>Julius No came up tough. Abandoned by his parents, he fell in with criminals—and eventually it caught up with him. One night, an assassin aimed carefully at his chest, just left of center, and shot him through the heart. Or so he thought. But Julius didn’t die. He went on to medical school, and became an early nemesis of a certain spy named James Bond. Dr. No is a fascinating character, but what surely escapes most fans of Ian Fleming’s novels is that the villain’s miraculous survival reveals a facet of human anatomy that usually remains hidden—a radical asymmetry of left and right.
>The difference between our front and back is so obvious that we rarely think about it; we simply don’t have eyes in the back of our head. Top and bottom are obvious, too. Inside, though, asymmetry is everywhere. Heart and stomach lie to the left, the liver to the right. Even our lungs aren’t truly paired; the right lung has three lobes, the left two. And anyone who’s had appendicitis can tell you about the chirality of our guts. The searing abdominal pain radiates from the lower right, not the left.
>Dr. No survived because his assassin quite reasonably assumed the heart would lie to the left, but his victim was among the very tiny fraction of people who are born with their organs reversed, a mirror image called situs inversus. And while Dr. No is fictional, situs inversus did save the life of at least one real-world gunshot victim, described in a 2020 case study titled, “[Shot in the Chest, Saved by the Heart](https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(20)32422-3/fulltext).”
1 Comment
Here’s an excerpt from the article
>Julius No came up tough. Abandoned by his parents, he fell in with criminals—and eventually it caught up with him. One night, an assassin aimed carefully at his chest, just left of center, and shot him through the heart. Or so he thought. But Julius didn’t die. He went on to medical school, and became an early nemesis of a certain spy named James Bond. Dr. No is a fascinating character, but what surely escapes most fans of Ian Fleming’s novels is that the villain’s miraculous survival reveals a facet of human anatomy that usually remains hidden—a radical asymmetry of left and right.
>The difference between our front and back is so obvious that we rarely think about it; we simply don’t have eyes in the back of our head. Top and bottom are obvious, too. Inside, though, asymmetry is everywhere. Heart and stomach lie to the left, the liver to the right. Even our lungs aren’t truly paired; the right lung has three lobes, the left two. And anyone who’s had appendicitis can tell you about the chirality of our guts. The searing abdominal pain radiates from the lower right, not the left.
>Dr. No survived because his assassin quite reasonably assumed the heart would lie to the left, but his victim was among the very tiny fraction of people who are born with their organs reversed, a mirror image called situs inversus. And while Dr. No is fictional, situs inversus did save the life of at least one real-world gunshot victim, described in a 2020 case study titled, “[Shot in the Chest, Saved by the Heart](https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(20)32422-3/fulltext).”