The dissection kit

In second year, all biology students had to buy a dissection kit. It was sold at the campus book store, alongside the texts, notebooks and pens and cost about $25. Engineering students bought complex calculators or slide rules, chemistry students the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but for us it was scissors, scalpels, blades, tweezers and plastic-handled needles. One enigma was the 'probe', a metal handle with a bend near the end, with a rounded or recessed tip. What was it for? The word 'probe' was so provocative.

We all carried our identical baby blue plastic cases full of identical tools, in a time when permanent laboratory markers were still imperfect. Students customized their boxes with unscientific magic markers and stickers. My sister, a veteran of the same course, sewed me a custom case of lurid red vinyl-like material, which rolled closed and was held together with strips of Velcro, and ensured that my tools would stay separate from everyone else's. There were abundant narrow slots for additional implements, so I could stock up if the opportunity arose. I don't remember permanently borrowing anything from anybody, but somehow the kit expanded with pins and clamps, holders and blades, simply because there were spaces for them.

This was the final year that premeds mingled with those who only wanted to be biologists. They shoved us aside in the teaching labs, eager to hone their tissue slicing skills while the rest of us tried to avoid opening the velvety bellies of white mice. We started with earth worms and frogs and graduated to cow's eyes, stiff, plank-like mink and eventually dog fish. Several companies sold preserved cadavers specially prepared for the classroom, with veins injected with rubberized blue paint and the arteries with red. Larger animals were preserved in formaldehyde, a stench that bonded to hair and clothes. Dissecting these elastic, oozing tissues was tricky despite the sharpness of the scalpels and the power of the scissors. There was only one time that we were required to handle warm tissue. Lab rats were 'sacrificed' in the name of science, so their livers could be harvested in a physiologically active state and we could isolate mitochondria. Teaching assistants did the deed in another room, away from our sensitive eyes; one TA admitted that he hated his job that day. I let my lab partner, a curly haired blond named Steve, remove the rat's liver with his own scalpels and scissors so that my own would remain innocent.

The end of the term featured the dreaded lab exam. We circulated from one bench to the next, allowed two or three minutes per station to answer a few questions about ducts or muscles indicated by coloured pins. The premeds sometimes slyly shifted the markers around so that no one after them would get the right answer. 

Although it did not often serve its intended purpose, my dissection kit has now followed me for 37 years, mutating as I've moved from lab to lab, adapting to what I really need it to do rather than what it was originally intended to do. The original scissors are now used to trim my finger and toe nails, cut paper, and prune plants. I guard them ferociously because they are fantastic and I would never be able to find a better pair. Like any good biological system, they have reproduced and there are now two pairs of scissors, one at home and one in the lab. I'm not sure where the second pair came from or which is the original. The forceps also multiplied, overflowing the original case into trays in the lab and racks in the workshop downstairs. Sometimes I use the scalpels and forceps on myself, sterilizing them with alcohol, taking advantage of the high quality microscope optics at my disposal to remove slivers from my fingers.

As students and post docs filter into my lab from different cities, provinces and countries, it is fascinating to to see what their dissection kits hold. The collections all start out the same, but evolve in symbiosis with the interests, needs and manual dexterity of their owners. One colleague mounted his own thick, oriental eyebrows in metal handles for handling fragile microscopic structures. One student donated special microscalpels used for retinal surgery to my own kit. 

The first paintbrush and colour pallette, the first violin, the first baseball mitt, these are all tools that take us from a world of dreams and possibility to a world of work and accomplishment. My dissection kit and its tools are extensions of my hands and my mind. May you find the same.