Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb and we have a special treat for
Speaker 2: you here today. Mary Roach has a new book that
Speaker 2: is about to come out, Replaceable You Adventures in Human Anatomy.
Speaker 2: Mary Roach is a multiple times Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 2: Mind guest. Anytime she has a new book out, we
Speaker 2: always say absolutely, send us an advance copy, let me
Speaker 2: get my hands on it, and we would be happy
Speaker 2: to have her on the show. So once more, I'm
Speaker 2: going to be chatting with Mary Roach again about her
Speaker 2: new book, Replaceable You Adventures in Human Anatomy. It's going
Speaker 2: to be released September sixteenth, twenty twenty five, and is
Speaker 2: currently available for pre order. So without further ado, let's
Speaker 2: jump right into the interview. Hi, Mary, welcome back to
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: The new book is Replaceable You, which will be released
Speaker 2: September sixteenth, twenty twenty five, and it's currently available for
Speaker 2: pre order. As always, it's a tremendous, insightful and humorous read,
Speaker 2: and in many ways it feels like a natural follow
Speaker 2: up to topics you've explored in previous books, especially two
Speaker 2: thousand and three Stiff and twenty sixteen's Grunt. Did it
Speaker 2: indeed spring in any way from topics you touched on
Speaker 2: in previous books or was there some other sort of
Speaker 2: out of the blue inspiration.
Speaker 3: Well, I always have the human body kind of the
Speaker 3: back of my head as a fertile area to poke
Speaker 3: around in. In this case, it didn't really spring from
Speaker 3: anything in a past book per se. This the idea
Speaker 3: kind of came from a couple of things I encountered
Speaker 3: in talking to people. I'm often my way of finding
Speaker 3: a new book topic is sometimes just to reach out
Speaker 3: to people I've met in the past and kind of
Speaker 3: just bitball brainstorm and this but this one was a
Speaker 3: reader wrote to me and said for your next for
Speaker 3: your next book, you should write about professional football referees,
Speaker 3: which was, you know, no disrespect, just a terrible idea
Speaker 3: for me. I don't I don't watch football, I don't
Speaker 3: know anything about football. And but we had a conversation
Speaker 3: on email and she mentioned that she's an elective vamputee
Speaker 3: and I had never heard this term, and I asked
Speaker 3: her what that means. And she's talking about how she
Speaker 3: has a kind of a dysfunctional foot. It's healthy, you know,
Speaker 3: it gets blood, it's funk, it's functional, but not in
Speaker 3: the way she would like it to be. And she
Speaker 3: wanted it cut off and replaced with a prosthetic because
Speaker 3: she would see people walking around on prosthetic feet and
Speaker 3: they're running and they're hiking, and she couldn't do that stuff.
Speaker 3: And so she and it was very hard for her
Speaker 3: to find a surgeon willing to cut off a quote
Speaker 3: unquote healthy foot, and that frustrated her. And it was
Speaker 3: kind of interesting, does this sort of sense of whole,
Speaker 3: like this bias for wholeness and this sense of are
Speaker 3: we a whole entity? Are we made up of parts?
Speaker 3: Can you just swap them in and out? And that
Speaker 3: kind of led me along that path. And of course,
Speaker 3: you know that there's lots of kind of interesting areas
Speaker 3: like iron lungs and nasal mutilation and skin grafting and
Speaker 3: the history of skin grafting. There's just a lot of
Speaker 3: kind of mary roachy topics under that umbrella of replacing
Speaker 3: bits and pieces of the human body.
Speaker 2: Was there a particular chapter that kind of solidified first,
Speaker 2: or was there some were they just sort of all
Speaker 2: sort of come together like, what's your process when it
Speaker 2: comes to writing a book.
Speaker 3: I knew right off the bat there was something that
Speaker 3: there's one thing that I definitely wanted to include. And
Speaker 3: this is again it was a conversation. This was a
Speaker 3: woman who works in a stem cell lab, but it
Speaker 3: oddly had nothing to do with stem cells. She mentioned
Speaker 3: I think I had contacted her because I'd been poking
Speaker 3: around on the idea of fat as a topic a
Speaker 3: book topic fat the substance fat, and I backed off
Speaker 3: of that because I don't want to write about weight loss.
