We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon

Murph

Murph

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-new-anatomy-anytime-soon/

We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
September 7, 2024

If you are interested in making anatomical discoveries, good! Because relative to a single human life, the work to be done is effectively infinite.

But wait, you might say, how could that possibly be true? Have we not been plumbing the depths of the human body literally for thousands of years? Have we not imaged people down to micron resolution with every available scanning modality?

And what about other extant critters? Chickens are one of the commonly-used model organisms in laboratory studies, and the basis for a multi-billion-dollar food industry. Surely we must know everything there is to know about their anatomy? (Spoiler alert: we do not.)

What about fossils? Are we not even now engaged in a massive, civilization-wide, distributed project to scan museum collections? Can we not publish entire dinosaur skeletons as 3D files in the supplementary information to our papers (Lacovara et al. 2014)? There will always be new fossils to discover, but can’t we at least say that the ones we’ve digitized are completely known?

Where is all this new anatomy hiding?

I’ll tell you.

(Warning: dissection images inbound. Nothing too gory, but still.)

I’m going to draw a lot from human anatomy, because it’s one of the areas where I have the most hands-on experience, and because humans are one of the best-studied organisms on the planet. So if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia.

continues at link:
https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-new-anatomy-anytime-soon/
 
This is a blogpost by an anatomy professor. I appreciate how he's not defensive about the fact that much is still to be known in medicine, rather he is excited and frustrated to get on with finding things out.
 
Murph said:
This is a blogpost by an anatomy professor. I appreciate how he's not defensive about the fact that much is still to be known in medicine, rather he is excited and frustrated to get on with finding things out.
Click to expand...
Yes I always assumed that was the mindset of medicine and that they’d be curious to hear about my careful observations when I was ill etc coming from a background where I was sciencey at school so assumed the same people who went on to med school were similarly interested and thought in that way.
 
It's a nice article.

As I was reading about the significant variation in human bodies, I was thinking about the misplaced certainty of the FND proponents when it comes to their diagnostic tests. If nerves can branch off in multiple different ways in different bodies, and it seems that they certainly do, then a problem with a nerve could look quite different in different people. It seems possible that unusual differences in neural architecture might account for some of the physical problems that don't fit the pattern that the neurologist expects.
 
It's a good point that just 'discovering' something isn't enough to make it known, there are all the other steps of having it recognised and brought into mainstream knowledge, or even specialist knowledge. Which is relevant when we're being told that AI is about to revolutionise medicine and science by generating a million new ideas/drugs/research priorities a week.
 
I remember hearing about a couple of oddities from a friend who was a medical student when I was at university.

One of the anatomy cadavers had an extra muscle in the chest that didn't appear in the anatomy text books. It went horizontally across the chest at the level where the arms came out of the chest, and was about three inches high and about 4 inches wide. The tutor hypothesised that it was a muscle that helped ancient pre-humans to swing through the trees, and it helped to strengthen the arms preventing them from being torn out. It wasn't functional in the body being dissected so it was just a prehistoric "leftover".

Other things that I remember was an artery going from the armpit down the arm. According to the anatomy books it split into two high up the arm, but the point where it split varied a lot from body to body. There was similar variations in the positioning and splitting of some nerves.

If I could dictate where anatomy research went next I would want scanning techniques to be developed that could identify endometriosis and also adhesions and internal scar tissue.
 
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