THE usual statement in textbooks of physiology that the adult organism contains much less Fe than the young one is in noteworthy contradiction to a number of findings, some of them quite old. Lapicque & Guillemonat [1889] and Lapicque [1897] observed a characteristic life curve of the Fe content of bloodfree human and animal livers and found higher values in the adult than in the child. The first part of this curve, however, shows a rapid drop from the high values of the newborn to the low level present in childhood. Physiologists seem to have concentrated their attention chiefly on this phenomenon and have thus often overlooked the later rise. More recently Lapicque's results have been corroborated, in part at least, e.g. by Ramage et al. [1933] in the human, and by Lintzel & Radeff [1931] in several species of animals. One of us [Zondek & Karp, 1934] showed that in certain animals the Fe content of the organs rose considerably during a definite period of life. Since this increase occurred later in those animals whose span of life is longer, one could assume that there might exist a connexion between the ageing process of the cell and its Fe content.In the present investigation we have extended our work to man: the literature contains little about the Fe content of human tissues and the figures found must sometimes be considered critically because of the methods used. Since, moreover, only the liver had been previously studied, we carried out a reinvestigation which included also the kidney.In a number of cases Cu and Mn were also determined in order to show how far the life curve is typical for Fe and perhaps to contribute further information on the significance of the congenital Cu deposit. EXPERIMENTALNon-haemin-Fe. An organ, e.g. liver, contains: (1) blood-Fe, ofwhich 95-98 % is in the form of haemin-Fe (or more correctly: haem-Fe), accepting Barkan & Schales' [1937] hypothesis that there exists a small fraction of pseudohaemoglobins; (2) tissue-Fe, of which 80-90 % occurs in the form of nonhaemin-Fe whose chemical nature has not yet been defined, 10-20 % being haemin compounds such as cytochrome, catalase, respiratory enzyme etc. Although direct determinations for the latter group have been made only on the rat [Yabusoe, 1925], we may assume a similar distribution in human organs. Careful washing or perfusion of an organ can at best remove only the total blood-Fe. The residue thus contains not only non-haemin-Fe, as is usually believed, but also a certain amount of haemin-Fe, the cell catalysts mentioned above.Here we were interested chiefly in the amount of non-haemin-Fe. A report of our experience with the various methods will be left to another paper; we (1845
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