First Year Seminar: Fall, 2022

Exploring Complex Questions: The End(s) of the Body

Short Assigned Paper #1: Heart Dissection Lab Report

The format for your lab reports will be based on a typical journal article format for the journal Science. (For an example, see https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciimmunol.add4853). The lab report will go through at least four drafts, a pre-lab report (due September 7 with revision due September 9), a first draft lab report (due September 12), and a substantive revision of your lab report (due September 19). For the prelab report, you should write a draft only of your Introduction.

The final draft will be at least 1200 words, and it will have five parts. The five parts are the following:

1. Abstract

2. Introduction

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. Materials and Methods

Abstract. You will not write your abstract until you have finished the rest of your lab report. The abstract must be no more than 75 words. It should summarize the central finding(s) of your lab report.

Introduction. Generally, introductions lay out the context and background for the research presented in the lab report. In the case of this particular project, you will explain why the nature of the heart is important for understanding the relationship between the mind and the body, and in particular, for understanding Descartes’s view of the relationship between mind and body. You will also describe the central problem(s) that a dissection of the heart can solve, from Descartes’s perspective. Finally, you will lay out a hypothesis and the significance of that hypothesis. That is, what do/did you expect to find when you dissect(ed) the heart, and why do/did you expect that, and what would it mean to find it?

Results. For this particular assignment, your results should explain to what extent you found Descartes’s description of the heart to be accurate, and what you found that differs from his description. You should include a diagram of the heart as you saw it. You may also include photographs, ideally with labels inserted into the photographs.

Discussion. You should discuss the implications of your results for the problems you introduced in the introduction, including the nature of the heart, the nature of the human body, and the relationship between mind and body. You should include some description of needed future research.

Materials and Methods. Here you should describe the tools that you used and the procedure that you followed in dissecting the heart. What did you cut and in what order and how and why. (For example, “I started with scissors and removed blah blah and then cut into the blah blah with a scalpel in order to see blah blah. When I did not find a particular structure, I did blah blah to confirm its presence or absence.”