Word: porphyrin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Endless Supply. Testing the substance, the NASA scientists discovered that it was either a porphyrin, a ring molecule or a closely related chemical structure. Significantly, the porphyrin ring molecule with a magnesium atom in the center is chlorophyll...
...strange sickness is incurable and not fully understood. Through an inborn metabolic quirk, the body produces an excess of porphyrins, chemicals that are usually produced only in tiny amounts and seem somehow to be involved with the body's sensitivity to the sun. In some forms of porphyria, skin sensitivity is slight, but the victim suffers severe abdominal pains, bizarre mental disturbances, and sometimes respiratory paralysis. Mrs. Carlson suffers from a form called porphyria cutaneatarda, in which the porphyrin overproduction can be traced to an inherited liver malfunction. Doctors have studied such cases for years, but have only recently...
...knowledge is interesting; but to Mrs. Carlson, it means little that two Harvard Medical School researchers studied porphyria patients to find out whether a major change in the porphyrin content of their skin takes place before or after exposure to sunlight. Dr. J. W. Burnett and Dr. M. A. Pathak examined two victims and three healthy subjects, both after long confinement indoors and after exposure to the sun. In the people with porphyria, output of porphyrin compounds rose sharply after exposure to the light; the others showed no change. Sunlight, the doctors concluded, increases the concentration of porphyrin...
Ultraviolet light, the Harvard researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine, produces photo-sensitization by activating the porphyrin already present in the blood and skin. They suspect that it also increases the production of porphyrin. This is more than medicine has known before about the elusive disease, but it is still far from suggesting a cure. For Mrs. Carlson and her fellow sufferers, the only prescription remains to avoid sunlight like the plague...
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