Replaceable You with Mary Roach

Gary Chuck, yes. Are you in need of any organs? Are we talking Hammond or... Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's right. Ha, ha, ha. What time are replaceable you? Oh. All the ways our organs and appendages might need replacement in the future. Coming up with the one and only, Mary Roach. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now. This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And I see next to me, Gary O'Reilly, that must mean this is special edition. Gary, you're new manformer soccer pro. Allegedly. Soccer announcer. And you lend of yourself to our cause. Yeah, with pleasure. Thank you. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Okay, professional stand-up comedian. Nice. You working tonight. I am. Man, and... We're recording this to the surprise. We're recording this to the surprise to say aware because it'll be over by time. Anybody hears this? So... So today, we, titled this, are we replaceable? Mmm. Mmm. Are we replaceable? I see you've been talking to my wife. I see you've been talking to my wife. I see you've been talking to my wife. Are we replaceable? So what does that even mean, Gary? 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. In the universe? Yes, that we know about. Normally, when you buy a complex machine, it comes with the contact details for the manufacturer. Uh, no. It's a warranty. 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 BC. Wow. That would all get explained. I'm not going to steal anyone's thunder. So nearly if you would please introduce our guest. Well, this, we now have three or four time. Five, how many times it puts me? How many times she'd been on here? I don't know. Three is enough. It's been a lot. We have to start talk fan base. Mary Roach, Mary Roach, welcome back to start talk. Thank you. I think it's like five. Five. I have lost count. Newer times best selling author. We eventually had to boost your vocabulary to put more than one word in the title of your books. Because I got you, listen, we got here. Stiff. That was like dead people. Grunt. There was like military. Bunk. I think that was just sex. Has to be. Fuzz. I forgot what it was. That's sex. Bits. Go. And finally we added more words to your time. Packing for Mars. Packing for Mars. Packing for Mars. Yeah. 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. Live sweet and real replaceable you. Thank you. It's a play on emberesable. Yeah. Subtitled Adventures in Human Anatomy. And that's out at the fall of 2025. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. And you're in from Oakland, California. Uh-huh. Thanks for coming to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. I'm always a pleasure. I'm excellent. Excellent. Putting us on your schedule. So you you you pick these topics that no one else thinks to talk about and then use a below wide open. That's my thing. Yes. Yes. And you approach it journalistically but all of your source material are people who are active in these topics. Yeah. And you put it together in ways no one imagines even possible. So this is this is incredible. Isn't it? It's like it's a unique niche in the nonfiction verse. Nice. So that's us again. Yeah. No, I go and I I target some unsuspecting expert researcher scientist and I use them as an unpaid tutor basically. Oh, there you go. Wow. And if they're good and their educators don't love to talk. They love to talk. They like their spouse doesn't want to hear about it. No one else is interested in what they do. Exactly. And like go hear some woman she wants to know what I do. Come on down. Yeah. So you have explored human behavior not only physiologically but you bring a dose of humor to it. That's part of our branding here. If you can't laugh or at least smile, you know, go home. Yeah. Yeah. You just spoke to half the country right now. All right. So is there one or more words that you might describe yourself? If I would pick I would say journalist science communicator and writer. Just. All of those work I might say nonfiction author. Sure. Funny sometimes. Okay. Yeah. We have something in common. Sometimes. Journalist science journalist sounds a little high brow. It does, doesn't it? It does. It doesn't sound fun. No. It sounds a little staggy and boring too. Yeah. That's not. It does not apply to you at all. So replaceable you, embraceable you. What started you on that journey? You have to get something you have to pivot and say I'm done with the right. I know. And let me go do something else and know what is done before. It's all very exciting that moment where like I am so done with fill in the blank. I'm ready to move on. Yeah. 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. So but we had a correspondence back and forth that she turned out she's an amputee, specifically elective amputee like she wanted her foot because her foot didn't work well. She couldn't walk right. She'd had to spine and biff it at any way. 