Replaceable You

Mary Roach dives into the strange, funny, and unsettling world of designing new body parts, from pig hearts to prosthetic feet, revealing just how messy replacing ourselves can be.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:26Roman Mars?

  to help get your job, the premium status it deserves, at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I was working at the radio station KALW in San Francisco in 2003 when a preview copy of the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was sent to the station. It immediately became one of my favorite books of all time, full of fun, gruesome, intriguing stories about what happens to our bodies after we die. So in 2003, I scheduled what turned out to be

• 2:10Roman Mars?

  the very first media interview of the author, Mary Roach.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Do you remember that?

• 2:15Roman Mars?

  I remember it so well.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, I got it. And I kind of dressed up, even though it's radio.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  It was like one of the best interviews ever.

• 2:28Roman Mars?

  Over the years, Mary and I have become friends. We even shared an office in Oakland for a while. And over her career, she has continued to come out with some of the best, and certainly the funniest, science books I've ever read. Longtime listeners will know that she has been on the show a few times over the years. But when she announced that her new book was about designing human replacement parts, designing is the key word there, I knew that it was time for us to have a long overdue chat.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  My name is Mary Roach, and my book is called Replaceable You. And the subtitle, which doesn't really tell you that much, is Adventures in Human Anatomy.

• 3:04Roman Mars?

  But what it really is, is this scientific pursuit to find replacement parts for our worn out, diseased, and malfunctioning bodies.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  That is exactly right. Some of it historical, and some of it current. Yeah, just these efforts to swap things out, make things from scratch, grow things from scratch, all those things we want to do, and sometimes do, do. I said do, do.

• 3:32Roman Mars?

  And you know, what struck me, you know, as I was reading this book, and you know, like, we're a design show ostensibly, is that, you know, this is the mother of all design problems. Like, there are really major roadblocks to designing replacement parts for the human body. It is like, truly difficult. Could you just talk about why that is?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the basic problem here is that you have 200 years, more or less, of medicine and engineering that's trying to compete with millions of years of evolutionary tinkering. And that's tough to do. And there's, the other thing is that just things that seem simple are not in the human body. There's nothing simple.

• 4:17Roman Mars?

  One idea that you present in the book is that we have somewhat worked out how to replace simple organ functions in the body with these big external machines, like dialysis for kidney function, or a big ECMO machine which takes over the function of the heart and lungs. But the holy grail for replacement human parts are organic, maybe donated, maybe animal grown parts that can be surgically implanted into a person whose body is damaged. Why is that last step of integrating replacement parts into the body so difficult?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it comes down, I think, to two very basic features of the human body, and one is the immune system. You know, when you're developing a machine outside the body, the immune system doesn't give a [BLEEP].

• 5:04Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  You try to stick that in, and now you've got the immune system for one. You also have to deal with clotting. You know, if you've got like a stent in there, you know, anytime the blood sort of coursing along through the blood vessels, and as long as what it's touching is the wall of a blood vessel, it's fine. But if it starts, if there's something else there, it's like, uh, and it starts to form clots. So people with stents and things in the body often have to be on blood thinners, and so there's that going on. And then just the body can have a sort of an inflammatory reaction, and that can just become a mess and infection. That's another thing.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Anytime you open up the body and you put in something from the outside world, it's really hard to be 100% sure that you're not letting in bacteria. And infection inside the body is a real bitch. When a hip replacement or a knee replacement goes poorly, it's almost always infection.

• 6:10Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And that, you know, if you're using a cane... You're not gonna have to worry about infection.

• 6:17Roman Mars?

  I guess that's right. Well, what do you think that impulse is for replacement function to be further and further integrated into the body? Like, for example, when someone is very ill and their heart and lungs can't function, a big ECMO machine will pump the blood out and oxygenated in the machine and then pump the blood back in, and it works amazingly well. Like, someone could be on an ECMO machine forever, I suppose. And if someone wanted to live a more normal life where they could walk around and do things, you could go down the path of designing, you know, a smaller and smaller ECMO machine. But even the man who invented the ECMO machine decades ago is now trying to find ways to make donated hearts better and more successful for transplants.

• 7:02Roman Mars?

  How did that preference for finding solutions that were more and more organic, more and more natural, strike you as you were doing your research?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely a bias for wholeness and for normalness, and I'm using quotes around normal.

