Chapter 2 



FATS 



W 



e must now see what happens to the fats in a damaged cell. 

 This means that we must consider, in the first place, the conditions 

 that upset the metabolism of fat in a broad sort of way, then we 

 must try to find out how much and what kind of fat accumulates 

 under such circumstances and finally, we shall select recent dis- 

 coveries that help us to explain the meaning of these changes. 



WHAT MAKES THE CELL FATTY"? 



For a long time we have known that certain organs become very 

 fatty as the result of disease. The liver, kidneys and heart often are 

 affected in this way, and experience has shown that whenever this 

 happens, the individual has been exposed to severe infection, in- 

 toxication with one or other of a large variety of poisons, a restricted 

 oxygen supply or possibly inanition. Sometimes the patient is over- 

 nourished, in which case his connective tissues are overloaded with 

 fat and it would almost seem, too, as if the organs were participating 

 in a generalised adiposity. 



How to assemble such a wide array of causes into a few generali- 

 sations has vexed investigators for many years until the ingenious 

 experiments of Lebedev (1883) and Rosenfeld (1902, 1903) and 

 the modern versions of Dible, Best and their collaborators effec- 

 tively sorted out the difficulties. The details of this era of research 

 are given by Cameron ( 1 952) . All that we need do now is to remind 

 the reader that the fat depots were "labelled" by feeding animals 

 with an easily-detectable foreign fat and the organs were then 

 damaged by a poison such as phosphorus. As a result the cells of the 

 affected organ became stuffed with fat and when this was analysed 

 it turned out to be chiefly foreign fat. Without doubt this fat has 

 been brought in the blood from the depots to the organs whose cells 

 can no longer use it up or prepare it for transport to other localities 

 because they have been poisoned. 



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