If human blood is red because of all iron in it, why is it that magnets do nothing at all to us?
In: Biology
They actually do. Oxygenated hemoglobin is slightly repelled by a magnet; deoxygenated hemoglobin is slightly attracted by one. But the effect is really small compared to the other forces acting on your blood at any given time, even in a very strong magnetic field.
The iron is bound up in a larger molecule that doesn’t behave the same way as pure iron. And the amount of iron in your blood is not very large in absolute terms to begin with; it’s only one part of some of the cells in your blood, and most of your blood is the liquid plasma (which is mostly water) anyway.
Iron isn’t red, is it? At least, not the kind that magnets stick to. It’s that shiny metallic stuff. So, why is it red in our blood?
It has undergone a transition into an ionized state, and is bound into molecules. The iron in our blood has the same number of protons as metallic iron, but is ‘in a completely different situation’ and does not interact with magnets in the same way.
As a sidenote, magnets actually *do* interact with humans. They very weakly repel us.
The actual thing that gives blood the red color is a protien called heme, which has a lot of different atoms in it and just one iron atom. Add onto that that there doesn’t need to be a lot of it to change the color of blood. Think like mixing a small amount of dye into a bucket of water. It spreads out.
So magnets do affect it slightly, but there just isn’t a lot of it. An adult might have about 4 paperclips worth of iron in all of their blood.
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