Biology News Too :)

What Happens After a Python Gorges May Help Human Hearts

Lawrence K. Altman

The New York Times

October 27, 2011

            This article discusses the possibility of Pythons helping out human hearts. The findings from these scientists in Colorado may pave the way to developing a way to delay, prevent, treat, or reverse certain hereditary or acquired human diseases. When a Python eats, it devours animals that are as big as it is. During this process, its heart and other organs double in size and its metabolic rate and production of lipids and insulin increase. The organs then reduce down to normal size in a few days and the snake can fast for months without losing muscle mass. The first hypothesis on the cause of this magnification was that new cells were created, but scientists have found this to be false. The python uses hypertrophy, which is enlarging existing cells, through the specific combination of the fatty acids myristic, palmitic, and palmitoleic to double the size of multiple organs during digestion. When this combination was injected into a mouse heart, it surprisingly enlarged it in a good way, causing much excitement in the science world. Enlargement of the human heart can occur  two different ways; it can be caused by high blood pressure or heart attacks, or it can be caused by exercise in well-conditioned athletes. This article explains that we may have another way to fight off diseases with drugs using helpful reptile substances.

            This article is good news, and can potentially impact the world in a very large and beneficial way. If we do develop new medicine using this python technology, many diseases will be eradicated form out society. We will be able to worry less about heart disease because we have preventative measures and treatment available. There are still a lot of questions on how this python substance will affect humans and how beneficial it will be, so this medical advance may be far in the future. Even if this specific experiment with pythons doesn’t work out, it still has given us a lot of new information and has opened many doors for more research.

            I enjoyed reading this article. It was very interesting and got my mind thinking about things. Even though I’m still left with a lot of questions on the effects of this on the human heart, I learned a lot about pythons from this article which was entertaining. This article really caught my eye and I think just about anyone can read it and learn something from it, whether it’s about the human heart, pythons, or the process of hypertrophy.