Mary Roach is the author of Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, and several other books including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Gulp. Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.
Mary’s books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.
She lives in Oakland, California.
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The Science Of Replacing Body Parts, From Hair To Hearts
In “Replaceable You,” Mary Roach describes mind-boggling efforts to replace human body parts—and why it’s proven to be so difficult.
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The Absurdity—And Difficulty—Of Writing About The Dead
“There is nothing amusing about being dead,” Mary Roach writes. But how can one inject humor and levity while writing about cadaver science?
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From Chicken Guns to Testing Cobra Venom: The Strange World of Military Science
Author Mary Roach dives into the odd and fascinating experiments conducted by the military.
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Stink Bombs, Submarine Safety, and the Science of Soldiering
In “Grunt,” author Mary Roach looks at the technology used to battle disease, shock, and exhaustion in the ranks.
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Down the Gullet: A Guided Tour of Your Guts
In Gulp., science writer Mary Roach travels through the intestines–and out the other end.
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The Story of Saliva
Why do newborns drool excessively? How many pints of saliva does a person generate daily? (Hint, it’s more than one.) And more spit mysteries excerpted from “Gulp: Adventures Down the Alimentary Canal.”