Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  “How much of your body can you lose and still live?”

  —ROBERT CHARLES REULAND, JR., age nine,

  Brooklyn, New York

  Dr. Elliott R. Haut, assistant professor of surgery and anesthesiology/critical care medicine, Division of Trauma Surgery and Critical Care, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore:

  “The list of body parts that can be removed is long and varied. It includes the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, tonsils and even part of the brain. Abdominal organs that are not crucial include the stomach, small intestine, large intestine, colon, rectum, anus, adrenal glands, uterus, ovaries, pancreas and parts of the liver. Even both kidneys can be removed and replaced with dialysis.

  “The most drastic extremity amputation is the interscapulothoracic—or forequarter—amputation, which includes complete amputation of an arm, including the shoulder girdle, shoulder blade and part of the collarbone. Advances in medicine can now save patients with two, three or even four limbs amputated at different levels. The term ‘basket case’ was originally coined to describe wounded soldiers with multiple amputations who needed to be carried in baskets.

  “In 1950, Frederick Kredel, a professor of surgery at the Medical College of South Carolina, proposed the idea of a ‘halfectomy’ operation. This operation, now known as a hemicorporectomy, or translumbar amputation, is probably the most dramatic surgical operation performed. The surgeons remove the entire lower half of the patient’s body, including both legs, the entire pelvis, the internal and external genitalia. This results in approximately fifty percent decrease in body weight. He suggested it be used only in severe cancer cases in which standard surgical procedures were not feasible or appropriate.

  “The first attempt at this operation was performed in 1960. However, the patient died shortly after the operation. In 1961, the operation was performed on a twenty-nine-year-old patient who lived nineteen years after the operation. Since then, approximately fifty such operations have been described in the medical literature.”

  “Why do growing pains hurt?”

  —LUCY BARRY, age six, Purdys, New York

  Dr. Maurice Chianese, pediatrician, Lake Success, New York:

  “The current theory is that bones are surrounded by a connective tissue, a lining, which tears as the bones grow, and it is the tears, we think, that cause the pain. It tends to be in the long bones, and it tends to be after periods of vigorous activity. It is a mild pain, kind of like a mild toothache, so you don’t notice it while you are playing. One of the keys is that you feel a lot of pain before you go to bed, but in the morning everything is back to normal. Tylenol works, but a little parental massage works just as well.”

  “When you have a brain freeze, does your brain actually freeze?”

  —SABINA MARINO, age five, Brooklyn, New York

  Dr. Arthur L. Day, director, Cerebrovascular Center, Division of Cerebrovascular Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston:

  “No. The brain doesn’t have any sensitivity at all. It is covered by structures that protect it, to warn it when it is in danger of being penetrated. The pain structures are located in the scalp and skull and the outermost covering of the brain, which is called the dura mater. It means, literally, ‘tough mother.’ When you get cold, like a taste, it overwhelms the area of the mouth where the taste is coming from; it refers pain to adjacent things, to the nerves that go up, to the nerves that surround the brain, to the dura mater. So when you get this feeling of ‘Gosh, that’s painful,’ it’s not the brain complaining.”

  “Why is my blood warm?”

  —DECLAN GUNN, age four, Brooklyn, New York

  David Hillis, Ph.D., Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin:

  “All living things have a temperature at which their bodies work best. That is called an ‘optimal temperature.’ Many animals behave in certain ways to try to keep their bodies near the optimal temperature, so that their bodies will work well. Mammals, birds and some reptiles and fishes retain the heat that their bodies generate, and have various kinds of insulation (like hair, or feathers, or layers of fat) to keep it from escaping. Some mammals (including ourselves) also sweat on hot days to cool our bodies through evaporation. We also shiver when we are cold to generate more heat. In these and other ways, we keep our bodies at about the same temperature all the time, winter and summer, as do most mammals. Most of the time, that temperature is warmer than our surroundings, so we think of our bodies as ‘warm.’ Our insides are all about the same temperature, not just our blood, but we are more likely to feel the temperature of our blood than other internal body parts.

