The Secret Science of Baby by Michael Banks

Author:Michael Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637741474
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

A domestic appliance used almost daily by new parents—apart from the coffee machine—is the washing machine. For such a small body, babies produce an incredible amount of drool, vomit, urine, and poo, all of which will somehow be instantly attracted to your own clothes. Indeed, a rite of passage of any new parent is to suffer, at least once, from a cascade of puke down the back when burping your newborn over the shoulder, regardless of what size of muslin you have placed in the baby’s way. Of course, water alone is not enough to get your clothes clean; you also need detergent, made up of clever molecules called surfactants, the most widely used commercial one being alkylbenzene sulfonate.

A surfactant has two important jobs that are carried out by different parts of the molecule. The first is that it connects to water molecules preventing them from bonding strongly with each other. This reduces the surface tension of the water, allowing it to spread over a greater area and seep deeper into the fibers of the clothes. The second is that the surfactant binds with dirt and grease. The wash cycle of the washing machine combines the water with the surfactant, which clings to the dirt, while the tumbling process breaks down the dirt and grease into smaller pieces. The rinse stage wipes away the dirt and detergent leaving you with clean clothes. Et voilà.

There is a simple experiment you can do at home to demonstrate the power of surfactants. If you cut out a piece of paper in the shape of a boat and put it in a bath, it should float on top and not really go anywhere. However, if you drop a tiny amount of dishwashing liquid at one end of the boat (before it gets soggy and sinks), it will magically propel away—and at a decent speed. This is because the detergent is reducing the surface tension of the water in a way that breaks this virtual film and provides a reactive force that pushes the boat. This same principle is why soap bubbles, a favorite attraction for any child, can last for so long and do not burst. The surfactant reduces the surface tension in the bubble, and this reduces the pressure difference between the outside and inside of the bubble to keep it in equilibrium—at least, that is, until it gets thin enough to break. Pattle was seeing a similar phenomenon in the 1950s when investigating edema fluids: the surfactant in the lung was stabilizing the foams so they would not collapse.

At the same time as Pattle was conducting his research in the mid-1950s, pediatrician Mary Ellen Avery at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan School)* saw for herself how many babies struggled to breathe following birth. Avery, who worked at the newborn service at a local hospital in Boston, was convinced that surfactants were the missing piece of the jigsaw, and building on the work of Clements, she constructed her own apparatus to measure the surface tension of the lungs of babies who had died of IRDS.

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