Ed Cameron, age 12, of lancaster, pa., for his question:
What does my body do with air?
The astounding process begins when you fill your lungs with a breath of air. Almost a fourth of the gaseous mixture is oxygen and almost all the rest is nitrogen. The oxygen is used to power the living cells, but the nitrogen is needed to slow down its fueling activity.
Your body is like a busy city where countless behind the scene activities go on in assorted buildings. The building units of the body are millions of microscopic living cells. A city needs heat, light and power to turn its wheels, and the energy for these jobs comes from fuels. Its electric power may be generated by steam from burning coal or coke, and its buildings may be heated by furnaces fueled by coal or oil.
The body uses oxygen as a fuel to produce the energy it needs. Each living cell is a chemical laboratory where astounding processes go on day and night. The miraculous midgets use dissolved foods to produce energy for nerves and muscles and heat to keep the body at a normal temperature. It fights off invading germs and heals and sometimes multiplies itself. It shares basic living processes with all the other cells of the body and carries on special duties, depending upon whether it is a liver or blood cell, a brain or nerve cell. all its work requires energy, and its energy comes from the slow combustion of
Oxygen gas. This vital fuel enters the lungs when you take in each breath of air. The lungs are riddled with spongy pockets that are lined with tissue thin membrane. Fine blood vesse.is carry streams of red blood cells through the walls of the spongy pockets.
And the red cells are oxygen grabbers. They grab m01ecules of oxygen from the air that is in the spongy pockets, right through the thin membrane walls.
Each red cell carries a quota of oxygen and circulates around the body. It streams back to the heart where it is pumped through a network of arteries to smaller blood vessels to hair thin capillaries that snake among the living cells.
The busy cells grab molecules of vital oxygen from the passing blood stream. They use it as a slow burning fuel to provide the chemical energy they need to carry on the astounding processes that occur among submicroscopic atoms and molecules. Until recently, we knew little about them. But researchers in molecular biology now know a lot about the chemical activities of the cell and all these miniature miracles of life need energy from oxygen fuel.
A fire leaves ashes and a factory produces wastes and by products. The busy living cell also produces waste material. As oxygen is consumed, it creates waste carbon dioxide. This waste gas must be removed or the living cell. Would choke and perish. It is removed by the same blood cells that deliver the oxygen. The red cells gather carbon dioxide and carry it back to the lungs. You breathe it out before you breathe in your next supply of fresh, oxygen rich air.