World Kidney Day: top ten list

Nephron Power has a fine post on the top ten reasons the kidney’s are the best organs. Here is my riff:

1. A lot of organs can secrete hormones. The kidneys can turn water into stone.
2. Other organs have epithelial cells. Kidneys have podocytes.
3. Orthopods can cast bones. The kidneys can cast red cells, white cells, brown mud and hyalin!
4. Acute renal success!
5. Recombinant EPO causes thrombotic complications, erythropoietin from the kidney, pure gold.
6. The adrenal gland looks like a hat!
7. The lack of randomized controlled data means that all of the kidney’s secrets are still, secret.
8. Technology can not duplicate the function of any other organ as well as the kidney. 
9. They are the key part of the machine that turns “the red wine of Shiraz into urine“
10. They have the best diss, “You got a problem with ‘dis? Well you can just piss off.”

The lungs serve to maintain the composition of the extracellular fluid with respect to oxygen and carbon dioxide, and with this their duty ends. The responsibility for maintaining the composition of this fluid in respect to other constituents devolves on the kidneys. It is no exaggeration to say that the composition of the body fluids is determined not by what the mouth takes in but what the kidneys keep: they are the master chemists of our internal environment. Which, so to speak, they manufacture in reverse by working it over some fifteen times a day. When among other duties, they excrete the ashes of our body fires, or remove from the blood the infinite variety of foreign substances that are constantly being absorbed from our indiscriminate gastrointestinal tracts, these excretory operations are incidental to the major task of keeping our internal environments in the ideal, balanced state.