Adam Bradford, IB Biology

Two students come into biology class. No, that sounds like the start of a joke. I’ll start over.

I’m sitting in the back of the biology class, next to a sink and a counter with some stains from a previous experiment.

One of the two students who arrived early sees that they will be working with a kidney today. A dissection. The teacher jokes that afterwards they might get to have kidney pie. The student asks; “Would you ever eat human?”

We like provocative questions in education. Usually we fancy that we the teachers are the ones to ask them. But in the spirit of student agency, here we go. The teacher doesn’t miss a beat. 

“Well it depends, I suppose. If you are stranded somewhere, stuck, nothing to eat …”

This teacher has a nice sense of humor. On the screen he’s projected the cross section of a large kidney. He is showing the students what to look for during the dissection, what they should label.

Three additional bullets for them to consider are:

• the saltiest part?
• the smelliest part?
• the tastiest part?

Very nice. He snuck that last bullet in to keep the joke going.

Dissection is one of the things I remember from grade 10. Not particularly well, though, mostly just the smell. What I really remember from grade 10 biology is the teacher, a small, wiry guy who walked on his toes with as much up and down as forward. He wore corduroy pants, maybe from the kids section. He told us one day that we are all constantly sloughing off an enormous amount of dead skin cells, that he never wore the same pair of pants two days in a row so that he could wash out those dead skin cells. A bane of knowing too much, perhaps.

That’s why I remember his pants. I pictured the teacher stuffing his pants in the washing machine, standing there in his briefs. It made him far too human. It made me focus on his pants. Different every day, true to his word.

The students have managed to open up their pig kidneys, they each have one. The teacher points out a few things. The kidney nephron, for example, with parts like Bowman’s Capsule and the Loop of Henle. 

Sir William Bowman described this initial phase of filtration of the blood in the 1800s. His name still has to be memorized by students like these high schoolers as they learn about kidneys now in 2024. The term to memorize should probably have been Shumlansky’s Capsule, after the Ukranian student who described this same part of the kidney nephron in his 1782 doctoral thesis, De Structura Renum. But for a quirk of history, Shumlansky might be far better known. Maybe writing in English gave Bowman a leg up. 

German anatomist Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle is the namesake of the Loop of Henle, and as far as I can tell, legitimately so. Though who knows, really. Discoveries are often the work of multiple people, even if not directly collaborating. Discoveries open themselves as areas of study become possible and interesting to pursue. Sort of like opening these pig kidneys with a butterfly cut, leaving us two halves to peer into, capsules and loops exposed.