Replaceable You with Mary Roach

0:00Gary, Chuck, are you in need of any organs? Are we talking Hammond or Steinway? Yeah, exactly. We're talking about replaceable you. All the ways our organs and appendages might need replacement in the future. Coming up with the one and only Mary Roach. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And I see next to me Gary O 'Reilly. That must mean this is special edition. Gary. Hey, Neil. How you doing, man? Former soccer pro. Allegedly. Soccer announcer. Mm-hmm.

0:48And you lend of yourself to our cause. Yeah, with pleasure. Thank you. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Okay, professional stand-up comedian. Nice. You're working tonight. I am. And it makes no difference to say where because it'll be over by the time anybody hears this. So today, we're titling this, Are We Replaceable? Are we replaceable? I see you've been talking to my wife.

1:18Are we replaceable? So what does that even mean, Gary? Okay, let me sort of phrase it this way. Some see the human body, especially the human brain, as the most complex machine we know that exists today. In the universe. Yes, that we know about. Normally, when you buy a complex machine, it comes with the contact details for the manufacturer. The warranty. Yeah, no such luck with the human body, as we all know. So how far has medical science got when it comes to replacement parts? Just FYI here, humans have been in the replacement parts business since about 1500 BC. Wow. That will all get explained.

1:58I'm not going to steal anyone's thunder, so Neil, if you would, please introduce our guest. Well, we now have three or four times, how many times she's been on here? I don't know. Reintroducing to the StarTalk fan base, Mary Roach. Mary Roach, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. I think it's like five. Five. I've lost count. New York Times bestselling author. We eventually had to boost your vocabulary to put more than one word in the title of your books. I got you a list here. We got here stiff. That was like dead people. Grunt. That was like military. Bunk. I think that was just sex. It has to be.

2:38Fuzz. I forgot what it was. That's bad sex. Bits. Gulp. And finally, we added more words to your title. Packing for Mars. Packing for Mars. Packing for Mars. Yeah. And that's just six out of the multiple books. And latest offering is, I love the title because it's so melodic, Replaceable You. Replaceable You. This should be a song with that title. My Sweet and Replaceable You. Thank you. Maybe there is a song. It's a play on Embraceable You. Yes, yes. Subtitled Adventures in Human Anatomy. And that's out at the fall of 2025. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. And you're in from Oakland, California.

3:20Uh-huh. Thanks for coming to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. Always a pleasure. Excellent, excellent. Putting us on your schedule. So you pick these topics that no one else thinks to talk about, and then you just blow it wide open. That's my thing. That's my thing. And you approach it journalistically, but all of your source material are people who are active in these topics. Yeah. And you put it together in ways no one imagines even possible. So this is— It's incredible. isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it is. It's a unique niche in the nonfictionverse. Nice. So, again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I go and I target some unsuspecting expert researcher scientist and I use them as an unpaid tutor, basically.

4:07Oh, there you go. Wow. And if they're good and their educators will love to talk. They love to talk. They do. Like, their spouse doesn't want to hear about it anymore. Because no one else is interested in what they're doing. Exactly. And like, oh, here's this woman. She wants to know what I do. Come on down. Yeah, so, You have explored human behavior, not only physiologically, but you bring a dose of humor to it. That's part of our branding here. If you can't laugh or at least smile, go home. Yeah. You just spoke to half the country right now. All right. So is there one or more words that you might describe yourself?

4:42If I were to pick, I would say journalist, science communicator, and writer. Yeah, all of those work. I might say nonfiction author. Sure. Who's funny sometimes. Okay. Yeah. We have something in common. Sometimes. Science journalist sounds a little highbrow. It does, doesn't it? Doesn't it? It does. It doesn't sound fun. No. I was going to say, it sounds a little stodgy and boring, too. Yeah, that's not me. It does not apply to you at all. So, replaceable you, embraceable you. What started you on that journey? At some point, you have to pivot and say, I'm done with the rap. I know. And let me go do something else that no one has done before.

