Replaceable You

ROMAN MARS: 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 the very first media interview of the author, Mary Roach. 

MARY ROACH: Do you remember that? I was kind of–

ROMAN MARS: I remember it so well! 

MARY ROACH: I was like, “Oh, I–” And I kind of dressed up even though it’s radio. I thought it was, like, one of the best interviews ever. 

ROMAN 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. 

MARY ROACH: 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. 

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

MARY ROACH: 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!” 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] And what struck me as I was reading this book–we’re a design show, ostensibly–is that this is the mother of all design problems. There are really major roadblocks to designing replacement parts for the human body. It is truly difficult. Could you just talk about why that is? 

MARY ROACH: 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. That’s tough to do. And the other thing is that just things that seem simple are not in the human body. There’s nothing simple. 

ROMAN 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? 

MARY ROACH: 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 doesn’t give a [BLEEP]. No. You try to stick that in, and now you’ve got the immune for one. You also have to deal with clotting–you know–if you’ve got, like, a stent in there… Any time… The blood’s 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 there’s something else there, it’s like, “Ah!” 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 sort of an inflammatory reaction. And that can just become a mess and infection. That’s another thing. 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. Infection inside the body is a real bitch. When a hip replacement or a knee replacement goes poorly, it’s almost always infection. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. 

MARY ROACH: And if you’re using a cane, you’re not gonna have to worry about infection. 

ROMAN 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 oxygenate it in the machine and then pump the 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 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. 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? 

MARY ROACH: Yeah, there’s definitely a bias for wholeness and for “normalness.” And I’m using quotes around normal because what is normal? But 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 can 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! And you’re cannulated. In other words, one tube is going into the other. If you trip and fall, you’re going to decannulate! And that’s like blood’s spurting everywhere! You’ve got, like, a couple minutes and you’re dead. Well, fast forward–I don’t know–30 years maybe, yeah, this could be done in, like, a little pouch that you wear in a fanny pack. I don’t know. But it’s still not you. And it’s still… You’d just rather have something inside you. 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. I spent some time with a woman who… It took her a long time, but she succeeded in getting her own foot amputated, 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. And there was a guy who had foot drop, which is, when you’re walking, you need to pick your toes 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 wanna 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. You have a mangled mess. We will take it off.”

ROMAN 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? 

MARY ROACH: 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. difficile, which is a really serious gut infection that kills. I don’t have the numbers, but it’s kind of astounding. So, 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 and going, “Yeah, not my best effort.” But you take that. It’s like [BLEEP]. You put it in a blender–an Oster blender, actually. 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, he’s having what they say on the Bristol Stool scale is a number three, I think. Smooth and soft, like a sausage or snake. And, you know, that 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. 

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

MARY ROACH: Yeah, it’s so much so that there are people in their 20s who are extremely nearsighted. And for whatever reason–contacts aren’t comfortable or they don’t want to do LASIK–they’re asking to just have the lens popped out and a new one put in. 

ROMAN MARS: Like, they don’t have cataracts, but they’re– 

MARY ROACH: They don’t have cataracts. They don’t have cataracts. It’s just 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, gets cloudy and dark and hard. And 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. But that didn’t happen overnight. You know, back in the ’60s, 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. It didn’t often go well. They would not let people get it until they were a lot older because they wanted to wait until your vision is so bad that you’re going to be grateful for even a small improvement. But now, yeah, people are happier with it than they were before. 

ROMAN MARS: And in the book, you actually travel 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 that this procedure is better now and they should consider it. 

MARY ROACH: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the comments that the surgeon from Orbis International that does this work– He said that 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 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, you know, the word spreads, like, “Oh, that actually works.” There was a patient there who, 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 didn’t always go well.” But these days it’s pretty amazing.

ROMAN MARS: 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 was bad enough, they would just take out the lens and use glasses to be the lens at that point. And it’s so much of an improvement just to have the cloudy lens out of the way. 

MARY ROACH: Yeah. And way, way back, in the 1700s, it was called “couching.” It comes from the French “to lie down”–“se coucher.” And so they would just stick a probe. “Sit down here. And I have this probe, and I’m gonna stick it in your eye.” And they would 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 Our Fathers.” And you would definitely want somebody saying four or five Our 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 blind because some of those cataracts– If you let a cataract go long enough, you’re functionally blind, you know?

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

MARY ROACH: [LAUGHS] Thank you for noticing that one. I was, first of all, fascinated by the fact that the early blood banks–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, AND they’d never have to see the phlebotomist who’s drawing the blood. They would 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!” Is that inappropriate? I don’t know. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I exclaimed out loud, invoking your fake middle name, many, many times–just going like, “Oh my goodness!” 

MARY ROACH: “My goodness, Mary.”

ROMAN MARS: “Mary Anastasia Roach! How could you say such a thing?”

MARY ROACH: You sound like my mother. “Mary Katherine Roach!”

ROMAN 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 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 the 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? 

MARY ROACH: 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 fast forward to when I started writing. And I was writing for Discover Magazine because they’d asked me to. And I went, “Oh, holy [BLEEP]. Science is kind of cool. The human body–it’s like another planet! I think it’s interesting.” But I think that it stems from my insecurity. 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 just running as fast as I can–dancing as fast I can–to make it interesting. “Stay with me. It’s 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 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 entertain myself that way. But if it’s not entertaining for me, forget about it! 

ROMAN MARS: No, that’s fair. 

MARY ROACH: It has to be fun for me. 

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

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN 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 really game for things. 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? 