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. Wow. And the other thing was I was so you amputated the foot because she could find it out. I did, you know, it's not that hard. It's really ultimately with the right equipment or even the wrong equipment. I was going to know even the wrong equipment. It's pretty doable. At the dollar, that better. And I didn't charge her very much. There you go. She did get it cut off, but not by me. So for many of us of a certain age, we all watched the six million dollar man. Absolutely. It was the first replaceable body part. We can rebuild him. We can make him stronger. Yes. Better, stronger, faster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he had the eye that would be annoying, right? You cut up your eye and it goes, yeah, exactly. You need to do that. Right. And so then that was followed by was it also the six million dollar woman. Lindsay Wagoner. She had the ear and so the eye. Oh, okay. She could have. So I thought that was inventive and creative. And it gave us the word bionic. It did as a bionic man. But none of that was part of your inspiration for this. Well, that's it 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. Yes. Did it. Didn't that. Didn't that. Yeah. You got it. And here I say, and they had to show him running a slow motion. Yes. Because he could run up to 60s on the mountain. Yeah. And they speed it up. All right. I've seen a white man run that fast. So I said, I'm going to watch this show. Would you not only read any of the books. So Gary, what are you going to take us first? It's interesting. Having read the book, it's 17 short plays, different cast, different themes at, but it's all based around this medical regenerative science. Yeah. How did you go about that and not rinse and repeat every single theme in 17 chapters? I'm always going for kind of an 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 something 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 that's not my thing. Go anywhere else for that. Yeah. I try to throw myself into it like there's a chapter on mechanical breathing. So I spent, so I found an old, yeah, an Emerson. You spent some time in an iron lung? Yeah, it was an old Emerson iron lung from the polio era. Right. I mean, the original polio era. Not the one that's coming. Exactly. Not the one that's coming. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was fascinating. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm always looking for a different way in, you know, having done all this research, having gone around the world, it seems. Do you get the feeling that medical sciences 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? 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, that's a hard thing to compete with. Yeah. So I don't, I don't feel like it's a total failure. I don't, I feel like it gets. We have millions of years of revolution, but in 10 years, we went to the moon. So I'm not buying that. We want to do it. We can do it. 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 in 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, a lot of money in it. Or the urgency of it, right? Yeah. Well, the DOD spent a lot of money, you know, especially Iraq, Afghanistan, everybody getting stepping on IEDs, they funded a lot of work into prosthetics. I mean, it's getting there, but you know, it's, it's the kind of thing that hand is like five fingers that are moving independently and you got to like track the signals from the brain and that's got it. So you know, people, most people who have an amputee at one arm missing or part of an arm, they just use the other arm, right? There's going to reach over and pick it up. So was there no inspiration that came from Star Wars where Luke lost his hand? Luke had his hand cut off in a, in a saber fight. Did he now? And then then you say, oh my gosh. And then the next scene, he's just sort of, yeah, the next scene, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, okay, I just got a new hand. Everybody thinks that's easy, but it's not easy. So 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 base on, it's just not there yet. But I mean, you know, but give it some time. Yeah, I was just exploring what sources of motivation might prompt people to think this way. And that might have been such a moment. