Thursday, September 27, 2007
Electron Microscopes and Mountain Bikes
Rode the bike to school for the first time today. It's the old Trek mountain bike with no kickstand, as was impractically fashionable 11 years ago. Since my brain is thoroughly embalmed with medicine now, I couldn't help but come up with the nerdy analogy number 247: driving a car somewhere and riding a bike to the same place is a lot like looking at cells with a light microscope or an electron microscope. One sees much more detail in his surroundings when riding a slow moving bike rather than when driving a faster moving car. With an electron microscope, one sees far more detail than with a light microscope. Not perfect, but, hey, it's 2:00am here.
Photos above illustrate the point. The color (light) micrograph shows oodles and oodles of pink cells spotted with dark nuclei in the rat liver. (ROS, I know) The purple-blue spots are nuclei. The black-and-white (electron) micrograph shows the detail of a single nucleus in the said rat liver.
Why? Because 2 delightful hours of histology await me in the morning, and I just spent 2 equally delightful hours studying it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
People should read this.
Post a Comment