Speaker 3: So she mentioned, and I don't know how this came up,
Speaker 3: don't remember, but she mentioned that there was a surgeon
Speaker 3: who had reconstructed a man's penis using his own middle finger,
Speaker 3: and that because of the way my brain works, that
Speaker 3: just you know, I'm like, oh my god, they just
Speaker 3: cut the finger off and like attached it down there
Speaker 3: and he could move his finger. And I had this very,
Speaker 3: as it turned out, inaccurate impression of what that surgery was.
Speaker 3: But I'm like, I'm going there. I'm going to see
Speaker 3: this surgeon. It turned out he's in former Soviet Georgia,
Speaker 3: and I did go there, and this story is in
Speaker 3: the book, But I think that was one of the
Speaker 3: first places that I went to report in one of
Speaker 3: the first chapter that I wrote, so that that kind
Speaker 3: of cemented things I think for me like that I
Speaker 3: have to have a book that includes this.
Speaker 2: Somehow, it reminds me a little bit of some of
Speaker 2: the topics you touched on in Grunt, which made me wonder,
Speaker 2: do you revisit what you wrote in previous books when
Speaker 2: you cover something like adjacent to it in a later book.
Speaker 2: And I ask in part because I know that, like
Speaker 2: the history broadly remains the same, and the autobiographical and
Speaker 2: personal aspects of the book remains evergreen, but the science
Speaker 2: and the way we perceive where we are with the
Speaker 2: science can change so rapidly in just a few years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did. I did go back to in Grunt.
Speaker 3: As you know, I covered the Department of Defense was
Speaker 3: funding some work with penis transplants, in other words, taking
Speaker 3: a cadaver penis and hooking it up and replacing whatever
Speaker 3: remains of a man's penis who And this was you know,
Speaker 3: during Afghanistan and Iraq, when there were lots of IEDs
Speaker 3: going off and damaging not just legs but all the
Speaker 3: way up to the pelvis so and I'd been in
Speaker 3: the lab when they were doing some of the early
Speaker 3: work for penis transplants, so I did I called that
Speaker 3: surgeon just to see where where things at, what's going
Speaker 3: on in the world of transplantation. I don't like to
Speaker 3: repeat things that I've covered before. I mean, I was
Speaker 3: definitely not going to include that project or kind of
Speaker 3: go back and follow up on that patient or anything
Speaker 3: like that. So I do make use of the people
Speaker 3: that I've met and sort of pick their brains and
Speaker 3: get ideas from them, and also referrals to people that
Speaker 3: they know. So I do that, but not I don't
Speaker 3: really completely step back into the setting of a previous book.
Speaker 2: So the way that we perceive the current trajectory of
Speaker 2: science is one of the really fascinating subjects in the
Speaker 2: new book. In numerous places. I was really floored by
Speaker 2: an early discussion in the book about how people viewed
Speaker 2: the promise of denture technology in the forties, fifties, and sixties.
Speaker 2: This was just really mind blowing for making. Can you
Speaker 2: explain this one for us?
Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah, the history of dentures and we're talking here
Speaker 3: about not what goes on today, which is implants set
Speaker 3: into the bone and then a plate attached to those
Speaker 3: talking more about a whole set of teeth that's either
Speaker 3: glued or in some cases suspended through piercings. That was unbelievable.
