Replaceable You with Mary Roach

Are our parts replaceable? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, & Gary O’Reilly sit down with bestselling author Mary Roach, who discusses her newest book, Replaceable You, and the quest to grow organs, build parts, and engineer the human body.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, Chuck. Mm-hmm. Yes. Are you in need of any organs? Are we talking Hammond or? Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about replaceable you. Ah. All the ways our organs and appendages might need replacement in the future. Coming up with the one and only Mary Roach.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing, man? Former soccer pro.

• 0:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Allegedly.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soccer announcer.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you lend of yourself to our cause.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, with pleasure.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Okay, professional stand-up comedian. You working tonight? I am. Man, we're recording this on a Friday. It's 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?" Hmm. Are we replaceable? I see you've been talking to my wife.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we replaceable? So what does that even mean, Gary?

• 1:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, 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.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the universe?

• 1:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, that we know about. Normally, when you buy a complex machine, it comes with the contact details for the manufacturer.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The warranty.

• 1:40Gary O'Reilly?

  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 B.C.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 1:57Gary O'Reilly?

  That will all get explained. Uh, I'm not going to steal anyone's thunder, so Neil, if you would, please introduce our guest.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this, we now have three or four time, five, how many times this person, how many times she'd been on here? Hmm, I don't know. Reintroducing to the StarTalk fanbase, Mary Roach. Mary Roach, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 2:15Mary Roach?

  Thank you. I think it's like five.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five. I've lost count. Newer 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. Listen, we got here stiff. That was like dead people. Grunt, that was like military. Bonk, I think that was just sex. Has to be. Fuzz, but I forgot what it was. That's bad sex.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gulp. And finally, we added more words here to packing for Mars.

• 2:49Mary Roach?

  Packing for Mars.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Packing for Mars.

• 2:50Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. Life sweet and replaceable you.

• 3:03Mary Roach?

  Thank you. It's a play on embraceable you.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Subtitled Adventures in Human Anatomy. And that's out at the fall of 2025. Welcome.

• 3:16Mary Roach?

  Thank you.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And you're in from Oakland, California.

• 3:20Mary Roach?

  Uh huh.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.

• 3:23Mary Roach?

  Always a pleasure.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Excellent. Putting us on your, on your schedule. So you, you, you pick these topics that no one else thinks to talk about. And then you just blow it wide open.

• 3:35Mary Roach?

  That's my thing.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you approach it journalistically, but all of your source material are people who are active in these topics.

• 3:45Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you put it together in ways no one imagines even possible. So this is, this is.

• 3:50Mary Roach?

  It's incredible, isn't it?

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. It's a, it's a unique niche. Yeah. In the nonfiction verse. Nice. So that's just again.

• 3:59Mary Roach?

  No, I go and I, I target some unsuspecting expert researcher scientist and I use them as an unpaid tutor, basically.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go. Wow. And if they're good and they're educated, they'll love to talk.

• 4:11Mary Roach?

  They love to talk. They do. Like their spouse doesn't want to hear about it anymore. Their kids, exactly. And like, oh, here's this woman. She wants to know what I do. Come on down.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So you have explored human behavior. Uh, not only physiologically, but you bring a dose of humor to it. That's, it's part of our branding here. If you can't laugh or at least smile, you know, go home. Yeah. Yeah. That's, you just spoke to half the country right now.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So is there one or more words that you might describe yourself? If I were to pick, I would say journalist, science communicator and writer.

• 4:47Mary Roach?

  Just. Yeah. All of those work. I might say nonfiction author.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure.

• 4:51Mary Roach?

  Funny sometimes.

• 4:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:53Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Chuck Nice?

  We have something in common. Sometimes.

• 4:59Mary Roach?

  Journal, science journalist, sounds a little highbrow.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does, doesn't it?

• 5:03Mary Roach?

  Doesn't it?

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does. It doesn't sound fun.

• 5:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds a little stodgy and boring, too.

• 5:07Mary Roach?

  Yeah, that's, that's not me.

• 5:09Chuck Nice?

  Does not, not apply to you at all.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 rep.

• 5:19Mary Roach?

  I know.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me go do something else and know what is done before.

• 5:21Mary Roach?

  It's always very exciting, that moment where you're like, I am so done with fill in the blank. I'm ready to move on.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Mary Roach?

  Yeah, so, this one started, I got an email from a reader who had an idea, 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.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Mary Roach?

  So, but we had a correspondence back and forth. It turned out she's an amputee, specifically elective amputee, like she

• 5:54Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 5:55Mary Roach?

  Wanted her foot, because her foot didn't work well. She couldn't walk right, she'd have the spinal bifida. Anyway, I 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.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 6:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:14Mary Roach?

  And the other thing was, I was talking-

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you amputated the foot, because she couldn't find a doctor?

• 6:20Mary Roach?

  I did, you know, it's not that hard.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 6:22Mary Roach?

  It's really-

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ultimately.

• 6:24Mary Roach?

  With the right equipment, or even the wrong equipment.

• 6:26Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, not even the wrong equipment.

• 6:28Mary Roach?

  It's pretty doable.

• 6:29Chuck Nice?

  The duller, the better.

• 6:31Mary Roach?

  And I didn't charge, I didn't charge her very much.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 6:35Mary Roach?

  She did get it cut off, but not by me.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, for many of us of a certain age.

• 6:40Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all watched The Six Million Dollar Man.

• 6:44Mary Roach?

  Absolutely.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's the first replaceable body part-

• 6:46Chuck Nice?

  We can rebuild him. We can make them stronger.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 6:49Mary Roach?

  Better, stronger, faster.

• 6:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he had the eye that which would be annoying, right? You cue up your eye and it goes why does it need to do that?

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, right. And so then that was followed by, was it also the Six Million Dollar Woman?

• 7:03Mary Roach?

  Lindsay Wagner.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lindsay Wagner.

• 7:04Mary Roach?

  She had the ear instead of the eye.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so she could have. So I thought that was inventive and creative. And it gave us the word bionic.

• 7:13Mary Roach?