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Hello, I'm thinking, bro, Gaelin, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil Grass Tyson. So if we sort of jump into replaceable you, you start the first chapter. Is about noses. Yeah. Yeah. And then you won't put 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 you. At least in Michael Jackson. Don't be slow. That's the tip. I had a beautiful nose. I almost took my nose. Poor Michael. One of the most famous astronomers had fake nose. Really? Yeah. I don't know if he got into your book. He's in the first. Yeah. Yeah. Because he read the by and read the book. Who didn't read the book? He read the book. Who didn't even read the first chapter? Thank you. Gary. Gary. Yeah. Please expand on the nose replacement industry and where about? We could cut that out. We don't leave it in. Yeah. So, yeah, well, nasal, it's because of nasal mutilation, which was a popular punishment. And I'll go and 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 it. It's literally the visible deterrent. It is. Yeah. That was a punishment for a crime. Yeah, for a crime. What kind of crime? You name it. You name it. The crime of wanting to spite your face. What? I had to do it. I had to. Okay. Don't use that one tonight. I'll stay. I'll believe you. I'll believe you. I'll believe you. Okay. So, what culture was big on this? This was in Ireland in Egypt in the Middle East. How would they do it? They just cut it off. There was this story about Nepal. There was this whole town, Kirtipur, supposedly, where because the whole town was disloyal to the local conquerors and vaders, whatever, they denounced all the male population. My God, we are just awful. I'm just saying. Yeah. How disgusting. You ever been to an ancient ruins, I'm going to be a Roman or Greek and seeing a statue and it's nose has been chipped away. Yeah. The nose is saying it. Yeah. But it's a comparison. Yeah. Oh, I thought it just fell off. Like the old man in the mountain. I was facing the old man in the mountain. I was facing the old man in the face. Oh, he's happy. Yeah. Apparently so. That's right. So, so. So, the little meaning of the word deface would be to just slap your nose. Slap your nose. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Where were you when I was writing the book? Oh, yeah. That's so cool. But also, and then there was a... Yeah, that's in New Hampshire. New Hampshire, yes. And that the nose fell off their natural causes, however. Yeah. So, who was the military surgeon that came up? US military surgeon came up with an idea for New Jersey. Frank Tetamore. That's the fact. Yes, love him. Frank Tetamore. Okay. 1894. Frank Tetamore. Army surgeon came up with... It was a pair of glasses. This is going to work mostly for men. Paraglasses, okay. And then you would hang a celluloid plastic nose off the glasses. You need a little bit of nose left for the glasses. Right. And then at the bottom to hide the line, there was a mustache. A big mustache. So it's basically a medical... It's a brush of a black... Exactly. A medical... Exactly. A medical version of that. Yeah. Exactly. But what was more amazing, although it's hard to beat the Groucher Mars Groucher, was going back to like the 1500s, there was surgery where 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, Tagliakotsi. Gus Baudi, Tagliakotsi, and the 1500s is like... What's he Italian? No, he was from Pittsburgh. So you came up with this thing like... Like, let's take the underside of the upper arm... You don't normally look at it. That you don't look at, right? And there's no hair there. So, but the problem then is that you had to have your head caught... Like your eye'm attached to your face. You like your checking if you have BO. Right. It's that position, right? So you do like that for a couple of weeks. So you had this whole harness system... Back then, everyone had BO. Let's be clear about this. I think he said that made it easier. Like, I was like... Am I lying? No. There's a statue of Gus Baudi, Tagliakotsi, in Bologna. Like, that's like a niche in the wall. And 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. Wow. That's his thing. It's really creepy. So there was a whole industry to repair those who were defaced. Yeah. And then syphilis came along. More need. More demand for fixing noses. It's been a thing. Now, what's the tie to syphilis? I mean, I'm not familiar with the... Eventually, if you don't treat it, I guess the bridge of the cartilage. The cartilage, the deteriorates. The cartilage, the deteriorates. The system like that. Yeah. 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... That just seemed to be surprising. 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 you can find examples of it in nature, you know, those shells like that. And the design of sunflowers on a sunflower planet. It turns up everywhere apparently. Anyway, so this guy wrote this paper. There were a couple papers. One was on the perfect calf and one was on the perfect proportion, but a proportions. And when he did a Brazilian butt lift basically, you know, taking fat from one place and applying it elsewhere, he would use the Fibonacci sequence. I imagined him with, you know, I don't know, a protractor and markers. And he's like, no, I ball it. By now I can't eyeball it. But anyway, so I just was kind of interested in that whole. I was not expecting to read about the Fibonacci sequence in a butt shaft. