Replaceable You

Mary Roach investigates the long history and present efforts to re-create the human body’s most intricate parts. She documents examples such as sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, fashioning eye parts from jet canopies, and making breasts from petroleum by-products, and notes that researchers now attempt to grow parts using stem cells and 3D printers. Roach poses practical questions about prosthetics, donated organs, and anatomical substitution. Her reporting takes her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a superclean xeno-pigsty in China, a stem cell hair nursery in San Diego, and on a trip across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.