My daughter and I were talking about outing oneself ? the act of disclosing one?s inner identity. The discussion was not purely academic.
?Dad, when most people out themselves, they open the closet door and just come out,? she said. ?You, Dad, you went through the wall.?
I had just told my daughter that I was a eunuch….
So begins an essay by Richard Wassersug in the March 27, 2007 New York Times.
When a person receives sudden, surprising medical news, one possible — and unusual — reaction is intense, driven curiosity.
Professor Wassersug chose to react just that way. He is a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is also a member of the Improbable Research editorial board. Perhaps best of all, he is the 2000 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner. He won the Ig “for his first-hand report, ‘On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica.'”
[The study was published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.]” And he is a good friend.