Anatomy road show moves students beyond books
Dr. Douglas Merrill is the Director of CBET and a Professor of Biological Sciences at RIT. He also holds a deep commitment to inspiring K-12 students to consider careers in bioscience. For 25 years, Dr. Merrill has been visiting high school classrooms to lecture on human anatomy and physiology, and to introduce students to what he calls “lifestyle diseases.” What makes these visits extraordinary for students is that he brings along actual human organs for them to see, touch and learn from. This is what Dr. Merrill has to say about the experience:
“When you hold a heart in your hand that’s had a bypass operation, or when you explore a lung that is cancerous or wracked with emphysema and you can’t imagine how anyone could breathe with lungs like that, you are forever changed.
“This experience takes the book-based understanding and knowledge of disease and carries it to a new level. They can for the first time imagine what it must feel like to be sick from the effects of a lifetime of cigarette smoking. It lifts their appreciation of disease from the abstract (it won’t happen to me) to the reality that it could happen to them if they smoke.
“That level of experience can’t be found in most high schools; the closest they often come is dissecting a sheep heart or a frog, and those specimens don’t show evidence of disease caused by years of abuse.”
Merrill says the organ that usually gets the most attention is the brain.
“The first time you hold a human brain with an intact spinal cord in your hand, and you realize that this was the tissue that created the entire identity of that human being, it’s an experience that is transcendent. And you should see their faces when I hand it to them. They become almost reverential. I say to them, ‘Look at how the spinal cord is attached. See the spinal nerves as they descend from the spinal cord. Now look where a spinal tap could be done without injuring the cord.’ They just go, ‘Wow, oh my God!’ At that moment, I know why I am a teacher.”
