Nobody picks where they're born or chooses where they're raised as a child.

You play the cards that you're dealt with.

I just think it's unfortunate that the cards in our hands are, after 30 [scoffing] years, still...unequal.

-Today, it's the potential economic benefit of new neighborhoods that's getting attention.

Lawrence Katz is working with cities trying new experiments in moving public housing families, using detailed data on income and incarceration rates to find the neighborhoods most likely to help children escape poverty.

-We're losing people who could be innovators.

We're losing people who could be artists and we could have a much more vibrant society, if we had less concentration of poverty and social problems.

♪♪ -The diagnosis of rare illnesses has come a long way.

Just a simple blood test of a pregnant woman can reveal a host of genetic anomalies before a baby is born.

-This testing can be traced, in part, to a strange and singular medical case from almost 50 years ago.

The patient's name was David Vetter.

To the world that became fixated on his remarkable story, he was known as The Boy in the Bubble.

-Last December, every newborn in the nation began to be screened for a rare genetic disease called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID.

It was a groundbreaking moment.

-Babies that are picked up at birth with SCID have a 94% chance of successfully going on and leading a normal life.

-But the achievement might never have been possible, were it not for the story of one little boy.

-David was born September 21, 1971.

I heard the first sounds of life and he was placed in a isolator, in a bubble, that was a few feet from me.

We thought that the immune system was just slow to develop.

There was never any plan to keep David in there, in the bubble, indefinitely.

-The sterile bubble was the brainchild of doctors who feared the worst: severe combined immunodeficiency, a rare genetic defect that had taken the life of David's brother the year before.

But it fell short of a cure.

-There was a gradual realization that his immune system was not going to spontaneously function, so I trusted science would find an answer for us next year, then, the next year.

-This three-year-old boy you see in that picture has spent his entire life in a plastic bubble.

-To expose him to the air would be to kill him.

-His food, clothes, and toys have to be sterilized and placed inside the bubble with sterile rubber gloves.

-As the years passed with no solution... -Since his birth six years ago, David has lived in a plastic world.

-...America tuned in to watch the milestones of his curious life unfold.

-The scientists who sent men to the Moon have achieved another first.

They have found a way to open up the world of a small Houston boy who has spent his life inside a sterile bubble.

-That he was excited by his newfound freedom is obvious from the NASA film.

David wanted to do everything.

-I think the best portrayal of his reaction is when he held up his hands, the fascination of seeing his hands in the small gloves for the first time.

-Now, it is possible for him to play catch with his sister, and dream of even more.

-The nightly news was just the start.

Soon, his story took on a life of its own.

-John Travolta is the boy in the plastic bubble.

-David was unique, and people pay attention to things that are unique.

When he was about nine years old, he looked at me, and he said, "Well, I'm a star.

I don't have to clean my bubble," and I thought he meant like a star in heaven and I said, "Oh, yes, you are because you light up my life," and he said, "Well, not that kinda star.

I'm famous."

-But David's predicament brought him more than fame.

-Certain things would filter back about the ethics involved in keeping a boy in this germ-free environment.

-What about the day he says, "I want out of here," and you can't let him out?

-I'm not sure that the quality of life which has been created for David is going to, very long, be a desirable one for him.

♪♪ -To keep a child isolated, unable to touch or feel or smell or enjoy sounds cruel, perhaps.

What did they expect us to do, take David out of the bubble, which would've been certain death?

-Tell me the letters.

-I.

-Okay.

-T. -Okay.

-O. T. I try to do my best in school.

-I know you do.

-We all knew that a day would come when a decision would have to be made, either in or out.

Everybody knew that this isolator system, this couldn't continue forever.

-David had grown into an adolescent without a clear road forward, but medical advances were cause for hope.

-They were having success with bone marrow transplant from an unmatched donor.

Everything seemed to come into play.

He would be free, or we would go back to square one.

-At 3:00 a.m., David did receive a bone marrow transplant administered by Dr. Shearer.

-The new bone marrow, which comes from his sister, could spur his body into developing an immune system.

-Everything was just fine.

His blood pressure stayed good.

-There was nothing different.

Except, New Year's Eve, there was an elevation in temperature and, the next day, it elevated again.

-Today, David has been removed from his bubble for the first time in his life, but the reason for his freedom is not good news.

-David, the 12-year-old boy who lived in a plastic bubble until two weeks ago, is listed in critical condition tonight.