5:21It's always very exciting, that moment where, like, I am so done with fill in the blank. I'm ready to move on. Yeah. So this one started, I got an email from a reader who had a book idea. And I would love to say that she was like, you should write about replaceable body parts. And I was like, hey, done, next book. But in fact, she said, you should write a book about professional football referees, which is not the best match for me. Yeah. But we had a correspondence back and forth. It turned out she's an amputee, specifically elective amputee. Like she wanted her foot because her foot didn't work well.

5:58She couldn't walk right. She'd had spina bifida. Anyway, it was like, whoa. It was really hard for her to find somebody to take off her foot. Nobody wanted to do it. They're like, but this is a healthy foot. And she's like, I can't really walk on it very well. So anyway, that was one thing that got me headed in that direction. Wow. And the other thing was, I was talking. So you amputated the foot because she couldn't find a dollar. I did. You know, it's not that hard. Ultimately. With the right equipment or even the wrong equipment. I was going to say, not even the wrong equipment. It's pretty doable.

6:29The duller, the better. And I didn't charge her very much. There you go. She did get it cut off, but not by me. So for many of us of a certain age, we all watched The Six Million Dollar Man. Absolutely. He's the first replaceable body part. We can rebuild him. We can make him stronger. Yes. Better, stronger, faster. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he had the eye that went, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Which would be annoying, right? You cue up your eye and it goes, do, do, do, do, do, do. Why does it need to do that? Yeah, exactly. Right. And so then that was followed by, was it also the$6 million woman?

7:03Lindsay Wagner. Lindsay Wagner. She had the ear instead of the eye. Oh, okay. So she could have. So I thought that was inventive and creative. And it gave us the word bionic. It did. as a bionic man. But none of that was part of your inspiration for this? Well, that's it lodged in the back of my head because I grew up, I watched a lot of 70s television. I did watch the Lee Majors as the bionic man. Yes. Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. Wasn't that the theme song? Yeah, that was the theme song. There we go. Dare I say? And they had to show him running in slow motion because he could run up to 60-something miles an hour.

7:36And they speeded it up. Right, right. I've never seen a white man run that fast. So I said, I've got to watch this show.

7:46So, Gary, where are you going to take us first? It's interesting. Having read the book, it's 17 short plays, different cast, different themes, but it's all based around this medical regenerative science. How did you go about that and not rinse and repeat every single theme in 17 chapters? I'm always going for kind of an odd take on things. Again, the chapter, the amputation chapter, it's specifically about how hard it is if you want to get something and that bias for wholeness. So it wasn't like, here's the latest developments in prosthetic limb technology. Because you go to Wired for that. That's not my thing.

8:34Go anywhere else for that. Yeah. And I try to throw myself into it. Like there's a chapter on mechanical breathing. So I spent some, I found an old. Iron lung. Yeah, an Emerson. You spent some time in an iron lung? Yeah, it was an old Emerson iron lung from the polio era. Right. I mean, the original polio era. Not the one that's coming. Not the one that's coming. Exactly. Get ready, people. So that, yeah, that was fascinating. So, you know, I'm always looking for a different way in, you know. Having done all this research, having gone around the world, it seems, do you get the feeling that medical science has failed us, that we've come so far in other areas, we're not able to get ourselves into a position where we can just chop and change parts?

9:24Yeah, no, I wouldn't say it's a failure. I think the thing to keep in mind is like medical science has had a couple hundred years, right? And the human body's had millions of years of evolution. So it's like it's – that's a hard thing to compete with. So I don't feel like it's a total failure. I feel like it gets – We had millions of years of evolution, but in 10 years we went to the moon. So I'm not buying that. We want to do it. We can do it. Right. Yeah, but I will say that – would you say that maybe it's about – so there's not a lot of people here in America. Around the world you might find this, but not a lot of people here who are missing limbs, appendages, whatever, which means there's not a lot of money in it.

10:10Well, the urgency of it. Right. Well, the DOD spent a lot of money, especially Iraq, Afghanistan, everybody stepping on IEDs. They funded a lot of work into prosthetics. I mean, it's getting there, but it's the kind of thing that hand is five fingers that are moving independently, and you've got to track the signals from the brain. and that's got to, so, you know, people, most people who have an amputation, one arm missing or part of an arm, they just use the other arm. Right. They just reach over and pick it up. So, was there no inspiration that came from Star Wars where Luke lost his hand? Yeah, Luke had his hand cut off in a saber fight.

