CAVE people

This, this is some cool shit.

But it brings up a couple of points.

One, yes, that could be a fabulously useful tool in the medical world. I don't exactly know why they think this could be useful for work in genetics, per se, but the other possibilities I see are amazing. However, no, it isn't going to replace cadavers for training, as they suggest. There are things that simply cannot be learned virtually - the feel of the scalpel slicing through tissue and how it changes as you vary your technique. An appreciation for how the tissue planes separate and a full understanding of the miracles that appear by (and the limitations of) blunt dissection. And frankly, an inkling of the diversity that occurs "within normal limits" inside the human body. You can look at pictures of fifty different brachial plexuses and say, huh, okay, they're all a little unique, but something different happens when you walk around a cadaver lab and look at your friends' dissections in their cadavers and call them (the cadavers) by the names you've all given them in the context of the stories you've told about them and you start to understand the awesome and mystifying complexity of the human body on a whole different level. And then, when you start looking at living people, and think about where their internal stuff is, and how you're going to approach that stuff when you invade their body, you end up thinking back about something much more actual, much more tactile, and much more...well, important than the images in Netter or even on some big fancy 4D thing. You respect it more. You start thinking back on real people. They may not be the same real people they were in life, frankly, because you often don't get their personal data, but they're real to you. My anatomy lab cadaver's name was Millie Schmutz, she was in her early 60s when she died, and she'd just had a lumbar laminectomy (surgery on her lower spine). The wound hadn't even healed yet. She also had three heads to her bicep (there are only supposed to be two), a benign tumor in her parotid (salivary) gland, and a goiter. Oh, and raging cirrhosis, although we never knew if it was from alcohol or infection or something else. We also decided she was a nurse who'd had three kids and a family who loved her (I read her palm - don't be impressed, I had a book - before we skinned it). See? It sticks with you. (Thanks, Millie.) There's just no substitute for the real thing. And cadaveric tissue is no substitute for the live stuff, either, I concede, but it beats a hologram. For training. For planning, for educating, for many other things, though, this is fabulous.

2. This is relatively cheap technology. $500K-2M Canadian? That's astonishing. Ever price an MRI machine?

3. Wait.....this was developed because the massage therapists thought it would be useful? Where the hell were we? Hello, training, planning, education?! Oy. That's a little embarrassing...