Replaceable You
Adventures in Human Anatomy
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4.4 • 23 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Instant New York Times Bestseller
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
A Goodreads Readers' Most Anticipated Fall Book
From the New York Times best-selling author of Stiff and Fuzz, a rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy.
The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet?
In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?
Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a “superclean” xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell “hair nursery” in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.
Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In dissecting the ways that medical science attempts to find substitutions for body parts, Mary Roach crafts a compelling discourse on alternate anatomy. The author allows her curiosity to be her guide as she wanders through the history of, and current advancements in, body reconstruction. She unearths strange but true stories of early attempts at replacing everything from teeth to lungs—and her observations from testing out an iron lung are fascinating. Whether she’s traipsing the globe to check out a Chinese pig farm used for organ harvesting or learning about prosthetics at a conference for amputees, she brings her razor-sharp wit along. As always, Roach fills her footnotes with asides that range from informative to hilarious. Ultimately, the primary takeaway from Replaceable You is less about science itself and more about an appreciation for how intricate the human body is.
