Penile Transplants (With Special Guest Mary Roach)

The year is 2016 and we officially live in the age of the penis transplant -- and while the notion may stir giggles from some, there's nothing humorous about the cancer survivors and wounded soldiers who can benefit from such surgeries. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian discuss recent advances in penile transplant surgery and chat with author Mary Roach, who devotes two chapters of her new book "Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War" to urotrauma and genital transplant surgery.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop
works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff with all
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and i'm Christian Seger. Today,
as you could probably tell from the title of this episode,
we have, well, what is an unusual topic. We're gonna

(00:25):
be talking about penile transplants, And we just wanted to
say up front before we you know, dive into this
episode that every time we've posted something about this subject,
because there's been a lot of news about it lately,
whether it's been to social media or we talked about
it on like our live streams or something like that,
it often kind of descends into these sort of like

(00:46):
adolescent jokes, uh, And you know, we want to have
a sense of humor about this, but at the same time,
like doing this research, it really became apparent to us
like how traumatizing this is for a lot of people,
and how important this proced JR. Is. There's some weird
science to it, certainly, but there's a lot of people's
lives that are affected by this. Yeah, I mean we're

(01:07):
talking about the loss of genitalia, the loss of a
sex organ here, and that's that's a serious matter, and
I think are our sort of conditioning is certainly in
an American culture, in Western culture in general, Uh, are
are conditioning to want to laugh, to want to make
a joke about it? I mean, I guess a lot
of that is coming from an area of just you know,

(01:28):
you're uncomfortable. What can you do? What kind of what's
my response? I can make a joke and then I
can fill that space bred of your anxiety or something. Yeah,
And that's and that's understandable. You know, for the most part,
I feel like everything is on the table when it
comes to humor. But in in in researching this, in
talking with our special guests today, it really became apparent

(01:49):
that this unwillingness to seriously engage with with this issue
has actually held back some of the advances that can
that that could help people who need it. Yeah. Absolutely,
So that's a perfect segue into that. We were very
lucky to be able to talk with Mary Roach for
about half an hour about her upcoming book, Grunt. In particular,

(02:10):
there are two chapters in that book that are about
penile transplant surgery for soldiers. Uh. This is a very
real issue for American soldiers coming back from overseas in
particular who have been damaged by i e. D. Explosions UH,
and the military's UH wing of doctors are trying to
figure out what to do with that, and Mary consulted

(02:32):
with a lot of those. But then there's also like
a good like ten year history now of the science
of penile transplants for everything from these wounded soldiers to
cancer victims. And then also, as we'll talk about in
South Africa, there is ritualistic circumcision that leads to penis
is essentially falling off right and and and it's the

(02:55):
situations where it's not full on penal transplant. I mean,
we're still still dealing with with euro trauma. You're dealing
with plastic surgery to correct injuries to the genitals. UH.
And that is and and some of that science actually
is what was we end up discussing ends up stemming
from gender reassignment surgeries and advancements that have been made

(03:17):
in that area. Yeah, And so a little bit of
clarification to about like the conversation and then the like
sort of turn of events since we recorded the conversation. UH,
Mary's book was coming out soon. It should be out
this week grant the Curious Science of Humans at War,
and we actually interviewed Mary a couple of weeks ago

(03:37):
in preparation for this, and since then, on May sixteenth,
the first US UH penile transplant was achieved UH, and
it was announced in the New York Times, I believe,
UH and actually here at how stuff works. Our colleague
Lauren Vogelbaum wrote an article and recorded a video about that.
By the time you're hearing this episode, that maybe like

(03:59):
two or three week old news. But when we recorded
the interview with Mary, it actually hadn't been announced here.
So we were focusing primarily on the research and transplants
that have been done in China and South Africa, as
well as what Mary had experienced in her research with
military medicine right, and some of the depending um advancements there,

(04:24):
like some of the procedures they're working up too. So yeah,
just keep that timeline in mind as you listen to
the interview, and you know, nothing's actually broken in the interview,
just keep in mind when it was recorded. So we're
gonna play the interview now, UH and let you hear
our conversation with Mary about this fascinating topic. And then
when we come back after that, Robert and I are
going to go over the brief history and the science

(04:46):
of what's going on here with penile transplants. Well, first
of all, thanks for taking the time out of your
day to chat with us here. UM. We've we've really
been in going uh reading Grunt and UH and in
the past I've been a big fan of I think
I've I've read all of your previous books, Stiff, Spook, Gulp,

(05:07):
Packing for Mars. Uh. So anytime I'm Mary Roach book
comes out, we get excited. There should be some kind
of special I don't know, bracelet or metal or something
that you get if you've read all of them. Very
few people have read all of them. Thank you, Thank you.
With this particular book, I guess the place I want
to start is UM. I was particularly interested in the

(05:31):
two chapters concerning euro trauma, genital reconstruction, surgery, and genital transplants,
because I mean, there's the I mean, there's the morbidity
and the squint, the squeamishness of the topic, but it
ultimately provides some some you provide some powerful insights into
the place where science and and to a certain extent,
the war machine itself has to try and stitch everything
back together again, both physically and psychologically. Was this a

(05:54):
challenging subject matter to undertake? It was, Yeah, for just
the reasons that you've just mentioned. It's it's it's a
sensitive topic. And I'm not known as a sensitive writer.
Uh if you're familiar with my book, but it's, um, yeah,

(06:14):
I think that because it is sensitive, people shy away
from it. And I feel like it's important to talk
about it, and so does the people who do the work.
Because somebody's sexual health and sex life and relationships are
in the balance, and that's you know, that's important stuff.
It's you know, I mean, it's important to get veterans,

(06:38):
wounded warriors whatever you want to call them, you know,
mobile and walking and able to take care of data
day activities and be back on their feet. But sex
is important too. And um, a substantial number of these
men say injuries that do that do go up that high.
I mean it's a it's a it's a fraction of them,

(06:59):
but still enough that it's it's important to talk about it. Hey, Mary,
this is Christian Sega, the COEs to the show to
piggyback off of what Robert was just saying, I'm particularly
interested here in the cultural and identity connections that you
remarked on regarding penis reconstruction. And i'd like to know,

(07:19):
you know, from the research and from the people you
talked to, how much of the repair part is actually psychological.
In particular, I'm thinking of the example you gave of
men who are worried about having to sit down to urinate. Yeah,
that's there is a cultural um. You know that what
you're talking about is a euri thrust. To me, I
believe I'm saying it right. Um, wherein if it's it's