• 7:17Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  What is normal? But, you know, we all know it when we see it. And you go out into the world wheeling a portable ECMO machine, and first of all, it's going into your body. And yeah, okay, they could probably finesse it so it's less dramatic, but it's kind of like these two vampiric, if that's an adjective. Openings in the neck, you know, and you're cannulated. In other words, it's like it's going, one tube is going into the other. If you trip and fall, you're gonna decannulate. And that, like, blood's burning everywhere. You got like, you know, a couple minutes and you're dead. Well, you know, going fast forward, I don't know, 30 years, maybe, yeah,

• 8:00Speaker 01

  this could be done in one of the, in like a little pouch that you wear in a fanny pack. I don't know. But it's still not you.

• 8:10Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  And it's still, you'd just rather have something inside you. You know, you'd rather be able to pass as just human. And there's such a bias for it that it's really hard for people with underperforming limbs, feet, say. You know, I spent some time with a woman who, it took her a long time, but she succeeded in getting her own foot amputated.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Even though it was healthy, it was healthy, it was viable, but it was underperforming, it was twisted. But it was clear to her, watching people with a prosthetic foot, especially below the knee, pretty simple thing to replace, really, in terms of prosthetics. And she'd see those people running and hiking and just sort of living life the way most people do. And she couldn't do any of that. And yet, surgeons were like, nope, I'm not taking off this foot, perfectly healthy foot. And yeah, as in oxygenated, you know, nothing's dead on it. But it didn't work, you know. And there was a guy who had foot drop, which is, you know, you, when you're walking, you need to pick your toes

• 9:19Speaker 01

  up, and then put them down, and you do it automatically. But some people have nerve, yes, with Parkinson's, I think, too. So you end up kind of shuffling. And he didn't want to do that. He was like, give me a prosthetic foot. And so he shot himself in the foot. And that way, they couldn't say, you have a perfectly healthy foot here. Like, you have a mangled mess. We will take it off.

• 9:44Roman Mars?

  Yeah. We've mentioned the fact that a lot of the integration of replacement parts is particularly difficult. Could you name some examples of where it's actually kind of worked well?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Sure. I would say a couple of success stories. And one of them I don't actually talk about in this book, I talked about it in Gulp. And that's the fecal microbiome transplant, which is to take somebody else's gut bacteria and put it in your own, just replace the microbiome. And that works really well, particularly with people who have an infection with C. diff, C. difficile, which is a really serious

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Gut infection that kills, I don't have the numbers, but it's kind of astounding. So you, and back in the day, before they sort of isolated the bacteria and put them in a capsule, you're talking about some guy coming in with a brown paper bag and handing it over going, "Yeah, not my best effort." But that, you take that, it's like [BLEEP]. You put it in a blender, an Oster blender, actually. And you, the guy's taken some antibiotics to get kind of a clean slate. You use a colonoscope, which has a spurting function. And you just put it up there. And within two days, I mean, the patient that I saw, two days later,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  he's having, what they say on the Bristol stool scale, number three, I think? Smooth and soft, like a sausage or snake. And he, you know, it's like, it was on Saturday night. He'd had the surgery like Thursday, and on Saturday night, that's what he sent to the physician. I mean, that's not everybody's idea of a great Saturday night, but that, for him, was the best Saturday night ever. And that's a simple, just take it out and put it in. I mean, now it's done with expensive capsules, yada, yada. But that works. The other one that is really pretty amazing is intraocular lenses for cataracts.

• 11:47Roman Mars?

  I definitely want to talk about this. My, my wife has had terrible vision her entire life. Recently had cataract surgery and had lens replaced. And it is life-changing for her.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so much so that there are people in their twenties who are extremely nearsighted. And for whatever reason, contacts aren't comfortable, they don't want to do LASIK. They're asking to just have the lens popped out and a new one put in.

• 12:15Roman Mars?

  Like, they don't have cataracts, but they're...

• 12:16Speaker 01

  They don't have cataracts. They don't have cataracts. They, it's just, they want, they want that miraculous vision that you get with these lenses. So a cataract, it's kind of confusing because people think it's a separate thing from the lens. But the lens, as you age, it, it gets cloudy and dark and hard. And it's, the whole lens is referred to as the cataract. And they take the whole thing out and put in a new, clear, lovely, man-made lens. That has been, but you know, that didn't happen overnight, you know, back in the sixties. That was like a... You were in the hospital for eight days. It was a big incision with stitches. People would lie in bed with sandbags, holding their head in place.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  It didn't often go well. They would not let people get it till they were a lot older because they wanted to wait till your vision is so bad that you're going to be grateful for even a small improvement.

