Counseling in medical genetics / Sheldon C. Reed.

  • Sheldon Clark Reed
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Counseling in medical genetics / Sheldon C. Reed. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    chapter 18 BLOOD GENETICS JL/eath is the price of ignorance in blood group genetics! The technician who matches blood types can do so without genetics, but her ritual is precisely determined by the genes. When Jansky and Moss independently gave opposite numbers to the same blood groups, people died from transfusions of the wrong gene products. This fatal confusion was eliminated by the substitution of the A-B-O letter system. The confusion of termi¬ nology that existed then was as nothing compared with what it is now for the Rhesus factors. Fortunately, the confusion is now academic and results in no deaths, we hope. It is interesting that while predictions about the heredity of the blood groups are practically infallible, the mature red blood cells, which obey the mendelian laws so nicely, have no power of reproduction, nor do they have nuclei or genes present. The story is that the immature red blood cells once did have genes present that controlled the production of the specific anti¬ gens, which exist in the cell as long as it lives. There are prob¬ ably not many chemical steps between the gene and the antigen. Here is an opportunity for an enterprising biochemist to make his name and fame along the route from gene to antigen! A person does not have antibodies in his blood that can agglutinate his own antigens. But he has all the rest of the anti- 137