(07:42):
one option, if rebuilding the euretra isn't possible or doesn't work,
you can take what remains of urethra and make an
opening in the Paraneum. Okay, however you pronounce it. Uh?
And then um, the the person would sit down to urinate,

(08:03):
you know, as a as a woman does. And um,
I asked. When I was in the operating room, I
asked both the surgeons. They're like, how but how much
of a big deal is this? And one of them said, well,
you know, when you're talking about you've lost one part
of one leg, and you know part of one hand,
and you know, this is not a big deal. The

(08:24):
other surgeon looked at me and said it's huge. So
there's a difference of opinion there. But um, yeah, obviously
it's I think it's And then she went on to
say that she'd been at a neurological conference in Europe.
It was a World urology conference, and it was very cultural.
They were, she said, the Italian surgeons are like, are

(08:46):
you kidding me? No, you know that that seemed to be,
you know, an affront to masculinity. Other cultures were, you know,
it was less. It seemed like less of a big deal. So, um,
you know, as a woman, it's hard for me. That's
an interesting thing. You know. There's sometimes, you know, every
now and then that men who are like, yeah, I
sit down the toilet because you know it keeps the

(09:07):
carpet cleaner, where my wife likes me too, And and
then there's other men are like, you sit down on
the toilet to peace. So I think it's both cultural
and personal. It's an interesting topic. So they're incorporating therapy
into this then as well, I would assume, um, therapy

(09:32):
is this is an area of sex, sexual health and
intimacy counseling is is an area that I think the
government would do well to dedicate more funding too. At
the time I was at Walter Ree, there was not
a full time staff person doing just that. You know,
there's a sense that, um that that you know, we

(09:54):
only have so much money to go around and this,
you know, sex is it's LIFETI this is this lifestyle.
You know that this is not going to be a
priority for our taxpayer of dollars. And there are people
at Walter Root who work with these patients who feel
like this is really important, Like, yeah, it's important that
they walk, but it's also important that they be able

(10:15):
to have a sexual relationship that isn't fraught and that
you know, and that and that once you know, once
you come out of these operations and you know, there's
just a lot of things to adjust to and and
you know, how do you use this thing now that
it's been reconstructed or you know, whatever has been done.
I mean, and it's not just with reconstruction and transplants.

(10:38):
It's also, um there's a lot of heavy medication that
goes on, especially in the early months after an injury.
There's nerves stabilizers and antidepressants and pain meds, all of
which can affect um a man's ability to get an
erection or to keep an erection. And that's you know,
that's that's also should be part of the council. And

(11:00):
there are people there who do it, but there there
need to be more of them. Yeah. So I'm going
to jump ahead a little bit here because that you
connected right to another thing I wanted to ask about,
which is this idea that that sex isn't as valued
financially as walking, for instance. And so I'm curious from
your experience researching this book, do you think the fear
of just sex talk in general is preventing us from

(11:23):
making strides in health sciences. Yes, I think the part
of part of it. I mean the woman that I
um that I spoke to, Christine Delorier, who runs the
Wall to Read. It's a sexual health and Intimacy working
group and it's something she does on her own time.
There's about fifty people who get together and share resources

(11:43):
and who've been working in this area. And that was
what she said to me. She said, this isn't just
a budget issue. This is the government not wanting to
embrace sex, and and not just out of prudishness. I
think just as it's out of a sense of you know,
we we spend taxpair dollars and you know the way
that taxpayers want us to and and that sex is perceived.

(12:06):
It's certainly, certainly certain segments of the population. You know,
that's that's not perceived as a worthy expense. You know
that that is uh um, yeah, it's it's it's considered
lower priority. And yeah, I think it is. It is

(12:27):
in some way tied in with kind of a not
a prudishness, but you know it to be spending taxpayer
dollars promoting sexual pleasure, you know, it's it's it's treacherous
grounds in terms of getting negative media attention or what

(12:47):
have you. But it's also you know, I should also
say the number of I mean, if you look at
the number of veterans whose injuries have left them in
need of surgery or infertile or what have you, it's
a small percentage because most I mean most of the
injuries in the lower part of the body. It's the
foot and the calf and below the need higher up

(13:09):
you go to the less frequent. These injuries are so
something like three genital ural euro genital. However you want
to um term it injuries for something like a hundred
and fifty thousand amputations or sorry, sorry, so I know
I think it was it's three D genital eurological patients

(13:30):
very eighteen thousand limb amputees. So it's it's a it's
a lower priority in that sense, and you know that's
when you're looking at a budget and where to spend
the money. That's also part of it. So it's not
just squeamishness regarding sex. But I do I do think
that probably places a factor. Yes, But as you you
point the point out in the book, and this I

(13:50):
thought was the really important factors. Just we are our
medical technology has has reached the point where more soldiers
are surviving the sort of injuries that would in previous
uh decades would have just killed them out right, but
now just surviving with more grievous grievous injuries. Correct, Yeah,
that's right, Yeah, exactly. The I E. D s have

(14:12):
gotten larger, so the injuries are going higher up the
limb and to the extent where they're affecting the genitals,
and that used to be a fatal and you know
that size of an explosion you used to be a
fatal injury for the most part. That if you if
you're hitting the level of someone's hips, you're also going
to be damaging organs and so so that's a a

(14:34):
very serious injury. And yes, these patients are now surviving
more than they used to. But not only are the injuries,
the explosions are getting bigger, but also the ability to
keep these folks alive has it ANSWD a lot. So yeah,
there's there's there are more people surviving to need this
kind of surgery and counseling. So, Mary, I'm curious in

(15:00):
the conversations you had with medical professionals about this, how
much did they acknowledge the contributions of fallow plastic from
the transgender community as contributing to their work. UM that
one the very first conversation I had was someone at UM.
It was a meeting I had It uses the Uniform

(15:21):
Uniform Services, University of Health Sciences, and that first person
that I spoke to, UH, that's what he said, some
of the you know that these are techniques that are
stemming from work from transgender work. I mean that it
makes perfect sense. I mean that is what has pushed

(15:42):
the advances in rebuilding building a penis from various other
pieces of anatomy. That's where the demand has been, you know,
I mean it started out with war injuries way way back,
but the very early on one of the first you know,
I think one of the first cosmetic surgeons who started.

