{"id":128584,"date":"2025-10-17T18:38:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T18:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/128584\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T18:38:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T18:38:08","slug":"her-science-writing-is-not-for-the-squeamish-harvard-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/128584\/","title":{"rendered":"Her science writing is not for the squeamish \u2014 Harvard Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is hard to gross out Mary Roach<\/a>, but not impossible.<\/p>\n

The science writer\u2019s books have explored uncomfortable topics ranging from the afterlife of cadavers to the physiology of sex to the \u201calimentary canal\u201d running from your mouth to your anus. She once visited a \u201cbody farm\u201d in Tennessee where corpses are left to decompose to provide a time standard to determine time of death in murder and other cases.<\/p>\n

\"Replaceable<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was tough because it was visual and also olfactory, and at one point the researcher said, \u2018If you put your ear really close, you can hear the maggots feeding,\u2019\u201d said Roach in a recent talk at Harvard\u2019s Science Center. That maggot fest didn\u2019t do it, though, in part because Roach said her fascination with her topics often outweighs her disgust or horror.<\/p>\n

But then her home county medical examiner stepped to the plate. That official, Roach said, \u201cmade it a personal goal to gross me out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd she did, one day, succeed. She just said, \u2018Oh, you should come in this morning, there\u2019s an interesting case.\u2019 And I don\u2019t need to describe that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a rare instance of Roach leaving things to the audience\u2019s imagination, something her books \u2014 including her latest, \u201cReplaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy,\u201d published in September \u2014 don\u2019t tend to do. Roach spoke to a packed lecture hall, responding to questions from fellow science writer Elizabeth Preston and members of the audience. Roach proved as engaging and taboo-breaking in person as she is on the page.<\/p>\n

In the talk, sponsored by the Harvard Book Store<\/a>, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences\u2019 Division of Science<\/a>, and Harvard Library<\/a>,Roach said she starts with a broad topic of interest to her and then goes by instinct. When she hears of an interesting and illuminating fact, a finding, or some other wrinkle, she emails the researchers \u2014 she spends a lot of time emailing strangers, she said \u2014 and visits the site to see for herself. Sometimes those trips are a bust \u2014 not as interesting as she expected, or without the access she envisioned. She told of volunteering for an experiment that she thought would lead to a compelling article about how airplane seat ergonomics are tested. When she arrived, she was told she had to sit in the seat for eight hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sold it to this magazine and then I got there and it\u2019s like, \u2018You\u2019re going to be sitting in this chair for eight hours.\u2019 And that\u2019s what it was,\u201d Roach said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it was my most interesting piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

Usually, however, Roach said she can take away something from a trip and often gets more than she anticipated: \u201cYou don\u2019t know until you get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her humorous approach to sometimes serious subjects involves walking a fine line, however, and she admitted she sometimes wobbles. That\u2019s where her editors come in, highlighting when her intended light touch becomes disrespectful, or when her treatment of a subject is simply too much.<\/p>\n

Her most recent book, \u201cReplaceable You,\u201d explores human efforts to repair and replace parts of the body. The book takes the reader through the early fumbling to sophisticated modern efforts at prosthetic limbs, joints, eyeballs, reproductive organs, and skin grafts. She describes an early effort at a skin graft where the skin remained attached to the donor animal \u2014 a dog in this case \u2014 in order to ensure blood flow and the graft\u2019s survival on its human host. The account of the experiment, done by a French doctor in the 1800s, was in French, and when Roach saw that it involved a living dog, she assumed it was something small and portable.<\/p>\n

\n

Her most recent book, \u201cReplaceable You,\u201d explores human efforts to repair and replace parts of the body. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt said \u2018un chien danois\u2019 and I thought, \u2018Oh, Danish dog breeds.\u2019 I\u2019m not that familiar with Danish dog breeds but I\u2019m picturing quite a small one because it\u2019s going to be attached,\u201d Roach said. \u201cBut, in fact, no. It was a Great Dane \u2014 and he complained about \u2018mouvement continuelle excessif\u2019 (excessive continual movement). And how do I \u2014 just because of the image \u2014 how do I not?\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the course of working on the project, Roach said she became convinced that the body is a marvel of evolutionary engineering, with each organ and part adapted nearly perfectly to its purpose. Human efforts to replicate them almost always fall short, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did realize early on that the human body is such a miraculous machine and to think that you could create any component of it as good as what we\u2019re born with, even something that is malfunctioning, and you could come up with a replacement,\u201d Roach said. \u201cThere was a point where I thought I need to change the title. \u2026 Technically it should be \u2018Irreplaceable.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is hard to gross out Mary Roach, but not impossible. The science writer\u2019s books have explored uncomfortable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[359,18,135,475,19,17,172],"class_list":{"0":"post-128584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-health-care","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-research"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}