Book: Replaceable You
Author: Mary Roach
Pages: 288
This is my 172nd read for the year
What Amazon Says:
The boyd 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? This book explores the remarkable advances and difficul questions prompted by the human body's failings. When and how does a person decide they's 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 "superclea" xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell "hair nursery" in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and osteomates, 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 done, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.
Fantastic book. Mary Roach is the best of both world in the non-fiction space. Funny and informative. She is smart, and the information is well researched.
Stars: 5