We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon

As part of an NIH consortium I work with two teams that are collecting multi-scale anatomical data on the human vagus nerve with one of the objectives being to start to get a handle on the variability between individuals. The variability that the experimental teams are seeing is beyond anything I expected, though admittedly my assumptions were naive. The branching structure and routing of the nerves is basically unique per human and we are in the processes of determining whether there are invariant rules (e.g. for branch ordering) that apply across all individuals. And that is at the level of gross anatomy. So we aren't even done with gross anatomy, despite many biologists thinking that the foundations are complete and have been since the 16th century. Turns out that if you want to be able to apply our knowledge of gross anatomy for more complex clinical use cases we need significantly more data about basic variability in structure so that we know what additional data we need to collect for each individual.

That was a super interesting read. Another factor that's probably missing is a weird form of prudeness/sexism. I remember reading articles years ago about new discoveries about the clitoris, and thinkig "how the fuck was this missed", or the debate around the existance of the G-spot, or the existence (or not) of female ejaculate. I suspect there's more female anatomy left to be discovered/described than male.

If I understand his three groups correctly, he’s basically saying that one of the big bottlenecks is that nobody is looking full time.<p>Basically, nobody has the job of discovering human anatomy except as a side hustle or byproduct.<p>I’m quite surprised at that. That’s a remarkable area to not have full time researchers in.

I just skimmed the article, but it reminds me of something from my own PhD in fluid dynamics. I worked in liquid jets&#x2F;sprays, basically, when a stream of liquid flows from a nozzle and breaks into droplets. Nearly everyone has seen this in some form.<p>I published a &quot;regime diagram&quot; improving the existing categorization of types of liquid jet breakup. There were a lot of changes from the status quo, but one that strikes me as particularly sad was the addition of a new regime that I called &quot;turbulent Rayleigh&quot;. Every time men pee, they create a turbulent Rayleigh liquid jet. Yet this was a mostly foreign concept to spray researchers! You can find a few papers that identify what they view as an anomaly, but the papers seem to be mostly ignored and they don&#x27;t go beyond saying something like &quot;Something here is weird, future researchers should look into this&quot;. I did my share, making a theoretical model of the regime, showing how it&#x27;s fundamentally different from the conventional <i>laminar</i> Rayleigh regime. Most spray researchers would consider a &quot;Rayleigh&quot; jet to be inherently laminar, but that&#x27;s a misconception.<p>The reason why this happened is that liquid jet&#x2F;sprays research is heavily biased towards fuel sprays, which rarely ever have this regime. You basically need a long tube (or something similar) to reduce the Reynolds number for turbulence to appear, which usually doesn&#x27;t happen in fuel spray nozzles. Fuel sprays tend to have lower surface tension and higher viscosity than water&#x2F;pee too, which makes seeing a turbulent Rayleigh jet even harder.

The incredible complexity of anatomy is even more amazing considering<p>* all the structures grow from a single cell<p>* somehow it&#x27;s all encoded in DNA (only 6 billion bits in humans, which has to also build cells and their ultracomplex machinery)<p>* this all had to evolve using only a very noisy objective function

Bit late and I posted essentially this same comment on their site in hopes they&#x27;ll see it, but this article jumped out at me because a while ago I was thinking about what it would take to get a whole organism single cell atlas so that you could explore it on the computer. The only thing I can really think of is to take a CNC machine, put it in a big freezer, then scan one layer of the specimen with a microscope and whatever multispectral lighting&#x2F;imaging you need, then mill away a layer and repeat. Pathology slides are prepared with stains to enhance the contrast of membranes and other features which is probably not an option in the frozen state, so that&#x27;s a big hurdle, but maybe you can do it with some fancy multispectral imaging. And if you can&#x27;t, maybe you can at least start with lower resolution structures like anatomy (though I think there&#x27;s still contrast challenges for that). I know there are some single cell atlas efforts for parts of or whole brains for mice and maybe other organs, but like the author&#x27;s dream idea of getting order thousands of specimens to study variation, it would be great dataset if you could capture everything in one go.

This is a great case study in how all science is hobbled.<p>Define categories, silo information - who will ever recognise something unusual under their very nose?

I think human species real advantage is human hands, they are so precise, for me that&#x27;s what made the difference

The author says that no one‘s gonna fund such work, but I really think the stated multibillionaires should fund it.<p>biological anatomy makes it pretty clear that biological bodies are complex layering of biopolymer sheets that perform incredible mechanical, biochemical and other subtle energetic processes.<p>We could learn a lot about the robots we hope to build by intricate studies of how Animal anatomy has really perfected the art of efficient and compact mechanical motion and advanced functions.<p>In a sense, the sophistication of the dense layering is akin to how modern processor architectures, motherboard and fully integrated circuits SOCs inside compact devices are kind of composite materials of fused layers of nevertheless separate components.<p>I believe this kind of work really should be funded.

Link seems to be broken, Firefox is displaying raw JSON when I visit it.

Ant that’s just the structures, next is the purpose

&gt; If I was a multi-billionaire, I’d hire 1000 of the world’s best surgeons &lt;&gt; supply them with 10,000 ethically donated willed bodies<p>No, this would be like like giving the best programmers super computers in the 80&#x27;s.<p>What&#x27;s needed is a better way of doing anatomy. The tools and access are the problem.<p>One cadaver x-rayed and MRI&#x27;ed and ultra sounded in great detail then the raw data shared for free for instance.<p>Or do what really really matters and is also the end goal, a cheap way to see inside the living. Cheap ultrasound chips with open data APIs so people can try and find ways to increase accuracy for instance. Every farmer should have an ultrasound but they are too $$$

There is still too many things to be discovered and hope AI will give us a full understanding of it