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Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital HealthHub
The North American porcupine is easily recognizable due to its impressive coat of long, sharp quills. These unique projections are designed so that they can easily penetrate animal flesh, but are extremely difficult to remove. While this may be bad news for a predator or a curious pet, this natural mechanism is a boon for a curious medical researcher trying to develop a better medical device.
Read more on BWH – Prickly Porcupine: Medicine’s Next Top Model?…
Original Story: SciLogs – From Nature to Nurture
One late evening in a coffee shop near McGill University, Jeff Karp overheard two students talking about drug delivery and tissue engineering. Jeff, an undergrad, listened closely as the students discussed two graduate level courses. At the time Jeff was questioning his major. He had switched from biology to chemical engineering but found himself bored in class; uninterested in the details of how refrigerators work. That night at the coffee shop Jeff learned about two classes that he became desperate to take: one on artificial organs and engineering and the other on cells and biotechnology. To enroll he would need to take no less than 5 prerequisite physiology classes. Undeterred, Jeff added a year to his undergrad studies and switched majors yet again, this time to biomedical engineering. He had finally found the right balance between medicine and engineering. Jeff says a “degree in engineering is a degree in problem-solving” and that he uses the skills he learned in undergrad every day.
Read more on Scilogs – From Nature to Nurture…