  It did.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a bionic man. But that, none of that was part of your inspiration for this?

• 7:18Mary Roach?

  Well, that's 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.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:29Mary Roach?

  Wasn't that the theme song?

• 7:30Chuck Nice?

  That was the theme song.

• 7:31Mary Roach?

  There we go.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dare I say?

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  And they had to show him running in slow motion because he could run up to 60 something miles an hour.

• 7:36Mary Roach?

  And they speeded it up.

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have seen a white man run that fast.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, I gotta watch this show.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, where are you gonna take us first?

• 7:50Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 8:04Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Gary O'Reilly?

  How did you go about that and not rinse and repeat every single theme in 17 chapters?

• 8:11Mary Roach?

  I'm always going for kind of a odd take on things, you know, like again, the chapter, the amputation chapter, it's specifically about how hard it is if you want to get some, and that bias for wholeness. And so it wasn't like, here's the latest developments in prosthetic limb technology. Because that's, you know, you go to Wired for that, or I don't know, that's not my thing.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go anywhere else for that?

• 8:35Mary Roach?

  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

• 8:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Iron lung.

• 8:44Mary Roach?

  Uh, yeah, an Emerson.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You spent some time in an iron lung?

• 8:47Mary Roach?

  Yeah, it was an old Emerson iron lung from the polio era.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 8:51Mary Roach?

  I mean, the original polio era.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the one that's coming.

• 8:55Mary Roach?

  Exactly.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get ready, people.

• 8:59Mary Roach?

  So that, yeah, that was fascinating. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm always looking for a different way in, you know?

• 9:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Having done all this research, having gone around the world, it seems, do you get the feeling that?

• 9:14Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 9:24Mary Roach?

  Yeah, no, I wouldn't say it's a failure, because 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 incre- that's a hard thing to compete with.

• 9:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Mary Roach?

  So I don't, I don't feel like it's a total failure.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait.

• 9:45Mary Roach?

  I feel like it gets-

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah, but I will say that, would you, 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, lot of money in it.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the urgency of it.

• 10:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:12Mary Roach?

  Yeah, well, the DOD spent a lot of money, you know, especially Iraq, Afghanistan, everybody getting, stepping on IEDs, they, they funded a lot of work into prosthetics. I, I mean, it's getting there, but, you know, it's, it's the kind of thing, that hand is like, your five fingers that are moving independently, and you gotta like, track the signals from the brain, and that's gotta, so, you know, people, most people who have an amputa- one arm, missing or part of an arm, they just use the other arm.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:38Mary Roach?

  They just like, reach over and pick it up.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was there no inspiration that came from Star Wars, where, uh-

• 10:44Chuck Nice?

  Luke lost his hand.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Luke, Luke had his hand cut off in a, in a saber fight.

• 10:48Mary Roach?

  Did he now?

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, and you say, oh my gosh, and then the next scene, he's just sort of-

• 10:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the next scene is him getting a new hand.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and it's like, okay, I just got a new handle.

• 10:57Mary Roach?

  Everybody thinks that's easy, but it's not easy. Also, those, 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, I mean, you know, but, give it some time.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was just exploring what sources of motivation might prompt people to think this way, and that might have been such a moment.

• 11:19Mary Roach?

  Right.

• 11:29Mary Roach?

  Hello, I'm Vicky Brook Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson.

• 11:45Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we sort of jump into Replaceable You, you start, the first chapter is about noses.

• 11:51Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 12:01Mary Roach?

  At least since Michael Jackson.

• 12:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't be silly.

• 12:05Mary Roach?

  I had a beautiful nose. Bubbles took my nose. Oh, poor Michael.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the most famous astronomers had a fake nose.

• 12:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Really?

• 12:14Mary Roach?

  Dugong Brey.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't know if he got into your book.

• 12:16Mary Roach?

  He's in the first...

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because he read the book. I hadn't read the book.

• 12:21Mary Roach?

  Who didn't read the book?

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He read the book.

• 12:22Mary Roach?

  Who didn't even read the first chapter?

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 12:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, Gary did. Gary did our homework.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Gary did our homework.

• 12:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So please, please expand on the nose replacement industry and whereabouts it began and why.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 12:33Gary O'Reilly?

  No, leave it in.

• 12:35Mary Roach?

  So, yeah, well, nasal, 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, they're like, ooh.

• 12:50Gary O'Reilly?

  It's literally the visible deterrent.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is. Wait, wait, that was a punishment for a crime?

• 12:56Mary Roach?

  Yeah, for crimes, yes.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of crime?

• 12:58Mary Roach?

  You can name it. You can name it.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The crime of wanting to spite your face.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to do it. I had to. Okay, don't use that one tonight on stage. Believe me, I won't. Okay, so, and what culture, what culture was big on this?

• 13:15Mary Roach?

  This was in Ireland in, um...

• 13:19Mary Roach?

  Egypt in the Middle, yeah, the Middle East.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how would they do it?

• 13:23Mary Roach?

  Just hack it off. There was, there was this story about Nepal. The, uh, there was this whole town, Kirtypur supposedly, where because the whole town was disloyal to the local conquerors, invaders, whatever, they de-nosed all the male population.

• 13:41Chuck Nice?

  My God, we are just awful as a species. I'm just saying. Yeah. How disgusting.

• 13:48Gary O'Reilly?

  You ever been to an ancient ruins, say, but be a Roman or Greek, and seen a statue and its nose has been chipped away?

• 13:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deface the nose.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  But is that on purpose?

• 13:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Defacing their gods.

• 14:01Mary Roach?

  Oh, I thought it just fell off, like the old man in the mountain.

• 14:02Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm guessing it was defacing their gods.

• 14:04Mary Roach?

  Oh, is that right?

• 14:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Apparently so.

• 14:07Mary Roach?

  Is that right? Wow.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the literal meaning of the word deface would be to just slap off your nose.

• 14:14Chuck Nice?

  Hack off a nose.

• 14:15Mary Roach?

  Oh, that's interesting. So, yeah, where were you when I was writing the book?

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, wow.