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wasn't either. And then I, you know, I mean... You would sort of mix a lot, agree with these proportions. Oh, he likes big butts and he cannot do that. Oh, sorry, yes. Okay. Well, thank you. I know the song. Yes, it's from the 90s, actually. It would be also. Yeah, I think that's my gun. But, but not. But you have to do it. You're evolving aesthetic. Right. This involved. So I was interested because this was one of the first, this was the first chapter that I reported. So, you know, going back some years and the Kardashian butt was the big thing. And that point, and that is... Literally. That is, yes, it was the big thing, yes. And that is not... That he bought from the J-Load butt. The correct ass, but yeah. And the original, the OG butt. We know a lot about this. Yeah. 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. Right. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned prosthetics just a minute ago. We have some really advanced prosthetics that come on with microprocessors. They cost a lot of money to the point, are they worth it? And then I asked myself... Well, what do you need a chip in your implant for? Like, you've got them. Well, you like to get up flat with a chip? No, not your butt. You need a smart ass work. Yay! Oh! Yeah. Use that one tonight. That's right. No, but seriously, what do you need to do? Not in your butt. Not in your prosthetic. In a leg or a... Obviously, another stender started to read further through the chapter and went, they cost how much and they're not even water proof. And the battery needs to be charged. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're heavy. That's another thing. But for a leg, you know, particularly if it's an upper leg, you know, they're pretty great for legs. They can help... But how do you get your stability and your central gravity when you've got another person becomes... Correct. Yes. 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 gate. I mean, so the legs have come a long way. The legs are... A lot. I mean, I went to the national gathering of the amputee coalition. So it's a huge... Like, they book the whole hotel. That's the thing. That's the thing. And like, 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 aren't, you know, because the fingers... Yeah, if fingers are very thick. Yeah, like you can sort of toggle through the grip, but it's kind of walkie. It's not there quite there yet. So how much of the bionic man are we today? How far have we come? In the 50 years since the making... What was the arms, he's legs and arms and eye? Legs, arms, eye. Oh, he had all his organs, though. He had his legs, his torso. As far as I know. All right. Yeah, yeah. It's just legs and arms and... And he had his own brain. Yeah. He had his own brain. Okay. So we're kind of there. But the eye, the optic nerve is kind of hard as the brain. That's the... And that's... Well, actually, they... I've read an article about a prosthetic eye that is attached that will give sight, that will actually give sight. Huh. Is there anything... Not very good sight. No, it isn't. Believe it or not. It's not good sight. But it's a roometry sight. Yeah, that's... Like, right. Yeah, we're not. But the lens is for cataract surgery. That's a... That's an... That counts, absolutely. But yeah, like the whole... That's pretty complicated to do. An eye and an optic nerve hook that up and everything. But... I mean, I think AI is going to speed things up quite a bit. Going back to the prosthetics, there's something called osteointegration. Integration. Yeah. I see it with that bone. Yeah, just think dentures versus implants for your teeth. 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 implant and the mouth. And it's the same... The same guy who came up with the implants in the mouth, brain mark, paring-amar, brain, it has that accent that a paring-amar... Somewhere up there. Yeah, these are being your deer. Yeah, I'm just... Back again. Sure. There you go. Just lustful, no way to hold you in. Yeah. 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. But it's just... Wow, let's just screw him in everywhere. And if you could do the... Setting aside the infection issue, it's great because now you have sensation through the bone. You can tell, like, surface you're walking on and... She bones are like two by fours inside your body that you just hang stuff on. Yeah. Well, and this gets screw in. It's carpentry. It's carpentry, right? Yeah, you just screw it in. Yeah. And now you don't need the socket because the socket, you know, it works by compression so it can be uncomfortable. It's sweaty. I remember seeing a booth for, like, residual limb antiperspirant because it's... Wow. You know, on a hot day, they... Yeah, yeah. Residual limb antiperspirant. Did you know that was the same? That's the same. Yeah. So, if anything like Mondo, these commercials were people who put