It's about those days when biology and I were in love. Like many ambitious youngsters, unaware of the demands and limitations of our society, my dream was to become a 'scientist' on growing up; biologist in this case (I had thought of becoming an astronomer before and a nuclear physicist later and what I ended up doing was medicine. Lol)
My interest began when my elder cousins told me that you get to dissect a frog in grade nine and ten. I was intrigued by the details of nailing the frog on a wood board and using all those dissecting instruments. I was pretty much looking forward to it. My cousins also told me that you get to dissect bigger animals as you go to higher grades. Frog, rabbit and then a giant monitor! Never got the monitor though.
Ms. Rizwana was one of the best teachers I have ever had. She demonstrated very accurately the technique of preserving that one vein that ran across ventral body wall of the frog. Some guys still cut it and their frogs bled to death. Some mischievous, gangster 'cool dudes' stabbed the frog right in the abdomen on their first time to show their indifference and valor. I was very meticulous, successfully preserved the vein and took a long time in just opening up the frog. A live beating heart was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I just kept on wondering why is it beating, where is the energy coming from. And then the bell rang. The practical time was over. In fact it was the last period; school time was over. But I wasn't done yet. I had just opened up the frog. So what I did was I cut it's oesophagus from the highest end, then I cut it's cloaca and took out it's whole digestive system with every organ I could get hold of. I wrapped it in a paper, put it in my pocket and brought it home.
On coming back, in all excitement, I told mom, 'Hey mom, guess what I've got from school? FROG BOWELS!!! Yayyyy' She said it was disgusting and told me to get it out of the room. So I dissected and observed each and every thing of it in the veranda. I opened up the stomach and and intestines and looked at their insides to my heart's content. Finally I threw it away.
There were just three or four dissections in school. It wasn't enough of frog for me. I decided to buy a frog and dissect it at home. My younger brother had also reached the dissection stage so I bought one from him too, from Anarkali. I kept them in an old shoe box. To anesthetize them I soaked a piece of cotton in the anesthetic, dropped it in the box and covered it. I thought that the frogs would get unconscious by it's fumes. I shook the box well and it took a long time to knock them out. I had wanted to buy chloroform but the guy at the shop gave me carbon disulfide instead, saying that it was a 'better' anesthetic. In fact it was worse. Our frogs kept on convulsing during the whole dissection, though I had kept cotton pieces soaked in the anesthetic under the frogs' nostrils.
Even before a frog I had dissected a chick. I must have been in grade six or seven then. There was this huge banyan tree behind our house whose branches had covered half or our roof. Crows and eagles would frequently build nests on it. Once I found a dead chick on our roof. I couldn't figure out the specie; it didn't even have feathers on it. But it was big enough for me to play with. I dissected it with make shift instruments: straws and sticks and tree branches.
The preserved specimen in the biology lab were another interesting thing. I decided to build my own museum. I would kill animals, tie them on a scale with a thread and place them inside an empty jam bottle. To preserve them I would add spirit in the bottle. And the specimen would look just like those in the biology lab, erect in the bottle. I had collected lizard, mouse, centipede, millipede, earthworm, another lizard like reptile I don't know the name of and any other thing I would across. I killed lizard with an air gun and mice in a mouse trap. To kill the invertebrates I would directly drop them in a bottle full of spirit. Earthworms would convulse violently, release a white fluid from one end, anus or mouth, and die. Sprinkling salt over earthworms when they would come out after rain and watch them convulse was one of our (me, brother and cousins) favorite deeds. I had kept all the specimen bottles in a cupboard properly arranged and labeled.
In high school we had to dissect cockroach. Again I was good at it. I could separate out the digestive system of the roach very finely while some messed it pretty much. But there was one thing I couldn't do in first and second years of med school. Stunning the frog. Uff...I was never able to do that. Striking a rod hard on a conscious frog's head to knock it out, the sign of which was it's tongue would protrude out. So you'd have to blow real hard on the first time. If you do not strike hard enough, it would not get unconscious and would just shriek in pain. Most of the first timers would do that. Strike it lightly again and again. That was very disgusting. I never did it. Pithing was one hell of a job too. You had to run a needle all along it's spinal cord to destroy it. Many guys would insert the needle in every part of the frog but the spinal canal. It was difficult to find in the beginning but easy once you knew the technique. That was after brutally killing three or four frogs.
When spiders caught my attention, I would be in search for one every day. I would observe it build its web and wait for a prey in the center of it. Sometimes I would pick up some insect and deliberately throw it on the web so that it would get stuck in it. I would see the spider come for it, wrap it with its thread and eat it.
In plants 'reproductive botany' was my favourite. I loved sowing seeds and watching them sprout and grow. I sowed watermelon seeds, mango seeds, ginger, garlic, onion. I followed them for some time till my interest faded. Inspired by Mendel I grew peas too, in a jam bottle. It sprouted and produced more peas. Once I grew Rhizopus on a piece of bread by soaking it in water and keeping it in a dark place. I scrapped it off, took it to college and observed under microscope. I also scrapped some moss from a dark, wet wall to see it under microscope.
Ah, such were those days. :-)
