It’s time to go spanning the globe for anatomy news and notes!
Humane Treatment of Body Donors
Boston radio station WBUR sent a reporter to a college anatomy lab to look at the issue of body donors and the respect shown to them in the wake of a scandal at the Harvard University’s medical school morgue. The bottom line? Times have changed. There is a push for more humane treatment of the body.
“We were taught to think of those individuals as kind of pieces of wood or, you know, inanimate objects and you were just learning anatomy from and not to think too much about them,” said Tom Champney, a professor at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. “The attitude we were given is that this is something dead. You can work on it, you can do things to it. It doesn't really matter because the living thing that was in there is gone.”
But Champney told the reporter he’s seeing a trend toward more humane treatment of donors. “I and my colleagues have been trying to move that needle to get more people to think of these as individuals in the lab, not as just objects to be worked on.”
Listen to the full report here.
Neanderthals with Heart
A Neanderthal child with Down syndrome lived to age six demonstrates that he was cared for despite the likelihood that he struggled with balance and was also likely deaf. An article in El Pais described how the glimpse of these compassionate Neanderthals started with a fossil “the size of a thumb found in the Spanish city of Valencia.” The bone was first found in the 1980s. Scientists who study the auditory differences of sapiens and Neanderthals (yes, those experts exist!) used computerized axial tomography to analyze the fossil. They found that the bone “had marks of congenital malformations that are normally associated with Down syndrome.”
The researchers, who published their findings in Science, it would have been impossible for the child to have survived without the mother’s care and also from other members of the family.
The finding “opens a whole window to the archeology of caregiving; something very interesting to understand our evolution,” said Edgard Camarós, archaeologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
The Human Heart & Less Trabeculation
Speaking of evolution, human evolution led to greater cardiac function.
As reported in ScienceDaily, a research team from the University of British Columbia Okanaga Campus (UBCO) and Swansea University compared the human heart with great apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutangs, and bonobos.
Ultrasounds of the heart's left ventricle in non-human great apes showed bundles of muscles extending into the chamber. These are called trabeculations. Humans, it turns out, have the least trabeculations. And this means greater cardiac function and indicates, according to the researchers, that the human heart may have evolved away from the structure of other non-human great apes to meet the “higher demands of humans’ unique ecological niche.”
Humans have a higher “metabolic demand” because we walk upright and our brains our larger.
Dr Aimee Drane, a senior lecturer from the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences at Swansea University said that “in evolutionary terms, our findings may suggest selective pressure as placed on the human heart to adapt to meet the demands of walking upright and managing thermal stress.”
Like Tom Petty said, you gotta listen to your heart. Sometimes it knows the whole story.
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