-Unforeseen things happened, and that's what we live with.

-David was always joking.

He said something to the effect that, "Here, we have all of these tubes and all of these tests, and nothing's working and I'm getting tired."

He said, "Why don't we just pull all these tubes out and let me go home?"

-12 years ago, in this country, a very unusual baby was born.

He died last night, two weeks after emerging into a world his body could not tolerate.

-Carol Ann vowed that David's life would not be in vain.

-David's story was repeated before the Congress, as a way of putting a face and a name to the problem and helping people understand why it's important to fund research.

-Dr. Michael Blaese, a gene therapy pioneer, has been studying immune deficiency diseases for more than five decades.

He says that, in the years that followed David's death, progress in bone marrow transplantation, alone, offered most children a virtual cure.

-We know that, if transplantation is done sometime in the first three months, that the chances of cure is in the range of 95%.

-But quick diagnosis was key.

-There's Brandon.

-Brandon Michael.

-He's one hour old.

-He's exactly one hour old.

-An hour old.

-Brandon looked like a healthy, normal baby at birth.

-Brandon's got his pacifier.

He's trying to put it back in his mouth.

He was eight weeks old yesterday.

-Hey, baby.

-"Hi!"

-Brandon's almost three months old.

-[Sneezes] -He's just sneezin'.

Hi, baby!

-Until he became about six months of age and came down with what we thought was his first cold.

-Yesterday, Heather had to take Brandon to the doctor because he didn't feel good.

-[Coos] -We had no family history of any kind of serious conditions, so, really, we were hoping that, whatever it was that Brandon had, he was going to be able to fight and get over.

Unfortunately, instead of getting better, he got progressively worse.

-Within days, she was rushing Brandon to the hospital.

-His fingernails were blue.

His lips were blue.

It was quite obvious that he was struggling to breathe.

-But, for three weeks, doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with the child.

-It was after the skin biopsy came back that they first told us they thought he had SCID.

They explained to me a little bit more: "We don't put babies in bubbles anymore, but what we do for them to treat this is a bone marrow transplant."

However, they said, at that point, that Brandon was just way too sick.

"We've done everything that we can for him and, unfortunately, we're going to have to turn the machines off."

All the family came in and took their turns saying goodbye.

-If you can identify the patient and get them treated, you essentially cure them, almost all of them, but, once they have that infection, that first infection, success rate drops substantially.

It's a problem of rare disease.

Patients get missed.

-Most pediatricians still couldn't recognize the signs of SCID.

Awareness of the disease had receded along with David Vetter's story, replaced in the public's mind by an image that had only the vaguest connection to the boy, who had once captivated the nation.

-What are you lookin' at?!

You never seen a kid in a bubble before?

-[Scoff] -[Nervous chuckle] -Of course I have.

Come on!

My cousin's in a bubble.

-You'll be living in this bubble.

It's clear plastic, so the world can see how normal you are.

[ Laughs ] -Such portrayals were painful to the parents of immune-deficient children, but they had one unexpected upside: publicity.

-That was very hurtful, but our driving focus is newborn screening, to let the world know that this is a condition that's still taking our babies' lives every day.

-The death of Heather Smith's first child had taught her that early detection was essential.

Forewarned, her second baby was given a landmark bone marrow transplant, while still in the womb.

Taylor is now 24 years old and has just graduated from college.

-And, to look at him, you'd have no idea that he has a condition called severe combined immune deficiency.

-Today, gene therapy is at the forefront of treating the disease.

-Doctors take out the patient's bone marrow and replace their defective gene with a healthy copy, then reinfuse the cells back into the patient.

-In 2008, advocates like Heather Smith helped push Wisconsin to begin screening all newborns for severe combined immune deficiency.

In fits and starts, other states followed suit, leading to the realization that this genetic defect was more common than generally thought.

-David's story is still helping people today, 30 years later.

-And not just as a symbol.

Important medical advances resulted from studying the young boy, from the discovery of the damaged gene that causes the most common form of SCID to another revelation.

-The little Houston boy provided a vital missing link between a common viral infection and the development of cancer.

-The final tragedy of David's life was that the transplant had initially worked, but, unbeknownst to doctors, the donor's bone marrow contained remnants of an old virus, which, when transferred into David's immune-compromised body, triggered an aggressive cancer.

It was the first time this connection had been observed.

♪♪ -What he gave us was a powerful lesson in many areas of medicine, and just in life itself.

David was a very courageous boy.

