WILTIMS #81: Do palm it pull his phat is hoc go line

TIL: Beta-thalassemia is a genetic disorder that affects the beta sub-units of the hemoglobin proteins in red blood cells. Hemoglobin are responsible for transporting carbon dioxide and oxygen to and from the lungs, so patients with beta-thalassemia often have symptoms of anemia. The disease is caused by an error in transcription from the DNA to the mRNA of the gene for the beta strand of the protein. The spliceosome, which normally cuts out the useless bits of the genetic transcript and splices back together the useful parts, for one reason or another cannot correctly remove all the fluff, which results in an altered hemoglobin protein. It can take as little as one errant nucleotide out of the over 3 billion that make up the human genome to cause this disease.

Atelectasis is the collapse of part or all of a lung. This has several causes, one being a deficiency of the surfactant secreted by the type II pneumocytes (lung cells) which reduces the surface tension of the fluid coating of the lungs, preventing the alveoli from collapsing. The chief surfactant is dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (which, by the way, my phone initially autocorrected as "do palm it pull his phat is hoc go line").

Atelectasis can be a problem in infants following a premature birth because, though the type II cells start producing surfactant during the 25th week, they don't begin to secrete until the 30th. The treatment is to give the mother glucocorticoids to stimulate surfactant release. Maternal diabetes can be another cause of this condition because high fetal insulin levels inhibit surfactant production. You can treat this by administering a surfactant into the infant's lungs through an intubation setup. The only problem is that the surfactant has a consistency of honey, so in order to coat the whole lung surface, you must pick up the baby and rotate them around, just as if you
were coating a ceramic pot with resin.