• 14:18Mary Roach?

  That's so cool. But also, and then there was a-

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said the old man in the mountain that's in New Hampshire?

• 14:22Mary Roach?

  Yes, and that the nose fell off there. Natural causes, however.

• 14:27Gary O'Reilly?

  So who was the military surgeon that came up? US military surgeon came up with an idea for noses?

• 14:32Mary Roach?

  Frank Teddermore. Yes, love him. Frank Teddermore, okay. Uh, 1894, Frank Teddermore, Army surgeon, came up with, it was a pair of glasses. This is gonna work mostly, mostly for men. Pair of glasses, okay? And then you would hang a celluloid plastic nose off the glasses. But you need a little bit of nose left for the glasses. But, and then at the bottom, uh, to hide the line, there was a mustache. So it's basically a medical, a medical, yeah. Exactly, a medical version of that. Yeah, exactly.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would have thought?

• 15:05Mary Roach?

  But what was more amazing, although it's hard to beat the Groucho Marx glasses, uh, was going back to like the 1500s, there was surgery where you would, you would take a flap from the cheek, right? 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, right? And that worked pretty well, but you'd have scarring on the face. So this guy, I love this guy, Tigliakotzi. Gaspadi Tigliakotzi in the 1500s is like, we need-

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was he Italian?

• 15:39Mary Roach?

  No, he was from Pittsburgh.

• 15:43Mary Roach?

  So he came up with this thing like, like, let's take the underside of the upper arm.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't normally look at.

• 15:49Mary Roach?

  That you don't look at, right? And there's no hair there. And so, but the problem then is that you had to have your head kind of.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  Attached to your face, your arm attached to your face.

• 15:58Mary Roach?

  Like you're checking if you have BO.

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:00Mary Roach?

  It's that position, right?

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 16:02Mary Roach?

  So you do like that for a couple of weeks. And so he had this whole harness system.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back then, everyone had BO. Let's be clear about this.

• 16:09Mary Roach?

  So that made it easier. Like, I was like.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I lying?

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  That's true, no.

• 16:13Mary Roach?

  There's a statue of Gus Baritaglia Kachi in Bologna. Like, it's like a niche in the wall and he's, it's a full figure thing. And he's stepping forward towards the viewer and he's holding something in his hand. And you like look closely like, what is it? It's a nose.

• 16:28Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 16:28Mary Roach?

  That's his thing.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely creepy.

• 16:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there was a whole industry to repair.

• 16:33Mary Roach?

  To repair.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those who were defaced.

• 16:35Mary Roach?

  Yeah, and then syphilis came along, more need, more demand for fixing noses. It's been a thing.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  Now, what's the tie to syphilis? I mean, I'm not familiar with the.

• 16:45Mary Roach?

  They, eventually, if you don't treat it, I guess the bridge of the cartilage.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  The cartilage deteriorates and then.

• 16:51Mary Roach?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 16:52Gary O'Reilly?

  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 back transfer. That just seemed to be surprising.

• 17:09Mary Roach?

  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. You know, it's been around a long time and, and you can find examples of it in nature. You know, those shells like that and the design of sunflowers on a sunflower plant. And 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 proportion buttock proportions. And when he did a Brazilian butt lift, basically, you know, taking fat from one place and applying it elsewhere,

• 17:53Mary Roach?

  he would use the Fibonacci sequence. I imagined him with, you know, I don't know, a protractor and markers. He's like, no, I eyeball it. By now, I can eyeball it. But anyway.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 18:04Mary Roach?

  So I just was kind of interested in that whole.

• 18:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I was not expecting to read about the Fibonacci sequence.

• 18:10Mary Roach?

  In a butt chapter.

• 18:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 18:12Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wasn't either. And then I, you know.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So would you sort of mix a lot, agree with these proportions?

• 18:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, he likes big butts and he cannot.

• 18:23Mary Roach?

  Oh, sorry. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you. I know the song.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is this an evolved, yes, it's from the 90s, actually. It's a pretty old song.

• 18:29Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Chuck Nice?

  But he would not.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it has to do with any evolving aesthetic.

• 18:34Mary Roach?

  Right, right.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That this involves.

• 18:36Mary Roach?

  So I was interested because this was one of the first, this was the first chapter that I reported. So it's, you know, going back some years. And the Kardashian butt was the big thing at that point.

• 18:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Literally.

• 18:48Mary Roach?

  That is, yes, it was the big thing. Yes. And that is not.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That evolved from the J-Lo butt.

• 18:53Mary Roach?

  It did. Yes, the original, the OG butt.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OG butt.

• 18:56Gary O'Reilly?

  You know a lot about this.

• 18:57Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Mary Roach?

  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.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:15Mary Roach?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:16Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, what do you need a chip in your implant for?

• 19:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Because you've got them, so use them.

• 19:34Mary Roach?

  Not your implant, not your.

• 19:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a smart ass, what?

• 19:39Chuck Nice?

  Yay.

• 19:43Mary Roach?

  Use that one tonight.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, use that one. No, but seriously, what do you need a chip?

• 19:47Mary Roach?

  Not in your butt.

• 19:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Not in your butt, no, in a prosthetic.

• 19:49Mary Roach?

  In a leg or an arm.

• 19:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Then I started to read further through the chapter and went, they cost how much and they're not even waterproof?

• 19:58Mary Roach?

  They're not, and they, the battery needs to be charged, they, yeah, yeah, yeah, and, and they're heavy. That's another thing they're, but so, uh, but for a leg, you know, particularly if it's an upper leg, you know, they're, they're pretty great for legs. They, you know, they can help.

• 20:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, how do you get the stability in your, your center of gravity? When you've got a, another prosthetic that comes?

• 20:19Mary Roach?

  Practice.

• 20:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah.

• 20:21Mary Roach?

  Yeah. Yeah. But that, but they can kind of, like, if they sense that you're about to fall, they can kind of help, you know, prevent that. And there's some that kind of, that use AI to kind of learn your gait. And I mean, so the legs have come a long way. The legs, the legs are a lot. I mean, I went to the national gathering of the amputee coalition. So it's a huge, like, they booked the whole hotel.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a thing.

