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Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, was released in September 2021. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, Spook, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.
Mary Roach's website
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What got you interested in the "lives" of human cadavers in
the first place?
One day I was talking to a man who designs crash test dummies. He told me
that actual humans--both living and dead--have also been used by automotive
safety researchers. He explained that you not only need to know how much
force an impact is unleashing on a body (dummies tell you that); you also
need to know what kind of damage that much force will cause to an actual
body. And for anything other than very minor impacts, you would want that
body to be dead.
Anyway, I began to realize there's this whole work force of donated
cadavers out there, being put through their paces in labs and
universities. Like any new and foreign world, it was fascinating to me and
I wanted to know more.
What was the creepiest place you visited during your research?
I visited a lab where plastic surgeons were practicing new techniques. I
remember walking in, and there were these 40 heads, set up in pans on
tabletops, all in a row. Your brain doesn't really know what to do with
this. Mine chose to pretend we were in a rubber mask factory, and these
were just very realistic Halloween items being worked ...
Dr. Erica Brown is a writer and educator who works as the scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. She is the author of Inspired Jewish Leadership, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, and a ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Stiff
Try:
Happier Endings
by Erica Brown
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He moved to England, where he worked for The Times and The Independent, and wrote for many major British and American publications.
Bill Bryson's bestselling books include A Walk ...
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If you enjoyed:
Stiff
Try:
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
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