Lab Offers Students Hands-On Experience

The day has dawned at Orange Coast College when everyone, not just the campus poets, can hold a human heart in their hands.

If it can be stomached, one can also cup a beagle’s lungs, a cat’s liver or a mouse’s kidneys. And, sometime next year, with a promise to be extra careful, others might be able to paw over an Asian elephant’s 40-pound heart.

The somewhat gross activities are made possible by the Costa Mesa community college’s “plastination” laboratory--one of the largest of its kind in the nation. In the campus lab, which formerly housed a butcher shop, two OCC professors oversee the process that permanently preserves organs by infusing them with silicone.

Instead of viewing a specimen through a murky jar of dangerous chemicals, plastination’s end product yields a durable and lightweight organ that everyone from grade-school kids to anatomy students to museum visitors can personally handle with no mess and no smells.

“The old way was drippy, disgusting and toxic. You had to wear gloves,” said OCC biology professor Ann T. Harmer, who along with OCC colleague Sharon Callaway Daniel officially opened the lab last year. “This is far more student-friendly.”

The plastinated organs, easily circulated among students during science lectures, are a tremendous teaching tool, explain the professors. By allowing students to closely examine an actual organ, plastination has practically eliminated the need to endure dull medical slide shows or static textbook photos.

The treated organs will also enhance a student’s ability to interpret two-dimensional medical tests such as MRIs and CT scans, the professors say.

“Students need to learn what’s under the surface,” said Harmer, 51, who on Wednesday was named Faculty Member of the Year. “To have a three-dimensional specimen that they can learn from is fantastic. You can’t get that from a book.”

OCC students will not be the only ones to benefit from the tactile learning. The two professors regularly show off their assortment of plastinated body parts to colleagues at national medical conferences and to local grade-school students who tour their one-room campus lab.

While medical professionals typically react with stoic fascination to items such as their plastinated human foot--cut vertically in four neat slices--the youngsters are another story.

“At first, their response is total shock,” Harmer said. “Then they migrate closer and closer and closer. Then, they want to touch it. You should see the faces.”

The fruits of the OCC lab will enjoy their best and most prolonged exposure beginning next year at California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles. Harmer and Daniel are supervising the completion of a $20,000 project to create a permanent physiology exhibit that will compare the hearts, digestive tracts and brains of rats, dogs, humans, cows and elephants.

“It’s always been a big barrier that you couldn’t touch things,” said Mary Ogle, a research assistant at the Los Angeles museum. “This exhibit will remove the formalness and scariness that can come with an organ display.”

The exhibit poses an exciting challenge for the professors and their two assistants who must plastinate an elephant’s heart, something about the size of a computer screen. (The organ, which was obtained from Marine World/Africa USA in Vallejo, is from an older elephant that had chronic foot and leg problems.) The heart’s weight and girth will make the four-step plastination process more difficult.

The first step calls for soaking the organ in formaldehyde to firm up the tissue, which is followed by thoroughly flushing out the specimen. The organ is then infused with silicone and finally treated with a gas to help dry out and seal it.

“It’s just so massive,” said Kathleen Conroy, a former OCC student who is assisting on the museum project. “But it’s a real thrill to do it.”

It’s a thrill, however, that is not exactly sweeping through the nation’s scientific community, the professors say. Though it’s a technique that was developed 17 years ago, plastination is performed at just five labs in California and probably fewer than 50 in the entire country.

In spite of its obvious teaching advantages, plastination may be too costly for cash-strapped schools and colleges. Plastination costs about 20 cents a gram, which for the average human heart would amount to about $100. Meanwhile, storing the same organ in a jar of chemicals runs less than $1.

But Harmer points out the plastinated organ lasts “forever,” while chemically stored specimens have to discarded after two years.

“It’s very cost-effective,” said Harmer. “I don’t just think the word has gotten out yet.”

The two professors didn’t learn of the process until an OCC student, Michael Kingman, now their lab assistant, told them about it after visiting a plastination lab in San Diego in 1989.

After applying for grants and badgering OCC administrators, the professors realized their plastination dreams through a $56,000 donation from the George Hoag Family Foundation in 1992.

Finally, in 1995, after the Hoag grant had converted a building abandoned by OCC’s butcher training program into a lab, the one-room plastination operation started.

The lab produced a bounty of plastinated organs for OCC science classes this semester. In fact, the professors and their two assistants have found they now have more organs than storage space.

Said Kingman, who now studies at Cal State Long Beach, as he stood next to a dozen one-inch-thick slices of a human torso: “We got boxes and boxes of this stuff lying around here.”