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

“You reach a point in life where you figure you’ve catalogued your flaws. You’re aware of all the ways your body and mind are below par, and you’ve made your peace with it. Then someone comes along and lets it be known that your follicle cells are weakly. (Also that they’re strangely pointy.)”

Mary donating her follicles for pluripotent hair regeneration is so fun and so her.

“So much of science is waiting,” McDonnell says. And when something finally works? “I cannot describe to you the satisfaction!”

“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.”

“Collagen has an appeal for would-be organ builders. It has no live cells, and thus none of the cell surface proteins that prompt the immune system to attack. The body will accept foreign collagen — from cows, pigs, most any mammal — without much fuss.”

“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.

“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!