-I always thought, at some point, when David left the bubble, that he would be a researcher himself and would help mankind that way.

-Hi, Mom!

-It turned out that he is helping mankind, but in a different way.

♪♪ -The number of people who say they would discourage their kids from playing football has been steadily rising: nearly half of all Americans, according to one poll.

The worries stem from a growing body of research about the dangers of concussions and the drumbeat of reports about the brain damage sustained by professional football players.

But, could concerns about violence ever really diminish football's hold on America?

♪♪ -Every autumn Sunday, football's bone-shattering hits unhinge NFL players across the country.

-Over the past several years, the National Football League has been shaken by the controversy over the long-term impact of concussions.

-In a surprise announcement, star 49ers linebacker Chris Borland says he's retiring from the NFL, after just one season.

-Around training camp, there was an incident, just a mild concussion, and it kinda changed the way I viewed the risks of the game, the mounting evidence, and these anecdotes of guys who went through hell.

By the end of the year, I had a good idea of what I was gonna do.

For 99.9% of people in America, football's just entertainment.

[ Rock plays ] -♪ Well, it's Monday night ♪ ♪ And we're ready to strike!

♪ -But the guys on the field are real.

They're humans, and so I think it's important to remember that.

-Since Borland's abrupt retirement in 2015, other players have followed suit.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] But this isn't the first time that the inherent violence of a sport has raised questions about its future.

Thirty-five years ago, it was boxing.

-In the old days, you might turn on a television on a weekend afternoon and three networks have a boxing match on.

In '82, particularly, there was an NFL strike and, figuring NFL fans are gonna wanna see action sports, we replaced it with boxing.

-Mancini is enjoying being a world champion.

-In 1982, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, the pride of Youngstown, Ohio, had won his first world lightweight championship.

-You know, I worked so hard to get it.

I'm not about to give it up now.

-Ray Mancini was a very, very popular champion.

His whole persona was of being this just nice kid from Ohio.

The ratings for Mancini fights were great, our highest ratings of any fighter we were doing.

-In November of that year, in Las Vegas stadium, before a live CBS audience, Mancini was set to defend his title against a little-known Korean challenger.

[echoing] -Fighting from Seoul, Korea, weighing 134.25 pounds, here is Duk-Koo Kim.

-We had never heard of Duk-Koo Kim before that, but, we would look at film, videotape, whatever we could get, of him fighting, and we knew he was a very tough guy.

We didn't want a guy who was gonna run.

We wanted somebody who would stand there and exchange, and that was Kim's style.

[ Cheering ] [ Bell dings ] -And there's the bell and we are underway -- -Kim built a coffin and he put it next to his bed and he told his people, "Either Mancini's comin' home in that, or I'm goin' home in that."

Put on the lampshade, "Kill or be killed."

To him, it was a live-or-die situation.

-It was a brutal fight.

In fact, Kim was the aggressor, more than Ray, for most of the fight, but there was never a point where you thought one guy was beating the other guy to the point where a referee should've stepped in.

-Duk-Koo Kim.

You may not have heard of him before.

You will remember him today, win or lose.

-I was hittin' him with shots but he was still movin', makin' me miss, too.

He still had the wherewithal to move his body, slip, bob and weave.

You can't stop a fight when the guy has the wherewithal to do that.

[ Bell dings ] -Number one in the world and there is 21-year-old champion Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini.

[ Cheering ] -It was a great punch.

I hit him with a right shot.

He went down.

We just jumped.

It was glorious because it was a great win!

Nobody knows about -- you know, what was going into.

Nobody knew.

I planned on a long fight.

Everybody didn't know about that.

I saw films.

The guy was very, very impressive, tough, rough, hungry, determined.

Those are the worst kind.

-The next morning, I called and said, "What's goin' on?"

and he was still in the hospital and in bad shape, and then it was pretty much we all knew what was gonna happen, you know.

He wasn't coming outta this.

-I was stunned.

I was like in a dream world, you know?

From the highest of the highs to hit the lowest of the lows.

-A professional boxer lies near death tonight.

He is Duk-Koo Kim, a 23-year-old South Korean lightweight.

-The boxer's mother pleading with him to, "Please wake up," and "Open eyes," before she was led from the room, weeping.

-When you fight fighters from another country, they're fightin' for more than themselves.

They're fightin' for their whole country.

♪♪ They carry the dreams and hopes of their countrymen on their backs.

