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Replaceable You

Adventures in Human Anatomy
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( 472 ratings, 120 reviews)
Brief Description
Our bodies regenerate at a remarkable rate – our skin replaces itself every month, our blood every four. You can remove ninety per cent of a liver and it’ll still grow back to its original size (please do not try this at home). Others – the... Read More
Format: Hardback
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The body is the most complex machine in the world, but what happens when the parts start to fail? Meet the scientists facing the challenge…

The body is the most complex machine in the world, but what happens when the parts start to fail? Meet the scientists facing the challenge…

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Our bodies regenerate at a remarkable rate – our skin replaces itself every month, our blood every four. You can remove ninety per cent of a liver and it’ll still grow back to its original size (please do not try this at home). Others – the brain, the heart, the eyes – are more complicated. These stay with us for life.

So what do we do when they break down? For centuries, medicine has searched for answers – sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, and crafting eye parts from jet canopies. And as technology has grown ever more ingenious, so have our solutions.

In Replaceable You, Mary Roach sets sail on the uncharted waters of regenerative medicine, exploring 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? Is there a sensitive way to harvest tissue and bones from the deceased? Which animals might be the best organ donors?

Through interviews with patients, physicians, pathologists, engineers, and scientists, Roach immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781836431558

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 02 October 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Oneworld Publications

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 25.0mm

Width: 135.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 288

About the Author

Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Gulp, Stiff, and, most recently, Animal, Vegetable, Criminal. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Wired, GQ, Vogue, National Geographic and more. She lives in California.

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    For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure,...
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  • Replaceable You
    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...
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  • Animal Vegetable Criminal
    What happens when nature and humanity clash? In past centuries, wild animals who broke the law would be given lawyers and put on trial. But what’s the solution now, as we humans dominate the planet and don’t like it when wildlife gets in the way? In this fresh, funny and thoroughly-researched book, Animal Vegetable Criminal, Mary Roach examines the problems,...
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  • Packing for Mars
    What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? When you can’t have sex? Or smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles an hour? Packing for Mars by Mary Roach delves into these fascinating and often humorous questions about the peculiarities...
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  • Gulp
    Eating is the most pleasurable, gross, necessary, unspeakable biological process we undertake. But very few of us realise what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal—let alone have pondered the results of the research. How have physicists made crisps crispier? What do laundry detergent and saliva have in common? Was self-styled 'nutritional economist' Horace Fletcher right...
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  • Grunt
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  • Bonk
    Few things are as fundamental to human happiness as sex, and few writers are as entertaining about the subject as Mary Roach. Can a woman think herself to orgasm? Is your penis three inches longer than you think? Why doesn't Viagra help women - or, for that matter, pandas? Does orgasm boost fertility? Or cure hiccups? The study of sexual...
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