Speaker 3: A technology that at its best only gave you about
Speaker 3: twenty five percent of your chewing capacity. It was never
Speaker 3: a good solution. But what amazed me was this trend
Speaker 3: in the period of time that you're talking about for
Speaker 3: having all of one's teeth pulled at once and getting
Speaker 3: fitted with dentures. And it was this sense of like,
Speaker 3: I'll have a marvelous, healthy, white smile, and it was
Speaker 3: done as a gift for brides. It called sort of
Speaker 3: matrimonial dentures, I think was the term and the people
Speaker 3: and I had thought of it as just this is
Speaker 3: something that's done in poor communities or people who don't
Speaker 3: have access to good dental care, but in fact it
Speaker 3: was just kind of a trend. And I could only
Speaker 3: explain it to myself by thinking people were just assuming
Speaker 3: it's new and it's man made, and it's got to
Speaker 3: be better. I mean, Paul McCartney, his dad told him
Speaker 3: you should when he turned twenty one, he should go
Speaker 3: get all his teeth removed and replaced with dentures and
Speaker 3: people and there was this reddit thread. It's no longer
Speaker 3: up for some reason, but this reddit thread where someone
Speaker 3: mentioned it, and there are a thousand replies people saying
Speaker 3: my grand my parent or grandparent, usually a grandparent had
Speaker 3: this done and ended up regretting it. Always had difficulty
Speaker 3: with the dentures, but it was a It was to
Speaker 3: me kind of a good way to open the book
Speaker 3: because it was this interest. It's interesting there's this tendency
Speaker 3: among humans, particularly you know, starting in the nineteen hundreds
Speaker 3: and onward, to just assume if it's if it's technical
Speaker 3: and new, it must be better, and to kind of
Speaker 3: rush headlong into that technology without really considering how will
Speaker 3: it stack up against what I've got going. My dad
Speaker 3: lost all of his back teeth he had he had
Speaker 3: a few front teeth in the front left and he
Speaker 3: was much older, sixty five when I was born. But anyway,
Speaker 3: he never got dentures. He never went. He didn't go.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he didn't trust dentists. He was British.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that had anything to two in it,
Speaker 3: but he u but he managed just fine using his
Speaker 3: front teeth to chew, and I think, you know, probably
Speaker 3: that worked better than had he gotten a couple of
Speaker 3: those plates that are you know, glued with polygrip and
Speaker 3: got stuff under them. It just sounded it sounded, you know,
Speaker 3: like not a great technology, and he did find it.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a little weird to watch him
Speaker 3: chew his lamb chops, but it seemed to work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's just it just it was so foreign to
Speaker 2: imagine like this level of excitement and trust and not
Speaker 2: only where the technology was going, but where it presently was.
Speaker 2: Because I can I can imagine, I can sort of
Speaker 2: put myselves in the shoes of imagining someone saying, Okay,
Speaker 2: well I don't have to worry as much about taking
Speaker 2: care of my teeth because the technology is coming along
Speaker 2: really well and it'll you know, and sort of like
Speaker 2: putting that off on your future self. But to go
Speaker 2: ahead and have it now, to go ahead and get
Speaker 2: the dentures that you know at an early age, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's hard to like, I can't think of anything, and
Speaker 2: surely there's something in our world that's that serves as
Speaker 2: an analogy for that, But I'm grasping at straws to
Speaker 2: think of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, what's going on now with intraocular lenses for
Speaker 3: cat That's a technology that's for decades been used for
Speaker 3: cataract patients in particular, where there's this opacification of the
Speaker 3: lens and you just can't focus and things that you
Speaker 3: lose color, and the technology is and the surgical procedure
Speaker 3: has come so far that there are now people who
Speaker 3: are in their twenties who just happen to be very
Speaker 3: very near sighted who want to have it done. There's
Speaker 3: a term for that that I've forgotten. I think that's
Speaker 3: an example, and that's an example where if everything goes well,
Speaker 3: which it usually does, it's not analogous to the dentures
Speaker 3: in that I think folks would who have that done.
Speaker 3: It can be kind of an amazing replacement. You don't
Speaker 3: have accommodation, which is the eyes amazing ability to go
Speaker 3: from far away to near focus just automatically, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of an built in auto focus. So that's not
Speaker 3: something that exists yet, So you are accepting a compromise
Speaker 3: in that sense. But for somebody who's who's very very
Speaker 3: near sighted or I suppose far sighted, it's an appealing option,
Speaker 3: you know, to not have to think about glasses, contact lenses,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And it's I think, you know, even compared
Speaker 3: to lasik, which can have after effects that are unappealing.
Speaker 3: But yeah, but to have all one's teeth pulled at
Speaker 3: once and there. And I think also people people had
Speaker 3: a sense of people don't like to go to the dentists.
Speaker 3: They don't like dental procedures. So in areas where dental
Speaker 3: care was lacking or wasn't close by, they thought, let's
Speaker 3: just get it over with and I'll never have to
Speaker 3: go back to a dentist, and I'll have this, you know,
Speaker 3: perfect straight smile, I don't have to get fillings, etc.
Speaker 3: But in fact, the dentures, you know, the gums start
Speaker 3: to receid so that you would have to go back
Speaker 3: and get refitted. So it really wasn't you didn't even
Speaker 3: deliver that right now.
