SPEAKER_01 0:00

BEHC, the Frequency. Happy Friday, Frequency Listeners. I'm your host, Shay Castle, and I'm so excited to be bringing you an interview with one of my favorite authors, the hilarious Mary Roach. This conversation needs a little bit of a content warning. It won't be any surprise if you've read her books, but Mary and I talked about sex, genitalia, dead bodies, and many other subjects that are gross, taboo, or otherwise not safe for work. So if you do listen at the office, make sure it's at a volume that can't be overheard. Before we hear from Mary, a very quick word from our sponsor, the Regional Air Quality Council. This year, set the summer trend. Take simple steps for better air and avoid idling your car when parked in parking lots or waiting in pickup lines or drive-throughs. Turning your car off and on again instead of idling can make a huge difference for summer air quality. It helps reduce ground level ozone pollution in Colorado's front range. Know when it matters most by signing up for ozone alerts from the Regional Air Quality Council. Learn more at SimpleStepsbetterAir.org. That's part of the fun, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

I think so too, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Okay, I'm gonna do my hyper dialed-in introduction, and otherwise I'm a very informal interviewer, so we'll just have a chat. Great. Our guest today is a best-selling science writer and nonfiction author of books such as Stiff, Spook, Fuzz, Gulp, Bonk, Grunt, and Packing for Mars. She'll be appearing in Boulder on Wednesday, September 9th, to talk about her latest book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Her footnotes are legend, and she is probably my only guest who has had sex in a lab, imaged on ultrasound. The one, the only Mary Roach. Mary, thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Thank you so much, Shay, for having me. Uh, and thank you for getting the fact that it was ultrasound, not an MRI, because people often go, oh, you had sex in an MRI tube. I'm like, you know, that'd be okay because you have some privacy.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Which you don't with ultrasound. It's because I listened to a podcast where you corrected the host on that. And I have to say, it was much easier to script sex in an MRI machine than like, how do you say sex in an ultrasound?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

I should just leave it, MRI, and just like rewrite history and say, yeah, okay, it was an MRI. There was a couple who did have sex in an MRI, and they were like little skinny gymnasts, like short, thin, muscular people. And even then, I don't think it was very interesting sex, a little limiting. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Well, we're here today to talk about your new book. And my first question is I'd love to know if and how it changed your relationship to your own body or to aging. I just wonder if you look at any part of your body now and say, like, oh, I need to take better care of this because replacing it is quite an ordeal.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Really, uh, just about any body part, I feel like is worth taking care of because whatever replacement, I mean, there's some amazing advancements in trying to create a substitute for what you were born with, but it's as far as I can tell, never quite gonna be as good as what you were born with, you know. So just you know, all of them. Remember thinking, well, I have thin bones, but so what? Because you can just replace a joint, easy peasy, which it you can, but I've seen that operation. And if I could avoid going through that, because it's like power equipment, and it's like a pretty intense surgery. I should be lifting weights, is what I'm saying, and doing whatever I can to keep my hips from breaking.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

My sister is your age, and the number of times she tells me you need to be progressively loading as you age. You need to be progressively loading. You do, I know.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And am I doing it? I'm not, I'm not. I need to. Yeah, I never learn anything really from my books. I do intellectually, but do I actually change my life based on what I've learned? No.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Your books, what I personally love about them, and I think why they're so popular, is that you tackle pretty gross subjects with curiosity and humor. I was only skeeved out at one point in this book, which I'll say for later. But I was wondering, did anything ever cross the line in reporting this book from fascinating to horrifying? Like, do you feel disgust at any point?

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Um, no, I don't think I did for this book. It's pretty hard to get me to that point. I think I've only once in my whole career actually had to leave the room, like gagged. And that wasn't even for reporting. It was just I knew someone who's a medical examiner, and I think she made it a personal goal of hers to make Mary Roach gag. So she's like, Oh, we have an interesting case at the morgue today. You should come down. I did like an idiot. For it was just the odor, really. Well, there was the visuals as well. So it was a body that had been decomposing in a hot room for a while. And she, you know, as a medical examiner, you do an autopsy, you cut that body open and a lot of smells come out. And I was out of there fast. So that's I think the only time I'm looking at the table of contents here. Was there anything that actually nah? This one was this is pretty tame. I can't wait to hear what skeeved you out, though.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

What skeeved me out a little bit, surprisingly, because I've read all your books, was the tissue donation of the man.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Yeah, oh yeah, right. The tissue donation. That was pretty visually exceptional, I'll say. Um, it's not something any you're used to seeing, you know, a body sort of taken apart. But so amazing the way they put the body, put everything back together, and other than the stitching, you would have no idea that this person had donated bones, ligaments, fascia, skin. The skin was taken from the back. What particular part?

