Fresh Prep Today!

Today is another fresh prep in the Anatomy Lab! For those of you who don't know, I'm a lab assistant for a course here at Uvic, PE 141, aka Human Anatomy. While we can't dissect human flesh for our learning purposes (I'll have have to wait until April for that, when the LA's get to see a human cadaver dissection. NEATO!), we can dissect Mr.Piggy over there to illustrate a few points about the heart and lungs. Why a pig you ask? Well if you're a fan of CSI Las Vegas, you'll know that Grissom always does his crime scene simulations on pigs. About half the time someone asks him why a pig, and he, in his Grissom-wisdom says "because Pigs are the most like humans out of all the animals." Which is mostly true. I mean, we used to use their insulin before we could make it synthetically, and their laryngx (voice box) and internal organs are organized about the same, approximately the right size and roughly the same shape. Besides, monkeys are hairy and in short supply, comparatively.


Cool things to note:

1) The surface area in your lungs, if you laid it all flat, would cover half of a standard tennis court.
2) Your heart pumps enough blood to cover that in 1.5 second, and shunts it all OFF the court-sized area in a similar amount of time.
3) You breathe about 20,000 times a day, 7.3 million times a year
4) The weight of blood circled through your lungs each DAY is approximately 8 tonnes.

Whoa. I'll try and get someone to take pictures :)