the.com/placenta
The only organ your body builds, uses once, then throws away like an invoice.
means The temporary organ that grows inside the uterus during pregnancy to pass oxygen and nutrients from mother to fetus and carry waste back out.
from From Latin placenta meaning 'flat cake,' which itself borrowed from Greek plakoenta/plakous — the same word used for an actual flat cake or wafer. Anatomists in the 1500s and 1600s, naming organs by what they resembled, looked at the broad, round, flattened shape of the afterbirth and reached for the bakery rather than the body — so an organ built from scratch every pregnancy ended up named after dessert.
- origin
- latin for flat cake
- job
- smuggles oxygen, blocks most toxins, bluffs the immune system
- genetics
- grown from fetal cells, not maternal ones
- afterlife
- some cultures bury it, others encapsulate and eat it