Artificial Human Feces

patent#: US 6933152

filed under Medicine, Toilet
view the full patent  | comments (7)
posted on 9/6/2005, patent issued on 8/23/2005

Labor Day is over. Time to go back to work: an unfortunate prospect, especially if your job is to make artificial human feces.

As the stutterer said, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to doo-doo it. This someone is Marshall E. Deutsch of the appropriately named town of Sudbury, Mass. Sudbury--a great place to wash off after a long day of crafting excrement.

People make artificial feces? Apparently so. (And the sign in the factory bathrooms say, "All employees are required to wash hands after using the toilet. Actually... don't bother.")

This must be for some kind of novelty, prank item, right? Nope. False feces have all kinds of important applications. As you can imagine (although you may prefer not to), it is useful for product testing new diapers and incontinence aids. This concoction is used to assess quality control at medical labs that test feces for intestinal conditions.

You can get a patent on that? Yup. As critics of the Patent Office say, "There are crappy patents and THERE ARE CRAPPY PATENTS." We in the patent humor business have our own saying: "Poop. It may not be intellectual humor, but it can be intellectual property." (intellectual ploperty? pooperty? propotty?)

A review of the patent literature reveals the development of this craptacular technology. We've progressed from the early days of "mashed potatoes, brownie mix, peanut butter and pumpkin pie filling" (as documented in Kimberly-Clark's 1994 patent) to the present, much less appetizing formula of "an aqueous base," "a thickening agent," "a stabilizing agent," "a preservative," and "a peroxidase mixture." This artisanal brew has the diSTINKtion (yes, I do poop jokes AND puns) of simulating "the appearance, texture or odor, or any combination thereof, of human feces," destroying the ancient proverb, "If it looks like crap and it smells like crap and it feels like crap, it's crap." (For the record, I usually stop after the second test).

What have we learned? Poop = funny. Poop science = hilarious.