• 20:44Mary Roach?

  That's a thing. And like, you're, so you're in the lobby and like, everybody has a prosthetic leg. It's kind of great. So, or, but not so many arms, because the arms are, you know, because the fingers, that's a problem. Yeah. Like, you can sort of toggle through the grip, but it's kind of wonky. It's not, it's not quite there yet.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how much of the bionic man are we today? How far have we come?

• 21:04Mary Roach?

  What was he, arms, he's legs and arms and eye?

• 21:07Chuck Nice?

  Legs, arms, eye.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is it, oh, he had all his organs, though?

• 21:09Mary Roach?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 21:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His torso.

• 21:11Mary Roach?

  As far as I know.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 21:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 21:13Mary Roach?

  It's just legs and arms and...

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and he had his own brain? Yeah.

• 21:17Mary Roach?

  He had his own brain.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we're kind of there.

• 21:19Mary Roach?

  But the eye, the optic nerve is kind of part of the brain. So...

• 21:23Chuck Nice?

  And that's, that's, that's, well, actually, they, I, I read, uh, um, in, in an article about a prosthetic eye that is attached that will give sight, that will actually give sight.

• 21:35Mary Roach?

  Huh.

• 21:36Chuck Nice?

  Is there anything, is, is that a thing?

• 21:38Mary Roach?

  Not very good sight.

• 21:39Chuck Nice?

  No, it isn't, believe it or not. It's not good sight.

• 21:41Mary Roach?

  Rudimentary sight.

• 21:42Chuck Nice?

  But it's rudimentary sight.

• 21:43Mary Roach?

  Yeah, that, like, right, we're, yeah, we're not, but the lenses for cataract surgery, that's, that's a, that's a ton of...

• 21:49Chuck Nice?

  That counts, absolutely.

• 21:50Mary Roach?

  That counts, yeah. But, but, yeah, like, the whole, but that's pretty complicated to do an eye and optic nerve, hook that up and everything, but...

• 21:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Mary Roach?

  Uh, I mean, I think AI is going to speed things up quite a bit.

• 22:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Going back to the prosthetics, there's something called osseo-integration.

• 22:05Mary Roach?

  Integration, yeah.

• 22:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Which...

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oseo is that bone?

• 22:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Just think dentures versus implants for your teeth.

• 22:13Mary Roach?

  Yeah, so it screws directly into the bone. And it's great if it, you know, if there's, if there's no infection. There's been, you know, some issues with... Infection, which you don't get with the with the implant in the mouth. And it's the same, the same guy who came up with the implants in the mouth. Brainmark, Per Ingamar Bren, it has an accent that I. Per Ingamar, somewhere up there.

• 22:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes, Mr. Beaner dear. There you go. Just lost all our Norwegian audience.

• 22:43Mary Roach?

  Yeah, exactly. Same, 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, it's 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 and.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, bones are like two by fours inside your body that you just hang stuff on.

• 23:04Mary Roach?

  Yes, yeah. Well, in this case, screw it in. You screw, it's carpentry. Right, yeah, you just screw it in.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Mary Roach?

  And now you don't need the socket because the socket, you know, it works by compression. So it's can be uncomfortable. It's sweaty. I remember seeing a booth for like residual limb antiperspirant because it's, you know, on a hot day, they like, yeah.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Residual limb antiperspirant.

• 23:28Mary Roach?

  It's such, it's a thing.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  Did you know that was the same?

• 23:30Mary Roach?

  It's a thing.

• 23:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Is that anything like Mondo, these commercials where people are putting deodorant everywhere?

• 23:37Mary Roach?

  What is up with that? What the hell? I know.

• 23:40Chuck Nice?

  Back in the day, we used to just say something called wash your ass. That's what we would say, right? They're like, that's what we'd be like, oh my, I'm so like, things are so weird down there. It'd be like, yeah, go wash your ass.

• 23:55Mary Roach?

  I know. What a marketing coup that is. Wow. Anyway, where were we?

• 24:00Chuck Nice?

  What is, 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, the, that's why you gotta wait like two months before you get the actual tooth.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the bone to heal.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  The bone has to heal around the anchor.

• 24:15Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Chuck Nice?

  And there's like zero problems with that. But you put it in the leg and they got infection problems.

• 24:19Mary Roach?

  Yeah. 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.

• 24:31Mary Roach?

  Antibacterial property, so I'm I, which makes sense, right? You would, yeah, so I'm

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 24:47Chuck Nice?

  Let the dog lick your wound, it's it's it's got antibiotic.

• 24:50Mary Roach?

  No.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  Right after it sniffed someone else's butt, licked its own butt, no, I'm not going there.

• 24:54Mary Roach?

  That's how powerful saliva is, you can lick your butt and then lick your wound.

• 25:01Mary Roach?

  Check it out.

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  Still not doing the practical.

• 25:06Gary O'Reilly?

  What advances have we made now in organ replacement? In terms of having like a dialysis, dialysis machine that's big and clunky and sat next to somebody, but actually being able to replace organs?

• 25:17Mary Roach?

  Well, one development that's pretty cool is you could extend the shelf life of a heart that's been taken for transplantation. So, right now, if you take a heart from a donor body, right, you've got, you know, four to six hours on ice.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:35Mary Roach?

  Or if you use, there's some more modern, like, perfusion systems, like a box where you're giving it a blood, so they're giving it oxygen supply.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  They keep the blood flowing through it.

• 25:43Mary Roach?

  Right, and that'll get you like 12 hours.

• 25:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:46Mary Roach?

  But there's a lab in University of Michigan, Extracorporeal Life Support Lab, which is where they came up with the ECMO, Extracorp, you know, the, the heart lung machine. So it's, so it's, it's basically oxygenating you outside the body.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:02Mary Roach?

  So, it's taking the place of your heart and lungs. It's this machine.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  That's what they use during, uh, open heart surgery. So they're pumping the blood through and the oxygen.

