In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, a listener writes in to tell us about being born 3 months premature likely due to their mom having HELLP syndrome, a variant of preeclampsia, and taking part in early trials for surfactants. Then we discuss why horseshoe crab blood is blue and the exciting generation of a one-electron bond between carbon atoms.
Transcript of this Episode
Deboki Chakravarti: Welcome to Tiny Show and Tell Us, the bonus series where you write in with your favorite science news or factoid, and we read your email aloud and then dive deeper. I'm Deboki Chakravarti and I'm here with my co-host Sam Jones.
Sam Jones: Last time we talked about NASA's laser interferometer space antenna searching for gravitational waves, how glass is a liquid kind of, sort of, not totally. And how milk is fluorescent. A reminder that we are always looking for you to write to us to be featured in one of these episodes. You can email tinymatters@acs.org, or you can fill out this form that's linked in the episode description.
All right, let's hop into it. I can go first this time.
Deboki Chakravarti: Sure.
Sam Jones: My Tiny Show and Tell Us is from listener Kevin. Kevin wrote in saying, "I was born three months premature in 1990. I was one kilogram when I was born." Which I think is 2.2 pounds.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Jones: So tiny.
Deboki Chakravarti: I know.
Sam Jones: "The reason I was so preemie has always fascinated me. My mother had HELLP syndrome. I believe it's a super rare complication of preeclampsia. Preeclampsia can lead to eclampsia, which can lead to HELLP syndrome. There is so much focus on prenatal care that many people haven't heard of it. Because I was so preemie, I was part of the clinical trials to get surfactant approved. There's so much more I could say, but on to my second fun fact."
All right, I'm now out what ...
Deboki Chakravarti: Now it's Sam. Sam is going to tell us things.
Sam Jones: Yeah. Now it's me again. I'm going to come to that second fun fact in a few minutes, because first I want to talk about HELLP syndrome, preeclampsia, eclampsia, surfactants, all that stuff.
I actually didn't know the difference between preeclampsia and eclampsia, but they are both pregnancy-related high blood pressure disorders. In preeclampsia, the mom's high blood pressure reduces blood supply to the fetus, which is obviously very scary. Then eclampsia is when pregnant people with preeclampsia have seizures, maybe slip into a coma. All of it is very scary for everyone.
Deboki Chakravarti: Right.
Sam Jones: Yeah, both are very serious for mom and baby. How does it happen? We don't really know, which is unfortunately typical for things related to women's health and/or pregnancy.
But yeah, Kevin mentioned that his mom had HELLP syndrome. That stands for hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets syndrome. It's a life-threatening pregnancy complication that is considered to be a variant of preeclampsia. Kevin also mentioned that he was part of clinical trials to get surfactants approved. Surfactants are substances that reduce surface tension in the lungs, which will actually keep the air sacks in the lungs from collapsing, which is really, really important in premature babies who have not had their lungs fully developed. Today there are a bunch of surfactants approved for us in premature infants to prevent something called respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS, which is I think the leading cause of complications in babies that are born prematurely.
Deboki Chakravarti: That's really amazing. That's really cool that-
Sam Jones: Yeah. Was in a trial.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. It's not cool that his mother and him had to go through what must have been such a terrifying birth experience, but that's really cool that they were able to do the trial and figure out how to help babies in this condition.
I think I mentioned this to you. My dad was also born super premature. This was in the '50s. I think he was also three months premature.
Sam Jones: Wow.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. He was tiny. They actually didn't think that he was alive. It was really an hour I think after he was born, one of his aunts or something saw his pinky move and was like, "Oh, he's alive."
Sam Jones: Oh my gosh.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. At that point, my grandfather I guess basically completely took over and was like ... Because my grandfather was a chemist and he set up basically these super sterile conditions to take care of him. Because this was the '50s in India, I don't think there were neonatal units, they do so much incredible work to help babies in these conditions. They do so much. He had to take a lot of that on.
Sam Jones: Wow.
Deboki Chakravarti: Because I think my grandmother was also recovering. I don't remember, I don't know if we know the circumstances that caused her to deliver so early. She was also having to recover. Yeah.
Sam Jones: Amazing.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: Amazing that your dad ... Yeah. Amazing. Kevin's story is amazing, your dad's story is amazing.
Deboki Chakravarti: You wouldn't look at him and be like, "You were born premature." You'd be like, "Yeah, you were born."
Sam Jones: It's incredible.
Deboki Chakravarti: I think when you hear the stories of how we figured out how to help preemie babies, it's incredible how much progress we've been able to make. And like I said, these units, now people know so much more about how to help babies in such a vulnerable place.
Sam Jones: Yeah.
Deboki Chakravarti: And also, to help their parents because that's such a scary thing to have to go through. In those early days of you're just trying to help your baby survive.
Sam Jones: Yeah.
Deboki Chakravarti: I think it's incredible that Kevin was able to be part of that.