[scoff] That's a load, to fight.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] That's a hard load to fight.

-Kim's death was far from boxing's first black eye.

In the early '60s, fighters Benny Paret and Davey Moore died in back-to-back years after major fights broadcast across the country.

[ Cheering ] -Paret slides to the canvas.

[ Whistling ] Look at him there.

-At that point, there was a sense of, "Well, is boxing even really a sport?"

In the mid-'70s, you have the sense of impropriety that has been an aspect of boxing's DNA for many decades and then, in '82, you had Ray Mancini and Duk-Koo Kim.

-And then, two weeks later, I'm watchin' and there's this fight with Randall "Tex" Cobb and Larry Holmes.

[ Cheering ] -This is just terrible.

-I wonder if that referee understands that he is constructing an advertisement for the abolition of the very sport that he's a part of.

-Cobb was a punching bag.

I mean, his head was just bobbin' back and forth, on and on and on.

-From the point of view of boxing, which is under fire, and deservedly so, this fight could not have come at a worse time.

-And I just said to myself, "This is crazy!

How can I, as a physician, possibly admire this, enhance it, support it, and not work against it?"

-Boxing attracts big television audiences.

It has drawn the attention of writers from Virgil to Hemingway to Norman Mailer, but, today, the American Medical Association came out swinging against the sport.

-The AMA journal says that "boxing is an obscenity that should not be sanctioned by any civilized society."

-The purpose of the boxing match is for one person to injure his or her opponent.

Now, when one knocks somebody out, one damages the brain, one tears brain cells.

-I don't think fight fans said, "Okay, that's it.

I'm never gonna watch another fight," just as they didn't say, "Okay, I'm never gonna smoke another cigarette," when they put a warning on the pack, but sponsors started to pull back and say, "You know, you're asking us for a lotta money, you networks, to pay for your exorbitant rights fees on football and basketball and baseball, and, with all the bad publicity boxing's getting, you know what?

We'd just as soon not do it."

-Before the Kim fight, I was being offered all kinda endorsement deals.

After that, everything went away, man.

It just vanished.

I understand that, now.

I understand, now, but, at the time, I was a kid.

I was heartbroken.

I didn't know why, you know?

It just all went away.

-For decades, stories of young boxers from blue-collar backgrounds fighting their way to fortune had captivated the public, both in real life... -I do it because I'll leave.

I'll leave the ghettos.

-...and on the big screen.

[ Triumphant tune swells ] -♪ Tiger ♪ -The American Medical Association -- -But, before long, the medical community began to make inroads in their fight against the sport.

-The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a formal position that children shouldn't box.

I took a position that, for any parent who put their child into a boxing situation, that should be considered child abuse.

-And, on television, beer companies were soon one of the only marquee advertisers still associated with boxing.

-WBC heavyweight championship fight is being brought to you by Budweiser.

"For all you do, this Bud's for you."

-Sponsors withdraw, so network TV doesn't want to broadcast it, so people don't see as much boxing, so, they don't know as much about it, so, sporting media doesn't write about it as much because they say people don't watch boxing.

They're not interested in it.

And, because media isn't reporting on it, people are learning about it even less and it becomes this feedback thing and, before you know it, suddenly, it's a niche sport.

-The legendary Julio César Chávez returns to the ring Saturday, October 12th, on Pay-Per-View!

-There's something fundamental and primal about boxing, but, as society shifts, there are legitimate questions of, "Well, do we still want to do this?"

It's that drip, drip, drip, that constant sense that that is what boxing is about.

If that becomes the prevailing feeling about football, then, the discussion changes.

-Look, at this point, we know how dangerous football is.

Anyone who continues to believe that professional football players aren't potentially shortening their life-span by playing this game is sort of living on another planet.

-More players are suing the NFL, claiming the league failed to properly protect them from concussions and brain injuries during their careers.

-Faced with medical evidence about the health risks posed by the game, the NFL has started making payments to retired players who have suffered brain trauma, payments that could total as much as $1 billion.

-If there's a way to do it better -- -The league has also promoted its efforts at making the game safer... -Changes were made to the kickoff this year, important changes.

-...all aimed at addressing the criticism of a sport with more money and power than any in American history.

-You know make about $10 billion a year in gross revenue.

You said that, by 2027, you would like to see $25 billion.

-We don't wanna become complacent.

-The NFL has a big issue in the concussion, the head-injury situation, huge issue, but there is an entity called the National Football League.

