Terry Gross

Aliens in America producers David Guarascio and Moses Port and writer Sameer Gardezi talk about their new sitcom. The story follows a young Muslim student from Pakistan on a foreign exchange program living with a Christian family in Wisconsin.

Guarascio and Port worked together previously on Just Shoot Me! and Mad About You.

The show airs Monday nights on The CW.

In his effort to decode the human genome, scientist J. Craig Venter volunteered his own DNA to be analyzed and made publicly available. His autobiography, A Life Decoded — My Genome: My Life details his side of the complicated and bureaucratic race to sequence the human genome.

Venter's early work to decode the genome through private research company Celera Genomics earned him both praise and criticism. His team competed with the National Institutes of Health publicly funded effort, the Human Genome Project.

Clive Stafford Smith is one of just a few people who've had independent access to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He's a human rights lawyer representing dozens of the prisoners held there, and he says countless innocent men have been held at Gitmo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them. Many of them, he says, have suffered terrible abuse.

In Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay, Smith details the abuses and absurdities of life inside the legal black hole of the prison camp.

Earlier on today's Fresh Air, we heard from Clive Stafford Smith. He's a defense attorney who charges in a new book that numerous innocent men have been held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them.

For a different perspective, we're speaking with Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government's lead counsel in Guantanamo.

She works in a country where reporters have been harassed, deported, jailed, even tortured. She's subject to all these risks herself — but Peta Thornycroft surrendered her British citizenship and became a Zimbabwean so she could remain in the country and continue to report on the challenges it faces. She's one of the few independent journalists still working in Zimbabwe.

James Weinstein, M.D., chairs Dartmouth College's orthopedic-surgery department; he's considered one of the nation's leading experts on low-back pain.

Weinstein says a multi-year study examining different treatments for lumbar disk herniation shows that surgery isn't necessarily a better choice than non-operative treatments. He says that there is little difference in outcomes, and he's an advocate of conservative, non-invasive treatment.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld last sat down with Fresh Air in September 1987, before his TV series made him an international celebrity.

Now he's back, and in a big way: Bee Movie, the animated comedy he's written and produced for DreamWorks, opens this Friday. (Watch clips.) It's about Barry B. Benson, a bee who learns about life outside the hive — and eventually sues humanity for stealing honey.

Journalist James Fallows, a 25-year veteran of The Atlantic Monthly, is living in China and writing about it. He joins Dave Davies to discuss his recent article "China Makes, The World Takes" — and the booming Chinese factories that are its subject.

Always politically minded, chess master Garry Kasparov is now running for president of Russia. He's the leader of an opposition coalition known as The Other Russia. He's also published a new book, called How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom.

Gone Baby Gone, a new film based on the Dennis Lehane novel, stars actor Casey Affleck as a blue-collar private investigator drawn into a child-abduction case. The film is directed by Affleck's movie-star brother, Ben Affleck.

Casey Affleck has also appeared in the American Pie films, Ocean's 11 and its sequels, and Good Will Hunting.