Speaker 2: Later in the book, when you're discussing skin graphs and xenographs,
Speaker 2: the skin graphs based on the tissue from other species,
Speaker 2: you hit on something similar about how certain headlines about
Speaker 2: breakthroughs with xenographs might be considered an unnecessary distraction by
Speaker 2: some in the industry, certainly on the research end. Of things.
Speaker 2: But do you think these various headlines sometimes and you know,
Speaker 2: advancements sometimes help implant the idea that the research is
Speaker 2: much further along than it actually is.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, absolutely, press press releases in particular, and a
Speaker 3: lot of times newspapers just take information from press releases
Speaker 3: without doing additional reporting. So in that sense, yeah, makes
Speaker 3: its way into the news. Absolutely. I think that you know,
Speaker 3: you see a headline like lab grown penises are on
Speaker 3: the horizon, which was an actual press release headline from
Speaker 3: some years back, and I don't know, the penises seemed
Speaker 3: to still be out on the distant horizon. You know,
Speaker 3: you follow up with these things a few years later,
Speaker 3: and the company's gone out of business, the researcher has
Speaker 3: stopped researching that, and you know, and I think it's
Speaker 3: a disservice to the public because you know, I have
Speaker 3: a friend who have who has Parkinson's, and he people
Speaker 3: are always sending him. Look, I saw this, I saw
Speaker 3: this press release online. I heard about this technique. I
Speaker 3: heard about same with the woman who the elective amputee said.
Speaker 3: I cannot tell you the number of times my friends
Speaker 3: have sent me a link to a story that says
Speaker 3: twenty dollars. You can buioprint and prosthetic foot. You'll never
Speaker 3: have to see prosthetists again. And it's cheap. And she's like,
Speaker 3: that's never going to happen, and I want them to stop,
Speaker 3: and they mean, well, but stop sending me this stuff
Speaker 3: because there's so much of it out there.
Speaker 2: And I suppose that feeds into one of the central
Speaker 2: ideas of the book, right that the human body isn't
Speaker 2: really replaceable, no matter how far the science has come.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It's it's you're talking about, you know, two hundred
Speaker 3: or so years of medical science competing with millions of
Speaker 3: years of evolutionary tinkering, and and that's a you know,
Speaker 3: that's that's tough to compete with, and it's tough to match.
Speaker 3: So it's not it's not that the researchers and scientists
Speaker 3: aren't doing a good job. They're doing amazing things. It's
Speaker 3: just a really the human body is just infinitely complex
Speaker 3: in ways that we don't even yet understand. So of
Speaker 3: course it's going to take a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you cover when you're talking about various transplants,
Speaker 2: the unforeseen consequences like the I believe it was the
Speaker 2: pig's heart that wasn't supposed to grow but then grew
Speaker 2: inside the recipient's chest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's and there's also there's there's
Speaker 3: just connections between you know, we think of ourselves as
Speaker 3: made up of parts and the parts can you know,
Speaker 3: you can replace parts, that's what you do on a car.
Speaker 3: But there are these kind of invisible links between you know,
Speaker 3: the brain and the organs, and the organs themselves and
Speaker 3: the There's just a lot going on that is difficult
Speaker 3: to anticipate when you talk about creating something to replace
Speaker 3: an individual piece, you know, trying to incorporate that piece
Speaker 3: into a whole system. I mean, we are a massively
Speaker 3: complex system, so it's it's quite a challenge.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, the history of our attempts to replace lost limbs, organs,
Speaker 2: and tissues, this is as captivating and sometimes more nauseating,
Speaker 2: certainly than the current and bleeding edge research into such replacements.
Speaker 2: And you can discuss a lot of this in the book.
Speaker 2: So I want to start with the history here. What
Speaker 2: was your favorite I can't believe they were trying to
Speaker 2: do blank back in such and such year, tidbit.
Speaker 3: I think the I can't believe reaction had to do
Speaker 3: with the crafting of a vagina from the intestine, and
Speaker 3: that is a technique that is sometimes done with trans women.
Speaker 3: If there's been problems with the more standard procedure, you
Speaker 3: can in fact bring a section of the intestine down
Speaker 3: and use it and it works surprisingly well. And it
Speaker 3: isn't it's it isn't new. In the eighteen hundreds, there
Speaker 3: were surgeons who were doing this, but it's it's for
Speaker 3: cancer patients and the set that there was a quote
Speaker 3: I wish I had it in front of me, but
Speaker 3: the surgeons were all conferring, like, should we do this?