• 13:11Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  But now it's, yeah, people are happier with it than they were before.

• 13:18Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And in the book, you actually traveled to Mongolia to folks that are encouraging cataract surgery, to folks who live out in the plains and therefore have, I guess, sort of damaged eyes from the sun in particular, and trying to sort of encourage them to that this procedure is like, better now, and they should, they should consider it.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was one of the comments that the surgeon, it was Orbis International that does this work. And he said, it's, you know, part of the hesitation people have is because they hear about it from their friends and family when it doesn't go well. And so, part of what Orbis does is train, they're training surgeons. They're doing a small incision surgery, and it's something you can do with very minimal equipment. And a huge improvement. You don't need stitches. And so that, you know, the word spreads, like, oh, that actually works. Because there was, there was a patient there who was like, you

• 14:17Speaker 01

  know, through a translator, said, I had heart surgery a few years ago, and I didn't hesitate on that, but I put off having this cataract operation for a long time because it, you know, it just, it didn't always go well. But these days, it's pretty amazing.

• 14:33Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that was so remarkable is knowing that before they actually knew how to put good lenses in, if the cataracts were bad enough, they would just take out the lens and use glasses to be the lens at that point. And it was, it's so much of an improvement just to have

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:51Roman Mars?

  the cloudy lens out of the way.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And way, way back, you know, in the 1700s, I mean, couching, it was called couching. Comes from the French to lie down, to coucher. And so they would just stick a probe and then we thought just like, sit down here. And I have this probe and I'm going to stick it in your eye. And they would push, they get the like, push the lens down to the bottom of the eyeball and hold it there. There was one 12th century medical manual that recommended holding it there for four or five R Fathers.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And you would definitely want somebody saying four or five R Fathers if they've got a pointy object in your eye, holding down your lens. But then, yeah, suddenly light can come through and hit the retina and you're not able to focus on things. You need super thick glasses, but you can now see, you're not, you're not blind. Cause some of those, if you let a cataract go long enough, you're, you're functionally blind, you know?

• 15:47Roman Mars?

  Yeah. So your, your books are super funny and every other sort of, you know, paragraph is, is a joke. And there's occasionally, there's, you know, like a joke that is so inappropriate, it makes me laugh. It's so inappropriate that I exclaim out loud, I'll go, Mary Roach. And also sometimes I'll go, Mary Frances Roach. I'll like invent a middle name for you. Mary Abigail Roach. Did you actually say a phlebotomist glory hole or something?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Thank you for noticing that one.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I was just, I was first of all fascinated by the fact that the early blood banks, that, you know, that people were so squeamish about blood that they'd sit down at this, there'd be a wall with holes cut in it and they'd stick their arms through. They'd never have to see the phlebotomist who's drawing the blood. They'd never have to see their own blood coming out in a tube. And I was like, oh my God, it's a phlebotomy glory hole.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Is that inappropriate?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 16:50Roman Mars?

  Well, there's, there's, I exclaimed out loud in invoking your middle name, your fake, your fake middle name many, many times, just going like, oh, my goodness.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  My goodness, Mary.

• 17:00Roman Mars?

  Mary Anastasia Roach. How could you say such a thing?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  You sound like my mother. Mary Catherine Roach.

• 17:08Roman Mars?

  That part of the book is so delightful. I was wondering like how you, you know, I know you as just a funny person. It is interesting to me that there, that you write the funniest books I've read, and also they are rigorous, factual explorations of things. Is this a natural thing for you? Is this a thing that you're interested in this and this is who you are and so for this? Or is there an aspect to this where you think this is the way to explore this type of thing?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's the former. I think science and the human body are endlessly interesting and strange. And I've always been surprised by the things that I learn when I sit down with somebody who knows this stuff, because I didn't pay any attention in high school to science at all. I took the gut science, you know, not the advanced, what is it, the AP science. Apparently that was a better teacher. Anyway, I just didn't pay any attention. I thought science was boring. But, you know, fast forward to when I started writing and, you know, I was writing for Discover magazine because they'd asked me to. And I went, oh, holy science. It's kind of cool. The human body. It's like

