Ageing in Human Red Cells 239 



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DISCUSSION 



Krohn: I have got three questions altogether; two for Dr. Mollison. 

 The first is : do the red cells of infants and children or young animals 

 age or have a different life-span from the mature cells of the adult 

 person " 



The second one was : in the slide you showed of the chromium-treated 

 red cells, the cells seemed to be normal for some length of time and 

 then suddenly were destroyed; is it possible that your treatment with 

 chromium altered the proteins of the cells so that they became im- 

 munologically incompatible and that this sudden removal of the cells 

 was the development of an immunity reaction so many days after their 

 introduction ? 



And the final question, for Dr Parkes, was that I wondered whether 

 the choice of red cells was very convenient ? They have not got any 

 nuclei and they are not really very good cells in a sense, I should have 

 thought, to work on. 



Mollison: As to the first question, the life-span of the red cells in 

 newborn infants is more or less the same as that of adults — although 

 there may be a proportion with a shorter life-span; I hope the treatment 

 of red cells with relatively large doses of chromium does not make them 

 antigenic ; one of the cases I showed was that of my own cells in my 

 own circulation! 



As for red cells being a bad choice, I quite agree that they should not 

 be regarded as necessarily behaving in the same way as nucleated cells. 



Krohn: You could, perhaps, in freezing experiments anyway, use 

 suspensions of, say, the epidermal cells. Something of that sort might 

 also provide suitable material for Lovelock. 



Parkes: I think that the attraction of the red cell to the physical 

 chemist is its sharp end-point in haemolysis. 



Mollison: I was not quite clear what you meant by "not good for 

 ageing experiments", Dr. Krohn. In what sense? 



Krohn: It is so atypical a cell that it seems to me you want a cell 

 which has got a nucleus inside it. A lot of these changes that take place 

 in the red cell may depend on the fact that it has not a got nucleus. 



