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Mary Roach with Mary Ann Gwinn
Replaceable You — Adventures in Human Anatomy
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
Free and reduced cost tickets made possible in part by
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?
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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, Roach takes readers on a wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.
Mary Roach is the author of seven best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications.
Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for Kirkus Reviews, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, she was the book editor of the Seattle Times from 1998 to 2017, a judge for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the co-host of Well Read, a national books and authors television show. She is currently on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Mary Ann lives in West Seattle with her family.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.
The Oculus Series is made possible with generous support from William Donnelly and our Season Sponsors.