Sam Jones: I know. It's amazing. Kevin, thank you for sharing that. Also, how cool that you were part of a trial that ultimately led to a bunch of surfactants being approved.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: Pretty early days with surfactants. Yeah, you're here and you're writing into us, so excellent.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: I want to get to Kevin's second fun fact. Kevin wrote, "Actually, my favorite random science fact. Did you know iron is not the only oxygen-carrying metal used in blood? Horseshoe crabs use copper, so their blood is blue. Because of their immune system being only innate and very reactive, their blood is used in pharmaceutical testing."
Deboki Chakravarti: Oh.
Sam Jones: I did know some of that because I feel like horseshoe crabs and pharmaceutical testing got a lot of airtime a couple years ago, there were a lot of stories about it. But yeah, horseshoe crabs, they use a copper-based protein called hemocyanin to bind oxygen in the blood and that gives it its blue color, as opposed to the red of human blood that's due to iron-based hemoglobin.
Horseshoe crab blood is very popular and very helpful in pharmaceutical safety testing because it contains this protein called limulus amebocyte lysate that I guess is highly reactive to bacterial substances called endotoxins that can be super dangerous to humans should they enter a drug. In terms of safety testing, the blood from horseshoe crabs is like gold kind of.
Deboki Chakravarti: Wow. That's really neat. I actually didn't know that they were used so much for safety testing. They're the gold standard. Wow. Well, that was really cool, Kevin. Thank you so much for these two facts.
Sam Jones: I know, a two-parter.
Deboki Chakravarti: Well, Sam, I am coming to you with a message from listener Rubi who wrote, "They recently found out how to create a one-electron bond."
Sam Jones: Oh.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. I'll admit, at first when I read this I was like, "I don't know if I entirely understand what this means." That's because apparently I have forgotten a lot of chemistry. For anyone else who has also forgotten, we're talking about covalent bonds. This is when two atoms share a pair of electrons. It's always a pair pretty much, that's at least what we're talking about most of the time. It's the basis of most organic compounds, or these carbons, hydrogens, other molecules, them sharing this pair of electrons.
People have wondered for a while, could you get a covalent bond that has a single unpaired electron? This was the result of a proposal from Linus Pauling, who was a chemist in the early 20th Century. In 1931, he argued that this kind of bond would be possible, but it would probably be weaker than our paired electron covalent bond because it's not as stable. One of the problems is that if you get a bond that's not as stable, that molecule is going to be more reactive, so it's going to be harder to study them.
People have been wondering, "Hey, can we actually observe a single-electron bond?" They've been observed, but they haven't been found in molecules that involve carbon and hydrogen. Scientists have been trying to figure out, "Could we find a one-electron bond between carbons?" Recently, researchers at Hokkaido University found a single-electron bond between two carbon atoms, and a fairly relatively stable covalent bond. They did this by doing a bunch of chemistry. They looked at a molecule called hexaphenylethane, or they looked at derivatives of it, because apparently these molecules, they have a part of their structure that's able to stabilize this type of bond. In particular, what they know about these molecules is they have a pair of electrons and a covalent bond between two carbon atoms and that those electrons are pretty stretched out.
They put this compound through an oxidation reaction with iodine, and then the result were these dark violet crystals that they could study with X-ray diffraction and other different tests. They could see that the carbon atoms were really, really close to each other. Close enough to suggest that they were actually sharing a single electron. From there, they did a bunch of work to confirm that that was the case.
Sam Jones: Whoa. Very interesting. I also was thinking how would you go about ever figuring that out? The originality in design is pretty impressive.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. I think it's always this part of chemistry is the part where I have to remember where to start to stop thinking.
Sam Jones: Yeah.
Deboki Chakravarti: I have to accept that this phrase makes sense and not ask too many more questions. Science is all about asking questions, but sometimes you ask too many questions and the thing that you understand slips out of your brain.
Sam Jones: Yeah.
Deboki Chakravarti: This is where we are with this chemistry, where it's really cool, and also I have to just hold on to the parts that I understand because otherwise-
Sam Jones: It's so complicated.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, it's so slippery, but it's really neat. Thank you so much to Rubi for sharing it because now I'm like, yeah, one-electron bond.
Sam Jones: Right.
Deboki Chakravarti: That's neat. I couldn't find ... I'm sure there are potential applications. When I was looking up these results, I was curious about whether or not we know what the application for this is. Mostly, the applications I saw were about understanding more parts of chemistry. I don't know yet what we'll do with this knowledge, but I'm really curious. Because it's true, a lot of these things that we do find out in this aspect of chemistry and physics, they're so fundamental to how molecules are put together that I think they translate into applications that are so downstream that I might not even fully realize they're grounded in this one-electron bond.
Sam Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of those things where it's such basic, fundamental-type research that the applications are probably beyond what you can even comprehend at this point.
Deboki Chakravarti: Right, yeah. But somewhere out there, someone who's listening and who's like, "Oh, I know what I'm going to do with the one-electron bond."
Sam Jones: Yeah. Yeah, can't wait to see it. Do something good with it, though. Let's do something positive.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. Well, thanks to Kevin and Rubi for submitting to Tiny Show and Tell Us, a bonus episode from Tiny Matters created by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude.
Sam Jones: You can send us an email to be featured in a future Tiny Show and Tell Us episode at tinymatters@acs.org. Or you can fill out this form that's linked in the episode description. We'll see you next time.
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