William Aird: Gulliver’s Atlas – Mapping the Evolution of the Vertebrate Red Cell
William Aird, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, shared a post on LinkedIn։
“Gulliver’s Atlas
This may be one of my favorite images in the history of hematology.
In the mid-19th century, British surgeon and microscopist George Gulliver measured red blood cells from an extraordinary range of vertebrates, then drew them side by side at the same scale.
Look closely.
Fish. Amphibians. Reptiles. Birds. Mammals.
Some cells are enormous, others tiny. Some are oval, others round.
Most vertebrate red cells contain a nucleus. Mammalian red cells do not.
What we casually call ‘the red blood cell’ is actually a family of different evolutionary solutions to the same problem: moving respiratory pigment through a circulation.
Gulliver was particularly interested in what he called the ‘vexed question of a nucleus.’
His atlas helps us see just how strange the mammalian solution really is.
We didn’t hide the nucleus.
We lost it.”
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