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Replaceable You
Adult • Fiction • Plastic
Adventures in Human Anatomy
Mary Roach examines the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy, tracing tools and techniques from historical improvisations to cutting-edge lab work. She documents how noses were sculpted from brass, skin borrowed from frogs, hearts taken from pigs, eye parts fashioned from jet canopies, and breasts built from petroleum by-products as precursors to current efforts.
Roach follows contemporary attempts to grow body parts from stem cells and 3D printers and asks practical questions: when might someone choose a prosthetic over a limb, can a donated heart be kept beating indefinitely, and can an intestine serve as a workable substitute for a vagina. Her travels include an OR at a burn unit in Boston, a xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell hair nursery in San Diego.
Mary Roach investigates whether medicine can truly re-create complex human body parts using stem cells, 3D printing, xenotransplants, and prosthetics.
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Edition information
Book details
- Publisher
- W. W. Norton & Company
- Publication date
- September 1, 2026
- Print length
- 304 pages
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 1324134267
Fiction + Plastic
Reader guide
What to Know Before Reading Replaceable You
The description focuses on real-world medical experimentation and inventive workaround approaches to bodily failure. Much of the setup centers on practical dilemmas and technical challenges faced by researchers, surgeons, donors, and patients. The narrative emphasis is on travel to operating rooms, labs, and unusual clinical sites and on concrete questions about prosthetics, organ durability, and tissue substitution. This may appeal more to someone interested in science reporting about surgical practice, biomedical innovation, and hands-on field scenes.
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About the author
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.
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