Lately, I’ve been reading that we’re facing another blood shortage, and it got me thinking . . . why can’t we come up with a blood substitute? Has any research been put into this?
Why can’t we use animal blood? Why can’t we use, for example, chimpanzee blood when chimps and humans are so closely related? (I’m assuming that chimps have platelets and cells like our own.)
If we use blood from another species, our immune system would detect that it was not our cells and would attack it. This would happen even if we used the wrong human blood type.
In the early days of blood transfusions, they did use goat blood. The patient almost always died.
Synthetic Blood International Inc.
http://www.sybd.com/
“He must have icewater in his veins” - ?
By the time I hit “preview” tcburnett had mentioned it, but I’ll be more specific anyway. Read about Oxycyte™, a blood substitute.
I can’t seem to get to the site tc is talking baout, so I don’t know if it covers this. I saw on the news the other day that some European countries(France specifically in this story) wer using synthetic blood very effectively. They haven’t found any side effects and it seems to work just as well as regular blood. The reason we don’t use synthetics over here is that the FDA won’t approve it. I think it’s the FDA. They’re doing research into it, but the guy doing the interview said not to expect synthetic blood in the US for at least another 5 to 10 years.
There’s a company here in town called Alliance Pharmaceuticals that I believe if working on a synthetic blood product called ‘Oxygent’. I’m not sure where they are in the approval process, and I’m too lazy to look right now…
Yeah, but how does it taste?
Who cares how it tastes- it’s less filling!
Arjuna34
Ooooooh that is REALLY sick. I like that.
What is the liquid that mice…and theoretically humans can breathe? Sounds about the same as this stuff.
You mean as in Cameron’s The Abyss?
It exists, but the amount of energy it takes to actually breathe the stuff (moving it in and out of the lungs) makes it impractical for use. I learned this on the nifty and new The Abyss DVD.
You’re thinking of Fluorovent™.
Interesting. I’ll be breathing Flurovent[sup]TM[/sup] while Oxycyte[sup]TM[/sup] flows through my arteries. I wonder how many more plastics I can immerse myself in. Maybe cerebrospinal fluid will be next, allowing us to keep brains alive without bodies attached. I’d go for it, as long as I could choose my own reality. Just think, rows and rows of little gray masses in clear jars with tubes and wires running into and out of them.
[Moderator’s note: I fixed the superscripts. The fact that they were broken didn’t really subtract from the post, but geez, I seriously got on my knees to get superscripts enabled, so I have a proprietary interest, forghod’ssake. -manhattan]
[Edited by manhattan on 07-15-2000 at 12:41 AM]