• 18:19Speaker 01

  another planet. I think it's interesting. But I think that it stems from my insecurity. I'm always picturing, and the humor that is, I'm picturing someone reading, thinking, like I did, oh, science, this is kind of boring. I don't think I want to read this book. So I'm like, just running as fast as I can, dancing as fast as I can, make it interesting. Stay with me. I'm not going to be boring. It's not going to be a slog like science was for me in high school. I want you to, I want you to stay here with me. So that's, I think, a large part of it. Also, it's just more fun for me to write that way. I kind of, I entertain myself that way. And if it's not entertaining for me, forget about it.

• 19:01Roman Mars?

  No, it's very.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  It has to be fun for me.

• 19:05Roman Mars?

  When we come back, Mary tells us about her dreams of having flowing locks of hair on her leg. More after the break.

• 19:16Roman Mars?

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• 21:25Roman Mars?

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• 22:31Roman Mars?

  We're back with Mary Roach. So in your books, I think I first recognized this in your second book, Bonk, where you have sex with your husband in an MRI and have people take pictures of it, like the insides of your bodies. But you're weakly game for things. Like, it's a huge part of what makes your books so fun. Can you talk about the things that you participated in for this book?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Um, sure. I have to point out, though, that was, in fact, ultrasound, which is so much more embarrassing. At least with an MRI, you have some privacy. Ultrasound, there's a dude in a white coat, holding an ultrasound wand to my belly, and Ed is behind me, and that is a really embarrassing afternoon. So, moving on.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, for this, let's see, for this book, I, yeah, I spent some time in a, an old Emerson iron lung, a holdover from the polio era, back before there was a vaccine. Mm-hmm. You know, not everybody got polio, had to be in an iron lung, but if you had a bad enough case of paralytic polio, your diaphragm and your rib muscles were out of commission, so you can't breathe. So, and I wanted to get at, like, what does that feel like to have a machine breathe for you? And actually breathe like you, because an iron lung, unlike the ventilators in the ICU

• 24:00Speaker 01

  today, which are positive pressure ventilation, it's like your lung is a party balloon, it's being blown in there. Whereas, negative pressure, which is an iron lung, it's done by vacuum, like, you pull out, you pull the air out of the tube, and then the lung, the rib cage expands, and that pulls in the air. Anyway, so I found a guy who's had an iron lung, his wife had died about a year before, and somebody told me, because I was asking around, and so there's this guy, Mark Randolph, who lived in Kansas City, said, yes, you can come to Kansas City and try out my deceased wife's iron lung.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Now that I'm saying it, it sounds like a really weird thing to ask somebody, but, as you say, I'm game, and he was game, and so I got there, and there are like two people who he recruited to help, because it's not simple, it's similar to an MRI in that there's a bed that rolls out and then rolls back in. Right. But then you have to get your head through that opening, and it's like this weird, your head's coming through, and there's people are kind of holding the head like it's like they're obstetricians giving birth to you through this hole. It's very, very weird.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  So I did that. I did that.

• 25:24Roman Mars?

  Like, this is something that his wife sort of went through every single night for hours and hours at a time. But, but you let, how long did you last in the iron?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, about, about nine minutes. Because, yeah, I had planned to, I wanted to spend the night in it. But one thing about it, in order to have, you know, to create a vacuum, it has to be, a seal has to be tight. You can't have any air leaks. That means that the collar around your neck has to be tight, uncomfortably tight. And so it was this weird, also, they had it, he had it turned way up, because that's what Mona, his late wife, had needed. So, but I didn't need that. So I got in there. So it was this weird thing where I was breathing like deeply and luxuriantly like, but at the same time, feeling like I was being strangled. So it

• 26:18Speaker 01

  was this weird combination of like, you're breathing in a more relaxed way than you ever have. And yet, you feel as though you're being strangled. And I asked Jane, the woman who had sort of set me up, and I said, for Mona, what was it, what was it like? How could she stand it? And she said, well, it was a situation like this. She had chronic pulmonary disease. So it was a struggle for her to breathe. She said, at the end of the day, she was so happy to get in it. She'd been breathing all day, struggling, never quite feeling like she was getting enough air. So she was always happy to get in it at the end of the night, and so happy to get out of it in the morning. So, like that.

• 27:00Roman Mars?

  You also, when you were researching hair replacement and hair shaft replacement, you proposed the idea of them harvesting a part of your hair and implanting it onto your leg?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Yes. And I had a reason for that. I had a good reason, Roman. I wanted to demonstrate for myself, and going forward, maybe people who came to a book event. I wanted to demonstrate donor dominance. And that is, with a hair transplant, If somebody has male pattern baldness, okay, they've got hair grown on the sides and the back because hair there isn't affected by testosterone. It doesn't care, but the hair on the top is sensitive to it. So if you take hair from the back and you put it up top, donor dominance, the donor site rules. So the hair stays. So I wanted to take some head hair because I was actually donating some follicular units

• 27:57Speaker 01

  for some research down the road at a stem cell place. I said, while you're there, can you take a couple of units and transplant them to my leg? Because I, I just thought it would be cool to have like a few strands of long flowing hair on my calf. You know, just, you know, not a lot, maybe three or four. And I could show people, I could talk about donor dominance and I could roll up my pant leg and go, look, look here, this is what I'm talking about. And sadly, they didn't take. And that's what the surgeon was, he was kind of skeptical. He's like, you know, the leg is a much weaker, there's not as much blood supply to the calf compared with the scalp.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  So I don't know if that's going to work, but I made them try it anyway. And the woman who, Galena, the woman who does most of the transplanting, she was so not interested in it. He didn't want to tell her, he's like, I'm, you know, Galena is done taking the follicles. She goes, okay, you're all set. And the doctor, Dr. Shafu, he goes, um, Galena, she was talking about wanting to take some hairs and put them on her leg. And, uh, yeah, anyway, we convinced her.

• 29:15Roman Mars?

  But it didn't take in the end.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  No, I'm so disappointed.

• 29:19Roman Mars?

  I mean, this interaction, you know, makes me think of another thing, which is, you know, often you are writing about stuff that is pretty sensitive, you know, stuff to do with our bodies, medical stuff, that maybe someone might be hesitant to talk to you for, for whatever reason. And sometimes if you find someone who won't talk to you that's based here in the United States, you'll like, Fly to Russia to find someone to talk with you.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I will do that, yes.

• 29:43Roman Mars?

  And more and more, I've noticed that you're probably reaching folks who know your work, and they welcome you even though what they do is pretty sensitive. And in the book, Replaceable You, you talk about this organization called CORE, and you kind of have to convince them that your demystification of their work, it would actually be really helpful to their mission. Could you talk about your role in pulling back the curtain on things that seem scary or gruesome?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  The example that you gave has to do with, it was tissue donation. And that is, as opposed to organ donation, you can also donate tissue, which is bone, skin, tendon, ligaments. And when I wrote STIF, I wanted to cover that, but no one at these places would get back to me or return my calls. And I understand why people are hesitant to have someone come in, because I've seen it, you know, and I described it kind of like a Francis Bacon painting. For me, it's just kind of amazing to see. And the way that, and I could say that the way they take skin from the back,

• 30:52Speaker 01

  so that no one will see there, and from the lower, they don't take anything from the face. They take things from the legs. And it's done, and then they kind of stitch it back up. It's like opening up a tamale almost, pulling the stuff out and then putting, you know, putting the skin back and stitching it up. And it's, I guess, in a way, you know, it is kind of a gruesome thing to see, but no more so than witnessing some kinds of surgery, you know? Ultimately, it's surgery. And unlike surgery, that this patient, in quotes, doesn't feel any pain, there's no downside, you know what I mean? It's all benefit. They don't care, they're just doing something good.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter what it looks like in someone's imagination. So I kind of just want, I find that if you can demystify this and just say, yeah, it sounds kind of gruesome, this is what it's like. And my hope is always that I'm not putting people off. Either organ donation or tissue donation. You can end up helping, I think it's 75 people with one person's tissue. You know, the bones are used for little spacers and spine surgery. The skin is used, sort of bio-dressing for people who've had serious burns. And there's all kinds of reconstruction that can be done with with this tissue. So it's a really good thing to do.

• 32:20Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  But and and I completely understand why they're called OPOs, organ procurement organizations. I get why they're wary of somebody coming in. Because if you chose to, you could make it sound really bad. I'm like, God, now they're pulling out this, he's holding this guy's leg and it's, there's blood here. And I'm like, yeah, you could make it sound bad if you wanted to. But I I just feel like if you act like you have something to hide, people think you have something to hide.