  “Different animals have evolved different optimal body temperatures, depending on where they live. There are fish that live in Antarctic waters that have optimal body temperatures near (or even below) the freezing point of fresh water.”

  “Why do your hands and feet get wrinkly in the tub, and not the rest of you?”

  —DEAN, in the tub

  David Blaine, magician, who spent 177 hours submerged in water—the longest uninterrupted full submersion ever recorded—in a 2006 stunt called Drowned Alive:

  “Your skin is made up of three layers: the outer, the epidermis, produces an oily substance called sebum—you can see the sebum when you touch a mirror or a window or something; it’s the oil you leave there. Sebum keeps water off your skin, but after a long period of time in water, the sebum is washed off and the skin starts to absorb water.

  “When you are immersed for long periods of time, dead keratin-filled cells in the outermost layer of your epidermis—which is called the stratum corneum, which protects the body from the environment—absorbs the water. This causes the outermost layer to have a greater surface area. Because it is attached to the tissue below, it wrinkles to compensate for the greater surface area. The stratum corneum is thicker on the palms of your hands and on the soles of your feet than on the other parts of your body because of the amount of wear and tear that your hands and feet get—imagine running with the skin on your stomach instead of with the skin on your feet. Because it’s thicker, it absorbs more water and the wrinkling is much more noticeable.”

  ME: “I guess your hands got pretty wrinkled after 177 hours underwater.”

  “Look, every doctor I spoke to—some of the top people, people at NASA—said it was extraordinarily dangerous on your skin, your skin is going to fall off. The truth is, the skin was the quickest to recover, but having it absorb that much water was actually very painful, insanely painful. Your skin is not supposed to absorb that much.”

  “Pain? They didn’t feel just, you know, super-wrinkly?”

  “Oh, the pain was ridiculous. It was as intense as it gets. It started, I guess, thirty-six hours or two days in. You can’t use your hands and feet: it would be like walking on an open wound. When I was in the tank and I would take the gloves off, people would gasp and scream; it looked very abnormal. I knew the pain would be bad, but the pain was unbearable.”

  “Why are people ticklish, and why sometimes are they not ticklish?”

  —ADELLA MAY DZITKO CARLSON, age seven,

  Woodbury, Connecticut

  Dr. Charles Sophy, pediatrician, medical director for Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services:

  “Ticklishness is rooted neurologically. Being tickled is a perceived attack, so however you muster up your defenses is how you will respond to that attack. If you are someone who is a little stiff, someone who is in control, you will have more ability to ward it off and not giggle as much. If you are somebody who is emotional and able to talk about your feelings, then you are going to be tickled more easily. If someone is going to tickle you and you don’t want to laugh, then close your eyes and focus on something else. Then you won’t have that neurological reaction inside of you.”

  “Am I allergic to metal?”

  —DEAN, apropos of nothing

  Dr. Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, assistant professor of pediatric aller
gies, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City:

  “It is extremely unusual to be allergic to metal. I would say no. The most common type of allergy to metal is a contact allergy. You see it in people who wear jewelry or are in regular contact with a certain metal. One example is nickel. Women who wear earrings, they sometimes become allergic to the nickel in gold or silver. So they might start to have itchy rashes or swollen ears whenever they wear earrings. For a child, a metal allergy would be a rash around your belly button, because you might have a belt that has a metal buckle, or metal buttons, so you would have the rash when it touches your skin. So if he doesn’t have that, I would say no.”

  “Why do we have eyebrows?”

