Every January, losing weight is among the most popular New Year’s resolutions. But few, if any, give any thought to what could be done with the fat they hope to shed.
But until recently, Dr. Craig Alan Bittner, a Beverly Hills doctor who performed liposuctions, was putting his patients’ fat to use to power the SUVs he and his girlfriend drive. Animal fat, once processed to remove free fatty acids, is a viable biofuel, and a car can travel about as far on a gallon of fat as on a gallon of diesel fuel. And while this Wired writer is skeptical of Bittner’s story in particular, the liposuctioned fat-to-fuel idea has been around for a while, and human fat even provided some of the fuel for the Earthrace boat, which circled the world in record time.
There are loads of problems with this idea, especially as Bittner was doing it. For one, using human waste as fuel is illegal in California. (These legal issues, in addition to another investigation which alleged he was allowing unlicensed assistants to perform medical procedures and lawsuits over botched procedures, have led Bittner to close his practice). And it will never become a large-scale alternative energy solution, as it’s obviously not worth the health or economic costs to eat our way to a fuel source.
Even so, it’s encouraging and, in this case, oddly entertaining, to see people thinking with such ingenuity about unconventional energy sources. This story serves as a reminder that sometimes even weird, gross, or crazy ideas can work and can contribute to scientific progress. It’s hard not to be curious about what might come next.
January 9, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Wow, I’ve seen those weightloss ads where they show you what a pound of fat looks like to motivate you to lose weight, but this is a whole new approach: I’ve got to have liposuction so I can put fuel in my car!
January 9, 2009 at 2:34 pm
So, this guy broke the law to run his car, and was charged with malpractice for botched procedures. Is this the sort of person that should be promoted for science?
January 12, 2009 at 11:17 am
Should he be a hero? Of course not, and I’ve not tried to make him one. And is he at the very leading edge of science? Again, clearly not. But what I find interesting about the story–and the point I tried to highlight–is not that Bittner is a model scientist, but that scientific solutions are often off-the-wall, and sometimes even funny or disgusting. Many of my posts have been focused on dispelling the myth that science is humorless or humdrum, and this story was selected because I found it funny and because it displays some measure of (admittedly ill-advised) creativity.