in deodorant everywhere. I'm like, what the hell is happening? What the hell? I know. Back in the day, we should just say something called Washer-ass. That's what we would say. They're like, that's what we could be like, oh, my, I'm so like, if things are so weird down there, they'll be like, yeah, go wash your ass. I know. What a marketing coup that is. Yeah, tell me about it. Anyway, where were we? What is... What are the specifics with the infection? Because the mouth is the dirtiest part of the body. Right. And when you get an implant, they screw it into the bone. You got... That's why you got to wait, like, two months before you get the actual tooth. For the bone, too. The bone has to give around the anchor. Yeah. And there's like zero problems with that. Right. But you put it in the leg and they got infection problems. Yeah. You know, what I think it is, because I did a book that... Well, I had a saliva chapter. Saliva has probably, because the mouth is a cesspool of bacteria. And saliva has antibacterial property. So I... Which makes sense, right? You would... Yeah. They say that about dogs. Yeah. But I always wonder whether... How soon after they lick their butt, is that a true fact about their saliva? I'm never going to find out. No. I'm here. Let the dog lick your wound. It's a scissor. It's got the antibiotic. Right. Right. I have to sniff someone else's butt, lick its own butt. No. I'm not going there. That's how powerful saliva is. You can lick your butt. You can lick your wound. Ah! Ah! Check it out. Still not doing the practical. Ah! Ah! Ah! So... What advances have we made now in organ replacement? In terms of... Yeah. ...not having like a dialysis machine that's big and clunky and sat next to somebody, but actually being able to replace organs? 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, you've got four to six hours on ice, or if you use... There's some more modern perfusion systems like a box where you're given an oxygen supply. And that'll get you like 12 hours, but there's a lab in a University of Michigan, Extra Corporeal Life Support Lab, which is where they came up with the ECMO, the heart-long machine. And so it's basically oxygenating you outside the body. Right. So it's taking the place your heart and lungs, it's this machine... That's what they used during open heart surgery. Open heart surgery. So they're pumping the blood through and the oxygen. And it keeps... It's basically your heart for the... Yes, it's for the course of that body. It's like one machine. Exactly. But there are some folks who are now... There's like a mobile unit that they're talking about. You could... So instead of somebody, if you have a heart attack, your heart's up. So the emergency personnel do... And like CPR, they could do extra... They could hook you up, like two things that through the neck and start doing that... Gotcha. ...in your home. If you could get the equipment downsized a bit, but the problem there, you've got to like four minutes before you're heading into the zone of, are you saving a life or creating a vegetable? Right. Because at that point, the deprivation of oxygen is a danger of creating a brain dead person. Well, so the biggest issue seems to be the rejection of an organ, a donated organ. Yeah. I mean, are we anywhere near overcoming, and if we are how? Well, it's been tough, you know. I remember like ten years ago, there was just tons of stuff about face transplants, hand transplants. And these are tricky because it's called a composite tissue allotransplant. So it's lots of different types of tissues, there's lots for the body to get it 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 was like, why do you not hear about that anymore? We got to face transplants when the chimps ripped off your face. Yes, that's right. Yeah, but then we realized, you know what, just stay away from the chimps. People are like, why are we spending all this money trying to figure out how we transplant a face, get away from the chimps. But yeah, and it, but as it turned out, you know, some of the face transplant people need a, like a second face because they're having rejection issues. People are asking, have hands taken off. Like the immune system figures out a way. It's just like the immune system does not want. Yeah. So it's not like something where their insurance covers it and everybody's having it done. It's, they kind of moved away from that. Right. So the rejection issues with the organs of other humans. How is it that an organ from a pig could ever work at all? Great question, Neil. Thank you. So you got to genetically edit those suckers, those pigs. So there's something called the AlphaGal 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. But, you know, the purer, what are we at? There's one guy who's had a kidney for about nine months. Everybody else lasted about two months. But those, pig, yeah, pig kidney. Yeah. But those first