SPEAKER_01 6:31

I don't know that it was a particular part, but I think when you said it was so visual, you did a great job of I was visualizing everything being taken out. Maybe it was the leg being like sliced open and the bones removed. I didn't know they made fake extendable legs to bones to put back in there because a body would be too hard to move without stiff legs. And I just I pictured a body with the flap of Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

It would be like that. There's this book by Ray Bradbury, I think it is, about this guy picks up a woman in a bar and her hair falls over most of her, like half her face, and he gets home with her, and then she pulls back the hair, and there's this thing that comes out and that sucks his bones out through his mouth. And then the last line was like describing him as like a jellyfish on the floor because there's no more bones. Anyway, that kind of without the bone, you'd be like one of those floppy roadside but winds worse because you're wet, like just a wet wind sock.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

That's disgusting.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

You're moist, you definitely moist. Yeah. But see, it was so interesting. I think that in situations like that or the body farm from stiff, what you're seeing slash smelling is kind of overwhelming, but it's outweighed by how interesting what you're learning is, at least for me. You know, it's just so interesting. There's an initial kind of sort of like whoa when you see something like that. But then very quickly it kind of becomes normal in a weird way. It's like, oh, this is how you do it, this is what they're doing. Okay. And in a sense, it's something like that. It's a kind of surgery. You go to an operating room for major surgery where the rib cage is held open and they're doing things in there, that's pretty extreme, too. And it's all being done for a good reason. So I think it just makes it easier to handle versus if you came across the victim of some horrific crime. I think that the the context makes a lot of difference, at least for me.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

I understand that because I also, as much as that was the only part of the book that made me ick, I was also incredibly moved for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe it was the details you shared about this man who was kept anonymous, obviously, but the phone conversation with his daughter and wife or something. I wondered, did you ever hear from the family, or do you ever hear from people that you've written about anonymously saying, like, oh, that that was me or that was my dad?

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Or I did not hear from these folks. I'm trying to think, has it ever? And even like there's the footnote about the guy I lost my virginity to.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

I'm like, I wonder, I wonder he's gonna read that. That's my next question. How did you know? I read that and I laughed out loud. And I wonder, I just thought, did she have any pause in writing this or did she just say literally?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

I'll tell you, I did go online and look up the number of orthopedic surgeons that work in the various branches of the Mayo Clinic, and there's quite a few of them. So I don't people will have to read the footnote, but I don't think it's not like we were dating for very long, you know, like 20 minutes. So I don't he probably doesn't even remember uh my name. I happen to remember his name because he was the first. I certainly wasn't his first. So no, I never did, but I kind of thought it would be hilarious if he did see that. If I worked at the Mayo Clinic in the orthopedic department and I saw that, I'd be like, which one of my colleagues is this? You know, I would have tried to figure it out. Yeah, I'd be posting on the bulletin board. Like exactly, is this new?

SPEAKER_01 10:12

I had a on a much smaller scale, a similar experience. I sat at a bar in my hometown maybe a couple years ago, and the first person to ever see my boobs was there, did not recognize me or my boobs. It was, I mean, they have changed a lot, to be fair, but I was a little insulted by that.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Uh yeah. And I think memory is like that. Like it's never a balance, you know. The things that stuck with you, things with somebody else, whether it's sexual or not, you remember details and they'll be like, I'm sorry, I don't really remember that ever happening. It's a weird thing.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

The thing I think that stuck with me the most from this book, oh wow, I really don't want a replacement part of any kind because you don't think about like the aftercare and the things you have to do for the rest of your life. I think I just thought like, oh, you just get a new limb or you just get a new organ and that that's it. But it's so involved.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

