Big Think Interview With Mary Roach | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Mary Roach

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A conservation with author Mary Roach.

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Mary Roach:

Mary Roach grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. She graduated from Wesleyan in 1981, and then moved out to San Francisco. She spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. During that time she wrote freelance articles for the local newspaper's Sunday magazine.

Though she mostly focuses on writing books, she writes the occasional magazine piece. These have run in Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as many others. A 1995 article of herse called "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and in 1996, her article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category. Mary Roach also reviews books for The New York Times.

Her first book, Stiff, was an offshoot of a column she wrote for Salon.com. Her other books include Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What inspired Bonk?

Mary Roach: I came across a reference to a technique that... Masters and Johnson essentially...They were the first to document the whole sexual response cycle from arousal through orgasm. And they want to document, like, what happens in the human body, male and female. And with women, a lot of that's going on inside so they're like, "we got to figure out a way to see what's going on." Actually, they built a penis camera in essence and women would come into their lab and essentially have sex with this penis camera, which will document their responses from the inside. And I just remember, thinking, "sex research, next book." Just because that is such a, you know, a technological challenge or logistical, ethical, weird challenge to how, you know, to figure out how do you... how do you study something like that in a scientific setting. So that was actually just a reference in Film Quarterly of all places to the colposcopic films of Masters and Johnson. I remember... Colposcopic, that means, like, cervical... And looking it up and doing all the research and finding out about that whole project, which is... And this was the 1950s too, which is incredible, that they were, you know, bringing...finding people who would come into a lab and be willing to be documented in that way. So that's what got me rolling.

Question: What does Viagra do for women?

Mary Roach: The Viagra is...You know, it affects the vascular system so that...And that... They try...They were very eager to test that out on women, hoping that they could, you know, sell the drug to the other half of the planet. And it... it doesn't work. It does actually increase genital blood flow in women but it doesn't create a change that the women, then, interpret as I'm really aroused, I want to have sex, I feel really sexy. It doesn't... It doesn't do that. They don't even notice. It's a small enough change that it's not... it's not something that they would pay for. It's not really doing anything. So they then looked at...

Well, there's the other approach to libido in women is hormonal. And there was... There actually is a patch, testosterone patch, which was all set to go, called Intrinsa. And the FDA, then, wanted longer term safety data, I think, because of hormone replacement therapy. Remember there was a big... You know, we thought that hormone replacement therapy was the next greatest thing since whatever, sliced bread. Then, they came up with this, you know, long-term findings, sort of saying that, you know, they were actually increasing risk of stroke. There was that big study that scared everyone off so the FDA kind of backed off hormones.

So now, the only thing left is central nervous system, you know, affecting the brain. And I think that that's going to be tricky because I think that the FDA... The FDA considers sex a lifestyle issue, not really a medical issue. So in order to pass something for what is considered... a pass to get a drug approved for something as considered a lifestyle issue, it's... you know, they're going to be pretty squeamish about affecting your, you know, your brain for that purpose. So they may have, maybe, a bit of a long road to get something approved.

Question: Do herbal medications work?

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