There's a controlling entity; there's a managing entity.

Football has the NFL to solve its problems or to at least attempt to solve its problems.

It has a PR machine to tell the public that, "We're working on this."

Boxing was controlled by promoters and the networks back in the day, so there was no such thing as boxing.

It had no ability to defend itself because there's no organization and that might've been one of the biggest problems they had.

-The future of football is playing out on local fields around the country, where flag football is gaining popularity after news stories about concussions in high school players.

-There is certainly a double standard.

I mean, if you support football, in the sense that you watch it and then turn around and don't allow your child to play it, the question is kind of like, by watching it, are you necessarily condoning it?

It's so ingrained in our culture that it does take a kind of real act of protest and resistance to turn away from it.

-Over three decades have passed since the Kim-Mancini fight stoked medical concerns about boxing.

Then, in one week, in July 2019... -Max, I'm gonna stop it.

-For what?

-Max, you're getting hit too much.

-...two boxers died from injuries suffered in the ring.

But, compared to the swiftness with which boxing was relegated to the sidelines of American life, football still holds its appeal.

-If somebody would've died during an NFL game being broadcast live, the massive social media response, would that cause a greater, perhaps long-term, response?

Or would it mean that everyone went through the cycle of grief and outrage in a couple of days, until Kim Kardashian did something else?

I don't know.

-I'm very curious to see what happens in society over the next decade or two.

♪♪ -Across the globe, a growing number of countries are facing a major demographic shift.

Too few babies are being born.

That's raising some worrisome questions about whether there will be enough workers to drive the global economy and to fund the safety net for a rapidly aging population.

Even China, once known for its one-child policy, is scrambling to reverse the trend.

But, wasn't the world supposed to be on a path to way too many people?

-That's a notion that can be traced to a best-selling book written five decades ago.

The book's author made alarming predictions that overpopulation would soon tip the world into chaos, causing famine and conflicts and environmental disaster.

He called it "The Population Bomb."

-Overpopulation, so long predicted, has stolen upon us.

It's getting worse week by week.

-In the 1960s, a new kind of fear began to spread across America.

-The U.S. could be busting out at the seams by the end of the century.

-If we do not, by humane means, limit our numbers, then numbers are going to be limited by more famines and shortages and consequent social conflicts.

-The idea that human population was outstripping the Earth's ability to support mankind was a powerful one, and it was one man, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich... -Population growth will kill you stone-cold dead.

-...who pushed the dramatic message home.

-If we continue to let population grow and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries, if we continue to pollute the seas with a wide variety of compounds and so on, it's very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so.

The basic point is so simple.

We have a finite planet with finite resources and, in such a system, you can't have infinite population growth.

-Ehrlich, who had previously focused his scientific research on butterflies, laid out his hypothesis in a slim volume called "The Population Bomb."

It was a call to action for many, including a student Ehrlich advised: Stewart Brand.

-There's too many people and we'd like to see people have fewer children, and better ones.

-The whole idea that people make more people who make more people, until there's too many people and, by then, it's too late, that's a very persuasive argument.

-Adrienne Germain, a women's health advocate, found herself drawn to Ehrlich as well, due to his support of birth control.

-The message was that we were already in a crisis and, if we didn't have urgent and immediate action, the world would simply destroy itself.

-Look at what the year 2000 will be.

Our cities are gonna be choked with people.

They're going to be choked with traffic.

They're gonna be choked with crime.

They're going to be choked with pollution and they will be impossible places in which to live.

♪♪ -Paul's picture of doom and gloom looked real.

-Net world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds.

It's clear that world population growth remains completely out of control.

-I bought it totally.

Many of my friends bought it totally.

I organized an event for 60 people to starve in public.

-Maybe anybody who's thinkin' of having a third child oughta go hungry a week.

-The mood became, "Don't have kids.

There's enough of them in the world and, if your friends have kids, it's fine if they feel uncomfortable about that."

-We had formed an organization called Zero Population Growth and then Johnny took me on "The Tonight Show."

-Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich.

[ Whistling and applause ] [ Piano plays tranquil tune ] -You have to get the death rate and birthrate in balance and there's only two ways to do it.

One is to bring the birthrate down.

The other is to push the death rate up.

-I did the show maybe 20 times and we went from six chapters and 600 members to 600 chapters and 60,000 members.

-We're starting in now.

This is the first step.

-The Bagleys belong to a growing number of young marrieds who favor ZPG, Zero Population Growth.