It is, it's really involved. It is. And that's why the chapter about elective amputation was interesting to me because that's a situation where the person doesn't have to have that foot or whatever it is removed, but their quality of life they know is going to be better with a prosthetic and they want that done. These are cases where what they were born with is mangled, or they were born with a difference, or it just is slowing them down and causing them to miss out on things. And so they want it gone. They want a prosthetic. And it's interesting the difficulty they sometimes have persuading a surgeon to take that foot off because it's still viable, it's still got a blood supply, it's not necrotic or anything. And they're like, Oh, I don't know, it seems so final to take it off. To like, yeah, I know I want it gone though. And that was super interesting to me.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Were there some parts of this book that you enjoyed reporting on more than others? That feels like tell me your least favorite kid, but you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Is there some that were more enjoyable? Oh, for sure. The trip to Tbilisi to track down that surgeon who had rebuilt a man's penis using the man's own middle finger. Just no matter what happened, that was going to be an interesting chapter. Whether the guy agreed to talk to me or not, whether I met the patient or not, it was just it was gonna be a fun chapter to report. And it was the hair transplant chapter, the history of hair transplants and getting the guy to transplant some hair from my head to my leg to see if I could, you know, grow long flowing hair on my calf. That was a lot of fun. The iron lung, again, that was just being in an iron lung for however short a time, a working iron lung was really, really fascinating. And not, it's just hard to imagine what that will feel like. So that was that was very cool.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Yeah, I know actually, strangely, several polio survivors, but no one who's been in the iron lung. So that was that was fascinating to read about. And I'm so sorry, their leg hair transplant didn't take. I was really bummed for you.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

I was so disappointed. I really was. There are a couple days where I'm like, oh, is that is that it is that no, that's it's not going anywhere. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

I was disappointed to learn that Merkins weren't real, or at least not in the popular sense that we thought that they were, perhaps.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

I was too. And I, you know, I can't prove it. I can't prove that there weren't any, but there's not references other than in certain literary contexts, which does suggest, I mean, if they were making jokes about them in literature from the 1500s, 1600s, perhaps they did. But it was also just it didn't make a whole lot of sense because you're not gonna fool anybody with some fake patch of hair that you've stuck on there with like the equivalent of Elmer's glue from the 1500s. That's the various explanations didn't really make a lot of sense to me. But I was hoping to find some kind of evidence, some sort of document. But according to my the closest I could find to a Merkin, to a Whig historian, couldn't really pin it down. Another dream dead. So unless, of course, you're in a play or in a film, those do exist. Making it for an actor, a pubic hair piece, those do exist. I guess you would call that a Merkin.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

That's very true. Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned the middle finger replacement for the penis. That's my favorite. And I can't stop picturing it holding. Was it a potted plant?

SPEAKER_00 14:37

No, it was a ceramic pitcher, like a you know, a water pitcher. And not full of water. They verified that for me. It wasn't a full pitcher, but still pretty heavy. When they clicked on that slide, I was like, what's happening here? What's happening here? You know, it's a ceramic, it wasn't like a surgical thing. It was a ceramic white pitcher with a flower, a red flower on it, kind of hanging off. Because the penis, although, you know, just the finger is inside and there's skin taken from elsewhere on the body, wrapped around it, and it's crafted to look like a penis, which it did. But the nonetheless, the finger was still inside, and the finger still would crook, would bend. So it was kind of bent up in a place that penises don't bend, and with this picture hanging off of it. And that was probably the oddest thing I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

I think that's the point where you lost my partner. We were reading this together, and he was like, I'm gonna go back and reread packing for Mars. I can't do this.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

I know. I think that a couple of my books should come with warnings for male readers. Oh, get over it. They'll they're fine. They're fine.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Uh yeah. Is there anything you wanted to include in this book, but you couldn't because like a dead end where people didn't get back to you?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Yes, there were a couple of things. I had hoped to write about transplantation of a uterus, and that was interesting to me because it's a temporary transplantation. So if you were a woman, usually a woman, who for whatever reason weren't able to carry a child in your uterus, or there was some issue with the uterus, you could have someone else's uterus, either a woman who agreed to donate it because she's done with it, or a cadaver uterus, you can have that installed and carry a child to term. The child will be delivered probably by C-section. And then what was cool about this is that it's a temporary transplant. So as soon as you're done with it, it could be removed. And that way the patient, the woman, doesn't have to be on immunosuppressive drugs the rest of her life as one would with a kidney or a heart, any other permanent transplant. It's a temporary transplant and it has worked. I had never heard of this, and I was like, whoa, this is going on. I had no idea. I was asking, you know, I could come for the initial transplant, I could come for the birth, I could come for the removal, I don't care, some portion of it. And they just didn't reply. And I'm pretty persistent, you know. I think I sent four or five emails and calls and they just didn't respond. And I tried to think why would why? Because that's not that's pretty unusual when somebody just doesn't respond, flat out won't reply to that many emails. And I wondered if it were because they thought that I would then ask, oh, well, can you, could you install a uterus in a biologically male trans woman? When I would have asked that because I'd be curious. And then maybe they don't want to talk about that. I don't believe that that's happened. I don't even know if it's possible. Probably. But anyway, I it is an interesting issue, but perhaps one that they just didn't want to address. I don't know. So I ended up talking about it in interviews like this, conversations, but I never put it in the book because I didn't, I just didn't have a way in. Just it didn't want it just to be a news report. This is how it would be done, and it's been done, and it's do they're doing it here. It just would have been a little flat. So that that would have been an interesting chapter.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