(16:02):
I think you're doing rebuilding noses, etcetera. I think one
of those, um was a was the very first transgender surgery.
You spent a lot of time with Dr Richard J.
Read It at John Hopkins discussing the continued efforts to
conduct the first successful penis transplant in the United States. Um,
you know, where are we currently in that process? Yeah,

(16:26):
right now as of a lot of last week. I
checked in with him, and there's a recipient that's been
identified who uh And they're trying to find a suitable
match because it's a it's a you know, in addition
to all the other things that you look for with
an organ with organ transplant, in this case, there's skin color.

(16:48):
And I mean that's the case is similar to it,
you know, like a hand transplant or a face transplant.
But anyway, they're they're they're trying to identify a donor.
And I'm not sure how much of it is. Much
of it is is also the discomfort that the family
might have that I don't know. I don't know why
things are white, why it's been slow to happen, because

(17:11):
as you, as you point out in the book, the
first procedure of this sort took place in Guangzho, China,
back in two thousand six. H Yes, And of course that,
as you point out, that did not exactly that was
not a successful surgery in the in the long run,
the this this early attempt at it, though, does that
do you think that speaks to anything culturally about a

(17:32):
more you know, a more openness to engage with the
sexual questions involved here, or is it just uh, you know,
more eagerness to h to carry out the endeavor. I mean,
probably more the latter. I think probably um more eagerness
to plunge ahead and be the first. And you know,

(17:53):
in this case, it was they claimed it was a
psychological issue, but two weeks later that removed it, after
having transplanted it there, they removed it, and they cited
a severe psychological problem, but they didn't elaborate at all.
And I wasn't able to get in touch with They
didn't respond to emails, so I don't know. I don't

(18:13):
know exactly there was some necrosis, there was some and
the and they didn't attach all of the same. And
I believe that the cavernosal artery, there's a there's an
artery that the U S. Surgeons are planning to hook
up that. I believe that they didn't, so that what

(18:34):
there was in the China operation, But a lot of
it is speculation because there hasn't been a lot of
open communication between the Chinese surgeons in the in the
U S. I mean, I wasn't able to get a
lot of details about that procedure, only what is in
the paper, which is that the there was some psychological
distress and it was removed and it looked like the U. S.

(18:55):
Surgeons told me that from looking at the photographs, that
looked like there was some necrosis, some tissue that was
not being receiving blood and getting oxygenated, and that that
um may have contributed as well. But you're asking why
did they go ahead so quickly? And I think that
just maybe a yeah, I desire to go ahead and

(19:17):
give it a whirl and be a little less perhaps
a little less cautious, and a little less inclined to
work out all the details. I don't know, I'm not sure. Well,
I hesitate to call this a lighter note, but Robert
and I were both very interested in how a rectile
tissue can be constructed from the sinuses and also from
mouth tissue. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Like?

(19:39):
Why is it so good for reconstructive penile surgery? Uh, cheek, Yeah,
but for rebuilding a euresra or part of a urethra.
And this is, of course a tube that is transporting
liquid um. The the inside of the cheek is good
because it's it's used to moisture. It doesn't doesn't steriorate

(20:00):
in moisture, it doesn't break down, it's it's it's evolved
to be wet all the time. And if you just
use skin, uh, you can end up with um infection
and fistulas, which is when infection kind of eats through,
uh to the outside, and you have sort of a
tube going off where you don't want it to the

(20:22):
other thing. Uh. You want you want a patch of
tissue that for the penis or the eis. You don't
want hair growing on it. For there three, you don't
want hair because there's minerals and urine which can collect
and build up on the strands of hair, and that
can cause problems. You get little calcls, little stones basically.

(20:45):
Uh So, the cheek is advantageous in two ways. It's
it's used to moisture and it's hairless. You know, the
um for rebuilding a penis they tend to use. You know,
the underside of the arm doesn't have hair. Also, that
behind the ear is another little strip there that is
a little careless stretch. Um. And in that case, just

(21:08):
you don't want a penis probably right. I mean can't
I can't speak. Yeah, So anyway, that's that's why those
particular um patches of tissue are selected. Yet in reading

(21:28):
you some of your past books, I've often found this
pattern where they'll be like a section of one book
and then uh in retrospect, you can I sort of
look back and see like, oh, that's maybe where she
got the idea for the following book. Um So, so
I had to ask, when did you decide that Grunt
was your next book? And if we look back into
previous books, is there a particular chapter in a previous

(21:50):
book that that basically gave birth to this volume. No,
you have to look into the pages of Smithsonian magazine
and you even then would never be because it was
a story I had to do with the world. But
as chili peppers which are grown in Naga land in India. UH.
And while I was reporting that Piezz, somebody told me

(22:12):
that the Indian Defense Ministry had basically weaponized this chili
pepper and made a kind of tear gas or mace
with this uh, with a nature's own tear gas. So
I felt like I needed to report on that. I
went over to the neighboring state of Asam, India, and
they went to this lab and while I was there,

(22:32):
I just there were a number of projects going on
that struck me as kind of fascinating and esoteric. There
was a leach repellent project going on, and I remember
that was the moment where I thought, oh, military science,
there's this whole world out there of things that uh,
I have nothing to do with building better weapons. There's
there's just there's it's a whole world of the kind

(22:54):
of stuff I like to report on. There's a lot
of biology and um human related science that goes on
in the name of keeping people alive, which is I
also liked that it was as kind of counterintuitive for
a military book. It's not really about so much of
what you see is about the technology of weaponry and

(23:15):
bombs and high tech lasers and drones, et cetera, so
that the human side of it seemed just it seemed
to fit in it. But anyway, it didn't grow out
of anything in any of the earlier books. It was
from a story I was doing in between books. Yeah,
that's interesting for us because we just maybe a month

(23:36):
or two ago, did an episode on the history of
the weaponization of animals for military purposes. So it was
really nice to see in your book, like the flip
side to it where it was more of the like
healing function that all this you know, d G research
goes towards. Did you cover the I saw something about
about owls. Did you cover that one where the coast

(23:58):
Guard wanted to use an owl? No? No, look for
uh yeah, that was anyway, but that's not weaponization. That
was more like almost more like a cadaver rescue dog.
It was. We've talked about going back anyway doing a
second episode where we talked about the use of animals
and more like spying, surveillance, you know, other other uses

(24:20):
aside from just killing people. I think the craziest one
we got into was the bat bomb. Did you ever
hear about that during World War Two? Yeah? I did. Yeah,
I almost put it in the book, but I thought
I had to remind myself that a little off topics. Yeah,
were amazing, It's totally insane. So how does science and

