Love, Lust, and Carbon Monoxide
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Sweet: Glam Rockers and Biochemists
In 1978, a glam rock band from Great Britain called Sweet was on their way to musical obscurity. The era of musicians in sparkling tight pants, pink scarves and blaze orange platform boots was coming to an end thanks to this new thing called “Punk.” But Sweet had one last hit percolating in their minds. When they released their new single, “Love Is Like Oxygen” shot up the charts in both the US and UK.
From looking at them or paying close attention to their lyrics, you might not get the impression that Sweet were brilliant philosophers or accomplished biochemists. Nevertheless, this Love Is Like Oxygen notion of theirs has some legs. The idea that everyone needs love seems to be pretty well accepted. In child development circles especially, they seem to believe that human beings need love just to survive, much less to be happy.
But then, that’s not the kind of love I’m interested in ranting about. I was born to loving parents who would do anything for me and for whom I would do anything. I share the same sort of love with my brother, and with a small cadre of very close friends. So I’m covered on that kind of love. However, there is this other kind of love that I don’t know that I need, but certainly want. I’m going to call it romantic love. I can’t say that anyone needs it, per se. I’ve never had it, and yet I’ve managed to survive for 34 years. Nevertheless, I can say that I want it really bad, to the point that it does sometimes feel like I’ve been holding my breath for three and a half decades.
And that brings me to carbon monoxide poisoning. Every cell in your body needs oxygen to stay alive. The mitochondria in the cells require oxygen to produce ATP, which is the chemical energy source used by the cells to carry out the rest of its life processes. Oxygen is transported to each cell through your respiratory and circulatory systems. You breathe it into your lungs, where individual O2 molecules (that’s two oxygen atoms bonded together) bind with a molecule in your red blood cells called hemoglobin. These red blood cells are then pumped out to the body in your bloodstream to drop off the oxygen molecules to the rest of your cells.
The problem is that carbon monoxide (an oxygen and carbon atom bound together, or CO) can take the place of the oxygen in the red blood cell (in fact, it’s 200 times more likely to attach to a hemoglobin molecule than an oxygen molecule is, so where both are present, the CO is most likely to get the spot). So when you get a bunch of carbon monoxide in your lungs, the CO binds to the hemoglobin in your red blood cells in place of the oxygen, and is transported to your cells throughout the body. When it gets to the cells, it turns out to be useless. It can’t even be dislodged from the red blood cell, much less used to make ATP. So the more CO you breathe in, the more you increases the CO level in your bloodstream, and the less oxygen is able to get to your cells.
In the diagram below, George Clooney represents oxygen, and Pee Wee Herman represents carbon monoxide in the lungs. As you can see, although the Georges easily outnumber the Pee Wees, it is Pee Wee that manages to fill most all of the available link-up points on the hemoglobin molecules.
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