Speaker 3: It's kind of risky. I don't know, it hasn't been done,
Speaker 3: but they said, if the home life and matrimonial harmony
Speaker 3: depends on it, it is mandatory. I'm like, hello, maybe
Speaker 3: want to check with that woman before you do that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But it's an it's a I spent some time with
Speaker 3: the surgeon who who from time to time does that technique,
Speaker 3: and it is a kind of an incredible I just
Speaker 3: I just love the idea of like recruiting parts of
Speaker 3: the body that evolved for one thing and using them
Speaker 3: for something else. And the body is surprisingly adaptable, you know, agreeable, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I can be a vagina. I think I can do that,
Speaker 3: you know, moist tubular secretion. Yeah, I got it.
Speaker 2: And then of course early on in the book you
Speaker 2: walk us through the history of just replacing the nose,
Speaker 2: and there's so many interesting details there with like the
Speaker 2: marching of the skin up from the forearm and so forth.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, and this goes back to like fifteen
Speaker 3: hundred BC. This is a technique because nasal mutilation was
Speaker 3: a pretty common you know, globally and throughout history. If
Speaker 3: to punish a group of people or an individual, to
Speaker 3: cut off the nose was popular because not only is
Speaker 3: it humiliating and awful for the person, but it serves
Speaker 3: as a kind of a deterrent, like, look, what will
Speaker 3: happen to you if you steal, if you're supporting the
Speaker 3: wrong leader, whatever whatever it is. So there was this
Speaker 3: demand for rebuilding the nose, and over the course of
Speaker 3: time some very ingenious techniques, you know, taking a piece
Speaker 3: of the forehead or a piece of the cheek, taking
Speaker 3: that skin, loosening it, leaving it attached so it still
Speaker 3: has a blood supply, and then turning it over and
Speaker 3: putting it in place on what's left of the nose
Speaker 3: and building a nose that way, and that and the
Speaker 3: fact that I mean plastic, that's the dawn of plastic
Speaker 3: surgery right there. That's really where it began with the nose.
Speaker 3: And then of course that leaves scarring, or it can
Speaker 3: leave you know, if you put a graft on the
Speaker 3: place where you took the skin. Now you've got skin
Speaker 3: that doesn't match. You know, it's not seamless. So they
Speaker 3: started using the underside of the arm the fifteen hundreds
Speaker 3: in Italy, just having you know, and then then you
Speaker 3: of course to have the arm underside of the arm
Speaker 3: close to the nose, you had to have the arm
Speaker 3: up over the head with a harness. I mean, it
Speaker 3: was quite an elaborate setup to for a few weeks
Speaker 3: to keep that piece of the underside of the upper
Speaker 3: arm attached to the nose. He kind of looked like
Speaker 3: he was you know, I've seen a etching of that
Speaker 3: and the guy looks like he's checking for bo kind
Speaker 3: of a you know, head close to the underarm pose.
Speaker 3: But just amazing the ingenuity that went into it. And
Speaker 3: then once you know, you had more options with different
Speaker 3: materials and adhesives. There were noses made of celluloid, noses
Speaker 3: made of brass or other metal composits. There were noses
Speaker 3: hanging off glasses frames, kind of a grouseiow Marx thing
Speaker 3: because they even had a little mustache to cover up
Speaker 3: the boundary below the lower boundary, So it was kind
Speaker 3: of a medical Gaucho Marx glasses.
Speaker 2: The flammable celluloid nose that you mentioned that was rather
Speaker 2: horrifying to imagine.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, it could only carry the Groucho Marx comparison,
Speaker 3: so far, you definitely not want the cigar.
Speaker 2: One example you brought up that really floored me too
Speaker 2: was the idea of polyester hair implants. I no idea
Speaker 2: this was ever a thing.
Speaker 3: Oh me, neither me neither, Thank you for asking. Nobody
Speaker 3: has asked about that, but there was in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: It was possible if you were losing hair, either you know,
Speaker 3: a bald spot or just sort of all over.
Speaker 2: You could have.
