Vermin Handler

摘要

Spending one's childhood catching rats doesn't (necessarily) make you a psycho; at his father's hobby farm in rural Arkansas, it prepared William Parker for cutting-edge medical research. To capture them, "you have to know how rats think," he says. The Duke University professor of surgical sciences, who in 2007 helped suss out why humans have an appendix (it protects beneficial bacteria), now fishes the wriggly vermin out of traps in and around Durham, North Carolina, for an ongoing study on hygiene.