Episode: 4027
Title: HPR4027: Today I learnt (2023-12-18)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4027/hpr4027.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:49:21

---

This is Hacker Public Radio, episode 4,000, and 27 for Tuesday the 9th of January 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Today I Learned 2023-1218.
It is part of the series today I Learned.
It is hosted by Dave Morris, and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is three random things I discovered in the recent past.
Hello everybody, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Dave Morris, and I'm doing a show in the series today I Learned.
I just noticed my notes say two random things, but I've made three random things, so it's
very random indeed.
So yeah, like I said, I've got three items I want to talk about.
I'm a bit on the border of making these two complex.
So I'm trying to reduce the complexity a bit, but still give you the gist of it.
This is not my great skill.
I tend to go off down rabbit holes very easily.
So I'm covering the two first two items together, and I put them under the same heading.
And first part of it is a cure for sickle cell anemia.
I'll tell you a little bit about that in a minute.
And the other one is about fetal hemoglobin, fetal being attaining to a fetus, which I'll again talk about in a bit more detail.
I started putting this together on the 18th of December.
The plan was to be able to turn them around within a day, but of course it didn't happen.
And also I got snagged by words.
I'm afraid this demonstrates how easily my brain is diverted and different channels.
Many of the words that I'm using here have got alternative UK and UK Commonwealth spellings versus the USA spellings.
I'm using the USA versions throughout.
I personally prefer the UK versions with diphthongs, and I've mentioned what diphthongs are in case you care.
And ligatures, which are strange, strange things about writing and spelling.
And the word fetal is traditionally spelled with F-O-E-T-A-L, but the O and the E is stuck together, which is called a ligature.
But I was trained this way, I was taught this way, because I'm come from an era where that was the common thing, so forgive me.
But I'm trying to to update my brain a little bit.
So I've written two TLDRs if you don't want to read anymore.
And the first one is there's a potential cure, which has been approved in the UK in November 2023 for the blood disorder called sickle cell anemia.
The second TLDR is that the oxygen carrying pigment in fetuses in the blood, that is, is different from that in adults and changes after birth.
So those are my two discoveries, if you like, things I was not aware of.
So I tend to look at all things relating to science these days.
I was trained in biology, but I haven't really done anything with my BSC degree in zoology.
I was listening to a podcast the other day where the subject of sickle cell anemia was discussed.
Now, in my degree, we did cover sickle cell anemia because it is a, those are called sickle cell disease.
It's an inherited blood disorder.
It results in anemia, which means you don't have enough oxygen carrying capacity in your blood.
And it has lots of complications that can be very painful and so on.
It's caused by, and it kind of think it can be fatal too.
It can be, it's caused by an abnormality in the hemoglobin, and I've got an item about hemoglobin in a minute.
Sickle cell disease is quite complex, and I'm not going to go into it here because I'm already spending a lot of time on this, I think.
The Wikipedia page that I've linked to has got lots of useful information, but it's, it's quite detailed.
So, but the first part of it can give you some sort of insight.
Let me try and just mention very, very briefly that the problem with the hemoglobin in the blood cells, the red blood cells,
means that they change shape from a thing a bit like a doughnut, but with our, an actual hole, just an indentation in the block.
Two strange twisted things that don't have the correct surface area for transfer of oxygen and things, I think.
And they also tend to clot quite easily because they're wrong shape to slide through blood vessels.
So, the new treatment has been developed using genetic manipulation.
This CRISPR thing, which you might have heard about, and I've given a link here.
I could do shows on this, if anybody wanted, but the cure has been to modify the stem cells in the bone marrow,
so that they produce more fetal hemoglobin, which is called hemoglobin F.
And red blood cells with hemoglobin F don't form the sickle shape.
Things to take away are babies don't have sickle cell anemia until they're growing, they're 7 months old,
if they have the potential that is.
And hemoglobin F is what helps to prevent it.
So, I then digress into what's a fetus and it's the unborn offspring of an animal that develops from the embryo.