• 32:49Roman Mars?

  How has working on this book changed the way you think about yourself and your own body? Like, are you like, would you, would you get a pig organ put in your body? Would you, you know, like, how does it, I don't know, how does it change your?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I mean, how cool, that'd be cool. I know, I'd be like, if you can save my life by throwing a pig heart in there and it's going to actually work for a while, maybe long enough, at least for me to get a human transplant, absolutely. And what a cool thing to be able to say at a cocktail party. I've got a pig heart in there. I don't know, I always have trouble coming up with interesting small talk at parties.

• 33:25Roman Mars?

  Oh, I find that very hard to believe, Mary.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  If I could say, you know what, I've got a, I got, like, I have, I have a friend, Clark, who has a third kidney. And he would sort of bring that up at parties. And I was, I was kind of jealous.

• 33:40Roman Mars?

  Man, I wish I had a third kidney.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  I wish I had a third kidney. I could, I mean, I could lie, I suppose, too honest.

• 33:47Roman Mars?

  While we're on the subject, what is the deal with pigs? Like, they're kind of the go-to for human replacement parts, you know, like as an organism? Like, what is it about pigs that makes them good for this?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  I'm glad you asked, because I have a whole section on that. And you can blame Hormel. Hormel, back in the, I think it might start in the 40s, 40s, 50s era. I'm terrible with dates, but. The Mayo Foundation, which is the research arm of the Mayo Clinic, and the Hormel Institute, which is the research arm of pork.

• 34:20Roman Mars?

  Wow.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  They work together to miniaturize pigs in order to create a lab animal that would have organs of approximately the same size, but that also wouldn't be so loud and rambunctious as a full grown pig. That's a large, loud animal to have running around a lab or anywhere in a facility, research facility. So they started breeding them smaller and breeding them for the purpose of studying various surgical procedures. The other thing with pig hearts, pigs are, this one researcher described them as almost a caricature of an obese human

• 35:02Speaker 01

  because they get atherosclerosis, they have heart problems. Pigs that are being raised on farms don't get a lot of exercise and they eat garbage. So they're a very apt animal to use for studying heart disease. But the other thing going on here is, I mean, obviously, a primate might be a better fit, a better, closer match, but there are ethical issues and also zoonoses, like diseases can transfer more readily between two primates than between a... I mean, it's still an issue with pigs, but less so. So there was all of that going on.

• 35:41Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. So they're close, but not too close. And there's also like agricultural research can push things forward when medical research is not like always funded to the best of our ability.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, yeah. And I think, I'm sure on some level, the Hormel people were like, oh, another way to sell pigs.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Lab animals.

• 36:04Roman Mars?

  Exactly.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  I have to say, I did not speak to anybody from the Hormel Institute, as I don't think they exist anymore. But anyway, they published a whole lot of papers.

• 36:14Roman Mars?

  About, about.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  That whole, yeah, the whole miniaturization of the pig project went on for some time.

• 36:21Roman Mars?

  Did you come away from all this research thinking that maybe in our quest to have normal function for our worn out, damaged bodies, we overemphasized this idea of this integrated whole, like a quote unquote "normal body," and maybe we should be more open to a, like a variety of solutions?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think that it would be great if people were drawn to whatever works best without being hung up by what does it look like and how much will I, how will I not look like everyone else? But you know, part of that is like, if it's in, the other side of that is if it's inside you and it's incorporated in you, you don't have to think about it. You don't see it. You don't have to change its batteries. You don't have to, it becomes part of you and you can just live your life normally. So it's not just that bias for wholeness. It's also wanting to just be able to go through your life without thinking about that part.

• 37:21Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  You know, we are happiest when we are unaware of all our parts and what they're doing. We just want them to do their thing and be invisible. So, you know, anytime you externalize a piece of yourself, it's, it's always there, you know?

• 37:37Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the book is so good. Your books are so good. I enjoy talking to you so much. So, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for doing this. It was fabulous.

• 38:02Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Jacob Medina Gleason and edited by Christopher Johnson, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Kathy Too is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server, there's a link to that, as well as every past episode, including many, many, with Mary Roach, at

• 38:47Roman Mars?

  99pi.org.

• 38:57Speaker 04

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