Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne.

Mary Roach is the kind of science writer who gets interested in very, very specific things.

Here are some examples.

Cadivers, dead bodies in general.

Animals, what happens when they break the law, space travel, and

accommodating for human necessities, such as romantic and bathroom activities, and in her newest

book, replaceable body parts, all of the body partss, Ears, Hair, Noses, Legs, Organs.

Replacable You Adventures in Human Anatomy is a history and a snapshot of how humankind has gotten better at recreating parts of our own bodies.

She talks with patients, historians, and in one chapter, the keeper of a special

super clean breed of pigs. We'll get into all of it. A quick warning before we kick off our

conversation, though, we are going to be talking about body parts, including genitalia.

So if that is a sensitive topic for you or for someone

with whom you might be listening, we wanted to let you know. Okay, let's do it. Mary Roach.

Mary Roach, welcome back to Bullseye. It's nice to see you again, as always.

Oh, Jesse Thorne, thank you. Lovely to be here.

Were you just like staring at Elon Musk's hair one day and decided to write this book?

I've whiled away many an hour gazing upon that marvel of modern science.

It's a very uniform and impressive hairline, if not entirely natural looking.

Was there an inciting incident?

Yeah, well, they're kind of two, because I had some stuff in a folder about religious relics,

you know, fingers and toes and stuff, because apparently there's some forensic relicologists who, you know, when there's five big toes or something has to come in and like try to verify which ones are real. I really wanted to write about that.

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