10:48Did he now? And then, and you say, oh my gosh, and then the next scene he's just sort of. Yeah, the next scene is him getting a new hand. Yeah, and it's like, okay, I just got a new hand. Everybody thinks that's easy, but it's not easy. Also, I mean, those arms, they're heavy. They have a battery that you have to charge. They're like$15 ,000. Insurance doesn't pay. So it's just not there yet. But I mean, you know, but give it some time. Yeah, I was just exploring what sources of motivation might prompt people to think this way. And that might have been such a moment. Right. Right.

11:29Hello. I'm Finkie Maroke-Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

11:43So if we sort of jump into Replaceable You you start the first chapter is about noses Yeah And then you open up as to how long we've been in the business of replacement noses I mean, I don't want to tell this story because it's yours to tell. At least it's Michael Jackson. Don't be silly. That's a different one. I had a beautiful nose. Bubbles took my nose. Oh, poor Michael. One of the most famous astronomers had a fake nose. Really? Duke O 'Brien. Yeah, I don't know if he got into your book. He's in the first. Gary, read it. Because he read the book. I hadn't read the book. Who didn't read the book?

12:22He read the book. Who didn't even read the first chapter? Thank you. Gary did our homework. Yeah, Gary did our homework. So please, please expand on the nose replacement industry and whereabouts it began and why. No, we don't. No, leave it in. So, yeah, well, it's because of nasal mutilation, which was a popular punishment, you know, going back. Yeah, because, first of all, nobody wants their nose cut off, but also it was like good deterrent, right? Because everybody sees your face and they see it. It's literally the visible deterrent. It is. Wait, wait, that was a punishment for a crime? Yeah, for crimes, yes.

12:57What kind of crime? You name it. You name it. The crime of wanting to spite your face. Wah, wah. I had to do it. I had to. Okay, don't use that one tonight on stage. Believe me, I won't. Okay. Okay, so what culture was big on this? This was in Ireland, in Egypt, in the Middle East. So how would they do it? They just cut it off. There was this story about Nepal. There was this whole town, Kirtipur, supposedly, where because the whole town was disloyal to the local conquerors, invaders, whatever, they denosed all the male population. My God, we are just awful as a species. I'm just saying. How disgusting.

13:48Have you ever been to an ancient ruins, be it Roman or Greek, and seen a statue and its nose has been chipped away? Yeah, same thing. It's the same thing. Is that on purpose? Yeah, defacing their gods. Oh, I thought it just fell off, like the old man in the mountains. I'm guessing it was defacing their gods. That's a defacement of it. Oh, is that right? Apparently so. Is that right? Wow. So the literal meaning of the word deface would be to just slap off your nose. Hack off a nose. Oh, that's interesting. See, where were you when I was writing the book? Oh, yeah, wow. That's so cool. But also, and then there was a - You said the old man in the mountain that's in New Hampshire.

14:22New Hampshire, yes. And the nose fell off there. Natural causes, however. So who was the military surgeon that came up, U.S. military surgeon came up with an idea for noses? Frank Tettimore. Yes, love him. Frank Tettimore. Okay, 1894, Frank Tettimore, army surgeon, came up with, it was a pair of glasses. This is going to work mostly for men. A pair of glasses, okay. and then you would hang a celluloid plastic nose off the glasses. You need a little bit of nose left for the glasses. And then at the bottom, to hide the line, there was a mustache. So it's basically a medical version of that. Yeah, exactly.

15:04Who would have thought? But what was more amazing, although it's hard to beat, the Groucho Marx glasses, was going back to like the 1500s, 1500s, there was surgery where you would take a flap from the cheek or the forehead and then separate it, but leave it attached in one spot. Flip it over onto the nose. Leave it attached so it has a blood supply while it's growing in on the nose. And that worked pretty well, but you'd have scarring on the face. So this guy, I love this guy, Tagliacazzi. Gaspari Tagliacazzi in the 1500s. Was he Italian? No, he was from Pittsburgh. So he came up with this thing like, let's take the underside of the upper arm.

