School Trips & Visits

Year 10 visit to Harefield Hospital Transplant unit

I would like to thank Mrs Eyles for kindly inviting a group of Long Close students to Harefield hospital and the opportunity that this gave us, to see how analytical science is making such an impact on people’s lives.

The hub of everything took place in two small rooms at the top of one of the hospital buildings. The room was full of gadgets and white coated scientists measuring compounds to the hundred millionth of a gram. We saw mass spectrometers, machines with the collective worth of millions smashing molecules in a relentless hunt for the contents of tiny sample tubes. In every corner of the room machines hummed in the quest for discovery.

It was clear from very early on, that the samples held the secrets. Little vials of plasma from patients in the transplant wards, all clinging to life in the hope that their precious new organs wouldn’t be rejected.

The human immune system is something we study in year 10. Marvelling at the way our body’s last line of defence homes in, with devastating effect on microscopic invaders. Unfortunately as we soon learnt, this impressive system is just as likely to see a replacement heart as an enemy. Like a giant unwanted bacteria, it attacks with the same lethal urgency that it would an unwanted microbe.

Immune suppressant drugs counter this effect but to terrible cost, both in terms of appalling side effects and of course by laying the body open to attack from any opportunistic disease.

The balance of these drugs is crucial and unique to each patient. The numbers mean everything to these scientists. Small changes in the peaks and troughs of futuristic charts are enough to precipitate urgent calls to doctors and pharmacists. A heady combination, of not only the nature of these constant discoveries but the speed at which the information is relayed is simply life or death stuff.