Dr. Donald McMillan
Comparative Vertebrate Histology
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Position: Professor Emeritus Office: Collip Room 112 Phone: 519 661-2111 ext. 82640 Fax: 519 661-3935 Email: dmcmilla@uwo.ca |
Research Statement
For the past several years I have been preparing a series of textbooks on the histology, including ultrastructure, of fishes: cyclostomes, elasmobranchs, and teleosts. Since histology is a visual field, I have used large numbers of previously published illustrations gleaned from many diverse journals. This has become economically feasible with the development of stored images on compact discs, This project celebrates the twilight of the golden age of descriptive morphology and should rescue many classic illustrations from the dust and obscurity of library stacks, making them once again accessible to the present-day scientist. The section on the female reproductive systems is complete and has been been published.
In the Department, there is an enormous and valuable collection of microscope slides of animal material; these slides are responding to the ravages of time and are slowly deteriorating. At present I am engaged in recording photomicrographs of the materials used when I taught a course in comparative vertebrate histology. Not only should this collection of thousands of digital photographs be useful for students in biology who are interested in the disappearing discipline of cellular morphology, it should preserve images from these slides for subsequent generations.
