With books like Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach has earned a well-deserved reputation for delivering useful scientific information to a general readership with impressive style and wit. She continues on that path with Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, a lively survey of the state of the art in the field of regenerative medicine--a collection of disciplines that, in the aggregate, function as the equivalent of a human auto body shop.
Each of Replaceable You's chapters focuses on a discrete body part or system, such as hair follicles and the rectum. With Roach as an inquisitive, intelligent guide, readers learn about topics like the evolution of the technology for joint replacements. Roach isn't afraid to step out from behind her computer and observe cutting-edge research up close. Among other places, her travels took her to Sichuan, China, where researchers are working to overcome traditional Chinese reluctance to donate organs by exploring ways of adapting pig organs to human beings, and to a clinic in Tbilisi, Georgia, attempting to track down a doctor who uses fingers for penis transplants.
In the chapter on fashioning a vagina out of a colon, Roach comments on the "remarkable and sometimes surreal adaptability--the agreeableness--of the human body." But as she cautions in her chapter on 3D printed organs, citing Carnegie Mellon biomedical engineer Adam Feinberg, when it comes to implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients, we are "somewhere around the Wright brothers stage." Despite that caveat, anyone interested in an informative, entertaining exploration of the fast-moving developments in these fields will enjoy taking that trip with Mary Roach. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer