Next to me stands Peter Claes, a modern pioneer just like Vesalius.
Tell me, Peter; what makes you a modern pioneer?
I wouldn't compare myself to Vesalius to begin with
but we did recently develop a quite revolutionary technique
that is able to link our facial appearance – how we look like – with our underlying DNA.
So imagine you find some DNA on a crime scene for example,
if you're an investigator, in the form of blood or hair or saliva
and you want to figure out how the person looks like that was at the scene.
We are able today to tell aspects about this person in terms of his face.
We can show the face belonging to the DNA.
Wow just like CSI on TV.
That's true in a way. You find a lot of those shows these days on television
and it’s quite interesting to note that these shows are not telling us the reality
what we can do today, but they do give us a hint about the future,
in the sense that they are using techniques during their investigations that people
now at universities are investigating to solve.
So for me it's a quite interesting outlet for people
to know what it's all about and the nice thing also is they can see the societal value
of crime scene investigation because you're not helping a company becoming richer,
but actually you're helping someone, a victim or a family of a victim,
to find closure about what happened.
So today, for your research, do you have to do dissections
like they used to in this room?
No, I don't. Actually I'm an engineer and not an anatomist.
I'm not a doctor, a medical doctor. So I can't even perform a dissection.
Luckily for me, other engineers have developed technology
that is able to image the anatomy of a person without having to dissect the person.
We have medical image scanners such as MRI and CT.
This scanning equipment allows us to visualise the anatomy
of a particular person, even a particular patient
so we can be more specific towards a patient, in treatment planning for example.
And thanks to these images we're actually able to investigate
the relation of the human anatomy on the one hand with other information on the other hand,
Which, in my case, is our DNA.
So thanks to these images I'm able to investigate the correlation
between DNA and the facial anatomy of humans.
In the future we will also educate students in a different way
by showing them a virtual human atlas which is again a virtual visualization,
even in 3D, of the human anatomy from which they can learn
so they don't have to dissect corpses any more.
Thank you very much, Peter. That was fascinating.
The pleasure was all mine. Thank you.