Humans - just another animal
Alice Roberts
Delegates swarmed to this year's keynote speech at BSAVA Congress. Dr Alice Roberts spoke to a packed out lecture hall on embryonic development and the connections between animals and humans.
Dr Roberts is a clinical anatomist and professor of public engagement at the University of Birmingham. She has also presented a number of BBC 2 programmes including Origins of Us and Prehistoric Autopsy.
She says she fully grasped the links between animals and humans the first time she dissected a dog when she started teaching veterinary anatomy at the University of Bristol. At this moment she realised "humans are just another animal".
During her lecture, Dr Roberts discussed the gradual discoveries and developments leading up to our understanding of embryonic development today.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, she explained, was the first to discover that inherited information is held in the chromosomes, through his research with fruit flies.
Leading on from this, she added, a team of scientists in 1986 found that hocks genes in vertebrates are essentially the same as those in fruit flies, indicating that humans share an ancestor with the fruit fly.
Dr Roberts also compared images of a five-week-old human foetus with that of a shark, pointing out that gill arches are visible on both at this stage.
These links between humans and animals, she says, are "positive and heart-warming", reflecting our "intimate connection" with animals.
She concluded: We are not separate from nature, but a part of it."
Two independent vets have launched a podcast to help owners strengthen their bond with pets. Dr Maggie Roberts and Dr Vanessa Howie, who have worked in both veterinary practice and major charities, are keen to use their experience to enable people to give pets a better life.