  —CAROLINE BEAIL, age two, San Diego, California

  Aaron E. Hirsh, Ph.D., professor of evolutionary biology, Stanford University, California

  “In his surprisingly weird book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, Charles Darwin notes that human eyebrows are descended from other mammalian eyebrows. This gets a little personal, but you know every once in a while, an eyebrow hair is incredibly long? Well, Darwin maintained that those real reachers are the vestigial remnants of the scattering of really long hairs one finds in the very same place on other mammals, including chimps and (easier to check) dogs. But why were eyebrows preserved, while most of the rest of our hair was lost? Darwin thought they were subject to sexual selection. He generally attributed most human traits that get a lot of grooming attention to sexual selection, which seems plausible enough. My own guess, however, would be that they’re important for forming facial expressions that are more easily legible by other individuals in one’s social group. Social interactions can have huge consequences for fitness: if a facial expression that is meant to convey ‘Get away from my meat’ is misunderstood to mean ‘Here, have some meat,’ there could be needless costs of time, energy and risk. Maybe eyebrows make such misunderstandings less likely, by accentuating expressions. One could test this, of course, by shaving a person’s eyebrows and testing if he or she is harder to understand. Also, there are regions of the brain that respond exclusively to faces—and even to certain facial expressions—so one could watch whether they respond less sensitively or reliably when eyebrows are removed.”

  “Why does soap sting your eyes?”

  —GABRIEL SCHLACHET, age five, Brooklyn, New York

  Dr. Barbara Huggins, pediatrician, professor and chairman of the department of pediatrics, University of Texas Health Center at Tyler:

  “It is related to the difference in pH of tears and soap. The pH of a solution is the way we tell whether it is an acid or a base. The lower the number, the more acidic; the higher the number, the more basic. Because the pH of the eye is about 7, it falls in the neutral range—neither acid nor base. Therefore, anything that has a really different pH that gets into the eye changes the pH of the eye, causing it to sting. The pH of soap or shampoo is 9.0 or 9.5, which makes these cleansers a base; but if you splashed vinegar (an acid with pH around 3) in your eye, it would also sting, because of the pH changes. The pH can be anywhere from 1 to 14, and the middle of that scale is 7. That’s about where the tears fall. A lot of the systems in the body have neutral pH. They work the best that way.”

  “How and why do our ears make earwax?”

  —DEVON CERMELE CINQUE, age four,

  Mountain Lakes, New Jersey

  Dr. Stacey L. Ishman, pediatric otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor), The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore:

  “About sixty percent of your earwax is made up of dead skin, and the rest of it is divided between secretions from glands in your ear: one of them is the ceruminous gland, and that secretes a protein-like substance, and there’s a sebaceous gland, and that secretes something that is a lot like fat. And all of those things mix together to become earwax. And the reason that you make earwax is that it carries the dead skin out of our ear. We need it to carry the skin out of there as we make new skin. Also, it helps trap dirt in your ears and bring it out, and it helps repel water. And then there is some question about whether it actually has an anti-infection property, whether it can fight off bacteria and fungus.”

  “Why are people different colors?”

  —REBECCA GUDZY, age six, Montclair, New Jersey

  Jayne S. Gerson, Ph.D., anthropologist, former adjunct professor at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, and senior conservation associate at the Philadelphia Zoo:

  “Skin color is adaptive, reflecting a balance between conflicting needs. Exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun destroys folate—a B vitamin vital to successful reproduction—but is needed for the body to make vitamin D. Closer to the equator where sun exposure is stronger, it is more important to block ultraviolet light to protect folate—and ensure successful reproduction—and hence skin color is darker. As you move away from the equator to less sunny areas, insufficient vitamin D is a problem and evolution favored lighter skin color.

  “Early human ancestors, living in the tropics, probably had light skin and dark hair. When they lost their hair, they evolved dark skin to protect folate levels. As early hominids moved to less sunny areas, their skin lost some of its pigmentation and lightened to allow sufficient vitamin D synthesis.”

  “How many hairs do I have on my head?”

  —ROSA SCHEMBARI, age five, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

  Sy Sperling, founder, Hair Club for Men:

  “I started about twenty years ago, and I’m still counting. Seriously: the average adult has about one hundred thousand hairs, or hair follicles, and children have the same amount. Redheads actually have fewer because their individual strands are thicker. Keep in mind, I am more in the business of replacing it when you lose it than an expert in hair when you have it, although I know a lot about hair.”