-How many children do you have?

-Two.

I have two children.

-Ehrlich's views on how to bring that birthrate down were concrete: "compulsion if voluntary methods fail," creating a "blacklist of people, companies, and organizations impeding population control" in the United States, "Responsibility prizes" for childless marriages, a tax on children, and a luxury tax on diapers and cribs.

-Our concerns about population became misanthropic and it was taken with so much seriousness that Paul Ehrlich would recommend things like putting stuff in public water that would make people not as fertile.

-Panic is not too strong a word to use for some of the advocates that I referred to as true believers.

-It appears that large families are on the way out and ZPG may be possible.

-The idea also took hold in the developing world, where governments like India's had already begun to embrace population control.

-The core message of the work, population growth outstripping food supply, resonated quite a bit with India's elites, with the middle classes.

They much preferred to believe that the poor were poor because of too many children, rather than being poor because of an unfair and unequal economic system.

♪♪ -If you start with that problem definition, then, it's almost inevitable that there will be circumstances where governments and other actors will act in a way that is coercive.

-In the mid-1970s, the Indian government began a controversial program to encourage mass sterilization.

-We do want to create an atmosphere in which people realize the importance of this program.

-It led to abuses.

Access to food aid and housing were sometimes used as coercion.

Others weren't even given a choice.

-More than eight million sterilizations were performed, many forcibly.

The people, in the words of one family planning expert, were treated like cattle.

-Zero Population Growth is a tragic frame, in the sense that it was assumed that there was no way out, that people would just go on reproducing until there really was a desperate circumstance in the world.

-Ehrlich's message could be summed up in a dramatic prediction.

-Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come, and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.

Predictions do not necessarily come true.

The critics go in and look at these little stories that won't come true and, when they didn't come true, say, "Ehrlich was wrong."

-But Ehrlich says it could still be just a matter of time.

-One of the things that people don't understand is that timing, to an ecologist, is very, very different from timing to an average person.

-How many years do you have to not have the world end to decide whatever reason you thought the world was gonna end, it actually maybe didn't end because that reason was wrong?

-Ehrlich predicted that, by the 1970s, India would be starving.

Quite to the contrary.

The green revolution came to India with a big bang and a boom, in such a rapid way that India has never looked back.

-Although an estimated three million children around the world still die of malnutrition every year, the green revolution's farming technology helped lessen rates of hunger in the developing world over the decades, even as the world's population skyrocketed.

-There's a tendency to apply to human beings the same sort of models that may apply for the insect world.

The difference, of course, is that human beings are conscious beings and we do all kinds of things to change our destiny.

-That story is playing out today in parts of India.

In growing cities, like Chennai, in the south, large families, once needed for farming are no longer always seen as the key to success.

-Previously, my father used to have four children and my grandfather used to have seven children, but things have changed.

Even myself, I have only two children.

Even my sister is having only one kid because, now, education become the first priority here.

-The population bomb was defused by urbanization; by people getting out of poverty all over the world; by having enough to eat, so you didn't have multiple children, in the hopes that some of them would survive.

[ Horns blaring ] It's somewhat ironic that what Paul Ehrlich saw as a horrible, hellish vision of the future is what turned the population bomb upside-down.

-Brand says that Ehrlich did succeed in raising awareness about important issues, such as the destructive effect population growth can have on the environment, even if some of his predictions didn't come to pass.

-If you ask me the question, "Are there things that I have written in the past that I wouldn't write today?"

The answer is certainly yes.

I expressed more certainty because I was trying to bring people to get something done.

-But his core message remains the same today.

There are nearly four billion more people in the world and they are consuming more resources than ever before.

-I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in "The Population Bomb."

My language would be even more apocalyptic today.

The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor's backyard as they want.

-But, if the world were to succeed in its decades-old task to curb population growth, what then?

-What if large population is not bad, but is good?

-What many more countries are already trying to come to terms with is aging of the population.

-Japan needs more women to have children.

-America's in the midst of a baby bust.

-China is hoping for a new baby boom.

-The point at which population peaks, around nine billion in the 2040s or '50s, the story will not be, "Oh, my god.

We got nine billion people.

How horrible."

It'll be, "Oh, my god.

We're running out of people."

♪♪ -Some of the biggest sci-fi fans in the country have been in the White House.

-New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz explains.

-Mass destruction.

-Sexual relations.

-Potato.

-Fear.

-[chanting] USA!

