Kinetics of hemoglobin synthesis in mice and humans.

As a student of erythropoiesis, I read the report of Wickrema et al' with great interest. It was particularly gratifying to see their conclusions about differences between mice and humans as to the stage at which peak hemoglobin synthesis occurs. We had previously arrived at the same conclusions using radioiron (Fe59) kinetics in vivo and Fess autoradiography of erythroid cells2. As our studies were performed with normal, not virally infected cells, Wickrema et al's concerns of whether virally (ITA) infected cells are different from normal cells may be alleviated by these earlier data. As emphasized in the report by Wickrema et al and our report, this is but one ofthe several peculiarities in hematopoiesis or erythropoiesis between small animals and humans.