15:48That you don't normally look at. That you don't look at, right? And there's no hair there. But the problem then is that you had to have your head kind of. Like attached to your arm, attached to your face until it grows in. Like you're checking if you have BO. Right. It's that position, right? So you did like that for a couple weeks. So he had this whole harness system. Back then, everyone had BO. Let's be clear about this. So that made it easier. Am I lying? That's true. No. There's a statue of Gaspari Tagliacachi in Bologna. It's like a niche in the wall, and it's a full-figure thing, and he's stepping forward towards the viewer, and he's holding something in his hand, and you look closely.

16:26What is it? It's a nose. Wow. That's his thing. Completely creepy. So there was a whole industry to repair those who were defaced. Yeah, and then syphilis came along, more need, more demand for fixing noses. It's been a thing. Now, what's the tie to syphilis? I mean, I'm not familiar with the... Eventually, if you don't treat it, I guess the bridge of the cartilage. The cartilage deteriorates. Something like that, yeah. Let's get into how implant surgeons, plastic surgeons, as we historically refer to them, came across the golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence when it came to breast implants and that transfer.

17:06That just seemed to be surprising. It was surprising to me, and that's why I decided to go to Mexico City and see this plastic surgeon. He applied the Fibonacci, the golden ratio, which is kind of two-thirds, one-third. It's been around a long time, and you can find examples of it in nature, those shells like that, and the design of sunflowers on a sunflower plant. It turns up everywhere, apparently. Anyway, so this guy wrote this paper. There were a couple of papers. One was on the perfect calf, and one was on the perfect buttock proportions. And when he did a Brazilian butt lift, basically, taking fat from one place and applying it elsewhere, he would use the Fibonacci sequence.

17:56I imagined him with, I don't know, a protractor and markers. He's like, no, I eyeball it. By now, I can eyeball it. But anyway, so I just was kind of interested in that whole. I was not expecting to read about the Fibonacci sequence. In a butt chapter? Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wasn't either. And then I, you know. So would Sir Mix-a-Lot agree with these proportions? Oh. He likes big butts and he cannot lie. Oh, sorry, yes. Okay. Well, thank you. I know the song. So is this an evolving? Yes, it's from the 90s, actually. It's a pretty old song. Yeah, it is. He likes big butts and he cannot lie.

18:31But he would not. But it had to do with the evolving aesthetic that this involved. So I was interested because this was the first chapter that I reported. So it was going back some years. And the Kardashian butt was the big thing at that point. Literally. Yes, it was the big thing, yes. And that is not— That evolved from the J-Lo butt. It did, yes. The original, the OG butt. The OG butt. You know a lot about this. Yeah. Yeah. So I was curious, you know, now is he discarding Fibonacci for Kardashian? Like, how does he deal with this? Anyway, so it was an interesting conversation and an interesting afternoon seeing this person have their fat from here, put here and back here.

19:15Right. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned prosthetics just a minute ago, but we have some really advanced prosthetics that have come on with microprocessors. they cost a lot of money to the point are they worth it and then I asked myself what do you need a chip in your implant for? because you've got them so use them like you get a butt implant with a chip no no not your butt it's going to be a smart ass yay oh good one yeah use that one tonight come on that's a very no but seriously what do you need a chip not in your butt no in a prosthetic in a leg or a And then they started to read further through the chapter and went, they cost how much and they're not even waterproof?

19:58They're not, and the battery needs to be charged. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're heavy. That's another thing. But for a leg, particularly if it's an upper leg, they're pretty great for legs. They can help. How do you get with the stability in your center of gravity when you've got another person that comes? Ah. Yeah. But they can kind of, like, if they sense that you're about to fall, they can kind of help prevent that. And there's some that use AI to kind of learn your gait. I mean, so the legs have come a long way. The legs are a lot. I mean, I went to the National Gathering of the Amputee Coalition.