And hemoglobin is the oxygen carrying protein in red blood cells.
In the fetus it's hemoglobin F, and the fetal form of hemoglobin is replaced by the adult form after birth in the first two to four months.
That did not know at all, I don't think we were.
I'm sure it was known in the time that I learned about these things, but it wasn't mentioned, it wasn't the big deal as far as the BSC zoologist were concerned.
Here's the thing though, hemoglobin F is there because a developing fetus has got a challenge to get oxygen.
So, it's inside the mother, its blood supply is passing by the mother's blood supply.
And the mother's blood supply has got hemoglobin of its own which has grabbed the oxygen from the air and is carrying it about.
What the fetus has to do is to grab the oxygen from the mother's blood cells.
So, it must have some sort of stronger affinity with it, you know, you think it is being stronger if you like.
So, the quote from Wikipedia is hemoglobin F has a different composition than adult forms of hemoglobin,
allowing it to bind or attach to oxygen more strongly.
This in turn enables the developing fetus to retrieve oxygen from the mother's bloodstream which occurs through the placenta found in the mother's uterus.
So, if you're not trained in this area and like me haven't really done much in it for the past 50 years or something,
the thought that how does the fetus get the oxygen from the mother?
There is no sort of donation process, it's just that it's passing by and the fetus has to grab it.
So, it needs this stronger, more strongly binding hemoglobin to do it.
The change from fetal to adult hemoglobin, I've said here, has been known for about 75 plus years, but it passed me by.
Which is why I was quite excited to discover that human physiology has done this fantastic stuff.
It looks like sickle cell anemia can be controlled, if not cured, and it's done to fetal hemoglobin that it works.
The other thing I was taught didn't put this in the notes actually,
but the thing I was taught when I was doing my degree was that it's prevalent sickle cell disease is prevalent in Africa.
I'm sure if that's strictly true, but that was why I was taught at the time.
But it has a side effect, which means that people with it are less prone to catching malaria.
Because malaria is a parasite injected by mosquitoes, which it's an organism,
which resides inside blood cells, inside the red blood cells,
and it does not get on well with the sickle shaped one.
So, there is less prone to catching malaria if you have sickle cell disease,
but that's not really much of a cure for malaria.
Okay, so I've given a lot of links here for those two items, and hopefully you'll...
If you're interested, you'll find some good avenues to follow.
So, I dated this particular show as the 18th of December,
and the reason I stuck with that was now the 1st of January, 2024,
by the time I get to it.
The reason I did that was because the Pearl scripting language came into being,
the first GitHub commit appeared on December the 18th, 1987.
So, that day is Pearl's birthday, and you might know,
I'm a long time devotee of Pearl, because...
Well, probably because I found it amazingly useful back when I discovered it,
and started using it quite a long time ago now, not 1987.
Maybe in the 1990s? 1990s?
And being a long time devotee of Pearl,
and now it had a birthday on the 19th December the 18th,
because that's the same day that I have a birthday.
The only thing is, I'm about twice as old as Pearl, for what that's worth.
Looking at the GitHub, which I've linked to,
it's quite interesting to look behind the original ideas that led to Pearl.
It was thinking behind it was,
well, we've got Bath or Shet or other shells,
and we've got all the goodies in there, and we've got Orc and we've got Said.
So, it'd be quite nice if we could merge them all together
and have a sort of generic language,
and also improve on what's of a point in the other one.
That was what I was told was the origin of Pearl.
I think it's moved on quite a lot since then.
It's regarded as being obsolete now,
but still quite a lot of people working in the area,
getting jobs and being employed for many, many years, right, Pearl.
My brain can't cope with learning another language.
This stage of my life, so I'm sticking with it.
All right, then, that's it.
I hope you found some of that interesting.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording or cast,
then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by
an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive, and our Sync.net.
On this otherwise stated, today's show is released
under Creative Commons' Attribution 4.0 International License.