The Pleasures of Undergraduate Research

Abstract

In their first years of medical school, students are taught the basic science that underpins their clinical studies: anatomy and physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology – and so MacLeod spent the flower of his youth sitting around a stinking corpse and loitering in laboratories. In the dissection room, groups of medical students clustered around twenty yellowed bodies laid out on steel tables. There, under neon light in a gloomy basement, the students breathed in foul formaldehyde-tainted air and mapped out brown and yellow planes of fascia and aponeuroses, and stringy cords of blood vessels and nerves. Muscle groups and bones were put on display like so many proud leeks and onions at a WI harvest festival.