ANN ARBOR, MI — Machines keeping hearts alive outside the body at a University of Michigan laboratory caught the attention of bestselling author Mary Roach.
She’s not a scientist, but she uses humor to make scientific knowledge digestible for everyday readers, as evidenced by her eight published books.
“People call me a science writer…but I have a strong inclination to make things entertaining and fun,” Roach, 66, said.
The California-based author now has a ninth book with a chapter covering her time at UM.
“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy” published by W.W. Norton & Co., describes efforts to replace and protect human body parts with out-of-body machinery in simple, comedic words.
Roach will speak about the book Tuesday, Sept. 23, at the City Opera House in Traverse City as part of the National Writers Series.
“It’s all about past and present efforts to build, grow, swap out and generally replace pieces of the human body if they aren’t working or they’re wearing out,” Roach explained.
She said her research interests lie in efforts to increase organ shelf life when organs are outside the body.
A chapter from her book features her visit to the Extracorporeal Life Support Lab on UM’s medical campus.
The lab conducts research on life-support and organ-transplant technology.
During her day at the lab in January 2024, she observed a pig-heart perfusion done using an external device. She noted researchers taking the pig heart out of its body, attaching it to tubes connected to an echocardiogram and pumping blood throughout the organ.
Although a researcher monitored the heart the entire time, she was fascinated by how the heart continued beating outside the host’s body.
Roach thought of a myriad ways this research was applicable to humans.
“Could they get a heart in a device like this to last 24 or 48 hours and eventually longer?” Roach said. “What if this person is a marathoner and their heart’s in great shape? It’s a shame to lose that heart.”
She first engaged with UM by contacting Robert Bartlett, lab director and UM professor emeritus of surgery, to set up a lab visit. She said Bartlett was instrumental in giving her lab access.
She remained in touch with the lab researchers throughout her book-writing process and sent the lab a copy of her book.
She included the heart perfusion scene in her book and described it as an editorialized “Edgar Allan Poe situation.”
Roach wanted to write about her UM visit because she hopes to make scientific research engaging for readers who may dislike the field.
“I’m trying to bring it to life for people because it’s really cool science and people have a mistaken notion that science is boring and it could not possibly be anything boring about what was going on that day in the lab,” Roach explained. “It was incredibly interesting and inspiring.”
As with her previous titles, “the human body is the stage” is a recurring theme in her newest book.
“It’s an incredible, complex, surreal, surprising, beautiful piece of machinery,” Roach said.
Before her career as a published author, Roach wrote travel stories for science magazines throughout her 20s.
Through her travel writing, she said she “came to see the human body as an interesting terrain, almost a foreign planet.”
Readers can expect “a mix of narrative and science” in her book, as she describes.
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