ones, those folks were really sick. That was done like a kind of compassionate. And give you time to think about it. It's a big thing. Well, I was like, you know, you're, you're, you're going to die. Right. And so could we give this a whirl? At least. And maybe it'll work. I'd be all sort of. Yeah. I'd be all sort of. I'd be all sort of like you're going to die. Put whatever organs in and out. Or science. Yeah. And maybe I'll help somebody else. But it'll surely help the process of helping other people. So, 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, it's fooled in the thinking that it's us. Well, a version of that is called chimerism. So now, so if you were to take a, take a pig when it's just a few cells old and do an edit whereby that pig is not going to grow a pig kidney. And now you introduce some human stem cells, pulary potent 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. You pick with a human kidney? It's a pig with a human kidney. So the pig's grown up with it, doesn't bother the pig. It's part of its body, but it's an actual human organ. So you could then take that and transplant it. And the end point being everybody has their own personal pig like with a car for spare parts and you just like waiting to go. So I used to feel bad that a pig would give its life, give up its organ for you. And then you had bacon. I'm a bacon and pork chops and pork sausage I eat. So I guess the triggers don't ever name the pig. Right. Maybe that's the trick. And even then I'm like, Jimmy was delicious. So Mary, you said this is all in the future, right? So where did you go and find a 26-story pigstie with elevators that could hold 40-ton loads of facial recognition? Oh, it went to China. That was pretty amazing, right? But those were pigs for Eden. Those were for Eden. But when you got facial recognition for pigs, you got a bad whole thing. You got a bad bull. I'm going to definitely buy it. But you got it. You got it. You got it. Yeah, they've got this is a 26-story pigery. They call them pigries. So it's just super high-tech, big kind of pig agriculture. And the facial recognition, I don't know why they need that, but they got it. So, but those are not for... Tissue pig commits a crime. You'll know when you have it. Yeah, right. So if you've got these kind of facilities... Yes, for pork. Yeah. Aren't you then, one step away from having peripotent cells in a very sterile situation and that then becomes an offshoot of just not the meat, but the organs? Well, chimerism is like... It's pretty early on. Like, somebody... As far as I know that it's gotten, as somebody created, like, got a pig probably, I think, to grow a mesoniferous, which is apparently a very primitive kid. And it's not known if that would even grow into a whole kidney. So it's... And I don't have any reason to believe China's further along in these things. No, really. Like, when I was talking to the folks who at the super clean pigstie, when I was at... In the West, super clean? Yeah, it was super... Well... How was the smell? Because pigs... I mean, my god, they're... They're not awful. Yeah, I know. But you know what? Because it's super clean, and I'm not super clean. I couldn't go in. Oh! So you stink. So I stink. To the point, yeah, that's so much. You got a bunch of pigs sitting around like, oh, God, these humans. Oh, my God, it's so much. Oh, my God, it's so much. Get her out of here. Big saying, geez, Louise. Big saying, geez, Louise. But wait, could we back up just briefly here? Yes. I remembered some years ago, when I hosted a spin-off 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 that was intended. Then they got cells of that organ, and cultured those cells into that scaffold. Yes, which... And then the cells knew what to do together. They took heart cells and 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. They do. If you look at heart cells, just a sheet of them under a microscope, they're beating, and they open up a connection to one another, and they all start beating, and you just together, even to the point where they catch air. They'll like, come off the... Yeah, that's great. But the scaffold thing is tough, because 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. It was a particular... It was a... It was probably a bladder, right? I don't remember, actually. But no, but it was very futuristic, and they didn't claim to have a solution then. Right, right, right. It made me look forward to what this would be. And that technology, D-cell, resale. So, okay, you take a heart, and you're using the same kind of thing an embomer would do, or you use the vascular to pump in detergent, right? And that's what it was. So that new worship. Yeah, all of the cells, the detergent, opens up the fats, all the contents of the cells come out. So, basically, rinse away all the living stuff, and you're left with extra cellular stuff, the scaffold. And the hope was, now we