Erika Engelhaupt - Gory Details

Published by National Geographic Partners, LLC

1145 17th Street NW Washington, DC 20036

Gory Details Book Copyright 2020 Erika Engelhaupt. All rights reserved. Gory Details Blog Copyright 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved. Compilation Copyright 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents without written permission from the publisher is prohibited.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and Yellow Border Design are trademarks of the National Geographic Society, used under license.

GORY DETAILS is a trademark of the author, used under license.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Engelhaupt, Erika, author.

Title: Gory details : adventures from the dark side of science / Erika Engelhaupt.

Description: Washington, DC : National Geographic Partners, LLC, [2020] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044364 (print) | LCCN 2019044365 (ebook) | ISBN 9781426220975 (hardback) | ISBN 9781426220982 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Science--Miscellanea. | Medicine--Miscellanea. | Curiosities and wonders.

Classification: LCC Q173 .E536 2020 (print) | LCC Q173 (ebook) | DDC 500--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044364

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044365

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Interior design: Melissa Farris and Nicole Miller

20/MP-PCML/1

For Gay, Darell, and Jay

U ntil I was seven years old, my family lived among the rolling hills on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. Our little white stucco house was perched at the top of a gentle peak, tailed by a long, curving driveway. Each afternoon, the school bus would drop me at the bottom, where my mother and our big black German shepherd would be waiting for me.

One day, something new appeared at the end of the driveway: two mountains. (Well, hills, really, but keep in mind that I was small.) They were made of trash, piled high where a truck had pulled over and tipped its unloved cargo onto a convenient patch of land. As my mother and I approached, the jumble sorted itself into recognizable objects. There were filing cabinets and cardboard boxes filled with papers. My mom picked up a dark sheet and held it up to the light; it was an x-ray of teeth. We realized that a dentists office must have closed down and dumped its entire contents at the end of our driveway.

Although toys from the waiting room were scattered in each pile, they were less interesting to me than the jewelry box I unearthed, holding a silver necklace strung with tiny jade green birds. But then I came upon the best part: plaster casts of patients teeth, both uppers and lowers. Soon I was setting aside all the gnarliest entries: teeth with chips, teeth that tilted out like broken fence posts, teeth with missing teeththe uglier, the better.

My parents were irritated by the dump at our doorstep; eventually, an uncle with construction equipment would spread and cover it, creating our own mini-landfill. But because it was there, I got to keep some of my favorite finds. Im sure I was the only girl in those parts of Missouri who had not only her own playhouse but also a playhouse with windowsills featuring rows of snaggleteeth. Occasionally, I rearranged them, finding new and more hideous combinations of uppers and lowers. On breezy summer evenings, I could lie on my cot with the windows open and feel comforted by the grinning incisors glowing in moonlight.

I suppose if my parents had been horrified by my collectionor later, by my abiding interest in bloody nature documentaries and Stephen King novelsI might have turned out a bit differently. Maybe instead of writing about gross stuff, Id be an accountant, or one of those people who gets queasy at the sight of blood.

But that was not my fate. A couple years later, my family moved to a swampy seven acres in Florida. My father, an engineer, built his own cinder block electrochemistry laboratory next to our mobile home. Inside those block walls, he tried to introduce me to a few basic scientific principles. I didnt understand much but was amazed at his ability to stick a penny into a tank of liquid and pull it out the next day, covered in shiny nickel. Most important, I learned that it was entirely possible to figure out how things workand to figure it out using science.

Fast-forward about 30 years. After a decade of research (where I had engaged in activities like tromping around in swamps to study carbon-containing compounds), I became a writer and editor at Science News magazine in Washington, D.C. When the opportunity to write a blog came along, I knew I wanted in. It took only a glance at my office bookshelffilled with titles like Blood Work, The Killer of Little Shepherds, and Thats Disgustingto spark a concept. Although I hadnt considered myself particularly interested in the macabre, I realized that my morbid curiosity had been there all along. And so the Gory Details blog was born.

Since then, Ive had years of adventures writing about subjects that require warning when people ask me what Im working on. For a while, colleagues would pass me any article or scientific paper that dealt with pee or poop. (Im told that traffic to my post about what happens to urine in a swimming pool spikes every summer, around the time pools open for the season.) Later, when I went to work as a science editor at National Geographics website, Gory Details came with me, and has lived there ever since.

Along the way, some of my favorite stories have ended up being the ones that I initially worried were too disturbing for prime time. For instance, when a colleague from Science News innocently asked whether its true that pets sometimes eat their deceased owners, I thought Id look into it in the spirit of shared curiosity. I was skeptical, though, about a story with such disturbing implications for animal lovers.

As it turned out, not only did a lot of other people have the same question, but there were also plenty of forensic case studies describing such incidents. Other reporters had already written about some of these, but I decided to apply my research skills to taking a deeper dive into the forensic journals. Despite my fears that dog lovers everywhere would turn on me, the piece ended up being one of the most popular articles on the National Geographic website that year. Seems that even if people deride a gross question, they still want to know the answer.

Beyond satisfying my own weird inquisitiveness, the larger goal of Gory Details has always been to create a place where its OK to talk about gross, taboo, or morbid topicsand then to examine them, up close, through the lens of science.