4 ms·
>What if tPA worked like the starter motor that turns on a car, and urokinase was the gasoline that ran it? No comment on the underlying science, but I will ex
by lvs 9y ago
>What if tPA worked like the starter motor that turns on a car, and urokinase was the gasoline that ran it?
No comment on the underlying science, but I will express my continued frustration with popsci writers and their counterproductive analogies. It's especially unhelpful when it's wrong on the dumbed-down end. A starter motor does not run on gasoline. It's an electric motor that runs off the battery.
- twic 9y agoThat's the whole point of the analogy. From the next paragraph: > When a clot forms, tPA in the bloodstream is quickly recruited to the site to begin dissolving it. But too much of a clot-buster could lead to bleeds, so once the process is sparked, the body rapidly clears out tPA. Urokinase comes along, carried on the surface of platelets and certain white blood cells, to finish the job. tPA kicks off the process, and once it's started, urokinase does the rest. I don't know the biochemistry in enough detail to say whether this is a really good metaphor (can urokinase only be activated if tPA has acted? is urokinase consumed by this process?), but the author is not suggesting that a starter motor runs off gasoline.
- skosch 9y agoOP simply mis-parsed the last "it" of the sentence to refer to the starter motor, when the author intended for it to refer to the car.
- smallnamespace 9y agoThat's a strange mis-parse since the rule is that pronouns refer to their closest reasonable antecedent (in this case 'car' is closest to 'it').