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In This Issue

• Confessions of a Dangerous Broccoli Head
• English Majors, Decades Later
• How to Spend Your Time After Co-Founding Apple
• The Cyborg Army of Death
• Salvation is a Prophet Away
• Chris Tucker to Play James Bond
• The Fed Point–Counterpoint: You Just Stabbed Me
• What Would You Do-ooh-ooh...
• Loose Lips Sink Credit Reports
• Bowling as Symbolism
• The Wonders of the Undersea World
• It is Imperative that You Spoon that Fruit Indiscriminately
• “They” Watch Reality TV, Drink Coke Blak for Fun
• Behind the Scenes at MythBusters Headquarters
• Good Night, and Good Luck
• Campus Bureaucracy Replaced With Rube Goldberg Machine
• The Seeker
• Tales of the Inexpressible
• The Most Trusted Name in News
• It Swings Both Ways
• They Watch
• The Fed Index
• King Kong Returns

Celebrities look weird in person. Big heads, startlingly tall, their corporeal presence always seems a little implausible. That's why I was taken aback by the look of the pair I recently met.

In fairness to me, there was no apparent reason to suspect either Rick Wright or Henry Luce (who bears no relation to the Time magazine cofounder of the same name) of being anything but what their appearance suggested: unremarkable, self-employed experimentalists who retained the nerdy sense of humor they'd honed at the University of Chicago. They say that the University of Chicago has that effect on people. And that was what had brought me to their garage-cum-laboratory just outside of Atlanta. Rick and Henry alone comprise the "they" whose knowledge and discoveries millions of people reference in conversation every day. They say that video games can make children violent. They say that every drop of tap water contains thousands of microscopic crustaceans. They are Rick Wright and Henry Luce.

They say that potato chips will give you cancer. "To be honest, there's a good chance we were wrong about that," Rick told me as we sat in his office. "None of the studies we do are peer-reviewed or published, so it's up to me and Henry to make sure our methods are rigorous. The potato chip study didn't even have a control group.

"My grandfather had just gotten cancer, and he always loved Herr's chips-he eats seven or eight bags a week to this day. Anyway, his cancer alone should have disqualified him from the study. It had already taken me months to get up to a sample size of two, though, so I couldn't really afford to kick him out. So I ended up with this pretty tight correlation between potato chip consumption and a moderately aggressive form of melanoma.

"Normally, Henry and I release findings by mentioning them casually to a friend. That friend then talks to all our mutual friends and says something like, ‘Did you hear that they said Freon damages the ozone layer?' or whatever the finding may be. In that sentence, because the people talking know us, ‘they' clearly refers to Henry and me. As the news spreads, that reference gets lost, and soon ‘they' doesn't refer to anyone in particular. I prefer it that way; the fame would be too much.

"I dropped the potato chip finding into a conversation with a friend, but I should have told her that I mentioned it only because it was weird and pretty wildly unscientific, not because I wanted her to spread the word. Lo and behold, I woke up three days later to see this news about potato chips emblazoned across the front page of The New York Times' Health section. It's always surprising how when they publish one of my results, those people cite no sources and skip right to ‘they' without any indication of who the word refers to. Like I said, the anonymity is nice, but you'd think that someone would notice."

Henry is the more jocular of the two, and it would be fair to say that he is more nonchalant than Rick with regard to the societal influence he commands. We took a tour of his lab, and he explained half-complete studies as we walked past workbenches covered with test tubes and piles of paper.

"This one doesn't look very promising," he said, gesturing towards a turkey stuffed with cotton swabs. "We've said in the past that you shouldn't put those swabs in your ear canal, but one day I wondered whether it would be okay to put them in a turkey. In retrospect, it seems that test may not have been the best use of our resources. At the very least, it would have been helpful to determine beforehand what I meant by ‘okay.'"

Henry noticed that a vast expanse of mouse cages had caught my eye. Each mouse's enclosure had a clock radio glued to its side and was lit with a grid of bulbs attached to a dimmer switch. "That's actually pretty neat. We're trying to figure out the most comfortable way for people to wake up. There are a lot of variables: music type, volume, ambient light, abruptness, physical motion, sleep debt-oh, you want a preliminary finding? If you've had less than six hours' sleep, don't wake up to anything by the Eurhythmics; the mice in that group kept dying. Just to be safe, stay away from ‘She Blinded Me with Science,' too."

In the middle of the 20th century, Rick and Henry made their name with their discovery that cigarette smoke is a carcinogen. Previously, their research had been confined to blood-letting and attempts to shore up the medical theory of the four humors (they declined to explain how it is that their research predates by several hundred years their dates of birth).

Rick explains, "It took us a few centuries to get our bearings. Medieval medicine was fine for the times, but running with the pack wasn't getting us anywhere. In the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur creamed us with the germ theory of disease. I mean, Henry and I were still doing all our work on spontaneous generation. Of course, now it seems silly to think that diseases spring to life from nothing. If we had wised up earlier, you'd be saying, ‘They say that many diseases are caused by microscopic germs.' As it is, you say that Pasteur said so. And more power to him; we dropped the ball on that one."

The success of their research on cigarettes has allowed them to explore a wider variety of topics (witness the cotton swab study), and recent results include the link between HIV and AIDS, the realization that airbags can be dangerous to children, and the discovery that the noise made by wet Rice Krispies is a distant linguistic relative of Hebrew. They say that every year, it is thousands of scientists and intellectuals who make the discoveries like that help advance mankind. But they only say that because they like their anonymity.