Mid-course Review: Introduction to Human Physiology
Coursera’s Introduction to Human Physiology from Duke University is a great detailed introductory course available for study at your own pace, consisting of 11 modules/weeks each with 2-3hrs of lectures & slides, good post-slide recall questions, and a graded quiz for each module that forms your grade in the course.
The course is taught by two Cell Biologists, Jennifer Cabrey and Emma Jakoi, and they do well at elaborating in lecture beyond their slides, in providing examples of biological processes and in illustrating the relations between physical or time components of the cellular systems. I was not entirely expecting the cellular focus for a physiology course: while the high-level organization of the material is the organ systems of the body (nervous, muscular, cardiovascular, etc), the emphasis in each lecture is the cell-level mechanisms that support the higher-level function:
- How cells maintain homeostasis and chemical balances: via diffusion across cell membranes, cellular gap junctions, and facilitated transport; by gated ion channels and by active pumps.
- How hormones and receptors interact to create sensory feedback loops.
- How graded potentials in the cell membrane lead to action potentials in neurons and muscle cells.
- How calcium regulates the contracting mechanisms of muscle cells, and how calcium is moved in and out of the muscle fibers.
- How various sense organs translate their physical and chemical experiences to the nervous system.
- How the heart’s electrical system is coordinated by pacemaker cells’ unstable resting potentials.
- How gas exchange occurs in the respiratory cycle.
This has been a great class for me to follow both EMT training and Systems Biology courses - perhaps logically it belongs before either of those, but has been a wonderful filling-in experience around the knowledge of systemic failure in emergency situations and of the somewhat-abstracted cellular networks studied in the latter.