Cleaning Yourself Out

I was listening to a Naked Scientist Podcast where they were doing an demonstration about bilirubin. This is a compound that the body makes when it breaks down old red blood cells. Normally, this compound is fat soluble, and your body produces and enzyme that makes it water soluble so that you can get rid of it by excreting it through your urine. Newborns never had to do this before, it was taken care of in the womb by the mother. So sometimes it's a problem for newborns, who build up bilirubin and turn yellow, or jaundiced. A nurse serving in a maternity ward found out years ago that exposing babies to sunlight cures this problem. The sunlight makes the molecule flip around into a different configuration, a water soluble one, just like what the enzyme does. The naked scientists did an experiment where they showed how the yellow bilirubin got converted and could be expelled with a transparent baby doll with the liquids inside.

This made me think about how these kinds of problems would be handled by future space travellers. What if the men on the first Mars or Lunar colonies get contaminated by the mining operations they will be working on? How would they get lead or other contaminants out of the bodies of astronauts. I thought about the line in Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osborne's Iron Man. I guess he was turned to steel and only had boots of lead, but you can see that they are clearly referring to an industrial accident that caused contamination. Will we learn tricks similar to the sunlight trick where toxic chemicals like lead and mercury will bind to something and be expelled from the body?

Scientists have a name for the process, it's called kelation, also spelled chelation. This is defined as the process where a molecule binds to and surrounds a metal to remove it from tissue. We currently already use this therapy on earth for mercury, lead, and arsenic. This is different from the use of activated charcoal to remove poisons, those are adsorbed by the charcoal, not chemically bound to it.

In another podcast I was listening to, they were studying a cinnamon tea that a native tribe had used for centuries to relieve back pain. The scientists examining the tea were initially mystified, because they found that the cinnamon had toxins in it that should be poisoning the natives. They discovered that it was converted to a non-toxic form by the gentle heating used in brewing it into a tea. In fact, the non-toxic form had medicinal properties that the tribe had stumbled onto years ago.

How much of the technology to cure, treat, or maintain the health of people will come from ancient practices and how many treatments will have to come from future developments?