  ME: “I guess a lot of kids didn’t go to the Hair Club for Men.”

  “It’s extremely rare for kids to lose their hair. Usually it will happen in their twenties, or their thirties or forties, depending on genetic code. I started a foundation called The Hair Club for Kids about twenty years ago. At first we started doing a few kids with cancer, who lost their hair, at no charge. It became more and more. When I sold the company about six years ago, I think, we were doing up to a thousand kids a year at no charge. We would give them something that would work for them—whether it was a fitted wig, or a weaving process or a fusion process.”

  “What’s inside my eyeballs?”

  —MATTHEW CECCIO, age four, Jersey City, New Jersey

  Dr. Don Lyon, chief of pediatrics and binocular services, Indiana University School of Optometry:

  “There’s a jelly-like substance that is called the vitreous humor. This substance helps give shape to the eye and allows light to get to the back of the eye so we can see. Before we are born there is also a blood vessel system that runs through the chamber where the vitreous humor is, but that blood supply goes away during pregnancy. The vitreous also helps keep the retina in place. The retina is a layer of tissue that is responsible for how we see; people make an analogy to the film in a camera. We also have a lens that acts as any lens does—it helps to focus light so we can see clearly. And then there is a nerve on the back edge of the eye. Basically, the nerve takes all the information from the lens and the retina—also from the cornea, but that’s on the outside of the eye, and that’s not part of the question he asked—and then sends it on to the brain to allow us to see our world.”

  “Do nose hairs turn gray?”

  —CLAIRE MULLANY, age twelve, Brooklyn, New York

  Giovanni Cafiso, age sixty-seven, who recently moved back to Pozzallo, Sicily, after running a one-man barbershop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for forty-five years:

  “Yes, they do, but they turn gray later than the hairs on your head do. The hair in your ears and in your nose starts growing when you are forty or forty-five years old. Hair on your head usually starts getting gray before that. People always want
me to trim their nose hair, otherwise, they look like a little elephant, or a little mouse, with all that hair there. I do it with small scissors. First, I dip them in disinfectant: you don’t want the scissors to touch the nose, but if they do, if you have an accident, you want everything to be very clean. The hair in the ears turns gray, too, but people don’t usually want me to cut that. I don’t know why. They say, ‘God made the hair grow in my ears to be like a filter, so don’t cut it.’ They just want me to cut around the edge of the ears, never inside.”

  We tell our kids not to swallow gum, right? And when they do, we look at them with alarm, or say, “Oh, Jesus.” (At least my mother-in-law does.) But what’s the harm? Does all the gum you swallowed in your lifetime collect in your lower intestine? Does it really take seven years to pass through you, as one old wives’ tale has it? Finding the answer was surprisingly hard. I sought gastroenterologists. I asked Dr. Theodore Bayless at Johns Hopkins: “I have no idea,” he said. I asked Dr. Michael Levitt of the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center: “I assume it is not digestible. It doesn’t plug you up or anything. But I really don’t know. You should try Wrigley’s.”

  “What happens when you eat gum?”

  —GABRIEL SCHLACHET, age five, Brooklyn, New York

  Steven Zibell, director, Clinical Research and Claims Support, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, Chicago:

  “Many people seem to harbor misconceptions about chewing gum, and we’ve received many inquiries over the years asking about the digestibility of our product. Chewing gum is made of five basic ingredients—sugar, corn syrup, softeners, flavors and gum base (the insoluble part that puts the ‘chew’ in chewing gum). The first four ingredients are soluble and are extracted from the gum as you chew. Although gum base is not intended to be swallowed, if it is, gum base simply passes through one’s system, similar to roughage. This normally takes only a few days. Incidentally, chewing gum is a food product, so all ingredients used in it are in compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations.”