STUDIES ON THE PATHOGENESIS OF THALASSAEMIA BY

This short paper is a study of erythrocyte production and destruction in thalass-aemia, undertaken so as to throw light on the pathogenesis of the disease. Thalassaemic bone marrow has been cultured in vitro (Astaldi, Tolentino, and Sacchetti, 1951a, b, c) thereby allowing the separate study of the intensity of differentiation and the proliferation of erythroblasts. By the culture method it is possible to visualize these activities more exactly than by static morphological criteria such as the myelogram, the maturation curve, the mitotic rate, and the karyokinetic histogram. Method Differentiation.-Differentiation was studied by keeping the surviving medullary cells in a Carrel flask containing a liquid medium consisting of plasma and Tyrode's solution (Astaldi and Tolentino, 1949). At the beginning of the experiment, and then at six to 12-hour intervals, a count was made in absolute numbers per c.mm. of the erythroblasts and reticulocytes (at different stages of maturation) surviving in the culture