How Animals Work

Molecular biology and advanced techniques informed by chemistry and physics have changed biological research and teaching. Today's students take for granted that as they study the life sciences, they will hear a lot about genes and molecules. Sir William Harvey would be profoundly disorientated and then gratified by a visit to the Harvey Society's website (www.harveysociety.org). The man who accurately described the functional anatomy of the circulatory system would appreciate the extent to which his evidence-based approach to animal physiology has won the day. Indeed, understanding life processes at a molecular level is immensely satisfying. Three cheers for reductionism (Figure 1). Figure 1. The i heart guts website sells plush toys based on most of your favorite internal organs. It can be difficult, however, to fully appreciate the beauty of molecular details if the larger functions they serve are poorly understood. After all, it is the anatomical genius of the circulatory system that ensures that every cell of the body benefits from the marvel of hemoglobin. The steadily growing body of biological information makes it more challenging to preserve places in the curriculum to provide organismal and physiological context for students, and to cultivate deep thinking about how complex biological systems function through emergent properties of molecular mechanics. We are all interested in how our bodies work and are obsessed, if not enthralled, by our innards, or as one website (http://iheartguts.com/) would put it, “we heart guts.” My main goal for this review is to uncover websites that can be used to infuse the biology curriculum with systems and organismal context. Because a human anatomy and physiology (A&P) sequence is still part of most life science curricula, websites that support the teaching of A&P vastly outnumber websites concerned with general physiological principles or comparative physiology and anatomy. I highlight websites that emphasize fundamental principles and a comparative approach, but I also point to several excellent sites devoted to human A&P (Figure 2). Figure 2. The University of Utah Medical Library has a number of outstanding educational resources and tutorials on its Knowledge Weavers website, including an excellent animation of the circulation through the heart. To honor Harvey, let's begin by looking at a website that does an outstanding job of showing how our hearts work. The Knowledge Weavers website (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/) from the University of Utah medical library offers many excellent resources. Their Flash-animated heart (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/resources.html#animations) is one of the best of many available on the Web. The action of the heart is linked to dynamic graphs of blood pressure/volume, electrocardiogram, and heart sounds. The progress of the heart cycle is tracked by systole and diastole, in turn subdivided into relevant phases, and controls are available to run the animation fast, slow, or in step-through mode. The Flash console conveniently locates links to tutorials. The tutorials, by dissecting the animation step by step, should help students consolidate their learning based on the animation. It would be an interesting assessment to have students make their own tutorials and then see how they measure up to those made by the website authors. In addition to the cardiology information, the site also has an interesting concept for presenting a functional neural pathway. The Osteointeractive section (http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/osteo/index2.html) is noteworthy in presenting topics such as forensic anthropology and paleopathology, including the use of bones for human rights work. They've also developed tools to help faculty make multimedia and Web-based quizzes.