Reading scientific papers, it’s all too easy to forget the human stories and personalities behind the dry, scientific writing. So it’s always good to hear about the crazy, focused, obsessed minds that do science:
“Among this group of scientists was Raymond J. Hock, a zoologist who’d written his doctoral thesis at Cornell University about the metabolic rates of hibernating bats. In the mid-1950s he wound up at the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory in Fairbanks, where Air Force scientists were scrambling to make American soldiers immune to cold. (In one ethically shaky experiment, the lab’s personnel paid several Indigenous inhabitants of Chilean Patagonia to wear temperature sensors and ventilated plastic hoods while they slept in freezing canvas tents.) Hock developed a keen interest in bears during his stint in Fairbanks, and he lamented how little was known about the changes in the animals’ metabolism during hibernation. So he mustered the courage to creep into the sleeping bears’ dens and stick thermometers in their rectums, a gambit that allowed him to assess just how much their internal temperature declined during their annual torpor.” (https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-galaxy)
Dr. Hock needed to know the temperature of hibernating bears, which no one had ever found out, probably because to find out you have to stick a thermometer in the butt of a sleeping bear, at no more than an arm’s length away. Thanks for advancing science Doctor!