20:41So it's a huge, like, they book the whole hotel. That's a thing. And, like, so you're in the lobby and, like, everybody has a prosthetic leg. It's kind of great. but not so many arms because the fingers that's a problem you can sort of toggle through the grip but it's kind of wonky it's not quite there yet so how much of the bionic man are we today how far have we come in the 50 years since the 1970s he's legs and arms and eye legs, arms, eye he had all his organs though is that right? yeah I think so his torso as far as I know alright it's just legs and arms and he had his own brain he had his own brain Okay, so we're kind of there.

21:19But the eye, the optic nerve is kind of part of the brain. It is. And that's, well, actually, I read an article about a prosthetic eye that is attached that will give sight, that will actually give sight. Huh. Is there anything, is that a thing? Not very good sight. No, it isn't, believe it or not. It's not good sight. Rudimentary sight, yes. But it's rudimentary sight. Yeah, right. Yeah, we're not. But the lenses for cataract surgery, that's a lot. That counts. Absolutely. That counts. But, yeah, like the whole, that's pretty complicated to do. An eye and an optic nerve hook that up and everything.

21:58Yeah. I mean, I think AI is going to speed things up quite a bit. Going back to the prosthetics, there's something called osseointegration. Yeah. Which, I don't know. Osseointegration is that bone? Yeah. Yeah. Just think dentures versus implants for your teeth. Yeah, so it screws directly into the bone. And it's great if there's no infection. There's been some issues with infection, which you don't get with the implant in the mouth. And it's the same guy who came up with the implants in the mouth, Brainmark, Per Ingemar Bren. It has an accent that I, Per Ingemar, somewhere up there. Yes, Mr. Beaner, dear.

22:38There you go. Just lost a lot of knowledge in the audience. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's like, wow, this seems to be working well and doesn't get infected even though the mouth is full of bacteria. Wow, let's just screw them in everywhere. And if you could do that, setting aside the infection issue, it's great because now you have sensation through the bone. You can tell what surface you're walking on. See, bones are like two-by-fours inside your body that you just hang stuff on. Well, in this case, screw it in. It's carpentry. Yeah, you just screw it in. Yeah. And now you don't need the socket because the socket, you know, it works by compression so it can be uncomfortable.

23:17It's sweaty. I remember seeing a booth for like residual limb antiperspirant because it's on a hot day. Residual limb antiperspirant. It's a thing. Did you know that was a thing? It's a thing. Yeah. Is that anything like Mondo? These commercials where people are putting deodorant everywhere. What is up with that? I'm like, what the hell has happened? What the hell? I know. Back in the day, we used to just say something called, wash your ass. That's what we would say. That's what we'd be like. I'm so like, if things are so weird down there, we'd be like, yeah, go wash your ass. I know. What a marketing coup that is.

23:57Yeah, tell me about it. Anyway, where were we? What are the specifics with the infection? Because the mouth is the dirtiest part of the body. And when you get an implant, they screw it into the bone. That's why you got to wait. like two months before you get the actual tooth. For the bone to heal. The bone has to heal around the anchor. And there's like zero problems with that. But you put it in the leg and they got infection problems. You know what I think it is? Because I did a book that had a saliva chapter. Saliva has, probably because the mouth is a cesspool of bacteria, saliva has antibacterial property.

24:32So I'm, which makes sense, right? Yeah. They say that about dogs. Yep. But I always wonder whether, how soon after they lick their butt, is that a true fact about their saliva? I am never going to find out. Let the dog lick your wound. It's got antibiotics. Right after it sniffs someone else's butt, licked its own butt. No, I'm not going there. That's how powerful saliva is. You can lick your butt and then lick your wound. Check it out. Still not doing the practical. So what advances have we made now in organ replacement in terms of having like a dialysis machine that's big and clunky and sat next to somebody, but actually being able to replace organs?

25:17Well, one development that's pretty cool is you could extend the shelf life of a heart that's been taken for transplantation. transplantation. So right now, if you take a heart from a donor body, you've got four to six hours on ice. Or if you use, there's some more modern perfusion systems, like a box where you're given an oxygen supply. And that'll get to like 12 hours. But there's a lab in a university of Michigan, extracorporeal life support lab, which is where they came up with the ECMO, extra, you know, the heart-lung machine. So it's basically oxygenating you outside the body. Right. So it's taking the place of your heart and lungs.