{"id":8820,"date":"2022-06-13T07:46:21","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T07:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/?post_type=product&p=8820"},"modified":"2022-06-13T07:47:03","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T07:47:03","slug":"why-do-we-have-blood-types","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/pt\/why-do-we-have-blood-types\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do we have blood types?"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a century after their discovery, we still don\u2019t really know what blood types are for. Do they really matter? Carl Zimmer investigates.<\/h4>\n
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When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types \u2013 a biological mark of distinction.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn\u2019t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type.<\/p>\n

And yet there remained some nagging questions. Why do 40 per cent of Caucasians have type A blood, while only 27 per cent of Asians do? Where do different blood types come from, and what do they do?\u00a0To get some answers, I went to the experts \u2013 to haematologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, virologists and nutrition scientists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1900 the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research in 1930. Since then scientists have developed ever more powerful tools for probing the biology of blood types. They\u2019ve found some intriguing clues about them \u2013 tracing their deep ancestry, for example, and detecting influences of blood types on our health. And yet I found that in many ways blood types remain strangely mysterious. Scientists have yet to come up with a good explanation for their very existence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t it amazing?\u201d says Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego. \u201cAlmost a hundred years after the Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery, we still don\u2019t know exactly what they\u2019re for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reference:<\/h4>\n