I discovered a site called Dissection Alternatives (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) that explores these issues and offers lots of practical solutions. Do students have a choice? Are there alternative ways for students to learn about anatomy that don’t harm animals? Each student had his/her own animal to dissect.īut with the rise of animals rights groups, PETA being the most visible, I wondered if times had changed. In both junior high and high school, I dissected a fetal pig.
When I was a student, I didn’t have a choice. He brought up an interesting issue: Would he be required to dissect an animal even if it is against his beliefs? Are alternatives provided for these students? This past weekend, Tim returned to college, where he is thinking of minoring in biology. when Elliott frees all frogs in his science class? Elliott reminds me of my younger son Tim, who probably would have done the same thing (without being inebriated)! V-Frog is being sold directly to individual schools, under a one-time licensing fee.Note: this is a rerun of last year’s frog dissection post, updated with new information.
It is also in the final stages of a similar review in New York State. There are currently upwards of 6 million dissections performed annually in the United States,and as many as 20 million or more worldwide, according to Tactus.Ĭalifornia has approved V-Frog for legal and social compliance as per their State board of Education guidelines. The Humane Society of the United States, as well as educators, legislators, students and others, support the realization that the use of virtual reality frog dissection means no exposure to chemicals and potentially dangerous instruments, no specimen or ecosystem harm, and no specimen disintegration. The technology allows for virtual surgery and the software's tissue simulation lets students see the correlation between form and function, and can be manipulated however the student wishes - without that nasty smell some real biology class frogs have. Tactus said V-Frog is a simulation product, not simply a static Web site and claims it is superior to physical specimens and multi-media representations.
In addition, V-Frog lets users watch a beating heart, observe digestion, dissect, probe and perform endoscopic procedures. V-Frog was in development for three years and allows for comparative anatomy, letting students make parallels and contrasts between the amphibian's physiology and that of a human being, crab and other organisms, Tactus said.
Tactus Technologies developed the software which lets students, biologists or the just plain curious use a mouse to "pick up" a scalpel, cut open V-Frog's skin, and explore the internal organs - with real-time interaction and 3-D navigation that accommodates discovery and procedures not possible with a physical frog specimen, the company said. V-Frog software simulates nearly unlimited manipulation of specimen tissue. If you were one of those folks who didn't really like to cut into frogs in biology class, you can easily relate with this software: V-Frog, virtual-reality-based frog dissection software.