From heart to skin to hair, 'Replaceable You' dives into the science of transplants (Mary Roach Book)

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Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy with Mary Roach

Mary Roach unpacks the millennia-long effort to replace failing body parts—and the reasons that modern medicine still struggles to match the original designs.

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.

Read on Scientific American:

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Regenerative Medicine, Growing New Organs, Etc
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I just got this book, as it looks pretty interesting.

A new book review on New Scientist, of this book:

A fascinatingly grisly guide to replacing and repairing body parts

Mary Roach’s new book Replaceable You explores what we do when bits of our bodies break down or need switching out. It makes for a brilliant read – just beware the gory details

Our bodies are made of many squishy, hard and intricate parts. When these fail – or fall short of our expectations – what are we to do? Medicine offers some solutions, from dentures to skin, heart or hair transplants, but don’t expect to buy a brand-new you anytime soon.

In Replaceable You: Adventures in human anatomy, popular science writer Mary Roach tours us through some of the most jaw-dropping efforts – past and present – to repair, replace or enhance our body parts.

These include fake teeth worn like mouth earrings, lab-grown anuses and gene-edited pig hearts, each presented with an infectious humour that had me chuckling, grimacing and holding my breath from one page to the next.

I have no doubt that Roach was, in her own words, drawn to the “human elements of the quest”. She provides brilliantly entertaining accounts of travelling the world to meet the personalities – surgeons, scientists and patients – pioneering ways to tweak our bodies.

These encounters come alive thanks to her daring, sometimes mischievous, questions. For instance, when discussing intestine-derived vaginas with a surgeon over dinner, she points out that gut tissue usually contracts to move food along.

“That could be kind of fabulous for a partner with a penis, no?” she asks. “It’s not that aggressive,” the surgeon replies, between sips of Chianti.

Full book review: A fascinatingly grisly guide to replacing and repairing body parts