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In 'Packing for Mars,' I tried to convey the importance of getting young people interested in science.

Mary Roach

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Mary Roach
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 20
Author
Journalist
Medical Writer
Writer
Etna
New Hampshire
People
Convey
Mars
Importance
Tried
Interested
Getting
Science
Young
Packing

More quotes by Mary Roach

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If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way.
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Viagra does have a physiological effect, but it doesn't make women feel aroused. Nowadays, researchers are looking at drugs that affect the central nervous system rather than blood flow to the genitals.
Mary Roach
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All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?
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I dont fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
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In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)
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Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play.
Mary Roach
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Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.
Mary Roach
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Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.
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Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
Mary Roach
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The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
Mary Roach
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Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.
Mary Roach
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NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant he's the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.
Mary Roach
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Yet if you don't understand the physiology of a biological system or process-like female sexual arousal-you can't possibly come up with a way to fix it when things go wrong. No one would have come up with a treatment for diabetes if physiologists hadn't figured out how metabolism, blood sugar, and insulin work.
Mary Roach
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Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.
Mary Roach
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For the scientists, they're kind of puzzled and pleased that somebody finds their work interesting. It makes it fun for me. I feel like I've sort of turned over a stone that hasn't been turned over.
Mary Roach
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You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well.
Mary Roach
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The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)
Mary Roach
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I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.
Mary Roach
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The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.
Mary Roach
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Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain.
Mary Roach