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Chapter 2: A Case Study Of Osmosis

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Desiree Cottle
10/12/2015
Case study #2: Osmosis
Part I
Wanting to please his dad Michael added extra fertilizer to their crops of corn thinking it would help the plants grow. However, the plants started dying instead. The plants died because of osmosis. Osmosis is water being moved across a membrane of a cell due to diffusion, which is the movement of molecules from a high concentration to a low concentration until molecules are equally distributed. The high concentration of fertilizer created a hypertonic environment around the root of the corn. A hypertonic environment meaning there is more solute than water outside of the cell, which causes water to move out of the cell. The water coming out of the cell causes the cell to shrink and reduces pressure on the cell wall, this process is called plasmolysis and is what caused the corn plants to wilt and die. If Michael’s mistake were caught earlier, he could have taken out some of the fertilizer or added …show more content…

When putting up his IV, he gave the patient Distilled water instead of saline solution, causing the patient’s death. The patient died because osmosis caused the distilled water in the patient’s bloodstream to create a hypotonic environment. A hypotonic environment meaning there was more solute in the cell then outside of it. Human cells have 0.9% sodium in them. When the distilled water entered the blood stream, the water went where there was more solute, which was in the cell causing the cell to undergo hemolysis and burst. This caused oxygen levels to fail because the red blood cells could no longer supply oxygen to the rest of the body. After Tom made this error there was not much that could be done to save the patient because the IV was dripping quickly and once the cells burst nothing could be done to repair them. However perhaps a blood transfusion could have been done to add blood cells if he noticed early enough and switched to the saline

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