Musings of a Compulsive Thinker

Bones and My Future?

I am just fascinated by skeletal structure, joints, bone tissue: individual bones, and how they all fit together. Human bones are especially fascinating, maybe because I can identify with the subject matter. I love studying x-ray images. I have a segment of a bison spine in the big freezer in the garage; it's been out there for over a year, and I still need to clean and sterilize it, but it's there for when I find the time, and eventually it will be something cool to display on my desk. (I lobbied to gain custody of a humerus or femur as well, but they've been reserved for the dog.) The myriad times I've been in physical therapy, I pestered my therapists with questions about anatomy and joint structure, bone mineralization, cartilage, scar tissue, muscle attachments, ligaments, etc.

Bones are cool.

I have concluded that I will very likely continue my education; the biomedical field is one of two likely areas of study (the other being air quality and/or environmental policy). Should I go the biomedical route, I suspect I'll end up doing something bone-related. On the far engineering side of that field, there are narrower areas such as bone fracture mechanics, material properties and mineral composition of different types of bone, and orthopedic implants. Another area that I've started thinking about in the last two weeks is physical anthropology; there, I could specialize in anthropometry, forensic identification, musculoskeletal adaptations in certain groups of people (such as increased calcification around the knuckles of rock climbers), or something like that.

So, bones. Yep. They're fascinating ("cool"). (I'd really like to get a replica human femur or humerus to keep on my desk. Vertebrae are also nifty.)

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Labels: my future, ponderings, science

posted by the alygator @ 10:11 PM