As another new semester begins, what better place to begin than the hierarchy of structure in the human body — organ systems, organs, tissues and cells. I hope this doesn’t sound old-fashioned, but it’s a strict hierarchy!

It sounds easy enough, but it’s easy to lose your bearings when you hear statements like “bone tissue has a lot of blood vessels”.  Sure, that’s true — and that’s why bone heals faster than, say, cartilage.  But this does not mean that blood vessels are a part of the bone tissue.  Blood vessels, in fact, are made of tissues like muscle, connective tissue, epithelium. So, if a blood vessel were a part of the bone tissue, then you’d have one tissue that’s part of another tissue — bad news for our hierarchy!