• Question: What made you want to study kidneys? Why do they fascinate you?

    Asked by lukethetieman to Keith, Heather, Bimpe on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Heather Eyre

      Heather Eyre answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Kidneys are amazing – you have a spare one! each one looks like a kidney bean. They are smooth, and on the outside at least, and simple.

      Inside there are about 1 million nephrons (filters) in each kidney! your kidneys filter all your blood about 25 times a day! And they don’t just filter it – they help control your blood pressure at the same time!

      The inside of a kidney is really neatly laid out (that’s part of how it is so efficient!) so when you cut sections from it they are really quite pretty!

    • Photo: Keith Siew

      Keith Siew answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      I love them because they seem at first glance a little boring and simple… and you have two of them so can’t be that big a deal… but when you look inside and get down to the nitty-gritty you fast learn that they are mind bogglingly complex, intricate and do countless tasks for us without even knowing!

      The kidneys filter about 180L of blood a day and remove waste, instruct other organs and tissues what to do and essentially keep the body in balance! They’re also pretty challenging to work with and the techniques required to do research seemed like they required real skill and were hands-on.

      The moment I knew I wanted to do something in kidney research was when I learnt of a little factoid involving the pituitary gland (the little peanut-like structure at the base of the brain) and a hormone it produces called ADH (anti-diuretic hormone) which affects the kidneys… all involved in a process called osmoregulation (controlling the water content of our bodies)… it fascinated me that if you were to drink a glass of water that the receptors in your mouth, oesophagus, stomach and small intestine have an ability to in a way quantify the amount of water you drank and the pituitary gland then will change the amount of ADH it secretes to increase urine production so that you begin to excrete the volume water in your urine required to keep your body in balance before you’ve even begun to absorb the water you drank through your intestines…

      Now to me that’s AMAZING!

Comments