-Aah!

-Hello.

-Aw, [buzzer] damn it.

-None of it makes sense.

-Maybe you guys should get a sense of humor.

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

[ Rock chords striking ] ♪♪ -Last year, Vice President Mike Pence [ Poignant tune plays ] made an exciting announcement.

-The time has come to establish the United States Space Force.

[ Crickets chirping ] -The audience was clearly too... excited to clap, eagerly awaiting a detailed, scientific explanation of what a space force is.

-The space force.

Incredible.

A powerful new rocket and gleaming new spaceships.

-Spa-a-a-a-a-ce!

Fo-o-o-o-o-o-rce!

-Yes!

We're going to have incredible, powerful, gleaming rockets and not blow our space money, like Europe, on boring things like saving the planet.

It's nice to have leaders who recognize their most American duty.

-Turning science fiction into science fact.

-Science fiction, a.k.a.

the only type of science the administration should be supporting, was also the basis for the most glorious weapons program in U.S. history, conceived during the Cold War... -What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles?

[ Zap! ]

-...the Strategic Defense Initiative, which soon became known by the name of a popular movie.

-♪ What a feelin' ♪ -No, not that movie!

-The Strategic Defense Initiative has been labeled Star Wars.

[ "Star Wars" theme plays ] -But even beyond Star Wars, Reagan was transforming before our eyes, from cold warrior to Jedi warrior!

-Mm!

Powerful you have become, Ronnie.

[ Zap! ]

-This was one of his concerns.

-What if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened from another planet?

-Reagan knew of what he spoke.

As a young man, he was on the cutting edge of defense research.

-The spy ring has designs on the greatest war weapon ever invented.

-And so began Reagan's lifelong love affair with fictitious weaponry.

-I want my MTV.

-But, by the early '80s, outer space seemed like old news.

Who could help Reagan make space sexy again?

-I'm Congressman Newt Gingrich, the Republican cochairman of the Congressional Space Caucus.

[ Sultry music plays ] -In no time, Pentagon bureaucrats were happily drawing up budgets for Reagan's ambitious new program.

-And it's gonna cost you something extra: 10,000, all in advance.

-10,000?!

-Actually, 10,000 turned out to be a low ball, [ Suspenseful chord strikes ] but this was a time when there was no stopping technological innovation!

-Introducing Auto Cup by Ronco, the amazing no-spill cup.

Get a buttoneer, the only automatic button fastener.

-But, now, there's the egg scrambler.

It scrambles an egg while it's still in the shell.

-But wait.

There's more!

-With government funding in place, defense contractors were soon hard at work developing ultra-futuristic weapons systems beyond Americans' wildest imaginations.

Unless they had ever played "Pong."

[ Adventure music climbs ] And the Strategic Defense Initiative was only getting more innovative.

-The heart of SDI Phase I will undoubtedly be Brilliant Pebbles.

-Suck it, Bamm-Bamm.

-Bam, bam, bam!

-President Trump learned a great deal from the past, [ "Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays ] but how does he plan to pay for this amazing new chapter of science fiction?

By cutting how much the government spends on actual science and actual space research.

If our country can only afford science or science fiction, we're much better off with science fiction.

Science fiction is fun!

But science is so complicated, even our smartest politicians have a hard time understanding it.

-We keep hearing the warmest year on record.

You know what this is?

It's a snowball.

-Polar bears, because it's warmer, actually are living better than they were before.

-How do you explain climate change before man ever had a carbon footprint?

How do you explain that?

-The statement that you just made is blatantly false.

-If that scientist wants people to understand his explanations, he should try making his science more interesting.

-There are variations in the Earth's orbital elements.

We shouldn't waste money on actual science when science fiction is more fun and easier to comprehend.

President Reagan's Star Wars was an excellent example for today's leaders, a genius program, with only one single flaw: It didn't work.

-Oh, shut up!

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

-"Retro Report" on PBS.

Thanks for watching.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program is available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪ O0 C1 -Next time... -No enemy stands a chance against our Special Forces.

-Special ops didn't always lead military strategy.

An Israeli raid on Entebbe changed everything.

And... -Go with throttle up.

-...how the Challenger disaster affected the way we think about risk.

-I will regret, always, why I didn't break the door down.

-Plus, humorist Andy Borowitz.

-We recognize the trailblazers who changed the future of gay rights.

-♪ Come to the Florida sunshine dream ♪ -Next time, on "Retro Report."