Cutting open dead animals (for science)

Juno

Juno

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    Was animal dissection a part of your labs in Biology class, and what kind of animals/insects did you dissect? Do you feel like it helped you understand anatomy better? Were you/are you squeamish when it comes to these things?

    I was pretty immature in high school (as were my friends) and we just dicked around a lot when it came to dissection - to be honest, I don't really think it helped me learn much, even when we did it right; it was basically just like "yup, this is where all the parts are, just like the book depicted - time to throw all these scraps away now". Didn't really seem necessary.
     
    Animal (and corpse) dissection is absolutely necessary for med school students. As I see it, you only ever see the importance of high school study when it becomes relevant to some aspect of your higher education. So I guess the doctors among us would be best positioned to speak to the utility of high school dissection lab classes.

    [The following examples don't involve the sort of dissection experiments involving frogs and worms and roaches that we did in high school, but they still involve cutting open dead animals- so thought I should share]

    I work in a virology-immunology lab. Two of my lab partners are immunologists, and their work involves figuring out the antigenic profiles of certain proteins. Very briefly and simplistically, this is done by injecting the proteins (antigens) into the test animals (mice or rabbits), waiting for a few weeks, then sacrificing them at the altar of science and drawing out all their blood. The blood is then analyzed to detect the presence of antibodies which were raised against the initially injected proteins.

    [PokeCommunity.com] Cutting open dead animals (for science)


    Another test sometimes done (to detect certain toxins) is a little more squeamworthy- a toxin suspension is inoculated into a part of rabbit gut. If the toxins are present, they coax the intestine cells to produce lots of fluid (cf. cholera), and the gut segment becomes swollen.
     
    Just about one month ago, I dissected a fetal pig in my Honors Biology class. Even though it smelled horrible, it definitely helped me understand the basic anatomy of the pig. Since all of the fetuses were well developed, each body system had everything that a mature pig has. We explored it's basic anatomy with some complex things added in. From this, you learn where everything in the pig's body is, and since it's organs and their locations are similar to human organs, you can understand your own anatomy as well. We discovered how thick the skin of the pig is, and we also looked at its brain. It was fun, but we discovered that tons of these pigs were sadly sacrificed for scientific research, but you sort of need to do it in order to discover more about how you can cure something or whatnot.
     
    We didn't have much dissections in Biology. All we had to dissect was a rabbit, a mussel (for some reason) and a pig's eyeball. I thought it was fun. ANd it shows better where everything is than it does on paper or in a video.

    I've never been squeamish during dissections. Before I graduated as a nurse, I had placement on surgery for 7 weeks and saw operations daily. It was one of the best placements I've had since you're basically getting a real life anatomy lesson every day. I especially liked abdominal surgeries.
     
    I actually skipped class both times this happened. Hahahhha. I really really don't like to see the insides of living things. It grosses me out beyond explanation. I'll stick with the theory, thank you.
     
    I will be working with cadavers for the next two years, so I'll be able to give a first-hand account by then. From what I currently know, it's important to look at physical specimens because everyone is an individual and you can't automatically figure out where something is in someone's body just by looking at a photograph or a diagram.
     
    never did that or had to thank god
    and if i had to i would of declined
    wouldn't be able to do it anyway
    call me a sucker for it, i don't care {XD}
    i cannot handle animals being dead or tortured;-;
    its just so sad, they so cute    ​
     
    I haven't had to dissect anything. Though I would have probably declined or just joined with someone who did all the dirty work. Though I'm not completely sure if they did it or not seeing as I came in the middle of the school year. Even then I was taking a completely different science class at that point.
     
    i did it, it turned out okay and got a good grade out of it

    though my memory of that moment in my school life was having our "big jock bully" classmate freak the hell out as our teacher (a bigger, scarier woman) grabbed his hand and forced him to touch his alive and undissected frog while the rest of the boys goofed around making their frogs race along the lab and placing bets

    some people, amirite?
     
    Throughout school I had to dissect the heart, kidney, brain, lungs and eye of a cow. I honestly didn't learn anything that I didn't already have a good grasp of from the theory. I can see how it would have benefited the more practically-oriented students but I gained nothing but an easy lesson out of it.

    The brains were disgusting though they'd decomposed despite being in a freezer and came out practically soup.
     
    we dissected a frog and a lamb heart back in eighth grade, i was absolutely horrified. then i did what any person who is scared of dead bodies did and took anatomy. we had dissection every week to every two weeks. we operated on dozens of rats and got to examine quite a few parts of the sheep, the heart, brain, lungs, kidney, eye, ect.

    one thing i'll never forget is when we found a pregnant rat in the batch. my teacher filled up a jar with solution, put the embryos in the jar and promptly placed them on her desk.
     
    Animal dissections were definitely a part of my high school biology class, although they were pretty much few and far between. I got excited when dissections came up in class because those were pretty much the only labs we did in the class. One of the most memorable ones we did was dissect some brain (I can't remember which species) and also a whole frog.
     
    Dissecting animals is absolutely terrifying for me. It is the one thing I would let others do while I go hide. I cannot handle dissection at all. I have known full well for years I am not meant to be a doctor. xD
     
    None of my biology courses ever included dissections. I think I dissected an owl pellet back in elementary school as part of a field trip, but that was it. We never really got around to studying organ systems or any of the things that dissections might have been useful for, and I definitely felt like there were some gaps in my education as a result. At the college level, labs were more molecular anyway, so dissections weren't really relevant, and I filled in gaps in my mouse anatomical knowledge as needed for other lab work.

    Having pretty much moved straight from owl pellet to cadaver, I must say that dissections in earlier biology classes are probably useful, but aren't essential for most students. However, I don't think there is any true substitute for cadaver dissection for med students or for others who really need a thorough understanding of the human body.

    I'm not especially squeamish. The slight uneasiness I had pretty much wore off after a day of dissection. My sense is that most people can adjust to it after a little while.
     
    Entomology required the dissection of several species. Grasshoppers, cockroaches, crickets, ticks, mites, fleas... my eyes get so strained from looking at moths under a microscope or magnifying glass. It holds some merit, as you can see how the insect grows, shapes, and functions. It's hard work trying to pry off the legs of a wasp and not crush the thing. Good thing there are a bajillion more of those things...

    Except cockroaches. I stood far away from the cockroaches. You can never really tell if those things are dead. It's funny. Cockroaches are the one thing that freak me the fuck out. People don't scare me half as much. I remember watching commercials for Orken and this giant cockroach was trying to get into the house.

    *shivers*
     
    I study neuroscience and genetics, and if you can't handle dead animals and/or people, you should probably not be in those fields. I tend to become very clinical and abstract about it, and it lets me think about anatomy more systematically, as well as help me with my 3D visual-spatial issues and grasping the dimensions of body cavities. I regularly look at pictures and videos of brain surgery and have undergone it myself so I'm very calm about it, and being able to physically examine it yourself (as well as certain nervous things) is much more useful than pictures and videos.

    My mother was pretty sure I'd drop bio in my first year in uni after the cane toad dissection, but she underestimated my fascination for anatomy a lot.

    I think it's pretty bad to dick around, and it's absolutely heinous with human cadavers, but then that's partly the fault of high school education for allowing it and having it in the curriculum at all. I think doing dissections in HS bio is weird and not very educational. I'm grateful to people who have donated their bodies to science, especially as someone who is very ill, and constantly sad for animals used as research specimens, but most researchers feel the same and mostly just want to see the enormous human benefit gained. I don't think I could do something like zoology, to be honest. Neuroscience tends to be a bit abstracted. And in genetics we mostly use tissue samples.
     
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