Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy

by Mary Roach Narrated by Mary Roach

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Mary Roach travels across the world to uncover the impact modern science has on the human body. From stem cell centers to a working iron lung, Roach shares relevant and informative examples of science in action.

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"We are all replaceable to some degree or another . . . with the exception of Mary Roach. There is no one and nothing like her—singular, bizarre, dedicated, passionate, fascinating. Her writing traffics at the unusual intersection of science, storytelling, and humor. That is a very tricky intersection to navigate, and no one does it as masterfully or consistently as she. I devour everything she writes."— Jason Alexander, actor/director

"Mary Roach has had a more direct impact on my career than any other writer. She is her own genre of book—gonzo, hilarious, wildly educational. This is Roach at her finest."— Daniel Kraus, author of Whale Fall

"In her brilliant (and brilliantly funny book) Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the puzzle of the human body, the way we can assemble and reassemble the very human pieces into different versions of who we are and how we work. The result is intriguing, compassionate, wise and—as with all her books—addictively readable. Or to put this another way: Don't miss it."— Deborah Blum, best-selling author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-06-10
A lively treatise on the human body as an endlessly interchangeable set of parts.

It’s an old saw (and, these days, canard) that British teeth are bad. All the same, Roach, an indefatigable researcher, turns up a gem at the start of her latest book: Paul McCartney’s father once suggested that Paul “have all my teeth taken out and false teeth put in,” since he’d likely lose his original set soon enough. Her catalog of cut-and-paste body parts goes on, corporeal trivia mixed with solid, elegantly written scientific journalism. One such part is the nose, none too easy to craft a replacement for, as witness the eminent Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who lost his original proboscis in a duel. “Occasionally,” Roach quotes one biographer as saying of its substitute, “it would drop off.” Other appendages await, not least the male member. Given that cataract surgery is now almost assembly-line common, Roach wonders, what about elective surgeries to replace underperforming parts? No, not that part; rather, Roach tells the story of a former Marine who had suffered an injury that led to his toes dragging and thus arranged (by shooting himself in the afflicted foot) for an amputation and refitting with a prosthetic that allowed him to walk more easily. Roach wanders through the hallways of eldritch laboratories where pigs are grown to provide organs that are transplantable to humans, and she visits cadaver labs to look at another source of carefully inventoried parts (“As much time is spent on documentation and shipping of a donor’s tissues as on their removal. You’re expectingThe Jeffrey Dahmer Story but it’s closer to UPS”). She interviews researchers on cures for type 1 diabetes and advances in “in vitro gametogenesis” and generally has a grand time looking into areas where few writers—especially squeamish ones—have ventured.

An amiably entertaining, endlessly intriguing stroll through the stuff of which we’re made.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193074861
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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