Da Vinci: Anatomist

On Sunday 24^th, a friend of mine and I went to see the Da Vinci exhibition in the Queens Gallery, London. The exhibit was displaying the anatomical drawings Leonardo Da Vinci made over 400 years ago. He originally intended them to be published in a treatise, but died before he completed the works. 

Da Vinci was an extraordinary bloke. He was an artist-cum-engineer-cum-scientist. He was the first to document some of the more difficult to define parts of the body (he did a full dissection of the brachial plexus, which is a bundle of crisscrossing nerves, which I gathered was difficult to dissect) as well as identifying structures which would not be identified again for several hundred years. 

In his early career he experienced similar problems to the ones faced by universities today – namely, a regular source of human cadavers. He was, as a result, forced to do many of his dissections on animals. As his career was furthered he gained the fame which unlocked doors to charitable hospices and medical schools, allowing him to study the human anatomy.

Having seen the drawings and sketches close up, it is amazing to see how precise the observations he made were, and it is something which definitely has to be seen to fully comprehend – the photos of the exhibition are good, but there’s an almost religious silence in the gallery, as everyone peers at his drawings, many of them annotated with his characteristic backwards handwriting. 

I was however, disappointed by one thing. Much of the theories in medicine at that time were proposed by Roman or Greek theorists who had not actually dissected a corpse. As a result, much of what he saw did not fit with the models. An example of this would be the three ventricles in the brain, which were thought to house reason, feelings and memory. In this instance, when he pioneered the idea of injecting molten wax into the brain to fully discover what shape these “ventricles” were, he changed the theory and his notes to match with his observation. 

Da Vinci's interpretation of the current theory

Da Vinci's own theory based on observation - much closer!

This is one of the earliest examples of scientific thinking – empirical evidence is the basis for theories. However, later on, he became erratic and started to change what he drew as his observations to fit with the theories of the time. While I understand that it must have been difficult for him to completely dismantle the idea of how the heart works, I still think it was a shame that he couldn’t have kept in line with his observations and used reasoning to propose a new theory based on observation. 

Regardless, the exhibition is amazing and definitely worth seeing. It finishes 07 October, 2012. Get going!

Exams, Science Coordinator and Bees

I’ve been busy revising for my As Exams, hence the complete lack of posts. I’m now trying not to think about them, because I know I tried my best and nothing I can do now will change the results.

Anyway! Shortly before my exams all of the school officer posts were up for grabs. This means that Head Boy, the various house captains, and subject coordinator applicants all went through an interview process and the officers were chosen. 

The interesting this about this was that the only subject coordinator posts available were numeracy, literacy and anti-bullying. There were also no rules about making up your own posts, so I applied for science coordinator. I feel that too many students struggle initially with science and as a result find it boring, and I wanted to change that. However, it emerged that several others went for the post of science coordinator as well, which was certainly a shock to me, given that I’d made up that post!

The end result was that I didn’t get the post, which I have to admit, was disappointing for me. However, I approached the two students who had got it, and persuaded them to support me when I implemented my own ideas, so that even though I wasn’t coordinator, I could still try to get my activities in place. 

The following weekend I was asked by my dad to “do the bees”. This is entails nothing more than an inspection of the hives we have at the bottom of the garden, but it would be the first time I had done them without him. So I suited up, and went down to check on them. Due to the wet weather, the bees hadn’t been flying as much as they should have, and weren’t able to collect the nectar and pollen for the honey and had no food. I recognised this, and the causes, and mixed up a batch of sugar syrup to help feed them through the rainy periods. In one hive I was pleased to find the queen bee, who, despite being almost double the size of the others, is fairly difficult to spot amongst the 5000 others.  

The third hive I looked in was a swarm (when a bee hive splits), and so had fewer bees. I looked in to the frames which, in the other hives had had brood (baby bees) and could find none. Also with so few bees in the hive I was also struggling to find the queen. Her absence and the absence of brood lead me to believe that actually, the hive had lost its queen (a hive almost certainly dies when this happens). When my dad checked the bees a week later, he agreed with all of my suggestions. I was pleased because I’d thought objectively and worked through any problems. We aren’t sure what to do with the swarm, but we’re going to leave it for now.

A queen bee