Or, how I can not seem to manage either.
I spent all weekend writing a series of bullet points and multiple choice questions for doctors who will come learn more about how the face and neck develop, among other things, in Tarragona, Spain mid-October. I mistakenly thought I could just cut and paste those into a blog post. Facial development is fascinating – it’s our window into our identity – but not the way I wrote it!
So, since images are worth many words, I will simply point you towards a beautiful site set up by a former collaborator of our laboratory, who explains the prenatal development of your body with real electron scanning microscopy photos at every turn. You need not be an embryologist or a doctor to enjoy it.
Suffice it to say that it’s pretty neat how any vertebrate face is made out of the same clay: blobs of tissue draped on either side of and in front of the tube that will become the brain, and that the fusion of those blobs on the lower side of the tube, beyond the other tube used for feeding, somehow arranges itself into recognizable features. And what I study – those genes that are used and reused, in just the right time and place, to confer a contextual identity on any given cell in one of those blobs. It boggles my mind, and I love it.
That site is wonderful! I particularly enjoyed the animations of cleavers cutting through planes to reveal what’s beneath. The EM micrographs really are stunning.
I find it relatively rare for a basic science researcher to have something to communicate to clinicians that could actually help them. I envy that – the knowledge that your work really makes a difference. So much of basic science can be esoteric. That doesn’t make it less important, of course, but it does make it more difficult to keep the big picture in mind.
I think pretty much everyone’s science makes a difference, Anna, but the question is, to whom? It’s true that embryology has always had tight ties to the study of birth defects and teratology, and so it’s easier to get non-science people around the dinner table interested in what you do than for some other fields. Check out this delightful article by D.S. Lamb from 1900. I’ve personally seen all examples of the photos of page 9 in humans or animal models.
Molecular embryologists and geneticists are definitely homing in on what causes many of these malformations. Once you begin to understand what can go wrong and how it happens, it brings appreciation of all that goes “right” – and that is my most regular form of worship. I worship life. Wow. Hmm. I think I will think about this a little more before going off half-cocked on a new blog post.
What a great post. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a good animation is worth a million. Computer animation, X-ray cinematography, Cat scans, rotoscoping, motion capture — these and other techniques are being used to capture complex, three-dimensional biological structures in motion that could not be understood in any other way.
Heather, what are you going to do about your talk now – just display the url you gave above? :-)
Well, since I know Kathy pretty well, she has kindly made the originals available to me… but seriously, the talk is the easy part. And I usually go top-heavy on pictures, because I can; the SciBlog talk was an exception. I’m trying very hard though to retain some presentation design tips from the generalist Apollo Ideas Blog.
Wow, thanks for that link – the box office chart is amazing. Looks a bit like 70s tapestry, but seems to do the trick! At least you won’t have to remember not to make the cover green for this one..
On a slightly more serious note: I find that a lot of academics are still shy when it comes to showing/including pictures and colourful graphs in their (professional conference/meeting) presentations, at least in my field (marine sciences), even though there’s a lot of amazing material – and their peers like a good shot of a critter from an ROV as much as the next person.. is that the same in embryology (minus the ROV, of course..)?
It’s just laziness, I think – images often need to be formatted or worked in some way, and that takes time. But we sure do love our pretty pictures in embryology. Check these:“http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/~davek/gallery.html” out quickly to see one set that caught my attention and even kept it! (unfortunately, I couldn’t get the technique to work for me on sections of mammalian embryos.)
Arrgh. I need that coffee. Sorry about the link
So, since images are worth many words, I will simply point you towards a beautiful site set up by a former collaborator of our laboratory, who explains the prenatal development of your body with real electron scanning microscopy photos at every turn.
Embryology is feared and often loathed by medical students, but when they start seeing patients, especially on their pediatrics rotations, they may wish they remembered more of it. As an embryologist by training (and as the junior member of the anatomy teaching faculty), I give lectures on some of the more heinous embryology topics. This week, I have to cram pharyngeal apparatus, thyroid, face, and palate development, plus anomalies, into one 50-minute lecture. Immediately afterward, we all go to gross anatomy lab. So to ease some of the tension, I have prepared a few images:
I’m not entirely sure why cats and other animals have poor spelling and grammar, but according to teh interwebz, they do.
The owl is the mascot of my undergrad alma mater, which I share with 5-10% of the freshman class each year.
Heather, the SEM images on the site you linked are fantastic, and really helpful for the students.
Heh – I have to do the same, but the students are those doctors wishing they remembered something, they’re neuroradiologists to boot, and I have two twenty-five minute slots. One is supposed to be entitled “Maxillofacial embryology and development” and the other “Development of the branchial arches”.
So I really feel your pain. Want to swap slides? I can put them up privately for now on SlideShare (I always rework things, otherwise I’d put them up publicly. I’ll get around to it someday under pressure of popular demand, but there are other pressures today).
Can I sign up for a lecture from Kristi, please? (Heather, I’m sure yours are great too, but I’d only listen if you DO use some of Kristi’s slides!)