There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the room...

[Davidson] Black procured cadavers for research, obtained from the Peking police department. These cadavers were mostly of people who had been executed for various crimes; the police regularly sent Black truckloads of the bodies of the executed convicts. Execution in China was by beheading, and thus the cadavers Black received lacked heads and had mutilated necks. After some time, he asked the police whether there was any possibility of getting better dead bodies for research - corpses that were intact. The next day, he received a shipment of convicts, all chained together, with a note from the police asking him to kill them in any way he chose.

My books are not really books; they're endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.

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.

But can you prove that, Dr. Crick?

We can study it, we can apply principles of peer-reviewed research, we can do it.' People say, 'Yes, we can figure it out.