Gulp: Adventures On The Alimentary Canal - Plot & Excerpts
MICHAEL LEVITT DID not set out to make his mark on the world by parsing the secrets of noxious flatus. His fellowship advisor had the idea. The gas chromatograph had just come into use as a laboratory tool, and no one had yet had the ingenuity—or nerve—to apply the technology to human emissions. “He called me into his office,” Levitt recalls. “He said, ‘I think you ought to study gas.’ I said, ‘Why’s that?’ He said, ‘Because you’re pretty much of an incompetent, and this way if you discover anything, at least it’ll be new, and you’ll be able to publish something.’” Levitt published thirty-four papers on flatus. He identified the three sulfur gases responsible for flatus odor. He showed that it is mainly trapped methane gas, not dietary fiber or fat, that makes the floater float. Most memorably, to this mind anyway, he invented the flatus-trapping Mylar “pantaloon.” “Even now,” he says of his flatus work, “it overshadows everything else I do.”
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