(24:41):
sort of generally speaking, and you know, I know your experience,
how does science that orbits military endeavors, you know, not
necessarily the weaponized stuff, but the stuff you've covered in
this book, How does that How does it differ from
other areas of science and scientific research and inquiry. Um,
It's well, it's an interesting mix because they're there. There's
a whole world of kind of science that gets funded

(25:05):
through DARPA, which is very um it's with an eye
to the future. And then like, for example, there'd be
UM and I didn't. I didn't do cover a lot
of darper stuff, but I was fascinated by it because
it was it would be so idea of like, you know, well,
how can we with a what's a way to make

(25:25):
you know soldiers, you know, more effective and better at
what they do. Wouldn't it be great if they were
away where they could not be sleep to provide so
they could be they could sleep but have what kind
of one eye open, like be partially looking out for
things um and but still sleep and not get sleep deprived.
And and so they were looking at animals, marine mammals

(25:48):
and also some birds that have UM one that are
awakened with and in one hemisphere and a sleep in
the other. Like there are there are geese and ducks
that can you know, they have sleep in a group
in the one on the perimeter, will sleep but also
be watching out for predators. And so there's there's some
um biologists or zoologists who have gotten funded by DARPA

(26:10):
to just to study unique hemispheric sleep. So that and
you'll you'll look at this paper and they'll think why
is DARPA funding Like oh okay, they're looking forward to
the future, like how can we make this kind of
invincible modulated soldier, Like what what could we do to
the sight soldier to make him or her more efficient,

(26:33):
more awake, uh, just less of a human and more
of a fighting machine. So there's that very strange world
which I didn't spend much time and I just sort
of would come across the papers and go, WHOA really
surgically installed gils? Really? So that's that's sort of futuristic
surreal stuff. And then there's, um, there's just a tremendous

(26:57):
amount of work that kind of goes on under the
a R. That's just you know, like the Naval Submarine
Medical Research Lab, which is just you know, looking at
sleep deprivation and you know, air levels and and and
the you know, the various things that people deal with
when they're out on a submarine, and um, how to

(27:21):
sort of make that existence better, more efficient, healthier, etcetera.
So but there's like that work goes on and has
gone on and just is not it's kind of um invisible.
I mean it's not that it just doesn't get a
lot of attention, and it's you know, it's it's heartening
to me to see that that's there and that the
people that are doing it are very committed and dedicated

(27:43):
and caring. You know, the reasons ultimate reasons some of
this work is being done. You know, when you get
right down to it's like how to make soldiers better
at what they do and keep them alive so they
can keep being soldiers, which is less sort of heartwarming,
but take it down to the level of the actual scientists,
and they're really caring people who are very dedicated to

(28:05):
the lives of men and women who are serving the military.
And that's so so it was anyway, I don't know
if I answered your question. No, No, that's that's exactly
what I was wondering, just sort of the the difference,
you know, what what the energy of the research is
like as opposed to like non military research. Uh so, yes,

(28:26):
I think that's that That answers the question perfectly. I
can only imagine you're getting a lot of interview questions
about the euro trauma and the pianot transplant sections of
the books as we ask you and I and again
I want to stress that I thought you handled it
just perfectly with you know, utilizing the the expected Mary
wrote voice, but also you know, handling some potentially delicate

(28:48):
subject matter. But can you tell our our listeners and
readers about something that you explored in the book that's
getting less coverage that maybe you wish more interviewers we're
asking you about. Well, I'm actually you know the book.
Since I'm talking, I'm talking to you a month before
the book is out, so you are really among the
first folks that I've spoken to. I've done um, I've

(29:12):
done some q and as, and to be honest, this
is the first time where I've talked in much detail
about it, probably because there just haven't been many interviews yet. UM.
But UM. And it'll be interesting to see whether this
is something that people focus on or whether they'd rather
leave it alone because it is you know, it is
sensitive and it's UM there's a level of discomfort with

(29:36):
the conversation and with I guess how listeners, readers, whatever,
will react to it. And so I think I don't
know whether that will be discussed. I would think it
would be discussed a lot, but we'll see. Um, it's
hard to imagine it coming up like the late night

(29:57):
talk shows. Yeah, depending on who's um, yeah, well or
or I was thinking more like you know CBS Sunday
morning or the morning mainstream TV, you know, while people
are having their breakfast. Yeah, we really gravitated for that section.
It just I think it felt like it fit the

(30:20):
voice of the show. The whole book did. But this
in particular. We were like, that is something we can
make a whole episode around. Oh yeah, I agree, I
mean I think. I mean, there's two chapters in the book,
and I had originally planned one, and um, then I
heard about the transplant that the the folks at Johns
Hopkins working towards, and then I obviously wanted to cover that.

(30:44):
I mean partly because I'm Mary Roach and that's the
kind of thing I covered, but also just how could
it how could I not want to cover that. It's
it's just really interesting because it's it's it's it's Tara
incognito for for the transplant. You know, the face face
first face transplantment tremendously compelling to people because it's, you know,
we've we've left behind the world of organs are they're hidden.

(31:08):
You don't really look at somebody and you think, okay,
they've got a new liver. That's great, But that doesn't
have to say there's not a psychological component that's as
kind of immediately fascinating. Yeah, I feel like a lot
of this research to just like strays right alongside like
some borderline science fiction pop culture stuff too. You know,

(31:31):
like when we're talking about these sleep experiments. Thinking about
Robert and I have done episodes in the past about
like people speculating about all these myths about theoretical Russian
military sleep experiments, you know, and then like, of course,
you know, you just mentioned the face transplant thing, and
it brings to mind that with that nineties movie Face

(31:51):
Off where they swap face. Yeah, you know, and it's
it's this is exac Yeah, and people have been thinking
thing about it in sort of silly terms for a while,
but this has some very serious real world applications. Yeah,
and the fact that the immuno suppressive regiments have have

(32:14):
made tremendous strides, And so now you can do something
like faith transplant, which because it wasn't because it wasn't
matter life and death, people sort of shied away from
it because the burden of the drugs that you take
to suppress the immune system so it doesn't reject the
tissue um that that seemed, you know, it was questionably ethical.