• 26:10Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  And it keep, it's basically your heart for the, for the course of the surgery. One machine.

• 26:16Mary Roach?

  Yeah, exactly. But there is some folks who are now, there's like a, a mobile unit that they're talking about, you could, so instead of somebody, if you have a heart attack, your heart stuff, say the, the emergency personnel doing like, you know, CPR.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:29Mary Roach?

  They could do extra, they could hook you up, like, sort of like two things through the neck and start doing that

• 26:35Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 26:36Mary Roach?

  in your home, like, if you could get the

• 26:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:39Mary Roach?

  equipment downsized a bit and you, but you, the problem there, you gotta like Four minutes before you're heading into the zone of are you saving a life or creating a vegetable?

• 26:48Chuck Nice?

  Right, because yeah, at that point, the deprivation of oxygen, you're in danger of creating a brain-dead person. Wow.

• 26:55Gary O'Reilly?

  So, the biggest issue seems to be the rejection of an organ, a donated organ.

• 27:03Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, are we, are we anywhere near overcoming, and if we are, how?

• 27:07Mary Roach?

  Well, it's been tough, you know, I remember like 10 years ago, there was just tons of stuff about face transplants, hand transplants, and these are, these are tricky because it's, it's called a composite tissue allotransplant, so it's lots of different types of tissues, there's lots for the body to get worked up about and go like, ah, I don't like this. I asked, you know, because I was thinking, you know, I don't see much about that anymore, like, because I remember seeing the first bilateral leg transplant, arm transplant, there somebody did a leg, and I was like, why do you not hear about that anymore?

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got the face transplants when the chimps ripped off your face.

• 27:43Mary Roach?

  Yes, that's right.

• 27:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but then we realized, you know what, just stay away from the chimps. Why are we spending all this money trying to figure out how we transplant a face? Get away from the chimp.

• 27:55Mary Roach?

  But, yeah, and it, but as it turned out, you know, some of the, some of the face transplant, people need like a second face because they're having rejection issues, people are asking to have hands taken off, like, the immune system figures out a way, it's just like, the immune system does not want, so it's not like something where they're, insurance covers it and everybody's having it done, it's, they've kind of moved away from that.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if we have rejection issues with the organs of other humans?

• 28:20Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is it that an organ from a pig could ever work at all?

• 28:23Mary Roach?

  Great question, Neil, thank you. So, you gotta genetically edit, edit those suckers, those pigs. So, there's something called the alpha-gal protein, and if you knock that out, now the body's a little more accepting. So now, it's on a par with putting another human's organ in, so, but, you know, the per, what are we at, there's one guy who's had a kidney for about nine months, everybody else lasted about two months.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A pig kidney?

• 28:50Mary Roach?

  Pig, yeah, pig kidney, yeah. But those first ones, those folks were really sick, that was done like a compassionate...

• 28:57Chuck Nice?

  And give you time to say goodbye type thing.

• 28:59Mary Roach?

  Well, it was like, you know, you're you're you're going to die soon.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:02Mary Roach?

  So could we give this a whirl?

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's right.

• 29:04Mary Roach?

  And maybe it'll work for you.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be all for it.

• 29:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. You're gonna die.

• 29:07Mary Roach?

  Yeah, right.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take whatever organs in and out for science.

• 29:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and like, maybe I'll help somebody else live.

• 29:12Mary Roach?

  Yeah, right. Maybe it'll help me, but it'll surely help the process of helping other people, so.

• 29:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm I'm curious as to why, you know, we look at transplant, transplant, and that includes the pig. Instead of, like, if you were to take a pig's organ and graft our cellular signature onto that organ, so when we put it back in our body, our body is is fooled into thinking that it's us.

• 29:38Mary Roach?

  Well, a version of that is called chimerism. So now, so if you were to take a pig, when it's just a few cells old, and and do an edit whereby that pig is not going to grow a pig kidney, and now you introduce some human stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, that are going to fill that niche, that open niche. So now you've got a pig, this is all, you know, in the future. It's very early on.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a pig with a human kidney?

• 30:03Mary Roach?

  It's a pig with a human kidney. So the pig's grown up with it, doesn't doesn't bother the pig. It's part of it's part of its body, but it's an actual human organ. So you could then take that and transplant it. And the endpoint being, everybody has their own personal pig, like with a car for spare parts, and you're just like waiting to go.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I used to feel bad that a pig would give its life, give up its organs for you.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  And then you had bacon.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bacon and pork chops and and pork sausage I eat. So I guess the trick is, don't ever name the pig.

• 30:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe that's the that's the trick.

• 30:35Chuck Nice?

  And even then, I'm like, Jimmy was delicious.

• 30:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So Mary, you said this is all in the future, right? So where did you go and find a 26-story pigsty with elevators that could hold 40-ton loads?

• 30:52Mary Roach?

  Of pigs.

• 30:53Gary O'Reilly?

  And facial recognition?

• 30:55Mary Roach?

  I went to China. That was pretty amazing, right? But those were pigs for Eden. Those were for Eden. Those are for Eden.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got to back this whole thing up.

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  Wait, wait, wait. Where are you gonna find a book? I'm gonna definitely buy the book, but you gotta you gotta kind of.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, facial recognition for pigs?

• 31:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Mary Roach?

  Yeah, they've got, this is, yeah, it's a 26-story piggery. They call them piggeries.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Piggeries.

• 31:15Mary Roach?

  So it's just, it's super high-tech, big, kind of pig agriculture. It's and facial recon, I don't know why they need that, but they got it. So, but those are not for.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if a pig commits a crime, you'll know who.

• 31:27Mary Roach?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So if you've got these kind of facilities.

• 31:32Mary Roach?

  Yes, for pork.

• 31:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm, aren't you then one step away from having pluripotent cells in a very sterile situation and that then becomes an offshoot of just not the meat, but the organs?

• 31:47Mary Roach?