Speaker 3: Essentially doll hair inserted with a kind of surgical crochet
Speaker 3: hook kind of hooked into the scalp. And it was
Speaker 3: a terrible idea for a number of reasons. First of all,
Speaker 3: if you start to go gray. It's not going to
Speaker 3: go gray. You can't style it the same way you
Speaker 3: can style it. You can barely style it at all,
Speaker 3: not to mention infections and all these horrible kind of
Speaker 3: lumps that would appear, and it was it's illegal now,
Speaker 3: but for a while, I think in Turkey you could
Speaker 3: still get it done and you had to space them
Speaker 3: out such that you kind of looked like a doll,
Speaker 3: you know, how dolls have? You know?
Speaker 2: The barb.
Speaker 3: Far apart. It didn't look natural, it looked like dull hair,
Speaker 3: but it was something and it was not cheap.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, Now I have to ask of which of
Speaker 2: the following did you find more horrifying, goat milk transfusions
Speaker 2: or goat milk based breast implants. I was surprised at
Speaker 2: how how many different uses we had for goat and
Speaker 2: cow milk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, goat milk in particularly, I guess because there's less
Speaker 3: of a market for drinking goat milk. They're like, what
Speaker 3: can we do with this, but goat milk. I think
Speaker 3: that the transfusions shocked me more partly, but they shocked me,
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, it's kind of you know,
Speaker 3: they often worked pretty well if someone was hemorrhaging and
Speaker 3: losing a lot of blood, and you needed to keep
Speaker 3: the volume up. Obviously you don't have red blood cells
Speaker 3: to carry oxygen. But if what you're talking about is
Speaker 3: preventing somebody going into what is it hypovolemic like shock
Speaker 3: from just not enough blood, the blood vessels are going
Speaker 3: to collapse, and you want to get something in there.
Speaker 3: I mean, you could use saline. That's you know, what
Speaker 3: is done now. But so goat milk was kind of that.
Speaker 3: Without knowing why, I think that the medical folks had
Speaker 3: stumbled on and they were talking eighteen seventy eight, I
Speaker 3: think it was, and there's kind of a flurry of
Speaker 3: journal articles about goat milk and cow milk transfusions. They
Speaker 3: assumed there was something in the milk that was a benefit,
Speaker 3: but in fact it was just getting something in there
Speaker 3: to keep the blood pressure up. But they were talking.
Speaker 3: They would talk about, you know, a cow was brought
Speaker 3: into the room because it was done. You know, they
Speaker 3: had to be fresh and had to be fresh from
Speaker 3: the teeth. They weren't storing the milk. It was so there.
Speaker 3: You know, there was this wonderfully strange couple of years
Speaker 3: in medical history where cows and goats are being brought
Speaker 3: into the surgical facilities or the patient home, and people
Speaker 3: are being transfused, and and the the articles were tremendously
Speaker 3: enthusiastic in the medical journals, and you know, mainstream medical journals,
Speaker 3: saying I would be remiss if I did not predict
Speaker 3: great things for goat milk transfusions in the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you. It was an article in the
Speaker 2: New York Times, the site that was hyping it up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh And in terms of oh,
Speaker 3: you know, breast implants, what wasn't tried. You know, it
Speaker 3: was just anything kind of remotely injectable. Some surgeon tried
Speaker 3: putting it in there. So that's just one of many
Speaker 3: unwise decisions that were made for the goal of making
Speaker 3: tits bigger.
Speaker 2: Now, I want to come back around to the field
Speaker 2: work for this particular book. You mentioned a little bit
Speaker 2: about this already, but let's see, you traveled to China
Speaker 2: and Mongolia, as well as some rather challenging domestic locations
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: I did, Oh, wherever I can. Whenever I have a
Speaker 3: chance to go somewhere interesting, I jump on it, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, my last book was about human wildlife conflict,
Speaker 3: and I found a way to go to the Vatican
Speaker 3: for that one. That's right, there's no need to go
Speaker 3: to the Vatican for a book about human wildlife conflict.
