Do You Own Your Own Foot?
5/24/202651 min
What happens to a body part once it’s been removed from your body? Can you take it home? Cremate it? Bury it? Even give it a funeral? In the first episode of a new mini-series on ownership, Hannah and Michael explore a deceptively simple question: what parts of ourselves do we actually own? From amputated limbs and stolen skulls to black markets for human organs, they uncover the strange, unsettling, and often lucrative world of body ownership. Why did grave robbing help advance modern medicine? When are flesh-eating beetles surprisingly useful? Who owns your organs after you die? And what does the bizarre fate of Einstein’s brain reveal about the blurry line between science, consent, and control after death? This episode asks: do our bodies really belong to us?
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsHannah Fry· Host0:01
Hello, welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
Michael Stevens· Host0:02
And I'm Michael Stevens.
Hannah Fry· Host0:04
We're starting today, Michael, have you, have you held onto any body parts? You know, children's teeth, for example, would be the normal one.
Michael Stevens· Host0:13
My daughter hasn't lost teeth yet, but my mother still has all of my baby teeth- Right ... in a little container in her cabinet in her kitchen.
Hannah Fry· Host0:23
That's, um, somewhere between adorable and creepy.
Michael Stevens· Host0:26
I know, right? But it's not creepy.
Hannah Fry· Host0:28
I have kept all of my daughter's teeth, actually.
Michael Stevens· Host0:31
Yeah.
Hannah Fry· Host0:31
And I'm not sure which one's which [laughs].
Michael Stevens· Host0:33
Oh, 'cause you've got multiple- Multiple daughters.
Hannah Fry· Host0:36
Mm ...
Michael Stevens· Host0:36
well, don't you have separate containers for them?
Hannah Fry· Host0:38
I probably should've done that, yeah.
Michael Stevens· Host0:39
'Cause my mom has kept mine and my sister's teeth, like, labeled.
Hannah Fry· Host0:42
Oh, that's- Now, I only have one child. Yeah.
Michael Stevens· Host0:44
So when I look and I find a old, dried-up piece of umbilical cord- [laughs] ... I know that it's hers. But I've kept that. I've kept cuttings from my daughter's first haircut. Oh, you know what? This isn't a body part, but I kept a bandage from my cat, because when I took the bandage off, the blood stain on it was a perfect heart shape.
Hannah Fry· Host1:02
Aw.
Michael Stevens· Host1:02
[laughs] I mean perfect, like uncanny. I'll have to show you a photo later. If I can find one, we'll put it in the ep- episode. I was just using some in- industry terms. [laughs] But that's it. Oh, and of course my bag of beard hair.
Hannah Fry· Host1:14
Wait, tell me that you did not bring a bag of beard hair with you.
Michael Stevens· Host1:17
I didn't bring my bag of beard hair. [laughs] But I once shaved my beard off for charity, and there was way more beard hair than, like, we could in good conscience give a person. So- [laughs] So I, but I kept the rest of