Harvard Science Book Talk: Mary Roach, in conversation with Elizabeth Preston, "Replaceable You: Adventures in 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.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, Fuzz, and Packing for Mars. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' journalism award. 

Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist who contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for the Boston Globe, Science, The Atlantic, Orion, Slate, Audubon, Quanta Magazine, STAT, Discover, National Geographic and others. She is a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Gold Award. Preston is also a humor writer for outlets such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Parents, and Real Simple and was the editor of Muse, a magazine about science and ideas for kids. Her book The Creatures' Guide to Caring will be published this spring.

Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store
For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.

Contact Info: science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu