Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [42]
“Whaddya see?” I asked Al. “See any red?”
Silence for a minute as he fiddled with the focus, and then, with a sense of ceremony, he handed his microscope to me.
I was surprised by what I saw, which pleased me most. My first impression was not of color, as I’d expected, but of translucent shapes: countless clear granules where I thought I’d see brilliant scarlet beads. They had a slushy appearance, as if I were looking at ice-frosted glass. At the edges, however, where cells were piled up, there was an unmistakable rosy tinge.
I was completely satisfied with the demonstration. Al wasn’t. “Can you spare another drop?” he asked.
Al then disappeared with a new slide, freshly smeared with a touch of my blood. A few minutes later, he hollered from his back porch: “Come take a look! We’ve got a better microscope!”
Al had dug up a modern-day compound microscope, which he’d positioned atop his washing machine in the sun-drenched room. “This light is so perfect,” he exclaimed.
With magnification set at about five hundred times—more than twice that of his Leeuwenhoek model—I could now see hundreds of my red blood cells, sharp and delineated. Most were stuck together, huddled as if for protection from my huge peering eye. But a few lay flat, perfect specimens. And if I wasn’t mistaken, I also spied a couple of cells near the top of the slide with a different profile—white blood cells.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Al said.
“Very cool.”
“It’s just too bad that there wasn’t anything crawling around in that water drop. But we can try that again, too—have a better look with this ’scope.” Al surveyed his overgrown property through the back screen door. “There’s got to be some scummy old water back here someplace,” he said. “Let’s see now . . .” With that, he set forth, blazing a trail through the wilds of his Berkeley backyard, in search of his own very little animals.
That our blood absorbs fresh air within the lungs and then circulates it throughout the body was first proved during Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s lifetime. Exactly how the blood carries out this task of transporting and discharging oxygen remained a mystery, however, for another two centuries. In studies conducted in the mid-1860s, a German pathologist discovered that the main component of the red blood cell is a complex protein he named hemoglobin, which gives blood its characteristic color. If you stop and think about it, the concept is counterintuitive: Blood is bright red because it is fully oxygenated, yet oxygen is, by definition, colorless. But this scientist proved that hemoglobin is actually a functioning pigment, the precise shade of which is determined by how much breath, so to speak, the cell is holding. To picture how it works, think of a balloon not yet inflated. It’s deep burgundy in color. Now blow. As it fills with air, its color is stretched and the burgundy brightens to cherry red. This is hemoglobin in action.
Over the past hundred years a series of scientists have unveiled further clues as to the workings of the red cell (also known as an erythrocyte, i-RITH-row-site, from the Greek for “red,” erythrós). With its supple disk shape, the erythrocyte can dock next to other cells in tissue throughout the body to perform the equivalent of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It not only breathes oxygen