can use that same capillary system to put the cells back with the problem, according to the bioprinting lab, that I went to, is that the breakdown products, those are molecular, tiny, very tiny, and the stuff you're trying to pump in is much bigger. And there's different types of cells. Like, how are you going to tell them where to get off the train, the different types? For muscle cells, you have to align them the way the pumps. Yeah, like 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 got to align when you're printing. So to just throw them on a scaffold, doesn't it? Maybe, you know, for like, you know, this outer ear that I think is the one that is approved, FDA approved, outer ears. All right. I want to get to 3D printing, but I don't address the finger penis. I'm going to have a denture like a 3D wring. I think I have been exceedingly patient. And so, I mean, I'm very mature. I mean, I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. I'm very mature. 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 Georgia, and I got no reply. So I did what I sometimes do as I showed up. I just showed up. And it's, you know, the Caucasian man sits in, yeah, you are bold. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Well, the surgeon was on vacation, but the woman who runs the office took pity on me, because I've come all the way from America to see this penis. It's acceptance. I love that. Well, that's the thing. Why are you here in Georgia? That's the thing. Ever been honored in the history of the world. You imagine an immigration officer all the way from America to see this penis. Okay. 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 inside for rigidity. Okay. Then they used some skin from, I think, the lower part of the forehead. Anyway, and then they 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 crick it up like a thing. And they had a photograph. And in order to show how strong it was, they hung a bucket on it. Not far off. What? A ceramic water picture. Oh my god. Yeah. That is impressive, I have to say. White with kind of red and green flowers. Right. Yeah. So. That's it for code, please. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. That was a good job as code, too. Got to rest her on it. A little more iced tea, my love. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Get out. And because I never, this guy never, I call. I tried to follow up. He never got in touch with me. But 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 mali that bendable kind of deals. Why don't I use that? But interesting choice. You happy now? I, I, I, I, I, I, that was fascinating. Okay. I'm sorry. I think I speak for everyone. We all want to know about finger penis. You definitely speak for me. I don't think I have to buy the book and read the chapter. 3D printing. Yes. Are we into 3D printing for things such as organs now? That's a tough one. I asked that very question at the lab that I went to a Carnegie Mellon, the Feinberg lab that does a lot of stuff of 3D printing. Everywhere. I've been everywhere. I have been absolutely everywhere. No. And I asked that same question. Like how long before we're printing an organ that you can install in a body? And he said, we are kind of in the Wright Brothers stage. Oh, took it that far back. I'm going to say that's relatively close. He must still. It's honest. The Wright Brothers 19-0-3. Flying bicycle. 19-0-3. But that's a flying bicycle. Not really because they use the combustion engine. Yes. So let's be honest. If you're looking at 19-03 and then commercial flight. Commercial flight. We've 15 years. 15, 20 years from the Limbergs would fly. Limberg, 25 years later. So you're looking at about 35, 40 years. And we could be someplace. Yeah. Or even messing that because we can plug it in. Exactly. He said a couple of decades. OK. But things are speeding up more quickly now because of AI. So there's a lot of stuff going on that led him to think that it could happen faster than that. And he put it at about 20 years. And the it is what specifically? An organ that you could print that could then be put in a body, installed, hooked up. 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? Well, at this point, they're just taking off the shelf and trying to figure out. They're just trying to get started at that. Right now, there was a woman there who had printed a single ventricle for a mouse and installed it. And 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. OK. And the ventricle doesn't have valves. So the blood shoots out either end. So we have to get the valves installed. But they can print valves. And print valves right now. The stages are spaghetti at the bowl. By the way, I wonder if you could do a hybrid, especially for a heart, because we already have valves that are artificial. Right. And so you could print the musculature and then apply the valves and actually put that heart in a person. You could, yeah. And right now, you can take cow collagen, which the body, human body, accepts fine. Yes. But what's great about printing it could be custom fit, because some cow valve, sometimes it's too big for people. It doesn't fit everybody. Not everybody's a candidate. But now you can print it. And I've seen a 3D printed tri-leaf lit valve. It's pretty cool. I have a little one in a jar. I could have brought it today and show you. Yeah, it's so cute. This sounds like we are inching towards people who will see this as a road to immortality. Oh, like what Putin and she said, yeah. 