Speaker 3: But I always enjoy setting a chapter somewhere I know
Speaker 3: nothing about. So in this case, yeah, Mongolia. There's no
Speaker 3: need for a Cataract chapter to go to Mongolia, but
Speaker 3: I chose to and it was incredibly interesting. And I
Speaker 3: was in China the China trip. In that case, both
Speaker 3: of the companies here that create pigs for zeno transplantation,
Speaker 3: in other words, pigs that are genetically edited such that
Speaker 3: their organs don't create as intense a rejection in the
Speaker 3: human body. There are two companies here that have pig
Speaker 3: farms that and I wanted to visit one of the
Speaker 3: pig farms pig facilities, I should say, the designated pathogen
Speaker 3: free facility, and they both very politely said no. So
Speaker 3: I contacted someone who's worked on zeno transplantation for thirty
Speaker 3: years and who happens to be in Sichuan, China, Chengdu,
Speaker 3: and they were very welcoming and they said, come on over,
Speaker 3: you're welcome to visit the facility. As it turned out,
Speaker 3: I couldn't go inside a facility. I could get close
Speaker 3: to it and watch it from the control room, because
Speaker 3: of course I'm a walking pile of bacteria and other
Speaker 3: horrible things that if you have a designated pathoge and
Speaker 3: free facility, nobody comes in. I mean, the staff are
Speaker 3: quarantined and they stay there for three months. So I
Speaker 3: didn't actually get to go in, but I got close.
Speaker 3: But in that case, the travel was warranted by my
Speaker 3: inability to get access here, and that was a challenge
Speaker 3: with this book. Biotech companies are notoriously wary of having outsiders, journalists,
Speaker 3: writers come in for various reasons. They have things that
Speaker 3: are secret that they don't want to risk somebody getting
Speaker 3: access to. And they also just I mean that there's
Speaker 3: a a process that a lot about tech tech firms,
Speaker 3: public relations firms adhere to, which is just to say,
Speaker 3: here's a press kit, here's a video, this is what
Speaker 3: we're going to share with you. Take it or leave it,
Speaker 3: And that's not what you know. I as a reporter
Speaker 3: grew up with a lot more openness, like, yes, you
Speaker 3: can come here and spend a couple of days and
Speaker 3: we'll show you around and it's not like that anymore.
Speaker 3: So if I have to go to China, I go
Speaker 3: to China. So sometimes that's what's at play.
Speaker 2: Because that's one of the great things about all your
Speaker 2: books is they're not just about the subject. They're about
Speaker 2: the places, and they're about the people. It's about you
Speaker 2: getting out in the field and visiting places and meeting people,
Speaker 2: and we get to know them through your write.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, I can't do what I do without going somewhere.
Speaker 3: If if I can't get in anywhere, I just don't
Speaker 3: do that chapter. You know, there have been books where
Speaker 3: I should have included a topic because it was relevant
Speaker 3: and important. I'm thinking of packing from Mars. I don't
Speaker 3: have a specific chapter devoted to radiation. Cosmic radiation and
Speaker 3: solar radiation are two pretty significant physical challenges when you
Speaker 3: talk about living off planet. I couldn't find a setting
Speaker 3: for it. I couldn't find there. You know, there was
Speaker 3: a Brookhaven was doing something with irradiating some animals. I'm like,
Speaker 3: I don't want it. That's not the scene that I want.
Speaker 3: So I didn't do a chapter. And and but if
Speaker 3: you take that to its endpoint, I just can't do books.
Speaker 3: If people because people, and I understand that, like my
Speaker 3: agent said, kind of don't blame them, Mary, do you
Speaker 3: you know what's in it for them? They're not being paid,
Speaker 3: there's they don't have any control over what I say,
Speaker 3: what I choose to represent, how I say it, how
Speaker 3: I portray them. So it's a huge in some ways,
Speaker 3: a big risk to say to me, Mary Roach, Yeah,
Speaker 3: come on down for a couple of days and do
Speaker 3: what you want to do.
Speaker 2: So of course, if you do mention, you know, a
Speaker 2: particular topic or particular company in your book, they could
Speaker 2: always put that on the products as featured in Mary
Speaker 2: Roach's Gulp or Mary Roach is Replaceable You.
Speaker 3: Yes, that is the small gift I give to them,
Speaker 3: and they, by and large they take it. They take
Speaker 3: it well given that they're not able to say it
Speaker 3: the way they want or highlight the things that they want,
Speaker 3: and I'm sure most of what they'd like to say
Speaker 3: doesn't end up in the chapter. But it certainly is
Speaker 3: exposure for a company. You know, I don't write expose
Speaker 3: a's I'm not out to get anybody, but by the
Speaker 3: same token, I'm not sugarcoating things or writing puff pieces.
Speaker 2: Broadly speaking, what do you feel like you learned about
Speaker 2: the human experience writing Replaceable You, and what do you
Speaker 2: hope that the reader takes away from the book.
