MohammedKhanFreshmanScholarsGroup6

ThirdLecture
The Origins of the Heart
Lionel Christiaen, Assistant Professor of Biology
Going into this lecture I was very excited, my dream career was to become a Cardio
surgeon, or a heart surgeon and this lecture was, as far as I knew, all about the heart. Professor
Christiaen begins the lecture with a light-hearted - no pun intended - introduction to the heart.
He discusses how it works, what it looks like, what its for and so on. I felt like it was a really
quick review of my AP Biology classes lesson plan on learning about the heart and the
circulatory system.
Professor Christiaen then moved on to the different heart complications and diseases that
people have. From those that are affected by diet and exercise to those hereditary even caused
by developmental problems in the DNA of the heart as it was being made. This brought us at the
lecture hall to his main point, to study the heart as it was being developed, to understand why the
cells in the body during the formation of a creature, at its earliest developmental stages, choose
to become heart cells as opposed to muscles cells or another other kind of cell.
He took us into exploring quite a bit of the molecular cell biology behind the formations
of cells and how the cells divided to become an embryo and how they became specialized cells
grouping together to create these organ pieces. At this point, to be completely honest, I was lost
at the lecture, I mean I found all of this very interesting and I wanted to know what was going on
but I felt myself losing Professor Christiaen at every other sentences. I couldnt follow him from
one slide to another. I felt a little more into it once he begin to explain how he and his team were
beginning to explore and experiment to figure out the question in a lab, probably because it
seemed more hands on than conceptual but soon after I was lost again.
I wish I had been able to appreciate the lecture more, maybe if I saw it over after a
semester of taking molecular cellular biology here at NYU. But what I did take from the lecture
was a whole new idea, I had never thought of studying the heart at its very origin, but I can only
imagine the great strides in medicine with the experimentation that Professor Christiaen and his
team is conducting. The thought of artificial hearts might become extinct, instead of looking to
perfect a singular model which the body could potentially reject, we could figure out how to
custom make a heart fit for an individual, this will give many a chance to actually live in the
world as well as increase the living capacity of human beings worldwide.
Some books define death at the moment the heart stops beating and with new strides in
this research, people can imagine that as one heart stops beating, you can replace it with another
exactly identical without any mileage. I definitely want to look into this some more and actual
understand the intricacies in the experimental design and the overall steps in heart development
from conception. Even though I was bewildered a lot during the lecture, it has been an eyeopening experience and I only wish lectures were a bit longer to give a lecturer a little more time
to explain some of these really extensive topics.