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 two, three, four, five hundred years of age? Yeah, I don't think that's going to come from replacement bits. I mean, the one, you know, there is a surgeon who repeatedly talks about a whole body transplant. If you could hook up the spinal nerves, which isn't possible now, but if you can do that, and you could certainly hook up the blood supply to the brain in the head. I mean, that's been 1970, Robert White, did that with monkeys. Successfully transplanted one head onto a different one's body. I mean, you could... Freaky monkey Friday. Freaky monkey Friday. Yeah, exactly. What you do there, none of them. Yeah. 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. Right, so with ALS, if you could... With ALS, you would take that person's head and attach it to the body of the Alzheimer's patient and then you get one whole person out of that. Oh, interesting. You took it a step further. Yeah, yeah, do both. Okay. Do both. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right. I'm thinking, no, I'm saying that's scary. Right. It makes perfect sense, but it's very frank and stinion. Well, yeah, then you get back to the puri potency of being able to edit cells down in genes and then where can that go? And how could that be misdirected potentially in the future? 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? So if we took someone's, and they created their own egg, they create their own sperm, it's probably like an intro. Right, right, in vitro, gamotogenesis. Fine. 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. Because it's just... Because we need more Elon Musk's in the world. Yeah. The motivation. Yeah, so that's an interesting potential of future direction, right? Yes. And there are ethics papers out there on that. Oh, yeah. There are. So let me ask more precisely, are there ethicists working in tandem with these efforts or they brought on only when it's too late? I think there are ethicists... I think there are ethicists who are publishing papers about this with warnings and everything. But I don't know if I can't answer that question, whether they're working in tandem. I hope so. Yeah. So we got to end it there. Yeah. Man, we could be here for hours, Thomas. Yeah, this fascinating video is fascinating. Yeah, very well. Well, let me get it. Here we go. Oh, right, replaceable you. There it is. All right. So congratulations again on another book that no one else would have even thought to write. And you did it. I've done it. All right. All right. All right. Thanks, you guys. Jack, we could have you. Oh, always a pleasure. Yeah, Ray. How's your meal? Thanks for cooking one of these up again. Oh, yeah, both. Thanks to our guest. Yeah. And thank you for reading the book. You're welcome. I'm going to be active on this if I may. Please. Go ahead. Should we stop you? Just if I may. 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 and try to fix that problem. 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. Manoeuvre 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. There were street vendors selling fish and other produce and meats. Flies would be all over it. It was a sanitation nightmare. So what do you do? You 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. When I look around at nature, I see noots 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 pyramid when other animals can recreate their organs in. We can't. So how far does that go? The plenary. It's a form of worm. You can cut off its head and it'll regrow ahead. Oh my gosh. So maybe the solution to this is not one lab or another inventing a kidney or 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 vertebrate, we have vertebrate there 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. 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 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. Was that too long? No. This point, parts that can be pulled out and collapsed and it will work just fine. It worked on every level. It's good and people are looking at it. That's why. That's why we ran out of time. That's why you put it in the car. That's why it's so frustrating when people make fun of like why are you studying newt? They're studying, you know, they're so short-sighted that people are making these cuts. Yeah, everyone.