Kimberly T’s Reviews > Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy > Status Update

“As with much of regenerative medicine, smaller is easier. A ventricle is easier than a heart; a mouse ventricle, easier still. One of the companies furthest along has set its sights on the smallest organ of all: the human hair follicle. Long before regenerative medicine grows a heart or reverses liver failure, it may well conquer baldness.”

“We owe our scientists a lot. We owe them gratitude, awe, respect. Mostly what they want from us, of course, is a little more funding.”

“It’s a truth that’s clear cut in much of the world: if the cost of high tech medical care makes it inaccessible to all but those who can travel elsewhere, then low tech care isn’t inferior at all.”

I hate capitalism :)

“This is how this book thing goes sometimes. You think you’re leaving to report on a chapter on breathing machines, and then you arrive and there’s a man standing beside an iron lung saying ‘I went a week without a weeping spell,’ and the man wants to tell you about the woman who once inhabited the iron lung you’re so keen on trying, and so your plans scooch over and make some room.”

Heartbreaking.

“How do you people leave the house in the morning?” I said to the pair on my laptop screen.

Stoodley doesn’t dwell on it. “There are two kinds of microbiologists,” he said. “Those who say, ‘bacteria are everywhere! We’ve got to sterilize everything!” His wife is one of those.

“Then there’s the ones who say, ‘bacteria are everywhere! And yet we’ve survived!”

“We will all, should we live long enough, be disabled.”

Sobering and really true.

“A cancer patient stated she must have a vagina, or her husband would desert her.*

*’All colleagues took sides with her, one of the gentlemen stating that any operation destined to preserve the marital relations and keep the home intact was not only justifiable but mandatory.’

And here we see how the anus can be used as a substitute for the male brain.”

“That Pfalzpaint failed to garner lasting renown perhaps came down to the unscholarly titles he chose for his works. His treatise on nasal reconstruction is called ‘HOW TO MAKE A NEW NOSE FOR SOMEONE: WHICH IS OFF ENTIRELY: AND THE DOG HAS EATEN IT.’”

Classic Mary Roach sentence. Yay, footnotes!