I'd like to do a lightning round with you if I can. The inspiration for this came from Wendy Zuckerman. You're on the Science Versus podcast. Oh, yes. So credit to her for some of these questions. Is there any part that you wouldn't replace on your body even if you needed to?

SPEAKER_00 18:28

If I lost my lower arm, based on what I know about those prosthetics with the cyborg fingers, based on what I know about those, how heavy they are, how limiting they are, and also how much you can do with just a residual limb, plus your mouth or your other hand. I have an office mate who is missing part of her arm and she doesn't use so I yeah, I would not opt for one of those hands. Yeah, a a prosthetic hand. I would just use my other hand as much as possible.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

That's funny because we here used to have an office mate who worked on prosthetic hands.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

So oh really, yeah. They're both amazing and have a long way to go. An arm/slash hand is so much more difficult than a foot because it's five independent units that have to work together. And you know, often these limbs will they'll have certain grips, but there's one that's a credit card grip, which is good because these limbs are like $20,000.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

It's appropriate, I should say. Opposite question Is there any part of your body you would replace even if you don't need to voluntarily?

SPEAKER_00 19:44

If it was a hassle-free and side effect free replacement, oh sure, yeah. I'd just replace my neck, my chin. This whole, yeah, you know, just you hit my age and it just all starts to fall. So yeah, just like from here down, yeah, from under the nose down to the collarbone. Let's just swap something in there. Do you have a favorite footnote from this book? I'm kind of fond of the Hitler's mustache one and the fact that it isn't a Hitler, everyone calls it a Hitler mustache, but it was in fact it predated Hitler. It was called the toothbrush mustache. So he didn't start it, he kind of ended it. I love that. And also I love the fact that that one of the other people in his do you call it his cabinet? Anyway, his dentist had a toothbrush. Hitler's dentist had a toothbrush mustache. Just a lovely little meaningless blip of information.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

You're kind of your specialty, but I wouldn't argue they're not meaningless. I love them. We already discussed two of my favorites, the Merkin and the man you lost your virginity to. Um slabotomy glory holes is top.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Oh, oh, yes. Okay, I forgot about that. Yes, the early blood banks, because people were when they figured out how to preserve blood, keep it from clotting, that is. And so you could have blood banks, you could have people come in and volunteer to give blood. And because people were squeamish, it was a new thing. They had this wall set up with the holes, and you would stick your arm through the hole and you wouldn't see the person on the other side, the phlebotomist, the person drawing the blood. And the last line of that footnote is phlebotomist's glory holes. I particularly did like that one.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Did you have a favorite research paper title from this book?

SPEAKER_00 21:38

There's one in the nose chapter, and I can't recite it because it's very long. It's from the 1600s, and I'm not going to do it justice. It was like how to replace, how to rebuild or replace a nose when it has fallen off and the dog has eaten it. And this is a, you know, legitimate research paper from I mean, it's the 1600s, I guess the standard. For medical journals were a little different, but the fact that and the dog has eaten it, which is like, yeah, okay, if the dog's eaten it, you can't sew it back on, even if you're very quick. So I suppose it was relevant to add that.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Fill in the blank and specific to this book. Now that I know blank, I'll never look at blank the same way again.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Now that I know that half and half is useful in certain circumstances as a douche, I won't look at half and half the same, quite the same. I can't, you people, somebody's just gonna have to read that chapter. I can't, let's not go into it. I read it and I can't recall that. That must have slipped me by. If you build a vagina for either someone who's had cancer or a trans woman, and you use a piece of the intestine as your neo vagina, there's certain things that don't always go well, and and it helps to douche with half and half because half and half has I forget what is in half and half that makes it uh helpful. But anyway, that's what the surgeon recommends. So a carton of half and half has taken on new meaning for me.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Just to clarify, that's for those particular people only. Don't start douching with half and half folks.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Yes, don't. I mean, probably harmless, but not gonna help you in any way, probably. And they waste a perfectly good carton of half and half. That's that shit's expensive these days.

SPEAKER_01 23:27

I shouldn't tell you this story, but I will, and we'll cut this probably for the final episode. But Cosmopolitan should be sued for their terrible advice. And I once read in Cosmo when I was like 19 that you could use yogurt to cure a yeast infection. And so the instruction was to dip a tampon in yogurt, or the other way you could do it if you wanted to have some fun with your partner was to have them dip their penis in yogurt. Not flavored, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

No, no, and probably not with the chunks of berries and everything. Absolutely. Plain, yeah, plain yogurt. Did you try the second method?

SPEAKER_01 24:03

I sure did. It was it was messy and gross. But did it work? Maybe. I mean, as a science-minded person, I have to say, like, it could have just been time, as all have just been time, it could have been, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah, I remember hearing that too. And people would eat yogurt. I'm like, no, I don't think that's what they meant. I think you have to directly apply the yogurt. And I don't know what you're gonna use, but yes, a penis seems like probably would work as well as anything else. Again, don't recommend, but don't recommend has been done. Dairy products of all kinds, keep them out of the vagina. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Speaking of one of my low points, we talked about some of your high points of reporting this book. Did you have a low or like worst experience of reporting the book?

SPEAKER_00 24:49

For me, it's trying when I just can't get a response from somebody. And there were a couple of those and a lot of unreturned emails from various biotech companies. It's just frustrating. It's not, I don't know that I'd say it's a low point. Oh, that was the uterus transplant and also the artificial womb. That was another chapter that where people were just like, nah, just don't want to talk to you. And in that case, I'm guessing, and this is like a biobag, it's called. It's very cool because it's something that would, if you were a very it's a very, very premature birth that's not gonna a baby that's not gonna survive even in a NICU, neonate intensive care unit. You can have an artificial womb that would provide whatever the fetus needs. And so you could buy a few weeks of time until the fetus is viable on its own, outside of the womb. And I thought that was fascinating. I think that in that case, maybe it had to do with you are messing around with the whole issue of at what point does a fetus survive outside the body, and how does that relate to abortion rights and timelines? So that may have been their concern. Again, though, just drop me a line and say, hey, this is why we don't. So I waste a lot of time writing to people and rewriting to people, but that's the only low point. It wasn't all that low.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

It's just part of the job. What's something that's interesting you or sparking your curiosity at this moment?

SPEAKER_00 26:13

I'm writing about forensics, so there's lots of stuff which I won't really go into, but I'll share one fact that I recently stumbled onto, which I was quite memorable, which is if you find a dead body and you're trying to figure out how long it's been there, what's the timeline between the murder and the present? One of the things you have to, if you're looking at the life cycle of insects, you know, forensic entomology, one of the things you have to keep in mind is if the person who was killed was on cocaine, the maggots do their thing much faster. The maggots are all like speeded up on coke. So it makes it seem like the person decomposed much more quickly than they, the timeline is compressed. Like you might think, oh, this person's been dead six weeks, but in fact it's only three weeks. I don't have the exact numbers. But the fact that the maggots are affected by the Coke is that was they're fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Yeah, a sequel to the film Cocaine Bear, cocaine maggots.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Oh, yeah, yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Well, Mary, is there anything else I should be asking you that I'm not, or anything else you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_00 27:25

No, Shay, you have asked all the perfect things, and I'm looking forward to Boulder. Are you gonna come?

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Um, bringing the friend who introduced me to you and bringing my partner who has red packing from ours like four times. So very excited about that.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Yeah, they need to branch out.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

I agree. They need to finish the general reconstruction chapter and then read about Brazilian butt lifts at the very least.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Exactly. I yeah, I agree. But you know, we'll give them a pass. All right, well, we'll see you in Boulder. All right, thanks so much. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Thanks again to Mary for making time to speak with me and rolling with the sometimes crazy directions our conversation went. You can find tickets and details for Mary's upcoming book talk at boulderbookstore.com. One final note on that. Boulder Bookstore is a sponsor of this podcast, but they did not sponsor this episode or even ask me for coverage. I saw Mary's name on the calendar of upcoming author events and jumped at the chance to interview one of my absolute favorites. Thank you for understanding this rare mixing of advertising and content. I just couldn't deny myself this opportunity. And as always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.