Kidney complexity

Today was the first day on the renal system. Our professor obviously found the subject material fascinating. The teachers get a certain light in their eyes when they talk about their favorite subject. She was able to communicate her enthusiasm, too, which not all of the professors can manage. The kidneys win as the strangest organs in the body.



The heart, which we recently started learning about in anatomy, is beautifully simple, whereas kidneys just get more complex as you go. They have teensy arteries in glorious profusion, but ordered too. Long straight branches of blood vessels that hand off tiny bunches of capillaries. Like trees. Or like an orchard, with a bundle of capillaries hanging off the branches of every tree. Then within the capillary bundles are podocytes, cells that look like centipedes stretched along the surfaces. Very, very strange.

(There's a picture of a podocyte on this webpage: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/ransom.lab/the_glomerular_podocyte)