Ethos
Mary Roach was Etna, New Hampshire. She graduated from Wesleyan University and then traveled out to San Francisco where she worked at a zoo and a copy editor. She began by writing columns for San Francisco local newspaper. Eventually she upgraded to books, and Stiff was her first written piece outside of magazines. Today she mainly writes books but sometimes writes for magazines. She does not have a degree in science; however, she still writes about the scientific topics that fascinate her, such as the topic of Stiff, which is the experiments of human cadavers. Roach is easily influenced by bodies and corpses, which led to the writing of this book. She believes a body will be much more useful in scientific research than lying on its back, which is the purpose of Stiff.