Red Blood Cells

One morning before dawn aboutseven years ago, George Rathmann drove to his office in a Thousand Oaks industrial park to catch up on his work. Rathmann, chairman of Amgen Inc., noticed that the lights were on in one of the biotechnology company's laboratories and concluded that a careless worker had forgotten to shut them off. So he strolled over to the building to do it himself. But inside the laboratory, Rathmann recalled, was Fu-Kuen Lin, a Taiwan-born scientist with a Ph.D.

A genetically engineered drug expected to relieve the chronic anemia suffered by thousands of people with kidney disease was approved for sale Thursday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The drug also has shown promise in treating anemia in AIDS and cancer patients, but it was not yet approved for those uses by the government. The announcement capped an eight-year effort by Amgen Inc. of Thousand Oaks to bring to market what is expected to be one of biotechnology's first blockbuster drugs.

One of red blood cells' remarkable characteristics, among many, is their ability to deform and squish their way through blood vessels -- even blood vessels tinier than they are -- to deliver oxygen throughout the body.  Scientists believe this flexibility contributes to red blood cells' ability to circulate for an average of 120 days. Now researchers at the University of North Carolina have synthesized red blood cell-sized and -shaped nanoparticles that mimic this flexibility and longevity.

A new biological test to detect exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals has been developed by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and tested on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and on blood drawn from firefighters who battled the blaze at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union. The new assay monitors changes in red blood cells. It is considered as accurate as current techniques, but can be performed much more quickly, according to chemist Ronald H.

IT is 4:01 a.m. The red glow of the digital clock is clearly visible through the clear plastic walls surrounding my bed. It is mid-March, and the Boston Marathon is more than a month away. If everything works as planned, I will finish it in less than three hours. For several nights now, I've been sleeping in a giant plastic bubble as part of an unscientific but increasingly common experiment on athletic performance.

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

I can't really pinpoint when my dad first started bringing home the powdery mixture, as white as sugar and as fine as beach sand. He'd step into the kitchen and sprinkle it -- three grams at a time -- into some orange juice and stir to the point it crested the edge of the glass. He'd serve it with breakfast. One glass for each of us. Drink up. Had I been older, I might have protested. But I was just a kid, living in an era when the only things you were supposed to avoid eating were paper and dirt.

Sickle cell anemia causes pain, fatigue and delayed growth, all because of a lack of enough healthy red blood cells. And yet genetic mutations that cause it — recessive genes for the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin protein — have survived natural selection because they also seem to provide a natural defense against malaria. Scientists have long known this, and they have long wondered how it worked. In a paper published this month in the journal Science, researchers describe their look into how mutated hemoglobin genes defend their cells against attacks by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum . Study lead author Marek Cyrklaff, an electron microscopist and molecular biologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, explained the results.

Researchers have for the first time performed a successful bone marrow transplant to cure sickle cell disease in adults, a feat that could expand the procedure to more of the 70,000 Americans with the disease -- and possibly some other diseases as well. About 200 children have been cured of sickle cell with transplants, but the procedure was considered too harsh for adults with severe sickle cell disease. Now a team from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University is reporting today in the New England Journal of Medicine that it has developed a much-less-toxic transplant procedure and used it to cure nine of the first 10 patients studied.

When Katherine Bibeau's body arrived at the morgue, she was covered in large, deep purplish-black bruises. But she had not been beaten, Coroner Gary Watts discovered. Rather, she had massive internal bleeding after receiving an unconventional treatment for multiple sclerosis.