somatids

[veldkamp]

        Have you ever heard of  'somatids'? One of my students is working as an
assistant to an physician with alternative methods, and I was demonstrated
some of these. One of them is to put a drop of blood under a special
microscope. Very interesting to see, but what was remarkable was that small
objects darted about that he called 'somatids'.
        These are said to be proteins and to occur in all (!) living organisms. In
a healthy organism up to 3 forms occur, but when not there may be up to 16
'stages' indicative of the degree of unhealthiness. Little to say that of
course some of the quite advanced stages were present. Possibly because I
was an observer and not a patient I was spared prescriptions (and the bill)
        Intrigued by an apparant organism-like object with at least a partial life
cycle that in my education as a biologist I had never heard of I asked some
colleagues here, who were as ignorant. So I tried some of the students and
went to the first year lab to look in textbooks, but nothing there, either.
        On the WEB I found a lot of interesting remarks when I searched for
'somatid cycle'. You might try this if you got nothing better to do this
week-end.

        Has any taxonomic research been done on this?

        If you have any haematologist friends you might ask for what the current
opinion on what these things are is. (Excuse my English...)

Cheers,

JeF