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FOCUS ON RESEARCH Previous Volume 353:2743-2745 December 29, 2005 Number 26 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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In the late 1930s, William Bosworth Castle and his colleague Thomas Hale Ham were studying blood samples obtained from patients with sickle cell anemia and found that the viscosity of the blood increased dramatically as its oxygen content decreased. As Castle later reflected, "It immediately occurred to us that this was because the elongated, sickled red cells had become tangled up `like haywire.'"¹ Castle and Ham went on to hypothesize about the pathophysiology of organ damage in sickle cell anemia in a way that still drives much of our thinking today: "a vicious cycle of erythrostasis may be set up . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Dr. Platt is chief of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston and master of the William B. Castle Society at Harvard Medical School — both in Boston.

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