  Well, chimerism is like, it's pretty early on. Like, somebody, as far as I know that it's gotten, is somebody created, like, got a pig, probably, I think, to grow a mesonephros, which is apparently a very primitive kidney. It's not known if that would even grow into a whole kidney. So it's, and I don't, I don't have any reason to believe China's further along in, in these things. No, really. Like, when I was talking to the folks who, at the Super Clean Pigs Die that I was at.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was super clean?

• 32:21Mary Roach?

  Yeah, it was super, well.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How was the smell? Because pigs, I mean, my god, they're god awful.

• 32:26Mary Roach?

  I know, but you know what? Because it's super clean, and I'm not super clean, I couldn't go in. I was watching them on a video camera.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you stank.

• 32:33Mary Roach?

  So I stank.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny, you got a bunch of pigs sitting around like, "Oh, god, these humans. Jeez Louise, these humans."

• 32:41Mary Roach?

  Oh, my god. Get her out of here.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pigs stank, jeez Louise.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, I, I, could we back up just briefly here?

• 32:52Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remembered some years ago, when I hosted a spinoff of PBS Nova, Nova Science Now, we went to a lab where, picking up on your point, they created a scaffold in the shape of the organ.

• 33:05Mary Roach?

  Right.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was intended. Then they got cells of that organ.

• 33:11Mary Roach?

  Right.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And cultured those cells into that scaffold.

• 33:15Mary Roach?

  Yes, which.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the cells knew what to do together.

• 33:19Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they, as, as, they took heart cells and it, it, they, it built into a heart, and then you flick them, and then they all started beating together. And I thought, the cells know what they're trying to do.

• 33:30Mary Roach?

  They do. If you look at, if you look at heart cells, just a sheet of them under a microscope, they're beating and you, they like, open up like a connection to one another, and they all start beating in unison.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Together.

• 33:40Mary Roach?

  Together.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Together.

• 33:40Mary Roach?

  Even to the point where they catch air. They're like, bounce, come off the, yeah.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great.

• 33:45Mary Roach?

  But the, the scaffold thing is tough, because, you know, a heart is not just a bunch of. Cardiomyocytes, you have to align them properly. I mean, I don't know what you saw. There's a lot of overstatement.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was, it was a, it was a.

• 33:56Mary Roach?

  It was probably a bladder, right?

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, I, I don't remember actually.

• 33:59Mary Roach?

  Anyway.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But no, but it was very futuristic and they didn't claim to have a solution then.

• 34:03Mary Roach?

  Right, right, right.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it made me look forward to what this could be.

• 34:06Mary Roach?

  And that technology, decel, recel. So, okay, you take a heart and you, using the same kind of thing an embalmer would do, where you use the vasculature to pump in detergent, right?

• 34:15Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's, and you wash it.

• 34:17Mary Roach?

  Yeah, all of the cells, the detergent opens up the fats, the, all the contents of the cells come out and you can basically rinse away all the living stuff and you're left with the extracellular stuff, the scaffold.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:28Mary Roach?

  And the hope was, now we can use that same, like, capillary system to put the cells back. But the problem, according to the bioprinting lab that I went to, is that the breakdown products, those are, you know, molecular, tiny, very tiny, and the stuff you're pump, trying to pump in is much bigger and it's, you can't, and there's different types of cells. Like, how are you, like, how are you gonna tell them where to get off the train? You know, the different types. And for mu, for muscle cells, you have to align them the way,

• 34:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Like the patterns.

• 34:57Mary Roach?

  Yeah, like the, the shoulders, like, they're in a fan shape, the heart, they're in a helix shape, because it kind of twists as it pumps. So, you gotta align when you're printing. So, to just throw them on a scaffold doesn't, maybe, you know, for like, the, you know, this outer ear, I think is the one that is approved, FDA-approved, outer ears.

• 35:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 35:37Gary O'Reilly?

  I wanna get to 3D printing, but if I don't address the finger penis, he's gonna have a tension like a three-year-old.

• 35:44Chuck Nice?

  I think I have been exceedingly patient and

• 35:47Gary O'Reilly?

  See what I mean?

• 35:48Chuck Nice?

  and very mature throughout this entire show, that I have not pushed the issue.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take it over, Chuck.

• 35:54Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so here we go.

• 35:55Mary Roach?

  Okay.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, let Chuck, let Chuck take it over, go.

• 35:58Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so please tell us, you went to Tbilisi to check out a finger penis?

• 36:02Mary Roach?

  I did.

• 36:03Chuck Nice?

  And, yeah.

• 36:04Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  So, did, one, did it come from Donald Trump, because I saw South Park? And two,

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. No, just, anyway, forget that joke, just go with it.

• 36:15Mary Roach?

  Okay. All right, well, early on, when I was thinking about doing this book, I was talking to this woman, she actually worked in a stem cell lab, it had nothing to do with the conversation, but for some reason, she mentioned this, um, she'd seen a paper by a surgeon who had used a man's own middle finger to recreate a penis, he'd had-

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  How appropriate.

• 36:34Mary Roach?

  And I, of course, imagined-

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happened to his penis?

• 36:38Mary Roach?

  Cancer, cancer, so he, so, yeah.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  You get cancer of the penis?

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get penis cancer?

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let me just say this, all of our research dollars should now be going to cure cancer of the penis. I had no idea that this existed. I get, I get, I get letters from the American Cancer Society on a daily basis, and I'm just like, yeah, whatever, whatever. If they send me penis cancer material, I'm sending money. Anyway.

• 37:05Mary Roach?

  Anyway, so.

• 37:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, check your mail, child. Oh, it's incoming.

• 37:12Mary Roach?

  There it comes. So, I, of course, I, of course, pictured the man's finger taken intact with the nail and everything, and just stitched in place and able to kind of move and beckon like a finger, which, right? Which is not, it's not actually the case.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  I gotta say, on the one hand, it's crazy, but on the other hand, I love to be able to stand naked in front of a bed and go, "Come here."

• 37:34Mary Roach?

  Come here.

• 37:41Mary Roach?

  That's what I was picturing. And that's why, and I, on sub-level, knew that was probably not the situation, but I'm like, I'm got, and I wrote, I used Google Translate, I wrote to this person in English, in Russian, and in Georgian, and I got no reply, so I did what I sometimes do, is I showed up. I just showed up. Uh, and it's, you know, the Caucasian smell, it's just-

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are bold.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right, so then what happened?