(32:35):
Do you put somebody you should you put someone through
the risks and inconveniences and problems of this very heavy
immuno suppressive regiment just for a faith was not a
matter of life and death. And now that they know
with marrow infusion and other advances and immun suppression. Now
it's it's that's kind of falling away, and it's, um,

(32:58):
they're they're transplanting whole arms, They're transplanting faces and you know,
now penises and probably at some point legs, although legs
are problematic for various reasons. Uh, and and because um
there's they're also at the same time making great strives
with prosthetics. With prosthetic Yeah, so, um, you definitely want

(33:21):
to You're a leg transplant is not going to be
the best option for a very long time, I think so.
But then yeah, this is the guy and Eleeve is
talking about a whole body transplant or what is sort
of commonly talked about in the press as a head transplant,
but really the head is the person. The transplantation is
the whole body of the brain dead person. So and
there's some guy in Italy. I don't know how much

(33:43):
of that is bluster and how much of that is real,
but he's talking about, oh, yeah, I've got a patient
and I'm ready to go, which I can't even imagine
because that, um, there's so many unknowns with that and
so many potential problems. I don't know, and I haven't
spoken to him, But anyway, this whole Frankenstein science fiction
realm is rapidly coming to be not science fiction, and

(34:07):
it's it's fascinating now. In all of your books, I've
I always enjoyed the footnotes so much because there's always
they're always these little little nuggets of a fascination that
kind of spring off from the main material. And and
in this one there were several great ones, but that
the rabbit eye transplant by one Dr H. Bradford, that

(34:31):
one really floored me. Were you able to learn much
about this? Just it was in the paper? You know,
I couldn't interview him, he's long gone, But that was
so like there were so many things that fascinating me
about that. First of all the fact that rabbit eyes
are very similar to human eyes. If you go on
the internet, you can sort of verify this, and I

(34:53):
don't really recommend that because when you do the search,
this weird thing comes up about a guy who was
selling a box of rabbit heads um anyway purposes. I
don't know why. They seemed like he was offering a
pretty good deal on those, right, But no, and I

(35:14):
was like, well, somebody transplanting eyeballs, why would you want
these rabbit heads? What are you doing with them? But
and he was like, make me an offer that. But anyway,
see this is what happens when I got on these tangents.
But the UM, Yeah, but there was some It was
some guy who he was. He was a sailor I
think where he was anyway, he worked on ships and
he um for some reason that was there saying well, Lett,

(35:37):
for that reason, we you know, a glass eye won't work.
I guess it was an occupational issue. So they wanted
to do something that wouldn't break when you were hitting
your in the face or something. And then I thought, well,
you have pirates have eye patches, so maybe there's a
there is a high level of ocular injury on ships.
I don't know why. Anyway, that was what the reason
they gave for why they were going to do this. UM.

(36:00):
And of course I should point out to listeners, Um,
the eye this is just it was cosmetic. It wasn't
gonna be hooked up and you would be able to
the person couldn't see because there's never been a successful
eye transplant because hooking up the eye it's a much
more complicated. It's insteadily hooking up a telephone cable. You know,
I'm talking about the nerves here. You're hooking up, you know,
a complicated computer system, and the body doesn't know how

(36:21):
to regrow and reattach and make it all work again.
So the there hasn't been an eye transplant other than
this cosmetic eighteen what was it ninete early nineteen hundreds.
I don't have the date handed yeah, yeah, yeah, So
other than the guy who tried to do it for

(36:43):
transparent reasons, yeah, there hasn't. There's there's not any but
nobody else's transplanting eyes rabbit or pop or otherwise or otherwise.
All right, well, you know those were our main questions
for you here today. Uh again, thank you for taking
time out of your day to chat with us. UH

(37:05):
greatly enjoyed the book, and we certainly encourage all of
our listeners to go and pick it up. Um when
this episode comes out, it should be available and all
the physical and digital um ways that one normally acquires
a a good book. Well, thanks thanks so much for
having me on this program. Thanks once again to Mary Roach. Again.

(37:29):
The book is Grunt the Curious science of Humans at War.
Thanks to Mary for coming on the show and chatting
with us. We're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, Christian and I are going to discuss
the topic further. So, well, let's back up a little bit.
We've had myths and legends of penis loss and probably

(37:53):
replacement as well, to go back pretty far. It's the
sort of thing that's likely lost in the midst of history.
I mean, the myths of are full of castration and
um penectomy accounts with a with a primordial castration of
the god urine Us being one of the big ones.
And I've I've read various the European tales that have

(38:15):
involved which is, stealing men's penises, sometimes hiding them away
in trees, and then uh, sometimes the men are able
to steal the penises back and they are somehow magically
reattached the body. So and this is probably like a
legend that is deeply seated in psychological fear of you know,

(38:36):
as we're gonna talk about that, there's like a real
deep psychological cultural connection to your genitals, of course, but um, yeah,
something like that seems like, you know, it's sort of
pre lorraina Bobbitt style, like fear of the woman's stealing
uh manliness. Yeah, and even then there has there's like
a sense of humor and uneasiness, unwillingness to like confront

(38:59):
the horror or in terror of it and therefore wrapping
it then in the in something a little more whimsical.
And then as far as just simply as far as
just simply reattaching a penis that has been uh cut
from the body. UH penis reattachment surgery has been around
for a little while. Um. In fact, Dr Surasak Moon

(39:19):
Sumbat of Thailand actually became something of an expert in
it uh during the nineties due to an upswing in
such attacks on philandering men um by their wives um
and transplanting you know, one's own member back is challenging enough,
especially if said member has been fed to a duck,
which was apparently the practice at the time. I wonder why,

(39:42):
in particular a duck as rather than any other animal.
That's something we should look into, that would I would
be curious to see what the sort of cultural implications
of that or just the ducks are around. Maybe they're
just plentiful. Yeah, Well, if you out there. No, let
let us know about that. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's
a worse fate than a fish. I'm not sure, but
certainly it's one thing too. It's complicated enough involving microsurgery

(40:05):
to to to put one penis back onto an individual,
but then to transplant another's member, that's a more complicated scenario.
So before we get into the like real nitty gritty
specifics about how these penile transplants work, I think it's
worth doing just like a brief overview of organ transplantation
in general, because a lot of the same stuff applies here.

(40:28):
So uh. To start with, researchers originally had success in
early twenty century with transplanting organs in animals but not
in humans, and that they were basically they had a
lot of failures. They could not make it work until
the nineteen fifties when the first kidney transplants started to
work out. And this is important because it was saving

(40:49):
lives in these instances. These are organs that people need
to live, right, kidneys, hearts, uh, And so they need
these transplants and oftentimes even today still don't get them
because of the availability. And that's something that we're going
to talk about as well, but um genitals were kind
of off the table. Nobody had been able to pull

(41:10):
that one off. Uh. And the problem here is that
the demand for organs, with all of the diseases that
are affecting us as human beings, way outweighs the supply
of the actual organs. There's just not enough. UM donors
can wait for years. Sometimes they die while they're waiting. Uh.