Speaker 3: It's kind of an interesting mix. I want people to
Speaker 3: be impressed and kind of amazed at what has been done,
Speaker 3: is being done, might be done in the future, but
Speaker 3: at the same time to understand how difficult it is
Speaker 3: to make something that is a true replacement. And also
Speaker 3: there's so many times where something is done in a lab,
Speaker 3: something is created, but then you have to figure out
Speaker 3: how do you get that into a body or even
Speaker 3: onto a body. I spend a couple of days with
Speaker 3: a biotech firm, Stems and Therapeutics, who no longer exist.
Speaker 3: They were trying to grow follicles and then implant those
Speaker 3: from induced pluripotent stem cells like a person's own cells
Speaker 3: regress to plury potency, encouraged, instructed to become follicle cells,
Speaker 3: and then incorporated into the person's head. And I thought, Okay,
Speaker 3: the follicle pretty simple, how hard could it be? But
Speaker 3: the challenges were so interesting and so immense. I kind
Speaker 3: of want people to understand why it's taking so long,
Speaker 3: and not to be disappointed by science. I mean but
Speaker 3: just to understand what a tremendous challenge it is when
Speaker 3: you get down to the cellular level to create something
Speaker 3: that you can incorporate into a complicated system and have
Speaker 3: it work in the way you want it to work.
Speaker 3: So it's just a kind of a glimpse of how
Speaker 3: that's done, what's going on, what's taking so long? And
Speaker 3: you know what, we could hopefully expect a couple decades
Speaker 3: down the line, but just expect miracles, but don't expect
Speaker 3: them quickly.
Speaker 2: Well put, I'll see. Finally, you have some author appearances
Speaker 2: coming up. Correct, I think you're going to do the
Speaker 2: Decatur Book Festival, which is right down the road from me.
Speaker 2: So where can folks see you and where can they
Speaker 2: check out all your dates?
Speaker 3: I have on Instagram author Mary Roach, there is a
Speaker 3: visual of all of the book tour appearances and the dates. Yes,
Speaker 3: I will be at the Decatur Book Festival. I'm looking
Speaker 3: forward to that. And I remember, yeah, I remember like
Speaker 3: one of the best fish tacos I ever had was Indicatur.
Speaker 2: Oh nice.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and Maryoach dot Net there's I think they're
Speaker 3: putting that up this week, the list of where I'm
Speaker 3: going everywhere.
Speaker 2: I'm going well, Mary, thanks once more for coming on
Speaker 2: the podcast. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you so much, Robert. I really had a
Speaker 3: great time. Thank you for such a smart and insightful interview.
Speaker 2: Thanks once more to Mary Road for taking time out
Speaker 2: of her day to chat with me here again. That
Speaker 2: book is replaceable, you Adventures in Human Anatomy. Go ahead
Speaker 2: and pre order it now. I guarantee you you're going
Speaker 2: to have a blast with it. As always will remind
Speaker 2: you that stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Getticks.
Speaker 2: I did because next week is Star Trek Week. The
Speaker 2: whole week is going to be Star Trek themes. That
Speaker 2: means Star Trek core episodes, a Star Trek monster factor
Speaker 2: most likely, and yes we will cover one of the
Speaker 2: Star Trek motion pictures for Weird House Cinema. You'll have
Speaker 2: to tune in to find out which one. Sometimes you
Speaker 2: can peek ahead by going to our account at Letterbox.
Speaker 2: We are Weird House on letterbox, and we have a
Speaker 2: nice list of all the films we've covered over the
Speaker 2: years and sometimes a peek ahead of what comes next.
Speaker 2: And as far as social media accounts elsewhere, we'll let's see,
Speaker 2: we're on Instagram, STBYM podcast, and we are also on Facebook.
Speaker 2: We are on Twitter. We may be some other places,
Speaker 2: but those are the well ones that I really can
Speaker 2: immediately remember. So if you use any of those platforms,
Speaker 2: follow us, keep up with the show. Wherever you get
Speaker 2: the show, just make sure that you rate, review, and subscribe.
Speaker 2: It helps us out in the long run. Thanks as
Speaker 2: always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing this show,
Speaker 2: and if you would like to get in touch with
Speaker 2: Joe and myself, email us at contact stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: your Mind dot com.
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