Mary Roach and the Curious Lives of Cadavers

May 28, 2009

By Joanne Manaster

Can science be informative, funny AND accessible to non-nerds? I answer with a resounding “yes!” thanks to Mary Roach.

Author Mary Roach comes from a non-science liberal arts background and uses her science naïveté to OUR advantage when she goes exploring the macabre, the strange and most especially the taboo while investigating how science has historically approached topics that fall under those categories!

Mary has published three books so far: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her fourth book, about humans coping with working and living in outer space, is due out next summer as I discovered in an interview with her the other day.

I hung around with Mary at Ohio State University’s Injury Biomechanics symposium just last week. In order to perform studies on how injuries occur and how best to understand impact tolerance in various situations such as car accidents, it is important to use models which are numb to pain, compliant and quiet; in other words, cadavers, (or rather, Post Mortem Human Subjects -PMHS). As gruesome as that sounds, it would be unethical to recreate those injuries on live humans. Test dummies are useful to an extent and do provide information, but tissue damage is impossible to recreate in rubber and metal. As Mary had extensively researched various uses for human cadavers for Stiff, she has inadvertently become the spokesperson on behalf of the benefits of respectfully using cadavers for research. At the symposium she specifically addressed the importance of dealing with media reaction and the public perception of using PMHS in research.

I had taken full-body human dissection as I began my PhD coursework. This experience gave me a unique perspective with which to approach Mary’s first book, because I was able to come to it with an appreciation of the generosity of the donor and his/her family. In addition, having handled a dead body from top to bottom and from outside to inside had steeled my senses for what I would encounter in Stiff.

Stiff addresses the many different ways that cadavers have been used in the past and are STILL being used to this day to train surgeons, to study crime, to understand what really happens upon impact in vehicular and airplane crashes, and even what happens when a body experiences a bullet or bomb. Other questions Mary pursued include the curiosity of what happens during crucifixion? What is the appeal of cannibalism? Can we really do a head transplant? All fairly gruesome but as each has been approached scientifically, they were fair topics for this book.

Sounds pretty serious, huh?

Not quite. While she wrote Stiff with respect for the cadavers and sensitivity to readers not acclimated to the gruesomeness that accompanies death, Mary’s books have the wry wit and quirky observations of an outsider trying to make sense of it all. I love the fact that I laughed so hard while reading her books in coffee shops that I spit tea out of my mouth. I loved this book.

And if science of the dead isn’t cool enough for you, Bonk is sex from start to finish made sexier by being about the SCIENCE of it all. It’s neither pornographic nor libido killing, and it is hilarious.

Enjoy the interview, and be certain turn up your volume because I am resolving microphone issues. My favorite portion starts in the second half when I ask Mary the question submitted by science writer Carl Zimmer and we learn “What science can Mary NOT make funny?”

Mary was a charm, a joy, and oh so fun! There’s more details of my visit with her on my site: joannelovesscience.com

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Comments

[Barbara Oakley]

Love the upbeat, insightful questions. Terrific work!

[Joanna]

I love Stiff. It's one of my favorites. Looking forward to getting a copy of Bonk. Great interview.