The Science of Stephen King

Kelly:“Do you remember your first experience reading a Stephen King book or watching a movie based on one of his works? Has it had any lasting impact on you?”

Luke Hafdahl: “My first exposure to Stephen King was at the fourth-grade book fair when I bought one of his books called Eye of the Dragon, which literally is probably the only Stephen King book nobody is talking about adapting into a TV show or movie. I heard a lot about Stephen King, and even though this was probably one of the most unusual entry points into his works, I was compelled by his storytelling and I went on to read a lot of his books from there. I really love fantasy (Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc.) and I suspect this book had a lot do with that as it really captured my imagination and exposed me to the limitless potential of fantasy.”

Thank you to Luke Hafdahl for letting us in on his process for brewing beer (and for letting us sample some of his brews)!

Richie is described as more of a fungus than a human by a certain point in “Gray Matter.” Is it possible for fungi to grow on people? There are over 1.5 million types of fungi in the world and 300 of them can cause illness in humans. Some of these diseases include athlete’s foot, ringworm, aspergillosis, histoplasmosis, and coccidioidomycosis. We all have fungi living in our bodies, too, and they can be healthy for us. The give-and-take among bacteria, viruses, fungi, and each person’s specific biology likely influences our health. When out of balance, oral fungi can cause thrush and interactions between fungi and bacteria in the gut can aggravate the body’s autoimmune response in Crohn’s disease.3

A biome-based therapy is fecal transplantation: putting the stool of a healthy donor in a patient with Clostridium difficile colitis, a severe bacterial infection that often results as a side effect of antibiotic therapy. Patients receiving the healthy stool have a good chance of getting better.4

Richie is dividing and multiplying at the end of the story and will eventually conquer humanity. Are there examples in nature of things that divide in this way? Molds, yeasts, and mushrooms are all able to use fragmentation in order to reproduce. In the animal kingdom, sponges, coral colonies, annelids, and flatworms reproduce by this method. This is bad news if a giant fungus is ever trying to take over the world! We don’t find out the plan of attack by the end of the story and that makes it all the more terrifying.

Quitters, Inc.

More people in the United States are addicted to nicotine than to any other drug. Quitting smoking isn’t easy for most people but for Dick Morrison in the short story “Quitters, Inc.,” it becomes a necessity. Approached one day by an old acquaintance, Dick is given a business card for a place that can help people with nicotine addiction called “Quitters, Inc.” The mysterious outfit recruits its clients by word of mouth and has a purported 98 percent success rate of getting people to stop smoking. Dick isn’t given any specifics about the program but is intrigued enough to stop in one day and see what it is all about. What he discovers after he signs a contract is that if he doesn’t quit smoking, his wife and son will suffer the consequences for his actions. Someone will always be watching him and if he smokes another cigarette, he will be punished. The barbaric ramifications would begin with his wife getting electric shocks while he watched and escalate to his son being physically beaten.

Tobacco use kills close to four hundred thousand people each year and contributes to almost $200 billion in health care costs in the United States alone.5