• 38:04Mary Roach?

  Okay, well, uh, the surgeon was on vacation, but, but, uh, the woman who runs the office took pity on me, because I've come all the way from America to see this penis. And

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a sentence.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  I love that.

• 38:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Why are you here in Georgia?

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has a sentence ever been honored in the history of the world?

• 38:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Imagine immigration officer.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the way from America to see this penis.

• 38:27Mary Roach?

  So she took pity on me and she said, well, he's gone, but his office is open and I know that we can get onto his computer and there are some photographs and there were some photographs. Okay, the finger was used in inside for rigidity. Okay. And it then they used some skin from, I think, the lower part of the forearm anyway. And then they, you know, put that around it. It looked very penis like. But here's the thing, it didn't move and beckon like that, but you could crook it up like a finger and, and they had a photograph and in order to show how strong it was.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They hung a bucket on it?

• 39:05Mary Roach?

  Not far off.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 39:07Mary Roach?

  A ceramic water pitcher.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my God.

• 39:10Mary Roach?

  You know.

• 39:10Chuck Nice?

  That is impressive, I have to say.

• 39:12Mary Roach?

  White with kind of red and green flowers.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  May I take a coat, please?

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A new job as coach? At the restaurant.

• 39:26Mary Roach?

  A little more iced tea, my love.

• 39:29Mary Roach?

  Yeah, so. And I, you know, because I never, this guy never, I called, I tried to follow up. He never, he never got in touch with me. So I don't know quite why he didn't use, there are medical surgical products for erectile dysfunction surgery, you know, you can, that are even like that, malleable, bendable kind of deals. Well, I don't know why he didn't use that, but interesting choice, but.

• 39:51Gary O'Reilly?

  You happy now?

• 39:52Chuck Nice?

  I, I.

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get it out of your system?

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  That was fascinating. I'm sorry. I think I speak for everyone. We all want to know about finger penis.

• 40:02Mary Roach?

  You definitely speak for me.

• 40:05Gary O'Reilly?

  You have to buy the book and read the chapter. 3D printing.

• 40:09Mary Roach?

  Yes.

• 40:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we into 3D printing for things such as organs now?

• 40:13Mary Roach?

  That's a tough one. I, I asked that very question at the lab that I went to at Carnegie Mellon, the Feinberg lab that does a lot of stuff with 3D printing.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been everywhere.

• 40:22Mary Roach?

  I've been everywhere. I have been absolutely everywhere. No. And I asked that same question. How long before we're printing an organ that you could install in a body? And he said, we are kind of in the Wright Brothers stage.

• 40:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, took it that far back? I'm gonna say that's relatively close. Let's be honest, the Wright Brothers, nineteen oh? Flying bicycle. Nineteen oh three. I know, but that's a flying bicycle.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not really, because they use combustion in.

• 40:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes, so let's be honest, if you're looking at nineteen oh three, and then commercial flight, commercial flight is fifteen, thirty years from here.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lindbergh would fly twenty-five years later.

• 40:58Chuck Nice?

  So you're looking at about thirty-five, forty years, and we could be someplace.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, even this and that, because we're gonna plug AI in.

• 41:05Mary Roach?

  Exactly, he said, he said like, a couple of decades, okay? And, but, things are speeding up more quickly now because of AI. And so there's, there's a lot of stuff going on that led him to think that, you know, it could happen faster than that. And he put it at about twenty years.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the, and the it is what, specifically?

• 41:25Mary Roach?

  An organ that you could print that could then be put in a body, installed, hooked up.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. Is the printing process using your own cells? Because now we can take regular cells and turn them into stem cells. So do they take your own cells, and then?

• 41:39Mary Roach?

  Well, at this point, they're just taking off the shelf and trying to figure out, like, you know, like, right now, like, there was a woman there who had printed a single ventricle for a mouse and installed it, and it, months later, it was still working. I was like, whoa, so you actually have this thing that's pumping and keeping a mouse alive? And she said, well, it still has its own heart, okay? And the ventricle doesn't have valves, so the blood shoots out either end. So, we have to get the valves installed, but, you know, they can print valves. They can print valves right now.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  They're at the stage of throwing spaghetti at the wall. By the way, I mean, I, I wonder if you could do a hybrid, especially for a heart? Because we already have valves that are artificial.

• 42:18Mary Roach?

  Right.

• 42:18Chuck Nice?

  And, and so you could print the musculature, and then apply the valves, and actually put that heart in a person?

• 42:28Mary Roach?

  You could, yeah, and right now, you can take cow collagen, which the body, human body accepts fine, but what's great about printing it, it could be custom fit, because some, you know, uh... Cow valve, because sometimes it's too, it's too big for people. Like, it doesn't fit everybody. Not everybody's a candidate. But now you could, you can, you know, and I've seen a 3D printed, like, tri-leaflet valve. It's pretty cool. I have a little one in a jar. I could have brought it today and showed you. Yeah, it's so, it's cute.

• 42:55Gary O'Reilly?

  This sounds like we are inching towards people who will see this as a road to immortality.

• 43:02Mary Roach?

  Oh, like what Putin and she said, yeah.

• 43:06Gary O'Reilly?

  It's fabulous that you've been able to find these experts in these fields. But it seems a lot like a conversation we have in so many other areas, which leads us towards, is it going to be misdirected in some way for people using it for immortality? For wanting to live an extended lifetime beyond 2, 3, 4, 500 years of age?

• 43:28Mary Roach?

  Yeah, I, I don't think that's going to come from replacement bits. I mean, the, the, the one, you know, the, there, there is a surgeon who repeatedly talks about a whole body transplant. If you could hook, hook up the spinal nerves, which is impossible now, but if you can do that, and you can certainly hook up the blood supply to the brain and the head. I mean, that's been, 1970, Robert White did that with, with monkeys. Successfully transplanted one head onto a different one's body. I mean, you could.

