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Author interviews > Frederic Martini Interview
Writing from personal experience.
Frederic Martini relates anatomy to everyday life.
Frederic
Martini received his Ph.D from Cornell University in comparative and
functional anatomy. His publications include journal articles, technical
reports, magazine articles, and a book for naturalists about the biology
and geology of tropical islands. He is the coauthor of six undergraduate
texts on anatomy or anatomy and physiology. He is currently on the faculty
of the University of Hawaii and remains affiliated with the Shoals Marine
Laboratory, a joint venture between Cornell University and the University
of New Hampshire. Dr. Martini is a member of the Human Anatomy and Physiology
Society, the American Physiological Society, and the American Assocation
of Anatomists. He is also a member of the National Association of Biology
Teachers, the Society for College Science Teachers, the Society for
Integrative and Comparative Biology, the Western Society of Naturalists,
and the International Society of Vertebrate Morphologists.
BC |
What got you interested in studying comparative and functional
anatomy? How have you carried your Cornell experience into your textbooks?
FM |
From the time I was in kindergarten, I've been interested in
evolution and the way animals "work." My graduate committee
at Cornell consisted of Perry Gilbert, perhaps the most influential
American comparative anatomist of his generation, William Wimsatt, a
comparative histologist and embryologist, and William MacFarland, a
comparative physiologist. My doctoral work was on the comparative pathophysiology
of stress, looking at how the stress response in sharks differed from
that of other vertebrates.
When you are trained to look at things from a comparative
standpoint - whether it's anatomically or physiologically - you are
always aware of the "big picture." Facts and observations
are always organized and filed in that framework. So that's how I build
my textbooks - present the big picture first, and then present the details
in that context. This is really the only way to keep track of the number
of details one encounters in these courses. You can't memorize everything
- you've got to understand the patterns. When teaching, I found that
this approach - create a mental filing system first, then present the
information in a way that it can be filed easily - really helped students
avoid information overload.
BC |
Tell us a bit about your research work with marine life. How
has your research influenced your textbook writing?
FM |
Well, I really have two separate research lives. In the A&P
world, I've been working for the last five years under an NSF grant
working on the development of student-oriented software utilizing the
Visible Human dataset created by the National Library of Medicine.
Meanwhile, I've been doing fieldwork looking at the
respiratory physiology, ecology, and systematics of hagfishes, our most
distant relatives - their ancestors diverged from ours somewhere around
525 million years ago. This work has taken me around the world, given
me the chance to do deep-submersible dives in the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans, and resulted in technical publications that include research
journals, chapters in reference texts, and articles in Scientific American
and other popular magazines.
So I wear two hats. The NSF work keeps me abreast
of the latest media developments and options. The marine work really
has two benefits for my textbook projects - it forces me to keep current
in the physiological literature and it also makes sure that I don't
get too complacent. You can't get a very big ego when you are regularly
subjected to a drubbing by anonymous reviewers.
BC |
You've met A&P students across North America, Australia,
and New Zealand. What advice do you give them about managing the amount
of terminology, facts, and concepts that they must learn in the course?
FM |
There's just too much material to try and memorize it all. I
tell them to keep the big picture in mind, and use it to create a mental
filing system for the information in the course. If you learn to recognize
the major themes and patterns, you can often avoid rote memorization
- or if you forget something on an exam, you can use the patterns to
figure out the correct answer.
I should also note that this is a two-way street,
and students have also told me - in no uncertain terms - what I can
do to make their lives easier. Most of the key pedagogical features
in my texts, including the concept links, concept checks, figure-locator
dots, and 3-level review system, were developed in student focus groups
to address the problems they were encountering in the course. So, when
talking to new students, I make sure that they understand what these
features are for, why and how they were created, and how to use them
to good advantage.
BC |
Your books emphasize the practical relevance of anatomy and
physiology to everyday life. How have you made this point in your textbooks?
FM |
Students come into the course with a lot of practical experience
in this field - they've all had accidents, caught colds, dealt with
sick relatives or friends, and taken medications of one kind or another.
In the text, I've tried to relate the basic information to these kinds
of experiences. In the Applications Manual, I go a bit further and give
them the reference information they need to answer personal health questions,
interpret basic lab tests, and place this information in the larger
context presented in the textbook.
BC |
Your books encourage students to explore resources beyond their
textbook. What reading material (or other sources) do you like to explore
as you are working on your books, and why?
FM |
When I'm working on a new edition, I have one 7-foot bookcase
at my desk that I load with reference books whose identities vary depending
on the book I'm working on. I use these to check myself and answer reviewer
questions. I always work from an annotated copy of the previous edition.
Those annotations include any changes I plan on making based on conversations
or experiences over the intervening years, as well as copies of journal
articles and excerpts from the primary literature that I've flagged
as relevant, plus articles from medical journals that my wife feels
are worth considering.
Without blathering on unduly, I'd list my most important
journal sources as: JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Science,
Nature Medicine, Physiological Reviews, Science and Medicine, and
Developmental Anatomy. In terms of reference volumes for A&P,
I'd cite: Molecular Biology of the Cell, Molecular Genetics, Bloom
and Fawcett's Textbook of Histology, Harrison's Principles of Internal
Medicine, Ganong's and Guyton's Textbooks of Medical Physiology, Human
Development, Patten's Human Embryology, Fundamentals of Neuroscience,
Physiology, and Biophysics, to name but a few.
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