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Replaceable You
Adult • Plastic
Adventures in Human Anatomy
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.
Mary Roach follows surgeons, researchers, and patients from a Boston burn unit to a Chinese xeno-pigsty as medicine attempts to recreate human body parts.
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Edition information
Book details
- Publisher
- W. W. Norton & Company
- Publication date
- September 16, 2025
- Print length
- 288 pages
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 1324050624
Plastic
Reader guide
What to Know Before Reading Replaceable You
The description focuses on concrete medical practice, technology, and the choices individuals face when body parts fail. Much of the setup centers on surgeons, researchers, amputees, and organ recovery technicians in settings such as operating rooms, a xeno-pig facility, and a stem cell lab. The book treats advances like stem cells and 3D printing as central to the inquiry and places equal attention on historical improvisations and current laboratory work. This may appeal more to someone interested in practical medical innovation and ethical, real-world dilemmas.
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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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