MARY ROACH: 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… Yeah, for this book, I spent some time in an old Emerson iron lung–a holdover from the polio era, back before there was a vaccine. Not everybody got polio and 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, 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 today, which are positive pressure ventilation– It’s like your lung is a party balloon that’s being blown in there. Whereas negative pressure–which is an iron long–it’s done by vacuum. Like, you pull the air out of the tube, and then the rib cage expands and that pulls in the air. 

Anyway, I found a guy who has had an iron lung. His wife had died about a year before. And somebody told me because I was asking around. And so 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.” 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 were, like, two people who he’d 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. 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 kind of holding the head like they’re obstetricians giving birth to you through this hole. It’s very, very weird. So, I did that. I did that.

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

MARY ROACH: Yeah, about nine minutes. I had planned to spend the night in it. But one thing about it–in order to create a vacuum–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, he had it turned way up because that’s what Mona, his late wife, had needed. But I didn’t need that. So, I got in there–it was this weird thing where I was breathing deeply and luxuriantly, like… [DEEP BREATH] But at the same time feeling like I was being strangled! So, it 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 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, and 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… 

ROMAN MARS: You also–when you were researching hair replacement and hair shaft replacement–proposed the idea of them harvesting a part of your hair and implanting it onto your leg. 

MARY ROACH: Yes, and I had a reason for that. I had 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, they’ve got hair growing 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 for some research down the road at a stem cell place. I said, “While you’re there, can you take a couple units and transplant them to my leg?” I just thought it would be cool to have, like, a few strands of long, flowing hair on my calf. 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.” 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. So, I don’t know if that’s gonna work.” But I made them try it anyway. 

The woman, Galena, who does most of the transplanting–she was so not interested in it. You know, he didn’t want to tell her. He’s like, “Galena is done taking the follicles.” She goes, “Okay! You’re all set.” And the doctor, Dr. Shafik, goes, “Um… Galena? She was talking about wanting to take some hairs and put them on her leg?” And… Yeah, anyway, we convinced her. 

ROMAN MARS: But it didn’t take in the end. 

MARY ROACH: No. I’m so disappointed. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this interaction makes me think of another thing, which is, you know, often you are writing about stuff that is pretty sensitive–stuff to do with our bodies and medical stuff–that maybe someone might be hesitant to talk to you 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. 

MARY ROACH: I will do that, yes. 

ROMAN 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 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? 

MARY ROACH: The example that you gave has to do with tissue donation. And as opposed to organ donation, you can also donate tissue, which is bone, skin, tendon, ligaments… When I wrote Stiff, 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 the way they take skin from the back, so 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 the skin back and stitching it up. And it’s, I guess, in a way, kind of a gruesome thing to see, but no more so than witnessing some kinds of surgery. Ultimately, it’s surgery. And unlike surgery, this “patient” 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. And it doesn’t matter what it looks like in someone’s imagination. So, I kind of want to just demystify this and 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. The bones are used for little spacers and spine surgery. The skin is used as sort of bio dressing for people who’ve had serious burns. And there’s all kinds of reconstruction that can be done with this tissue. So, it’s a really good thing to do. And I completely understand why… They’re called OPOs–Organ Procurement Organizations. I get why they are wary of somebody coming in because, if you chose to, you could make it sound really bad, like, “Oh! Now they’re pulling out this– He’s holding this guy’s leg! And there’s blood here!” And I’m like, “Yeah, you can make it sound bad if you wanted to.” But I just feel like if you act like you have something to hide, people think you have something to hide. 

ROMAN MARS: How has working on this book changed the way you think about yourself and your own body? Like, would you get a pig organ put in your body? I don’t know. How’s it changed your–

MARY ROACH: Oh, yeah, I mean, how cool would that be? That’d be cool! No, I feel like, if you can save my life by throwing a pig heart in there and it’s gonna 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 pigheart in there.” I don’t know, I always have trouble coming up with interesting small talk at parties. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, I find that very hard to believe, Mary. 

MARY ROACH: If I could say, “You know what? I’ve got a…” I have a friend, Clark, who has a third kidney. And he would sort of bring that up at parties, and I was always kind of jealous. 

ROMAN MARS: “Man, I wish I had a third. kidney.”

MARY ROACH: “I wish I had a third kidney.” I mean, I could lie, I suppose. I’m too honest. 

ROMAN 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? 

MARY ROACH: I’m glad you asked because I have a whole section on that. And you can blame Hormel. Back in the… I think it might have started 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–they worked 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 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 what this one researcher described them as–almost a caricature of an obese human 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, obviously, a primate might be a better–a closer match. But there are ethical issues. And also zoonoses–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. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. So they’re close, but not too close. And also, like, agricultural research can push things forward when medical research is not always funded to the best of our ability. 

MARY ROACH: Yeah, right. Yeah. And I’m sure, on some level, the Hormel people were like, “Oh! Another way to sell pigs! Lab animals.”

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] Exactly. 

MARY ROACH: 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. The whole miniaturization of the pig project went on for some time.

ROMAN 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 overemphasize this idea of this integrated whole, like a “normal body,” and maybe we should be more open to a variety of solutions?

MARY ROACH: 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 not look like everyone else. But, you know, the other side of that is, if it is inside you and it’s incorporated in you, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t see it, and you don’t have to change its batteries. 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. 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, any time you externalize a piece of yourself, it’s always there, you know?

ROMAN MARS: 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. 

MARY ROACH: Thank you so much for doing this. It was fabulous. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced by Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, 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 every past episode–including many, many with Mary Roach–at 99pi.org.