REPLACEABLE YOU

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 expecting The 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.