(41:30):
And we're talking about thousands of people here. This isn't
pano transfers, which just organ transplants in general. Uh. And
even though here in the US, people in general favor
organ donation, right, Like if you walk up to most
people in the street and ask them, I'm sure they
would say, yeah, sure, I would you know, after I
pass away, get my organs a science or something like that, right,
or or to somebody who needs them. But actually only

(41:53):
a small percentage of people do this. They actually go
through the procedure of filling out the paperwork for it. Uh. Uh.
This is how serious it is. Sixteen potential recipients die
every single day from something that's totally curable if they
had transplants. Uh. And then we're also obviously looking into
artificial organs. You're hearing a lot about this lately, not

(42:16):
just in bioengineering, but then also with like the advent
of three D printing, what people can do with that, right,
the creation of the necessary scaffold thing and then the
growing of tissue over that to create a suitable replacement organ. Yeah.
So Uh. In the cases of organs that are super sensitive,
like your heart, your lungs, and other sensitive organs, transplantation

(42:37):
is actually like the last resort, Like that's the last
thing that they wanted to But here's the process of
how this works. And it's essentially the same for penile transplants. Uh.
A patient finds a willing donor. Uh. Usually it's a
friend or a family member, but what they're looking for
is a match, somebody that can go directly into surgery. Uh.

(42:58):
And a small number of the transplants come from general donors,
of course, people who who you know, have filled out
their organ donor cards or whatnot. But many of these
have to come from dead donors, and oftentimes we're actually
talking about brain dead donors, not physically dead donors. That's
kind of the I guess, the ideal if you want

(43:19):
to say, a situation, because the body is preserved with life,
but there is no more mental capacity in the creature exactly.
And it's incredibly complex going through the process of getting
permission to get an organ from somebody who's technically still
alive but who's brain dead legally. So it's so complex

(43:43):
in fact, like we don't have time to go into
it on this episode. And also, uh, you know, give
you the interview that we did with Mary, but if
you really want to know more about it, I recommend
going and checking out the article that's at how stuff
works dot com about organ transplants in general. There's some
good information there. The actual transplantation itself involves a huge
team of surgeons. Obviously there's a hospital involved, and they

(44:07):
all have to assess the patient's attitude, their psychological condition,
and especially their history with drugs, cigarette and alcohol use
because that can complicate things as well. Compatibility in particular
requires everything from your physical tissues and blood samples being
able to match to how long the recipient has actually

(44:29):
been waiting for this, right, So when it's a go,
you move quickly. Uh, you really hurry the patient into surgery,
and then a whole another team goes and gets the
organ from the donor. Now here's a disturbing little tidbit.
Note that you can stash away overseas. Organs often come

(44:50):
from executed prisoners, most notably in China, and there's an
indication that because there are people paying for these organs,
actually accelerated the execution schedules in these countries in order
to meet demand. So that's pretty disturbing. Post operation recovery

(45:11):
usually involves a lot of medication and a lot of
follow up hospital visits to make sure that everything is
healed correctly. This is gonna pretty much last for the
rest of your life. Um, and the reason why is
because your immune system is going to see this new
organ as foreign cells and it's going to try to
attack it. So to minimize this, like I said before,

(45:32):
you try to match the blood and tissue types. But
also the body is just naturally going to reject it
unless you have like an identical twin hanging around and
they're willing to give up their organs to you. So
there's three kinds of rejection. Uh, there's hyperacute rejection and
this is when like the blood type just doesn't match
up at all, the antibodies react and really like this

(45:53):
is the worst case scenario, because the recipient is going
to die on the operating table. Acute reaction uh A
rejection rather is what we see most often, and this
is when you have a normal immune response. It starts
a few days after the transplant UH and basically our
immune system UH it needs to be suppressed by medications

(46:14):
so that we can go ahead with the transplant. The
unfortunate side effect is it makes us susceptible to infection
and disease. Right, So sometimes they're they're trying at this
new thing where they sometimes also take bone marrow transplants
to produce white blood cells inside the recipient's body, hoping

(46:35):
that their immune system will sort of be tricked into
recognizing the new organ. The last kind of of rejection
is a chronic rejection, and this is a gradual thing
that that lasts over the course of months or years.
You may not find out until many years after the
transplant that the you know, that didn't actually hold in.
One note that I'd like to point out here too,

(46:56):
is that these immunosuppressive drugs that we give the patients,
they also have adverse effects over a long term, including
cancer and kidney damage. So in some situations, the benefits
may not outweigh the risks involved here. So let's get
to penises, shall we. Until recently, and like I'm talking

(47:16):
like ten years recently, Uh, the only treatment for men
was to construct a penis from the flesh of their
thigh or forearm skin and basically plastic surgery reconstruction. Yeah.
And so you take that skin, you add a penile
prosthetic and it's got malleable or inflatable rods in it

(47:38):
that make it semi rigid. Then you add a saline
pump to this that fills it up, right, like acting
like the um the blood filling up the tissue of penis.
And this has been around since the seventies is practice. Uh.
This is a direct quote from one of the articles
that we researched for this about this procedure. It said
the aesthetics were crude and the penetration is awkward. Now,

(48:02):
that can be said about most people's first that first
experience is sexually true too. Yeah, so we do have
a sense of human yeah. Yeah, And you know, and
I think it's also worth noting that it's it's look
at imagining this scenario here, and certainly you can look
up images and more, you know, technical documents on all this.
It's easy to say, well, that sounds crude, and certainly

(48:24):
that's no that that's no replacement for the tissue situation,
but that is still pretty remarkable that that we were
able to accomplish this. This is a still surgical feat. Yeah,
it gets back to what we were talking about in
our Cyborgs episode, like the things that we're able to accomplish,
like what makes us human, what makes us the machine,

(48:45):
the cyborg nature of humanity. So I don't want to
slite procedure at all, because that is an amazing feat. Uh.
And then here's the other thing that made uh any
kind of penile transplants really difficult and still does uh.
So I talked earlier about how just getting organs in
general is difficult, right, getting a penis downer is even

(49:05):
more difficult. The organ banks that accept other internal organs
they don't even have like a field on their form
for penises, right uh, And so they don't usually request these.
It has to be done separately. In fact, in South Africa,
families often flat out refuse. And this is going to
be important because the first penile transplant was in South Africa.

(49:27):
But there's such an emotional cultural gravity to a request
like that that most people just say no, I will
not give you, you you know, my my dead family members
penis uh. And in in the case of the people
who did the first penile transplant in South Africa, they
actually had to come up with a way to work
around it, where they started constructing faux penises for the

(49:51):
dead uh from the donor's skin to preserve their dignity
in their graves and subsequently still be able to use
the penis and give it to a living recipient. Huh. Wow,
that is that is that is crazy, you know. In
um In Grunt Mary wrote his book, she points out
that the cadavers that were being used in some of

(50:11):
the not even actual transfort procedures, but essentially rehearsals for
an upcoming transplant procedure. Like those are situations where somebody's
body was donated to science and they're you know, they're
not about to you know, necessarily share the exact details
of how that body was used totally, you know, in
part because of the complexities of our our psychological um

(50:34):
attachments to these various parts. Yeah, who wants to know
about like how their loved one was carved up and
maybe mistakes were made on them or whatever, but the
benefit is that it led to the successes that we're
going to talk about next and some of the failures.
So let's go back to a case that Mary Roach
discussed in the interview. This was a two thousand six

(50:55):
guang Show General Hospital in Guango, China. You had a
forty four year old man and who had lost his
penis and they quote an unfortunate traumatic accident. That's about
all we know. One of the is is we've already
touched on in the interview this case, there's there's some
material that is that is not as directly related to
the reader. There's maybe some of that might be lost

(51:17):
in translation, some of it's just maybe not provided. Um. Yeah,
there are a lot of things about this particular case,
and it's been ten years that are still vague to
this day. And when we talked to Mary, we sort
of mentioned that, right Like I remember saying to her,
you know what, what was actually up with that? And
she said, as far as she could tell, it was necrosis.
But we'll get there. So the lead surgeon on this

(51:37):
one was one doctor who Wai Lee and so from
what we know, the parents of a brain dead man
in his twenties agreed to donate their son's penis to
this man who was damaged in this unfortunate traumatic accident. Now,
the way that they did it in this Chinese procedure
was they warmed up the donor's penis with an infrared

(51:58):
lamp post operation, and this was supposed to increase the
metabolic requirements of the organ instead of increasing the blood supply. Now,
other doctors that have been interviewed about this particular procedure,
they have said things along the lines of they think
that what happened here and why it didn't work out
was there was inadequate psychological workup. So like with a

(52:21):
lot of the procedures that we talked about on this
show that are semi experimental, like say, uh, using m
D M A to help with PTSD, right, it requires
therapy as well. It's psychological and physical and not like
just you're doing not doing body work in a car here, Yeah, exactly. Um. Now,
in the particular case for the biological surgery here with

(52:47):
this Chinese case, they could only use the local nerve
structures because the donor's blood vessels had actually been obliterated. Uh.
And they re routed a blood vessel from his lower
abdomen to his paraneum to connect it to this new penis.
Then they connected the blood vessels and dorsal nerves, and

(53:09):
then the urethra for urination and the corpus cavernossum for erections. Now,
according to the Guardian, they thought okay, everything was a success.
After about ten days he had a rich blood supply
and could urinate normally. But then the recipient and his
wife came back in two weeks after the surgery and

(53:31):
requested that it be removed. And as we talked about
with Mary, nobody really knows the answer here, but we
think that it's likely due to psychological issues surrounding the
necrotian necrosis of the tissue involved. Yeah, I mean, of
course you can't help, but wonder, like to what extent
was this, how much of this was a failed reattachment surgery? Uh?

(53:52):
And then to what to what extent is it more
silent psychological? Like is it is the is the version
that everyone gets is it leaning one way or another
that they decided to lean away from from blaming the science?
And you know what kind of how was it portrayed
in the media, and like you said earlier, how much
is lost in translation when we bring it over to
English speaking media. So there's a lot of confusion around
this case. But from what we know, uh, it was

(54:14):
considered a quote failure because the man asked it to
be removed, right, And we shouldn't discount that the psychological
issues at all, because psychological issues involving transplants are not
unheard of. The world's first hand transplant recipient a New
Zealander by the name of Clint Hallam. He stopped taking
his immune suppression drugs, uh, you know, by choice, and

(54:36):
then later requested that the hand be amputated. So and
and this is often brought up as an example of well,
they essentially they essentially tackled the problem like like like
auto work, and they didn't they didn't take into account that, uys,
you have to have all of this additional psychological support
as well. Yeah, this is incredibly gruesome stuff when you
get down to the nitty gritty of it too, Like

(54:57):
this is the kind of stuff that would make up
like a Tales from the ript style story or something
like that, like like he has a dead man's hand
and uh, you know what I mean, Like it lends
itself very well to to paranoid thinking, to doubt, and
and I can't help but wonder two Like in the
especially these earlier cases, to what extent was the were

(55:19):
they straight straight with expectations for the recipient? They're like, hey,
this is this You aren't going to be this is
not going to be a you know, a one to
three fixed scenario. Right, It's not like you and as
we'll talk about, you don't just walk out of there
and you've got a fully functioning penis. It takes like weeks,
two months to years to try to get everything working properly.

(55:42):
And in fact, in the South African case, they were
surprised at how quickly things became functional. Well, let's look
at that. The South African case. This is a two
thousand fifteen and we're taking this is taking place at
the Tigerberg Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Twenty one
year old penile amputee who ust to his penis in
a botched circumcision. And this is apparently pretty common. Dozens,

(56:06):
some say hundreds of boys are maimed or die each
year during traditional initiation ceremony. So these are not. These
are not infant circumcisions. These are coming out of a circumcisions. Yeah,
he was eighteen when this happened. And these ritual circumcisions
are basically the way that it goes is they're so
tightly wrapped that it causes necrosis in the penis, but

(56:28):
you know, without it even being detached, So his penis
had to be amputated. Uh. This is particularly common in
South Africa's I believe this is Zosa speaking region. It's
x h o s a. I'm not quite sure how
to pronounce that, but let's say it's Zosa uh speaking
region of the Eastern Cape. Uh. And it's so it's

(56:49):
a rite of passage for young men. They actually attend
circumcisions school and they're instructed in family values and sexual
education there. Uh. There's also high prices that are charged
for this procedure. So basically they take the penis, they
wrap it at its base to stem the flow of
blood up to the foreskin. Right, some men actually die
because they won't go to a hospital because they're they're

(57:11):
afraid of being ostracized after revealing that their gangarinus penis
has fallen off. So there's such a strong psychological cultural
connection to this thing that it's leading to people dying.
Uh So yeah, so South Africa seems like an ideal
place to to start getting a prep team ready to
go for the first penile transplant. Uh. And the lead

(57:33):
surgeon here was one Professor Andre von der Murwi. So
when the recipient recovered, he actually had to come back
in UH and drain a hematoma and repair a small
fistilla in the urethra. And now here's the thing. They
expected that it was going to take two years for
him to be fully functional. It only took three and

(57:54):
a half months. Uh. And the surgery itself, it took
four years of clinical and ethical therapeutic preparation. They had
to work with cadavers and practice. As we talked about earlier,
it was really difficult to find penile donors. As we
talked about earlier, they were trying to overcome this by
doing the whole procedure that I talked about where they
build these fake penises. So this team is not only

(58:16):
trying to come up with a way to help these uh,
these victims of this botched ritual circumcision, but then they
also have to come up with a way to somehow
please the families of the donors. Uh. And as of
the last time this was reported, the hospital had nine
more candidates in weight. But the good news is the

(58:37):
recipient the patient. Last June it was reported that his
girlfriend was pregnant, so fully functioning penis apparently. I wonder
if this case of it also helped that the recipient
was so young, just by virtue of, you know, the
cause of the act, whereas in the recent case, the
American case, he was he was far not not he's

(58:57):
not old, but he was older than this guy's sixty
were years old, right, all right, So let's get to
this most recent case when we're looking at May eighth
through eighth and the ninth, two thousand, sixteen weeks, just
weeks ago at took place at Massachuset's Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston. Thomas Manning, a sixty four year old bank
carrier from Halifax, Massachusetts. Penis was removed because of cancer.

(59:20):
Now this is you know, most recent, and the New
York Times and then also The Atlantic did really great
write ups on this. So a lot of our information
is from here. Man. I wish we could get married
on the phone again and talk about this. I'm sure
she was pretty interested in it as well. Uh. It
took thirty healthcare workers in total to perform this operation.
There were three years of preparation again, all the practicing

(59:43):
on cadavers. Now, Manning only found out about the fact
that he had this rare cancer after he had an
accident at work. When he went into the doctor, they said, WHOA,
there's this this, you know, abnormal growth on your penis,
and they realized that it was. It was so cancerous
that it had to be amputated. Now. It only took
him two weeks though, to find a donor who matched

(01:00:06):
his blood and tissue type, so that works out pretty well. Now.
The surgery here in the US is estimated costs somewhere
between fifty thousand and seventy five thousand dollars, but the
hospitals involved are paying for the procedures while the doctors
are donating their time. So everything, as far as we
know with this is so far, so good. Right. In

(01:00:27):
their official statement, they said that the penis has regular
blood flow, no signs of infection or rejection. They hope
that in a few weeks he'll achieve normal urination, so
probably around right now. I would imagine they say they
already have another patient waiting. This guy his penis was
destroyed by burns in a car accident. Ultimately, their goal

(01:00:50):
is to help combat veterans, like we talked about with
Mary and Uh, other cancer patients and accident victims. They're
in fact hoping to train their techniques to military surgeons.
Because this is, like we talked about with Mary, so
common with i D victims. Yes, I mean all this
is very much taking on the front lines of the
of the surgical frontier. Um, That's why doctors are donating

(01:01:14):
their times, That's why hospitals are are are are paying
the bills here and then then hopefully as these techniques
are are perfected, yeah, they will be passed down and
and others can start utilizing that these techniques around the world. Now,
there's one thing that I want to add to this.
We talked a little bit about it with Mary Uh.
In the press release about this US penile transplant, they

(01:01:36):
specifically said this will not be offered to transgender people
for now. Now, I want to just touch on this
a little bit because as we were reading Mary's book,
obviously it was apparent that um, the science behind gender
reassignment surgery has been used as sort of like a
building block to get to where we are with these

(01:01:57):
penile transplants. When I was twenty one, I read Kate
Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and it it specifically describes the female
to male gender reassignment surgery, and I immediately thought, when
we were doing this research, well, it's it's clear that
you know, there's a foundation there. Uh, and it seems
to be the secret that no one's really talking about,

(01:02:20):
I mean clearly in China and South Africa. Uh. And
then in this most recent US case, it's it's it's
not in the public press releases, right. But I think
that it's fair to say that these medical teams uh
did get some help at least or some some foundational
work from the efforts that were done there. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:02:41):
because the field of gender reassignment surgery definitely had an
impact on our ability to treat eurotrauma wounds to the
general area, and of course all this ends up playing
directly and our ability to to graft a donor repeat
it's not due recipient. Yeah, but I do agree with
you it seems weird that that these contributions have not
been highlighted more. Um, and there's just continued unwillingness perhaps

(01:03:03):
to discuss, um sure, who should who should who should
be open, who should be able to receive these procedures. Yeah,
and given the controversy right now, especially like it's a
hot button issue with transgender rights and bathrooms in North Carolina,
you know, they these hospitals, they want to retain their funding.
I get it, like it's a it's a pr move,

(01:03:25):
but I think you know, for us covering this, it's
only fair to be honest and say, you know, it
seems like, uh, there was some foundational work there. Now
there's also another topic that we don't have time for today,
but maybe we'll be able to come back to in
the future, which is the fact that there are actually
artificially grown genitals that are being used and prepared for

(01:03:46):
potential transplantation, both penises and vaginas. The vaginas actually successful,
uh and have have been so for years. Um, But
we don't really have time to dive into the science
on that today. So if this is you know, something
that's interesting to you listeners and you want to hear
more about it, let us know and Robert and I

(01:04:08):
can come back and maybe we'll do something on artificially
grown organs and transling grown genitals. Who doesn't want to
hear an episode on that. Yeah. Also, we're gonna be
talking futuristically, so I feel like maybe that we'll be
able to actually work in a little more humor as
we distance it from some of the you know, the
real life and often grim circumstances that require these procedures
to begin with. Yeah, especially, man, let me tell you

(01:04:29):
what they do to rabbits for this next time, next time,
next time on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the things
they do to rabbits. All right, well, hey, in the meantime,
check out the landing page for this episode on Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's what you find,
links out to some of the articles we mentioned here,
links out to Mary's book, and you also find all
the podcast episodes. You'll find blog post links to our

(01:04:49):
social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. We are
blow the Mind on both of those. We're also on Tumbler.
We're also on Instagram. Yeah, and if you want to
write us directly and tell us what you know about
penile transplants or artificially grown organs or whatever, write us
at blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.

(01:05:17):
For more on miss in thousands of other topics is
how stuff works dot com. Love,