Bubbling cauldrons, toxic substances, insane and dangerous ideas -- whatever happened to that kind of science? Take a look at Mark Roth in his lab in Seattle. It's mad. It's heroic. It's science the way it's supposed to be.
There are things you should know about, just because they're weird. Did you know that people with diabetes exhale rocket fuel? It's true, but it's weird, right? And spontaneous combustion. That's true, too, apparently, albeit in a bigfoot sort of way. People just explode. Mark Roth keeps a file on them, because, well, for one thing, he's interested in the genetics of spontaneous combustion, and, for another, he's interested in what keeps people from exploding, like, all the time. I mean, why shouldn't they? People never ask that. But then, they never ask a lot of things. Human beings are 37 degrees Celsius. That's pretty much the standard. But why? Nobody ever tells you. You can read a thousand books on bioenergetics and they won't even ask the question. So it's unexplained, and that's when you can learn things. You can learn things when things are unexplained--when the sword is still in the stone. Take movement, for example. We humans are absolutely programmed to be interested in movement. In fact, if you're a biologist, you're really a movementologist; you study that which moves. You're a slave to the animate. Which, of course, is how Mark Roth got the idea that deanimation really might be the better scene, and found himself in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
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