• 43:56Chuck Nice?

  Freaky Monkey Friday.

• 43:58Mary Roach?

  Yes, exactly.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, the, the application is clear and present. Because Alzheimer's, you have a perfectly functioning body and your brain is gone. And ALS, you have a perfectly functioning brain and your body's gone.

• 44:13Mary Roach?

  Right, so with ALS, if you could.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With ALS, you would take that person's head and attach it to the body of the, of the Alzheimer's patient, and then you get one whole person out of that.

• 44:25Mary Roach?

  Oh, interesting. You took it a step further.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, do both, right?

• 44:28Mary Roach?

  Do both.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Mary Roach?

  Right, right, right.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking.

• 44:31Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm saying that's scary. It makes perfect sense, but it's very Frankensteinian.

• 44:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, yeah, then you get back to the puri potency of being able to edit cells down and genes. And then where can that go? And how could that be misdirected potentially in the future?

• 44:50Mary Roach?

  Well, at this point, we're just talking about implanting clusters of cells that might help somebody with Parkinson's or diabetes, and that's pretty cool. But you're talking about, what are you talking about?

• 45:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we took someone's, and they created their own egg, they create their own sperm, fertilize them in vitro.

• 45:09Mary Roach?

  Right, right, in vitro gametogenesis.

• 45:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Fine.

• 45:12Mary Roach?

  Right, right, right. You could, in theory, right, if you take someone's blood cells and you regress them to pluripotency, and then you direct them to become, say it's a man, and you direct it to become an egg, or if it's a woman, you direct it to become sperm, and now you could have, create another human being with only your own genetic material, which I think Elon Musk is probably really excited about.

• 45:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 45:36Mary Roach?

  Because it's just...

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we need more Elon Musks in the world.

• 45:38Mary Roach?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that the motivation?

• 45:40Mary Roach?

  Yeah, so, but that's an interesting potential future direction, right?

• 45:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 45:47Mary Roach?

  And that, there are ethics papers out there on that.

• 45:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I would imagine so.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me ask more precisely, are there ethicists working in tandem with these efforts, or are they brought on only when it's too late?

• 45:58Mary Roach?

  I think there are ethicists...

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to tell us what we shouldn't have done.

• 46:02Mary Roach?

  I think there are ethicists who are publishing papers about this with warnings and everything, but I don't know if, I don't, I can't answer that question, whether they're working in tandem. I hope so.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, we gotta end it there.

• 46:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, we could be here for hours talking about this.

• 46:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, marrying.

• 46:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, let me get, here we go.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, replaceable you. All right, so, congratulations again on another book that no one else would have even thought to write, and you did it.

• 46:29Mary Roach?

  I done it. Thank you.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right.

• 46:31Mary Roach?

  Thank you, guys.

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Yeah, Ray. Pleasure, Neil. Thanks for cooking one of these up again. Oh, yeah, well, thanks to our guest. Yeah.

• 46:39Mary Roach?

  And thank you for reading the book.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're welcome. Enjoyed it. So I just have a cosmic perspective on this, if I may.

• 46:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Please.

• 46:46Mary Roach?

  Please.

• 46:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Go ahead, shall we stop you?

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, if I may.

• 46:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What has happened in the history of science and technology, and history of innovation, is we see a problem, a challenge, and then we try to address that problem.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And try to fix that problem. Uh, one of the more famous examples of this was the manure problem in Manhattan. More than a century ago. The population was growing. Horses were everywhere. Manure was everywhere. And someone wrote a tongue in cheek article about that we were headed towards a manure catastrophe. Where the horses that come in to take out the manure from the other horses, they leave manure behind and who cleans that up? And you get a point where the entire city is buried under manure. Consider also that flies reproduce in the manure and we didn't have supermarkets yet.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There were street vendors selling fish and other, other produce and meats. Flies would be all over. It was a sanitation nightmare. So what do you do? Do you, you, you research, you gotta research that. You say, maybe we can change the food that the horse eats to reduce the amount of manure. Put something in the food so that flies won't want to reproduce in the manure. And you start attacking the problem directly. And the solution was the automobile. That's what got rid of the manure. It came from another place. It came from another mindset. It was, I'm not trying to fix the horse. I'm going to invent something that doesn't even need the horse.

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I look around at nature, I see newts that can regenerate limbs and tails. Lobsters regenerate claws. They don't need prosthetics. They don't need medical doctors. They don't need anything that we are currently exploring to replace our organs. It is built in to their DNA. And we like to think of ourselves as the top of some kind of evolutionary, uh, uh, pyramid? When other animals can recreate their organs and we can't? So. How far does that go? The planaria. It's a form of worm. You can cut off its head and it'll regrow a head.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh. So, maybe the solution to this is not one lab or another inventing a kidney or a heart or a lung or a limb. Maybe it's going into our DNA. Splicing into it that which regenerates organs in other animals. The animal kingdom. We have DNA in common with them. With other verte- we're vertebrate, they're vertebrates. Let's go in and find out what's making that work. Maybe the future of this is you just go in and they twiddle with your DNA and another organ grows. And at the top of that list, we put military veterans who need the limbs first.

• 50:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, everybody else, second in line. To replace our organs and our limbs for whatever it was we were doing. On our job, in defense of the country, or just being dumbass.

• 50:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To quote Chuck. Perhaps that's in our future. A future not yet visible to us. But maybe nature has that in store. That is a cosmic perspective. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

• 50:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that too long?

• 50:45Chuck Nice?

  No. There's, there's parts that can be pulled out and collapsed and it'll work just as fine. Yeah, it's, it worked on every level, so.

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:55Mary Roach?

  No, it's good. And people are looking at those answers.

• 50:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:57Mary Roach?

  That's why.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I was gonna bring it up, but we ran out of time.

• 51:00Mary Roach?

  Yeah, that's why, that's why it's so frustrating when like people make fun of like, why are you studying newt? They're studying, you know.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 51:07Mary Roach?

  They're like, they're so short sighted, the people are making these cuts.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, every one of them.