• Question: Is it true that when you are are very early baby in the womb you have two hearts with two chambers with then fuse into one heart with four chambers and is it true that scientists have managed to unfuse frogs hearts and give them two hearts and see them live?

    Asked by Ferris Bueller clone #47 to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      I’m not too familiar with embryo development, but according to Wikipedia it does seem like two tubes are initially formed to allow blood flow through the embryo. One for oxygenated blood, one tube to carry away the deoxygenated blood. Eventually they fuse and partition to form the heart with four chambers. So you don’t really start off with two hearts, just two very primitive tubes that act like a heart until the real thing develops!

      I haven’t heard of the experiment with frogs being given two hearts, sorry.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      No, me neither re the frog experiment. But I often look at my children (particularly when they do something out of the ordinary) and wonder how it is possible for all of the complexity they have become to have started off as two cells and a bit of DNA!

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      There is a frog heart experiment performed by a German scientist called Otto Loewi in 1921 who dissected beating hearts out of frogs one with the Vagus nerve attached (the one that controls heart rate) and one without. He wanted to research the chemical that controlled heart rate, which we now know to be called acetylcholine.

      I cannot find one that unfuses two hearts though, and I really have looked!

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